Inside Geneva: 2023 – can things get worse?

This time last year, I was sitting down with my journalist colleagues at the UN in Geneva to review 2022. There was a chink of hope that the pandemic was (almost over), but big new problems had appeared. A brand new war in Ukraine, continued crises in Yemen, Syria or Afghanistan, and the ever present threat of climate change.

A lot for the UN to deal with then. But wait until you see what 2023 had in store. On this week’s Inside Geneva I’m joined by my UN colleagues again to have a look back at this momentous year – and a quick glance at Inside Geneva’s coverage for 2023 shows just how momentous it was. In February, the devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria. In May the renewed, and brutal, conflict in Sudan. In June, the Taliban’s oppression of women in Afghanistan, and in October, the start of a new war in the Middle East.

When this year started, I and my colleagues highlighted the ongoing war in Ukraine, human rights in China, and the situation in Afghanistan as ones to watch in 23. When we got together for this week’s episode, those topics hardly featured. Not that they are not important, but they had become overshadowed by what Emma Farges of Reuters calls the ‘existential’ challenges the UN, and in particular its humanitarian wing, is now facing.

And it’s not just new wars and crises; the old ones (Yemen or Syria) haven’t gone away. In December 2022 the UN appealed for $56 billion dollars to fund its humanitarian work in 2023. But by this December, it had received only around a third of that. So has it appealed for more in 2024? Actually no. UN aid agencies have realised there’s no point asking for money they won’t get, so instead their budget is smaller – $46 billion, and some programmes are being cut, including food distribution in Afghanistan and Yemen.

Falling apart

‘This is a multilateral system that is absolutely falling apart under the strain of all the extreme events it’s having to deal with,’ New York times contributor Nick-Cumming Bruce tells Inside Geneva.

But it’s falling part not because aid agencies are doing a bad job. In fact they have become the squeezed middle, expected to do more and more, in longer and longer crises, because global diplomacy is an utter failure. The most recent week long session of the UN Security Council is a prime example. The council finally agreed on a relatively meaningless resolution on Gaza, to ‘create conditions’ for more aid supplies, but didn’t call for a ceasefire. Frustrated aid workers, risking their lives in Gaza, tell us with one voice that there’s no chance of ramping up aid deliveries without at least a temporary end to the fighting.

This latest conflict in the Middle East has, Dorian Burkhalter of swissinfo tells Inside Geneva, been especially hard for the UN. ‘The UN has never lost so many humanitarian workers {in a single conflict}, and just seeing their helplessness, you can really tell that they’ve lost their protection, and they’re totally desperate. It’s very sad.’

It has also been hard for journalists. It’s a not often discussed truth that working out of Geneva is not necessarily the soft number it might first appear. Most of us have spent time in conflict zones, so when aid workers describe the effects of bombing, the desperate search for medical care, the lack of food, and even of water, we know what they are talking about.

We are also given all the graphic reports, and images, of what is happening in conflict zones. Many of my non journalist friends tell me they are no longer watching the news, because it is too distressing. That’s not an option journalists have; to report, we have to look, and we have to read, even if what we learn keeps us awake at night long after our story has been handed in to the editors.

Emma Farge tells Inside Geneva that she now sees her journalism as ‘before and after’ the war in Gaza, and describes covering it as ‘personal for everyone. It’s been difficult for journalists to navigate this information war and to really navigate it with your composure.’

Human rights – where are they now?

We also started 2023 with an interview with the new UN Human Rights Commissioner Volker Türk, who told us he wanted the year to be a global recommitment to human rights, in the year the Universal Declaration on Human Rights marked its 75^th anniversary.

At year’s end Türk admitted the challenges were huge – there are currently 55 conflicts ongoing around the world, he told me – but insisted this was a reason not to abandon our human rights standards as outdated and unworkable, but to uphold them with even more determination.

Perhaps we can take a note of hope from that, and from the vision and experience which all the former UN Human Rights Commissioners offered Inside Geneva in our series of exclusive interviews with them. ‘We should believe’ Jose Ayala Lasso, who, now 91, was the first commissioner.

‘We should not lose our faith in the capacity of human beings to act correctly.’

So despite all the distress that 2023 has brought, Ayala Lasso’s advice is what I’m holding onto as 2024 dawns.

Join host Imogen Foulkes on the Inside Geneva podcast to listen to the full interviews.

For more insights and discussions from Switzerland’s international city, subscribe to Inside Geneva on Apple PodcastsExternal link, SpotifyExternal link, or wherever you get your podcasts. And subscribe to our newsletter to get all the International Geneva news and views from Imogen Foulkes in your inbox:

For more audio content from SWI swissinfo.ch, explore The Swiss Connection, a podcast with Swiss stories for the world.