Geneva journalists look back on 2022

2022 has been a momentous year. Just 12 months ago we were saying goodbye to 2021 with the fervent hope that lockdowns and travel restrictions would not feature in the year to come.

Here in Geneva, aid agencies were warning of a humanitarian catastrophe in Afghanistan following the Taliban takeover and imposition of economic sanctions by traditional donor countries.

And, in Moscow, Russian president Vladimir Putin was ordering a massive troop build-up on Russia’s border with Ukraine. That sparked a flurry of diplomacy at the start of 2022; with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken meeting Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov here in Geneva.

We journalists watched, and wondered: could a conflict many of us still believed could not happen be averted? No, came the answer on February 24^th, as Russian tanks and troops roared across the border.

On Inside Geneva this week, we bring together three of my journalist colleagues to talk about our reporting year, Nina Larson of Agence France-Presse, Dorian Burkhalter of SWI Swissinfo.ch, and Christiane Oelrich of the Deutsche Presse-Agentur.

Shadow of war

For all of us, the year has been overshadowed by the war in Ukraine. By the last week of February, we had mostly come to expect some kind of Russian intervention, but still, Larson remembers, the scale of the attack was astonishing.

“It was quite shocking waking up in the morning to that news I remember. UNHCR already on the first day was saying 100,000 people had been displaced.”

We all scrambled to talk to the aid agencies in Geneva. The UNHCR (United Nations refugee agency) told me it was the biggest crisis since the second world war and, somehow, I could not believe that. But going back to check the figures, and seeing the numbers crossing into Poland pass the million mark in a few short days, it became clear that this new war in Europe was going to have an impact far beyond Ukraine’s borders.

UN successes and failures

In Geneva, the UN’s humanitarian role when a war breaks out is key, and this one has been no exception. Many aid agencies were already present in Ukraine, since there has been conflict and humanitarian need in the east of the country since 2014.

But what about the UN’s traditional role in conflict prevention and resolution? Here, Burkhalter told Inside Geneva “I think we can clearly say this part of the UN failed.” We talk in more detail on the podcast about how the UN’s weaknesses are exposed when a permanent member of the UN Security Council goes rogue, as Russia has, and invades a sovereign state.

As Oelrich points out, “the UN is made up of its member states” and its decisions are only ever as strong as those member states want them to be. When a veto wielding member of the Security Council takes an action which violates the UN Charter, there is not a lot the UN, under its current rules and structure, can do.

Nevertheless our Inside Geneva guests, who have been reporting on the UN all year, argue its scorecard should not be marked F for fail in Ukraine. Its humanitarian agencies have stepped up to provide support for an estimated 17 million Ukrainians in need.

And the deal to allow grain exports to flow again from Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, hammered out personally by UN secretary general Antonio Guterres, was, Burkhalter argues “a major achievement of UN diplomacy.”

Neglected crises

One of the reasons the UN worked so hard on that deal, of course, is because of a crisis we all talked about at the start of 2022, and which many UN diplomats feared, post February 24^th, would be forgotten: food insecurity.

The Horn of Africa was suffering severe food shortages and rising malnutrition 12 months ago. Somalia in particular, after years of failed rainy seasons, was, and remains, on the verge of famine.

Many of these countries depend on grain imports from the World Food Programme, which buys its grain from Ukraine and Russia. So getting those Black Sea ports open has been vital to keeping supplies flowing.

But against that one success is a broader worry: with all the focus on Ukraine, are other crises being neglected? As 2022 draws to a close, we have some kind of answer in the UN’s humanitarian budget. By the start of this month, it had received just half of its requested funds ($43 billion) for this year. And its projected needs for 2023 are a record $51 billion, a staggering 25% increase on the previous year, not just because of the war in Ukraine, but because other long-term crises continue.

As Larson points out, we started the year with warnings of a humanitarian catastrophe in Afghanistan. Nothing in that long suffering country has got any better in the last 12 months, arguably the humanitarian situation has got worse. But how much attention been paid to it? Not a great deal, and as aid agencies know, when the spotlight is switched off, aid money can dry up.

The same could be said for Syria, Yemen, or the huge global challenge of climate change – something UN secretary general Antonio Guterres wanted to make the number one priority during his time in office.

The challenges of 2023

Our Inside Geneva guests agree 2023 is going to be another big challenge for the UN and its humanitarian agencies in Geneva. There are, as Oelrich says “compounding crises that are going to make going forward into the next year very challenging”.

What about the chances for peace, or for UN Geneva to host at least some initial discussions between Russia and Ukraine? I’m sorry to tell you our guests greeted that question with a chorus of “no”, “not yet”, and “I don’t see it.”

I’ll leave you with one key issue Oelrich identifies for 2023, “a big challenge to the Geneva Conventions and many other multilateral organisations”. For more detail on, for example, the difficulties faced by the ICRC fulfilling its Geneva Convention mandate to visit prisoners of war, or to UN human rights in its attempts to report on China, you’ll have to listen to Inside Geneva – and please do, it’s a great discussion!