Topic: UN's Role of Addressing Sectarian and Ethnic Conflict within a Nation
Country: Portugal
Delegate Name: Mike Jones
School: Traverse City West High School
Topic page: background guide and all position papers All Portugal position papers GLIMUN 2008 committees
Portugal is a country that is wholly devoted to the end of ethnic violence and secretarian attacks. In particular, Portugal has helped finance and assist East Timor in its efforts to halt ethnic violence and attacks. This condition arose from the violence between Lorosae and Loromonu, or “easterners” and “westerners” in East Timor after its independence from Portugal. The Portuguese government worked alongside UN bodies to end this violence. Having said, Portugal hopes to assist the fight against ethnic violence and secretarian attacks.
Portugal realizes that there is ethnic and secretarian violence in many places around the world, and particularly in developing nations in Africa, South America, and Asia. We realize that in order to completely combat these issue, a resolution would require a wide scale settlement as well as regional solutions. Portugal hopes that during the committee we decide and several basic areas to work on, which it hopes include Hutu and Tutsi peoples in the Rwandan-Congo area, the Abkhaz and Georgia peoples in Georgia territory, and the Darfur region of Sudan. We, again, also hope to establish a basic code (which may contain suggested laws, rights, organizations, etc) for nations to attempt to implement to help stop the ethnic violence and attacks that result.
As some solution ideas, Portugal hopes that the UN continues to sponsor its official bodies that make great effort to stop violence and ethnic issues in particular countries. It further thinks that more nations should take a greater part in assisting these nations that have violence issues in their ethnic populations, either with available resources and finances. It also hopes that nations that have ethic conflict and violence will receive support from the international community to help resolve its issues. We believe that solving this kind of violence is one of the first steps developing nations need to become politically and economically stable and allow for greater success. Portugal finally supports the creation of missions for each state that would benefit from one to help it administer and finance its riddance of ethnic conflict.
Portugal hopes that nations with their own ethnic violence issues use their obviously available resources(that they are channeling into other nations with similar ethnic conflicts) to put an end to their native secretarian attacks. Portugal speaks of the Russian Federation, whose own movements and passion in the Georgian/Abkhaz conflict heavily outweighs it own Chechen conflict. Also, on the opposite end from Russia, Portugal would like to specifically target the Sudanese government for refusing and denying assistance and human aid from other states and the UN to help its situation which is developed from secretarian and ethnic violence, resulting in large-scale genocide. Both of these nations should use available (or made available) resources to end its ethnic an secretarian violences.
