If there’s one thing I remember from my schooldays, it’s the fact that I never took part in an extracurricular activity. Not. A. Single. One. School was about passing exams, doing homework, doing that extra assignment to please the teacher, and getting back home for a nap, a cup of tea, some biscuits, and a wholesome dinner. There was no room for cricket, football, or even the most popular sport at my school, basketball. No, I can’t swim, I can’t debate, and though I can play chess, I never dared to cross the line and join the club. I also remember there being a good Scrabble Master, but once again, I didn’t dare.
Then I hit adolescence in Grade Eight. The transition was terrible. I wanted to instil some meaning in my life, to get out of the world I’d shut myself in. Looking around and perusing the many clubs and societies (non-sport, of course) at school, I picked one I thought I could prosper in. Model United Nations. I’d heard from various friends that apart from being an enjoyable enterprise, it was headed at the time by a veritable set of determined prefects, elders, and teachers who wanted to see both the society and the school thrive outside. Having nothing to lose, and everything to gain, I hence tried it out.
The first few days were humbling. MUN, as those who’ve been at it would know, consists of simulating (hence the term “Model”) real life situations, based on the various bodies in the United Nations and based on multifarious and specific contingencies: disaster management, crisis avoidance, consensus, what-not. The first few countries you get aren’t popular, and for good reason: when you get to represent a popular country (the USA, India, even Sri Lanka), you tend to be complacent, because research and preparation – the twin peaks of any budding MUN student – become easier to handle. The first country I got, North Korea, was nowhere near that. Since this was long, long before broadband and Wi-Fi caught up in Sri Lanka, researching on such a country was a difficult, although enjoyable, enterprise. I stayed in the Club, happily, predictably, for a number of months, if not years (I can’t remember), after which I left, returned, left again, returned again, and left for good. That’s life.
We (my school and the club) soon reached a point where we could reckon with outsiders and this in a way that was beneficial to us, meaning a way that encouraged us to try and spread the MUN culture throughout the country. But try as they could, none of those prefects and teachers could take the MUN culture we had institutionalised in our classrooms to classrooms outside. Many, many years later, after expending much effort and after trying out this, that, and everything else that could be tried out, a group of students from a batch decided to stake everything and come up with a simple solution. That solution turned out to be a platform. The platform had a name. MUNation. I wrote about MUNation in 2016, but the footnote it compels today deserves a less sketchy article, particularly with respect to where they are now.
On the 21st and the 28th of January, 2018 (one year after they started out, that is), MUNation hosted the Sri Lankan Crisis Simulation Conference at the Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology (SLIIT). What’s special about this is the fact that it is the first conference held in the country catered specifically to crisis situations. Crisis situations, in case you don’t know, are part and parcel of the MUN culture, because crises are what compel world bodies to get together and try to wade through them as peaceably and diplomatically as possible. The crises being simulated can be from the past or the present, and for that matter can even be imagined: at the MUNation Conference, for instance, six different specific situations were simulated and worked out: the Allied and Nazi High Commands for the Second World War, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, the UN Security Council, NATO, and a futuristic (also unrealistic? idealistic?) Global Commonwealth of Nations.
To me such an enterprise is important, and not because it’s MUNation at the helm. If there’s one misconception of what the MUN stands for, which has been sustained throughout, it’s the misconception that the United Nations stands for the rights of individual countries over a global polity. In other words, nationalism, chauvinism, and the politics of sovereignty and autonomy and expedience are regarded (sometimes erroneously) as taking precedence over the interests of the entire world, as a whole, which explains the at times irrational wars and conflicts, small as they are compared to the two World Wars, which have been waged by bigger countries against smaller countries despite the best efforts of the United Nations to prevent them. Simulating crises, and locating them not just in the present but also in the past and future, goes a long way in dispelling that aforementioned misconception, because now the global body (i.e. the UN) now has truly become a global institution: arguments need to be made, disagreements need to be resolved and immediately. It’s consensus politics at one level, diplomacy at another.
The Conference, attended by various dignitaries on both days (including Senel Wanniarachchi and Malinda Seneviratne), oversaw various events and side-events, which eventually saw Royal Institute emerge as the Director General’s Award for Best Delegation. A marvellous start-up conference, it ended up enrapturing audiences with rapt speeches and with the timeliness and relevance the whole enterprise entailed. To a large extent, this had to do with the main figures at the head of MUNation, above them all the Founder of the organisation, Nikin Mataraarachchi. I remember the last word he put in the last time I interviewed him regarding MUNation: “We hope to help the future of the MUN and upcoming delegates. We would also like to hope to expand and become Sri Lanka’s first professional MUN consultancy service and also increase the knowledge of Sri Lankans as a whole on international politics.” It would seem that this service he hopes to provide has gone beyond just a website, just a platform, and just an idea. It has evolved. As it should.
Written for: The Island YOUth, February 18 2018
No comments:
Post a Comment