Home Front

By Robin Hayden

Notable Honors…

Dr. Frederick M. “Skip” Burkle, Jr., Director of the Center and Professor of Emergency Medicine, University of Hawaii, was awarded the prestigious Gorgas Medal from the Association of Military Surgeons of the United States (AMSUS). Dr. Burkle accepted the award during the annual AMSUS conference in Anaheim, California. The Citation read: “For distinguished work in preventive medicine, ground-breaking work in disaster management and humanitarian assistance and the training of an entire generation of both U.S. and international medical personnel and military planners.” The Gorgas Medal, named after Major General William Crawford Gorgas for his work in the prevention of malaria, was established in 1942 and is awarded to outstanding individuals active in the preventive medicine field.

Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, University of Hawaii, was also recently awarded an honorary doctorate degree at the University of Copenhagen for his scientific and professional contributions to cultural and international psychology, especially his work with the mentally ill and with refugees.

…for Founders of the University of Hawaii Certificate Program in Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance

On January 13, 2000, the foundation course—“Seminar in Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance”—a new collaborative, multidisciplinary training and research program, begins on the university’s Manoa campus in Honolulu. This joint effort culminates the efforts of professors Burkle and Marsella to leverage the assets of both organizations (UH is a partnering organization of the Center) to offer a program that draws on the Asia-Pacific expertise of UH faculty, and the extensive field experience of the Center staff. Associate guest lecturers from the United Nations headquarters, humanitarian agencies, overseas universities and key international agencies will augment the Center’s staff. Participation by both civilian and military students is encouraged. The program is international in scope and in the forefront of developing fresh approaches to complex disaster situations in the new millennium.

For more information, contact the Program Coordinator, James D. White, at (1-808) 956-3265, or e-mail: jwhite@hawaii.edu.

Developing Training Guidelines to Secure Peace

A roundtable held in November 1999 at the East-West Center in Honolulu brought together high-level members of national defense agencies to discuss training guidelines for peace training centers. Thirty-four participants from 11 countries (United States, Canada, Australia, Singapore, Italy, Germany, Finland, Bangladesh, Nepal, Malaysia and Sweden) discussed United Nations-sanctioned guidelines to certify centers training Peacekeeping Forces in the skills they need to keep peace in conflicted environments. “Certification of National and Regional Centres of Excellence and Peacekeeping Training Centres” was co-sponsored by the Center of Excellence, the International Association of Peacekeeping Training Centres, and the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO).

Some of the criteria considered were curricula and standards, staff capacity and expertise, library support material, range of courses and infrastructure. For regional centers, pre-requisite agreement of a regional organization, regional representation of staff, selection of students, operational model and international standards were also on the agenda.

Maj.-Gen. Frank van Kappen, former military advisor to the UN Secretary General provided opening remarks. (See this issue for a full interview.)

LTC John Derick, Deputy Director of the Training Unit for the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) for the United Nations acted as facilitator. On loan to the UN from the Malaysian Army, Derick was selected for the position based partly on the breadth of his experience. As a teenager he worked for the Malaysian Red Cross, now the Malaysia Red Crescent, during a time of violent conflict in his nation. Later, after joining the military, he served in a humanitarian UN mission to Cambodia.

But Derick also has a predilection for comprehending and following through for the bigger picture of the peace operations process. “[Soldiers] have to understand they provide an umbrella of security. They need to begin to think in terms of protecting the activities that lead to lasting peace,” Derick reflects.

A large part of his role is mediator and facilitator, both here and through his position in the New York headquarters, in order to permit the free flow of ideas, information exchange, information sharing and collaboration between and among all of the participants. Derick explains, “The nations [of the UN] participate in developing a document. It’s theirs. We put their consensual decisions into guidelines and publish them. Then we ask them—always—to provide feedback, make comments and recommend changes. In this way there is continuity; the loop feeds back to its origins.”

National training centers decide independently where to place their focus. “What nations want to teach their troops is sovereign—we are here to facilitate and to support that,” Derick explains. Regional Centers would address the training needs across a larger group of nations united principally by geography, adding greatly to the challenges of developing guidelines that can meet all of their interests, across several kinds of boundaries—cultural, political, social and economic. Centers of Excellence function as facilitators, bridging education and training, research, information management and sharing, and operational needs, modeled much after this Center of Excellence.

“Through the training processes now being developed and put in place, we are preparing militaries dedicated to serve in peace operations a step further than the expectations of their more traditional defense role. This represents a new frontier. Involved are the elements important to civilian society—water, sanitation, education, public works—and if the reconstruction of the infrastructure of a society is not being addressed, they may be required to act as facilitators to begin the process to make it happen.”

Even though he is enthusiastic about the prospects, Derick is a realist: “Peace is a much more difficult job than war.”