2002 Issues
Please click on the cover or the text link to view complete table of contents for each issue

	Issue 1, 2002: Today, in Afghanistan Our cover photograph, of a young Afghan girl carrying an even younger boy, personifies different aspects - war and displacement - of an even grimmer problem: the scarcity of hope. Over much of its modern existence, Afghanistan has been burned by war set alight from outside, as well as kindled internally. This fire has been fuelled by abject poverty, a shattered infrastructure and religious and ethnic strife. The events of 11 September 2001 have made it clear that the only hope for peace in Afghanistan, and across all borders, is to combat poverty and support democracy and good governance. What remains is for countries to not only rally around the defeat of a symptom - a regime that inspired terror at home and supported it abroad - but also to make the concrete, sustained commitments necessary to construct the underpinnings of a new infrastructure as a foundation of hope for the Afghan people. Without sustainable development, without institutions of democratic good governance, without hope, peace will always remain elusive, and conflict and terrorism will continue to feed on poverty, corruption and despair. The International Conference on Financing for Development (Monterrey, March 2002) and the World Summit on Sustainable Development (Johannesburg, August-September 2002) are opportunities for both developed and developing countries to demonstrate to the poor and the powerless that there is cause for hope, and a will to make a difference.
	Issue 2, 2002: A World Fit for Children Secretary-General Kofi Annan on 8 April concluded his address to the World Assembly on Ageing in Madrid with a confession. “I turned 64 today”, he remarked. “I, therefore, feel empowered to quote a Beatles song that asks, on behalf of all older persons, ‘Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 64’?” “I trust the answer is yes”, Mr. Annan went on. Population ageing is not sudden or sporadic, but an enduring factor, and the proportion of older persons has continued to rise through the last century and the present. While acknowledgement of the need for them varies among cultures and societies, they are, for the greater part, better equipped with security of finance and health to feed themselves, rather than awaiting kindness. For all the concern that a graying planet may compel, many societies and Governments are confronted with problems often defiant of solution at the other end of the life-scale - those facing children. Our enormously successful “War on Childhood” issue five years ago focused on the lives, often abbreviated, always scarred, of children thrown into the frontlines of conflict. But, as coverage in this issue makes clear, the war is being waged on several other fronts as well, among them despair, disease, deprivation and disregard. At the same time, a range of initiatives - public, private and partnered - offer exciting, often unconventional, peaks and trenches from where counter-attacks can be launched.
	Issue 3, 2002: Sustainable ? This is an issue about summits. Within weeks, our leaders will gather at Johannesburg, South Africa, for the World Summit on Sustainable Development to address an agenda "impossibly ambitious to some, disappointingly narrow to others", in Kofi Annan's phrase, to articulate "a message of shared responsibility", as President Tarja Halonen of Finland hopes, and, indeed, in Ambassador Lars-Göran Engfeldt's words, to "show a critical mass of concrete deliverables". And, as Huey Johnson stresses, if "only the United Nations can provide a vision of sustainable development as an alternative to war", that peace itself "will never really come without learning how to live more in harmony with the natural world", to quote Jane Goodall. The vision itself could be one, as Yolanda Kakabadse argues, "where natural systems are intimately linked to the systems created by people to allow life to continue to flourish in many forms" or, to put it in Ernst von Weizsaecker's phrase, where there is "a true harmonization of environmental and developmental goals". Whatever the definition, the "relationship between the human race and the earth's diverse resources" is complex, as Lydia Makhubu reminds us, even as the dramatic scientific achievements of the "post-genomic era", discussed by Arturo Falaschi, offer real possibilities to address the most visible problems arising from an inequitous relationship-whether in health, nutrition or poverty. And even mountains, which at one time could figuratively, as much as literally, be said to rise above the world's preoccupations and concerns, are no less vulnerable. This is the International Year of Mountains; and it was fifty years ago that the plans to scale Mount Everest were readied, culminating in the ascent by Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay on 29 May 1953, and the anchoring of the United Nations flag upon the pinnacle of the highest peak. And so, one summit is remembered even as another is looked forward to.
	Issue 4, 2002: Whose World Is It Anyway? The Millennium Development Goals (centrespread), reflected in the Declaration adopted by the General Assembly in 2000, remain, in Kofi Annan's phrase, "grim reminders of human needs neglected and promises unmet". From an organizational point of view, the Secretary-General intends to present a programme budget that reflects these priorities and to promote "a very different way of doing business". The fifty-seventh General Assembly President, Jan Kavan, has introduced a programme of work in which items are clustered "in a way that provides opportunities for joint debates of interlinked issues", giving impetus to the call to "stop talking and start walking", reflected by a key participant in the Johannesburg Summit on sustainable development. That Summit saw a reference to "time, the most precious non-renewable resource" running out, particularly for peoples made vulnerable precisely by their geography, including small island nations, in danger of losing physical territory to the ravages of global warming. Whether, as two distinguished members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change contend, "even by association it appears that the extent of increase in [extreme weather events] has something to do with the process of global climate change" or whether "exaggerations of the threat of climate change only serve to cheapen the environmental ethic", there is a sense, in the phrase of Tuvalu's Governor-General, that a people "having little or nothing to do with the causes cannot be left on its own to pay the price". Which returns us to the theme of this issue: just whose world is it anyway? The world of the elements that make up its environment and to whose ben- or mal-evolence there's little chance of man-made change? It's more than a rhetorical question, whose answer depends not just upon the immediate new year ahead (for which all good wishes come from us in the Chronicle team) but also upon those many succeeding ones. Otherwise, to borrow a phrase from one of the first United Nations tour guides, Nina Miness, at subsequent reunions "we shall all say to each other, 'you haven't changed a bit'. It's a lie, of course …" Read on , and write!

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