What+is+being+done

What are being done about conflicts? Caren Organizations and people around the world are trying to prevent conflicts from escalating into bigger conflicts such as, war. Efforts have been made by these people who lets us live in a better world today, but there is still more peace building to do. The United Nations is an international organization composed of most countries in the world. Their aims are to preserve peace and challenge humanity. The United Nations has held over 50 peace keeping operations since 1948. The first UN peacekeeping operation was an observer mission in the Middle East. Earlier in 1947, the UN thought it was a good idea to divide Palestine into two; a Jewish state and an Arab state. So the Count Bernadotte of Sweden has mediated the conflict and was able to negotiate a cease-fire. But even after the hostilities continued and unfortunately, the Count got assassinated. The job led on to Ralph Bunche of United States, who directed military observers and laid down the operation procedure. This operation still remains in force, keeping peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. In 2006, Washington post has quoted, //“// // Arab foreign ministers are meeting in Cairo, Egypt, on Sunday to pave the way for an Arab summit planned in Saudi Arabia later this month. A new peace initiative will likely be high on the agenda,” // which refers that they are still working on keeping peace between these two countries. Some of these peacekeeping operations are on-going and most of them have been completed by the UN with the Security Councils. They say, “to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security,” and “determining the existence of any threat to the peace and deciding what measures shall be taken.” is the solution to keeping peace between countries. The peace keepers, the ‘blue helmets’ are soldiers o volunteered by their governments to apply military discipline and training to keep peace by monitoring cease-fires, separating hostile forces and maintaining buffer zones. The United Nations peace keeping projects have made a difference in the world today by making and keeping peace among countries such as the example above. Another organization trying to prevent conflicts is the IMTD, The Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy, is a nonprofit organization founded in 1992 by Ambassador John W. McDonald and Dr. Louise Diamond. Their goals are to build peace and keep it. They hold conferences between countries and try to solve out what is wrong. For a reference, countries such as Bosnia, Cyprus, China, Japan, Korea, Tibet, Liberia, Jordan are one of their targets. Let’s examine “The Korea and Japan Project.” Their major problem was the historical tensions that continue to hinder the relationship between these two countries. The IMTD keeps track of their relationship and focuses one issue at a time. On the conference conducted on December 7th of 2005, they focused on confronting the well known problems and trying to figure out the solutions for the problems. Almost all of their projects are on-going and each time the countries’ relationships are getting better annually. The project on Cyprus, the ‘Conflict Resolution Summer Camp’ has educated teenagers aged thirteen to sixteen to show support for peaceful conflict resolutions after violence occurs. IMTD has reduced violence by settling down conflicts in the world. If more people get interested in peace keeping and contribute, it would help these organizations even more and decrease violence caused by small conflicts so it wouldn’t expand into bigger conflicts.

Sources by Caren
 * http://www.un.org/ (United Nations)
 * http://imtd.org/cgi-bin/imtd.cgi (IMTD)
 * http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/19/AR2006081900391.html (Washington post article)
 * Humanities Packet about UN Peacekeeping