Little Red Specks in the United Nations
Ask someone what a UN worker looks like and they will probably describe a diplomat at a cocktail party in New York. The reality, especially for the people in this chapter, is more like 700 trucks driving food through the Ethiopian desert to millions of starving people.
This is part of my retelling of “50 Years of Singapore and the United Nations” (Tommy Koh, Li Lin Chang, Joanna Koh, 2015, ISBN: 978-9814713030).
Chapter 30 is written by Andrew Toh, who spent 28 years as a UN staff member and retired as an Assistant Secretary-General. He tells the story of what it is actually like for Singaporeans to work inside the United Nations, far from the diplomatic headlines.
The Myth of the UN Worker
Toh starts by busting the common image of UN staff. Most people imagine diplomats engaged in endless politics during the day and attending fancy receptions at night. That is not what most UN employees do.
In reality, UN workers function like civil servants, except in an international setting instead of a national one. They come from many of the 193 member states. They serve in foreign locations. They carry a UN passport, called a Laissez Passer, that does not even list their nationality.
Most UN agencies are not doing politics at all. They are doing highly operational work. The World Food Programme delivers food to over 100 million people. UNICEF handles maternal and child care. The World Health Organisation leads on global health. UNDP coordinates development assistance worldwide. About 60 percent of UN employees work outside headquarters, in field offices mostly located in developing countries.
Singaporeans at the UN: Small in Number, Big in Impact
Singapore is one of the smallest UN member states. The number of staff that can be recruited from each country is limited by a quota based on a formula. In an average year, there are about 20 Singapore passport holders across the entire UN system. Out of roughly 40,000 UN employees worldwide, that is tiny.
But Singaporeans have held some serious positions. The most well-known is Professor Tommy Koh, who presided over the Third Conference of the Law of the Sea and drafted the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), adopted in 1982. Other Singaporeans have served as Under-Secretary-General, Assistant Secretary-General, Executive Director of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), and Deputy Director-General of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO).
So can 20 people out of 40,000 make a difference? Toh answers with “an unequivocal Yes.”
Becoming an International Civil Servant
Toh writes honestly about the adjustment. He had never worked or lived outside Singapore before his first assignment. Getting sent to the World Food Programme headquarters in Rome was both exciting and terrifying. Rome is not an English-speaking city. He was the first and only Singaporean at WFP.
But the fears went away fast. In an international workplace, almost everyone is in the same situation. Nobody is truly at home. That actually creates stronger bonds among colleagues because they have no choice but to adapt to each other quickly.
Toh spent his first 18 years at WFP primarily as Chief of Logistics. WFP is known within the UN family as “the logistics arm of the UN.” It is not a think tank or a policy shop. It is a highly operational organization that gets food from point A to the people who need it at point B, often under terrible conditions.
Ethiopia, 1985: The Famine That Shocked the World
This is the heart of the chapter.
In 1985, Ethiopia was in the grip of a famine that had already killed over a million people. The human suffering was on a scale that is hard to imagine. It got worldwide attention after Bob Geldof organized the Live Aid charity concert, which raised over $100 million.
WFP sent a small team of experts to Ethiopia to set up what was then the largest humanitarian operation the UN had ever conducted. The team had five key members. Two of them were Singaporean: Toh himself and a chartered accountant.
Think about that for a moment. The UN’s biggest-ever humanitarian operation, and 40 percent of the core team was from a tiny island nation in Southeast Asia.
Building a Logistics Operation From Nothing
The team established the WFP Transport Operation Ethiopia, or WTOE. Its job was to deliver food and relief supplies to millions of people in the most remote parts of the country.
WTOE ended up operating about 700 vehicles. That was the largest truck fleet in Africa at the time. The operational headquarters was in Assab, then Ethiopia’s only working seaport where ships carrying humanitarian cargo could dock.
Assab was not a comfortable place. Toh describes it as an arid region comparable to a lunar landscape. There was almost no infrastructure. The Singaporeans and their colleagues had to import and build everything they needed within months. They had to handle millions of tons of food grain and then transport it hundreds of miles inland to reach starving populations.
Living conditions were basic. Staff lived in mobile trailers, which were the only refuge from the extreme heat. As Toh puts it, it was “a far cry from the glitz and glitter of New York, Paris and Rome.”
Seven Weeks That Turned Into Seven Years
WTOE was originally planned as a seven-week emergency operation. It lasted seven years. That tells you something about the scale of the crisis and the need on the ground.
The success of WTOE in Ethiopia set the stage for a similar operation in neighboring Sudan in 1988, when Sudan also fell victim to famine. There, a Singaporean conceived and organized the first commercial and most massive humanitarian airdrop operation in UN history.
What This Story Tells Us
Toh uses this single episode to make a broader point. Singaporeans are practical and adaptable people. They can adjust to any situation, even under unfamiliar and harsh conditions, and achieve great things. In the process, they raise the profile and reputation of their small island nation.
With just about 20 Singaporeans scattered across the entire UN system in any given year, each one carries an outsized responsibility. They are, as the chapter title suggests, little red specks in a vast organization. But those specks have made a real difference in some of the most challenging humanitarian crises in modern history.
About the Author
Andrew Toh was a staff member of the United Nations for 28 years. He retired as an Assistant Secretary-General in 2008. At the time this book was published, he was serving as Singapore’s Non-Resident Ambassador to UNESCO.