S4-Episode 4: Build Trust and Build a Future

 

Melissa Fleming 00:00

From the United Nations, I'm Melissa Fleming, and this is Awake At Night. Joining me today from Sarajevo is Ingrid Macdonald, the United Nations’ Resident Coordinator in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Ingrid, we’ll get into your current work later but I know you were once based in Afghanistan. We are having this conversation just as several days ago, the Taliban took over after [the] US withdrawal of troops. What are you feeling now about what's going on?

 

Ingrid Macdonald 00:51

What is happening in Afghanistan, I think, is just such a tragedy. It's devastating to see twenty years of effort that the Afghans themselves have put into their future going in the way that it is. And when you see those images in terms of the airport, of the desperation, it really... I think it makes everyone really think in terms of the fear and the, you know, the desperation that people are feeling, but we cannot just disengage and say it's too difficult, we have to actually re engage more, because those people put their their hope in us, they put their trust in us. And we have a responsibility to up that. So for me, I think it's frustrating, I think it's devastating. But my feelings don't really matter. What matters is the feelings of those people and what they put forward.

 

Melissa Fleming 01:43

When you think back of your time in Afghanistan, I mean, I'm sure a lot of vivid memories are coming to you these days. And what are some of those memories, what are some of the images that you have in your head from your time spent there?

 

Ingrid Macdonald 01:43

It's one of my favourite countries in terms of the scenery because it is so stark. It’s a really resilient country, and the scenery is really resilient as well. So that bit I remember really, driving and just seeing these mountains and these passes and the snow and just how people just keep moving forward with their lives despite the impediments put in front of them. But I think one of the things I also really struck me about Afghanistan, and I learned so much from, was the various women that I worked with.

One of the programmes we had was working with women, female lawyers. And so we had these really brave lawyers who would be working, particularly with women and women headed households to ensure that they could get access back to their property. And I mean, one in particular, that I remember when we had this high level visit. She was this… We went to visit her and she had been someone that we'd been working with for a long time and I remember that, she suddenly pulled out this knife, this big carving knife, and everyone was like, ‘Oh, no, here we go. It's a big carving knife.’ 

But when she pulled it out, and then she pulled out one of her tunics to actually show all the blood on it. And she said, ‘This is where I was attacked and this is what was used to attack me.’ And it was because she was a widow and there was an expectation that as a widow, she should automatically marry the brother of her husband. And she didn't want to do that because the brother of her husband was violent and he was only interested in the property and getting all of her assets. And then she would be totally vulnerable when she married. She’d basically have almost no rights. 

And so what he did was that, of course, he beat her and did horrible things to her. But then he took her children, and she had no rights, you know, to really get them back because there was this expectation and this belief that it was actually safer for them to be with him or better for them to be with him than to be with their own mother. And it was devastating for her. And so it's people like that, that I really worry about because now with the situation, where do they fit in? At that point, she actually had people who at least we were able to work with her around her property, and also to try and get her children back. But where were people like that going to be now? Will they just be forced into those situations? And I think these are the really horrible, horrible situations that many women are facing now.

 

Melissa Fleming 04:28

Ingrid, you're now working in international organisations, I bet you've come on a long journey from a very small town, I believe, in New Zealand. Can you tell me about the town you grew up in? And what was it like and what was the environment like there?

 

Ingrid Macdonald 04:46

So I moved to New Zealand when I was young from Australia, and I was... my father was in the mines so he was minor. There's this place in New Zealand called Waiuku and there's this big mine there and so when I grew up, I lived in this place that was like, I suppose you'd call on an estate where all the families were living and so my street had I think about forty five or fifty kids from the same school on it which was great as a kid because we would all go cycling and there was all kids everywhere and it was very safe on the streets and that was wonderful. 

So everyone knew everyone's business which was always interesting. But at the same time, I think my school, I was very lucky because there was fantastic teachers who also really invested in their students, because it was a small town school. And it was a really dynamic time in New Zealand because, I mean, one of the things I remember is, there was all this nuclear protests and everything happening. And we had, you know, we had in the Pacific, the French were doing the tests on nuclear bombs and this was something that was very much opposed in New Zealand. And so our politicians were actually going out on military frigates to oppose it and protest it, which was, I think, quite a unique experience to see your politicians going out doing something like that. So it was very high profile. 

And for me, I remember at that time, I watched this movie called The Day After and it really had a dramatic impact on me, it was, you know, because it was about the nuclear winter and, you know, I looked at that and I was like, ‘Oh, my god, there's no future for us. What is the future if this is where we're headed?’ And for a small child, I think that you see things, sometimes you take things very... you internalise a lot. 

And so, for me, growing up in that small town, even though I was in a small town, I was also seeing very big issues and being exposed to very big issues. And I was drawn to these international issues at the same time, which gave me the opportunities to see beyond just being in that town where I grew up.

 

Melissa Fleming 06:57

So you weren't interested in a career in mining. You decided, I guess, to pursue at least higher education, which... was that the first in your family?

 

Ingrid Macdonald 07:08

Yeah, it was blue collar in terms of my family. My father being an electrician, and my mother was more of a homemaker and used to work in people's gardens. But I actually did look at mining in terms of geography. So I actually have qualifications that are both in law and in geography but once I started going to university, I was much more drawn to the political legal side and I was very lucky also, Auckland University had these fantastic lecturers who came there and they always really practice this critical engagement. So it wasn't just about you go there and you just learn, you also learnt to think and you learnt to to engage.

 

Melissa Fleming 07:52

And you had a bit of a spark towards activism, what was it that sparked your activism? And how did you then take that into your student life?

 

Ingrid Macdonald 07:49

For me, if I go back in terms of the nuclear issue because I was so scared, one of the things my father said to me was ‘Okay, there's no point in just being scared, you need to educate yourself around this.’ And so he sent me a way to research about the whole nuclear area and so I would go to the library. In those days, we didn't have the internet and everything so I would actually go off to the library, and read books and things like that. And then I learnt a lot on this and so I became very passionate, and I watched TV. We had two TV channels at that stage, and I watched the news in terms of what was happening. 

And so I started writing letters to politicians, to my MP, and then also at the same time, I became very passionate about my English classes, because we were going through this stage of not, you know, where you weren't really learning grammar was about how it sounded. And I got very annoyed because, I mean, to this day, I still struggle a little bit with my grammar, because it wasn't something that we were taught. And so I wrote to my principal of my school and said, ‘You're not teaching us proper English and you need to, you need to improve it. So I was called to the principal's office in terms of my letter, and then they encouraged me to go into the debating team and pursue other avenues with that level of passion.

 

Melissa Fleming 09:32

So Ingrid, you made it to university, I guess, the first in your family. But it was no longer free education, I believe they changed the policies in New Zealand. So you had to find a way to pay for your tuition, how did you do that?

 

Ingrid Macdonald 09:49

I think my generation was was the first in New Zealand where they really brought in this user pays, which meant that previously it cost something like $300 for the year to go and then suddenly it was thousands and thousands of dollars, and I was lucky enough that my stepfather at that time, he tried to help out a little bit which was fantastic but, of course, I needed to really work. I did modelling. I used to do a lot of commercials on TV. I did waitressing. I used to run restaurants. I did tele-phoning, you know, where you phone people up and caught...and try and do... I was one of those annoying people who, at dinner time, would phone you and ask you to do a survey and things like that. I mean, I put pamphlets on cars. 

Whatever it took to really get the money to be able to pay for the university and pay for my accommodation, I think it was really, really important. Because most of us came out with quite big student loans. Mine, I think mine was around $30,000 or $40,000 when I came out and so you didn't... you really as a generation coming out with that, that becomes then a really big impediment if you want to buy a house or you want to do something else in terms of moving forward. So I was really keen not to have too big of a student loan and to really pay that off as quickly as possible when I came out. 

But I think working while you're at university, I learnt so, so much so I don't regret it at all. I made incredible friends and I had fantastic colleagues. I had great experiences. But I also learned a lot about how to manage, particularly in restaurants; how to balance books, how to deal with staff who didn't turn up sometimes for their shifts, and really how to crisis manage. Because you know, when you're running a restaurant, I think it's very similar to doing humanitarian work sometimes because you're sort of always crisis managing in terms of situations. So yeah, I was able to move forward and not only have the good learning in terms of the university, but also to have good life learning as well.

 

Melissa Fleming 11:55

After university, I believe you went to work for the New Zealand Defence Force on land rights. Why did you choose to go work for the New Zealand Defence Force, and what kind of work was that?

 

Ingrid Macdonald 12:07

The job was amazing. It was working on the Tekapo, a military training range, which was primarily used by the army, the New Zealand army. And if you've seen the Lord of the Rings movies or some of those, it's basically that scenery. So I was constantly going down there to work on a training range that had the backdrop like you see in the Lord of the Rings and my job was really to work with the military to work out how they could do their testing safely. I used to work a lot also on, in New Zealand, the Maori population [who] has a very close connection to the land, and they’re considered to be the stewards of the land. The tribe, the Ngāi Tahu, they were stewards of that area as well and so they had a very strong voice. And also a lot of the New Zealand army, there's about 30% of the New Zealand army, actually from the Maori population, even though they're only 10% of the population itself. So there's a very proud and strong heritage there. 

I learned so much from working with that, and I was exposed to incredible people, you know, the New Zealand Defence Force, the Head of the Legal Department, the reason I went... one of the reasons I went into international is because he invested in me and he saw and encouraged me to go into international humanitarian law. I've been very lucky and very privileged to come across people like that, who put their trust in me and invest in me in that way.

 

Melissa Fleming 13:32

So he was a kind of mentor that led you to get a degree in humanitarian law and then move on to Oxfam, I believe?

 

Ingrid Macdonald 13:24

Yeah, he encouraged me to... In Melbourne University they have this fantastic international legal programme and actually now we have Assistant Secretary General Gillian Triggs, who's the High Commissioner for Protection. She was actually one of my lecturers in Melbourne University and Oxfam was advertising for this position of being a mining ombudsman which intrigued me. I didn't know what a mining ombudsman was. And so I would be going to places like Peru or the Philippines or Indonesia or Papua New Guinea and working with indigenous communities primarily, in terms of some of their grievances or complaints against these mining companies which were generally in the areas of human rights grievances or in the areas of environmental, a lot of it was around environmental concerns. 

And so... and then I would document that I would write reports, and I would bring it back. And then we would either try and set up complaints resolution processes or if the company was not going to go down that line and try and work with the community, then we would launch campaigns against them. To the point where we would also even look at international legal action, if we could, because some of these situations were devastating and they still are.

 

Melissa Fleming 14:56 

You went on to hold other positions at Oxfam, I guess, most notably working on their advocacy campaign to draw attention to the Darfur crisis in 2005-2007. How did you tackle that challenge?

 

Ingrid Macdonald 14:56

The Darfur crisis I think was... I mean that was a defining moment for many people because it was so all encompassing in terms of the level of displacement that occurred because of the conflict that broke out. I remember coming in and there was, there were millions of people essentially who'd been on the move, because they were in fear of their lives. And so many of them were in these camps. Aid agencies were trying to provide services. The United Nations was there. The African Union, at the time, was also looking at how it could engage on the security operation and it was a massive operation. At the same time, I think that, as an aid community, we were also facing a whole lot of impediments. There was all these restrictions that were being put on our ability to operate. 

So, for example, if you came into the country, you had to get a permit that could take months to get. Then if you left Khartoum, you need to get a permit to go to, like Al-Junaynah, or Kalma and then you would need to get a permit to then go out of there to go and visit one of the villages or go into the camps. And it was this level of bureaucracy that was...it was strangling the operation and so we quantified that it was hundreds and hundreds of lost days in terms of the operation, which meant that there were millions of dollars being wasted. But what it also meant was that there were so many people who were not getting water. There were so many people whose mental health needs were not being addressed. There were so many people who were not having their physical health needs met.

 

Melissa Fleming 16:55

And on that note, you were there on the ground and you just mentioned that you witnessed so many people who had lost everything and were, I assume, in desperate conditions but I wonder how it was for you personally to go into a situation like that and witness so much suffering?

 

Ingrid Macdonald 17:15

I think one of the most difficult situations I was in was when I went to Kalma Camp. One of the key problems that was happening was that, you know, for families, they needed to be able to cook their food and to do that they needed firewood. And so you had a lot of women who had to leave to go and collect firewood and bring it back. Now the reason the women were doing this is one it was culturally, it was often the woman's job to do that but also the men couldn't leave the camp because they were in fear of being killed. 

So the women were leaving the camp because they knew that they will probably not be killed but they would only be sexually assaulted or raped. And this was the sort of decision that they were having to make to feed their children and so when you're sitting there and you're interviewing woman after woman after woman in terms of what they had gone through to be able to pull together this sort of monitoring, to really show that there was a systematic pattern of abuse happening so that action could be taken. I mean, when you can rationalise that as a professional but as an individual, you know, it's very tough.

 

Melissa Fleming 18:06

Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed by the responsibility that these women were giving you, disclosing this kind of information and hoping that you could do something about it?

 

Ingrid Macdonald 18:19

I think, yes, sometimes. But also, I see, I've always thought that that was a bit of a luxury to feel that way. I'm there to do a job and I'm a professional, to be there to do a job. And it's really important that I put the best foot forward. They're the ones who have gone through the situation. They're the ones who are suffering. And my job is to be there to ensure that it's not about me and my issues, it's about how to take their voice and take it forward. So I think that's something in my private time I can deal with, but when I'm doing my job, I am there to do a job.

 

Melissa Fleming 19:15 

How do you deal with it in your private time? It must be quite a lot to just hold inside internally.

 

Ingrid Macdonald  19:24

I think for most anyone who's worked in humanitarian or human rights work in the field, I think this is something that we all need to deal with and we all need to hold. And so that's why I think I often... and I have quite a few colleagues and friends from this line of work because it’s sometimes a different conversation that you can have with them. And you don't even need to have the conversation about the issue. But you all know and you can have solidarity with each other and I think that's really important. 

I do think for humanitarians, there is a need for much more focus on mental health because I do think that we shouldn't just assume that we're all superhumans and everything. For me, personally, I used to do a lot of running. I used to do... I used to see my friends. I used to go back and see my family. Now I had my daughter, I watch a lot of movies, eat a lot of popcorn and, you know, do things like go into the garden and play. I have a dog, I have a cat, I have fish, I have my daughter so that balances me a lot. But I think that it's something that you need to work towards.

 

Melissa Fleming 20:38

Had you ever gotten to a point where you just thought, ‘This is too much. I can't take any more of these horrific stories of suffering, of violence, of injustice?’

 

Ingrid Macdonald 20:55

I think one of the things that I've learned is that I'm very good at sometimes giving a lot and then and then sometimes I need to... I've learned how to step back, as well, when you get to a point. And it's a thing where it comes back to also being about being a professional and seeing that this is a responsibility. It's not just about being someone who's going out there because I feel this way and I have this calling. It's also a responsibility to the people that I'm working with. 

And so one of the times when, for example, when I was a mining ombudsman, I got to a point where I had communities in different countries. There was seven different countries; Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Peru, where I was working on trying to bring forward their voice in terms of their cases and I'd been doing that for about four years and I was at the point of exhaustion because I was on a plane constantly. And I was losing my energy and I wasn't able to maintain what I was doing. And so at that point, I was like, ‘Okay, now I need to hand this to somebody else to take it forward. They need someone who can bring new energy, who can bring that vitality that I'm lacking. It's not about me, I have to step aside.’ 

And so, that's one of the reasons even though I love that job and I really was completely dedicated to working on that. I had got to the point of exhaustion and I needed to move aside. And so I did. I had a sabbatical in the Solomon Islands for a while and then went off to Darfur but I needed that time.

 

Melissa Fleming 22:37

Ingrid, as of 2016, you have been working for the United Nations in a number of functions and now you've entered into a country in March 2020, Bosnia Herzegovina, that is also stable but yet, in a very precarious situation. Recently, you had a visit from the Secretary General Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide, Alice Nderitu, and she visited you on the eve of the anniversary of Srebrenica. And as we remember, that's where over eight thousand men and boys were slaughtered by the Bosnian-Serb army back then for the Republic of Srpska. She emerged shocked by the level of denial of genocide that she witnessed there. Can you talk a bit about that and then just in general, what is your job in Bosnia Herzegovina and what is it like working there?

 

Ingrid Macdonald 23:34

Well, in terms of, I'll start with my job first. I mean, here I'm the Resident Coordinator so that essentially, as the resident coordinator, my job is to try and work with all the different UN agencies, funds and programmes that are working here. We've got about 850 staff here, most of them actually nationals of the country and we've been working here for a long time. So the United Nations has had large programmes in Bosnia and Herzegovina for a long time. 

And my job is to try and bring them together and look at how we can work together with the government and with other other actors to really accelerate achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. So that's a... it's a fascinating role but it also means that I work on areas like prevention and human rights and the issues of genocide and atrocity crimes. Now, in terms of Bosnia Herzegovina, Bosnia Herzegovina is an amazing country. It's got so much diversity in it, like in Sarajevo, a few like… if you go 500 metres from where I am, you will go to an area where you're at the crossroads of East meets West, basically. You've got within a 500 metre area. You can see mosques. You can see synagogues. You can see churches. There's so much diversity and it's a very incredible history here. 

But unfortunately, it's often defined by the wars. When the Yugoslavia broke up in the 1990s, it was actually extremely brutal. The atrocities were terrible. I mean, this is one of the places where rape as a weapon of war was defined as a war crime in terms of what went through the international tribunals. And, as we know, Srebrenica, I mean, the genocide in Srebrenica  was horrific in terms of what happened. And I think this is something that as the United Nations, it's also one of the darkest periods of our history. We did not perform in the way that we should have during that time and this is something that also the previous Secretary General, Kofi Annan, acknowledged that we had failed as an international community and we had failed as the United Nations. 

So being the Resident Coordinator here and having to go to the Srebrenica commemorations like I did this year and like I did last year, it's a huge responsibility to be there. But it's also, I think, it's not one of the most pleasant experiences to be going there but it's incredibly important that we never forget. But it's not just that we never forget, but that we all work...that we apply that learning and that we don't let this happen again, legitimately. And I think the UN's taken a lot of steps in the right direction on that. But there's still a lot to go. 

And one of those areas is, of course, in the era of hate speech. We know that whenever you have these sort of atrocity crimes that happened here, they're often preceded by hate. They're often preceded by individuals and responsibility, whether they're political leaders, whether they're religious leaders, whether they're average population, putting out hate or putting out “the other” so that religious community is evil, or they're responsible for XYZ. 

And I think here, this has been one of the concerns is that, and why it was so important that USG [Under-Secretary-General Alice] Nderitu came here, because her mandate is so critical at this time. And so we were seeing, at this point, an escalation in the denial not only of the genocide in Srebrenica but denial of war crimes more broadly because there were many war crimes that were committed here. So one of the things she did, which was really important, is that we took her out to lots of different communities. So we went to communities where you have at the community level, local leaders trying to come together across their ethnic divisions and work together to say ‘We need to look forward. It's been 25 years. We can't have 25 years more like this. We need to have a future for our people and for our children.’

And so we took her to places like Tjentište where the mayors and the different war veterans associations had come together to create one memorial across the… for all victims. So this is a huge step. We also went to Stolac and Stolac is a place that's close to the Croatian border where there was a lot of atrocities there and it's still a very divided community. So you go down you, when you cross the bridge, there's a bridge that goes across the main river there, you see flags on different sides of the bridges, which symbolises the different communities on different sides of the bridge. And they have what's called two schools under one roof which means that you have the Muslim children going to one school,and you have the Catholic children go into another school under the same roof being taught separately, playing separately, engaging separately. 

But there what we saw was these two principles, because you have two principles in the school, who came together and said, ‘We're going to have one library and we're going to have the children come together in the library, and they can just read books together.’ And that was a huge step forward. And this was really important for it to have visibility and I think that is what we are really trying to work on. And that's what I'm deeply committed [about]. We have to work with those people who are trying to take their communities forward and trying to build trust and build a future while we also deal with the unacceptable denialism revisionism in these types of areas.

 

Melissa Fleming 29:35

What keeps you awake at night, these days, Ingrid?

 

Ingrid Macdonald 29:38

I think one of the things that keeps me... it's really been playing on me a lot at the moment, is this whole climate change or well, I suppose it's not even climate change now. This climate catastrophe, this impending existential disaster that we all know that's there and that we're trying to work on. And it's the fact that, you know, we just had this report that came out from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that basically says we're now at the point of no return in certain areas. We know that we're going to hit two degrees. We know that we're going to have more extreme weather events, that we're going to have more devastation though, they will be more frequent, the oceans will rise. This is not speculation anymore. This is fact. The speculation is how much is it going to be unless we change our behaviour? 

And so what keeps me up at night is how do we change that behaviour? How do we actually find some way of getting a resolve to really stop this destruction and these destructive practices that have become second nature to us and really work together as a community and as humanity to really face the biggest crisis that we are facing. Not for ourselves, I mean, our generation, we will probably be okay. But for the next generation and the generation after, what are we leaving them? And so that really plays on me, and I think a lot about it. 

And I think about how it's become so difficult. Previously, you could put together factual arguments and then you could take those factual arguments forward and people would listen, and they would listen to scientists and they would listen to experts. Now we have the situation where it's like, we're all drowning in information. It's like this huge information overload and there's so much misinformation in there that you have thousands of scientists coming out saying, ‘This is a reality’ and you have one or two commentators saying, ‘Oh, no, this is all conspiracy theories.’ And people will believe the other. 

And I think this is the challenge that we have is it breeds this sort of distrust. We face this almost pandemic of distrust at the moment. So how do we build trust again? We have to think about that we have to try and work out ways to challenge this disinformation to challenge this toxicity and everything else that goes with it, and really look for examples of hope and look for how we can inspire people to take up the responsibility and start thinking together as humanity, rather than just thinking about me, me, me, me, me and thinking in terms of this disinformation. 

I'm trying my hardest to do my little bit, to add to that here and in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I'm trying really hard to do that with my family and my daughter. But I think it's something that is the challenge for us as a generation, it's up to us. Unless we do something in the next five to ten years, what are we leaving for our children? What are we leaving in terms of this world? And it's just not acceptable to turn your head away and just say, ‘Oh, well, that'll be fine,’ because it won't.

 

Melissa Fleming 32:56

I guess you must also be thinking about as a mother, what are you leaving for your daughter?

 

Ingrid Macdonald 33:07

Oh, it definitely becomes more personal when it's your own child. It's like... when I look at the situations I've been in, I don't know how I would cope with many of the people I have worked with in the field who have gone through what they've gone through. That's, you know, as a mother, yeah, I mean, that's something that is something I just don't even want to think about, in some respects. 

But for me, it also helps me to know that I am really privileged and my daughter has a privilege in terms of where she is and also that that's a responsibility. Privilege is not just something that we should take lightly and so, for her, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to provide her with some sense of normality. It's not normal to have lived in New York, Ukraine and now Bosnia and everything all before the time you're like five years old, but that's the reality that she has. And so I try to provide some normality there. 

But I think I'm like any mother, I want my daughter to be safe. I want my daughter to be happy. I want my daughter to be able to make her own choices. And I want her to be responsible and generous and kind. I think that that's what any mother would want for their child.

 

Melissa Fleming 34:32

Ingrid, thank you so much for joining me on  Awake At Night.

 

Ingrid Macdonald 34:37

Thank you, Melissa. That was an absolute pleasure. I'm so humbled to be here. Thank you so much.

 

Melissa Fleming 34:47

Thank you for listening to Awake At Night. We'll be back soon with more incredible and inspiring stories from people working to do some good in this world at a time of global crisis. To find out more about the series and the extraordinary people featured, do visit un.org-awake-at-night. On Twitter, we're @UN and I'm @melissafleming. Ingrid is @MacdonaldIngrid Subscribe to Awake At Night wherever you get your podcasts and please take the time to rate and review us. It does make a difference. 

Thanks to my producers Bethany Bell, and the team at Chalk & Blade: Laura Sheeter, Cheri Percy, Fatuma Khaireh and Matt Nielsen, and to my colleagues at the UN: Roberta Politi, Darrin Farrant, Geneva Damayanti, Tulin Battikhi, and Bissera Kostova.

The original music for this podcast was written and performed by Nadine Shah and produced by Ben Hillier, the sound design and additional music was by Pascal Wyse.