Michael von der Schulenburg

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Michael von der Schulenburg (completely Michael Sergius Graf von der Schulenburg; born October 16, 1948 in Munich ) is a former German diplomat of the OSCE and the UN . From 2009 to 2012 he was the highest representative of the UN in Freetown , Sierra Leone and head of the world's first integrated peacebuilding mission.

Life

Michael von der Schulenburg comes from the German noble family von der Schulenburg from the "Russian line". He is married and has four kids.

After studying economics at the Free University of Berlin, as well as at the London School of Economics (LSE) and the Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA) in Paris, he worked for the UN in New York City ( United States ), Vienna ( Austria ) , Afghanistan , Haiti , Kuwait , Iraq , Iran , Pakistan , Sierra Leone and Syria as well as for the OSCE in Vienna.

On January 14th, 2009 he was appointed representative of the UN in Sierra Leone by the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon . The United Nations Integrated Peacebuilding Office in Sierra Leone (UNIPSIL), which he led, was the world's first integrated peacebuilding mission, coordinating 14 UN organizations. Regarding his job, he said: “We have learned from the past ... that one should not only look at the military. The civilian side must be considered from the start. I am therefore head of the peace mission and development program in Sierra Leone. This has not been implemented so consistently in any other country. ”He reported regularly to the UN Security Council, pointing out not only the successes of the former civil war country in its reconstruction but also new political, economic and social undesirable developments. After disagreements over compliance with the Lomé Peace Agreement and the preparations for the presidential elections in 2012, the Schulenburg government asked to leave the country.

Since then he has been active as a consultant and journalist.

Awards

In January 2020 Michael von der Schulenburg received the highest award in the country of Sierra Leone with the appointment of Grand Commander of the Order of the Republic (GCOR) .

Public positions

Michael von der Schulenburg has been active as a journalist on various political issues:

Afghanistan

In 2020 he called the NATO mission in Afghanistan a "fiasco". The type of withdrawal is also a fiasco that will have dramatic consequences for the world. He criticized the German federal government for nowhere in its report to the Bundestag admitted "even the slightest doubt about the meaning or the implementation of the German military operation". The question must be asked why Afghans had to pay a collective debt for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and what led to the inglorious end of this military intervention.

Islamic State (IS)

In 2014, he warned against all indignation about the atrocities committed by IS to think better about the consequences of the military action and to weigh up possible options. To a certain extent there is also the option of letting IS fail on itself.

Peacebuilding

In 2017 he published a political science book on peacebuilding entitled On Building Peace: Rescuing the Nation-state and Saving the United Nations .

UN charter

In 2018, he made three proposals on Germany's role in the UN Security Council and the UN General Assembly in strengthening the UN Charter as the foundation of international peace settlement. He mentioned the preservation of universal application, the extension to internal conflicts and the democratization of collective decisions.

UN reform

He prepared several internal strategy and reform documents for the UN, which were commended by the UN Secretary General in 2009. Already during his career he publicly stated in the Tagesspiegel , for example , that from his point of view one of the biggest problems was the great fragmentation of the UN. There are too many individual organizations and funds that are difficult to use effectively for a cause. However, since these structures were created by the member states of the UN, states like Germany would have the power to change something.

In 2001 it became known in the media that he accused Pino Arlacchi , Director General of the UN Office in Vienna and Director of the Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (ODCCP) with the rank of Under-Secretary General, that in the UN authority " Fear, intimidation and a complete absence of transparency "prevailed. An official investigation confirmed the serious grievances disclosed by Schulenburg.

Varia

In 1990 he was injured in a cluster bomb explosion in Kabul.

In 2009, according to observers in Sierra Leone, he prevented the lynching of 22 opposition members and the alleged resurgence of the civil war, which ended in 2002, through personal intervention in a precarious situation.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ SECRETARY-GENERAL APPOINTS MICHAEL VON DER SCHULENBURG AS DEPUTY SPECIAL REPRESENTATIVE FOR POLITICAL AFFAIRS IN IRAQ | Meetings Coverage and Press Releases. May 6, 2005, accessed May 12, 2020 .
  2. ↑ SECRETARY-GENERAL APPOINTS EXECUTIVE REPRESENTATIVE FOR UNITED NATIONS INTEGRATED PEACEBUILDING OFFICE IN SIERRA LEONE | Meetings Coverage and Press Releases. January 14, 2009, accessed May 12, 2020 .
  3. ↑ Ulrike Scheffer: “The UN is too fragmented”. Der Tagesspiegel, September 11, 2010, accessed on May 12, 2020 .
  4. ^ Sierra Leone: Eighth year of truce. United Nations - YouTube, February 9, 2009, accessed May 12, 2020 .
  5. ^ First report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Integrated Peacebuilding Office in Sierra Leone (S / 2009/59). Official Records of the Security Council, February 9, 2009, accessed May 12, 2020 .
  6. ^ Fifth report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Integrated Peacebuilding Office in Sierra Leone (S / 2010/471). Official Records of the Security Council, September 28, 2010, accessed May 12, 2020 .
  7. ↑ Dagmar Dehmer: Grenade launcher for the police. Der Tagesspiegel, August 6, 2012, accessed on May 12, 2020 .
  8. ↑ Turning tables . In: The Economist . ISSN  0013-0613 ( economist.com [accessed May 12, 2020]).
  9. ↑ Foreign deployments of the Bundeswehr in transition: Outlook and balance sheetExternal project participants. SWP, 2017, accessed May 13, 2020 .
  10. ↑ The Patriotic Vanguard: State House: Michael von der Schulenburg honored. January 24, 2020, accessed on May 12, 2020 .
  11. ↑ Michael von der Schulenburg: Afghanistan mission: End with horror. In: IPG. FES, March 25, 2020, accessed May 12, 2020 .
  12. ↑ Michael von der Schulenburg: Just let the "IS" fail on itself! In: IPG. FES, November 3, 2014, accessed May 12, 2020 .
  13. ↑ Michael von der Schulenburg: On Building Peace: Rescuing the Nation-state and Saving the United Nations . Amsterdam University Press, 2017, ISBN 978-94-6298-427-1 .
  14. ↑ SECRETARY-GENERAL APPOINTS EXECUTIVE REPRESENTATIVE FOR UNITED NATIONS INTEGRATED PEACEBUILDING OFFICE IN SIERRA LEONE | Meetings Coverage and Press Releases. January 14, 2009, accessed May 12, 2020 .
  15. ↑ Ulrike Scheffer: “The UN is too fragmented”. Der Tagesspiegel, November 9, 2010, accessed on May 12, 2020 .
  16. ↑ Serious allegations against the Vienna UN chief - derStandard.at. January 18, 2001, accessed on May 12, 2020 (Austrian German).
  17. ↑ Ex-employees appeared against their former boss - derStandard.at. Retrieved on May 14, 2020 (Austrian German).
  18. ↑ Stefanie Lafrentz: Jobs far from home . In: THE WORLD . September 12, 2003 ( welt.de [accessed May 12, 2020]).
  19. ^ Jina Moore: The Peacebuilders: Making Conflict Resolution Permanent. Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, April 2, 2011, accessed May 12, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Schulenburg, Michael von der
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schulenburg, Michael Sergius Graf von der (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German diplomat of the OSCE and the UN
DATE OF BIRTH October 16, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich