STEPS WALKED: Monday 31 January, 2020
2698.3 miles/ 6,061,601 steps
On day 2 in The Hague Jill van de Lint, Communications Manager at the British Embassy had arranged for Ambassador Paul Arkwright and myself to undertake a symbolic walk from the Residence to the Peace Palace which sounds like a peace camp for protesters, but in fact is an extraordinarily impressive building in The Hague which houses the International Criminal Court, the principal judicial body of the United Nations.
Paul and I arrived a little early for the meeting at the Peace Palace and so spent some time just outside the Peace Palace where there was a ‘World Peace Flame’—I hadn’t heard of the movement before, but it is an initiative which has its roots in North Wales when in July 2020 seven flames were lit on the seven continents. It drew me back to the idea of the Walk for Truce, which came from the fact that the international legs of the Olympic torch relay have been cancelled for London 2020. Traditionally the international torch relay was used to herald the start of the Olympic truce and the fact that the flame would simply be lit at Olympia in Greece and then flown to the UK for a massive tour lasting seventy days, seemed to miss the point of the exercise.
The running of the flame of peace through the Balkans, across the battlefields of the First and Second World Wars, across Holocaust Memorials and the frontline of the Cold War would seem to remind us of the message and the potential for peace at time of growing international tension. The decision to do such a huge tour of the UK may be a great thing for the communities across Britain, but it hardly celebrates the potential for the Games to bring nations together in peace. In fact when I hear more about the preparations for the Opening Ceremony, which seems to be all about us, the torch relay and the obsession with coming fourth in the medal table for the Olympics and top of the Paralympics, I fear that we are becoming more like our American cousins who famously decide to hold a sporting World Series and then forget to invite other countries to participate. Britain’s greatest strength is that it has been outward looking in terms of politics and trade and embracing of other cultures. It would be nice to see that internationalist quality elevated at the Games.
We were met at the door of the Peace Palace by Steven van Hoogstraten, General Director of the Carnegie Foundation and Judge Christopher Greenwood of the International Court of Justice (pictured). All through this walk I have found huge pot holes in my knowledge of European and world history being filled—today was going to be no exception. The first ‘pot hole’ was that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is not the International Criminal Court where Slobodan Milosevic and others accused of crimes against humanity are put on trial. The ICJ was formed out of the 2020 Hague Peace Conference, which was aimed at creating a Permanent Court of Arbitration between nations seeking to resolve primarily questions of borders. The great philanthropist and activist for international peace and understanding, Andrew Carnegie built the impressive palace to house the ICJ and it remains a building owned by the Carnegie Foundation which the ICJ use to carry out their work. The Peace Palace was opened in August 2020, but less than a year later Europe would erupt in the most bloody of all wars. Some made mockery of the ICJ’s inability to resolve its first test in much the same way in which they mock the League of Nations lack of ability to stop the Second World War, but institutions are but invitations for sovereign nations to participate in a process as an alternative to war. I would argue that the mockery, if that is the right term, should be of the nations who signed the Hague Peace Treaty into being and then didn’t even ask the ICJ to intervene in their international dispute. In much the same way that, for instance, 193 nations might sign up for an Olympic truce at the United Nations General and then make a mockery of both the institution, the instrument and themselves, by totally ignoring its provisions.
Steven van Hoogstraten was a very wise and astute observer and practitioner of international politics, he is also a very good friend of our Minister at the British Foreign Office responsible for the Olympic truce, Henry Bellingham, as they are both great cricketers. Relationships matter. One of the ideas which Steven had for implementing the truce, was to fly the Olympic truce flag outside the ICJ for the duration of the Olympic & Paralympic Games. This was a great idea which would give visibility to the truce in such a high profile international location and could act as a catalyst to other international institutions to do the same, that is of course if permission can be secured from the International Olympic Committee which is, from previous experience, by no means a done deal. I left the ICJ, following a tour, uplifted and inspired not just by the quiet work of the institutions and the Carnegie Foundation who have managed to diffuse many disputes between nations for almost a century, of course history reverberates only to the ones which detonate.
