Bath MUN Opening Speech

by: Jake Eliot, Secretary-General, Kingswood School



(Ed's note: Jake Eliot will be entering Oxford University next fall. His excellent speech helped set a realistic tone for student delegates prior to going into committee.)

Honourable Chairs, Delegates, Ladies and Gentlemen. Welcome to the tenth Bath Schools' Model United Nations conference. You are most welcome at Kingswood this weekend and we hope you will enjoy the conference and fully exploit all the opportunities open to you.

The conference has come a long way since the inaugural event in 1991. The first conference, in fact, did not take place here, but at Bath University. However, by 1992, it had been held here, on the Kingswood site. The first conference included only 31 delegations from 13 Schools. Almost all of the original participating schools were from the local area; many of them are still represented here today, some with the same advisers. Only one school came from further afield, Methodist College, Belfast.

The first conference was, relatively speaking, quite primitive: there was no lobbying session, a one hour committee session on Saturday morning and nearly two days of GA. But in my own time of participation, there have been many positive changes. At my first Bath MUN- when I was in year 8 - pre-written resolutions were still the norm. At my second conference a super-committee was created for this theatre, to run concurrently with GA. This began as the Economic and Social Council, but has since become the UN Commission on Human Rights. All in all a few thousand students have taken part in our program over the years, with many having built on this experience to go on to other conferences, and in some cases, careers, with a direct link to issues which have been debated. Ten years on, we are particularly pleased that, in the spirit of the UN, this has become a truly international event.

Team Niagara - British Museum in London
London England - Team Niagara


Before this opening address turns into thinly disguised trip down memory lane, let me say, that to all intents and purposes, any sense of an anniversary conference is superfluous because, really what makes MUN conferences so valuable is their relevance to today.

In effect, of course MUN is a role-play, and is atypical in the normal course of our educational program. It is widely held that our generation is not interested or engaged in what we might call political matters or international affairs. Certainly, much of the media coverage of these events tends to be presented in a sketchy, even disjointed fashion. Given the given the pressures of a news agenda is increasingly difficult for us to acquire a knowledge and interest in what is going on outside our immediate environment. Editorial discretion does sometimes mean that we are left in the dark. The latest twist in the colourful life of Posh (Spice) is, perhaps, always likely to receive more coverage than the humanitarian disaster in Sierra Leone, the plight of Children in conflict situations or the effects of the Economic sanctions on Iraq.

We should not need reminding that the issues we are debating this weekend are real. One needs only to look to the current crisis in Mozambique. There has been a great deal of coverage of events there in the past seven days. One of those journalists wrote the following after he joined a helicopter mission to pluck survivors from the floods.

"Even from the air, the sight of a whole town underwater is almost impossible to describe. The eye struggles to make sense of it. The first impression is of driftwood littering a pond. It is only a moment later that it becomes clear that the debris is actually the tops of houses and huts - that entire families are sitting on roofs. On a narrow strip of dry land, cut from all sides by murky water, bewildered children squatted before a line of villagers who had spent a day and a night waiting to be rescued. Next to the helicopter's landing spot, a stick jutted out into freshly dug earth, where Flora Ngomane's baby had been buried the previous day. She had also lost a seven-year-old child when the Limpopo River's floodwaters submerged the village of Lionde.

The joy of the survivors mixed with the despair of those who could not find relatives. A woman carrying an infant on her back staggered out of the South African helicopter and gave a long inconsolable wail. She had lost one of her three children in the village of Guija. Pilots have said they have seen many corpses in the water, but it is impossible to tell how many
have died"

Woven into this horrifying story line are the remarkable stories of human bravery and endurance, born out of the desperate situation. South African pilots and rescuers say they have seen five children perched carefully on top of the roof of a small submerged car, staying perfectly still for fear of falling for hours on end.

While one woman, utterly isolated on a tiny patch of raised ground, seeing the last helicopter flight before nightfall realized she would not be rescued that day, and possibly never rescued at all. Her one last maternal act was to fling her small child into the hovering helicopter she could not reach herself ; knowing that, even if she did survive the night ahead her child might not.

Another story, another human experience. A woman rescued on Wednesday, who, heavily pregnant, had given birth while perched in a tree. Her survival, and that of her child is, perhaps, a metaphor for indomitable human spirit.

As the delegation of Mozambique at this conference probably realizes, their assignment carries with it additional responsibilities this weekend.

There may well be, after all, a larger case of cause and effect at work here. If we, as individuals, are ignorant about an international issue, then we are unlikely to make an effort to help. Likewise therefore, making a difference must primarily involve a degree of awareness. Awareness comes first, then the action. Perhaps the biggest challenge we face then, is not what we do at this conference, but what we use our experience to go on to do after it.

But I believe, fellow MUN'ers, that our presence here today shows that we are not apathetic, that we do want to know more, and, above all, that we will be heard.


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