Former Parker & Parker lawyer Nick Grono gives an insight into his role as director of advocacy and research at the Brussels-based International Crisis Group which is headed by Australia’s former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans.
I am usually relaxed about flying, but I have to admit to a big sigh of relief when my Ariana Airlines flight finally touched down in one piece at Kabul Airport late last year.
As we had circled above Afghanistan’s capital, (held up by the Ariana flight before us, which had problems landing because of mechanical difficulties) one of our flight attendants took a call on her mobile, and happily chatted away during the 15 minutes it took us to land – pretty much summing up the airline's relaxed approach to safety.
Ariana is Afghan’s resurrected national airline – infamous in the 1990s for carrying drugs and the Taliban. Standards have improved marginally since then, but not by much. The planes are hand-me-downs from Air India, and UN staff are officially prohibited from flying on the airline.
So, here I was in Afghanistan for the first time. I had flown in for a fortnight to help finalise a report on Afghanistan’s first ever presidential elections, held a week earlier. My outfit, the International Crisis Group, is perhaps the world’s leading non-governmental conflict prevention organisation – described by UN secretary general Kofi Annan as "a global voice of conscience, and a genuine force for peace" and by former US Secretary of State Colin Powell as "an organisation that matters".
Headed by Australia’s former foreign minister, Gareth Evans, Crisis Group writes in-depth research reports on actual and potential conflicts around the world and pushes governments and the UN to take steps to resolve or prevent them. I’m the director of advocacy and research, which involves me coordinating advocacy across the organisation, and running special research projects.
I also fill in as in-house lawyer when our General Counsel is on leave. Crisis Group has some 110 staff in about 20 locations around the world.
Our board is a who’s who of former statesmen – with 11 former foreign ministers and eight former presidents or prime ministers among its 56 worthies.
The Afghanistan trip was a departure from my normal work, necessitated by some delays we had experienced in finalising our report on the election.
Kabul is the most fascinating city I’ve ever visited. It’s still very much in conflict mode – as we taxied down the runway after landing, I could see Apache helicopters and big US army transport planes.
Armoured personnel carriers were stationed at one end of the runway. Alongside the runway there were huts surrounded by barbed wire and covered with camouflage netting, and scattered around the place were little flags marking mine clearing work. My guest house had a guard in fatigues with an AK47 stationed out front – a common sight in Kabul.
It’s a teeming, hectic, traffic-choked city. Its population has exploded from an empty 500,000 at the height of the Taliban, to two million plus now – and increasing rapidly. Infrastructure is having trouble keeping up – electricity was available from 5pm (in time for the evening meal – this was Ramadan, so people were fasting from 5am to 5.45pm every day) until early morning. At other times you needed a generator.
There were lots of men, and very few women, out and about. Most of the women I saw wore full burka – covered from head to toe, with a little knitted mesh to peer through.
Despite the post Taliban era, its still a male dominated society. I did see lots of girls in mornings and evenings going to and from school.
And of course, wherever you go there are reminders of the war. Guys missing a leg or an arm. Some with both legs gone, wheeling themselves around on improvised tricycles. One-legged beggars dodging death in the middle of busy roads, pleading for some change and burkaed beggar women just sitting in the middle of the road with their infants, beseeching passing drivers.
My days were spent interviewing people about the elections, or writing. I met with a range of people – one of the presidential candidates, the Justice Minister, European Union and UN election staff, the Afghan in charge of the elections and various Afghan analysts and academics, among others.
Every Afghan we spoke to said that, for all its flaws, the recent presidential election was a historic occasion for Afghanistan.
After I'd been there for four days and becoming blasé about security, there was a suicide attack on the main tourist shopping strip, Chicken Street. Some fanatic with hand grenades had detonated one or more of them, bravely killing a 10 year old Afghan girl and an American woman and himself.
If that wasn’t bad enough, five days later, three UN election workers were kidnapped in broad daylight in west Kabul. I’d had a drink with one of them the night before at a party – so it made it all too distressingly real. Suddenly the excessive security precautions didn’t seem so excessive. The hostages were released unharmed about five weeks after being snatched.
When I'm not writing reports on Afghan elections I'm doing my best to raise international – and especially governmental – awareness of particular conflicts.
My focus for much of 2004 was on Darfur. Crisis Group started reporting on Darfur at least a year before it became headline news. We significantly ramped up our efforts in May and June 2004 – in the space of two months meeting with 14 or so foreign ministers, having 30 opinion pieces published, taking the US 60 Minutes program out there and playing a leading role in putting it at the forefront of international awareness.
Such was our success that the Sudanese Government felt it necessary to put out a press statement criticising our efforts. Of course, despite our efforts, and the professed concern of the Security Council, the Sudanese Government continues to unleash its militias on the civilians in Darfur – demonstrating the limits of what can be done if there is a lack of international will.
This year my early focus has been on Kosovo, where a decision needs to be made soon on whether that country will become independent. I’m working with some of our board members, such as former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, General Wes Clark and the last British Governor of Hong Kong Chris Patten (now the European Unions’ Commissioner in charge of External Relations), to try and get key governments to make the hard decisions on the issue.
Nepal has also become a key Crisis Group target, following the recent coup there.
I’m based in Brussels, Belgium – a small, pleasant, northern European city with world famous beers, lots of mussels and fries and appalling weather. It’s also the headquarters of the European Union, giving it a genuinely international feel.
But probably the best thing about Brussels is that it’s close to so many more interesting places – 1.5 hours by train to Paris, 2.5 to Amsterdam and London for starters. I get to travel a lot with my job – making it to New York and Washington DC a couple of times a year and various European capitals every couple of months for advocacy or conferences. In a couple of weeks I’ll be combining work and holidays with an eight-day visit to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon – all countries covered by our analysts.
So all in all a deeply satisfying and rewarding job. A long way from my first job as a lawyer at former Perth legal practice Parker & Parker (now Freehills) 15 years ago.
Since then I’ve had a two-year stint at the merchant bank Goldman Sachs in London, then back to law in Perth for 3 years, then to Canberra as adviser and chief of staff to the Federal Attorney General Daryl Williams for four years.
After that I went to Princeton University in the US on a one-year fellowship to get an international relations degree and ended up at the International Crisis Group – where I’m likely to stay for the foreseeable future.
