Build Trust and Build a Future
“We know that whenever you have these sort of atrocity crimes that happened here [Bosnia and Herzegovina], 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.”
Ingrid Macdonald is the United Nations Resident Coordinator in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She is tasked with spearheading the UN’s efforts to support development in a country still deeply scarred by ethnic divisions and the legacy of war and the 1995 genocide at Srebrenica.
Ingrid, who was raised in a small New Zealand mining town, joined the UN in 2016. But she has a long record of working in humanitarian, development and human rights jobs around the world, from Darfur to the Philippines and from Peru to Ukraine. In this insightful episode, she talks about the challenges she faced in many of those roles and her vivid memories of trying to advocate for the vulnerable, including her time helping women in Afghanistan.
Since relocating to Sarajevo in early 2020, just as COVID-19 was taking hold across the world, Ingrid has been focused on finding ways to bring divided communities together as well as tackle hate speech and genocide denial, just 26 years after Bosnian Serb forces massacred 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica.
Below, are some of highlights from the podcast interview with Ingrid Macdonald, hosted and interviewed by Melissa Fleming, the United Nations' Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications. Ingrid candidly tells us about herself and her perspectives on very critical matters impacting Bosnia and Herzegovina and the world.
COVID-19 and Bosnia and Herzegovina
Afghanistan
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.
Climate Change
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.
To listen to the full interview, visit: https://www.un.org/en/awake-at-night/S4-E4-build-trust-and-build-a-future.