One Weeked - Two MUN Conferences
Executive Summary
This weekend I travelled down to Los Angeles to attend the UCLA Model UN Conference. There I represented the Minister of Justice for the People's Republic of China (PRC)-- making it my personal mission to ensure that as conference staff served up imaginary political developments Chinese policy didn't include the misconception that their people had any civil rights.
As the conference progressed Thursday evening and all day Friday, I became increasingly alarmed at the shoddy quality of the conference. On Saturday morning I defected to the CalMUN Long Beach Conference that was to occur that day in Long Beach, some twenty miles south. There I was the Chairman of the UN Commission on Human Rights.
After that concluded, I had dinner with my parents, and then returned to the UCLA conference. On Sunday we returned to Davis.
I. UCLAMUNC 2006: A Constant Series of Crises
The first annual UCLAMUN collegiate conference was held at the LAX hilton. Oddly, this is some twenty to thirty minutes from the UCLA campus. For unclear reasons half their attendees didn't end up showing up, so all committees were extremely small. Several committees were combined or broken up and reapportioned to other committees immediately. Even so, the largest committee only had 16 people in it, whil General Assembly (usually an 80-150 person committee) only had 12. Several of the committees ran with between five and eight people (!).
There had intended to be three cabinet committees: the Russian Cabinet, Chinese Cabinet, & Israeli Cabinet; which would interact with eachother to deal with crises the staff would come up with. The Israeli cabinet was immediately broken up and redistributed, contributing to us our Defence Minister.
B. Bad Information: From the start relations with the Russian cabinet were shaky, with them making saucy statements, apparently sabatoging an oil pipeline supplying China through Kazakstan from Russia & operated by Gazprom, and mobilizing their army to "quarantine" the Sino-Russian border against the avian flu (incidently, with the avian flu breakout, I ordered all who were diagnosed with it, had symptoms of it, or had been in contact with those with it be immediately locked up in quarantine). Once we'd exchanged ambassadors a few times however we realized the crisis staff was embellishing what we both were doing to the detriment of relations. For example the Russians had indeed ordered a quarantine of avian flu outbreaks in their country, but they only learned that anyone was talking about mobilizing military units to the border when we told their ambassador.
As to Kazakstan, I quickly pointed out that Gazprom does not operate in Kazakstan, nor does it have any oil pipelines to China (it supplies Russia), while someone else noted that Gazprom is a natural gas company. Despite us publicly airing these findings, crisis staff shortly told us we were in a dire oil shortage due to this pipeline which clearly does not exist.
Crisis staff also informed us later that Interpol had arrested suspected terrorists in Beijing and had custody of them. I formally requested they hand over custody but was denied. As the Chinese Minister of Justice I had some major problems with this development: Interpol does not have any arresting personnel nor make arrests; Interpol does not have any detainment facilities or make detainments; and it flies in the face of anything acceptable to any country, much less China, for a foreign agency to make arrests in ones own borders and refuse to surrender custody. To quote wikipedia: "Contrary to what has been featured in some works of fiction, INTERPOL officers do not directly conduct inquiries in member countries." I asked the "Interpol representative" crisis sent us, when the Interpol mandate had changed, but he blithely lied and said Interpol had always acted like this. I was quite displeased.
Additionally, after Iran announced its intention to pursue nuclear weapons (in conference reality) we asked if they intended to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) --which forbids such pursuits. The Iranian representative said he'd get back to us and eventually crises staff informed us that violation of the NPT is automatic exit from it. This of course is just another statement completely pulled from their collective ass, as a treaty that doesn't apply to those who violate it is worthless.
Altogether crises staff had displayed terminally bad fact checking up to this point, backed up by standing fully behind all their most egregious statements in face of reality. It is normal for conferences to have "crisis committees" where cabinets respond to saucy made-up political developments, however usually conference staff allows the cabinet to participate in shaping future events. In this case, whenever we tried to do something that crisis control hadn't anticipated, they flatly informed us that it had not worked. Usually 24 hours into a conference, the situation is vastly different than how it was planned and begun, in this case 24 hours later nothing was different from the first 15 minutes (Iran wants nukes, we supposedly have an oil shortage). After about 24 hours however, I left.
C. Caste: As to my fellow cabinet members: there was the Minister of Defence, who despite being recently transferred from Israel had a miraculous ability to tell us exactly how many of every sort of vessel our navy had, & similar numbers for our other forces (apparently there's a website dedicated to scrutiny of the PRC's military); the Vice President was this girl from Westpoint who was suprisingly our foremost dove; the Foreign Minister was this very animated character who had a veritable kiniption over some development. Despite his excessive enthusiasm I don't think anyone really listened to him, and he was mostly seen as the VP's yes-man; our foremost hawk was the Premier, who early on confided in me his intention to "play politics" & have the VP and the Foreign Minister assassinated or at least ousted. Of lesser note we also had an ambassador to Russia, a Minister of State Security, & maybe an ambassador to the UN.
I was also rather disappointed in the lack of strategic thinking that the FM and VP were capable of. Whenever we learned something (for example we learned of Iran's nuclear intentions first), they wanted to tell Russia asap, and could not concieve of why us knowing something they don't could be a strategic advantage. Furthermore once we had finally put the Kazakstan situation to rest, I advocated causing some kind of crisis for Russia, preferably one not obviously linked to us, so that they'd be preoccupied discussing it as we had been with Kazakstan. The VP & FM once again could not fathom why it would be advantagous to be controlling what Russia talks about. I tried giving them some Sun Tzu quotations but to no avail.
D. Escape: By Friday evening it had become apparent to me that anything we tried to do which wasn't in Crisis' plan would be summarily thwarted & we were stuck in a loop of stupidity. I also knew that the CalMUN Longbeach conference would be occuring the next day on the Queen Mary, being put on by the PAXMUN organization for which I'd chaired several times previously. I left committee & contacted the CalMUN Secretary-General, Mark Edwards. He said they could use me.
When I came back to committee I was informed that we'd blamed Taiwan for the terrorists arrested in Beijing & declared war on Taiwan. By the end of committee that day (which was imminently) the United States had moved a fleet between China & Taiwan and vowed to protect it. Normally I'd estimate that US forces could kick Chinese forces ass, but not in the face of utter stupidity: Most of the Chinese military is aimed at delivering its force at Taiwan. A relatively small US force in that location1 would be more or less annihilated in the onslaught. However, as the US was being represented by Crisis staff, I predicted that they'd godmode it and tell us we've been defeated by the carrier & five accompanying vessels.
The next morning I left the premier a saucy note to read to the committee explaining the reasons I was leaving (ie the various ways the crisis was being run terribly), & for the first time in nine years of MUNing & around 40 conferences, I abandoned a committee.
II. CalMUN Longbeach 2006
Travelling from the LAX Hilton to the Queen Mary in Long Beach is a distance of about 20 miles. Yellow Cab taxi Co. charges $2.20 a mile. Taxi No. 6445 charged me $75 for this trip.
Needless to say, if you do the math it should be about $47.74. One might allow another dollar or two from the center of Long Beach that google maps used to the actual ship. I paid by credit card, so I hope that if I contact the cab company and demand an explanation I may be able to recoup some of the exorbitant charge. CalMUN will reimburse me up to $50 for travel expenses.
B. Commissioning Human Rights: Arriving, I was assigned to the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) as Vice Chair, under Vic Kapor, who will be the Governor-General of the upcoming AmPac conference. It should be noted that chairing the CHR is pretty much the opposite of being the PRC's Minister of Justice. I walked in just in time to sit down and gavel the committee to order. In introducing myself I mentioned that I had just left the UCLA conference because it was so bad. Immediately after this Vic introduced himself, starting with "I'm Vic Kapor, & I go to UCLA..." leading the committee to perceive a moment of severe awkwardness, but then he continued "...but its okay because they're the competition."
CalMUNs are all one day conferences, so eight and a half hours later it was over, and much more smoothly than things were no doubt going at the Hilton. Evaluations filled out by the delegates pretty much all said "Vic was very friendly helpful and laid back but it was good we had the strict one [me] to give the committee structure." Holy crap I've never been "the strict one." Vic has unreal powers of laidbackicity. Another highlight of the evaluations was the one that said "Kris would often look me in the eye, only to then call on someone else. He did this eight times. I hate him." I was nearly laughing on the floor when I read that.
Also, for unclear reasons, a girl in my committee loudly said to a guy in the committee (and appeared NOT to intend it to sound like a pick up line) "hey want to violate MY human rights?" As a pick-up line it seems a bit in poor taste, but what was hilarious about it is that I don't think she did (though I can't fathom what else she meant by it).
In addition to the usual staff (80% of the staff was the same as CalMUN Anaheim, except apparently Sally's been fired by Vic), I saw my friends Liz Gonzalez (as a delegate, attending U of San Diego), whom I hadn't seen since High School five years ago, and Marianna Kotcharian (as an advisor at CalMUN, currently graduated & serving as a Special Advisor on Arab Relations to the State Department), who had been a delegate in my committee at AmWest 2004. (Compare UCLAMUN, at which the only person I saw whom I knew from before was this girl Swati who had been a delegate in my committee at a San Diego conference two years ago - as a highschooler!)
C. The Parental Units & Dinners: Mother & Father came up from Mission Viejo after committee ended and we had delicious dinner at a Lebanese restaurant. Speaking of which, the UCDMUN group had gone for Indian food friday night. It was delicious and we had some leftovers, but due to having no way of reheating or refridgerating it in the hotel room it ended up being thrown out. )=
III. Return to UCLAMUN
The parentals then drove me back up to LAX (and returned home, having completed a triangular adventure of appx 110 miles), and I set about trying to peice together what happened while I was gone.
B. Crisis, Day Three: It seems that as I had predicted, Crisis declared their miniscule US fleet to have trounced the entire military of the People's Republic of China. Additionally, Crisis became annoyed with the Premier's attempts to insert creativity into the situation and declared him overthrown by the Vice President & Foreign Minister -- he was demoted to "health minister" & then fired altogether. Everyone I talked to (The Premier, the Defence Minister, one of the ambassadors) said I had displayed amazing foresight by abandoning the committee earlier. Reportedly even the chairperson --whom I had regarded as a henchman of the Crisis staff & general cold fish-- expressed I belief that I had made a good decision.
In the end apparently China nuked Russia, & US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton personally assassinated the Iranian president.
The Foreign Minister was given the best delegate award for the Chinese Cabinet committee.
C. Saturday Night Activities: UCLAMUN had rented out a club on the Santa Monica, probably at exorbitant cost. Emosnail operatives discovered the astronomical actual budget for the conference, but have been sworn to secrecy. Transportation between the LAX Hilton & the pier was provided by a single chartered schoolbus, which ran once an hour (ie it only came and went four times between 10 & 2!). Most of UCDMUN went to Disneyland instead, but having grown up around here I wasn't going to spend my time on such an endeavour.
After returning to the hotel on the last bus (I'd missed the 1am one by seconds) I hung out with most of the staff in the SGs room until the wee hours of the morning.
D. Return: We returned on Sunday.
Previously on Emosnail
Three Years Ago Yesterday: UCBMUNC 2003 - I miss the first day because I have to work at IHOP. The next morning I was going to catch an 8am bus but I woke up flat on my back on my floor at 10am, so I couldn't catch a bus until a few hours later. ...also this girl Kristy Heidenberger from my CRD class informs me she's decided we're going to be friends (see last line of entry). I think thats the first reference to her in this livejournal.
Two Years Ago Tomorrow: UCBMUNC 2004 - Origami landmines, what more can I say.
Year Ago Today: UCBMUNC 2005 - "Djibouti considers Djibouti to encompass the airspace above it as well, and Djibouti does not appreciate things being inserted into Djibouti..."