they would no longer recognize because Chile broke some of its
parameters through its increased military pres-ence on the
continent.The treaty was
originally signed by 12 nations as an agree-ment on the peaceful
division and use of the Ant-
spotted near the Philippines by British intelligence, according
to an update issued to the council.Both claims were disputed by
the
Chinese delegate, who said while they have no intention in
engaging in military battles with Chile, they are interested in
laying claim to open land on the continent.The discussion called
into ques-
tion the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, which the Chinese delegate
said
The country would accept humanitarian aid if the situation
worsened, he said.The council continues to work Fri-
day to draft comprehensive solution designed to address the long
term.“The main concern of the U.N.
is to de-escalate the situation at all cost,” the council said
in an agreed news release.
delegate from Syria said. “We are currently preparing to take
action. This is a horrible encroachment of our sovereignty.”Turkish
Foreign Affairs Minister
Mevlut Cavusoglu told the council that they would not be
request-ing military aid from its allies, adding that “We have a
special but extreme situation in Turkey.”
MMUN World News & ReportVOLUME IX ISSUE 3 MMUN.ORG Friday,
February 12, 2016
Turkey invades following ISIS attack
Mortar shelling from Syria cross-ing the Turkish border caused
the deaths of eight Turkish soldiers Friday morning and resulted in
retaliatory action that led to the capture of a Turkish pilot.The
situation escalated over the
course of the day with Turkey sending in tanks, ground troops
and air support into Syria to at-tack ISIS bases there, according
to reports issued to the Security Council North, which called an
emergency meeting at 12:45 a.m. central time.The Security Council
North
ultimately agreed in a 4-1 vote with two abstentions to send in
Rus-sian Special Forces to rescue the sounded Turkish pilot from
ISIS captivity, despite the fact that the pilot in a video released
by his cap-tors said the plane that shot him done had Russian
insignia on it.The delegate from Russia denied
that the plane was theirs and agreed to contact the government
in Moscow to confirm that. “Russia will be transparent in this
issue,” the delegate said. “If it was a Russian aircraft, it was
against my knowledge.”ISIS operatives told the council
in the video that the pilot would
byAL-JAZEERA be executed shortly, something del-
egates from China and Chad said happens all over the world.The
Security Council should not
risk escalating the situation on be-half of one pilot, the
delegate from China said.While the pilot was successfully
recovered, the conflict between Turk-ish, Syrian and ISIS forces
had not been resolved as of Friday morning. Turkey, though, had
decided to
not move its forces into the coun-try any farther as a result of
Jorda-nian airstrikes targeting ISIS bases in Syria, something the
kingdom was doing with permission from the Syrian
government.“Turkey and Syria have been in
contact with each other in some respect and have come to a loose
agreement regarding the temporary positioning of the Turkish
military personnel within Syria to protect their own border,” the
council said in an agreed news release. “Both parties acknowledge
that this is not a long-term solution.”Despite the short-term
agree-
ment, the Syrian government through Foreign Minister Walid
Muallem condemned Turkey’s military actions.“Syria is deeply
offended by the
Turkish troops that have entered our land without permission,”
the
OIL FIELD, 2A
Dispute follows Antarctic oil field discoveryA dispute over a
newly discovered
oil field found by Chile in Antarc-tica led to 37 Russian
researchers being trapped in Australia’s Antarc-tic territory.The
Security Council South
called an emergency meeting to address the situation around the
oil field, which is thought to be the largest in the world,
surpass-
byBBC
ing even the Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia.With the oil field
straddling the
Chilean border and a territory of unclaimed land, China moved
ag-gressively to claim the entire field, Chilean intelligence
released in an announcement. The Chilean military subsequent-
ly secured an area extending 10 miles into the unclaimed
territory.A Chinese naval fleet was also
One of the Russian scientists makes a plea to the Security
Council.
Top: Delegates discuss a crisis involving Turkey and Syria late
Thursday night. Bottom: Turkish Foreign Affairs Minister Mevlut
Cavusoglu answers questions posed by Security Council North
delegates.
Small arm sales targeted in approvedresolution
A resolution attempting to limit the illicit brokering of small
arms and light weapons dominated the conversation Friday afternoon
in the General Assembly plenary committee.The resolution, which
ulti-
mately passed, discusses strength-ening border security,
increasing international communication and stepping up law
enforcement training.The main concern was sovereign-
ty, the delegate from Spain said.“With the resolution, we
focused
on the sovereignty and the ability for nation-states to create
their own law enforcement mecha-nisms so [that] they are relying on
themselves for border security,” she said. “As it stood before,
there were a few programs, such as Interpol, that had a database
system, but now we are looking at being more global in that
aspect.”The system will allow countries
to develop their own models and utilize the resources and
knowledge of other nations, the delegate from Spain said.The
resolution faced some
criticism early on, but after some discussion, they were able to
build consensus.“We worked really hard to try
to get a consensus so that we’d be working for all nation-states
while also including the interests of ev-eryone,” the Spanish
delegate said.The General Assembly also
worked on 15 amendments that will seek to acknowledge the
correlation between non-state ac-tors, the illicit weapons trade
and groups that are affected by that trade, she said. Not all of
these amendments passed. The General Assembly Plenary
Committee also passed a resolu-tion Friday morning that focused
on international cooperation on humanitarian assistance for natural
disasters.The resolution emphasized the
importance of non-governmental organizations, requested annual
reports on disaster
byNEW YORK TIMES
ARMS , 2A
2A l Friday, February 12, 2016 l MMUN World News &
Report
Peace talks in works for Syria, Turkey
Syria and Turkey agreed on peace terms about 15 hours after a
mili-tary crisis stemming from an ISIS attack on Turkish soldiers
put the two countries at odds.ISIS militants fired mortar
shells
Friday morning across the Syrian-Turkish border, killing eight
Turk-ish soldiers, according to reports is-sued to the Security
Council North just hours after the incident. The attack triggered a
response
from the Turkish government that included ground troops, tanks
and air support being sent across the Syrian border, a move that
led to the capture of a Turkish pilot by ISIS. Jordanian airstrikes
halted the
advance of Turkish troops into the interior of Syria.The
resolution reached Friday
afternoon proposes a peace summit to be located in Amman,
Jordan, within the 30 days, a solution designed to protect the
national sov-ereignty of both Syria and Turkey.Syrian Foreign
Minister Walid
Muallem told the council that the maintenance of his country’s
sover-eignty was a primary concern.“Syria firmly adheres to the
idea
that the peace talks do need to include some sort of mutual
assur-ance on both Syria and Turkey’s part,” Muallem said.
“Tensions have been strained for so long, and it is the opinion of
Syria that re-gaining those ties with one another is
imperative.”The United States delegate also
offered the assistance of FBI agents and resources to help
Turkey coun-ter the ISIS threat. The FBI agen-cies will work
closely with Turkish officials to seek out terrorist cells.“We just
want to make sure that
the final resolution addresses coun-tering ISIS, so that we will
not have any similar situations in the fu-ture,” Turkish Minister
of Foreign Affairs Mevlut Cavusoglu said.The delegate from the
United
Kingdom also reinforced the coun-cil’s opposition to
ISIS.“Countering ISIS is an impor-
tant issue for the Security Council North,” the delegate said.
“We openly condemn the actions that ISIS has taken in the Middle
East.”
A single clause in a resolution concerned many delegations in
the Economic and Social Council ple-nary committee Friday morning.
The clause was part of a paper
drafted in the Commission on Narcotic Drugs that dealt with the
demand of narcotic drugs and psy-chotropic substances and that was
ultimately passed Friday morning. The resolution, which aimed
to combat the production and use of narcotic drugs, included an
operative clause that vari-
byAL-JAZEERA
byCNN
ARMS: Sovereignty raises some concernspreparedness and proposed
the increased transfer of technology assistance. The approved
resolution also
placed a special emphasis on na-tional sovereignty, according to
the delegate from Cuba. “The whole idea of the resolution
was ensuring that all of our actions make everything more
efficient, more effective and really help the people that were at
the center of
the response to natural disasters,” the delegate from Mexico
said.But the delegate from Yemen
thought that the resolution did not go far enough. “Yemen and a
small bloc of coun-
tries, however, did feel that, when it came to the subject of
medi-cal care, certain things were not addressed in the way that
Yemen would like,” the Yemeni delegate said.
ous delegations wanted out of the resolution that they otherwise
agreed with. The clause “recommends the
Security Council apply economic sanctions to those states or
entities found in non-compliance with or to be undermining the
afore-mentioned recommended plan of action.”States who harbored
drug lords
and entities involved in the drug trade would have sanctions
imposed on them by the Security Coun-cil, the Commission on
Narcotic Drugs delegate from Pakistan said.
arctic continent. Now the treaty includes more than fifty
countries.With the situation escalating, the
Australian government decided to close the borders of its
Ant-arctic territory as a precautionary measure, but the move
trapped 37 Russian researchers within, leading the Russian
government to demand the freedom of its scientists.“Our only goal
is to retrieve those
scientists trapped in the Australian territory through
diplomacy,” the delegate from Russia said.The Australian
government
did not formally respond to that request, but a representative
from the country was called into the Security Council meeting.“The
Russian scientists that were
caught within our borders are being held as safety precautions,”
Australian Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove said.A video of one
of the Russian
scientists, Petrologist Rasputin Orlov, being held in the
Australian The Security Council South considered redividing some
Antarctic territory fol-
lowing a dispute over a newly discovered oil field.
Anti-drug proposal includes controversial sanctions
OIL FIELD: Australia says border closure done as
precautionterritory soon surfaced in which he said they were
barricaded inside and said he feared they would be
killed.“Everything the Australian
government has told you is a lie,” Orlov said in the video. “We
are being kept here against our will. We cannot conduct research.
They have intercepted all communica-tions. I was only able to hack
the mainframe for so long.”The French government also
closed its Antarctic borders, but the French delegate in the
council condemned the actions of Austra-lia saying that they were
holding hostages.The delegate from the U.S. ques-
tioned France on its haste closing its borders saying that if
France reopened its borders, then the Australians would follow
suit.“The United States stands with
Australia, we feel that the Aus-tralian government is acting
well
within their right to protect their land,” the U.S. delegate
said.Talks continued into the late
hours with solutions, including a full evacuation of the
continent and dividing up the territory in a way as to meet
American and Chinese territorial claims while punishing the
Australians by taking some of their land.
After the peaceful extraction of 37 trapped Russian scientists
Thursday night, conversation in the Security Council South turned
to the division of Antarctica and whether the body should respond
to Chile’s effort to unilaterally claim some of the land.Chile
wasn’t the only country
to try to assume ownership of a stretch of previously unclaimed
Antarctic territory. The United States and China had both laid
claim to the area in the wake of a large oil field being discovered
there.The moves called into question
the status of the Antarctic treaty that divvies up the
continent.“When the United States
expressed its interest in Antarc-tica, we had the notion that
these claims were well within our right,” the delegate said.The
council brought in Manuela
Reinke, a specialist on the Ant-arctic treaty, who validated the
U.S.’s assertion that due to a clause included when the U.S. as
wellas Russia ratified the treaty they reserved the right to make
such claims.Reinke went on to refute the
Chinese by referring to the treaty’s
byBBC
The delegate from New Zealand asks a question about the
Antarctic treaty that divvies up the continent during an emer-gency
meeting of the Security Council South.
Russian scientists peacefully released
clause that prohibits any new as-sertions and claims of land on
the continent. All of the land claims, though,
faced criticism from some del-egates.“Lithuania sees these land
claims
as a power grab between two major powers,” he said. “They are
using their veto power as a way to push economic policies they want
to see in Antarctica.”Even though the delegate from
France recognized the intentions of
the other major powers, she main-tained France’s support for
peaceful negotiations, “The situation at hand was
threatening,” the delegate. “The de-escalation of said situation
is the most ideal at this time.”Another question that remained
was whether Chileviolated the parameters of the treaty.“Chile is
concerned with any
language that would condemn the research that has been done and
maintains that the finding of oil
was on accident,” its delegate said. “We would like to see an
immedi-ate action where we know that the Chinese military will not
confront the Chilean military.”Both the delegates from France
and the U.S. backed Chile’s claim of innocence.The U.S. delegate
added that the
attempt to punish Chile is an effort to disrupt attention from
the real issues that came from the crisis, specifically China’s
push into the area and the closing of borders.
Many delegations did not agree with the implications of the
clause.The Forum on Indigenous
Issues delegate from Argentina pointed to sanctions possibly
being levied against some nations that would be unable to meet the
action plan laid out in the resolu-tion.“It would be unfair to
impose
economic sanctions on states that wouldn’t be able to afford a
plan that they didn’t sign on to in the beginning,” the Argentinian
del-egate said.
However, the delegate from Gua-temala noted that the resolution
was just a proposed idea and that another committee would have to
figure out the details of how the sanctions would be defined and
implemented. The delegate also said the resolu-
tion could be amended if delega-tions disagreed with the
individual clause.“We wrote it in a way where
the resolution could still stand if people decided that we don’t
want to suggest this,” the Guatemalan delegate said.