MUN Trip

Last week I went to the National High School Model United Nations and the experience and my involvement were much greater than last year. On the first day of the conference we got our self settled and decided to what topic to discuss first. We decided to discuss because even though it was not my topic, I had read what my partner had researched about the topic and it seemed that landmines macedonia had a much stronger stance on landmines and more personal positions on landmine de-mining than it did on security sector reform in Africa. This is because Macedonia had recently successfully de mined parts of it's country and so it had person connection to the topic and stronger view than on the security sector reform topic in Africa. Landmines vs SSR in africa were voted on my the delegates and de-mining won as the position that we would be discussing. This was a successful first night because the topic our country felt more strongly on was chosen which would lead for more for Macedonia to work with.

The next day we had both ups and down while trying to get our views on landmines out. During the first unmoderated caucus we went to go talk to the European Union because those country's would be the ones most likely to gain Macedonia's support in the real UN. We approached the big players from the EU and were essentially shut down. We asked a couple kids there view but they either gave vague answers or walked right by. We could not even inch our way into the EU crowed meeting. Macedonia is not part of the UN but they have been a candidate since 2005 and so showing support to these countries would be one of Macedonia's major interests.

After the shut down at that committee, we continued with different tactics to get our views heard. We wrote notes to a couple of our other major allies asking there views and positions and actually got some good responses from Bosnia and Albania and other nations. We started to see which countries were align ing with who and where we should place our alliance. One country even asked how we successfully de mined our country (we told then how finical support from our ally Albania helped us and how important the availability of funding was for countries needing aid to de-mine).

This continued for the next few committee sessions until we found a paper to align ourselves behind. We ended up choosing paper resolution 1.1 because it contained a good number of our ally's as sponsors/signers and talked about funding. This resolution did not pass and the other paper went through but our paper put up a good fight. All in all it was a very rewarding experience no matter what paper was passed and my partner and myself made a lot more contact with other nations then I had last year. I felt like we actually had a stance and were able to share it.