Promoting Peace:
Combatting Racism, Xenophobia and Ethnic Rivalry

Dear BERMUN 2006 participants,
Welcome to the virtual home of the BERMUN 2006 conference. On this website you will find all necessary information pertaining to the conference. We encourage you to explore the rest of the site and the forum and check it regularly for updates.

At this year’s Model United Nations conference in Berlin, you will have the chance to assume the role of diplomats, while interacting with students from many nations and numerous cultural backgrounds. Together you will address a variety of issues in world politics that affect all nations regardless of their standing in the international community. Your aim should be to reach a broad consensus with the other delegates and this will require compromise. As a BERMUN delegate you will be exercising the art of diplomacy and underlining the importance of the United Nations (UN). At the same time you will be engaged in contemporary affairs affecting our world today as students and members of civic society.

You will especially be able to pursue your engagement with this year's theme:

Promoting Peace: Combating Racism, Xenophobia and Ethnic Rivalry.

Although our modern world is continually brought closer together through new technological inventions and globalization, racial discrimination, xenophobia and ethnic rivalry continue to rupture our societies and everyday lives. In recent years we have witnessed atrocities such as “ethnic cleansing” and multinational terrorism, and as this ethnic violence grows in complexity, new methods for eliminating it are urgently required. Since the creation of the United Nations, member states have dealt with the intricate issue of racial discrimination and have passed several documents, such as the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination of 1963. They have also convened in several conferences, last of which was the World Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (WCAR), held in Durban, South Africa in 2001. Although at the WCAR the UN member states reached a consensus and made progress with issues such as the protection of migrants and refugees, repairing the legacy of slavery, and equal nationality rights for women, they had difficulty with addressing racial discrimination and related intolerance within the framework of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Now, five years after the conference and in the times of conflicts fuelled by ethnic clashes, it is more important than ever to constructively deal with this international concern.

During the BERMUN conference, it will be your task to convene and look at past mistakes and failures in order to be capable of understanding how to best combat racism nowadays and in the future. The WCAR has called on several far-reaching programs to address intolerance and discrimination, but it will be your duty to try and find methods which will help implement these programs. This year, the Special Conference will play a particularly important role in working with the BERMUN theme, as one of their goals will be to draft a new declaration on the elimination of ethnic rivalry as a means of preventing ethnic conflict and it will be the job of assignment of the General Assembly to implement this declaration.

We hope that this year’s theme will challenge you and inspire you to research and eventually write outstanding resolutions in your Councils and Committees. Furthermore, we hope that by being confronted with this theme at our conference, you will come to realize what a significant part it plays in our everyday lives and that you, a part of the civic society, play a role in combating racism, xenophobia and ethnic rivalry.
We wish you all the best for your preparations and encourage you to contact your chairs or us in case you have any questions.

We are looking forward to seeing you in November,

Samuel Rogers	Eugen Wollfahrt	Christina Babourkova
Secretary-General	Deputy Secretary-General	President of the General Assembly

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