COUNCIL for PARITY DEMOCRACY
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19 Mulready House Herrick Street Westminster London England SW1P 4JL
Tel & Fax + 44 20 7834 1309 Mobile + 44 79 32 79 44 32 Email shequality @ gmail.com
Honorary Secretary
Raymond Lloyd
THE PRICE OF INTEGRITY
A note for UN and other public servants
8 March 1995 Raymond Lloyd
Fifteen years ago today I resigned on principle from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Rome, and from the UN system. I resigned to work for their political regeneration. In this note I detail some of the costs of my action, in financial, professional, social, physical and spiritual terms. The note has one main aim, to alert other persons of integrity, in national or international public service, to the price of principle, to the costs which, even for a long considered action, may not be foreseen. Many costs described here are personal to me: other individuals will bear different costs. To tell my story in full may need a book. This note can be taken as a summary.
I resigned from FAO for three reasons: our growing privileges were putting UN staff more and more out of touch with our hungry constituents; FAO and the UN were increasingly becoming agencies, not of "we, the peoples", but of what, in their great majority, were repressive governments; and we were paying only lip service to the development needs of half of humankind, of women and girls. My resignation memo, dated 10 December 1979, Human Rights Day, is available on request. It took effect on 8 March 1980, 70th International Women's Day. I planned to continue working for all three goals, now without pay.
It took three years of deliberation, and opposition from within, before I resigned in 1980. I had no exact precedent to guide me. There were other staff who had resigned on principle, but they had all gone to another post, sometimes, it must be said, of less seniority. But I knew of none who had resigned, in order to oppose, to become part of a "loyal opposition". I knew of some who, after resignation, made public criticisms, but these were often from personal resentment, and this soon dried up, or was seen for what it was. I had long realized that resignation would be effective, only from a position of strength, although I did not then understand how deep my reserves would have to be. In the mid 1980s, when the US and Britain pulled out of Unesco, a proposal I had made earlier with regard to FAO, no one asked whether citizen employees would follow the example of these democratic governments out of Unesco, but only whether US and UK staff in Unesco would be protected.
Financial costs of integrity
When I left FAO in 1980 I was employed at P4 Professional Grade, level 10. I calculate that, in the 15 years since, I have forgone salary, other entitlements, and interest on savings totaling some $1.5 million. I resigned at the age of 45 and, because I could have gone on working till 62, the total loss will be nearer $2 million. That is the financial cost of integrity.
As it happens, the financial cost to FAO was greater. For the twelve previous years I had been running an information programme which, by 1979 and after paying our salaries, was making a net business profit of $400 000 a year, some $3 000 000 in all. A list of the projects in rural women's advancement financed by these profits is attached (A). However, this money was little valued by the FAO leadership, which had just created a fund of $25 million, to be used for projects at the Director-General's discretion, and which was soon to become a slush fund to ensure his reelections.
In the three years preceding my resignation, I deliberately accustomed myself to a bleak financial future by increasing earlier forms of contribution, now by giving to women's groups all my disposable income. I continued this after 1980 by donating to such groups all monies received for research and articles on UN reform, and most payments received for offering friends hospitality. A list of these donations, totaling some $73 000, is attached (B).
These gifts are balanced by $30 000 in contributions received over the past 15 years from some 70 friends, including 10 from FAO and 10 from elsewhere in the UN. The contributions have averaged $2000 a year. My working and living expenses over the past 15 years have averaged $10 000 a year. I have met these by cashing my pension, and twice trading down my office/flat, and drawing on the capital gained. In another two years my savings will again run out, and I shall have to trade down to a studio. But in the year 2000, I shall receive a contributory state pension of $40 a week, plus whatever extra income support, or poor relief, my savings, or lack thereof, will entitle me. I assume I shall die in poverty, genteel or abject, according to how long I live.
As it happens, I learned poverty early in life. My father's newly rich family, while sending their children to Devon's best public school, abandoned me, at the age of four for eleven years, to a Dickensian orphanage in Bristol.
Professional costs of integrity
Today I am working as hard as ever. In 1994, for example, I attended ten major international meetings, at my own expense, and prepared papers for most of them. A list of the papers prepared on democracy in 1994 is attached (C). A similar list is available of papers prepared on women's advancement. I have over 30 databases going on these subjects at any one time (D). I am thus able to write some 10 to 15 letters a year to political leaders and other citizens, proposing how democracy and women's advancement may be enhanced, and put 30 to 40 followup questions at press conferences.
None of this work gets me any nearer a job, let alone a consultancy. It is easy to see why. The proposals I make, and the questions I ask, while always courteous and non-confrontational, go to the heart of democracy and women's advancement, and are of the kind which career people, and career women, seldom risk. In ten years of general press conferences, I have heard only one other question on women's representation, and I have yet to hear a political question such as I put to the leaders of the European Summit in Brussels on 11 December 1993:
This is the first European Council after the entry into force of the Maastricht treaty with its provisions for a common foreign and security policy: can we therefore expect at a future summit that, say, all 12 foreign ministers will offer their collective resignation if they fail on a common policy as disastrously as they have done in the past three years over former Yugoslavia?
It had been the same with the questions I raised both in and out of FAO from 1976 to 1993. No other professional, staff or delegate, dared raise them publicly. When I began to do so, in the form of an open memo to the Director-General on 9 November 1976, I was sent to the staff psychiatrist. All eight Assistant Directors-General surrendered their copies, and only one, Kenneth King of Guyana, who himself was to resign, apologized later for his "cowardice". The Kontiki crew member among them, Herman Watzinger, considered it an "administrative matter": he too was to resign. The British government representative waded into the attack: he was later given a consultancy.
The professional cost of integrity, and courage, is that you make almost all other colleagues afraid of you. This may be overcome, within an organization, if one is a friendly person or if, over the years, one has built up a track record of principle. Once outside the organization, no one answers your letters, or returns your calls. Professionally, one is starved of information, on which to do further research. From 1980 to 1986 this was not such a handicap. A retired World Food Programme director, Otto Matzke, had, since 1973, been writing constructively critical articles on food aid and, by the late 1970s, he had realized sooner than most how the new FAO Director-General was using for political purposes his control over emergency food aid. For six years we shared our information.
In December 1986 Otto Matzke died, and the articles, which had appeared regularly in the Frankfurter Allgemeine and the Neue Zuercher Zeitung, ceased. Earlier, growing material insecurity had forced me to return from Rome to London. After Peter Gill's 1987 ITV documentary, and Graham Hancock's 1989 book "Lords of Poverty", regular investigative reporting of FAO ceased. And, in the real world, famines increased.
Peter Gill, however, had discovered a crime in FAO's history, the Director-General's 20-day delay, at the height of the Ethiopian famine in 1984, in authorizing a shipment of emergency food aid, till an Ethiopian representative he disliked was removed from Rome. At the FAO Conference in November 1987, not one of the 150 delegates brought this up, and the incumbent Director-General was reelected for a third six-year term. To the thousand and more letters I sent to FAO delegates over fifteen years, not one received a reply. Only one was acknowledged by phone, by the Swiss delegate, when his office found there was a page missing.
After 1980 I did apply for one or two other posts in the UN system, where I thought I could put to good use my work for women's advancement. My applications were never acknowledged. From subsequent talks with UN agency heads, I found that many knew of my work, but they also knew of the public stand I had taken against corrupt leadership in FAO, Unesco and the UN. They would have felt uncomfortable employing me. The only UN heads who acknowledged my letters were Jacques de Larosière, then IMF Managing Director, and Arpad Bogsch, still Director-General of the World Intellectual Property Organization.
Social costs of integrity
One disadvantage of an orphanage upbringing, and the lack of a home to which to invite school and university friends, is the shortage of contacts later in life who might support one's stand for integrity, or help a person find paying channels for one's activity. Another is the likelihood of being emotionally seduced by someone nearly old enough to be my mother. In my case, after fifteen years of marriage, the strains of incompatibility led to an agreed separation and, having provided for my wife, Iwas able better to appreciate the risks of opposition from within an organization.
Integrity may bring admirers, but admiration is shortlived if one's work does not contribute to family income. More important, friendships too have to be financed, so that, in straitened circumstances, new ones, on a non-dependency basis, can be made only when one has services or information to offer. To a considerable degree, one can keep friendships going by letter, but once work and family ties are gone, there are not many occasions when even a friendly person can make new friends. In any case, friends have to be convinced that the pursuit of integrity is not obsessive, a point difficult to make when, as sacrifices increase, compromise becomes harder.
The social cost of integrity is isolation. In about nine out of ten cases, it is I who take the initiative to keep a friendship going, in every case that with former colleagues.
Physical costs of integrity
Courage, I once wrote, paraphrasing Thomas Edison, is 1% exultation and 99% palpitations. When one is isolated, anxiety develops. When isolated, there is none to assure you that a pain in the left chest is only rheumatic, or that a throbbing in the temples is not a prelude to a stroke. And then one gets caught out, when a hospital misdiagnoses a deep vein thrombosis as a cramp, and the ensuing pulmonary embolism as only a sharp pain in the right chest. But I was still alive and, to celebrate, Iwrote "In Praise of Life" (E).
More insidiously, it is difficult not to subsume another's indifferent opinion of the value of one's work, and the cumulative effect this has on one's self-esteem, and the resulting depressiveness. This is particularly so when one has had a psychosis, as I had in 1966, and a family history of manic-depression. I had gone into the orphanage in 1939, when my father finally broke down, and was confined to hospital for twelve years. My mother also had a nervous breakdown, but putting her children into an orphanage was not of such consequence, because she had been brought up in a good one, and assumed this to be the case of other children's homes.
In short the physical toll of integrity may be imaginary, but imagination may create disease, and lack of imagination may be life-threatening.
Spiritual costs of integrity
Even in a secular age, there are the costs of integrity which can not be reduced to the moral or psychological. The pursuit of integrity in some way entails standing up to evil, initially to another's, then to one's own, and then again to another's. And standing up to evil brings about the recognition that there is no guarantee of success, only that, once engaged, there is no turning back.
Evil, I have come by experience to define, is not only lying, stealing, wounding and killing, but doing such acts in order to keep someone else in your power. Again this may be a subject for a book. But briefly, many get over the problem of evil by reducing evil to madness, or by believing that goodness, or God, is omnipotent. I do neither. Power and evil too often go together. Power is the goal of evil people, power over individuals in the case of private evil, and power over organizations or the polity in the case of public evil. For good people, power is the means, rather than the end. But for many, power also becomes the end and, to remain in power, they begin to lie, steal, wound and kill, often creating legal or other institutional sanctions to rationalize such acts.
To face up to public evil, one has to face up to and acknowledge one's own private evils, one's own lying, stealing, wounding and leaving to die. In any case the evil leaders heading the organization you are opposing will make sure that all one's shortcomings are soon over the public blackboard. This unwillingness to face up to oneself is perhaps the main reason why there are so few whistle-blowers, prophets or conscientious objectors, or why so many good people shun public office.
Standing up to one's own evil requires long practice. The discipline of integrity can start by acknowledging one's ulterior motives for a good action, with the decision to go on, without hypocrisy, only if these are outweighed by the benefits to others. The discipline of courage begins, not with a resignation, but by putting on record one's disagreement with an action by one's supervisor, and accepting the consequences that an official disagreement may bring. Both disciplines may take several years of practice, during which one may also have to learn to forgo resentment when disagreement is interpreted as disloyalty. The frustrations may lead to a personal breakdown, but this should be seen not as a humiliation so much as an opportunity for greater self-knowledge.
But the greatest spiritual cost of integrity is uncertainty, the feeling that you may not be right, or not entirely right, that your sacrifice will not be appreciated or will soon be forgotten, that there may be nothing but personal loss in standing up to evil, and that, even if the evil is recognized and action taken, it will resurface sooner or later in a new form, as someone else attempts to accrue power and we are so naive or submissive that we allow official lying and stealing to happen all over again.
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Is integrity worth the sacrifice? The answer, for the individual, is almost always likely to be no. The most an individual will gain is serenity, but without happiness, and allied with poverty. But the community may gain. An individual's integrity may lead to the strengthening of institutions and of democratic culture. It is also possible that others may be inspired by your example.
One person who gave me inspiration was Anton Schmidt, a sergeant in the German army whose integrity and courage is described by Hannah Arendt in her 1963 book "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil". In the course of his duties in Poland, Anton Schmidt had helped the Jewish partisans by supplying forged papers and military trucks. "He did not do it for money". Thiswent on from October 1941 to March 1942, when Anton Schmidt was arrested and executed. Twenty years later, his example was remembered. The hush which then came over the Jerusalem court put to shame the tens of millions of respectable people who had considered such an action, not so much morally meaningless, as practically useless.
Public life is worth enhancing, even if an individual does not survive the process.
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