A Little History - A Young Swede Visits Barcelona : Tom McDermott

 

Barcelona March 1938

From 16 to 18 March 1938 Mussolini’s Italian Air Force carried out an intense bombing of Barcelona. The Spanish Civil War was in its second year and Italy and Germany were providing units of their air forces to support Franco’s Nationalist Forces. The object of the bombing was openly stated - terrorize the civilian population of the city.

The attack was unexpected - even Franco had not been informed in advance of the attack, and was said later to be very upset by the action of his nominal allies. Barcelona had no air defenses and no alerts could be sounded as the bombers flew high and silenced their engines until the bombs had dropped. The bombs had time-delayed fuses and were dropped in unpredictable times and patterns. Many areas of the city were carpet bombed.

Except for Germany and Italy, world-wide condemnation followed, but little practical response. Several war relief efforts were already underway in Spain, but these expanded quickly after the bombing. One of the groups formed quickly in response was the International Committee for the Assistance of Child Refugees in Spain, a group largely made up of British and American Quakers. That autumn a 27-year old Swedish journalist working for ILO took a leave of absence and came to Barcelona at the invitation of a Swedish friend already working there.

The young Swede’s name was Nils Emil Thedin. He later said, “I was staying there for some time going out to the refugee camps, to the food distribution centres and to the children's hospitals, I was really shaken by what I saw - thousands and thousands of undernourished children, sick children, abandoned children. “

After Barcelona, Thedin worked for a period with the Nansen International Office for Refugees to raise funds for its work in Spain. During the period between World Wars I and II, the Nansen Office was the sole international refugee agency, and in 1938 won the Nobel Prize for its work. Although Thedin had no experience in fundraising, he managed to secure considerable funds from Sweden and other Scandinavian countries. Donations were driven, no doubt, by widening concerns in Europe over the situation in Spain and the growing numbers of refugees flowing out to France and Britain.

When Thedin returned to Geneva in 1939, he found ILO in turmoil. With war about to break out in Europe, the organization decided on safety grounds to relocate from Geneva to Montreal (ILO then set up its temporary headquarters in McGill University’s campus). Thedin chose to return to Sweden where he was soon hired by Margit Levinson, Chairperson of Swedish Save the Children Fund, Rädda Barnen. In addition to his work with Rädda Barnen, Thedin stayed active as a journalist and at the international level where he attended meetings of ILO and of UNESCO.

Rädda Barnen

Through the war years and its aftermath, Rädda Barnen’s focus remained primarily on Spain and Spanish refugees. During those post war years Sweden’s attitude towards UNICEF remained ambivalent, and at times hostile. Rädda Barnen and the Swedish Red Cross tended to see UNICEF increasingly as a competitor, rather than a partner. This became painfully clear when UNICEF began to appeal for funds from the public, rather than just the government. In 1950 the government made clear to UNICEF that it should expect no more funding from Sweden, and Sweden joined the US and other countries arguing that UNICEF’s mandate should not be allowed to continue beyond its early emergency status. At a global and European level this tension with UNICEF was expressed by IUCW, the International Union of Child Welfare, which was the larger network to which Rädda Barnen belonged.

The situation began to change as Maurice Pate developed a closer working relationship with Margit Levinson. Gradually, Levinson became an advocate for UNICEF in Sweden, and Rädda Barnen was seen as the ‘executive’ of a future UNICEF committee. Unfortunately, this sparked a row with the Swedish Red Cross, which felt cut out of the arrangement. In the end however the Red Cross joined the board of the Swedish Committee for UNICEF which Levinson formed in 1954. Levinson appointed Nils Thedin to lead the new committee. As the group later became more formal in structure, he took the title, ‘Vice-President’.

The War of the Days

Oh, if only that had been the end of problems !!  Another row soon broke out both in Sweden and at the international level between the IUCW and the UN, with UNICEF largely caught in the middle. The UN decided to establish a Universal Children’s Day. This cut across a decision taken two years earlier by IUCW to establish ‘World Children’s Day’. IUCW and many national members of its network saw themselves as sidelined by the UN and no longer (if ever) considered the world’s relief agency for children. They viewed UNICEF as young and inexperienced in relief matters. Most importantly, they did not see themselves as having 'a seat at the table.' Their appeals that UNICEF and other agencies not call for donations from the public had been ignored. Establishing a different UN day for children was 'the final straw'. The debate over the two days dragged on for years, and the issue remains unsettled today.


Pate, Thedin and Levinson played key roles in getting past through this debate. Pate’s approach was to say ‘yes’ to all parties and celebrate both days. However, his approach differed sharply from that taken by others on the Board and at the UN. Despite their concerns, Pate invited NGOs to consult and participate in UNICEF meetings and made a point to listen and act on their views. This differed sharply from other UN practice at the time. In the view of many UN delegations, the UN was for official delegations and statements approved only by their governments.


Sweden joined the Executive Board in 1956 and UNICEF immediately began hinting to the Swedish delegation that it would like to hear more from the non-governmental community - not just through informal contacts, but directly at the Board. Finally, in 1959 for the first time Sweden invited a member of the Swedish Committee for UNICEF to join the Swedish delegation. Thedin himself attended for the first time in 1961. Soon after he came to head the delegation. From 1970 to 1972 he chaired the Executive Board.

1972 Board - Labouisse and Thedin

The Swedes Did Their Homework 

Sweden’s delegations came to the Board each year with new and challenging policy proposals - health and welfare of preschool children, women’s rights, family welfare, and - most controversially - family planning. Sweden wanted UNICEF to take a more active approach to promoting family planning in its health programmes. This, of course, set off enormous controversy and continued to roil debate in subsequent Board sessions. The Swedish position fell on deaf ears for some other delegations, with one delegate telling Adelaide Sinclair that it was ‘disgusting’ to hear such issues discussed in the halls of the United Nations.

The ‘show-down’ over the issue came in the 1966 Board session in Addis Ababa when the Board members divided 15 for and 15 against. The countries ‘for’ included a few unexpected ones - the US, Pakistan, Turkey and Tunisia. Thedin credited the diplomatic skills of Henry Labouisse in breaking the deadlock. He arranged for the US delegate to enter a resolution calling on UNICEF to present the following year a paper outlining a role UNICEF 'could' take in the health aspects of family planning, but restricted to information and training of health workers. It worked !! The policy continued to be controversial, but the confrontation was over and training and communications on the importance of birth spacing became regular elements of UNICEF's support to health services.

By the time Thedin himself joined the Swedish delegation in 1961, Sweden’s other (and less controversial) policy initiative had already borne fruit - a study on the ‘interdependent’ factors of development affecting children. The 1961 report was considered at the time 'ground-breaking'. It started a solid move away from relief and towards integrated child development. As Thedin later put it, “ It was of no avail to prevent a child from starving to death if the child instead died of malaria.” This was seen by most delegations as a major step forward, a look at ‘the integrated needs’ of children in the developing world, rather than simply separate initiatives for water, nutrition, health and education.

Thedin developed a close personal relationship, not just with UNICEF’s successive Executive Directors, but also with many other levels of the organization. He enjoyed traveling and said that he most enjoyed meeting UNICEF representatives in the field. He loved hearing back from them about 'realities on the ground'.



Outside UNICEF Thedin remained active in both business and semi-government activities. In 1963 Thedin joined the Board of SIDA, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. The following year he became the Chairman of Liber, Sweden’s leading publisher of educational books, and in 1967 became the Chairman of Sveriges Radio

Children as a Zone of Peace

In UNICEF we tend to remember Thedin mainly for his 1971 address to the Board on children as a zone of peace. According to Jim Grant, “Thedin promoted the idea regularly at UNICEF meetings and made my life miserable until I acted on the idea.” Although Thedin raised the issue repeatedly at the Board and elsewhere, his formal statement is recorded simply as:

"UNICEF should awaken an awareness, in all of the world, of the special status of children. In the document on UNICEF's external relations as well as in the medium-term plan, reference was made to the possibility of promoting children as a conflict-free zone in human relations. It should be UNICEF's ambition to turn that ideal into a reality."

Nils Thedin died at age 78 on February 1st, 1989. His wife, Carin, died six years earlier in 1983.