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With the United Nations set to celebrate the 75th anniversary of its establishment on Saturday, a local school has staged an event which simulates the organisation’s heated debates and diplomacy in an effort to challenge young minds and promote knowledge of international relations.
The British School of Bahrain hosted its third BritMUN event last weekend at the Al Areen Palace Hotel & Spa, with 400 students from 16 schools in the kingdom sending delegates to participate.
The ‘Model United Nations’ is a popular worldwide event for students aged 15 and above. Referred to as delegates, students are presented with their assignments in advance, along with the topics that will be discussed. They are then placed in committees and assigned countries or specific political figures who they will represent in a form of role play.
Delegates conduct research before conferences and formulate positions that they will then debate with their fellow delegates in committee, staying true to the actual position of the member they represent.
Shakeel Sheikh, head of Year 12 at BSB and the director of BritMUN, said that the growth of the event in just three years underlines how popular and how enthusiastic the kingdom’s students are towards it.
He said: “Two years ago we had 17 delegates taking part, and it was held on the school grounds in Hamala. Now in its third edition, we had 318 delegates, plus the administration and media teams.
“This is an event by the students for the students. They sort everything out, from the organisation, to the selecting of delegates, establishing safety procedures, and even to the little things like making ID tags and preparing the menus. The website and social media accounts were all set up by students too and throughout the day they ran their own commentary on specially-created Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter accounts for BritMUN.”
Schools invited to take part included St Christopher’s, Bayan School, IKNS, MKS, the Indian School Bahrain and Riffa Views. Many of these institutes host their own version of the event, but Shakeel believes that the British School’s version is unique because it randomly introduces ‘crises’ into proceedings.
“These unusual situations really test the students to the limit and force them to act quickly on their feet, but they’re so much fun and different,” he explained. “For example, one of the issues our Doctors Without Borders Committee debated was how to maintain standards of vaccination programmes and improving public confidence in them.
“Whereas in other MUN conferences, the delegates would do their research and come along and deliver their viewpoint, suddenly halfway through we had ‘breaking news’ and a virus was released around the globe and quickly entered epidemic status.
“Then when the delegates finally decided what to do, another crisis was unleashed where the vaccine they decided to administer was the wrong one, and 10,000 people per minute were dying.
“It really makes them think on their feet and act their part, rather than come with prepared arguments. Of course, what makes it even better is that the media team created actual breaking news website pages and filmed videos as reporters to provide the latest details on the crisis and they were shown on the big screen.”
Other councils chosen for the event include scandal-hit football governing body FIFA, which discussed whether the World Cups of 2018 and 2022 should have gone to Russia and Qatar, respectively, the British House of Commons, the US Senate and NATO.
Year 11 student Alex Zakharia represented the United States on the United Nations Security Council in a fierce debate about the militarisation of air-space, the deep atmosphere and outer space.
His performance, where he demonstrated tremendous knowledge of the subject matter and his elected country’s relationship with others, included carefully balanced peace-keeping with aggressive diplomacy and even the use of veto over his Russian counterpart. This led to him securing the Best Delegate Award at the conference’s closing ceremony.
He said: “The event was fantastic and I had so much fun. If I could do a BritMUN every weekend, I would! This is my fifth event of its type now, and at the first one I was so nervous and didn’t think I’d like it, but it’s helped me so much in that regard and I’m much more confident speaking publicly and expressing my opinion now.
“It was great to win the award and I’m really proud of it, but most importantly I had a great time, learnt a lot about current affairs and got to network with a lot of other students interested in similar things.”
An opening dinner was attended by The United Nations in Bahrain’s Resident Coordinator Peter Grohmann, pictured, top, right, and British Ambassador Simon Martin who delivered speeches of encouragement to the participants and offered tips on diplomacy.
Also present was Kuwait Finance House board member Noorur Rahman Abid, who told delegates about Diya Pakistan, a professionally-managed charitable organisation which is committed to eradicating poverty by promoting literacy. The BritMUN event successfully raised approximately BD1,500 for the cause.
As for the future, Shakeel has plans to take the fourth edition to an international level. He explained: “This year we held the event in a five-star environment to make the delegates feel important and to increase the quality of the event. Next, we hope to invite international schools to take part, although we want to maintain our quality so we’ll keep the number of delegates roughly the same.”
Continuing the theme, the world’s top diplomats will be in action in the 11th IISS Manama Dialogue which will be held from October 30 to November 1. Organised annually, the event provides a forum for the national security establishments of the participating states to exchange views on regional security challenges.
