To begin your research on each of these countries you might want to take a look at the information available on the CPIN WebPages under Research Library. Click here and choose Research Library on the left-hand side of the page. http://www.lib.uconn.edu/~mboyer There are a number of resources available through the CPIN website including country profiles, web links, and other on-line resources.

This simulation exercise can be thought of as a set of interlocking subgames. Each subgame focuses on a particular issue that is outlined in this scenario. The exercise is intended to focus on a few primary issues in the world and how these issues are related; it is not intended to cover all international issues that exist today. The main subgames are:

Although the issue areas are presented as distinct, remember that the issues are intricately related. For example, global population issues affect development and the global environment. It may be less clear that discussions of development must take environmental, health and human rights considerations into account.

There will be two, one-hour conferences scheduled for each of the issue areas to be negotiated in this simulation. Simcon will chair these conferences. These conferences will be held at the dates and times listed on the Simulation Schedule linked from the Current Simulations portion of CPIN web-site. Even if your country is not invited to a particular conference, you may still negotiate the issue over the regular system. If your country feels it is vital to your national interest to be included in a particular conference, you may petition Simcon to also be included in that conference.

It is common for teams to begin the simulation in a passive mode with plans to respond after other country-teams take the lead. This creates an unrealistic foreign policy atmosphere and ensures a slow start to the exercise. Students are urged to send initial policy statements on every issue in which their country is involved on the first day of the simulation. In addition, students are urged to have their ideas developed and a plan of action set prior to each conference. Flexibility and knowledge are necessary for country-teams to react quickly to new developments during real-time conferences. Each team should continue to send daily messages on their issues.

Communiqués -- at minimum each country-team will issue five global communiques each week, i.e., one for each substantive area: terrorism, women’s rights, biodiversity, international financial crisis, and communicable diseases. Country delegates should send well-developed messages to the global community each week of the simulation. These messages are diplomatic statements of your country-team's official position on each of the four issue areas. A good negotiator takes into consideration many factors, including those of implementation and enforcement of the proposal.

Hint -- your country has a goal/s as do all the other countries involved. As a result of this reality, you and your country-teammates might want to consider the following questions: what issues will you be willing to compromise over? What compromises will you be willing to make? What compromises do you and your teammates think the other countries will consider reasonable? What leverage might you have to persuade other countries to work with you? Remember that each country has a different perspective and different priorities.  Your approach would be more effective if you consider the positions of the other countries and what compromises they might be willing to make.

The key to a successful simulation is the research that a country team does throughout the program. You will need a thorough understanding of policy and issues in order to strike a balance between creativity and realism in the negotiations. The setting for this simulation is late summer 2000. The simulation is set in the future to encourage you to be creative in developing your own policies instead of duplicating real-life events and decisions as they happen.

This scenario is an introduction to the issues you will be discussing in the ICONS simulation. It also gives a very brief overview of some of the interests and policies of other nations in the program. The scenario and country profiles are not meant to be the principal resource for the development of your policies or the conduct of your negotiations. They provide a starting point. You must now research your own country's history, foreign policy, and relations with the other countries involved in this simulation. Your challenge will be to come up with a better agreement than the experts and real world negotiators have found thus far.

Please note that after the program begins, real world developments will NOT affect the simulation.

The increasingly interdependent world is characterized by fewer trade and border restrictions. Global interdependence coupled with the advent of truly global financial and telecommunications systems have created a new brand of criminals – international criminals who extend their operations beyond national borders. Drug trafficking, illegal arms sales, and terrorism are seen as legitimate threats to national security, while the ability of international crime groups to transfer money between countries allows them to continue to elude the grip of traditional crime prevention entities. Their operations are similar to that of multinational corporations, with global reach and infrastructure.

Unlike past decades when most terrorism was conducted by groups who sought to achieve some concrete political aim (the African National Congress, Basque separatist ETA, Irish Republican Army, and Palestinian Liberation Organization, among others), fewer terrorist acts seem to have clear purposes today. It appears that the "statement" or the act itself is the most important reason for carrying out an attack. How else can the Aum Shinrikyo religious sect’s 1995 nerve gas attack in the Tokyo subway be explained? Terrorism has also become more global in scope, with attacks occurring beyond previously defined "dangerous" areas, for example, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community building in Buenos Aires, and the more recent embassy bombings in Africa.

Counter-terrorism databases list 3,000 suspected terrorist groups. The more successful of these have plenty of money to support training, the acquisition of weaponry (along with explosives and chemical and biological agents), and the planning and implementation of large-scale attacks. (This is an especially worrisome point, given the low cost of carrying out the bombing of the U.S. federal building in Oklahoma City.) Aum Shinrikyo had estimated assets of about $1 billion, and had taken advantage of the fall of the Soviet Union and economic problems in Russia to equip itself with sophisticated weaponry. Much of the weaponry available on the international black market, including tons of Semtex, the Czech-manufactured plastic explosive, and tens of thousands of Kalishnikov rifles, comes from the arsenals of the former Warsaw Pact nations. Osama bin Laden, the Saudi expatriate whose group is alleged to have orchestrated the August 1998 attack on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, has a personal fortune estimated to be as high as $300 million.

As terrorism has become more international in scope, dealing with it has required more international cooperation, as may be seen in the investigations of the bombings of Pan Am 103 and the embassies in Africa, as well as attempts to bring the alleged perpetrators to justice. In addition, cooperation is obviously necessary in preventing these attacks in the first place.

International banking must figure prominently into discussions of international crime because of the connection of money laundering to contraband trafficking, illegal arms sales, and terrorist financing, as well as business fraud, which is increasingly capable of crossing international borders. There have been international efforts to get countries to develop and enforce anti-money laundering statutes. These efforts include provisions under the United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances and the establishment of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) by the G­7 Economic Summit in Paris in 1989.

There are, however, complications in these efforts: 1) the increased penetration of worldwide financial systems by organized crime groups; 2) increased money laundering where anti­money laundering laws are rare; 3) differences in levels of compliance with international anti­money laundering standards, specifically in Asia and Latin America as compared with the U.S., Canada and Western Europe; and 4) the interest in achieving the fastest possible system for international transfers of payments, which benefits both banking/business and criminal money laundering groups.

A new type of terrorism has emerged: Cyber-terrorism. Recently, official web sites of the Japanese government were violated by computer hackers. The hackers placed a link to a pornographic site on the Science and Technology Agency homepage, posted messages attacking Japan over the 1937 Nanking massacre, and important data, including the population census, was erased. Another act of cyber-terrorism is e-bombs. These are viruses in the form of email messages that can destroy entire hard drives and networks to fail. Governments and corporations increasingly face technological security issues resulting from cyber-terrorism as they come to rely more on the Internet for conducting business ranging from posting government information to transferring monetary funds.

The International Crime Conference will focus on international efforts to control international terrorism, as well as actions that can be taken to prevent the money laundering that allows these groups to flourish.

Biodiversity is one area of international concern. Ensuring the protection of the huge variety of plant and animal species, organisms, and habitats is a difficult task in the wake of the need for development in many less developed countries (LDCs). A number of proposals have been put forth and a few agreements signed as the international community has begun to recognize the need to promote conservation.

One of the earliest attempts to protect endangered species was the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), an international treaty drawn up in 1973. The objective of the treaty is to protect wildlife against over-exploitation and to prevent international trade from threatening species with extinction.

In 1992, the international community began a negotiation process on a number of pressing international environmental concerns, among them global warming and biodiversity. The UN Conference on Environment and Development, also known as the Earth Summit, was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Though the conference was billed as a landmark of environmental progress, it achieved far less than originally hoped. Nevertheless, important issues facing the environment were discussed, and important agreements were reached. These agreements were:

In December 1997, 38 industrialized countries agreed to adopt binding targets for reducing emissions of the greenhouse gases believed to be responsible for global warming by signing the Kyoto Protocol to the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Control.

The Clinton Administration has yet to bring the treaty before the U.S. Senate for ratification. President Clinton has said that he will not do so until the developing nations vow to maintain their own commitment under Kyoto. But even if the developed world were immediately to initiate measures to meet their Kyoto commitments, many think it impossible to reduce CO₂ emissions by the required 50%. Some critics of Clinton environmental policy, though, believe that the administration also thinks the emission levels are unrealistic and that by gaining Senate approval, it would force the U.S. to comply with an impossible set of regulations. Thus, it is unclear whether the Kyoto Accords will actually be implemented in the near future.

Another attempt to preserve diversity in the environment is through the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). It has as its objectives "the conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources." The treaty came into force in late 1993, and the signatory parties have met regularly since to work out implementation issues. Far less progress has been made in this area than in dealing with climate change, which may be a result of the difficulty in assessing the impact of biodiversity on humankind.

The Clinton administration has signed, but the U.S. Senate has not ratified it; therefore, the U.S. is not a full partner in the negotiations. There has been some concern about the limits that the treaty could place on the U.S. biotechnology industry. Among the issues not yet fully dealt with in the treaty process have been questions about compensating the developing nations for biological materials with medical and commercial applications while protecting the investments and interests of the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries.

The first ecosystem to be addressed within the CBD framework is marine and coastal areas. At a meeting in Jakarta in March 1997, experts met to begin the process of developing a plan for preserving the biodiversity of these areas. The economic importance of ocean resources has led to marine biodiversity coming under attack from a number of sectors: construction, mining, shipping, agriculture, tourism, and fishing. The growth of commercial fishing provides one of the most obvious examples of the problem. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 70 percent of the world's commercially important fish stocks are fully or over-exploited.

The upcoming Global Environment Conference follows up on the CITES treaty, the Rio and Kyoto conferences, and the CBD framework in an attempt to develop mutually acceptable and effective approaches to these environmental issues.

The year 1998 marked the 50th anniversary of the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The UDHR was adopted by the United Nations on December 10, 1948. The UDHR guarantees many individual, social, economic, and political rights, including equal protection under law, a fair hearing, presumption of innocence, free movement, to marry and found a family, to social security, to work, to join trade unions, to an adequate standard of living for health and well-being, and to education. Subsequent UN efforts, including the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights have further expanded the concept of human rights.

Almost every nation of the world values some concept of human rights – defining, protecting and enforcing those rights. One of the principal problems in the protection of human rights lies in the inability of governments to agree on exactly what constitutes human rights. The definition of human rights still remains a subject of international debate as evidenced during the December 1998 World Conference on the Declaration of Human Rights. Western nations, including the US, continue to define human rights largely in political terms. Many developing countries maintain that economic rights to food, shelter and education supercede rights of free speech and representation. The debate over the nature of the international definition of human rights stymied any real progress in the 1998 Human Rights Conference.

In addition to the problem of defining human rights, the nations of the world are constantly debating which countries are violating human rights. The common targets of criticism are China, Cuba, North Korea, Israel, and the military governments of Africa, and Latin America. The U.S., however, has also been labeled a human rights violator for having the death penalty. Mexico has been criticized for political intimidation, Brazil for its war on street children, and Germany for its treatment of immigrants.

Even after nations agree on whether another country is violating human rights, it remains difficult to determine how to encourage change. The concept of sovereignty prevents one nation from interfering with the domestic affairs of another. Yet the world as a whole has determined that some cases of human rights abuse warrant international attention regardless of sovereignty. The Tiananmen Square incident in the PRC and apartheid in South Africa are two examples of human rights issues in which many nations of the world felt justified in becoming involved.

As nations discuss human rights standards and violations, they must consider what can and should be done to protect human rights on an international scale. Countries may, however, hold different views on the issue of human rights because of their cultures or particular political conditions. For example, some Southeast Asian leaders deny the accusation of human rights violation by asserting their "Asian values" to be different from the value Western nations place on human rights and democracy. Hence, as in every other international effort to monitor and influence human rights, the issues of sovereignty and the question of enforcement weigh heavily on the debate.

Unfortunately, discrimination is pervasive throughout the global community and no group has a monopoly on suffering. Discrimination against women ranges from invasive surgical procedures aimed at suppressing sexuality, to subtle physical, emotional, and psychological abuse, including job discrimination and the lack of access to higher education. Most industrialized countries have covert forms of discrimination, including sexual harassment, whereas many developing countries are characterized by more overt forms of oppression. The developing countries often view intervention by industrialized nations on behalf of women's rights as a form of cultural imperialism coupled with hypocrisy.

Women's rights are intrinsic to many issues and only recently have women's rights been reconceptualized as human rights. The global movement for women's rights as human rights first became apparent in Vienna at the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights. This movement also made itself known in Cairo at the 1994 World Summit on Social Development in Copenhagen and at the Fourth World Conference on Women in September 1995 in Beijing, China. There were seven main issue areas at the Beijing conference:

• The effects of poverty on women;
• Women's access to adequate health care and nutrition;
• Violence against women;
• Economic opportunities for women;
• Women's gaining equal power and decision making responsibility in politics and government;
• Human rights of women/discrimination;
• The unequal effects of environmental degradation on women;

The main issue for women's rights advocates is to increase the status of women, including their level of education, political efficacy, and social standing. The greatest area of contention is deciding and agreeing on how to raise the status of women. A United Nations Development Fund study on the status of women throughout the world, which was released shortly before the conference, revealed that women are the primary victims of poverty and violence, receive lower pay than male counterparts, work longer hours, and face social, cultural, and professional obstacles. In addition, particularly in many developing countries, women have far less access to education than men. Worldwide, in 1995, the estimated number of illiterate women aged 15 and over in developing countries is about 556 million, compared with 315 million illiterate men.

The discussion of the rights of women is constrained by cultural and economic realities. In some cultures, women are perceived as inferior, and the birth of a female child is an undesirable situation. Other cultures have other reasons for believing that women should be treated differently from men, and in many countries, laws are written to reflect this difference. This has been carried to its most extreme in Afghanistan, where the Taliban, which now controls all the major cities in the country, has imposed restrictive gender policies based upon a strict interpretation of Islamic law. Women are not allowed to leave home unless completely covered and accompanied by a male relative, are barred from working, and have very limited access to health care and education. The Ministry for the Enforcement of Virtue and Suppression of Vice is known to enforce these edicts through arbitrary beatings and detainment.

In addition to cultural considerations, many nations face economic obstacles that prevent them from addressing the rights of women. While studies have revealed that education and improved employment for women reduces population growth and poverty, many countries lack the resources to provide these opportunities. Of particular concern is the lack of effective contraception, which leads to frequent pregnancies and large family sizes, both of which inflict a burden on a woman's health and economic well being. Contraception may be unavailable due to expense, lack of access to a health clinic, or religious considerations. After deliberating nine years over a drug that has been available in the West for decades, for instance, the Japanese government has decided to permit the limited sale of birth control pills in May 1999.

The International Conference on Human Rights will concentrate on the position of women by addressing questions of labor, health and nutrition, education, violence, and culture.

In the summer of 2000, the overriding issue in the area of international economics is how to deal with the recurrent international financial crises and how to stem this recursion.

Since 1997 East and Southeast Asian economic crises have had worldwide effects because of the high level of international economic interdependence between these countries and others around the world. These economic crises began in Thailand, where the value of the baht fell dramatically, ending the tremendous growth of the Thai economy (which, like the other "powerhouse" economies of the region, had been growing at 7 to 9 percent a year). The Thai government blamed currency speculators for the crisis, while other observers have pointed out the role of Thai policies in creating a ripe environment for problems.

Indonesia and South Korea, which had been the eleventh largest economy in the world, have also seen their economies badly damaged. To avoid default, the governments of these countries have required the assistance of the International Monetary Fund (to the tune of $100 billion). The IMF, in turn, insisted on a package of economic reform and austerity measures that have imposed significant economic hardship on many economies as they struggle to adjust. For this reason, Korea accepted IMF assistance, while Indonesia hesitated, mainly because Indonesian leaders believed that this package might make the country more dependent on the IMF and thus damage its national sovereignty. (Indonesia did, however, finally accept IMF aid.) Japan is also suffering from economic crisis, and there are fears about the regional crisis spreading to the PRC, which is one of the major forces maintaining the stability of Asian economy.

The risk of a deep global recession currently seems very real, with trouble brewing in Latin America. Brazil is suffering from a deep recession and the government was forced to devalue the real in January 1999. In March of the same year, Brazil received an emergency relief sum of $5 million of the $41.5 billion package negotiated with the IMF to help the country weather the recession. The loan is a conditional one, requiring Brazil to reduce its inflation and public spending.

Elsewhere, the world has been concerned with the latest economic crises in Russia, where the ruble has plummeted in value and support for continuing economic reforms has greatly diminished. Indeed, Wall Street experienced its second largest drop of Dow Jones average on August 31st, 1998 as a result of investor concerns over the Russian political and economic crisis and its global impact.

The purpose of the IMF is to protect the soundness of the global economic system by providing emergency relief when members experience severe balance-of-payment problems, and cannot acquire any other external financing. Critics claim that the IMF protects foreign bankers from the consequences of imprudent loans, and provides a cover for bad economic policies, and perhaps, corruption. It has been argued that the IMF is not equipped to see problems before they develop, and that there is currently not enough regulation, either domestically or globally, of major financial institutions and markets.

Several countries are beginning to revisit the idea of currency controls, which would allow them to stem capital flight and stop short-term speculation. Many proponents claim that the use of such controls in Chile, for example, placing a one year waiting period on the withdrawal of capital, has allowed it to maintain a stable economy, while critics argue that such controls dampen economic growth by discouraging foreign investment.

At the same time, foreign debt burdens, some dating from the 1970s, continue to be a problem for many developing countries. The current economic crisis is beginning to exacerbate this by increasing the cost of borrowing money, thereby making debt servicing more expensive for debtor countries. Debt relief is crucial to their future economic prospects. In the 1990s, one of the primary methods for dealing with debt has been the Brady Plan, which grants official credit for debt reduction in return for the implementation of IMF-sanctioned structural reforms. While the Brady Plan has been given a great deal of the credit for stabilizing the Mexican and Argentine economies, it has been held accountable for much of the political and economic turmoil in Venezuela.

Venezuela’s experience, and the recent Asian financial crisis, raises questions about whether the orthodox, economic stabilization programs of the IMF do more harm than good over the long-term. The principal goals of orthodox policies are increased economic efficiency, stabilization, and the generation of hard currency revenues; countries are encouraged to open their economies to foreign investment, to open their markets to foreign competition, and to privatize government owned industry. Some observers fear that IMF-imposed economic reforms and austerity measures may send Asia even deeper into recession.

Finally, there are concerns that some of the most highly debt-burdened countries, especially in Africa, may require even more assistance. Despite reforms, countries like Mozambique cannot get ahead of its interest payments; Oxfam International reports that Mozambique spends four times as much on debt payments as on health. Getting creditors to reduce debt to sustainable levels may be the only way that such countries can improve their standards of living. This is the goal of a new joint debt relief plan managed by the IMF and World Bank, which began in 1998.

The Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative entails coordinated action by the international community to reduce the external debt burden to sustainable levels.

One of the most promising solutions to the debt crisis may lie in the improvement of international trading relations to help developing countries increase their exports. With more and varied exports, those countries could earn more Western currency to service their debts. The future of attempts to liberalize the international trading system in the interest of developing countries is closely tied to the WTO accords and current trends toward regional alliances and protectionism.

The International Conference on International Financial Crisis will focus on what measures the international community can take to protect itself from economic crises that potentially can lead to global economic collapse. Additionally, considerations will be made regarding how to reduce LDC debt and increase their economic prosperity.

Widespread poverty, overpopulation, and a lack of access to medicine have contributed to the global spread of deadly diseases. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), communicable diseases killed 17 million people in 1996, with 99 percent of these deaths occurred in developing countries. (Infectious diseases are more likely to affect poor or rural people, while higher income individuals, who have a higher life expectancy, are more affected by non-communicable diseases such as cancer and heart disease.) Communicable diseases are currently the world’s leading cause of death. While advanced industrialized countries debate the merits of mandating immunizations against chickenpox, developing countries struggle to control infectious diseases that the developed nations have long since eradicated.

Poverty alone is not the problem, as the emergence of diseases resistant to current treatment demonstrates. The outbreak of Ebola virus in Zaire (now The Democratic Republic of Congo) and the plague in India in 1995 were more cause for international concern. Ebola is unusually swift and deadly, killing over 90 percent of its victims in a little as a week. The epidemic ended in August 1995, having killed close to 300. One of the most troubling aspects of these outbreaks is the potential difficulty in containing them. Mechanized transportation, including global air travel, has made it possible for diseases such as these to rapidly spread beyond the primary area of contamination. This factor has raised concerns that the next epidemic will not be so quickly contained. (These concerns are important not just for swift-acting epidemics, but for diseases that cause chronic infections, such as malaria, a mosquito-transmitted disease that kills over 5,000 Africans a day. Some strains of malaria, which are transmitted by mosquitoes, are becoming increasingly resistant to existing drugs.)

Many communicable diseases are preventable or curable, but can have devastating effects when left untreated. Despite the fact that tuberculosis can be effectively treated with drugs, it was the cause of death for 3 million people worldwide in 1996. Similarly, hepatitis B, a disease for which there is a vaccine available, killed 1 million people. Another example is cholera, an intestinal disease spread by contaminated food and water, which has become increasingly widespread over the past several years. With good treatment, the fatality rate for those afflicted with cholera can be less than one percent. Death can come quickly, however, where treatment is not available. Although Latin America had been free from the disease for over a century, an epidemic begun in Peru in 1991 has spread throughout the region. The WHO has also reported large cholera outbreaks in Central Africa, particularly in Somalia and in and around refugee camps in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), claiming nearly 1,000 lives in the region through mid-1997. As in the case of cholera, environmental conditions associated with poverty make disease more likely to occur, while poverty itself often prevents effective treatment.

Namibia recently suffered an outbreak of the Bubonic Plague, which is spread by fleas that come in contact with infected rodents. Human infection usually occurs in poor areas with unsanitary living conditions and where access to antibiotics is scarce. A new vaccine is being developed but its availability will be limited by funding. The bubonic plague is easily treated if caught early and if antibiotics are available, as is not the case in many developing countries. Human cases of the plague continue to occur sporadically. In the mid-1990s, human plague cases were reported in Brazil, China, Madagascar, Mongolia, Myanmar, Peru, the United States, Vietnam, The Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), and India. The most recent outbreak was in Namibia in 1999. As long as plague infested rodents can come into close contact with human habitats, outbreaks of bubonic plague will continue to appear across the world.

Another communicable disease, AIDS, continues to be a problem. Although AIDS has been detected throughout the world, it is of particular concern in Africa. Some African countries that have not yet been hard hit by the epidemic are reluctant to dedicate many limited resources to education and prevention. Other health threats such as malnutrition and traditional diseases present an immediate need and drain resources that might otherwise be used to prevent the spread of AIDS.

In other nations, the resources being used to fight AIDS represent a drain of funds that might otherwise be available to prevent or cure other diseases. Additionally, African governments and AIDS patients seldom have the resources to afford expensive drugs, such as AZT, that are often used in the treatment of AIDS in the U.S. and Europe. African countries, as well as other nations grappling with the AIDS epidemic, are forced to juggle limited resources between AIDS treatment, prevention, and research towards finding a cure. In addition, countries must balance their AIDS-related expenditures with spending on other health concerns. To further complicate matters, every minute worldwide, five people between the ages of 10 and 24 become infected with HIV, according to a report released recently. Adding fuel to the fire, the spread of AIDS is expected to trigger more than 3 million new tuberculosis cases worldwide over the next four years, according to the UN AIDS agency.

The World Health Conference will focus on how the international community can help organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO) develop a strategy to educate people worldwide about ways to prevent the spread of disease, implement inoculation programs, and promote research into cures for existing and new strains of disease.