Angelica's home-coming

Her accent is English, her name is Angelica Hunt. When, as a matter of courtesy, I began the interview by asking the Director of the United Nations Information Centre (UNIC) in Trinidad if she was British, I was expecting the answer “Yes”. “Well, no - and yes. I’m a fruit salad.” was her enigmatic reply. That statement takes some explaining. Angelica Hunt was born in the Netherlands (Holland).  Her British mother didn’t give her the right to British nationality. In those days if, like Angelica, you were born outside the UK, you could only claim British nationality if your father was also British. (A check with the British High Commission confirmed that since 1983 —but not before — a child born, for example, to a British mother in Trinidad can claim British nationality).

As Angelica’s father was a naturalised Venezuelan of French and Dutch parentage the only thing she, or her parents, could be sure of when, at only a few weeks old, they whisked baby Angelica off to Venezuela, was that she wasn’t British. Her mother remarried a Venezuelan diplomat so she, too, lived the life of a diplomatic gypsy, going to school in Venezuela, in Spain, in the Netherlands, the UK — wherever the diplomatic service sent her family. By the time her stepfather was posted here as the Venezuelan Ambassador to Trinidad, Angelica was in her early twenties. Although she’d left home by then, she paid more than one visit to Trinidad to see her parents and younger sisters who were in school here. “My posting here as Director of UNIC was rather like coming home,” she said.

Marriage to an Englishman gave her both a British-sounding name and British nationality. Her birth and marriage make her a true multinational, her schooling made her multilingual, her degree in International Relations from the University of Sussex, UK, meant it was only natural for her to apply for work in the United Nations. And that’s about as much of her private life as Ms Hunt is prepared to reveal as, skillfully evading all personal questions — except the fact that she’s a cat-lover — she guided almost every query back to the UN and the work of various UN agencies. However, she doesn’t look on what she has done, and is doing, in the UN as job or a career. She insists that working for the UN is a calling. She is indeed passionate about the UN and its mission — as stated in the Millennium Development Goals for peace, justice and the pressing need to provide the basic necessities of life to all the peoples of the world. A calling? That may sound extreme, but when you hear what she has experienced working in UN missions in Eritrea, Guatemala and Bosnia-Herzegovina (among other places) you begin to comprehend why Angelica Hunt in so passionate about the work — especially the peace-keeping work — of the United Nations.

Maybe if Dubyah had seen the horrors, the aftermath of the Eritrean war of independence against Ethiopia, or what civil war had done in the former Yugoslavia, he might have thought twice about ignoring the UN and going ahead with the invasion of Iraq. Angelica Hunt will never forget what she saw when, as part of a UN team, she travelled around Eritrea monitoring the referendum on whether Eritrea would remain part of Ethiopia or become a separate independent nation. In a country devastated by war, an astonishing 90 per cent voted for separation from Ethiopia. Eritrea has a tragic history. Once part of the kingdom of Ethiopia, invaded and occupied by the Italians under Mussolini, annexed by Ethiopia in 1956, the educated elite chafed under Ethiopian rule. The struggle for Independence was waged by 100,000 irregulars, an underground (literally) guerrilla army funded by contributions from the Eritrean diaspora.

“The countryside was ravaged by the war. There wasn’t a tree left standing.  It was pitiful to see the towns, the villages absolutely levelled. One of the most gruesome sights I remember was seeing a skeleton inside the uniform of a soldier in the tower of a tank wrecked by a landmines - there were landmines everywhere. People who have never seen, never experienced it, can’t begin to imagine the devastation and the horrors of war. It’s one thing to see it on film, or video, it’s very different, very frightening to be in a war zone, to see, to smell it for oneself,” she declared.

“The older generation still speak Italian, so I was able to talk to them. On one occasion a man hushed me, begged me to stop talking. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘birds, can you hear the birds’?” The fighting had been so fierce, Angelica explained, that almost all the wildlife had fled. To hear birds singing once again was, for that elderly Eritrean a blessing, a sign, almost, of hope, of nature beginning to heal the wounds of war. Another thing she won’t soon forget was the jubilation that burst forth in ululations by the women when they saw the UN vehicles approaching villages on referendum day. Bosnia-Herzegovina was an even more tragic experience. As it is now in Trinidad, so it was once in Bosnia-Herzegovina where Muslims and Christians lived together, worked together and played together. After the break-up of Yugoslavia, ambitious, power-crazed politicians whipped up religious hatred into a frenzy of bloodletting, of massacres and civil war.

Here, again, Nature was taking back its own. Angelica told of wayside weeds growing on piles of rubble that were once neat homes. Before the war Bosnia had a population of four million; after four years of civil war there were a quarter million dead - mostly civilian non-combatants - a million internal refugees (forced to move from one part of the former Yugoslavia to another) and a million fled the country altogether. There is a lesson for us in hearing what Angelica Hunt saw and experienced in war-ravaged lands in Europe, Africa and Central America. We had but a very brief sight of what war might be like in ’90 — we should never forget that experience. Angelica Hunt’s mission in Trinidad as the Director of UNIC is to promote the UN and to work towards the UN Millennium Development Goals; in essence the Development Goals aim to narrow the gap between the rich and poor, to work for peace and justice for all, both now and in the future. We wish her well in her mission now that, after so many years, she is back in Trinidad — and suggest that in future she refers to herself as a callaloo soup, rather than a fruit salad?