A global and balanced vision
By Lluís Foix
La Vanguardia, Thursday 16th June 2016
I don’t know if she is the person who has more decision-making power in the field of communications in the New York headquarters of the United Nations. What I can reveal is that Cristina Gallach is one of the journalists who is more and better informed about information streams that move power in the world. She was in Barcelona and spoke before an audience of several hundred people brought together by the Societat Economica Barcelonesa D’amics del Pais. The title of “United Nations for the 21st century” was the pretext to outline the large challenges, both incomprehensible and unexpected, that turn assurances into fears and certainties into doubts.
Cristina Gallach is possibly the Catalan that has the most developed thoughts about the changing account of the situation in the world, which she observes as the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public. She is a journalist who manages information and knows those who generate it. She does not speak from hearsay. And over the last thirty years she has reached this point working as a journalist on the street, in an agency, as a correspondent, Chief of Staff, and person of maximum confidence to Javier Solana, in the years that the former Minister of Foreign Affairs was Secretary General of NATO and later responsible for the foreign policy of the European Union – a position which was filled much more by his personality and work than for the content that it was assigned.
A characteristic of Cristina Gallach is the optimism that she breathes. She speaks six languages, has worked long periods in Moscow, New York and Brussels and now has more than six hundred people working to her orders in many United Nations agencies distributed world-wide.
I have always known her as a journalist, hands-on and close to geopolitics, on the move – in the Balkans, at very diverse summits – with reports on what is happening in an Asian Republic or in Africa.
Examining trends, changes and contrasts in the socio-economic progress in the world, in the past 15 years poverty has been reduced to half, but there are more than 800 million people who go to bed hungry. We can say that the UN has died by its success, due to the conflicting interests of the 193 States that compose it and the existence of the veto that the most powerful people in the Security Council have.
But unlike the League of Nations, which had a brief and languid life in the interwar period, the UN has already fulfilled 70 years of trying to cushion the suffering of millions of people. Gallach speaks of reducing inequality within and between countries, the urgency of climate change, of gender equality, of hatred, of refugees and of the defence of universal human rights.
This Catalan from Sant Quirze de Besora will do many things because she has great faith in people.
