UNITED NATIONS - While talk of war has set the tone for the 57th session of the United Nations General Assembly and continues to dominate Security Council debates, Olara A. Otunnu is determined to keep a different side of war on the agenda in both chambers.
In 1997, Otunnu, a Ugandan, became the United Nation's first undersecretary-general for children in war. During the past decade, he says, 2 million children have been killed by war, with more than 6 million seriously injured or disabled and more than 1 million orphaned.
An additional 10 million struggle with psychological trauma. Untold numbers are raped as a deliberate tool of war - especially girls but, in some countries, boys as well. And perhaps 300,000, including girls, are forced to fight as soldiers.
Still, Otunnu has managed to place the safety and well-being of children for the first time on the world body's political agenda: right up there with sustainable development, multilateral loans and peacekeeping.
"With this award, Germany appreciates Olara A. Otunnu's fight for children's rights in Africa and all over the world," parliamentarian Karl-Heinz Hornhues declared in June, when his country's charitable German Africa Foundation gave its German Africa Prize to the undersecretary.
And, if Otunnu's name is hardly a household word, he is well known to longtime U.N. observers, from the days when he became one of the youngest ever to serve as permanent representative with a U.N. delegation.
Otunnu became Uganda's ambassador at the age of 28, in 1979, after earning a degree as a Fulbright student at Harvard University Law School. While still an undergraduate back home, he had faced certain death for leading the student movement against Idi Amin - until friends smuggled him out of the country.
In 1981, Uganda began a turn as one of the 10 member states that serve for two years each with the Security Council's five permanent members.
"He came to prominence with the international U.N. press," recalls two-time former president of the U.N. Correspondents Association Ted Morello, "when he untangled a prolonged Security Council deadlock over secretary-general that nearly brought the U.N. to a halt."
When Otunnu's turn came to chair the council for a month, he faced a deadlock on the vote between incumbent Kurt Waldheim of Austria and another young African ambassador, Salim-Salim of Tanzania.
Essentially, Otunnu had new candidates added to the roster, tested them by straw ballot and found Peru's Javier Perez de Cuellar to be veto-proof, earning the gratitude of many nations, including the United States.
Otunnu also became designated spokesman for growing global demands that South Africa end its 60-year occupation of Namibia, winning a reputation for persuasive argument.
In his current job, making the world safe for children, Otunnu not only mobilizes predictable players such as U.N. agencies and donor countries but also tracks down rebel and military leaders alike and persuades them to sign his "commitment log." Opposing leaders in nearly a dozen countries have already pledged the protection and well-being of children.
Under his full title of "special representative of the secretary-general for children and armed conflict," Otunnu travels continually to the world's hotspots - from Northern Ireland, Kosovo and Chechnya to Sri Lanka, Congo and Colombia.
His first goal is to stop warring camps from targeting and attacking children, including at schools and hospitals. This keeps him busy, and it took a U.N. fire drill recently to make him leave his desk long enough for an interview over coffee.
Though he is not married and has no children of his own, he has assumed many responsibilities in his extended family. Four of his dozen brothers and sisters and one cousin lived with him here to go to school. Then, after two relatives mysteriously died back home, he found himself guardian to six nieces and nephews.
Otunnu was called home from the United Nations in 1985 to help negotiate a settlement in the political jousting that broke out after Amin's ouster in 1979.
Later, he returned to international pursuits, working with high-powered think tanks, including the Aspen Institute and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He returned here in 1990 to head the International Peace Academy, a nongovernmental organization helping the United Nations recruit and train peacekeepers.
That year he was also one of five proposed by the United Nation's African Group to become that continent's first U.N. secretary-general. Yet when it came time to vote, his name was not on the list, an omission Otunnu attributes to Ugandan politics - because he is from the war-torn north, which is at odds with the government.
Another Ugandan, who is unwilling to be named, accuses Otunnu of being anti-government. Otunnu says the reverse is true: The Ugandan government is anti-Otunnu.
"The government of Uganda has taken my citizenship from me," he says. "But the government tells everyone I chose to renounce my citizenship."
He prefers to talk about his work, describing, for example, how 50 percent of the children in Afghanistan suffer from chronic malnutrition. Poverty there is so rampant that 50,000 street children in Kabul alone work as their family's main source of income. Children constitute about half the country's 200,000 land mine victims.
"In countries like Angola," he says, where peace followed 30 years of war, "children comprise more than 50 percent of more than 4 million displaced by it. More than 50,000 have been orphaned, another 100,000 have been separated from their families and 5,000 of their schools and 60 percent of hospitals and health centers have been destroyed."
Among Otunnu's successes are the provision safeguarding children that has been added to Northern Ireland's Good Friday Agreement, Sierra Leone's Lome Peace Accord and the Arusha Accord on Burundi. Sierra Leone has established a national commission for children's issues, while Northern Ireland is creating a commissioner for children. And special child-protection advisers are being trained to work in peacekeeping.
Since 1998, the Security Council has held annual debates and passed three resolutions on children and armed conflict, one of them declaring, for the first time anywhere, that war spreads AIDS.
Otunnu sees hope in the fact the new International Criminal Court has added most violations against children to the list of war crimes. He also cites the Convention on the Rights of the Child for raising the compulsory draft age worldwide from 15 to 18.
His own country has offered particular challenges. Last week, the World Food Program warned that more than a half-million victims of the fighting in northern Uganda will soon face severe food shortages unless donors make urgent contributions.
"Let me tell you," Otunnu unexpectedly says over his cell phone during a follow-up interview, "having the government of one's homeland - which one loves, and to which one has given a good portion of one's life - arbitrarily take away one's nationality, making one stateless, is a very particular and unique experience."
As he continues, his voice heightens: "To see children suffering from war in my own region and be unable to do anything about it despite my U.N. post is one of the most painful experiences through which I have ever had to live."