SECRETARY-GENERAL, IN STATEMENT AT EPCOT CENTER, STRESSES UNIQUE OPPORTUNITIES TO GIVE SHAPE TO `DREAM WORLD' IN THIRD MILLENNIUM
Press Release
SG/SM/6758
SECRETARY-GENERAL, IN STATEMENT AT EPCOT CENTER, STRESSES UNIQUE OPPORTUNITIES TO GIVE SHAPE TO `DREAM WORLD' IN THIRD MILLENNIUM
19981019 Following is the statement of Secretary-General Kofi Annan at Epcot Center, in Orlando, Florida, yesterday:Thank you, President Green, for that kind introduction. I am very pleased to be here at Epcot today. And I want to extend a special greeting to all the young International Fellows who are present in the audience, representing the 11 countries that make up Epcot's own mini-United Nations.
There is a plaque that welcomes us to this extraordinary place called Epcot. "Here", it says, "human achievements are celebrated."
The plaque goes on to express a prayer: it is the hope that this unique and beautiful place may "instil a new sense of belief and pride in man's ability to shape a world that offers hope to people everywhere".
The words on that plaque were those of Walt Disney, the founding father of all you see here today, and of so many other places and things that have brought joy to millions around the world. Disney recognized what he called the "need for starting from scratch on virgin land and building a special kind of new community". And he dreamt of this as a continuing process; of Epcot as a "community that will always be in a state of becoming".
When the United Nations was created 53 years ago, the words of our founding fathers were equally eloquent and memorable. They, too, recognized the need to start from scratch. After two world wars, they defined it first and foremost as the need "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war", which twice in their lifetime had "brought untold sorrow to humankind". Those are the opening words of the Charter of the United Nations -- the mission statement that laid the foundations of the Organization as we know it today.
Walt Disney's words also constitute a Charter -- a Charter not only for Epcot, but for his vision of humanity as a whole. And today, I would say that our two Charters complement each other well.
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For they speak of the need to secure peace and not repeat the mistakes of the past; but also about the mission to encourage and facilitate human invention, by ensuring it is put to the best possible use for humankind in the future.
There can be no more apt way of describing the challenges that lie before humanity on the eve of the twenty-first century than the marriage of those two Charters. In the five decades since the United Nations was founded, and in the two decades since the plans for Epcot were unveiled, the world has changed hugely as a result of the power of human invention.
We are near the end of a tumultuous century that has witnessed both the best and worst of human endeavour. Peace spreads in one region as genocidal fury rages in another.
Unprecedented wealth coexists with terrible deprivation, as a quarter of the world's people remain mired in poverty. Globalization knits us closer together while intolerance keeps us apart. All progress is fragile; the challenges we face grow ever more complex. Modern communications mean that whether we like it or not, we are connected, inextricably and irrevocably.
I think Walt Disney saw this coming. His special way of communicating with people of all continents was a foretaste of what we know today. A long time ago, when my Organization was still young, people were already gathered in movie theatres, around comic books, in front of television sets, and they saw the same things, from Daytona to Delhi. A rodent called Mickey Mouse became the world's first roving ambassador.
Mickey's global career took off, and he became a staunch ally of the United Nations. For his sixtieth birthday -- 10 years ago next month -- the United Nations named him an Emissary of Goodwill.
Today, we all recognize communications as the new web that binds us all together as human beings. The young generation of today is connected as none has ever been in the history of humankind. Jimmy in Nebraska is as connected to Kavita from India, Jibril from Senegal, Aleksandr from Ukraine, Graziela from Peru or Hiro from Japan as he is with Chuck next door.
This is the age where we recognize that there is only one world: ours; and that in that world, we all learn from each other.
But if communications bind us together as human beings, there is another bond that holds us together as humanity -- something that defines civilization itself. Something that ultimately gives us membership in the human race. It is the web of human values.
Human values are what Walt Disney described as "just what most of us are probably thinking every day ... the right to live and raise my family under
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the flag of tolerance, democracy and freedom". They are what I would describe as the feature that distinguishes a beast in the wilderness, conscious only of its own survival, from a member of humanity, concerned with the survival of the human race.
We know that we are not put here as the only individual on this Earth. Our behaviour is not the behaviour of one being in isolation -- because we know there are 6 billion other people in the world. And so when we ask ourselves how we can make the best of our short time on this Earth, we know that it is by uniting our individual needs with those of our fellow men.
I believe that if you combine the power of communications with the strength of human values, you will find the answer to how best to address the mission Disney identified in his day, and the challenge we grapple with in ours: how we, the people of the world, can come together to manage change in a way that benefits all humanity; how we can shape a world that offers hope to all.
We have already seen a few examples of what can be achieved when communications are hooked up with beliefs. Take the International Campaign to Ban Landmines -- the driving force behind last year's Treaty to ban the production, stockpile, export and use of those abominable weapons. Landmines are one of the most terrible legacies of modern warfare: well after many conflict situations have died down, they lie buried in silence and in their million, waiting to kill or maim innocent civilians -- usually unsuspecting women and children.
The International Campaign to Ban Landmines made governments acknowledge that the cost of landmines far outweighed the need to use them. And, in so doing, it demonstrated that there are no limits to what ordinary people can achieve in partnership with governments. A grass-roots movement of conviction matched by courage, propelled by the demands of citizens everywhere, the elimination of landmines became a truly global cause.
How did they do it? One thousand citizens' groups in 60 countries were linked together by one unbending conviction and a weapon that would ultimately prove more powerful than the landmine: e-mail.
Or, more recently, look to the role of such groups and organizations in advocating the establishment of an effective and just international criminal court to try crimes such as genocide and crimes against humanity. The point of the court is to put an end to the culture of impunity -- the culture whereby it has been easier to bring someone to justice for killing one person than for killing 100,000. Again, it took a people's movement in the form of a broad-based network of hundreds of non-governmental organizations and international law experts to develop strategies and foster awareness. And again, the key to their network -- and to their success -- was e-mail and the World Wide Web.
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If Disney knew the power of communications, he also invested much faith in the importance of private enterprise as a positive force. Today, we, in the United Nations, similarly place a high priority on building a stronger relationship with the global business community, and on rebuilding private-sector confidence in the United Nations. The basis for this new partnership is solid. The Organization is no longer prisoner to the conflicting ideologies of the cold war. We fully recognize that business is the main creator of wealth, jobs and prosperity, without which development cannot occur nor peace be sustained. Similarly, business knows that without values such as freedom, democracy, or respect for human rights and the rule of law, there can be no stability -- and ultimately no future security -- in markets anywhere. Again, what we share is a common sense of values.
It may be that global communications have already brought a sense of a shared humanity to bear on peace processes around the world. Take the case of Northern Ireland, where this year's Good Friday accords gave hope for the first time of enduring peace in this troubled province.
The people of Northern Ireland realized that perhaps the important thing was not what flag flew over Government House; what defined them as human beings was not the colour green, or the colour orange; what gave their lives purpose and content was the chance of a decent life, and a successful part in the global economy, for their children and their grandchildren.
How right it is, therefore, that this year's Nobel Peace Prize awarded three days ago went not to heads of State or government, nor to government ministers; but to two local leaders in Northern Ireland who had worked tirelessly for years to convince the people of the value of peace.
As we stand here at what Disney described as "a living blueprint for the future", let us give Mickey a new message to take around the world.
Issues before the United Nations, such as the environment, drugs, disease, sustainable development, are issues that cut across all frontiers. They are problems without passports; to address them we need blueprints without borders.
This is the message we are trying to send to the world. Yet, too many people still think in local terms, constrained by territorial boundaries.
We all need to be more sensitive to the concerns of others, to think in much broader terms that carry us beyond these narrow confines. And to do that, we need the power of education, of communication. And we need a shared sense of right and wrong.
And we need to speak up for the rights of all humankind, not just our own. To recognize that when one person's rights are diminished, it diminishes us all.
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Information technology has empowered civil society to be the true guardians of democracy and good governance everywhere. Oppressors cannot hide inside their borders any longer. A strong civil society, bound together across all borders with the help of modern communications, will not let them. In a sense, it has become the new super-Power -- the peoples determined to promote better standards of life in larger freedom.
Every movement starts somewhere -- usually from scratch. There are no limits to what the campaigns of tomorrow can achieve -- campaigns not yet born, for good causes not yet articulated, championed by hearts and minds still being formed. And it is often those single-minded enough to believe their mission to be the most important, who are also likely to make it the most successful. It is ultimately those brave enough to believe they can make a difference, who become the ones who do.
We look especially to the young people, to make the best possible use of the web of common values that modern communications have offered you; it gives you a tool your forefathers never had in acting for our common humanity. As we stand here today in Disney's experimental community of tomorrow, let us take that community into the real world. Let us shape that tomorrow into today.
Next year, Epcot will commence its Millennium Celebration with a new pavilion, the Millennium Village. I am happy to announce today that the United Nations will participate in this exciting venture, joining perhaps as many as 50 nations of the world. The Millennium Village will celebrate the human spirit, the common humanity that exists, not despite but because of our diversity, the aspirations people everywhere hold for the simple principles of peace, justice and the chance to lead a fulfilling life.
Then, in September of the year 2000, the 185 Members of the United Nations will convene in New York as the Millennium Assembly, to put these aspirations more firmly into practice for all humanity as we enter the next century.
I must say I am disappointed, and indeed disturbed, in the light of that record and these achievements, that the United States is failing to keep faith with the other 184 Member States by honouring its legal obligation and paying what it owes. The United States has fallen into arrears to the United Nations in the amount of some $1.5 billion. Indications are that, in the current Washington budget skirmishes, the United Nations again was sacrificed to political expediency.
I suggest to you that the state of the world, as we approach a new millennium, offers you a challenge to which you should rise, as you did to those earlier ones.
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The current global economic crisis is rooted in deep social and political imbalances and distortions. These problems have to be addressed both within countries and collectively.
These are unique opportunities for us to give shape to our dream world for the Third Millennium. That world will always be, as Walt Disney put it so well, in a state of becoming. But as we join our hands in partnership -- the imagineers here at Disney, the nations of the world united in the United Nations, and you, the people -- we can be sure that ours will become a better world. So dear friends, let us begin.
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