SECRETARY-GENERAL LAUDS UNITED NATIONS PEACEKEEPING -- NOT ANSWER TO ALL CONFLICT, BUT WITH CRUCIAL CONTINUING ROLE

17 November 1998

Press Release
SG/SM/6797

SECRETARY-GENERAL LAUDS UNITED NATIONS PEACEKEEPING -- NOT ANSWER TO ALL CONFLICT, BUT WITH CRUCIAL CONTINUING ROLE

19981117 Receiving 1998 World Methodist Peace Award, UN Chief Also Notes 50th Anniversary of Universal Human Rights Declaration

This is the text of a statement by Secretary-General Kofi Annan in New York today, at a ceremony where he received the 1998 World Methodist Peace Award:

It is a very special honour for me to receive the 1998 World Methodist Peace Award. To follow in the footsteps of such peacemakers as Anwar Sadat and Mikhail Gorbachev is to be both humbled and inspired. Humbled, because their lives remain shining examples of courage, initiative and independence. Inspired, because they showed that one man's conscience can change the world.

I am also very grateful for your kind and generous words of introduction, and for the choice of readings today -- readings which continue to guide me in my work and life.

As you have heard, I received my primary schooling at a Methodist institution, the Mfantsipim School in Ghana. There, I was privileged to have teachers who understood the value of knowledge infused with a moral purpose. They knew that learning and education are the strongest bulwarks against evil and ignorance. And they taught me, in the spirit of faith, that suffering anywhere concerns people everywhere, and that the light of one candle can truly illuminate the world.

Looking back today -- from the United Nations -- I value especially the lessons my teachers taught me about how we view the world around us, and how it views us. Once, I remember, Reverend Branful took out a large white sheet with a black dot in the middle, draped it over the blackboard and asked us "What do you see?" We all answered, "The black dot." "Why only the black dot?" he responded. "Why only the negative? What about the vast white space around the black dot?" He was reminding us to always look beyond the obvious and beneath the surface, to bear in mind the larger picture, not to focus just on the blemishes. He was teaching us also to remember that there is more than one side to a story, and more than one answer to a question.

To make peace between warring parties, to convince fighters to lay down their arms, and tyrants to give up their tyranny, it is critical to see conflicts in all their complexity. To make peace, we may sometimes have to shake the hands of aggressors and lend our ears to voices of enmity. For in the words of the late Yitzak Rabin, "We make peace not with our friends, but with our enemies."

Peace is never a perfect achievement. Why? Because it follows war. It follows suffering; it follows hatred; it follows the worst that man can do. To restore humanity from such hell requires the patience of ages, the will to see light when all is dark, and hope when all is bleak. Truly, it is the work of those who shall run, and not be weary, and those who shall walk and not faint.

It is, alas, the work of the United Nations. It is why we were founded from the ashes of the most destructive war in human history. It is what we have sought to achieve for more than 50 years -- from Africa to Asia, from the Balkans to Latin America -- by keeping the peace, promoting development and protecting human rights.

This year, as many of you know, we mark the fiftieth anniversary of United Nations peacekeeping. It is the fiftieth anniversary of the year when soldiers were sent on to the battlefield under a new flag and with a mission without precedent in human history: a mission of peace. It was an attempt to confront and defeat the worst in man with the best in man; to counter violence with tolerance, might with moderation, and war with peace.

That mission has earned its place in history as the first example of what has come to be known as "peacekeeping". Ever since then, day after day, year after year, United Nations peacekeepers have been meeting the threat and reality of conflict, without losing faith, without giving in, without giving up.

Fifty years later, we cannot declare victory, but we will not concede defeat. We cannot claim that peacekeeping has been the answer to every conflict, but nor will we agree that it cannot contain any conflict. We cannot say that peacekeeping will prevent all future wars, but we maintain that it can help humanity make its future less scarred by war than its past.

Too much remains to be done, too many innocents are dying even as we meet, too many conflicts can be prevented for us to leave the field and abandon all hope.

At the beginning of peacekeeping's second half century, we have recognized that peace itself is made up of many parts -- personal security, freedom from fear and from want, the absence of war and the opportunity to exercise a free conscience without the threat of retribution. These essential conditions of human peace and human existence are what we call human rights.

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They are the rights of those "who are persecuted for righteousness' sake; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" -- in the words of the same chapter from Matthew that Bishop Lindsey just read.

This year, therefore, we also celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of another pillar of peace: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We do so at a time when human rights have made great strides within and outside the work of the United Nations. We are making human rights central to our peace- building efforts by ensuring that peacekeeping missions incorporate human rights into their core activities.

We have learned that promoting human rights within a country not only assures justice within nations, but helps to assure peaceful relations between them. We have learned that human rights not only promote peace, but also prosperity, for they protect the free, unfettered flow of human ideas and initiative.

The words of Isaiah so memorably quoted by Bishop Alvarez -- that "they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war anymore" -- may never be more than an ideal for humanity.

If, however, in our service to the cause of the United Nations, we can help make that ideal more true than false, more promising than distant, more able to protect the innocent than embolden the guilty, we will have done our part. If, in our efforts to protect and promote human rights, we will have made one more voice free to speak, and one more mind free to think and one more child free to thrive, we will also have done our part.

We will have given peace a chance.

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