SECRETARY-GENERAL SAYS ICRC AND UNITED NATIONS ARE GOOD AND EFFECTIVE PARTNERS
Press Release
SG/SM/6872
SECRETARY-GENERAL SAYS ICRC AND UNITED NATIONS ARE GOOD AND EFFECTIVE PARTNERS
19990125 Following is the text of a statement made today by Secretary-General Kofi Annan to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) at the ICRC's Geneva Headquarters:First of all my dear friends, let me tell you how happy I am to be here. It is a real pleasure and an honour to join you today. Our organizations are good and effective partners: independent of each other, as you said, yet close in spirit and together on the ground. Our common aid is to prevent and ease the suffering caused by war.
President Sommaruga, you are a familiar presence at the United Nations. I recall in particular your words at the United Nations fiftieth anniversary ceremony, where you spoke of the urgent need "to form a common front at all times" to combat intolerance and to secure respect for human dignity.
That is a message I have taken to hear in the two years that I have been Secretary-General. I have sought to revitalize the United Nations so that its entire family of organizations works toward common goals like promoting the rule of law, ensuring respect for human rights and encouraging the peaceful resolution of disputes.
I have also tried to deepen our ties with regional organizations, with the private sector and with non-governmental organizations and the rest of civil society, because the simple fact is that the common challenges we face today are too big for the United Nations alone.
And I have preached a message stressing the common good and the need to pay special attention to the weak, poor and vulnerable of our world: first and foremost it is the victims of conflict, but also the victims of economic and social forces that have the power to play havoc with lives and livelihoods.
The humanitarian work carried out by the ICRC and the United Nations has come under unprecedented stress in recent years. Civilians have become the preferred targets of combatants, so that even low-intensity conflicts generate enormous human suffering. Breaches of humanitarian law and human rights have become almost routine means to an end. Humanitarian assistance has been used as a fig-leaf, hiding a lack of political will to address the root causes of conflict.
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The consequences have been dire: needless suffering, needlessly prolonged crises and damage to the credibility of international institutions and to the very idea of an international community. In the past year in particular, high numbers of individuals wearing United Nations Blue or the Red Cross and Crescent have been murdered, held hostage, assaulted or robbed.
The United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator, speaking to the Security Council last week, pointed out that 90 per cent of the deaths of humanitarian workers have not been adequately investigated by the authorities concerned. None of this may be particularly surprising to you, but we must not resign ourselves to this state of affairs. It is unacceptable and we have to fight it.
The year 1999 brings us several timely opportunities to reflect on the challenges we face. We will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Geneva Conventions and the 100th anniversary of the Hague Conventions. These are great achievements, which have since been supplemented by an impressive body of norms and law. It was fitting that the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court was adopted last year in the midst of the worldwide commemoration of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention. It would be equally fitting to use this year to reach the 60 ratifications needed to establish the International Criminal Court.
Of course, there is nothing like implementation. You know that better than anyone else, given what you do and what you have done. This is the challenge facing us from Afghanistan to Sierra Leone, form Iraq to what is going on not far from here in Kosovo and elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia. The gap -- between policy and practice, between laws on the books and facts on the ground, between what is said and what is done -- is something that plagues us across the spectrum of our agenda, whether we are talking about development or disarmament, the environment, literacy or the fight against disease.
So we have our work cut out for us. Let us work closely together and let me close by expressing my gratitude for your work, what you have done and keep doing in very difficult situations, and by saying that I look forward to the contribution you will make to the Millennium Assembly, which we will hold in the Year 2000 and which I see as a way to breathe new life into the common cause for which we work.
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