ULTIMATE CRIME TO MISS CHANCE FOR PEACE AND CONDEMN PEOPLE TO MISERY OF WAR, SAYS SECRETARY-GENERAL TO 'APPEAL FOR PEACE' CONFERENCE AT THE HAGUE
Press Release
SG/SM/6995
ULTIMATE CRIME TO MISS CHANCE FOR PEACE AND CONDEMN PEOPLE TO MISERY OF WAR, SAYS SECRETARY-GENERAL TO 'APPEAL FOR PEACE' CONFERENCE AT THE HAGUE
19990517 Following is Secretary-General Kofi Annan's address to the "Appeal for Peace Conference" at The Hague on 15 May:My dear friends and fellow workers for peace, thank you for that wonderful welcome! I cannot tell you how heartening it is to see you all here this morning. I don't mean just your sheer numbers -- though that is impressive enough. I mean knowing how many different countries and continents you come from, and what a great variety of movements you represent. I mean the thought that so many people in so many places, and in so many different ways, are devoting themselves to the cause of peace.
Not just casting a vote every four or five years. Not just giving a few dollars now and then -- or guilders, or even euros! Not just signing the odd petition when someone pushes it under your nose. But really working, day in, day out, to make things change.
The United Nations, as you know, is an association of States. Some unkind people have even called it a trade union of governments. But, I have always believed it needs to be much more than that, if it is to make any real difference in the world. Not for nothing did our founders begin the Charter of the United Nations with the words "We, the Peoples". They knew that States exist to serve peoples, and not the other way round.
At that moment, the world was just emerging from a war in which over 50 million people had died; in which whole countries had been laid waste; in which great cities had been reduced to mile upon mile of smouldering rubble. Our founders knew that people all over the world were looking to them to make sure that such a nightmare would never be repeated. It was that hope, that expectation, which they captured so unforgettably, in words that echo down to us across the decades: "determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war".
My friends, I cannot pronounce those words before you this morning without a feeling of deep frustration. We all know how far, far short of fulfilling that great expectation we still are. Forgive me if I think first of all my fellow Africans, who are feeling the scourge of war today, even as
we speak. The genocide in Rwanda and the subsequent conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have at least received worldwide publicity, even if far too little effective international action.
But other wars, hardly less murderous, have been almost completely ignored. For instance: In Congo-Brazzaville, a conflict that has gone almost unnoticed by the world has claimed thousands of lives; in the first four months of this year alone, the renewal of civil war in Angola has displaced 780,000 people, bringing to some 1.5 million the number who have been driven from their homes; the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea, where human wave attacks have produced thousands of battlefield casualties and deaths, has displaced over 550,000 people; some 440,000 refugees have poured out of Sierra Leone into Guinea and Liberia during an eight-year conflict, characterized by brutality, rape and murder -- and a further 310,000 people are displaced within Sierra Leone; in the Sudan, since 1983, Africa's longest running civil war has caused nearly 2 million deaths.
In Africa as a whole, there are now some 4 million refugees, and probably at least 10 million internally displaced persons. Africa has the largest share of conflict today. But, no part of the world is immune. This morning, our minds focus especially on what is happening here in Europe. At the end of this century, the scourge of war has returned, with a vengeance, to the continent which produced two world wars in the first half of the century.
During this decade, we have witnessed, in the former Yugoslavia, scenes which Europe thought it had left behind forever in 1945. And in the last two months, in Kosovo, those scenes have reached a ghastly climax: villages burnt; families driven from their homes at gunpoint; men separated from their families and taken away -- many of them, it seems, massacred in cold blood; whole cities and tracts of countryside emptied of their population; people herded into train cars; roads clogged with refugees; tent cities springing up overnight in what had been barren borderlands, and filled with thousand upon thousand of uprooted, bewildered people.
Who among us, seeing or hearing of these things, has not burned with indignation? Who among us has not felt that something must be done to stop it -- something swift, forceful and effective? And yet, who among us is not also troubled by the implications for world order, and for the United Nations itself?
While supporting and encouraging all those who worked for a peaceful solution in Kosovo, I recognized publicly -- as long ago as last June -- that there might come a moment when force would have to be used. And I voiced the hope then that, if that moment did come, the Security Council would shoulder its heavy burden of responsibility.
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It would serve no purpose now to discuss whose fault it was that that did not happen. No doubt each of us could and should have done more than we did. What matters now is that peace be restored as soon as possible. There must be a political solution based on the rule of law, and on justice and safety for the victims. Last week's statement of the Group of Eight was an important step in the right direction. I reaffirm my support for that declaration.
My own envoys, Carl Bildt and Eduard Kukan, are working hard with others to secure a political settlement of the crisis, and to plan -- and press hard for -- its implementation. But, what I want to say to you now, my dear friends, is this: Don't despair. Don't be discouraged. Above all, don't give up.
No one ever promised it would be easy to rid the world of the scourge of war, which is so deeply rooted in human history -- perhaps, even in human nature. No one ever said there would be no setbacks. No one ever promised us that the road would always be clear, or that those sincerely committed to peace would not sometimes be deeply divided. We all want peace. We all want justice. No one wants to choose between the two. All of us feel instinctively that they must go together. Is not injustice one of the main causes of conflict and war? Can there be true and lasting peace without justice?
In a broad sense, I am sure there cannot. If people's just grievances are constantly denied or ignored, sooner or later their anger will boil over into violence. We all know that. But don't we also know that sometimes to insist on perfect justice is to insist on perpetuating conflict? Don't we all admire the choice that the new South Africa has made, in settling for truth and reconciliation rather than absolute justice?
What hope of peace would there be if we insisted on full justice for every wrong done to indigenous peoples all over the world, in 500 years of colonialism? In truth, we can never really make amends to the dead. All the dead can ask of us is that we do our utmost to spare the living, and those yet unborn, from repeating their ordeal.
Yes, we must insist on ending the culture of impunity. We must, and we will, give our full support to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, based here in this city, which has a legal obligation to prosecute all those responsible for crimes against humanity. And we must push ahead with the creation of the permanent International Criminal Court. Let me acknowledge once again the magnificent contribution made by voluntary groups from all over the world, many of whom are represented in this hall today, in getting the Statute of the Court adopted in Rome last year. Let me also welcome the campaign launched by Amnesty International, the International Federation for the Rights of Man, and Human Rights Watch, calling for United Nations Member States to ratify the Statute of the International Criminal Court.
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We do all these things for the sake of the future, not the past. We do them to secure peace, not to perpetuate war. The conflicts still raging in Africa, in Europe, and elsewhere must not discourage us. It is not true that we are getting nowhere. Many conflicts have been ended. Many others have been prevented, because disputes were settled peacefully. Precisely for that reason we do not think about them -- we may not even have heard of them.
I commend to you especially today a new book published by the United Nations and available for the first time at this Conference: Peaceful Resolution of Major International Disputes. In it, you will find guidelines for negotiations, derived from real case studies of very serious disputes, which could have done terrible damage to world peace -- but did not. Those disputes -- the border dispute between Russia and China, and the arguments over nuclear arsenals between the United States and the Soviet Union - were successfully and peacefully resolved.
So you see, my friends, it can be done. Disputes can be resolved peacefully. Wars can be ended. Even better, they can be prevented. It takes wisdom and statesmanship on the part of political leaders. It takes patient and skilful diplomacy.
But, perhaps most important of all, it requires a deep change in civil society -- the development of a culture in which statesmen and diplomats alike know what is expected of them. They have to know that, in the eyes of their fellow citizens, the ultimate crime is not to give away some real or imaginary national interest. The ultimate crime is to miss the chance for peace, and so condemn your people to the unutterable misery of war.
My friends, it is you -- and people like you, all over the world -- who are slowly bringing about that deep and essential change. Let me thank you once again, and say: Please keep it up!
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