GENERAL ASSEMBLY PRESIDENT URGES DAG HAMMARSKJOLD FUND SCHOLARS, TO BE "MOVERS AND SHAKERS FOR SOCIAL CHANGE"

Press Release
GA/SM/121

GENERAL ASSEMBLY PRESIDENT URGES DAG HAMMARSKJOLD FUND SCHOLARS, TO BE ‘MOVERS AND SHAKERS FOR SOCIAL CHANGE’

Following are the remarks of the President of the General Assembly, Theo-Ben Gurirab (Namibia) at the United Nations Correspondents Association presentation of certificates to the 1999 Scholars of the Dag Hammarskjold Memorial Scholarship Fund at Headquarters on 10 November:

Being a United Nations Fellow myself, I am delighted to join you all present here and to express my appreciation for the opportunity to perform a happy duty, which you have just mentioned. I am pleased to present certificates to three student journalists from Kenya, Jamaica and Jordan.

I wish to commend the United Nations Correspondents Association for a fine tradition and its sterling accomplishments over the years.

Dag Hammarskjold is a legend both in the United Nations and also in the outside world. That a Memorial Scholarship Fund has been established in his sainted memory is a brilliant testimony to his eventful life and enduring innovations for a peaceful world and international cooperation. UNCA has assisted so many practising and aspiring journalists from different parts of the world by broadening their horizons and helping them to achieve excellence as reporters and media operators.

Dag Hammarskjold’s name will forever remain fixed in the minds and hearts of Africans alongside the name of another great man, Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first democratically-elected Prime Minister. History and fate made them partners in death. Both died tragically in 1961 and the world has been left that much the poorer.

Both of them were champions of freedom, human dignity and equality and justice -- men of vision, courage and determination. Let us salute their golden memories and pay tribute to their legacies of excellence and as worthy role models. They did not die in vain, but rather in the frontline of duty and service to humanity, and to make the world a better place for all human beings.

May I extend warm congratulations and best wishes to the graduating scholars of the Fund, and entreat them to be steadfast professionals and movers and shakers for social change as we welcome the new millennium.

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