HUMAN RIGHTS DAY STATEMENT BY ASSEMBLY PRESIDENT TO STUDENT CONFERENCE

Press Release
GA/SM/142
HR/4451

HUMAN RIGHTS DAY STATEMENT BY ASSEMBLY PRESIDENT TO STUDENT CONFERENCE

This is the text of a statement by the President of the General Assembly, Theo-Ben Gurirab (Namibia), to the Student Conference on Human Rights and the Culture of Peace of the New Millennium, held at United Nations Headquarters on 10 December:

May I join those who welcomed you this morning to the United Nations and shared with you some of their thoughts on the theme of your Conference on Human Rights and the Culture of Peace in the New Millennium. I want to particularly express my thanks and appreciation to the Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information, Kensaku Hogen, and his collaborators for this initiative. And I agree with them, and I commend you, for having made the United Nations the venue of this important Conference. If it was your idea, as young people, that you want to concentrate on human rights and the culture of peace, it was the right thing, it was the most timely thing that you could have thought of.

Young people are important. Every adult alive, without exception, was a young person at some point in time in her life or his life. It’s a stage that we adults have gone through; it is a moment in one’s life that is both challenging but precious. Once you go past it, you cannot really fully recover it. If you have a great capacity for imagination, you can relive, even as an adult, those wonderful moments when you were five years old, when you were twelve years old, when you were eighteen years old -– maybe I should stop there. But once you’ve gone past that stage of being a young person, you have, in a way, lost much of that excitement of being young.

Very often, we the adults say that we should take good care of you, and that we want you to listen to us because we believe that we have a deep well of experiences and wisdom. And we make a commitment to you, as parents, as members of family, as your neighbours in the community, as teachers, as religious leaders, as your sports coaches and so on, and we do so because we honestly and truly believe in you as individuals.

But we also do it, let me say, for selfish reasons, as an act of enlightened self-interest. We want you to grow up, be strong, be intelligent human beings, be healthy and be responsible, because you are the leaders of tomorrow. We want you to have all those things mixed together that form character and a sense of responsibility. For, by the time that we retire, we would be looking up to you, the roles would have been reversed.

Today, you are looking up to us to care for you, to provide for you, to counsel you, to lead you by example. A time will come when we will be taking - 2 - Press Release GA/SM/142 HR/4451 14 December 1999

the backseats, and you will be in the front, leading us as leaders of some of those categories that I have mentioned -- as government leaders, as statesmen and women of the world. Therefore, the investment that we are making, as governments and as society, in your upbringing and in educating you and helping you to grow and discover yourselves, is an investment that we are making to ensure that, by the time we leave, retire, we would have left the leadership in capable hands, and that you would assume the responsibility and go forward.

But, in a way, we adults are a bit wrong in thinking of you as leaders only of the future. You are actually leaders today. If I were to ask you, one by one, the kinds of things that you were called upon to do for your family, for your school, for your community ... Imagine that you were crossing a street and there was a car accident, and there were four young people nearby. It is an accident, people are bleeding, screaming. You’re not going to run away -- some of you have witnessed this, I’m sure. You would come to the aid of those people that are needing help.

Perhaps most of you are from the United States. But I think about young people of your age, in Africa, in Asia, in the Middle East, in the Caribbean, in Latin America who, by circumstances of their birth and where they are growing up, are forced to act and behave as adults. In faraway villages, children at a very young age -– age five, age six, age seven, age eight -– are having to go out in the morning, often with empty stomachs, to work the fields and fetch water for the family, to go out early in the morning to look after cattle upon which the family and the community depend for livelihood. In some cases, they are orphans and, as the eldest of the children left behind, they are forced to look after the other siblings.

Those of you who are eighteen years old, when your nation goes to war, you are drafted to go to faraway places sometimes, or to the borders of your own countries, to defend lives, to defend your country. And you go and die -– I’m not talking about you here because you’re all alive. Many like you die and are buried in unmarked graves. These days, many young people, even children, are recruited and used as soldiers to fight in armies in different countries.

So, when we say that you are the leaders of tomorrow, and ask you to walk the straight line, and demand of you certain virtues, certain behaviour, we often forget that that is a luxury perhaps only some young people in the world enjoy, and that large numbers of young people like you, elsewhere, do not have time to grow up; that they are forced, because of the circumstances and the hardships under which they live, to grow up earlier than their chronological age.

I come from an African country called Namibia, and some of the examples that I have cited are examples that I saw with my own eyes. Perhaps I was one of the fortunate ones, but there were many in my own family, children of neighbours, children in the community, children in the nearby village and township, who had very difficult problems to contend with at their very young age.

So, what do you do? - 3 - Press Release GA/SM/142 HR/4451 14 December 1999

The one thing that you have, which no one can take away from you as long as you are alive, my friends, is yourself. You must make use of yourself. You must be responsible for yourself. You must make a pledge to yourself that you will start making the best of yourself. Your parents will be there to help you. Your teachers will be there to help you. Your religious leaders will be there to help you. But you must make that commitment to yourself. If, tomorrow, you are a better person, a person ready to lead in whatever field, you may not realize it, but others will tell you that it was because you did certain things because they were right, and refused to do other things because they were wrong: Whether it is sex, whether it is drugs, whether it is alcohol.

So make use of yourself, believe in yourself, have confidence, but know also that you will be knocked down, not once but again and a few more times, whether it is by sickness, whether it is by failure in school, whether it is by your friends who are putting you down. But you must have that belief in yourself, that confidence in yourself that you will get back up on your feet again and try some more until you overcome the difficulties on the way.

Today is Human Rights Day. Each one of you has human rights that you were born with. You must know what they are. You must protect your own, but you must also extend a helping hand to help others to enjoy them fully. The United Nations is not only trying to preach the gospel of human rights; the United Nations is trying to make human rights become real for all the people in the world -- for the young ones, to provide education and training and health care and counselling to form their character, but particularly for young children who are today being forced to fight wars and die. What a shame! They, too, must be helped to stay alive, to learn their human rights and to enjoy them fully.

You also talked about a culture of peace. The United Nations decided that the coming century -- the twenty-first century -- is one that must be characterized by the culture of peace and tolerance and non-violence. That is the commitment that the Member States of the United Nations have made collectively. And as you prepare yourselves to kiss fond farewell to the twentieth century, and prepare a welcome kiss for the new millennium, I hope that you will take the lead, wherever you are, individually and together as friends and neighbours, to help yourself and others to make the next millennium, indeed and truly, a millennium of peace, a culture of peace, a culture of tolerance and, indeed, a culture where human beings would be freed of all the hardships and deprivations, and that human genius and creative imagination would be let loose to develop as human beings, to develop their economy so that there is enough for everybody in the world.

I know that I am not going to see you until the twenty-first century. I wish you well, each and every one of you, in whatever you want to do. And for those of you who are going to become President of the General Assembly, I will be available to give you hints of how to be even better than myself.

* *** *