Address at the World Trade Center of New Orleans

OPENING REMARKS

Thank you ladies and gentlemen. Thanks to the UNITED NATIONS Association of Greater New Orleans, the Consular Corps of New Orleans, the Louisiana Department of Economic Development and The World Trade Center for sponsoring this luncheon program in commemoration of UNITED NATIONS' Day. And, of course, thanks to Patricia Denechaud, President of the World Trade Center of New Orleans and to Gene Schreiber its Managing Director for bringing this UN Day lunch to such a delightful locale.

FOUNDING OF THE UN

Happy 54th birthday UNITED NATIONS. We were born in the same year and I am proud to say my father Morris Hughes Sr., a career diplomat, participated in the two-month 1945 international conference in San Francisco at which 50 countries met to draft the UNITED NATIONS Charter.

The UNITED NATIONS officially came into existence on October 24, 1945 when the Charter was ratified by China, France, The Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States and a majority of the other signatories.

Peace and security are the ultimate goals of all UNITED NATIONS activities. How the organization works to achieve these goals is best told, perhaps, by a very brief and selective review of its accomplishments over the years.

A BIT OF HISTORY AND REMINISCENCE

The first General Assembly was held in Westminster in London in 1946. The Fifty-one original members (Poland joined late) attended. There are now 188 members.

On January 24, 1946 the first General Assembly resolution was adopted. It was on the peaceful use of atomic energy and the elimination of atomic weapons and other weapons of mass destruction (which highlights the importance the General Assembly has always given to disarmament issues.)

On January 7, 1949, UN Envoy Ralphe Bunche secured a cease-fire between the new State of Israel and Arab States. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for it.

In September 1960 seventeen newly independent states, 16 from Africa, joined the UNITED NATIONS. It was the biggest increase in membership in the same year.

On the 12th of June 1968 the General Assembly gave its support to the treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and called for its ratification by all states.

Twenty-eight years later, on September 10, 1996 the General Assembly adopted the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-ban Treaty.

There were other historic events in which the UNITED NATIONS played an essential role such as the Korean War in 1950, the Suez Canal Crisis in 1956 and since then in Human Rights conventions and conventions on the rights of women and children, on the environment and the Law of the Sea, all promoting peace, democracy and development.

And, along the way, the UNITED NATIONS was awarded five Nobel Peace Prizes and six additional Nobel Peace Prizes were awarded to individuals working with the UN such as Ex-Secretary of State Cordell Hull in 1945 for his work in establishing the UN and Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961 for his work in helping settle the Congo Crisis of the day, a commitment which cost him his life in a plane crash on September 18, 1961.

These are headline events that many of us remember well. I selected them because the issues concerned are still relevant today. The Arab-Israeli dispute persists, the Nuclear Test-ban Treaty is still a question mark and a new crisis in the Congo and all of the Great Lakes Region in Central Africa is preoccupying diplomats once again.

HUMANITARIAN AID

Less in the headlines is the humanitarian work that is done by the UNITED NATIONS. Because of my recent assignments in Central Africa I will focus attention on crises there and the UNITED NATIONS' superb response to people in need.

First let me address the issue of why it is important to provide humanitarian aid. It is important because the international community has decided that it is the right thing to do. This is stated clearly in the preamble of the Covenant of the UNITED NATIONS which sets out the following goals:

• to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war;
• to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights;
• to promote social progress and better standards of life
• to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all people.

These are the aspirations of the founders of the UNITED NATIONS.

In addition we as Americans have always believed as President Kennedy once put it that "The effort to improve the conditions of man is not a task for the few. It is the task of all nations -- acting alone, acting in groups, acting in the UNITED NATIONS. For plague and pestilence and plunder and pollution, the hazards of nature and the hunger of children are foes of every nation."

Kofi Annan frequently expresses the same sentiment, but with an additional point, which, I think, needs to be emphasized. In remarks at the Kennedy Center in 1997, Secretary General Annan said, "There is one world, one humanity. And human security -- genuine, equitable and lasting – is indivisible… our enemy now is indifference [and] the belief that there are many worlds, and that the only one we need to care about is our own. That belief is false."

This leads me to the additional explanation for why humanitarian aid is important to the welfare of every nation and in our own self-interest. Also why we should take special note today of the dedication of the employees of the UNITED NATIONS who bring hope to millions of displaced and dispossessed people around the world.

It is the goal of the United States to help forge a world in which stability allows societies to advance, to make political progress towards democracy and to reform their economies. Economic growth closely linked with political reform will create more accountable governments and "establish conditions under which justice and the respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained. "That last phrase is also from the Preamble to the 1945 UN Charter. Progress and accountability go hand-in-hand. In a speech to the Institute of International Education on October 14, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright repeated this point very clearly. She said, "No society can advance very far unless its government is accountable." Accountable governments make for good partners, in arms control as well as in international trade.

The principle of self-interest in stability and development is, in my view, made all the more relevant by the shrinking world we live in. It is a world of satellite telephones, the internet, the inexpensive copy machine and the world-wide-web of resources. These wonderful advances not only make possible a global economy, they make that global economy as well as our security in general vulnerable to attack from the unstable areas of the world.

 This vulnerability can be summarized in one word: terrorism. The Bombings of our American Embassies in Nairobi Kenya and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania in August 1998 may well have been planned, managed and ordered from a cave in Afghanistan. Terrorist can operate from anywhere through the use of international communications and rapid transportation. They operate out of failed states and from states left out of the world order that the UN was founded to promote.

And, strong nations and developing nations have a common desire for a stable international environment, free of conflict, wherein the rule of law prevails and economic development is designed for the welfare of the population. This is consistent with our political ideals and with our goals for safe and expanding world trade.

But, as Kofi Annan said recently "one thing is indisputable, development has no worse enemy than war."

Kofi Annan has stated it very simply: The UNITED NATIONS gets involved in even the most desperate situations because "prolonged armed conflicts don’t only kill people, they destroy a country’s physical infrastructure." Conflict is the enemy of development, the enemy of the rule of law and causes states to live outside the world community of accountable nations that the founders of the UNITED NATIONS sought to create and which we value so highly as Americans.

UN HUMANITARIAN ASSISTANCE IN PRACTICE

"Much of our work at the UNITED NATIONS," Kofi Annan has said, "is devoted to coping with the immense suffering caused by conflicts and the search for ways to settle them peacefully."

The UN agencies that are engaged in humanitarian assistance include the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the World Food Program (WFP), the UNITED NATIONS Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the UNITED NATIONS Development Program (UNDP). These are the four UN organizations I wish to focus on by example and I will discuss a bit about their engagement in the crisis in the Great Lakes Region and in particular in Burundi in Central Africa where I served until this past May.

I am pleased to report that these UNITED NATIONS organizations are doing a superb job in Burundi.

UNHCR

The Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) looks after some 45 million Refugees and displaced persons around the world. Without this essential institution of the UNITED NATIONS, Kofi Annan has said, many countries would be destabilized by chaotic refugee flows.

This is certainly the case in the Great Lakes Region of Africa that includes Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and the Congo (formerly Zaire). The works of the UNHCR in this region is unending because of the persistent conflicts in the region. For better or for worse, UNHCR has become very efficient at housing and feeding refugees.

In Burundi the UNHCR Director is Ulf Chritoffersson. He is an expert and a very able and dedicated international civil servant. He has prepared for the return of hundreds of thousands of Burundian refugees from Tanzania and other neighboring countries. He has monitored the return of the few thousand refugees who have already returned to Burundi over the past two years and has worked to care for them and to protect them from reprisals.

He works closely with the foreign Embassies in Bujumbura to hold the Burundian Government accountable for the safety of the refugees who have returned. He was outspoken, for example, when he learned that some refugees had been turned away by Burundian authorities and he raised to the highest level of the UN allegations that Burundian security forces had executed returning refuges at the Burundian border. This has not made him popular with the host government, but it was courageous and appropriate for him to take the stands that he has in defense of helpless people.

Ulf Christoffersson is a principled and determined man who has done a great deal to maintain the highest standards in the UN’s dealings with the tragedy of refugees in Africa.

WFP

The World Food Program is the United Nation’s front-line agency in the fight against hunger. In 1998 WFP fed 75 million people worldwide. This number includes most of the world’s refugees. In Burundi and Rwanda, WFP in 1999 will distribute 276,000 tones of cereals, oil, beans and other consumables to 1.4 million people. Most of that food comes from the United States and much of the actual work of distributing the food is done by Non Governmental Organizations such as CARE, the Catholic Relief Service, and World Vision as well as by other UN entities such as UNICEF and UNHCR.

But statistics only tell part of the story of WFP’s successful efforts to distribute food to the hungry in isolated regions of the world. In 1998, for example, getting large quantities of anything into Burundi was a monumental task because the country was under total embargo. The embargo had been imposed in 1996 by Burundi’s neighboring states as a sign of their disapproval of a military coup d’etat in July of that year. The embargo had holes in it because of the war in the Congo and because of corruption, but that did not make the problem of importing 37,000 tons of food any easier for WFP logisticians. For reasons of cost, they could only fly in a few thousand tons of food for nutritional feeding centers to rescue mothers and children in particular who were near starvation.

What the WFP logistician did to get the food into Burundi was right out of a movie. He negotiated with transporters of all kinds in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Kenya and Zambia to move foodstuffs by rail and truck as far as the southern tip of Lake Tanganyika and then by barge the remaining 400 miles to Burundi, a landlocked country. There were many more problems than mere contracts. When the road in Kenya washed out during floods in 1998, he re-routed the trucks through Tanzania where possible. Other shipments came up from South Africa and once they got to Lake Tanganyika he had to buy or build barges to float them up to Bujumbura. He also had to negotiate with pirates and rebels to allow his shipments to pass freely on the lake. For the most part they did.

Why did this man go to all this trouble? Because he liked the challenge? Because he could do it? Mostly, I believe, he did it because he was committed to the job he was given and because he knew that without that supply of food, half-a-million Burundians would go from a state of manageable malnutrition to near starvation.

UNICEF

UNICEF, the UNITED NATIONS Children’s Fund advocates and works for the protection of children’s rights, to help the young meet their basic needs and to expand their opportunities to reach their full potential. In Burundi, UNICEF’s mission is basic: to feed children suffering from malnutrition, to provide them with primary health care, safe water and sanitation especially those children and families displaced by five years of civil war. UNICEF works with the Government of Burundi to improve public health care for children, to expand education and to provide community based services to children in general.

The UNICEF Director in Burundi was a Chilean by the name of Luis Zuniga. He was a quiet man, very professional and very determined to make a difference. He worked tirelessly with the Government of Burundi to get children in displaced person camps inoculated against disease and to provide them with clean water and sanitation. His was a voice in the wilderness as far as the Burundian authorities were concerned. They wanted the medical and school supplies Zuniga could obtain through UNICEF, but they did not appreciate his constant attention to how and for whom the supplies were used.

UNDP

The fourth UN entity in Burundi I wish to praise is the UNITED NATIONS Development Program. UNDP is committed to the principle that development is inseparable form the quest for peace and human security. The UNDP’s mission is to help countries in their effort to achieve sustainable human development.

 The UNDP Representative in Burundi is a senior UN official who helps coordinates development and humanitarian assistance from all sources. In Burundi the UNDP Representative is Kathleen Cravero, a woman who sets the example for outstanding international service and heroism, as you shall hear shortly.

Ms. Cravero has been an effective coordinator of the humanitarian assistance to Burundi and she has been equally effective at holding the Burundian Government accountable for its human rights abuses. She walks a fine line between critic and supporter of the government, but she has done it so successfully that I believe she is the most respected foreign official in Burundi today.

Ms. Cravero earned unequalled credibility with the Burundian Government by traveling to every Province in the country and by keeping contact with the Burundian population in need. Ms. Cravero traveled inside the country two to three days a week. That is a record few Burundian officials could match. She regularly raised issues with Burundian officials which affected the work of many Non-Governmental Organizations in Burundi and she helped coordinate the activities of the NGOs to avoid duplication, where possible, and to get the most urgently needed assistance to the right place in Burundi which were frequently the least accessible.

WORKING IN A CRISIS AREA

UN officials who work in crisis areas such as Burundi are careful, but they must work in the field if they are to be effective.

I should explain this. To be effective and accountable to donors, those administering humanitarian aid must go see for themselves what the needs are in the countryside and how best to respond to them. Although the host Government would prefer to have its officials establish what humanitarian aid should be provided and where, those officials have proven to be unreliable in this regard. Surveying and monitoring is as essential as it can be dangerous, but without it, no supplies will be given out by the UN or by any responsible organization.

This story begins on October 12, 1999. That is the day Ms. Cravero organized a trip to assess the needs at a camp for internally displaced Burundians in the remote Southeast of the country. It is an area that is well controlled by the military though incursions of rebels do occur.

With her on this particular trip were the Director of UNICEF, Luis Zuniga and the logistician for the World Food Program Saskia Von Meijenfeldt. Saskia would assess what were the basic food needs of the 4000 refugees and how to get the food distributed. The UNICEF Director would assess the most urgent sanitation and health issues for the children in the camp.

The Provincial Governor joined the expedition along with an escort of Burundian soldiers. All was in order and reasonable precautions had been taken, but they proved insufficient on that day particular day.

When the convoy arrived at the refugee camp, the UN officials climbed out of their vehicles and greeted uniformed men visible in a house near the gate to the camp. But when the uniformed men stepped out of the house, the UN officials realized they were imposters and the camp apparently was not under Government control. Armed men in civilian clothes put the foreign nationals against a wall and robbed them. When they heard the foreigners were associated with humanitarian assistance the men who had robbed them started to walk away.

But, one man armed with a pistol turned back and asked out loud: "Why should these people be allowed to live?" At point blank range he shot Luis Zuniga the 53 year-old Chilean director of UNICEF in the head. Luis fell dead.

The armed man then killed Saskia Von Meijenfeldt, the 34-year-old Dutch woman with WFP. His next target was Kathleen Cravero the American director of UNDP and the coordinator of all Humanitarian assistance to Burundi.

What happened next is not yet clear, but villagers who either knew her or realized the consequences of killing foreigners saved Ms. Cravero’s life and the lives of the rest of the UN delegation. During the ensuing confusion the remaining UN employees escaped and hid in the underbrush for an hour and a half until the Burundian authorities could rescue them.

The Provincial Governor who had been with the UN group when they arrived at the camp escaped unharmed and hid in the underbrush during the entire episode. The military detachment that was to provide security for the UN visitors was unable to do so. In the final count of casualties that day, there were seven Burundians killed in addition to Luis and Saskia, some may have been soldiers.

 TO CONTINUE OR ABANDON THE CHALLENGE

Should the UNITED NATIONS continue to work in Burundi under the circumstances?

At the Bujumbura airport on August 13, the day after this tragedy, a Western correspondent interviewed Ms. Cravero. She was on her way out of the country with the remains of her fallen colleagues. Everyone’s nerves were on edge in Bujumbura, few UN employees had slept the night before and the mood among foreign nationals was grim. Ms. Cravero was asked as Coordinator of humanitarian relief for Burundi and as someone who had narrowly escaped death herself, whether she thought UN assistance activities should continue in Burundi. She replied: "I am more convinced than ever of the importance of our humanitarian work in this country and how much we must stay by the Burundian people’s side in these difficult times."

She was right, but I don’t know how she had the presence of mind to express such a reasonable and generous sentiment under the circumstances.

The UN did tighten security in Burundi. There is still no travel outside of the capital and there is an 8:00 p.m. curfew in town. It is a difficult situation, but no less important to stabilize both through the peace talks that are being funded by the international community and through the food and other aid that will help prevent a humanitarian disaster in Burundi. Thanks to the UN’s humanitarian work, when peace is eventually restored in Burundi, the path back to stability and sustainable development will be far less steep.

The United Nations Charter addresses the struggle to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war and it reaffirms our faith in human rights. In remote corners of the world, United Nations employees like Luis Zuniga and Saskia Von Meijenfeldt have given their lives in that struggle. Others like Kathleen Cravero of UNDP, Ulf Kristoffersson of UNHCR and their staffs are carrying on the work with hope and courage.

CLOSING

On a brighter note, again, Happy Birthday UNITED NATIONS. The goals of the founders are as relevant and as urgent today as they were fifty four years ago and the really great news is that the men and women of the UNITED NATIONS working in crisis areas of the world today are worthy successors to the generations who have devoted their lives to achieve world peace and security.

Thank you.