The duty of remembrance (1945-1999)

By Federico Mayor

JAKARTA: "We the peoples... determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war." So begins the United Nations Charter. That was in 1945, in San Francisco. With terror- brimmed eyes, the peoples of the earth thought of their children and grandchildren and decided to spare them the woes they had just suffered.

"Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed." Such is the opening paragraph of UNESCO's Constitution, adopted in 1945. Peace is constructed every day, by each individual. Peace is a course of conduct forged through education, science and culture, conferring on each human being the capacity to act according to his or her own judgment.

Preventing war by going to its root causes: injustice that gives rise to exclusion and poverty, which in turn lead to emigration and the adoption of fanatical and extremist attitudes. Sharing more fairly, in order to avert disparities that tear society apart. The old saying: "If you want peace, prepare for war" has gradually given way to the idea of "prepare for peace". If you want peace, prepare for it, construct it.

How many conflicts have been avoided! How much dignity -- that of the "intellectual and moral solidarity" proclaimed by UNESCO's Constitution -- has been promoted or restored! But what is prevented, and therefore does not happen, is not seen. Peace is not seen. What is avoided is not seen. Yet this is the greatest victory and we all -- and first and foremost the media -- will have to play our part in bringing out and dealing with what is invisible, what does not appear on the screen, is not announced on the radio or is not written in the press.

In recent years, democracy has gained ground, and the voice of the people is now heard in places where silence previously reigned. Before, we had the peace of security. Now the security of peace is beginning to burgeon. Racial discrimination -- that abomination of apartheid -- has been overthrown in South Africa and Namibia, and two distinguished black figures (Nelson Mandela and Sam Nujoma) lead their respective countries. Peace has been achieved in Mozambique, El Salvador and Guatemala, and it is on the way in Ulster and the Middle East, because resolve and perseverance have worked in tandem. And vision. Vision, above all, because, as Albert Einstein said, "in times of crisis, imagination alone is more important than knowledge".

"To save from the scourge of war". How? By means of sustainable development worldwide, sharing with justice. Helping all countries to acquire the necessary skills. Helping all citizens to be involved, that is to count for something in public affairs and not just to be counted in opinion polls and elections.

At the center of the interactive triangle peace-development- democracy is education. Education for all throughout life. "Democracy is the best solution in the fight against poverty", writes Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize-winner in economics. In the 1990s, as though sensing in advance the need for change, many countries, including the highest-population countries, have made a great effort to invest in education. An increase in education is matched, in practically inverse proportion, by a decrease in population growth. Education is the best form of birth control. The present increase of 254,000 new "passengers" daily on planet Earth -- duty of remembrance! -- will keep coming down if the trends of recent years continue.

However, the vicious circle of a financial system based on loans that enrich those who hand them out (and keep their factories working) and impoverish those who receive them (who cannot keep their own factories running or exploit their natural resources) has given rise to a growing mismatch. In 1974, the most developed countries agreed to help the least privileged with 0.7 percent of their GDP. With some exceptions, the proportion allotted to international cooperation has dwindled (to 0.2 percent of GDP) and there has been a rise (three to fivefold in many countries) in military expenditure.

Duty of remembrance. Crime of silence. We have forgotten the anguish and suffering of the turmoil of violence and war. War is evil, not peoples. However, we have not raised our voices to produce enough clamor to alert the leaders. And instead of constructing peace, we have let brute force once more prevail over the force of reason, over prevention, over the constant effort of persuasion and dialog. We have failed to set up subregional alliances for rapid intervention in the event of disasters, whose role would be to reduce their impact and take advance action, so far as possible, when devastating forest fires, hurricanes or other calamities strike. We have not yet learned to pay the price of peace and we are once more paying that of war.

The price (in human lives, the finest monument that we have to safeguard) of World War II led to the founding of the United Nations. In 1989, when the Soviet system came down with the Berlin Wall, the world glimpsed the rainbow of a new change. The Iron Curtain rusted because, while it was based on equality, freedom was overlooked. We are now embroiled in a system which, while based on freedom, has overlooked equality. And both have dispensed with fraternity.

When it seemed that, at last, the peace dividend could be reaped and that the United Nations system would be strengthened, just the opposite has happened; the United Nations has been weakened and its functions stripped down to (post-conflict) peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance. The whole development mechanism (agencies for agriculture, health, labor, education, science and culture) has "zero growth" imposed on it. UNESCO has a great many tasks but only one underlying purpose, that of building peace and establishing a culture of peace instead of that of war and violence which has prevailed since the dawn of history. But even where UNESCO is concerned, the United States, the most powerful country on earth, has been unable to honor its heralded return to the organization, for budgetary reasons.

In 1999 we are once more seeing the use of force, with the most sophisticated weaponry, although the consequence is still that the air forces will to come down out of the skies, except in the desert, and wage war from house to house and from tree to tree. Once again we are dealing with force, and this time, what is more, outside the United Nations system, which creates a very dangerous precedent. If, with its present membership and functions, the Security Council is unable to act with the requisite dispatch and authority, then let that body be changed and improved.

The United Nations is the sole framework for a strong international democracy that will enable us to go to the roots of violence and terror, which all too often engender nationalistic, religious and ideological zeal, the only one that can make it known that the international community will not recognize those who come to power by bloodletting rather than by the ballot box; the only one that will interpose its forces vigorously and swiftly in the event of a manifest lack of governance or massive violation of human rights.

Now, in 1999, we shall have to go back to thinking and acting as we did in 1945. On the threshold of a new century and a new millennium, we shall have to act like founders to strengthen the union of nations, so as to forestall violence and war. We shall have to base such a union on four new contracts: social, natural, cultural and moral. We shall have to draw up and abide by codes of conduct -- in terms of flows of capital, energy, water, weapons and so forth on a planetary scale. We shall have to invest more heavily in the miracle of each human being, each unique human being. The cost is reasonable when one considers that spending on arms alone last year approached US$8 billion.

It is never too late for peace. Better today than tomorrow. Let there be a cease-fire and, with the same extravagance that is used to turn the wheels of the war machine, let us now turn the wheels of peace. Let the truth be known and justice be done. Under the care of the United Nations, let those who have been expelled from their homes and their land return to a Kosovo that is autonomous and plural, from both a religious and ethnical point of view. Wounds are inflicted in a matter of hours, but they take a long time to heal. A start must therefore be made as soon as possible.

As soon as possible, we have to set out on another path and we have to write a history different from the one which, for the time being, we can only describe. This would be the best legacy to leave to our children and grandchildren, those whom we promised, in 1945, to save from the scourge of war. The duty of remembrance.

The writer is director-general of UNESCO.