United Nations Chronicle - Brief Article - Editorial

UN Chronicle, June-August, 2001

Kofi Annan's reappointment as Secretary-General of the United Nations more than six months before his current tenure ends is a tribute without precedent to him personally and to the ideal of unanimity in decision-making in the institution he serves--the institution he described as indispensable and irreplaceable when he first took office. Like Dag Hammarskjold before him, Mr. Annan was first elected after an embittered and contentious season, and his very first call was "to embark upon a time of healing; a healing of fractures and frictions between Member States and this Organization".

That time has passed, and passed successfully; within four years, Member States had, in their Millennium Declaration, jointly reaffirmed "that the United Nations is the indispensable common house of the entire human family". But even as the strains of that equation, between an Organization and the Members who animate its being, have been quick to mend, older scars have persisted, newer wounds have festered. Indifference and apathy offer no balm. Hostilities may have lessened, and suspicions may have eased, but there is still a long way to go beyond grudging tolerance and longstanding premises of simple coexistence to a world of diversity without division, inclusion without intimidation.

Our centre section (pages 23 to 56) looks at possibilities before us, both in the specific context of the Durban Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, and in the larger context of the instruments we possess, among them: education, learning, travel, dialogue, humanitarian response and the vast generational potential inherent in today's children. As our other key articles suggest, aware as we are that problems carry no passports, we still have to fully exempt their solutions from visas. If there was one overarching message from the General Assembly's special session on HIV/AIDS (page 15), it was that an epidemic of global and non-discriminatory proportion requires a response of similar nature.

It's possible. Between the 1990 Children's Summit and the special session on children this year, reported polio cases in the world had dropped 99% (page 42). Our cover story brings home that point as well, through the aching vividness of personal experience. Even as we celebrate the end of the Ebola outbreak in Uganda, and applaud the enormous medical, scientific, administrative and political will channelled, we recognize, as Dan Bausch does (page 6), that there are lessons beyond the transience of that virus, which relate to the health and well-being of an entire continent, indeed world, of peoples.

In an article written before he was first elected Secretary-General, Kofi Annan remarked: "If I were a doctor examining the health of the world today, I would be greatly alarmed at the state of my patient." The prognosis is less grim today as the world moves to address crisis upon specific crisis, collectively and with courage; what remains is to go beyond crisis to the creation of a credible capacity for creative change.

Read on. And, please, write!