Format: Real

Duration: 13:42 mins.

Inter Press Service International Achievement Award
United Nations, New York, 17 September 1998

REMARKS BY STEPHEN LEWIS
Deputy Director, UNICEF
(Edited transcript)

I am here as a representative of UNICEF, an agency whose every institutional fiber is attuned to the well-being of children. But I am also here because I am privileged to be a friend of Graça Machel, and it is in that capacity that I frame these remarks.

I didn't meet Graça Machel in person until 1994. Like countless others, I knew of her by legendary reputation of course. But any encounter was very much at a distance, several times removed. The first occasion was in the mid-1980s while watching a documentary called "Chain of Tears", about the children of Mozambique with limbs amputated as a result of land mines or the savagery of civil war. The title was evocative. As the children cried, their tears artistically portrayed formed a chain imprisoning their lives. The narrator, angry and calm, outraged, hopeful and tender in equal measure, was Graça Machel. I have never forgotten the film.

The second occasion was rather later, I think in London at an anti-apartheid rally. I remember Bishop Tutu and Graça Machel. I had heard the Archbishop before many times. I had never heard Graça. The address was at once moving and intelligent, extraordinarily charismatic, utterly involving. It brought the horror and injustice of apartheid to life. I have never forgotten the speech.

So you can imagine, with those touches of history reverberating along behind me how exciting it was in 1994 to one of those who approached Graça Machel with the request that she take on the role of expert in the United nations study on the impact of armed conflict on children. We promised her that it would occupy but a tiny fraction of her time and make demands of microscopic proportion. In the event, it consumed Graça's life for a full two years and catapulted her into a frenzy of activity that rivaled the schedule of the Secretary-General himself.

Unlike some other appointees, Graça threw herself into the task. On her behalf, an eminent persons group and a technical advisory group were assembled; she traveled to a significant number of war-torn countries from Rwanda to Colombia to Cambodia; there were regional conferences around the global; thematic seminars were held; influential NGO coalitions formed; there was the obligatory UN inter-agency standing committee; governments were supernaturally energized; the media, national and international, was engaged; twenty-four research studies were commissioned; UNICEF national committees provided the funding; and a small but Herculean secretariat was established.

All in all, the prodigious effort neatly foreshadowed the report itself. When it emerged in November of 1996, the report was described as a triumph. It was masterfully rooted in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It is fair to say that in the sclerotic annals of the United Nations system, few documents have made such an impact. The Graça Machel study galvanized the international community.

Now, Graça would take exception and say what she has so often said. "It's not my report, Stephen, it's our report", referring to the grand collectivity of everyone who participated in its production. And in a very real sense that's true. No one would deny it.

But in an equally real sense, it's only part of the truth. All of the great multilateral documents of the last several years that have commanded attention invariably bear the imprimatur of the person in whose name they are issued. And that is how it should be. Whether we speak of Brandt or Bruntland or Nyerere or Ramphal, the tone of a report, its quality, the strength of its argument, the passion, the analysis, the courage of its recommendations, the sense of principle, its integrity, all of these things flow from the persona of the author or the expert.

Sure, it's a collective effort. But it's a collective effort with a unique individual stamp. Graça's stamp was that of a powerful morality, an affirmation of human values, an abiding love for children and outrage at their violation, all of it rooted in an uncompromising that the world do something to turn things around. She would repeatedly say often enough to make it a personal mantra, that children have the right to peace. It was the right report at the fight time.

I shall not belabor its contents. Undoubtedly, Ambassador Francesco Fulci of Italy and Graça Machel herself will deal with the issues in greater deal. But I beg you to bear with me while I give you the barest of snippets to savor the intellectual flavor. The report is strong and unflinching in its language. Listen to the opening couple of paragraphs:

"Millions of children are caught up in conflicts in which they are not merely bystanders, but targets. Some fall victim to a general onslaught against civilians; others die as part of a calculated genocide. Still other children suffer the effects of sexual violence or the multiple deprivations of armed conflict that expose them to hunger or disease.

"These statistics of the millions of children involved are shocking enough, but more chilling is the conclusion to be drawn from them: more and more of the world is being sucked into a desolate moral vacuum. This is a space devoid of the most basic human values; a space in which children are slaughtered, raped, and maimed; a space in which children are exploited as soldiers; a space in which children are starved and exposed to extreme brutality. Such unregulated terror and violence speak of deliberate victimization. There are few further depths to which humanity can sink."

The language draws the reader in. The language tells the reader that it is a repot to be conjured with. The report made one particularly inspired recommendation. In the context of the United Nations, parsimonious and begrudging as nation-states can so often be, it was initially a controversial recommendation. Everyone had to fight hard for its adoption. Ultimately it was carried because Graça Machel would not back down, and now predictably it is everywhere celebrated. I speak of the recommendation to appoint a special representative of the Secretary-General on Children and Armed Conflict, a post occupied with distinction by Ambassador Olara Otunnu.

The report gave profile to specific issues which have now captured the imagination of the world. Issues like child soldiers and landmines. I know and it must give Graça gratification, that we reached the target of forty ratifications just yesterday, which will make the convention to ban landmines an instrument of binding international law six months hence. More, the movement to raise the minimum age of recruitment to 18 years and end the reckless phenomenon of child soldiers is everywhere gaining support.

No one will claim that the report is alone is responsible for the growing crescendo of advocacy. But without the report the voices would be few and muted and isolated. The report has moments of prescience, never more so than in its section on gender-based violence. Long before the debates on the International Criminal Court, long before the decision of the International Tribunal on Rwanda, but very much consistent with the analysis which flowed from the International Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, Graça Machel spoke with great power about rape and sexual violence as a war crime, a special horror to which girls and women are subjected solely because they are girls and women. This part of the report has actually helped to shape public policy in an aspect of human behavior so upsetting as to paralyze previous policy initiatives.

The report has some riveting insights. I remember how fascinated everyone was when Gracia argued after yet another trip to a zone of conflict that education was the great stabilizer for children in war, or emerging from war. Education, said Graça, no matter how informal, no matter how impulsively contrived, no matter how forbidding the circumstances, education was like an anchor, like a bedrock of reassurance for a child whose life and safety were in tumultuous upheaval. That observation has had a great impact on an agency like UNICEF. In all areas of complex emergency, we now move heaven and earth to recreate even in the wasteland, even in the inferno, something that approximates an educational setting for children.

And that finally prompts me to point out that the report was unremitting in its demand that the entire United Nations family respond to the needs of children in war. The report issued a dossier of injunctions and recommendations to all departments and funds and programmes and specialized agencies which constitute the humanitarian and human rights dimensions of the United Nations system. No one was spared. And all of us are faced with the imperative of compliance and in many resolutions and in many bodies that compliance is and will be demanded.

I could go on gently into eternity. I won't because I have at least a vague sense that there is within this audience, despite its reverence and adoration for Graça, a certain plaintive restiveness. But I do want to say with full heart that the conferring of this award upon Graça Machel tonight is a true recognition of the actual and potential contribution of the study to the life and safety of millions of vulnerable children and women. I say "potential" advisedly, because this is a lousy time in this world, it's relentlessly depressing and therefore just before I bring these remarks to an end I want to say a word about that.

Every day seems to bring another conflict or intimations of war. We were under the illusion that we got it all out of our system between 1939 and 1945. Little did we know that that was but prelude to more than half a century of lunacy. What is so disheartening about it is exactly what Graça identified, the loss of moral compass. It is legitimate to ask oneself, has the world gone mad?

If as the historians would have it, the measure of a society lies in the way it treats its children, then we are in too many part of too many societies closer to the abattoir than to civilization. How dos one explain the numbing cruelty of rebel dissidents in northern Sierra Leone as they mutilate the limbs of children? How does one comprehend the abduction and rape and subsequent sexual slavery forced on young girls by the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda? How does one begin to understand the conscription of 9- and 10- and 11-year-olds into the armies of the Democratic republic of the Congo? Only the most recent example amongst many countries.

When one knows that the child's life is probably ruined forever, certainly it's a child who will never have a childhood. How does one emotionally cope with the dementia of laying yet more landmines in Afghanistan, a country where there is already virtually one landmine per inhabitant and watching the agony in the yes of the little boy in a hospital bed whose body will never move on its own again? How does one forget the image seared into the mind of the five-year-old girl flown wounded and paralyzed out of Bosnia only to die in a British hospital? And what of genocide, of ethnic cleansing, of mass refugee movements, of entire landscapes of internally displaced, and what of the fact that there are no more safe heavens for children on this planet, not schools, not churches, not hospitals. It's as though depravity has piled upon depravity until the mind reels.

In the midst of all of it, Graça Machel's report is like a laser beam of sanity. And even if we cannot now achieve every one of its humane and thoughtful recommendations, it will be there for the world to treasure when we come to our collective senses. That's quiet a contribution to the human condition and especially to the children.

I don't want to embarrass Graça by ending, as I began, on a personal note. But I want her to forgive me if I tell this audience that she can be funny, and affecting. That sometimes when she speaks extempore, she gesticulates so flamboyantly as to injure the person sitting beside her. That she is remarkably down to earth, and kind, and generous. That her very being pulsates with a passion for social justice. That apart from all the qualities of leadership, it's impossible in human terms to know Graça and not to love her. That has been the experience of many of us, and we thank her for it.