Format: Real

Duration: 5:15 mins.

Inter Press Service International Achievement Award
United Nations, New York, 29 October 1999

REMARKS BY ROBERTO SAVIO
Director-General, Inter Press Service
(Edited transcript)

I would like here to bring some perspective of the awardee of this year which has nothing to do with the Juan Somavia that practically everyone here knows. I never felt so ridiculous like standing in the receiving line with him where I am supposed to introduce the participants to the awardee, but because he knew everybody I ended up introducing myself to everybody. So it's useless that I insist on the Juan Somavia that all of you know, and Ambassador Insanally did that very well.

I would like to speak of a different Somavia. He was a very brilliant young diplomat who because of the coup in 1973 deprived Chile of democracy, became suddenly not a civil servant of his country but someone living in exile. And during that time it was the time that we became friends and it's the time in which he got involved in the international agenda in something which at the time was very much unusual, which was to use what is called civil society as a way to be active in international affairs. He created a number of initiatives and very important institutions like ILET (Latin American Institute of Transnational Studies) through which he played a very central role, as central as the institutions of intergovernmental nature, which were supposed to deal with this issue, like UNESCO. And during that time he was an endless fighter for democracy in Chile, for the issue of democracy in Latin America and in the South, for the issue of peace and human rights, and so he played such a significant role in that period that when he became again ambassador, many of us were in a sense sad because we felt that he would go back to the diplomatic career and therefore would lose his identity.

I have to say here something that I never told him. We are now very happy to see after so many years that the same Juan Somavia kept up with his consistency and with his commitment the same capability of implementing a political agenda in his different position in the international community. The agenda of the Social Summit of Copenhagen certainly bears with it all the past effort of Juan to establish in the international agenda issues which now have largely become a part of the international agenda, not only from civil society from also from the international community as such. I think therefore that it is because of this continuous effort that Juan, from the very beginning of his life, became a very young and brilliant diplomat involved in the process of integration of Latin America, in the Andean Pact which was at that moment a very revolutionary effort to bring together countries for common destiny in a region which had nationalistic history so strong that it was not able to find their unity, that we saw his consistency. The jury last year decided to honour Juan for this consistency, for this commitment, and for his vision. And I am sure that this award that we are giving is not covering only the span of diplomatic life that you all know, but a very much longer period in which it is very rare to find people who keep up the same vision and the same commitment when they were young. I would like therefore to present you the fifteenth award of IPS on behalf of all the people of IPS and all the constituency of IPS.