MaximsNews.com Columnist

        

Ambassador Pierre Schori of Sweden and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.  Amb. Schori, currently a Visiting Professor at Adelphi University, New York, was Sweden’s ambassador to the United Nations from September 2000 to September 2004.

 

 

 

Wars and Elections Seen From My Classroom

  By Ambassador Pierre Schori 

Amb.PierreSchori@MaximsNews.com 

                                               

          UNITED NATIONS --  27 October 2004 / www.MaximsNews.com  /  The Adelphi campus on Long Island is warming up to the elections. 

No one of its 8,000 students, including more than a hundred from overseas, has been able to ignore the buzz outside and inside class rooms and other University facilities. 

Debates are arranged between Young Democrats and Republicans, faculty encourages discussions and an energetic voter registration action, V.O.T.E.R. (Voicing Our Thoughts, Exercising our Rights) has been started by students. 

In my own Freshman class, on Human Rights, we have tried to find some answers to the questions of war and peace and political leadership.   

We have tried to go beyond the campaign that sometimes reminds me of Cardinal Richelieu’s words: 

“Give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.”

Studying the history of human rights we have discovered that not much is new under the sun, and that the powers of today would be wise to learn from the past. 

In our texts, we have found how the philosopher Plato, 2600 years ago, not only argued for equal rights for women but also for respectful treatment of enemy soldiers: 

"Treat our enemies as the Greeks now treat each other and never ravage their land nor burn their houses”. 

We have read how the Magna Charta came about in England, in 1215, as a protest against war against Muslims in foreign land. 

The need for heavy taxation to finance the Third Crusade prompted the call for more civil rights. 

Four hundred years later, Hugo Grotius of Holland, in his “Laws of War and Peace”, wrote “when arms have once been taken up there is no longer any respect for law, divine or human; it is as if frenzy had openly been set loose for the committing of all crimes”. 

Grotius also defined the right to self- defense, but in a restrictive sense: 

“No other just cause for undertaking of war can there be excepting injury received”. 

We applied this information to current events and concluded that, after September 11, the United States, supported by people all over the world and the UN Security Council and General Assembly, made use of the recognized right of self-defense against Al Qaeda and the Taliban regime. 

We also saw the war in Afghanistan as a legitimate action in response to what Grotius called “injury received”. 

But the war on Iraq was different. 

Most people in the world saw Saddam Hussein’s regime as a despicable dictatorship but hardly as a powerful state, subjected as it was to severe sanctions, fly-free zones, the oil-for-food program and the most intrusive foreign inspections program ever in the history of the United Nations.  

Hussein was “in the box”, as Madeleine Albright put it, and not an imminent threat.  

This view was also reflected in the conclusions of the September 11 Commission: there were no weapons of mass destruction and there is no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States.  

Therefore it was difficult to see the war on Iraq as a preemptive strike and not as a conventional attack on a sovereign state. 

Instead of defeating terrorism at its roots, are we now seeing “a new Afghanistan inside Iraq” being created, as Francis Fukuyama put it recently. 

Last week’s elections in the Eastern part of Germany showed strong support for far-right parties and former Communists. 

The reason for this was, according to a German political scientist, “a mixture of social rage, and the abuse of this rage by extreme groups” (NYT, 9/20). 

We can only imagine what the level of social rage is in countries whose people live without hope, in extreme poverty and exclusion, as the case is in the Middle East.

On September 21, at the United Nations, Spain’ s new Prime Minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, gave a thoughtful speech, sadly totally ignored by US media. 

He said: 

“Terrorism is insanity and death. From thirty years of terrorism Spanish women and men have learned that the risk of a terrorist victory rises sharply when, in order to fight terror, democracy betrays its fundamental nature, governments curtail civil liberties, put judicial guaranties at risk, or carry out pre-emptive military operations. This is what our people have learned: that it is legality, democracy and political means and ways what make us stronger and them weaker”. 

He went on to say:

“The seed of evil cannot take root when it falls on the rock of justice, well-being, freedom and hope; but it can take root if it lands on the soil of injustice, poverty, humiliation and despair.”

Are we listening?

According to the president of the World Bank, Jim Wolfensohn, the world spends more than 900 billion dollars on military expenditure, 300 billion on the world´s richest farmers in agricultural subsidies and allocates only 56 billion to foreign aid.

“It is the weakness of our enemies that is the threat today, not their strengths”, Nancy Birdsall, of the Center for Global Development,  warned last June in Washington when she presented the report “On the Brink: Weak States and U.S. National Security”.

It is vital that international terrorism is confronted and ultimately defeated. 

The UN acted quickly and resolutely after September 11 in solidarity with the U.S. and to create international laws against terrorist individuals and networks, including their financial resources.  

The world was united on September 11, 2001. 

This September both the USA and the world are divided. 

We must and we can find that unity again, to fight terrorism and its root causes.  

In this effort all democratic nations and their citizen must join forces, with the UN playing a central role.

 

Ambassador Jean PIERRE Olov SCHORI

Amb.PierreSchori@MaximsNews.com 

 

Born in Norrköping, Sweden, in 1938.

His mother was Swedish and his father Swiss 

Married to Maud EDGREN-SCHORI,

M.A.S.W, Licentiate of Philosophy in Social Work, Stockholm University

Mr. Schori has three children

Education

1962                            Master of Arts, Modern Languages and Political Science, University of Lund

 

Professional Experiences

1965-1968                   Deputy International Secretary for the Social Democratic Party

1968-71                       International Secretary for the Social Democratic Party

1971-1972                   First Secretary, Ministry for Foreign Affairs

1973-1976                                                       Foreign Policy Advisor in the Cabinet of Prime Minister Olof Palme

1976-1982                   International Secretary for the Social Democratic Party

1982-1991                   Permanent Under-Secretary of State, Ministry for Foreign Affairs

1991-1994                   Member of Parliament, Deputy Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs and Spokesperson for the Social Democratic Party on Foreign Affairs

1994-1996                   Minister for International Development Co-operation and Deputy Foreign Minister for Co-operation with Central and Eastern Europe, including Russia and the Baltic States

1996-1999                   Minister for International Development Co-operation, Migration and Asylum Policy and Deputy Foreign Minister

1999-2000                   Member of European Parliament, leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Group and Spokesperson for the Socialist Group on Foreign Affairs, President of the Parliament ´s Committee for relations with Japan

2000-2004                   Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Sweden to the United Nations 2004-                           

                                     Distinguished Visiting Professor, Adelphi University, New York

 

  Other Engagements and Commissions of Trust

1971-1973                   Editor of “Tiden”, the theoretical review of the Social Democratic Party

1973-1979                   Member of the Local School Authority in Lidingö

1979-1982                   Member of the Lidingö Cultural Board

1987-1989                   Member of the International Commission for Central American Recovery and Development (The Sanford Commission)

1989-1996                   Chairperson of the National Judo Federation, Black belt, 1st Dan, 1990

1996-                           Chairperson of the Olof Palme Memorial Fund

2000 and 2002                                                Head of the European Union Election Observation Mission in Zimbabwe

1999-2002                   Chairperson of the Swedish Institute in Alexandria, Egypt

2001- 2004                  Chair, United Nations Committee for Parliamentarians for

                         Global Action

2000-2004                                                        Member of the Board of the International Peace Academy, New York

 

Books and Publications

Latin Americans on Latin America, Stockholm, 1968

I orkanens öga (Central America -In the eye of the Hurricane), Stockholm 1981

El desafío europeo en Centroamérica, San José, Costa Rica, 1982

Dokument inifrån (Between Blocks and Bridges: Swedish Foreign Policy from Olof Palme to Post-Communism), Stockholm, 1992

Entre Escila y Caribdis: Olof Palme, la Guerra Fría y el Poscomunismo, Mexico, 1994

Mellan Maastricht och Sarajevo, (Europe between Maastricht and Sarajevo) Stockholm, 1994

The Impossible Neutrality. Southern Africa, Cape Town, 1994

Olof Palme – Reformisten utan gränser  (Reformer without Borders), 1996

Olof Palme - Reformista sin Fronteras, Barcelona 1997

Can the United Nations manage the new era? Stockholm, 1999

From Marshall to Post-Communism: A New Deal for Internationalism

First lecture of the Marshall Plan 50th Anniversary Distinguished Lecture Series at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., December 10, 1996

American Hegemony in the International Perspective. Lecture at the Summer Faculty Institute on World Security Affairs, Amherst College, June 11, 2002

Global challenges in the 21st century. Lecture at Adelphi University, Garden City, October 2002

The United Nations, Global Governance, and Global Citizenship after September 11

 Lecture at Adelphi University, Garden City, September 22, 2004

 

Languages

Swedish, English, French, Spanish and some German.