Award Ceremony of the Félix Houphouët-Boigny Peace Prize UNESCO, 16 May 2006

Size: px

Start display at page:

Download "Award Ceremony of the Félix Houphouët-Boigny Peace Prize UNESCO, 16 May 2006"

Muriel Harper
5 years ago
Views:

1 ODG/CRP/2006/PI/3 UNESCO, Paris, May 2006 Original: French Award Ceremony of the Félix Houphouët-Boigny Peace Prize UNESCO, 16 May 2006 Address by H.E. Mr Abdoulaye Wade President of the Republic of Senegal 2005 Prizewinner Heads of State and Government, Mr President Abdou Diouf, Patron of the Prize, Mr President Henri Konan Bédié, Sponsor of the Prize, Mr Director-General of UNESCO, Mr Secretary-General of the League of Arab States, Mr President and Members of the Jury, In traditional African society, when something pleasant and unexpected happens in someone's life, the custom is to call relatives round to share the joy of the event. By awarding me the Félix Houphouët-Boigny Peace Prize in the presence of eminent historical witnesses from the international community, relatives, fellow Heads of State and friends, UNESCO has satisfied two requirements: the ceremonial character that should be given to its great events, given its status of member of the United Nations family, and also acknowledgement of the culture of the prizewinner. That is why we have jointly agreed to place the event in the Senegalese cultural environment with the holding of a Senegalese Week. We should like to invite you to visit the different exhibitions, starting from tomorrow: the exhibition of Senegalese books, with writers present, the salon of Senegalese hairdressing, from the 19th century to the end of the Second World War, the exhibition of Senegalese costume, from the 19th century to the present, the art, painting and sculpture exhibition, the crafts exhibition, the music exhibition, the exhibition on Senegalese cinema, and a fashion parade. Before going any further, however, I wish to perform a pleasant duty by thanking you all from the bottom of my heart, you my dear colleagues, African Heads of State, who have left important and pressing tasks in order to be here beside me, you my friends, from here and 1

2 elsewhere, who were keen to witness in person the award ceremony held in my honour today in this sanctuary of peace, knowledge and culture. I should also like to express my gratitude to President Jacques Chirac, the President of the French Republic, who agreed to be a witness at an event that stands out in a life; Chirac who, in our world, is Chirac the African or Chirac, Africa's Advocate. I shall pay a very special tribute to my brother and friend, Olusegun Obasanjo, President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Some people might think that, having been a teacher and lawyer, I experience no difficulty in speaking in public. They are mistaken. I must confess that, at this precise moment, I am so gripped by emotion in the very depths of my being that I experience difficulty in finding my words, especially when my mind conjures up the image of Félix Houphouët- Boigny. My closeness to the Sage of Yamoussoukro began during my studies in Paris. I was elected Secretary-General of the student wing of the RDA (Rassemblement démocratique africain) party, the large political union that he launched during the period of colonisation, a movement that covered several countries that became the present-day States after independence. I would later reveal to my Senegalese compatriots, to President Chirac and my colleagues at the France-Africa Summit in Bamako in 2005, that it was from President Houphouët-Boigny that I got the inspiration for the system of the much-appreciated reservoirs that I have set up in Senegal, and that I recently presented in Bamako where it was favourably received by all the participants, including Chirac. President Houphouët-Boigny was fond of taking me on walks over his vast fields and, one day, he explained to me how he used certain creeping aquatic plants to make and keep the rainwater reservoirs impermeable throughout the year. He called this biological compaction as opposed to the mechanical compaction resulting from soil properties or the use of construction materials. This closeness also explains why, long before I took office, the young people of the RDA once invited me to give them a talk on "Houphouët and Peace". They wanted my testimony concerning the attachment to peace of the great African leader who remains the perfect embodiment of the supreme values of generosity, tolerance and peace. In Senegal, which he saw as his second homeland and where he carried out brilliant studies from a tender age, he had a large number of relatives and friends who retain an undying memory of him as a great man. He was an Ivorian by birth, an African in both his heart and mind and, even more, a seasoned citizen of the world. Dialogue elevated to the status of dogma; that, to him, was the door that led to peace. Houphouët is still among us in the precious legacy that he left for present and future generations. I very respectfully welcome his widow, Mrs Marie-Thérèse Houphouët-Boigny, to whom I pay deferential homage. 2

3 I wish to thank President Abdou Diouf, the Patron of the Prize, and President Henri Konan Bédié, the Sponsor of the Prize, for decisively contributing to the perpetuation of this great international award. My affectionate thoughts and wishes for a permanent peace go to the sister Republic of Côte d'ivoire which is very dear to each Senegalese citizen because of the immemorial and multi-faceted ties that bind our country to Houphouët's country. Lastly, I should like to express my most profound gratitude to the Director-General of UNESCO, Mr Koïchiro Matsuura, who is our host today and who, many a time, has proved his attachment to the African continent and the fundamental principles of the United Nations Charter. The contribution of this worthy son of Asia, which is so close to the African continent, to international cooperation is appreciated by all. I am deeply touched by the decision of the Jury oft he Félix Houphouët-Boigny Peace Prize, under the Presidency of Dr Henry Kissinger, to honour my humble person with the 2005 edition of the Prize. It is my wish to reserve this particular moment of my speech to express my deep and thorough gratitude to you, Dr Kissinger, for having accepted to come personally and chair this ceremony. Your long and painstaking trip just to preside over this prize awarding ceremony makes me value highly your positive appreciation of my action. I also wish to thank the Members of the Jury for their judgement. I accept this prestigious prize with humility. It will serve as motivation to me to always do more for peace among nations and between peoples. This award is not for me alone. An individual is also a product of his or her cultural environment, and the credit is due first and foremost to my people, the Senegalese people, who inculcated the universal values of tolerance and peace in me. The award therefore belongs to mother Africa, as a whole, which I pledge always to serve more and better in cooperation with her other leaders and, also and above all, with the young people and women of our continent. We must put a stop, at all costs, to the spectacle of the child-soldiers and the weeping mothers who, against their will, have seen their children forced into the game of death. A game that benefits only the unscrupulous adults who are motivated by their ambitions to exploit the enthusiasm of the young and their obliviousness to danger. The cheque of the Prize will be given to the Case des Tout-Petits. The Case des Tout- Petits is a preschool structure for children aged 2 to 6 which I proposed on the occasion of the International Day of Education held by UNESCO in Dakar in Its purpose is simple: first, to provide African children with educational toys that are lacking in their traditional environment. The toys, which can be assembled, disassembled, constructed, coloured and reconstructed, are supplied by a publishing house that specializes in educational toys and also provides personnel training. The children are familiarized with 3

4 computers from a very young age and will grow up to become a generation fit for the 21st century. The second objective of the Case des Tout-Petits is that, each and every day, a grandmother or grandfather in the village comes to tell the children an African legend that roots them in their cultural milieu. Given the moral lessons to be drawn from the character of the animal protagonists in each African story, the Case des Tout-Petits keeps the children within their culture and traditions. The cultural impact of the project, which educates the children for peace from an early age, brought UNESCO to define the Case des Tout-Petits as a universal project and to finance the first two of these kindergartens. I allow me to thank my wife, Viviane, who has always been, not behind me, in the formulation used for women whose husbands play a prominent role in society, but constantly beside me, and sometimes in front, as was the case when she built a hospital in the bush, 700 kilometres from Dakar, in an area that is so isolated that even national radio broadcasts cannot reach it. The Senegalese lady from the, to quote her, Toubab ethnic group (the seventh largest ethnic group in Senegal) has always been courageous enough to accompany me in all my combats, including, and especially, at the most difficult times. I now understand more fully this quotation from her native Franche-Comte: "Comtois, rends-toi! Nenni, ma Foi!" "Surrender, Comtois! Nay, that I shan't!" The path that brings me before you all today was determined by the background of my people, a people that has always been able to raise yo cult level the respect of difference as the foundation of its cohesion beyond the diversity of its components. Far from giving a lesson, my purpose is more to explain and share an experience born out of our background. In Senegal where 5% Christian and 95% Muslim live in perfect harmony, if I lost elections to Leopold Sedar Senghor, a Christian, in 1978, it is indeed because the Senegalese people, inspired by noble and ancestral values, has risen above the ethnic and denominational divisions that fuel tensions and conflicts. Indeed, I remember that, already in 1951, Senghor's party had defeated the party of Lamine Gueye, one of the historical figures of Senegalese political life who was also a Muslim. In the end, Senghor and I were partners in the construction of a young pluralistic democracy in Senegal. It was under the government of Senghor that, in 1974, I created the Senegalese Democratic Party (PDS), the first legal opposition party in Africa, as theses at the Sorbonne attest. I must confess that, despite our political opposition, my relations with 4

5 Senghor were rather peaceful, nourished and maintained by mutual respect and a degree of intellectual bonding. A French technical assistant was quite right when he wrote, in substance, in his book on Senghor's party that, "Senghor and Wade are having a dialogue above their people's heads. They alone can understand what they are saying." That was a subtle warning to the hotheads on all sides, the sometimes overzealous militants who could have been tempted to take violent advantage of what they saw as a gulf between us, when, in fact, it was only a skilful political game that, as I have already said, could neither be played nor understood by everyone. Then, with the legal recognition of the PDS, the ballot box was opened to competition after over half a century of waiting. Of course, even within the framework of a recognized and institutionalized democracy, many pitfalls often lie on the road leading to the effective functioning of the system because, over and above the legal texts, democracy is first and foremost a state of mind. As a result, democracy often implies, especially in Africa, that there is a physical price to be paid for the peaceful conquest of power. I, personally, believe that this price should never be the sacrifice of human lives, especially those of young people, the intrepid youth, to the ambition of adults. On a variety of occasions, when uncommonly massive popular demonstrations gave me the opportunity to seize power, I expressed these sentiments in the following words: I shall never walk over dead bodies to get to the Palace. At such times, when I turned my back on the people power which put power within my grasp, I had to face my fervent admirers, some of whom would go into a trance-like state of anger and disappointment. I have also been sent to prison a couple of times. I say this, without bitterness and anger, simply as a historical fact. In the search for the social peace without which there can be no development, I believe that one should know how to forget. This is true for both individuals and whole peoples. My long option bore fruit the day after the 19 March 2000 elections when, only a few hours after the end of voting and well before the official declaration of the results, President Abdou Diouf, in order to forestall any adventurous initiatives on the part of some of his supporters bent on holding on to power at all costs, made the sublime gesture of calling me on the telephone and, using my affectionate and familiar pet name, said to me in substance:"ablaye, I know that you have won. I acknowledge your victory, and as soon as I finish talking to you, I shall call the press to announce it myself". That, at the time, this could only happen in Senegal is to the credit of our people who educated both of us in the same melting pot of the virtues of relativism, tolerance and patriotism. I and Diouf, virulent and determined adversaries up to the day before, became, from that moment, allies for social peace. History has given us sufficient proof that peace is not merely the absence of war. The absence of war is only the point of departure, a sine qua non. Peace is also the absence of unending polemics, violent verbal recriminations between individuals and between countries. Peace is a life of harmony, mutual respect and love. 5

6 It is true that we live in a period in which humanity is still tempted by the demons of violent confrontation, despite the lessons of the disastrous experience of the two World Wars. There is talk of the clash of civilizations as if this were inevitable. Although the course of history has produced dividing lines in the fields of economics, techniques and technology, these differences concern only the products of human activity and do not define the actual human essence. For each of these areas, the appropriate mechanisms can be used to reduce the gaps, an example being the Digital Solidarity Fund that has been launched in Africa to bridge the digital divide. These human products, as I was saying, should not serve as the pretexts for elevating the theory that differences are generated by the environment into a doctrine and dogma. Even the religions, with the differences that some people want to see as insurmountable, can co-exist perfectly in peace, as in the example provided by Senegal. I have already expanded on this idea, in May 2003 in front of Liberal International, under the title "Islam and the West, the Liberal Point of View". Let us ponder together the lesson that the late Amadou Hampathé Ba, the long-standing companion of UNESCO, learnt from his Master, Thierno Bocar, the Sage of Bandiagara in Mali: "What is needed is always to acknowledge that the other person possesses a portion of the truth, and not to say that the whole truth belongs to me, to my country, to my race... No, the whole truth is to be found nowhere. It cannot be apprehended because God alone is truth". François Fénélon, the French prelate, writer and humanist, professed likewise, warning against the destructive feeling of self-importance in these words: "A person without any education might consider himself educated because his ignorance is so great that he is not even capable of understanding what he lacks". So, to live in peace, let us begin by educating and training our children. Let us fight, by word and deed, preconceived ideas, clichés and simplistic concepts. As men and women of good will who have to share the same planet, let us give high priority to the peaceful resolution of disputes if we want to avoid again falling into the ruinous traps of the last century. I shall leave here with the conviction that the Prize awarded to me is, in addition to being a reward and an encouragement, an invitation to persevere in the quest for peace. And that is the solemn pledge that I make before you, fully aware of the fact that the quest for peace is a vocation. It is in this same spirit that I cherish the hope that Dakar can host a Summit on the Islamic-Christian Dialogue to which I will invite the leaders of the world to come in person to launch, to the present and future generations, a message of peace and tolerance whose carrier waves will be transmitted far and wide among peoples in order to strengthen the cultural matrix of a new civilization of peace in the course of time. Thank you for your cordial attention. 6

Award Ceremony of the Félix Houphouët-Boigny Peace Prize UNESCO, 21 September Address by Dr Mustafa Cerić Grand Mufti of Bosnia 2003 Prizewinner

ODG/CRP/2004/PI/3 UNESCO, Paris, September 2004 Original: English Award Ceremony of the Félix Houphouët-Boigny Peace Prize UNESCO, 21 September 2004 Address by Dr Mustafa Cerić Grand Mufti of Bosnia 2003