Note to the Secretary-General

COMMENCEMENT DAY SPEECH AT MONTEREY INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

1. As agreed, I made the Commencement Day address at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California on 12 May 2001.

2. I enclose a copy of my speech for your information.

3. An abbreviated version of the speech was sent by the Monterey Institute to the International Herald Tribune and was published on Wednesday 23 May 2001 in that journal.

itha Dhanapala ,23 May 2001

f .. ADDRESS ON COMMENCEMENT DAY MONTEREY INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDIES BY JAYANTHA DHANAPALA UNDER-SECRETARY-GENERAL FOR DISARMAMENT , NEW YORK

12 MAY 2001

President Haskell, members of the Faculty, members of the graduating class of 2001, ladies and gentlemen,

To keep returning to Monterey is for me - and for my family - an opportunity to keep coming back to Shangrila - that unreal Eden-like world of natural beauty and idyllic, ageless innocence that James Eilton wrote of in his novel "Lost Horizon". To be invited to come back on this occasion to receive your Honorary Doctorate and be the Commencement Speaker is an even greater privilege and pleasure for which I am deeply grateful.

It is open season for commencement speakers throughout this great country as a new generation crosses the threshold, going out into the world of work and beginning their own unique journey through life equipped with the 2 academic training they have received in various Universities, Colleges and other institutions of learning. Precepts will be preached and platitudes will be pontificated from bully pulpits like this. For myself there is the cautionary advice of an old denizen of the Monterey region, John Steinbeck, who once wrote "No one wants advice, only corroboration"! There is also the proverb from the Spanish, who inhabited the Monterey Peninsula, until the mid nineteenth century, which says " Traveler there are no roads; roads are made by walking". And each of you will surely do your own walking.

But as we walk together along the shoreline road of the Monterey

Peninsula amidst the splendor of the green grass and the purple carpet of ice plant with the cypresses and red woods as silent sentinels watching over the sea otters, the Monarch butterflies and the birds frolic by the surging Pacific and the rugged Big Sur the question arises inexorably -for how long more ?

Respect and reverence for Nature was once the hallmark of traditional cultures like my own and that of the American Indians who held all living species and natural resources of this region in trust and bequeathed them to us

- the epigoni. Can our generation and those who come after us measure up to 3 being reliable trustees of tlie environment ? Sustainable development has been the global consensus policy from the 1972 first United Nations

Environmental Conference in Stockholm to the 1992 Rio UN Conference on

Environment and Development (UNCED) which yielded agreements on climate change, forests and bio-diversity and a policy framework. We now look towards the 2002 Earth Summit in Johannesburg next year confronting the unavoidable reckoning of progress achieved and failures registered.

Without doubt the 1987 Montreal Protocol has been a remarkable success eliminating ozone-depleting substances and reducing ultraviolet B radiation levels. The quadrupling of carbon emissions in the past 50 years has led to global warming and projected increases in average temperatures will certainly melt glaciers and polar ice caps, raise sea levels and threaten the drowning of millions living along coasts and low lying islands like the

Maldives in the Indian Ocean, not far from my own country .

Volatile weather patterns and weather-related disasters have increased. The implementation of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol is a vital element of a new global ethic of conservation and stewardship and a self-evidently pragmatic way to 4 preserve the sustainabiliiy of ecosystems plus half the jobs in the world that depend on them. Developing alternative and renewable sources of energy with energy-efficiency measures, rather than burning fossil fuels, can, for example solve California's energy crisis while preserving your glorious redwoods and Big Sur. We also need better water management strategies as freshwater consumption rises twice the rate of population growth and water tables fall alarmingly. In no area is the interdependent unity of humankind more obvious than in environmental protection. Our common responsibilities as inhabitants of the same planet must override the selfish pursuit of parochial prosperity. We can and must recognize this. We can and must act on this.

Looking across the vastness of the Pacific Ocean from Monterey we can only imagine the continent of Asia - my continent - which accounts for over half the six billion people in the world. Beyond lie other continents enriching the world, all together, with their natural diversity but marring it at the same time with great man- made disparities. In his Millennium Assembly

Report last year UN Secretary-General asked us to imagine the world as a village of 1000 persons. Here are some of the characteristics of this village:-

some 150 live in affluent areas, about 780 in poorer areas and another

70 in a transitional neighborhood.

Just 200 dispose of 86% of all the wealth while nearly half live on less

than $ 2 per day

220 villagers - 2/3 of them women - are illiterate

Fewer than 60 people own a computer, only 24 have access to the

Internet.

Finally over half in this global village have never made or received a

telephone call.

But there is good news in the village too.

We have succeeded in increasing life expectancy in developing countries 6 from 46 to 64 years; halved infant mortality rates; increased by more than

80% the proportion of children enrolled in primary school and doubled the access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. And yet sadly about 1.2 billion - 500 million in South Asia and 300 million in Africa - live on less than $ 1 per day. The world's leaders committed themselves in the historic

United Nations Millennium Declaration of last year to halve by the year 2015 the proportion of the worlds people living in absolute poverty lifting more than one billion people out of their current misery. It has been done already in 2 decades by 15 countries for 1.6 billion people.

Surely we can achieve our target as China has done with strong rates of economic growth; we can achieve our target through making the benefits of globalization reach all equitably generating opportunities especially for women and youth; we can achieve it through education with just $ 7 billion a year to provide primary education for 130 million children in the developing world. Next week the Third United Nations Conference on the Least

Developed countries will be held in Brussels and the industrialised countries will be called upon to provide quota and duty free access for all exports from 7 the 49 poorest countries of the world; an enhanced programme of debt relief

and a generous official development assistance (ODA) which is today at

0.24% of the GNP of OECD countries in comparison to the agreed figure of

0.7%. This is a beginning in which all of us must take part. Poverty reduction is a human development goal; a central challenge in human rights and a security imperative.

We had assumed, all too complacently, that the world would be a safer place since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 symbolizing the end of the Cold War.

Today we actually live in a world where we still have over 30,000 nuclear warheads most of them at frightening levels of alert -

a world where two more countries have crossed the nuclear threshold

openly detonating nuclear devices.

where conventional weapons, with the so called "revolution in military

affairs", have assumed new levels of accuracy and lethality . 8 • w1 ere over 500 million small arms and light weapons circulate - some of

them in the hands of about 300,000 child soldiers - feeding and

intensifying conflicts around the world and

• where at current levels of global military expenditure we are at 90% of the

cold war zenith.

An insatiable drive for military dominance not only on earth but in hitherto non weaponized space is fueled by the military-industrial complex.

In other countries arms races push military expenditure higher and higher.

Forty years ago an army general elected President in this country said

"Disarmament with mutual honour and confidence is a continuing imperative.

Together we must learn how to compose differences not with arms but with intellect and decent purpose". That was Dwight D. Eisenhower whom I had the privilege of meeting on my first visit to the USA as a young man of 18.

Every State has a UN Charter ordained right to self defence. But if national defence plans imperil strategic stability and create insecurity in other states we need to pause and engage in consultations rebuilding confidence. Only 9 then can we build a common and co-operative security upholding the norms of disarmament treaties and conventions reinforcing the rule of international law and investing the law- abiding with the moral authority to enforce compliance on the outlaws. Bilateral and multilateral negotiations on weapons of mass destruction are at a standstill except in where a

Protocol is being negotiated to strengthen the Biological Weapons

Convention. They need to be jump started. We can no longer insist that weapons in some hands are legitimate and stablizing but in other hands are wrong and destabilizing.

. Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen I have dwelt on three themes - environmental protection, poverty reduction and disarmament. All three are interlinked in helping to preserve our world for the future - a world whose beauty surrounds us here in Monterey. Happily it is also in Monterey - at the

Monterey Institute of International Studies - that all three issues, together with business, trade and commerce, are taught to students inculcating in them the values of multilateralism in an increasingly globalized world. Your faculty have created internationally-recognized centres of excellence, 10 buttressed by a strong foreign language teaching programme, engaging the

United Nations and other international organizations, Governments and civil society institutions in a common endeavour to improve the world we live in.

It is a world more connected than ever before. Your graduating class alone has 35 nationalities. It is a world where every nation is the most indispensable nation and where no unilateralism or exceptionalism is possible. It is a world where every human being is the most indispensable person. Those are invioleble principles enshrined in the Charter of the United

Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Let no person, no policy, no realpolitik put these asunder.

Let me conclude therefore not by advising you but rather by corroborating what you had already known from another great traveller who tarried a while in Monterey - Robert Louis Stevenson - who wrote in 1881

(120 years ago) "To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour". May your journeys therefore be both hopeful and successful both as good world citizens and as citizens of your own countries ! 11 I wish you Godspeed and good luck!

Jayantha Dhanapala is a former Ambassador of Sri Lanka to the U.S.A. and is currently the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs. This address was made in his personal capacity.