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The United Nations issued the following news release:
Following are UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson's remarks at the high-level opening on "Vienna+20: Achievements, Challenges and Perspectives", in Vienna, Austria, 27 June:
I will depart from my written notes and speak freely after some reflections on the introductions given by my fellow panellists.
I would first like to take you back to 1993. In spite of what Salil [Shetty]'s press statement said about the awaiting disaster, I would say there was a lot of hope, a lot of anticipation in 1993 because the world had changed so drastically, as we all recall. We had seen the end of the Cold War, the Wall had tumbled down in this neighbourhood and, remember, apartheid had been abolished. And here I can't refrain from saying that this was thanks to the determined, wise and visionary leadership of a person who is in our thoughts and prayers right at this moment, Nelson Mandela.
So, there were the anticipations, the new world we were going to create and it was in this spirit 7,000 people met here. But, let us also remember, there are valleys and there are mountains we had horrible conflicts, atrocities taking place about a couple of hundred kilometres away from here, in the Balkans.
I was, myself, Emergency Relief Coordinator in the United Nations and Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs I saw the worst things I had ever seen in my life in Somalia. We were involved in the horrible war in Angola at the time with huge and abhorrent abuses of human rights. And, let's remember, only a few years later, we saw genocide. We saw Srebrenica and we saw Rwanda. So this was a very important point possibility of a turning...
