Kofi Annan Accepts Nobel Peace Prize

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan collected this year’s Nobel Peace Prize here Monday, with the declaration that nondemocratic governments are a menace to the world.

“The lesson of the past century has been that where the dignity of the individual has been trampled or threatened--where citizens have not enjoyed the basic right to choose their government or the right to change it regularly--conflict has too often followed, with innocent civilians paying the price,” Annan told an elite audience gathered in the mural-decorated auditorium of Oslo City Hall.

“The sovereignty of states must no longer be used as a shield for gross violations of human rights,” Annan said in his typical soft-spoken tone, belying the sharpness of his words. “When states undermine the rule of law and violate the rights of individual citizens, they become a menace not only to their own people, but also to their neighbors, and indeed the world.”

Many members of the United Nations, particularly China, have long dismissed complaints about human rights violations and lack of democracy as improper interference in their internal affairs.

But Annan rejected that argument, insisting that “no walls can separate humanitarian or human rights crises in one part of the world from national security crises in another.”

One hundred years after the prize was inaugurated, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded this year’s $950,000 prize in two equal portions to Annan as an individual and the United Nations as an organization. President of the General Assembly Han Seung Soo, South Korea’s foreign minister, represented the agency at the event.

The committee said Annan, at the helm of the U.N. since 1997, “has risen to such new challenges as HIV/AIDS and international terrorism.” It praised his unwillingness to accept sovereignty as a defense against human rights violations.

The committee has made it clear that in the future it will probably place even greater emphasis on support for democratic change.

“Democracies rarely, if ever, go to war against each other,” committee Chairman Gunnar Berge said.

On Saturday, in a speech to a gathering of former Nobel peace laureates and international scholars, Nobel Institute director Geir Lundestad declared that with “almost half the world’s population . . . living under more or less authoritarian rule, the committee will undoubtedly continue to focus on democracy and human rights.”

“China will be the most burning question, since it alone has almost half of the population under such rule,” Lundestad said. “Sooner rather than later the committee should speak . . . against the regime in Beijing, despite the improvements that have been made in recent decades.”

Annan built his speech around the image of a single baby girl born in Afghanistan on Monday.

“Her mother will hold her and feed her, comfort her and care for her--just as any mother would anywhere in the world. In these most basic acts of human nature, humanity knows no divisions,” Annan said. “But to be born a girl in today’s Afghanistan is to begin life centuries away from the prosperity that one small part of humanity has achieved. It is to live under conditions that many of us in this hall would consider inhuman.”

Whether that baby Afghan girl lives or dies “is just one test of our common humanity, of our belief in our individual responsibility for our fellow men and women,” Annan said.

“But it is the only test that matters. Remember this girl, and then our larger aims--to fight poverty, prevent conflict and cure disease--will not seem distant or impossible.”