In Chicago on the evening of 31 January 2002 Mark Bruzonsky, Publisher of MER, gave the keynote address at the University of Chicago Model United Nations. The Palmer House Hilton Ballroom was full with more than 2500 persons for the opening session - standing room only. For the first time in the history of the keynote talks at this annual event the speaker received a prolonged standing ovation. "This has never happened before", said the conference organizer. The speech by Mark Bruzonsky as follows:
Thank you especially as I am well aware my name is not Mary Robinson, or Ramsey Clark, or Ralph Nader, and that few of you may have heard my name before this evening.
Indeed, in past years usually persons working for or with the UN in one way or another have spoken to this forum. And they have usually focused on the UN system itself, human rights issues, and very frankly matters not very controversial; some might even say "safe".
But in many ways, including psychologically, the world of the roaring 90s -- which is all most of you have directly experienced in your own lives until lately -- also crashed on 11 Sept. And I expect there are other crashes of various kinds now ahead of us all - is with these responsibilities and this new situation in mind that I have chosen to diverge from the "safe" subjects and deal with issues that will be crucial for your futures, and for our country's future, and for our entire world's future.
This evening I want to speak with you not about general human rights but about specific political and economic rights; not about the successes of the United Nations but about its failures and the great challenges it now faces.
And most of all I want to speak with you about the subject I personally know best and first-hand from over 150 visits to the Middle East region and 30 years of conferences and relationships since I was a student like you - about the "Middle East Peace Process" and why it has exploded in an orgy of even greater violence and despair than when it began.
Most of the human rights problems in our world really have deep political, economic and territorial roots. Basic issues of power and wealth are involved, both at the national and international level. How we structure our society, and who is really in control and why, are the truly crucial issues too often not truly discussed?
The most challenging and basic issue of all is how our world's resources are owned and controlled and distributed, because this is what determines crucial things like how people are fed and clothed.
In the wake of World War II the victorious powers created the United Nations, just as they had created the League of Nations after the previous "War To End All Wars", then renamed World War I. The UN quickly became a world forum that in one way or another had to be. But it did not have to evolve as it has.
For today's UN has not lived up to either the dream or the promise of its founders. Most of all it has not fulfilled its primary responsibility to achieve the kind of independence, credibility, and assertiveness on behalf of all of the people on Planet Earth, rather than on behalf of those most powerful and wealthy.
* There have been far too many major Security Council and General Assembly resolutions that have gone unheeded, unenforced, in many cases unremembered.
* The major powers, especially the United States, have manipulated and cowered the UN from despair - the UN should by now have far more seriously addressed this major dilemma in far more assertive and potent ways.
* There is an unprecedented environmental catastrophe looming. Projections from UN bodies warn that in the lifetime of most in this room our planet could experience unprecedented environmental change including as much as a 10 degree temperature rise leading to calamity on a tremendous scale.
* The international arms race is terribly out of control, propelled in fact by the very powers in charge of the UN through the Security Council - an international military-industrial complex is fueling future warfare and potential
Armageddon.
* And even if these terrible weapons of mass annihilation are controlled and never actually used human kind is squandering the best of its talent and wealth building ever new generations of ever more frightful weapons; rather than schools and hospitals and food for all.
* Nor has the UN and its many agencies properly prepared to seriously fight international disease and starvation - two plaques now ravaging the African continent and threatening much of humanity.
By now you may have realized that I have not included any jokes or one-liners to enliven my talk with you this evening. Frankly, the situation we are all now in is simply too dangerous and too tragic for jokes or for pointing
fingers at individual political personalities.
What we need urgently to do is to focus our greatest attention on the big political and economic issues and institutions - and to find ways to restructure and manage them for the common good. That in fact was the original United Nations vision and dream. That is what you are challenged to be discussing, debating, and learning from each other about for the next three very intense days.
We need to focus on eeking to provide some protection for the Palestinian people, whom it declared way back in 1947 should have a state of their own immediately.
Indeed, let me turn directly now to that most controversial of issues, the one the UN itself midwifed, and the one the UN has spent more time and energy and anguish dealing with than any other.
Of course I am referring to the situation in what many still call "The Holy Land", the area that was Palestine until 1947, the area now called Israel and the "occupied territories".
It is this very region which also has given birth to modern-day "terrorism", to airplane hijackings, suicide bombings, truck bombs, and political kidnapping. And today, because of the past wrongs for which the United Nations and the United States are considerably responsible, it is now more fractured and divided and blood-soaked than it has been since Biblical days and then the period of der these great issues for myself.
Now, more than 25 years later, when I have personally been so lucky to have had such opportunities, what I have to try to do is squeeze these 25 years into less than 25 minutes - now half gone already!
All I can realistically do in the next few moments is share with you my own conclusions; and then encourage you to start reaching your own. And in fact in just a few minutes when I have finished, I encourage you to start with the most difficult and important questions you can come up with to ask of me.
Today the situation in the Middle East is immensely worse than when I represented the International Student Movement for the United Nations at UN Headquarters for three years. It has been made worse precisely by the "Middle East Peace Process". And the basic reason is that all along rather than a true peace process it has been, and it is, a domination and subjugation anitness to the truth. Far from bringing peace [the agreement] will bring greater suffering for Palestinians and an assured threat to the Israeli people.. Every leader involved with the Oslo peace process - Palestinian, Israeli, American or European - has acted without principles and without anything remotely resembling vision and truthfulness. Worse, large droves of intellectuals, scholars and
experts have betrayed their vocations, to say nothing of their expertise and knowledge, and this betrayal has contributed to the amazingly compliant attitude of the American media in particular, who have celebrated, extolled, saluted and rejoiced, where there has been neither occasion nor cause to justify such excessive handclapping and jubilation."
If you had invited DR. EYAD SARRAJ - Dr. Sarraj, a distinguished Palestinian, who has his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard by the way, made these remarks at a Georgetown University forum:
rview with me also five years ago now, long before recent events proved him right:
"I put 'peace process' in quotation marks when I write about it in my newspaper, it is an American statement, it is definitely not a Middle Eastern statement. All one can say about the 'Peace Process' now is that it is dead,
it is finished, it is over, and the most remarkable thing I find in coming now to the States is the degree to which people do not realize that. I have to live the reality of the Middle East and I have not met anyone in the past two to three months including those who originally, wrongly in my view, believed it would work who does not now believe that it is dead, and finished completely."
If you had invited HAIDAR ABDUL-SHAFI - a most distinguished secular Palestinian who was Chairman of the Palestinian Delegation at the Madrid Conference and all subsequent international negotiations until Oslo - e career at the Yale University Law School. And yes, here too, no one would publish these views in the USA, the first time in his life Professor Black could not find a publisher for his essay about the US, Israel, and the Palestinians:
"They are imprisoned under obscene conditions, after kangaroo trials, or no trials at all. They are regularly shot at; enough of them are killed to make death ever-present. Many are maimed; many are disfigured for life. Yet they come out in the streets again and again, these young people. What name shall we give to the trait of character that produces conduct like that? Why do you hesitate? You know what the word is. Do you hesitate because that word just never happens to be spoken in American in application to these young Palestinians people? Or is it because you fear that a revolution in your thought and feeling will have to follow your pronouncing the word? Well, you'rth invoke God and use the loose millenarian currency of good and evil as their terms of reference. Both are engaged in unequivocal political crimes. Both are dangerously armed - one with the nuclear arsenal of the obscenely powerful, the other with the incandescent, destructive power of the utterly hopeless. The important thing to keep in mind is that neither is an acceptable alternative to the other."
"With all due respect to President Bush, the people of the world do not have to choose between the Taliban and the US government. All the beauty of human civilisation - our art, our music, our literature - lies beyond these two fundamentalist, ideological poles. There is as little chance that the people of the world can all become middle-class consumers as there is that they will all embrace any one particular religion. The issue is not about good v. evil or Islam v. Christianity as much as it is about space.
Most of these people truly desire
To harvest their olive trees
As they have for hundreds of years.
Most of these people truly desire
To raise their kids
Not to throw stones
Or Molotov cocktails;
But to study in peace
To Play in peace
And raise a flag.
A flag.
Their own flag.
And facing that flag, to cry,
As we did, that night, then, excited as we were.
And we have no, have no, have no
Right in the world
To rob them of this desire,
This flag, These tears,
These tears which always, always
Come after all the others.
Let us start preparing our defence.
We will need it soon enough;
Those who actually did it.
And those who still do.
And those who hushed it up
And those who still do.
And those who said nothing
And those who clucked their legs.
Of the old water carrier
Whom soldiers ordered off his donkey
And role on his back, just for fun.
We turned a deaf ear.
We turned a deaf heart.
Mean, arrogant, and dumb.
Who do we think we are
To be so deaf, so dump?
Ignoring the obvious:
They are as human
As we are, as we are.
At least as we used to be.
Only forty one years ago.
No less diligent, no less smart
As sensitive, as full of hope.
They love their wives and children
As we do, no less.
And our children now shoot theirs
With lead, plastic bullets, and gas.
The Palestinians State will come to pass, it will.
Not a poet wrote this. History will.
And seasons will come and seasons will go
And life goes on as we very well know.
Weddings and birth and death all the same.
But just the shame of it. The shame.
Thank you again so very much for inviting me and for so politely listening to me. Now it is your turn.
