Acceptance speech Gareth Evans

Acceptance Remarks by Gareth Evans, Presentation of Four Freedoms Award for Freedom from Fear, Roosevelt Stichting, Middelburg, Netherlands, 29 May 2010

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This is a great occasion, celebrating as it does the lasting contributions to human dignity and our common humanity of two of the greatest humanitarian internationalists who ever lived, and I am delighted, proud and grateful to be part of it.

The experiences of our youth sear us all and often determine the course we take in the rest of our lives. And two such experiences help explain why I am standing here today.

The first was in Cambodia, back in the late 1960s. I travelled for many months through Asia on my way to study in England I met and became friends with scores of my contemporaries, a great many of whom I kept in touch with in later life. But in Cambodia, of all those young students with whom I drank beer or ate noodles or shared wild countryside bus rides, I never saw any of them again -- or even anyone like them. The reason is harrowingly simple: none of them survived the Khmer Rouge genocide. They were executed outright as middle-class intellectuals, or worked or starved to death in the fields.

With the concept of “the responsibility to protect” to which I helped give birth I think we have now reached an international consensus -- that never again do any of us want to look back at another mass atrocity catastrophe, like Cambodia, or Rwanda, or Bosnia or more recently Darfur or Sri Lanka, and have to say to ourselves, with a mixture of anger, incomprehension and shame, how could we have let this happen again.

But getting the UN to agree on broad principles is of course only a starting point. As future such terrible cases arise in the future, as they surely will, we will have a huge job to fully implement the responsibility to protect in practice, with effective civil and military preparation, prevention and reaction. But do this we must, for -- as both Roosevelts would have insisted -- our common humanity demands no less.

My other really formative experience as a young man was visiting Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the early 1960s, in my first ever trip outside Australia. I have felt passionately ever since about our common responsibility to ensure that the most indiscriminately inhumane weapons ever invented should never again be used on our fellow human beings. When Franklin Roosevelt defined “freedom from fear” in 1941, he focused squarely on global disarmament as the central issue, and we can be sure he would have made the point even more strongly had he known then what the nuclear weapons age would bring.

In recent times I have been trying to give that commitment substance as co-chair of the Australia and Japan-sponsored International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament. This Commission’s report, published last December, sets out a very practical agenda for global policymakers for the years and decades ahead -- starting right now, in 2010, which I fear is going to be a make-or-break watershed year for the whole nuclear project.

Or course for many vulnerable populations around the world the most immediate fear is not so much nuclear holocaust or genocide, but the horror of war and civil war more generally.

Here I think we can be just a tiny bit optimistic, and I say this after years of intense work in various capacities on general conflict prevention and resolution.The good news, counter-intuitive as it may seem, is that for all the many things that continue to go wrong - not least in Africa and West Asia -- there are many things now going right.

Since the end of the Cold War, there has in fact been close to an 80 per cent decline in the number of wars, and number of people dying violent deaths in such wars. And that is attributable, more than anything else, to the huge upsurge of commitment -- through the UN and elsewhere -- to conflict prevention, to negotiated conflict resolution, to transitional peacekeeping, and to effective post-conflict peacebuilding to ensure that the whole weary and ugly cycle of violence does not repeat itself.

To be an optimist about anything in international affairs is to run a strong risk of being branded ignorant, incorrigibly naïve or outright demented. But I am an optimist about our capacity to learn something from the past and not repeat its most awful mistakes in all the areas I have mentioned.

It is crucial in this respect that the world, and particularly the younger generation, have examples before it of people and institutions who remained optimists, naïve or otherwise, and have made a real difference. Very few of us -- and I certainly put myself in that category -- can claim to have achieved even a fraction of what Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt did to rid the world of fear and want. But I feel immeasurably proud to be linked with their names, and to those of my fellow awardees over the years, as one who has at least tried hard to implement their magnificent vision.