OPENING SPEECH
Ladies and gentlemen, good evening. I think I’m here because I’m the Brit and this is happening in London, so you’ll have to forgive me. And some of you will have to forgive me even more because you thought that as of about a month ago you’d seen the last of me and you wouldn’t have to listen to me again. For those of you who don’t know, I in fact left Geneva, I think just a four and a bit weeks ago, with considerable sorrow. Tina and I were very happy there; after innumerable, wonderful farewells and many, many speeches I didn’t expect to find myself doing this. But Robert, I thank you for giving me the honor to invite you all, to welcome you all here to the Time for Peace Gala. I’ve already said that I feel that I am a bit of a fraud, but it’s very nice for Tina and I to be among very good friends; and we do feel rather honored to be in an area and in a milieu where we are not normally and with people we are not normally familiar. We are learning an awful lot and it’s a great pleasure to meet those of you in the cinema industry (if I am using the right terminology here tonight).
My job is to open the proceedings, but I thought I would just say a couple of words about what happens in Geneva. Time for Peace is an event which has been designed to fit in well with what happens in Geneva, and what happens in Geneva is not very well known. You all learn about the United Nations, mostly from your newspapers and your TV screens, and you hear about the squabbles and the wrangles in New York, mostly in the Security Council where some of us (I know I better say it than someone jumps up and says it) are better represented than others or at least more regularly represented than others. But in Geneva there’s a great deal of very important work done and it is done quietly in much the same way as Robert works with the Time for Peace ceremonies and awards. It’s done quietly; it’s done by a lot of very serious people.
As we sit here we’ve got new problems, man made and made by nature. We’ve had a dreadful cyclone in Myanmar where the U.N. and the international community are trying to get aid into the people who’ve been affected. We’ve also got the recurring tragedy of what is happening in Lebanon. In both those instances there are organizations based in Geneva who are doing an enormous amount of good work, actually leading the efforts to get aid into the people who are suffering on the ground. I won’t put them in order, but you’ve got the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees; we are honored here tonight to have the Ambassador from the Netherlands who is the current chairman of the Executive Council which runs the UNHCR. They are very active, particularly in Myanmar. You’ve got the International Committee of the Red Cross-- unsung heroes. They go to places where nobody else goes. They are there in Myanmar, they’re in Darfur, and they’re in all the nasty places where the rest of us, including the U.N., don’t go. You’ve got the human rights organizations and there it’s the job of the international community to keep the pressure up on those who are not behaving in the way in which they should behave in the view of most of us, vis-à-vis their own populations. Lots of things happen in Geneva; I thought it right to just mention that now in such distinguished company because it’s not very well known. Most of what happens in the United Nations tends to be somewhat contentious from what you see in your newspapers, but the U.N. is the sum of its parts. The United Nations belongs to and is the sum of its member states. If it’s not working properly, it’s not actually accurate to blame the U.N. More you need to just consider what the member states, the owners of the organization, the board of directors are actually doing. In Geneva, it works pretty well. There, a lot of very good work is being done and a lot of good work is being done in the context of the Time for Peace Awards by Robert and Marion. I would like to pay tribute to them. I think, Robert, the next thing that is going to happen is that one of your sponsors is going to come up here and follow my little ice-breaker. So ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much indeed for your attention. I’d like to handover to the next on Robert’s list. Thank you.