[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book I)]
[June 26, 1995]
[Pages 947-951]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks on the 50th Anniversary of the United Nations Charter
in San Francisco, California
June 26, 1995

    Thank you very much. Secretary Christopher, Mr. Secretary-General, 
Ambassador Albright, Bishop Tutu. My good friend Maya Angelou, thank you 
for your magnificent poem. Delegates to the Charter Conference, 
distinguished members of the diplomatic corps, the President of Poland, 
Members of Congress, honored guests, Mayor Jordan, Mr. Shorenstein, 
people of San Francisco, and friends of the United Nations: The 800 
delegates from 50 nations who came here 50 years ago to lift the world 
from the ashes of war and bring life to the dreams of peacemakers 
included both giants of diplomacy and untested leaders of infant 
nations. They were separated by tradition, race, and language, sharing 
only a vision of a better, safer future. On this day 50 years ago, the 
dream President Roosevelt did not live to see of a democratic 
organization of the world was launched.
    The charter the delegates signed reflected the harsh lessons of 
their experience, the experience of the thirties in which the world 
watched and reacted too slowly to fascist aggression, bringing millions 
sacrificed on the battlefields and millions more murdered in the death 
chambers. Those who had gone through this and the Second World War knew 
that celebrating victory was not enough, that merely punishing the enemy 
was self-defeating, that instead the world needed an effective and 
permanent system to promote peace and freedom for everyone.
    Some of those who worked at that historic conference are still here 
today, including our own Senator Claiborne Pell, who to this very day, 
every day, carries a copy of the U.N. Charter in his pocket. I would 
last like to ask all of the delegates to the original conference who are 
here today to rise and be recognized. Would you please stand? [Applause]
    San Francisco gave the world renewed confidence and hope for the 
future. On that day President Truman said, ``This is proof that nations, 
like men, can state their differences, can face them, and then can find 
common ground on which to stand.'' Five decades later, we see how very 
much the world has changed. The cold war has given way to freedom and 
cooperation. On this very day, a Russian spacecraft and an American 
spacecraft are preparing to link in orbit some 240 miles above the 
Earth. From Jericho to Belfast, ancient enemies are searching together 
for peace. On every continent, nations are struggling to embrace 
democracy, freedom, and prosperity. New technologies move people and 
ideas around the world, creating vast new reservoirs of opportunity.
    Yet we know that these new forces of integration also carry within 
them the seeds of disintegration and destruction. New technologies and 
greater openness make all our borders more vulnerable to terrorists, to 
dangerous weapons, to drug traffickers. Newly independent nations offer 
ripe targets for international criminals and

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nuclear smugglers. Fluid capital markets make it easier for nations to 
build up their economies but also make it much easier for one nation's 
troubles first to be exaggerated, then to spread to other nations.
    Today, to be sure, we face no Hitler, no Stalin, but we do have 
enemies, enemies who share their contempt for human life and human 
dignity and the rule of law, enemies who put lethal technology to lethal 
use, who seek personal gains in age-old conflicts and new divisions.
    Our generation's enemies are the terrorists and their outlaw nation 
sponsors, people who kill children or turn them into orphans, people who 
target innocent people in order to prevent peace, people who attack 
peacemakers, as our friend President Mubarak was attacked just a few 
hours ago, people who in the name of nationalism slaughter those of 
different faiths or tribes and drive their survivors from their own 
homelands. Their reach is increased by technology. Their communication 
is abetted by global media. Their actions reveal the age-old lack of 
conscience, scruples, and morality which have characterized the forces 
of destruction throughout history.
    Today, the threat to our security is not in an enemy silo but in the 
briefcase or the car bomb of a terrorist. Our enemies are also 
international criminals and drug traffickers who threaten the stability 
of new democracies and the future of our children. Our enemies are the 
forces of natural destruction, encroaching deserts that threaten the 
Earth's balance, famines that test the human spirit, deadly new diseases 
that endanger whole societies.
    So, my friends, in this increasingly interdependent world, we have 
more common opportunities and more common enemies than ever before. It 
is, therefore, in our interest to face them together as partners, 
sharing the burdens and costs and increasing our chances of success.
    Just months before his death, President Roosevelt said, ``We have 
learned that we cannot live alone at peace, that our own well-being is 
dependent on the well-being of other nations far away.'' Today, more 
than ever, those words ring true. Yet some here in our own country, 
where the United Nations was founded, dismissed Roosevelt's wisdom. Some 
of them acknowledge that the United States must play a strong role 
overseas but refuse to supply the nonmilitary resources our Nation needs 
to carry on its responsibilities. Others believe that outside our border 
America should only act alone.
    Well, of course the United States must be prepared to act alone when 
necessary, but we dare not ignore the benefits that coalitions bring to 
this Nation. We dare not reject decades of bipartisan wisdom. We dare 
not reject decades of bipartisan support for international cooperation. 
Those who would do so, these new isolationists, dismiss 50 years of hard 
evidence.
    In those years we've seen the United Nations compile a remarkable 
record of progress that advances our Nation's interest and, indeed, the 
interest of people everywhere. From President Truman in Korea to 
President Bush in the Persian Gulf, America has built United Nations 
military coalitions to contain aggressors. U.N. forces also often pick 
up where United States troops have taken the lead.
    As the Secretary of State said, we saw it just yesterday, when Haiti 
held parliamentary and local elections with the help of U.N. personnel. 
We saw the U.N. work in partnership with the United States and the 
people of Haiti, as they labor to create a democracy. And they have now 
been given a second chance to renew that promise.
    On every continent, the United Nations has played a vital role in 
making people more free and more secure. For decades, the U.N. fought to 
isolate South Africa, as that regime perpetuated apartheid. Last year, 
under the watchful eyes of U.N. observers, millions of South Africans 
who had been disenfranchised for life cast their first votes for 
freedom.
    In Namibia, Mozambique, and soon we hope in Angola, the United 
Nations is helping people to bury decades of civil strife and turn their 
energies into building new democratic nations. In Cambodia, where a 
brutal regime left more than one million dead in the killing fields, the 
U.N. helped hundreds of thousands of refugees return to their native 
land and stood watch over democratic elections that brought 90 percent 
of the people to the polls. In El Salvador, the U.N. brokered an end to 
12 years of bloody civil war and stayed on to help reform the army, 
bring justice to the citizens, and open the doors of democracy.
    From the Persian Gulf to the Caribbean, U.N. economic and political 
sanctions have proved to be a valuable means short of military action to 
isolate regimes and to make aggressors and terrorists pay at least a 
price for their actions:

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in Iraq, to help stop that nation from developing weapons of mass 
destruction or threatening its neighbors again; in the Balkans, to 
isolate aggressors; in North Africa, to pressure Libya to turn over for 
trial those indicted in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103.
    The record of the United Nations includes a proud battle for child 
survival and against human suffering and disease of all kinds. Every 
year, UNICEF oral vaccines save the lives of 3 million children. Last 
year alone the World Food Program, using the contributions of many 
governments including our own, fed 57 million hungry people. The World 
Health Organization has eliminated smallpox from the face of the Earth 
and is making great strides in its campaign to eliminate polio by the 
year 2000. It has helped to contain fatal diseases like the Ebola virus 
that could have threatened an entire continent.
    To millions around the world, the United Nations is not what we see 
on our news programs at night. Instead it's the meal that keeps a child 
from going to bed hungry, the knowledge that helps a farmer coax strong 
crops from hard land, the shelter that keeps a family together when 
they're displaced by war or natural disasters.
    In the last 50 years, these remarkable stories have been too 
obscured and the capacity of the United Nations to act too limited by 
the cold war. As colonial rule broke down, differences between 
developing and industrialized nations and regional rivalries added new 
tensions to the United Nations so that too often there was too much 
invective and too little debate in the General Assembly.
    But now the end of the cold war, the strong trend toward democratic 
ideals among all nations, the emergence of so many problems that can 
best be met by collective action, all these things enable the United 
Nations at this 50-year point finally to fulfill the promise of its 
founders.
    But if we want the U.N. to do so, we must face the fact that for all 
its successes and all its possibilities, it does not work as well as it 
should. The United Nations must be reformed. In this age of relentless 
change, successful governments and corporations are constantly reducing 
their bureaucracies, setting clearer priorities, focusing on targeted 
results. In the United States we have eliminated hundreds of programs, 
thousands of regulations. We're reducing our Government to its smallest 
size since President Kennedy served here, while increasing our efforts 
in areas most critical to our future. The U.N. must take similar steps.
    Over the years it has grown too bloated, too often encouraging 
duplication, and spending resources on meetings rather than results. As 
its board of directors, all of us, we, the member states, must create a 
U.N. that is more flexible, that operates more rapidly, that wastes less 
and produces more, and most importantly, that inspires confidence among 
our governments and our people. In the last few years we have seen some 
good reforms: a new oversight office to hold down costs, a new system to 
review personnel, a start toward modernization and privatization. But we 
must do more.
    The United Nations supports the proposal of the President of the 
General Assembly, Mr. Essy, who spoke so eloquently here earlier this 
morning, to prepare a blueprint for renewing the U.N. and to approve it 
before the 50th General Assembly finishes its work next fall.
    We must consider major structural changes. The United Nations simply 
does not need a separate agency with its own acronym, stationery, and 
bureaucracy for every problem. The new U.N. must peel off what doesn't 
work and get behind what will.
    We must also realize, in particular, the limits to peacekeeping and 
not ask the Blue Helmets to undertake missions they cannot be expected 
to handle. Peacekeeping can only succeed when the parties to a conflict 
understand they cannot profit from war. We have too often asked our 
peacekeepers to work miracles while denying them the military and 
political support required and the modern command-and-control systems 
they need to do their job as safely and effectively as possible. Today's 
U.N. must be ready to handle tomorrow's challenges. Those of us who most 
respect the U.N. must lead the charge of reform.
    Not all the critics of today's United Nations are isolationists. 
Many are supporters who gladly would pay for the U.N.'s essential work 
if they were convinced their money was being well-spent. But I pledge to 
all of you, as we work together to improve the United Nations, I will 
continue to work to see that the United States takes the lead in paying 
its fair share of our common load.
    Meanwhile, we must all remember that the United Nations is a 
reflection of the world it represents. Therefore, it will remain far 
from

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perfect. It will not be able to solve all problems. But even those it 
cannot solve, it may well be able to limit in terms of the scope and 
reach of the problem, and it may well be able to limit the loss of human 
life until the time for solution comes.
    So just as withdrawing from the world is impossible, turning our 
backs on the U.N. is no solution. It would be shortsighted and self-
destructive. It would strengthen the forces of global disintegration. It 
would threaten the security, the interest, and the values of the 
American people. So I say especially to the opponents of the United 
Nations here in the United States, turning our back on the U.N. and 
going it alone will lead to far more economic, political, and military 
burdens on our people in the future and would ignore the lessons of our 
own history.
    Instead, on this 50th anniversary of the charter signing, let us 
renew our vow to live together as good neighbors. And let us agree on a 
new United Nations agenda to increase confidence and ensure support for 
the United Nations, and to advance peace and prosperity for the next 50 
years.
    First and foremost, the U.N. must strengthen its efforts to isolate 
states and people who traffic in terror and support those who continue 
to take risks for peace in the face of violence. The bombing in Oklahoma 
City, the deadly gas attack in Tokyo, the struggles to establish peace 
in the Middle East and in Northern Ireland, all of these things remind 
us that we must stand against terror and support those who move away 
from it. Recent discoveries of laboratories working to produce 
biological weapons for terrorists demonstrate the dangerous link between 
terrorism and the weapons of mass destruction.
    In 1937, President Roosevelt called for a quarantine against 
aggressions, to keep the infection of fascism from seeping into the 
bloodstream of humanity. Today, we should quarantine the terrorists, the 
terrorist groups, and the nations that support terrorism. Where nations 
and groups honestly seek to reform, to change, to move away from the 
killing of innocents, we should support them. But when they are 
unrepentant in the delivery of death, we should stand tall against them. 
My friends, there is no easy way around the hard question: If nations 
and groups are not willing to move away from the delivery of death, we 
should put aside short-term profits for the people in our countries to 
stop, stop, stop their conduct.
    Second, the U.N. must continue our efforts to stem the proliferation 
of weapons of mass destruction. There are some things nations can do on 
their own. The U.S. and Russia today are destroying our nuclear arsenals 
rapidly, but the U.N. must also play a role. We were honored to help 
secure an indefinite extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty 
under U.N. auspices. We rely on U.N. agencies to monitor nations bent on 
acquiring nuclear capabilities. We must work together on the Chemical 
Weapons Convention. We must strengthen our common efforts to fight 
biological weapons. We must do everything we can to limit the spread of 
fissile materials. We must work on conventional weapons like the land 
mines that are the curse of children the world over. And we must 
complete a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty.
    Third, we must support through the United Nations the fight against 
manmade and natural forces of disintegration, from crime syndicates and 
drug cartels to new diseases and disappearing forests. These enemies are 
elusive; they cross borders at will. Nations can and must oppose them 
alone. But we know, and the Cairo conference reaffirmed, that the most 
effective opposition requires strong international cooperation and 
mutual support.
    Fourth, we must reaffirm our commitment to strengthen U.N. 
peacekeeping as an important tool for deterring, containing, and ending 
violent conflict. The U.N. can never be an absolute guarantor of peace, 
but it can reduce human suffering and advance the odds of peace.
    Fifth--you may clap for that. [Applause] Fifth, we must continue 
what is too often the least noticed of the U.N.'s missions, its 
unmatched efforts on the frontlines of the battle for child survival and 
against disease and human suffering.
    And finally, let us vow to make the United Nations an increasing 
strong voice for the protection of fundamental human dignity and human 
rights. After all, they were at the core of the founding of this great 
organization.
    Today we honor the men and women who gave shape to the United 
Nations. We celebrate 50 years of achievement. We commit ourselves to 
real reforms. We reject the siren song of the new isolationists. We set 
a clear agenda worthy of the vision of our founders. The measure of our 
generation will be whether we give up

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because we cannot achieve a perfect world or strive on to build a better 
world.
    Fifty years ago today, President Truman reminded the delegates that 
history had not ended with Hitler's defeat. He said, it is easier to 
remove tyrants and destroy concentration camps than it is to kill the 
ideas which give them birth. Victory on the battlefield was essential, 
but it is not good enough for a lasting, good peace.
    Today we know that history has not ended with the cold war. We know, 
and we have learned from painful evidence, that as long as there are 
people on the face of the Earth, imperfection and evil will be a part of 
human nature; there will be killing, cruelty, self-destructive abuse of 
our natural environment, denial of the problems that face us all. But we 
also know that here today, in this historic chamber, the challenge of 
building a good and lasting peace is in our hands and success is within 
our reach.
    Let us not forget that each child saved, each refugee housed, each 
disease prevented, each barrier to justice brought down, each sword 
turned into a plowshare, brings us closer to the vision of our founders, 
closer to peace, closer to freedom, closer to dignity.
    So my fellow citizens of the world, let us not lose heart. Let us 
gain renewed strength and energy and vigor from the progress which has 
been made and the opportunities which are plainly before us. Let us say 
no to isolation; yes to reform; yes to a brave, ambitious new agenda; 
most of all, yes to the dream of the United Nations.
    Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 11:17 a.m. in the War Memorial Opera House. 
In his remarks, he referred to United Nations Secretary-General Boutros 
Boutros-Ghali; Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa; poet Maya Angelou; 
President Lech Walesa of Poland; Mayor Frank Jordan of San Francisco; 
Walter H. Shorenstein, chairman, U.N. 50 National Committee; and 
President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt.