| arnico |
Posted
on 28-Mar-02 04:02 PM
[This may be relevant for thinking about the future of Nepal, of the Maoist war, and the government's response]
Below you will find the speech delivered by Dr. Oscar Arias, former president of Costa Rica and 1987 Nobel Peace Laureate at final dinner of the annual meeting of the Alliance for Global Sustainability (An international collaboration among four universities conducting research about the environment and sustainable development).
At some point in the next few weeks I hope to get a chance of sharing more details about some observations while visiting Costa Rica -- a country that abolished its army in 1948 and invested the money in education and health care (today it has life expectancy and literacy rates exceeding many developing countries'). Costa Rica was also the only country that remained peaceful during the cold war unrest in Central America during the 1980s. The president then, Dr. Oscar Arias, was able to bring peace to the surrounding countries: Nicaragua where the US funded rebels fighting a leftist government, and El Salvador, where the US funded a brutal government that was fighting leftist rebels. In the past decade, the country has seen remarkable economic growth, centered upon ecotourism and high tech manufacturing overshadowing coffee and banana exports as the main sources of income. I was especially impressed by the country's elected politicians. A total of three current and former presidents, and three ministers attended the AGS meetings. ALL are highly educated, most were university professors before entering politics, and it shows! They deliver excellent speeches, and go arounds with laptops giving powerpoint presentations about why Costa Rica is THE place to invest in...
Below is the speech delivered by Dr. Arias at dinner time. I hope we can have some discussion on kurakani about its relevance to the current unrest in Nepal.
Cheers,
Arnico.
_______________________________________________________________________________
Speech by Dr. Oscar Arias
Alliance for Global Sustainability/INCAE gala dinner
San Antonio de Belen, Costa Rica
March 22, 2002
_______________________________________________________________________________
Good evening. It is a pleasure to be here with you tonight to discuss the prospects for the sustainable development of our planet. You have been hard at work in panel discussions and working groups tackling various aspects of this problem, and I am not altogether confident that I will have anything unique to add to your musings. Nevertheless, I have twenty minutes to fill, so I shall try to say something original.
The cynics in our world often tell us that there is nothing we can do to combat poverty and destruction or to achieve lasting peace and development. They tell us that inequality and poverty are inevitable, that cancer will never be cured, that somehow evil will always get a better of good, so why fight it? Part of the tragedy is that these cynics paint themselves as realists, and then argue that anyone who is willing to fight for the underdog, to work for peace, to commit to ending human suffering, is really just a dreamer.
I was labeled a naïve utopian back in the 1980s for believing that the self-declared Marxist-Leninist government in Nicaragua would hold free elections, as they commited to doing when they signed my peace plan. Those who called themselves realists claimed that military victory was the only way to end the conflict in Central America. That time the realists were wrong. There is a first time for everything.
[cont.]
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