With special tribute to fallen staff and survivors of the UN Canal Hotel Bombing (10th Anniversary)
19 August 2013
I want to deeply thank you all for allow me to participate in this ceremony to honor and remember those who lost their lives during the last year serving the United Nations. And also, for give me the opportunity to pay tribute to fallen UN workers and survivors attacked at the Canal Hotel bombing in Baghdad in 2003.
Ten years ago today, twenty-two people lost their lives in that shameful and unjustifiable act.
Today, I want to share with their families and colleagues the total certainty that those 22 lives, full of courage and dignity, lives that were victims of cruelty and violence, will not be in the future also the victims of indifference and forgetting.
Those workers who served in Baghdad did so inspired in their wish to help thousands of Iraqi men and women to realize their yearning for peace and freedom.
Ten years ago, also this year, this mourning moves us.
And it still affects us because it is not easy to say goodbye to exemplary people that were victims of terrorist attacks, direct attacks, implacable catastrophes or deadly accidents while deploying their humanitarian actions.
We have the right to grieve—but memory also demands us that we recognize in each one of these human beings, deeply humans, the principles, values and ideals of the United Nations. And it also urges us to remember that those ideals of the United Nations are not empty words but very concrete actions, daily work, enthusiastic generosity and shared hopes.
For each humiliation that they prevent, for each suffering they ease, for the thirst they cure, for the chill they palliate, the desperation that they calm, the solidarity that they sow—for doing what they do and dreaming what they dream, the example and the dedication of those in the front line should have a special place in the deliberations and decisions of the Security Council.
With our hopes in peaceful resolutions and prevention of conflicts, the Council has the obligation to defend and to take care of the people who work for the organization in the missions it authorizes.
At each possible time, the Council should remind all parts involved in conflict about their obligation to respect the neutrality and independence of the UN personnel, and their obligation to respect and observe the international law.
Along with the firmest condemnation to the attacks against UN workers, the Council should call for a swift investigation into those attacks, so the perpetrators pay for their crimes, and so we prevent impunity and promote justice.
May today’s tribute --besides expressing gratitude and appreciation for those who gave their lives for a better and safer world—is also an opportunity to think and to imagine what else we can do from the positions we occupied in order to be like those who did not hesitate to defend the belief that dignity is not impossible, and peace not only an illusion.
