UN General Assembly
2003

﻿Let me congratulate you, Sir, on your election to the presidency of the General Assembly at its fifty-eighth session. I am confident that your leadership as well as your vast political and diplomatic experience will successfully carry us through this session. We extend to your predecessor, Mr. Jan Kavan, our sincere appreciation for the excellent manner in which he guided the work of the General Assembly at its fifty-seventh session, which just ended. Our meeting today is overshadowed by the death of Special Representative Sergio Vieira de Mello and of 22 other United Nations workers, who were killed in the line of duty in Baghdad on 19 August 2003. I join my colleagues in extending my personal condolences and those of my Government and of the people of Zimbabwe to Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the bereaved families. Against this tragedy and the inauspicious developments in Iraq, we cannot allow ourselves to treat this session as merely routine. At the heart of the tragedy in that nation is the unprecedented assault on the ethic and function of multilateralism in