UN General Assembly
1999

I have stood upon this platform on many occasions, and I well remember every speech I have given here since 1985. This is perhaps because, first, I cannot conceive of any loftier rostrum in the world and, secondly, because my personal political fate has always brought me here at times of great change. My most recent appearance before the General Assembly was in 1992, when I was already Head of State of my country, Georgia. That, too, was a moment filled with drama — one in which a new, independent State was going through a painful birth process. Today, I am with the Assembly at the end of a stormy century, one which I would call the century of freedom. That is not because freedom has become a universal norm of life — regrettably, that is not yet the case — but, rather, because the concept of freedom has assumed pre-eminence on the scale of political values and also because it was, indeed, in our century that the worst enemies of freedom and democracy were defeated.