They are the statesmen who made the supreme sacrifice to change the reputedly inexorable course of tragic events. They are the doctors who died from diseases contracted while caring for their patients. They are those who risk their lives every day to bring relief to refugees or to snatch innocent victims from the relentless clutches of their executioners. International cooperation and understanding can only find a durable basis in the primacy of law, not in the superiority of force. Without this, frustration and oppression are sure tomorrow if not today to give rise to new sources of conflict and destruction.
Wars are nothing but a tragic fool's lure against which vain dreams of dominance are shattered.
The battle to win hearts is the only battle worth winning. As the Spanish poet Miguel de Unamuno pointed out, the only true human challenge is not towin, but to win over. Mahatma Gandhi stands as an immortal beacon who demonstrated the virtues of nonviolence to an entire continent. And if Nelson Mandela has become a universal symbol, it is because he has drawn on reserves of goodness and goodwill that have left him without hatred for the partisans of racial hegemony who deprived him of his liberty for an entire generation. May conscience which as the French essayist Alain said, is moral because it always opposes what should be to what is guide in the path of reason and moderation, those who hold the peoples' fate in their hands.