DIRECTOR-GENERAL’S MESSAGE FOR INTERNATIONAL DAY FOR TOLERANCE

Paris, November 9 (No.2000-113) - UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura has issued a message on the occasion of International Day for Tolerance, celebrated on November 16.

Here’s the text of the message:

“The quality of mercy is not strained, said the greatest English poet once. But in harsh fact, and in our own stark times, the precious quality of compassion does all too often appear under tremendous strain in far too many parts of the world. And so does its parallel virtue, tolerance. Both mercy, and tolerance, as we now know all too well, do demand a major effort of will, a conscious striving of the intellect to imagine and enter deeply into the feelings, thoughts, values and representations of others.

“War thrives on intolerance; peace requires its opposite. This is why the United Nations system, and UNESCO within it, observe an International Day for Tolerance on November 16th. For UNESCO, this day commemorates the purposed choice of this Organization's Member States to symbolise common striving and shared efforts to put ideals into real practice, through careful legislation and thoughtfully planned educational measures, when they issued their Declaration of Principles on Tolerance on 16 November 1995. The search for peace, fundamentally the central mission of our entire United Nations family, is predicated upon tolerance. But sadly to belie the poet, neither mercy nor tolerance simply drop as the gentle rain from heaven. They demand hard work: education and dialogue.

“We do not take tolerance in its negative sense: as supercilious indifference to others. On the contrary: we regard tolerance as a positive outreach of human minds to understand others, and so to uncover, or to forge, common ethical ties. Accumulated prejudices, grudges, fears, nurtured on abiding mutual ignorance, are recognised seedbeds of war. To replace anxious mistrust with greater insights into one another's cultures and aspirations, is to help us learn to sympathise with one another, and prepare the way for lasting peace.

“Such are the explicit goals, and underlying thrust, of UNESCO's world-wide educational mission under every latitude. Such is the stuff of UNESCO's commitment to help safeguard the outstanding monuments of humanity's past on every continent and allow us all to share them. Such are the mainstays of our exploration of the future common courses of the sciences. Such, in sum, is UNESCO’s mission: to enhance mutual awareness of what we all share.

“The United Nations has dedicated this coming year to the theme of Dialogue among Civilizations: another way of underscoring the virtues of cultural exploration and exchange. We urge nations and individuals, governments and non-governmental organisations alike, to join in a dialogue of mutual appreciation and respect.

“All this is really the kind of world tolerance which UNESCO promotes and which it celebrates this day.”

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