2023 must be a year for reconciliation and reconstruction

Report from Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, Human Rights Activist, January 2022

My wife Carla and I are both retired from the UN and enjoy the blessings of life in Switzerland, where we became citizens 5 years ago and participate in every referendum and election around.  My wife Carla recently became a member of the municipal council, and I keep busy teaching international law at the Geneva School of Diplomacy and assisting my masters and doctoral candidates with their respective dissertations.  I also participated in numerous side-events and panels and the UN Human Rights Council, devoted inter alia to the human right to peace, conflict-prevention, the adverse impacts of unilateral coercive measures, access to information, freedom of expression and democratization of the media.  I guest lectured at the University of Geneva on my “25 Principles of International Order”, chapter 2 of my 2021 book “Building a Just World Order”[1], wrote op-eds for several newspapers including “Disarmament for Development”[2] and published the second volume of my human rights trilogy, “Countering mainstream narratives”[3].  The third volume of the trilogy is almost finished and should come out by May 2023.[4]

Carla and I started 2022 helping friends with the olive harvest in Piégon, Drôme provençale, where we collected 500 kg. of olives, which produced excellent olive oil and extraordinarily good olives for the apéro. Then we were blessed with powder snow  on the slopes of Belalp, Riederalp, Bettmeralp, Grächen and Saas Grund[5] in the upper Valais.  In all we skied fully 13 days.  Over Easter we were at our apartment in Noordwijk aan Zee, not far from The Hague, visiting Carla’s large family and some of my former students from Chicago (1993-94!), now engaged in international criminal law.  In the summer we cycled over the Nufenen Pass into the Val Bedretto, Val Levantina, Locarno, Cimeta, Madonna del Sasso, Luino, Sta. Catarina del Sasso, Domodossola and back to our chalet through the Simplon.  We also drove to Holland for the entire month of July, to swim in the North Sea and fly several kites, and admire the kite surfers. Alas, we both got Covid, but it was a mild form of it.

We are closing the year with a Christmas concert. Carla is an alto, I sing tenor.  We count our blessings and pray God that 2023 will be kinder than 2022 that has been so unfortunate for millions of human beings – not only in Ukraine.  Deo volente we will fly to the US on 27 December to visit my brother Joe, a retired professor of physics, and my sister Vicky.

What will 2023 bring us?  First and foremost we pray for peace.  We know the motto of the Peace of Westphalia (1648) which ended the murderous Thirty Years’ War – Pax optima rerum – peace is the highest good.  After 30 years and eight million deaths, the European powers made a grand compromise. There were no winners. Of course, we also want Pax et Justitia – peace and justice.  It is up to civil society, non-governmental organizations, the entire UN system to work for a viable compromise, a quid pro quo, as was struck by JF Kennedy and Khrushchev at the end of the Cuban missile crisis 1962. In the nuclear world there can be no “unconditional surrender” and to prolong a war in the expectation of “victory” may result in miscalculations, even a computer glitch, Apocalypse for the entire planet. The United Nations has the primary responsibility to save future generations from the scourge of war, in  promoting dialogue and mediation, safeguarding the common heritage of mankind. All world religions also have a role to play. Pope Francis has already formulated many initiatives that have not been listened to by the politicians.  We must always guard a sense for proportions, and the right to life must be our priority. An imperfect peace is always better than what Tacitus already deplored in his book Agricola, “solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant” – they make a wasteland and then call it peace.

2023 must be a year for reconciliation and reconstruction.  We must think not only of ourselves, but also of the human rights of eight billion human beings on the planet, since this internal European dispute whether Crimea and Donbass are in Russia or Ukraine, is of scarce importance for the billions of human beings in Asia, Africa and Latin America.  This war is destroying the benefits of globalization, breaking supply chains, and putting food security and the economies of many countries in grave danger.  I would like to see positive steps taken toward the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals and a return to international cooperation and solidarity. I will try to impart ethical priorities on my new 2023 students.

John F. Kennedy’s 1963 address[6] on peace is worth quoting: “ Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy–or of a collective death-wish for the world.”

[1] https://www.claritypress.com/product/building-a-just-world-order/

[2] https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/04/15/disarmament-for-development/

[3] https://www.claritypress.com/product/countering-mainstream-narratives-fake-news-fake-law-fake-freedomcountering-the-mainstream-narratives-fake-news-fake-law-fake-freedom/

[4] https://www.claritypress.com/product/human-rights-industry/

[5] http://www.alfreddezayas.com/Poems/skiing2.shtml

[6] https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/american-university-19630610