2. Mr. President, this is an opportunity for me to congratulate you most warmly on the confidence placed in you by Member States in electing you to the office of President of the twenty-third session of the General Assembly.
3. I also congratulate the outgoing President, whose competence and great personal qualities enabled him to perform his duties with such zeal during a particularly difficult period, namely the session that has just ended.
4. This is also an opportunity for me to welcome and congratulate the States that have newly entered the great United Nations family — the States of Southern Yemen, Mauritius and Swaziland.
5. My mind brims over with the words and ideas that might faithfully interpret the immense joy which fills me in making the voice of the Republic of Chad heard in the parliament of mankind.
6. Illustrious figures, His Holiness Pope Paul VI prominent among them, have preceded me on this rostrum, and all have emphasized the fundamental concerns of the United Nations: to build a world of true justice; effectively to ensure world peace; so to organize the world as to efface the ruins left by the last world war and to view the future with serenity in every sphere.
7. Today it is the Republic of Chad which, resolutely engaged in the great battle being waged in the cause of peace and of respect for the human person, would like to extol, through the voice of its President, the historic and lofty mission of the United Nations.
8. An idea becomes a force when it is served by men resolved to implant it in people’s minds. The ideas of freedom have the strength required to overturn inhuman ancient traditions and change the world. Through mankind’s long political and religious development the ideas of genuine brotherhood and true charity have become key concepts.
9. After the two cataclysms of 1914 and 1939 the great leaders of mankind, having been brought to knowledge through suffering and to moderation through sorrow, at last understood that the rights of nations, small and great, must henceforth be upheld and developed through a vast organization designed for the welfare of mankind.
10. The ideas of international peace and solidarity have taken shape and have profoundly affected peoples and individuals. This is the very essence of the United Nations. It is the human synthesis that modern humanism has sought to achieve, of the fundamental concepts of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and the other Eastern religions with the time-honoured principles of the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789.
11. Since that realization the United Nations has continued to perform energetic and effective work. The essential basis of this Organization, as expressed, is in our view optimistic; it seems to us to rest on an act of faith, for it presupposes a profound moral reform in man.
12. Unfortunately the evolution of the human conscience is not uniform and there still exist discrepancies that jeopardize the work of peace and weaken mankind to such a point that one wonders whether the human race has learnt nothing from the terrible catastrophes it has experienced in this twentieth century, and from the punishments that should instruct and guide.
13. Our generation and the one before it have witnessed events that could have demolished our planet. They have not been enough to make men reflect a little and recognize the futility of those shoddy quarrels that are basically a sign of man’s failure.
14. The stockpiling of bombs goes on, together with the fond illusion that they will never be used. Yet a passing fit of anger would be enough to move the holders of power and strength impetuously to drag all mankind into universal suicide, without thought for the vital interests of the human species. Wounded pride, like an unextinguished match, is all that is needed to start a fire.
15. That is why, notwithstanding the great doctrinal systems that have been set up to bring man back to the paths of peace, which is primarily born of justice, the human condition continues to be tragic in the highest degree. It is also why in most international conferences begun in enthusiasm and fervour the tone changes abruptly.
16. Several times in history, dominant nations incapable of allowing their reason to control them have dragged all mankind into insensate and dangerous adventures merely to satisfy the whims of their pride or their passions. The very genius with which they were endowed did not give them light enough, for they regarded it as an instrument with which the more easily to dominate others.
17. It reminds us of the criminal folly of the two legendary kings who staked their whole empire on a selfish undertaking — that of salvaging the honour of a brother whose wife had left him. An undertaking doomed from the outset and paid for in untold tears and lamentations on both sides. For it was not men, but urns and ashes that returned to every home after the destruction of Priam’s citadel. The end of that lamentable drama was put into words by an epic poet; an English rendering reads:
"And in every house whence warriors journeyed far from Greece, crushing grief weighed down on all. One obsessing thought gnawed at every heart.”
18. The lesson of that age-old story is no different from those we can learn from present-day events. We often see repeated the unhappy adventure of the hare, heavy with young, being devoured by pitiless eagles which give her no chance. And just as the plight of the hare stirred the compassion of a divinity protecting animal life, so does the United Nations abhor the eagles’ feast and extend its protection to weak peoples unable to defend themselves.
19. A tribute is also due to the United Nations, which, in addition to its interventions on behalf of peace wherever peace is threatened, has helped to develop in certain young States the technology, the foundation on which great undertakings are built. We also take pleasure in emphasizing what the United Nations has done towards restoring basic human rights, and welcome the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted under its aegis in 1948 and designed to afford effective protection for racial, religious or political minorities against oppression and annihilation. Quite apart from the fact that it has concerned itself with social security, child health and all measures likely to give workers more amenities and a healthier life. In short, with the United Nations many peoples feel that they are being given opportunities and that they can take them.
20. However, these achievements benefiting mankind do not prevent us from clearly perceiving the open conflicts, fraught with endless misery, which shock man’s conscience and await an adequate solution in one form or another. Those conflicts profoundly trouble sensitive men who, looking towards the future, have seen in them what they have interpreted as premonitory signs of world catastrophe and bloodshed: the distressing question of Nigeria; the dramatic Israeli-Arab conflict; the faceless war in Viet-Nam, where Americans end North Viet-Namese are “riding the tiger”, as an American author puts it.
21. Further questions, clearly less crucial than the foregoing, are nevertheless darkening the outlook of mankind: the organized subversion in young African and Asian States, the atrocities being perpetrated in certain countries, and especially in those where a minority holding political power is crushing and mutilating human beings.
22. In drawing up the list of problems mankind has been facing since the beginning of this century, the United Nations cannot close its eyes to the problems of the old Europe.
23. All these situations deserve to be examined in depth in a spirit of high understanding and justice, for heightened tension can make them explode into violence. To ignore them, when they are vital to the future of mankind, is to allow the basic causes that can bring about the total destruction of mankind itself to subsist.
24. Faced with the threats that those situations represent for us and viewing the abyss into which they can lead us, we must urgently bring about a return to rationality; in other words, we must acknowledge a common origin and destiny above and beyond any disagreements that may set men against each other.
25. Hatreds are so strong and grievances so bitter that such a return to rationality may be called utopian. It will be called utopian at a time when the conjunction of destructive elements and the accumulation of deadly weapons are sentencing mankind to live on the edge of a volcano. And that hope of seeing all the peoples of the earth freed from any spirit of domination and self-interest in the name of human rationality and brotherhood will also be called utopian.
26. Yet if human reason is not to triumph, if mankind must continue to provide an arena in which brothers are enemies seeking to destroy each other, our anxiety cannot but become increasingly acute; and the destruction of our species will then be a certainty.
27. Since the world is considered as being man’s domain, the wealth of the universe ought normally to be transformed into truly human and equitably-shared assets through labour, science and technology. However, objects have become the idols to which we are sacrificing our entire being. Man is being brought to the level of things, and not things to the level of man. That situation renders the condition of mankind even more tragic by separating man from humanity to make him a prisoner of material things.
28. We can see no relief for the anxiety that is stifling mankind other than total solidarity among nations. Mankind is being threatened by hunger. As for Africa, it is the tragic scene of many sufferings.
29. And yet among the great men of this century, His Holiness Pope Paul VI and the United Nations Secretary-General, U Thant, have denounced the deep distress of fatally-wounded mankind. If their ceaseless appeals for peace were to be heard, if their pleas for brotherhood were to meet with favourable response, the world would take a new course and men would no longer be doomed to a seemingly hopeless future.
30. The role of science is to shape cosmic forces to human ends. Its role is to lead man in every clime of the living universe towards the conquest of the lost Eden. When science, following the shock and chaos of the Second World War, resumed its powerful and triumphant course, driving back the frontiers of the infinite on both sides, it was hailed with a most sincere enthusiasm. It was said that the world had been saved and that generalized peace, propitious to agriculture, learning and industry, had been achieved for mankind.
31. The pain of living and the despair of being a man, to borrow a phrase from Daniel Rops, rose to choke us when science, instead of representing a labour of liberation and peace, instead of serving the high ends of man, made him slave to a surge of frenzied ambitions and frenetic pleasures.
32. Notwithstanding the torches of hatred lit in some corners of Africa by the very children of a civilization that was considered to be brilliant, Africa, because of its spirituality, is tending to become a place for rejuvenation, where hearts worn out by the battles of this century can rest; above all, Africa advocates that we make science our chief servant for the promotion of man’s spiritual development and for the grant to the greatest possible numbers of the indispensable conditions for a truly humane culture.
33. The Republic of Chad, situated in the heart of the African continent, young, full of the vigour of hope and strongly committed to the African traditions most capable of leading man towards his total fulfilment, is determined to lift its gaze in order to find in science the opportunity of progressing towards its own prosperity.
34. In the eyes of a certain press, that country is rather poorly understood; it has its detractors, who address it in highly unfavourable terms.
35. I have not come to this rostrum to speak solely about my own country. Neither is my presence in this Assembly aimed at setting me up as an advocate. Nevertheless, because of their segregationist policy, Portugal, South Africa and Rhodesia are plunging mankind into shame and are thereby jeopardizing peace on our continent.
36. I have come to reaffirm Chad’s unalterable determination to co-operate in establishing peace in the world and its complete adherence to the great principles of justice, freedom and international solidarity for which the United Nations stands.
37. We hold the belief that the Organization would more effectively serve the cause of mankind and that science, working for the United Nations, would be a magical working tool and would lead us to happiness, if the influence of some nations and the selfishness of some peoples did not hamper its activity.
38. And lastly, the conclusion of our message is a hope: the hope that the powers of the United Nations may be strengthened; the hope that the United Nations may be truly endowed with executive powers in the service of justice and humanity.