Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan's 2000
World Citizenship Award Acceptance Speech:
"New Forces For Peace"

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The 2000 Distinguished Peace Leader Award was presented to King Hussein of Jordan and accepted on behalf of her late husband by Queen Noor al Hussein of Jordan at a special dinner in Santa Barbara, California on April 6, 2000. Queen Noor was introduced by Jane Olson, a member of the Board of Directors for Human Rights Watch. The 2000 World Citizenship Award was presented to Queen Noor by Diandra Douglas and Eli Luria, both members of the Board of Directors of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. The World Citizenship Award recognized Queen Noor's outstanding and inspiring actions as a world citizen -- as well as her tireless efforts as patron of the Landmines Survivors Network, her work on behalf of the International Campaign to Ban Land-Mines, and for her work for peace, humanity, and raising the status of women, work that crosses borders and speaks to the need to live as a world citizen today.

"Nothing is more useless in developing a nation’s economy than a gun, and nothing blocks the road to social development more than the financial burden of war. War is the arch enemy of national progress and the modern scourge of civilized man." - - King Hussein

"This is no time for complacency about the single greatest threat to humankind. Nuclear capability must be reduced to zero, globally, permanently" - Queen Noor

The following is the full text of Queen Noor's speech at the awards presentation ceremony on April 6, 2000 in Santa Barbara, California.

Mr. Krieger, Honored Guests, Friends, It is so much more than an honor for me to be here tonight, to accept your Distinguished Peace Leadership Award on behalf of my husband, His Majesty King Hussein. Of course I must admit to some bias, but as someone who believes in the ideals your organization represents, I cannot think of a more appropriate recipient.

His Majesty King Hussein, a Distinguished Peace Leader

His tireless quest for peace earned him his own people's devotion and respect the world over. Time and time again, he vividly demonstrated that peace was worth more to him than his own life, from the beginning of his reign, when he braved the same intolerance and hatred which had claimed the life of his grandfather King Abdullah, to the end, when he rose from his hospital bed to guide the Wye Accord from stalemate to agreement.

When the Middle East seemed forever mired in limbo between peace and war, King Hussein devoted much of his time to promoting an equitable negotiating process that has opened the way, enshallah, to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace. He envisioned a peace that satisfies the aspirations of all peoples of the region, addresses their political, development and security concerns, enhances the region’s well-being and secures the interests of the international community; a peace that does not stop with ending the state of war, but that proactively attempts to foster cooperation and prosperity among all neighbors in the region. As he put it in his address to the Joint Session of the US Congress in 1994, "We in Jordan have always sought a bold peace. We have been conscious of our responsibilities towards coming generations — to ensure that they will have the certainty of leading a dignified and fulfilled life. We have sought a peace that can harness their creative energies, to allow them to realize their true potential, and build their future with confidence, devoid of fear and uncertainty."

Although he was a gifted diplomat and mediator, his work toward that bold peace extended far beyond negotiation. He realized that peace, although the dream of many in our region, is not instinctive; it is a skill that must be learned. He understood the value of education for peace and democracy, and staunchly supported programs which promote cross-cultural understanding and conflict resolution skills. He knew that lasting peace required a new way of looking at the world, and one’s place in it; a view that transcended borders. It was these values and enduring idealism and humanitarian commitment that originally drew together a young activist urban planner and a monarch remarkable for his openness and his vision. We shared a dream, in fact many dreams, in spite of the differences in our backgrounds. Working together to pursue them was my practical training in peacebuilding throughout our 21 years together.

Consider the Meaning of World Citizenship

I am further honored, therefore, to receive your World Citizenship Award, not so much for what it says about me, but what it says about us. The name of this award should give us pause to think. More and more every day, by necessity, we are all becoming World Citizens. Daily we are witnessing the dissolution of borders; political, economic, ecological. My husband, among many other things, was a keen pilot, and flying with him taught me the irrelevance of national boundaries. From the air, it is clear that lines on the map are not drawn in the earth. And with modern technical advances, it is possible to communicate instantaneously, independent of any terrestrial borders at all.

In the midst of the rush caused by our rapidly shrinking world, it is worth stopping for a moment to ponder what world citizenship means. We all share the same problems and must be part of the same solutions. Globalization increases opportunities, yes, but for exploitation as well as for growth. World citizenship implies sharing cultures and benefits, but also risks and responsibilities. Recognizing we are all citizens of the world is the first step towards peace.

As you in this audience are particularly aware, being a citizen of the world means realizing that as the world shrinks, there is less and less room on it for weapons and arms whether in the hands of governments, insurgent groups, or individuals. As King Hussein said a quarter century ago: "Nothing is more useless in developing a nation’s economy than a gun, and nothing blocks the road to social development more than the financial burden of war. War is the arch enemy of national progress and the modern scourge of civilized man." As we see all too clearly in our region, where the spending on armaments is the highest per capita in the world, this is a colossal waste of valuable resources, monetary, material and human.

The presence and availability of these vast arsenals, rather than acting as a deterrent, actually makes it harder to establish a lasting peace. If channeled into human priorities instead, such resources would provide much more sustainable forms of social security as a defense against violence. And not just officially sanctioned wars that cause such devastation. In the first half of this century wars were mammoth struggles between super powers and now longstanding ethnic tensions have escaped the restraints of larger state controls escalating into conflicts smaller, more localized, but no less devastating to those caught up in them. The world is becoming both more global and more fragmented. Such conflicts have repercussions far outside their geographical boundaries. One of the most insidious effects of globalization is that it has extended the reach of terrorism with the ready availability of all sorts of destructive agents from loose nukes to chemicals to explosives to small arms and the increased ability to move materials and people anywhere in the world. Truly no one is safe any longer from a splinter group with a grievance and no conscience.

A Nuclear Weapon Is Terrorism on a Massive Scale

One of the greatest evils in terms of lost resources and the danger of lost lives is nuclear weapons. With the end of the Cold War some people may have felt that we could breathe easier, that the danger of nuclear annihilation had receded; but this is no time for complacency about perhaps the single greatest threat that has ever faced humankind.

As we have seen with the entry of India and Pakistan into the nuclear club and the increased possibility of instability or accident in the Russian military and the destabilizing influence of clandestine nuclear programs on Israel and Iraq, the dangers are only proliferating. 1.8 tons of explosive power for every person on earth raises to new heights the definition of overkill. There has been a great deal of concern in recent years about terrorism, and chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, but what are nuclear arms if not the archetypal weapon of mass destruction? What is a defense policy based on the threat to murder countless innocent civilians but terrorism on a massive scale!

Nuclear weapons have been declared illegal under international law by the International Court of Justice. They must be considered immoral by anyone with a conscience. The sheer folly of trying to defend a nation by destroying all life on the planet must be apparent to anyone capable of rational thought. Nuclear capability must be reduced to zero, globally, permanently. There is no other option.

Every Month Landmines Kill 800 and Maim 1200 People

Less dramatic but perhaps much more of a day-to-day threat in the lives of millions is another type of weapons, anti-personnel mines. These pose a more insidious threat to civilians and progress because they continue killing after the conflict has stopped. When peace is declared, the guns and mortars are stilled, but no one turns off the mines. And because they are small, and destroy lives one by one, their horrific consequences can go as unnoticed as the mines themselves.

You may by now be familiar with the ghastly statistics: some 300,000 people around the globe are living with shattered limbs and lives, and the number is growing! Every month around 800 people are killed and 1200 maimed by landmines -- primarily civilians, often children attracted by their toy-like shapes and colors – a new tragedy every 20 minutes.

These indiscriminate killers constitute one of the greatest public health hazards of the late 20th century – a modern man-made epidemic. As patron of the Landmine Survivors Network and international spokesperson for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines ( ICBL), I have visited with survivors in the Middle East, United States, Viet Nam and Cambodia. I have seen first-hand the devastation caused by loss of life and limb. The only way to relieve the suffering of the survivors of landmines is to rid the world of landmines, and achieve universal compliance with the Ottawa Convention.

Fortunately over the past few years we have witnessed the growth of a new coalition activism which brought into force, in record time, the Ottawa Landmine Ban Treaty, the first international arms treaty to encompass humanitarian obligations to the weapons’ victims. Working together in unprecedented networks, concerned nations, organizations and individuals are united in a pledge to win back blighted land, to fulfill our humanitarian responsibilities to the survivors, and to make peace on the ground a reality as well as a declaration. Inspired by this progress, Jordan hosted in July 1998, the first Middle East Conference on Landmines Injury & Rehabilitation for which I was proud to announce that Jordan was signing the Ottawa Convention which we subsequently ratified. The conference brought together from throughout the Middle East and North Africa the largest group of landmine casualties ever gathered in one place.

My country was an unfortunately appropriate place to convene, because the Middle East is littered with, by estimates, more than half of the world’s deployed landmines. In Jordan, children and adults are routinely injured, and about ten percent of our population lives in areas still dangerous and economically unproductive, because of landmines. Scarce agricultural lands and some of the most beautiful and sacred, historic landscapes in the country, especially in the biblical Jordan River Valley, were scarred and forbidden until recently.

Recent events in the news have re-emphasized both the urgency of the fight against landmines, and the tremendous progress we have made. The first of these was the horrific flooding in Mozambique. Not only did it leave nearly one million people homeless, threatened by disease and starvation, but in some areas, the floodwaters uncovered buried mines, and washed them from marked minefields to new areas, previously thought of as safe. In 1998 Nicaragua faced the same threat as a result of hurricanes. In these tragic cases, natural disasters joined with man-made ones, therefore posing new and heightened threats to already suffering peoples.

There have been more hopeful signs. In March 2000, His Holiness Pope John Paul II visited Jordan and made a pilgrimage to Bethany, the baptismal site of Jesus Christ. His visit would have been inconceivable only a few short years ago, for the area was then heavily mined. There was a sad irony that landmines should hold hostage one of the world’s most spiritually significant landscapes, revered by Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Since 1993, we have cleared the Jordan Valley of some 300,000 mines, to allow those who had tilled the land many years ago, to cultivate it again, and others to unearth once more our region's precious history. And now, pilgrims who wish to walk in the paths of the prophets, can do so in safety. This ancient and holy land is no longer desecrated by mines. The Prophet Mohammed said, "imatatu al-'atha 'an al-tareeq sadaqah," the removal of harmful objects from the path is a good deed." What was once a metaphorical, moral precept is now a literal necessity – a prophecy that has become too true for comfort.

Arms Trade and Global Safety

In a few short years the fight to eradicate landmines has gone from a noble dream to international law, but landmines are only the tip of an iceberg in the problem of armaments of every kind, from nuclear weapons to handguns. Small arms in particular pose a growing threat to conflict prevention and recovery. The indiscriminate sale and distribution of easily carried weapons is the source of a broad spectrum of violence, from schoolyard shootings to civil wars to militia-led genocide, threatening daily the lives of more people than any other menace.

Encouraged first by progress in banning weapons of mass destruction, and then by the unprecedented success of the movement to ban landmines, the Red Cross and other concerned groups have launched similar initiatives against small arms proliferation. Controlling such arms is essential to any lasting peace anywhere in the world; but it is by no means simple. As Martin Amis put it, "weapons are like money; nobody knows the meaning of enough."

What is more, in many cases, weapons are money. The arms trade, both legal and illicit, is a source of tremendous profits, from the military-industrial giants through the gun-runners down to the decommissioned soldier who sells his weapon back on the black market. Often, ironically, a declaration of peace in one conflict will lead to an escalation of violence in neighboring countries, as weapons filter from former combatants to informal militias or criminal gangs. Small arms are cheap, easy to obtain, and difficult to trace. They hold a place in the psyche of many cultures that makes them almost impossible to dislodge. From rural America to Albania to Northern Ireland to Kosovo, the unwillingness to give up guns by those who feel they are their only protection, is one of the greatest threats to peace.

Countries Have Responsibilities As World Citizens

In our rapidly shrinking world, national sovereignty must acknowledge supra-national structures to ensure global safety, just as individuals must recognize the need for balancing their right to defend themselves with the necessity of law to defend everyone. The progress of the Ottawa Landmines Treaty, which has now been signed by two-thirds of the world’s governments, is a salutary example.

There are other treaties, the Non-Proliferation Treaty for instance, that need much more comprehensive support. And it is important for the US, in particular, to realize that it cannot expect to be a credible leader among the nations of the world if it lags behind in fighting our most serious problems, including mines and nuclear weapons, and if the US does not meet its financial obligations in full, on time, and without preconditions -- where the United Nations is concerned.

As individuals and as nations, we must move from the law of force to the force of law; it is time for all of us, governments and individuals alike, to embrace, extend, and empower the structures for peace created in the last one hundred years. We must invest them with the full legal and moral authority to stop violence before it begins. We must strengthen the mechanisms to resolve differences peacefully and to make their resolution by force ultimately unthinkable by instilling in everyone a culture of peace. This fundamental need was the oxygen behind the global effort in 1998 to create a statute for the permanent International Criminal Court which the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation endorses. Citizens of the world must embrace a culture of peace moving from armaments to agreements, and so doing necessitate a coming to terms with the thorny issue of security. As long as a nation or a community or an individual feels threatened, violence and recourse to weapons is never far from the surface, but like so much else, the definition of security today is changing.

Positive Human Security For All, Including Women Threats to security today come not only from war, but also from economic and social inequities, human rights abuses, marginalization, and poverty. Over the past decades, my work in Jordan and abroad has been predicated on this premise: that true security is not only a matter of protecting borders from military aggression, but of providing a stable environment for all citizens, women and men of all races and creeds, to participate fully in commercial and political life.

Peace is not merely the absence of hostilities, but a positive human security founded in equity. As King Hussein put it, "What is the real purpose of peace? In our view, it is to promote the security and the prosperity of peoples. Without security, there can be no assured prosperity. And without prosperity, there can be no assured security."

Providing the prosperity that underpins peace requires taking advantage of the new techniques and technologies of globalization. In this boundary-less information age, with productivity becoming ever more divorced from physical resources, the uniqueness of each country’s contribution is coming to depend more on the distinctness of cultures and the innovation of individuals. The recent innovations in global communication and commerce are instrumental in bringing the world these unique resources, from the mind-work of computer programmers to the handiwork of crafts men and women.

For example, the Internet has opened the global market to underprivileged women in Jordan who have been trained by the Noor Al Hussein Foundation to produce handicrafts and industrial garments to sustain themselves and their families. Their products are globally accessible through the world wide website of the NHF, which receives email orders from the US and other markets. This global connection came at an opportune time as the foundation has been turning over the ownership and management of these income generating projects to the women themselves. Such orders will insure their long-term sustainability.

The self-esteem and confidence that these women have acquired is as valuable to them as the substantial additional income they earn. In the empowerment of women, especially at the grassroots level, our projects have transformed development thinking in Jordan by moving beyond traditional ineffective social welfare schemes to enable women to become genuine economic and political forces in their communities, thereby increasing their status and influence at every level.

As a result we have seen significant progress in every aspect of quality of life from literacy to family income to population control. These women are building stable healthy and prosperous communities which in turn can engage in regional partnerships in the wider pursuit of peace. These programs which combine innovation with respect for local values and traditions have received international recognition as development models for the Middle East and the developing world. Through a network of regional partnerships we are supporting their implementation in other countries. Also, as models for sustainable economic growth and political participation, they have not only reinforced social stability and cohesion in Jordan, they are an essential component of our larger quest for justice, peace and understanding in the region and abroad.

Education, a Tool for Peace Building

World citizens need to be educated, both in the skills required to participate and prosper in the information economy, and, more importantly, in the skills required for getting along with other citizens of the world. We have seen clearly over the past decades that it is not enough simply to sign a peace treaty. We are very conscious of the importance, if we are to overcome the enmity of previous generations, of encouraging the next generation, the future guardians of peace, to understand both their opportunities in a changing world and their duties towards themselves and others.

Our experience over the past decades has taught me education is a supremely effective tool for peace-building, especially when it brings together students of differing ideas, backgrounds and, even, cultures, at a time in their lives when their minds are most open and receptive to programs emphasizing tolerance, cooperation and conflict resolution. It can give them the tools to make their voices heard in issues that affect them. I have seen this process at work in a number of institutions, in Jordan and around the world. For instance, the Jubilee School in Amman, established as a tribute to King Hussein's Silver Jubilee, was originally conceived in 1977 and has now graduated four years of students. It serves promising scholarship students from throughout the region, with special emphasis on less developed areas of Jordan, promoting community service, creative thinking, information technology, leadership and conflict resolution skills. Our graduates excel at the best US and other international universities, committed to return home to their local communities and to make an extraordinary difference.

The problems that these future leaders will have to address will go beyond politics, economics or even peace. Being a citizen of the world means realizing that we have a responsibility to the world itself, as well as to its human inhabitants, and to future generations.

As King Hussein said to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, "Our goal is to ensure that environmental protection becomes as deeply embedded in our national psyche and in our human spirit as our existing commitments to balanced development, pluralism, human rights, and regional peace based on justice and international law. We are deeply committed to this goal, despite the severe constraints of political, economic and demographic pressures on our country ... for we would be morally, politically, and perhaps even criminally negligent if we were to place financial profits and material comforts above the goal of the integrity of our earth, the welfare of our people, and the life prospects of our children and grandchildren." I believe that his words best express the responsibilities of being a citizen of the world.

His Majesty King Hussein, a Committed Member of the Global Family

In accepting this Award, I must once more express my debt to the one I consider the emblematic Citizen of the World, King Hussein. He was a committed member of the global family. His optimistic belief in his fellow man, a deep and abiding humanism, was unshakable. He believed in the power of mediation and reconciliation, and practiced what he believed. He understood that one can be a citizen of the world, and remain a devoted member of one’s own country, culture, and faith. In my own quest to become a world citizen, he was my motivator and my teacher, enabling me to build upon my earliest beliefs about global responsibility and put them to practical use. In this, he was an inspiration for me, as he clearly was for you, and for countless others around the world. These awards, both the one you have conferred upon him and the one with which you compliment me, are fitting tributes to his work and his ideals. He would have appreciated them greatly, for they would have been proof, for him that others shared those ideals. I know he would have been honored and touched if he could have been here this evening.

I thank you with all my heart, for both of us.

Biography

Her Majesty Queen Noor al Hussein of Jordan was born Lisa Najeeb Halaby on August 23, 1952 to a distinguished Arab-American family. She attended schools in Los Angeles, Washington DC, New York City, and Concord Academy in Massachusetts, before entering Princeton University in its first co-educational freshman class. After receiving a BA in Architecture and Urban Planning from Princeton University in 1974, Queen Noor participated in several international urban planning and design projects in Australia, Iran, the US, and Jordan. She married King Hussein of Jordan on June 15, 1978. They have four children, and their family included children from former marriages of King Hussein.

In 1979 Queen Noor chaired the National Committee for the International Year of the Child; she established the Royal Endowment for Culture and Education which provides scholarships for students, especially outstanding women. In 1984 Queen Noor assumed responsibility for the implementation of an educational project to commemorate His Majesty King Hussein's Silver Jubilee and in 1993 established the Jubilee School, an independent coeducational secondary school.

The Noor Al Hussein Foundation was established In 1985 to initiate and support both regional and international projects that promote community, self-reliance, and equal opportunity. In 1999 the King Hussein Foundation was established and chaired by Queen Noor, dedicated to give meaningful expression to the late King's humanitarian vision and legacy with emphasis on democracy and peace, education and leadership, environment and health.

In 1999 Queen Noor became the Patron of the Landmines Survivors Network and a member of the Advisory Board of the International Campaign to Ban Land-Mines. Queen Noor is patron of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and president of United World Colleges. Queen Noor joined the Advisory Council of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in April 2000.