Global Citizens Celebrated

On the evening of October 30, the Boston Research Center for the 21st Century honored the 1997 Global Citizen Award recipients, Dr. Oscar Arias and Dr. Randall Caroline Forsberg, with a festive awards ceremony and buffet dinner. The joyful camaraderie of assembled families, friends, colleagues, and supporters of the long-time peace activists made the occasion a memorable one.

The Global Citizen Award was established in 1995 to recognize those leaders who contribute globally in such fields as peace, human rights, and the environment. "The two recipients today are renowned for their pioneering and outstanding initiatives," Daisaku Ikeda observed in his message to the assembled guests, "in forging a broad based citizens' movement for peace and disarmament. We so highly value those who raise their voices to create steadily heightened and sustained awareness among the world's citizens." Daisaku Ikeda, a Buddhist peace activist, is the founder of the Boston Research Center for the 21st Century and president of the Soka Gakkai International.

In remarks read by BRC executive director Virginia Straus, the Center's founder continued: "Dr. Arias, whose indomitable efforts in Central America and throughout the world have paved a path for peace and Dr. Forsberg, who courageously continues her endeavors to build a world without war, are two individuals whose contributions make them the most fitting possible recipients of the Global Citizen Award."

Drs. Arias and Forsberg each received $20,000, a gold medallion, and a certificate comprised of original art work by Tini Miuri. Each brilliantly colored artistic rendering provided an interpretation of the life and work of the Global Citizen Award recipient with a focus on the peace initiatives successfully accomplished by each individual.

"What an honor," his friend Cora Weiss, vice president of the Geneva-based International Peace Bureau, declared about the opportunity to introduce the former president of Costa Rica. "Both you and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. went to Boston University. Both of you recognized and protested the role that militarism plays in contributing to poverty and preventing peace. And both of you earned the highest accolade the world can pay to a peacemaker, the Nobel Peace Prize."

With admiration she continued, "You captured the world stage. You both challenged governments that put arms sales above allocations for health and education. You both challenged Washington's war policies. Dr. King linked poverty at home with the war in Vietnam and you, Dr. Arias, who believe that 'poverty is the enemy of humanity' took on the US for its war policy in Central America. What wonderful history to recall, what nice company to remember."

After detailing his accomplishments, Cora Weiss summarized the peace activist's approach: "You are the first to say that peace is a process that never ends . There are too few voices of reason in this world, too few people of passion about peace, hardly any moral authorities with a practical vision of peace. It is time to launch a century of peace and to put war on the table for de-legitimization."

Dr. Arias, who acknowledged the BRC's mission to "promote peace through the mutual respect of diverse cultures and the advocacy of the universal ethics of nonviolence, human rights, economic security, and ecological harmony," addressed the topic, The Need for New Ethics in the 21st Century.

Oscar Arias accepts his Global Citizen certificate
from BRC board member Fred Zaitsu

The Global Citizen emphasized that "dialogue can work miracles." With the proceeds of the Nobel Prize for Peace, Dr. Arias established the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress to "carry out concrete projects that will prevent the resurgence of armed conflict and to educate the world to respect the power of words, not the roar of tanks." He is absolutely convinced that the abolition of national armed forces is a viable option for many countries.

"I have consistently called on the world's arms manufacturers," he emphasized, "to exercise restraint in their sales, especially to the developing world." Dr. Arias advocates preventive diplomacy. He has put together a commission of Nobel Peace Prize laureates to campaign for a code of conduct on arms sales that would obligate governments to support internationally recognized standards of democracy, human rights, and peaceful international relations. He encourages regional disarmament talks and the reduction of defense spending. He is entirely convinced that "demilitarization is a crucial step toward reducing poverty in many nations."

Costa Rica's past president decried the cynicism, hypocrisy, selfishness, and greed so prevalent in the twentieth century and asserted that "our lack of ethics has led to apathy, apathy to inaction, and our inaction is simply immoral." His theme was a simple but revolutionary one: Friends: There is a need for a new ethics.

Dr. Arias urged his listeners: "We must find the moral courage to work to overcome poverty, save the environment, and build a brighter future for the generations to come."

The remarks of Global Citizen Arias, a man who, before he aspired to become the president of his country had planned to practice medicine, echoed the earlier remarks of Daisaku Ikeda " the inner reformation of human beings hold[s] the key to ushering in an era of peace in the twenty-first century."

Joshua Cohen, chairman of the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, introduced Global Citizen Randall Forsberg and reflected on her work: "I have the greatest admiration for Randy and her extraordinary devotion, for thirty years now, to building a world safer, more just, more democratic, and more simply decent than the one we now inhabit."

Dr. Cohen lauded the compelling moral vision--and keen sense of moral outrage--of Global Citizen and peace activist Forsberg. She has the imagination to envision a world "in which people would regard war in much the way we now regard cannibalism and human sacrifice as palpably disgusting, too awful to be contemplated, the kind of thing people once did that we now find so hard even to understand."

Dr. Forsberg, Joshua Cohen continued, "maintains a deep respect for her listeners and readers and persists as an individual of great personal courage."

"Peace is a community endeavor," Randall Forsberg began, publicly thanking all of those who have worked with her and who have supported her efforts. She dedicated her talk to George Sommaripa, a champion for peace, hospitalized with a heart attack at the time of the awards ceremony.

"Our military spending," Forsberg began, "did not come down after the end of the Cold War when the threats went away. We still have military spending on the order of $250 billion a year even though the Warsaw Pact collapsed, the Soviet Union itself collapsed, [and] the Eastern European countries have been liberated and democratized."

Global Citizen Randall Forsberg

Addressing the topic, Ending War: Thinking the Unthinkable , the internationally recognized scholar continued, "The end of the Cold War offered an opportunity to create the kind of world that was envisioned with the founding of the United Nations in 1945."

To create a world without war, Dr. Forsberg insisted, the vision of an international community must be implemented. There is no place for the unilateralism the United States engages in.

There is presently no prospect of a great power war, the peace activist observed, nor is there the prospect of a major regional war. Indeed, she posited, the nature of war has changed.

The new opportunities we face warrant new conclusions such as: Burden-sharing is a good thing; we should increase our reliance on the United Nations; we need to reduce our standing military forces; and we need to strengthen means of preventing conflicts before they start.

If the United States, the executive director of the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies suggested, "took the lead in renouncing the use of force to advance national interests and committed itself to restrict the use of force to defense of one's self and others against aggression, this would create an entirely different moral and political environment an international environment in which there would be a steadily declining incidence of war, expectation of war, and acceptance of war." It is possible, Randall Forsberg concluded, to create the process whereby war can indeed become unthinkable.

1997 Global Citizen Award recipients with family and friends

The Global Citizen Award, according to BRC director Virginia Straus, "honors courageous individuals engaged in an uphill struggle to empower people and establish civil society in the face of oppressive institutions and structures. Recognizing such heroic efforts is one way to help make the shift from a century of war and violence to a global culture of peace."

--Helen Marie Casey