UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan received the centenary Nobel Peace Prize yesterday and said the UN should focus more on the plight of individuals in a quest to end poverty, prevent conflicts and promote democracy.
Annan, who is to share the US$951,600 prize with the UN, said the world body should be guided in the 21st century by the idea that to save one life was "to save humanity itself."
He collected the prize -- a gold medal and a diploma -- at a glittering ceremony in Oslo's City Hall. South Korean Foreign Minister Han Seung-soo, president of the 189-member UN General Assembly, collected the prize on behalf of the UN.
Annan, a 63-year-old Ghanaian, said the UN needed a deeper awareness of the "sanctity and dignity of every human life, regardless of race or religion."
"From this vision of the role of the United Nations in the next century flow three key priorities for the future: eradicating poverty, preventing conflict, and promoting democracy," he said in his acceptance speech.
The award marks 100 years since the first prize went to Henri Dunant, the Swiss founder of the Red Cross, and French peace campaigner Frederic Passy. The prize is named after Sweden's Alfred Nobel.
Annan, a career UN official elected the world's top diplomat in 1997, gave the example of an Afghan baby born today into poverty and who would be fed and comforted by her mother, just like other newborns around the globe.
"We must begin with the young Afghan girl, recognizing that saving that one life is to save humanity itself," he said.
The secretive Nobel committee said the prize, the latest in more than a dozen linked to the UN, rewarded work for a "better organized and more peaceful world."
It praised Annan for bringing "new life" to efforts to combat everything from poverty to AIDS.
Annan said the UN had been founded on the ashes of World War II but that horrors had not ended, citing the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the war in Bosnia. Survivors of massacres in Rwanda and Bosnia were among the few who criticized the decision to give Annan the prize -- he had been head of UN peacekeeping at the time.
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