Your Majesties, Your Royal Highness,Mr. Prime Minister,Mr. Chairman, Excellencies, Friends,

Thanks to the Prime Minister, and the Swedish government, this is the first time ever that an international Forum has been called to discuss the prevention of genocide, one of the main threats to humanity’s existence, and one that according to one calculation has cost 169 million human lives just between 1900 and 1987 – before Rwanda.

Our first task is to clarify the topic of our discussions – “Prevention of Genocide”. What do we mean by genocide or genocidal events? I think we should include at least, first, genocide according to the 1948 Convention; second, politicide, that is mass murder for political or social, economic or ideological reasons, and through mass sexual violations; third, so-called ‘ethnic cleansing’ that includes an existential threat to the targeted population; and fourth, global or transnational genocidal ideologies that not only threaten mass killings but actually engage in them.

The next task is to make clear that the organizers of the Forum would plead with the participants not to discuss past and current violent conflicts. They are asking you to leave the discussion of Irak, Kashmir, the Middle East, and other issues to the appropriate arenas, not here, where no resolutions can be passed´and no agreements can be reached. Our Forum is directed to the future.We want to help in creating the tools and mechanisms that may prevent, or at least diminish, genocidal dangers in the future.

Our discussion starts, obviously, with the Holocaust, the genocide of the Jews at the hands of National Socialist Germany, which was the topic of the first Stockholm Forum. But while trying to learn from it, as the paradigm for genocide, and while learning from genocidal events that took place after 1945, we want to move on to the future.We want to act within the UN framework. A great deal of criticism is leveled at the UN, some of it justified, some exaggerated and unfair. You know, when I was five years old, I told my mother: mother, you are not pretty, but you are mine. The UN has shortcomings, and we all know that; but the UN is ours, and it is the best UN we have.We have none other.

There will be the inevitable urge of people to tell us how much they oppose mass murder and how immoral it is; all of us here are motivated by a powerful moral urge. But we do not need moralizing sermons. We know how to preach them, we know they are true. Today, here, we need to discuss practical ways that will enable us to reduce the danger of us killing each other in large numbers.

We will hear statements by political leaders, hear panels and have workshops where options will be discussed which we hope will enable us to make practical progress on prevention of genocide. The seminal paper by Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun, Responsibility to Protect, will be one of the main guides to our deliberations. Some of the options presented will no doubt be controversial, and so they should be; we hope that they may lead to international contacts designed to use existing political tools and mechanisms, or encourage the creation of new ones, mechanisms that will enable the community of nations to act in the prevention of genocidal events as defined above. Our responsibility is, indeed, to protect endangered populations, and ultimately ourselves, not in talkfests and pious statements, but in the real world by real measures. Our responsibility to our children and children’s children demands no less.

In a way, this Forum has become possible because we can now assess, by the use of recently developed scientific means, and with a very high degree of accuracy, the risks of genocidal developments all over the globe; we can present early warnings of such dangers. Our problem will be how best to use these tools that we did not have before and that we now have. The information is there.What do we do with it?

One of the options discussed will be the well-known one of creating an armed force to intervene before the situation in any given area becomes genocidal, or when all other means of stopping such a danger have been exhausted, or when the genocidal event has already started and no other option but that of intervention to stop the tragedy has remained. Of course, the very need to use force is an admission of failure, and force is only justified as a measure of last resort.We need to develop a very clear and practical ladder of measures that precede the use of force.

Another option that will be presented is based on the obvious need for an efficient way to bring the information about impending and actual dangers of mass murder to the Security Council, the supreme political authority of the UN, obligated as it is by the Charter to face such threats and take preventive action. A possibility that will be brought up is the creation of an informal body of interested governments who would establish what some involved NGOs call a Focal Point, that is someone, an existing UN agency or an independent, trustworthy individual, who will collate the information now available and combine it with what the UN collects in any case. This then would be presented on a regular basis to the Secretary General, who would submit it to the Council. This could ensure a serious discussion, on a regular basis, in our highest international body.

We would like to discuss the non-military options to act – how far can diplomatic pressure be effective, how far can economic sanctions, when they are applied not globally, but in the form of smart, selective sanctions, be effective for prevention. What is clear is that one of the main dangers we face is that of hate speech that prepares the ground for genocidal ideologies to take hold of the minds of people. This is no easy matter. In many democracies the attitude is ‘I hate what you say but I will defend to the utmost your right to say it.’ However, there are limits, and some of us would like to define them. Two cases should limit the right of free speech: one, when there is a clear and explicit call for the murder of members of a targeted group; and two, when members of a targeted group are dehumanized, and thus removed from the universe of moral obligation. This happened, for instance, during the Holocaust, when Jews were called vermin and bacillae, and in Rwanda, where Tutsi were called cockroaches; in both cases, murder was, first, explicitly advocated, and then committed. An international agreement that condemns any authority that knowingly permits such hate speech to take place might be very effective in the task of prevention.

The threat of mass murder is also very explicit in a global, genocidal ideology that has a number of parallels with National Socialism and Soviet communism. Most of us will reject Samuel Huntington’s thesis of a necessary clash of civilizations.We affirm our view that Islam is one of the great civilizations that has contributed and will undoubtedly contribute in the future to the development of humanity. It is only with the help of the huge number of non- and anti-radical Moslems that we can face the danger of radical Islam, which is not Islam but a mutation of Islam. Radical Islam explicitly calls for mass murder and extinction, first of all of non-radical Moslems and their governments, for the abolition of nation states, for the murder of Jews, Christians and Hindus, for world government to be conquered by force. Some states, fearful of repercussions, and thinking that if they keep their heads down they will be spared, inadvertently help to increase the danger of this ideology, which is the motor of current worldwide terrorism. But beyond the recruitment for this battle of the non-radical Moslem world, we need economic plans that will give vast numbers of deprived, frustrated and despairing people a hope of a decent life; we need political alliances that will form a cordon sanitaire against the spread of this movement. Radical Islam cannot be fought by force alone; we need a combination of other means as well to fight this threat to all civilization.

We will not, at this Forum, save the world; we will not wish to usher in a utopia – we know that utopias kill, and that radical utopias kill radically, because we have experienced that with Nazism, Fascism and communism.We will not find solutions to all the ills of mankind.We do not aspire to a good world, because we know that that is not achievable. But we hope that maybe, possibly, hopefully, we can advance a small step forward to a slightly better world which we can pass on to the next generation. Humans are the only mammals that kill each other in huge numbers. If we help saving some lives, if we help create the means with which our innate tendency to kill other humans can be reined in; if we can do that, or even only some of that, our efforts will have been worthwhile, and our grandchildren will praise us; if we achieve more than that, they will bless us.