Verklaring van België tijdens het algemeen debat van de 81ste zitting van de Algemene Vergadering van de Verenigde Naties

Mr President, Mr Secretary-General, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, Maurice Maeterlinck, born in Ghent and awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911 (nineteen eleven), wrote a strange, almost unsettling play entitled The Blind. Twelve people find themselves in a forest on an island. The guide who led them there is sitting among them. He is dead, but they do not yet know it. They hear the wind, the sea, the voices around them. They know they are not alone, yet they can barely tell where the others are. At one point, one of the characters says: “Years and years we have been together, and we have never seen each other!” That line comes back to me when I look at our world. We exchange statements, messages and positions. At times, we spend hours around the same tables. And yet, being in the same room does not mean that we understand one another. Do we still take the time to hear what others are telling us? To understand what they fear, what they need, and what the world looks like from where they stand? Diplomacy is not about erasing disagreements, nor about abandoning our principles to secure consensus at any cost. It is about continuing to speak, continuing to listen, and f...