Hiroshima Speech

Monday 4 August 2003

It is my highest, most heartfelt hope......... that here, at Hiroshima, where the world got it so terribly wrong, we may begin to start to correct that wrong. Here, where we made a terrible leap toward the potential for our complete destruction, is a pivotal point in the history of humanity.

History has very few clear lines where the past lies shattered as clearly as it did here. Here war took the vast step toward lasting destruction and damage that, like the bewitched curses of legend, lasts from generation to generation to generation. Here the childish faith we all had in science as the key to positive progress was literally blown apart. And here the line

between combatant and non-combatant was literally atomised and destroyed.

For me, as a child of the uneasy peace Hiroshima and Nagasaki produced, this is a trip to the birthplace of that flawed peace. Beyond my role as a politician I stand here today as one of the peace children of the world who has literally grown up in the shadow cast by the horrors unleashed here.

Suddenly in that shadow even the major world powers were frozen in time. Ambition and power were abruptly restrained. It has been a long fraught peace for many of my generation that is only now starting to decay in the face of the new threats of terrorism from both the powerful and the powerless.

So, today I have to say that for me this is beyond a visit of remembrance, or indeed of hope. This is a spiritual journey to the centre of gravity of this age. Sometimes it is a mute centre, at other times, like today, it comes fully to life to bear witness and remind us all of what still has to be done to make sure a nuclear catastrophe never happens again.

It is moving beyond words to be here to see some of the lasting after shocks of the tragedy for humanity that took place here and has let me grow grey in peace.

It has been an age where even the peace has always had the menacing spectre of the mushroom cloud behind it. This year,

when many of us peace marchers of 30 years ago have found to our great sorrow we are marching again, is a particularly fitting year to be here.

We, and the world, need to be reminded again just how bad the price of war can become regardless of what appears to be the justification that begins that war.

For some years now I have kept near me in my office a blackened roof tile scorched here in Hiroshima by the atomic bomb. It has been a vivid reminder sometimes of the fragility of peace and life itself, and how we must all become willing to defend such things, as only their absence fully makes you aware of their value.

This has been a year for me of utter horror, as like many of you, I have watched, not in shock and awe, but in sorrow and shame, the mighty of the world decide that they may strike the first blow if they suspect one may be coming. They may not.

They have neither the moral right, nor the consent of those who stand for the rest of humanity. This year also I have had to witness with sorrow the spectacle of growing numbers of nations holding up the threat of nuclear destruction as some obscene emblem of national pride and progress. It is not.

Every nation and leader that goes down this path is instead showing the rest of us how huge must be the level of fear inside their heads. And how badly they need to come here and be reminded how awful and high the price for this can be.

Against this grim backdrop of horror it is all the more valuable to be here where we all show by our presence that we believe people who have resisted wickedness together can rid the world of this evil. We can.

It has made me proud that my city, Christchurch, is a city that has publicly stood up for peace for generations.

It amazed me recently to realise that it is now 30 years since my nation, New Zealand, stood up against nuclear testing in the Pacific. In one of our first major shows of moral force we made the whole world take notice in 1973 when the Government of Prime Minister Norman Kirk took France to the World Court to try and stop the testing of nuclear weapons in the South Pacific.

Prime Minister Kirk also sent the Frigate Otago to the test site in Mururoa to shame the French before the world. He wanted a Nuclear Free South Pacific and a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

We got those in 1985 and 1996, long after Norman Kirk had died his premature death in office.

It is worth reminding us all that when that campaign began the cynical and supposedly worldly amongst us said that a tiny island nation would never make the world take notice. That such a speck of a nation on the Pacific could never bend a major world power to our will for peace. We could and we did.

Nor has Christchurch given up on the commitment to a world at peace and rid of nuclear weapons.

Last week we hosted a visit by the grandson of Gandhi and the Dean of the Martin Luther King Junior chapel. They came to speak on the beliefs of Gandhi and King about the very real power of non-violence to get real results. One thousand people crowded into our Anglican Cathedral to hear their message.

Last weekend one of our local universities held a one day peace symposium to look at ways to build stronger ties between peace, justice and the environment.

It was another step forward for Lincoln University which in 1998 held the key role of hosting the Bougainville Peace Talks, which brought to an end the 10 year conflict arising from Bougainville’s desire to secede from Papua-New Guinea.

It was a role that Christchurch is keen to take on again, as a broker and venue for peace. It is a role that we have assumed in the struggle to rid the world of the threat of again unleashing the nuclear choice in war. It is a choice we believe, quite simply should not be available.

I am sure many of you here today will also have heard at home the jibes of the critics about how you should not presume to think you can make a difference.

Let me remind you, referring to the visitors my city, has just had, that Gandhi made a difference, Martin Luther King made a difference, and so can we.

Kate Dewes, who is here today as part of the Christchurch delegation, likes to try and make the point that the 1986 crusade to ask the World Court for an advisory opinion on the legality of nuclear weapons did not, as legend has it, start as an idea hatched over her kitchen table.

However, this was an idea that to a large degree got up and running in Christchurch. It grew into an international campaign spearheaded at times by retired Christchurch magistrate Harold Evans. The World Court project, as it became known, got 4 million declarations of public conscience.

It was endorsed by 700 groups globally. It got the backing of 74 members of the non-aligned movement to co-sponsor the

UN resolution asking for the Opinion. As you know, in 1996 the Court advised that the threat or use of nuclear weapons was generally illegal under existing international law, and that the nuclear states were obliged to negotiate in good faith toward complete nuclear disarmament.

It looks to me like Kate Dewes, Harold Evans and several million others ended up making a real difference.

We are deluded if we believe that individuals cannot make a

difference. In reality it has always been the decisions, beliefs and convictions of the few that have eventually carried along the rest of humanity in new directions.

I believe we are in some ways again at the stage many European cities found themselves in at the start of the European Renaissance. That is, a time when it was the cities that shaped their own destinies, rather than nations.

The Renaissance cities progressed because of technological and social changes. I believe we are again at one of those turning points where cities are again hugely influential as national structures struggle to catch up with the pace of change.

There is again a unique chance for cities and individuals to make a major difference. Today that difference can be made by the Mayors for Peace movement.

It started here with the Mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mayors for Peace now encompasses 547 cities in 107 countries. Again it looks to me like it is making a difference. We have a chance to exert pressure on our national governments to back our aims to get the next review of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty due in 2005 in New York, to become the start point for real efforts to get rid of all nuclear weapons.

We, the Mayors for Peace, want nothing less than a nuclear free world by 2020.

I'll finish by again showing how I believe we can make a difference. In New Zealand I helped start a group called the

Mayors' Taskforce for Jobs. We started from a point of deciding we would not accept what the realists and pragmatists said were inevitable levels of unemployment. We decided no unemployment would be our eventual goal. We broke the goal into smaller pieces. Our start point became a goal of no unemployment or lack of training for all those under the age 25.

That goal is now on its way to acceptance and action by central government. From contempt as utopian dreamers to acceptance and action took us only a few years. I believe we can do the same with this much greater evil.

I want my children's children to not grow up in the shadow of another peace bought at such a bitter, harrowing price as the price paid here. I also believe we can do it. We can make a difference.