United Nations Chronicle.

• Position: Brief Article - Editorial

Kofi Annan's reappointment as Secretary-General of the United Nations more than six months before his current tenure ends is a tribute without precedent to him personally and to the ideal of unanimity in decision-making in the institution he serves--the institution he described as indispensable and irreplaceable when he first took office. Like Dag Hammarskjold before him, Mr. Annan was first elected after an embittered and contentious season, and his very first call was "to embark upon a time of healing; a healing of fractures and frictions between Member States and this Organization".

That time has passed, and passed successfully; within four years, Member States had, in their Millennium Declaration, jointly reaffirmed "that the United Nations is the indispensable common house of the entire human family". But even as the strains of that equation, between an Organization and the Members who animate its being, have been quick to mend, older scars have persisted, newer wounds have festered. Indifference and apathy offer no balm. Hostilities may have lessened, and suspicions may have eased, but there is still a long way to go beyond grudging tolerance and longstanding premises of simple coexistence to a world of diversity without division, inclusion without intimidation.

Our centre section (pages 23 to 56) looks at possibilities before us, both in the specific context of the Durban Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, and in the larger context of the instruments we possess, among them: education, learning, travel, dialogue, humanitarian response and the vast generational potential inherent in today's children. As...