official texts and speeches
Ambassador Miller at the 3rd Annual UN Model
University of Macedonia
Wednesday, April 14, 2004, 19:00
I thank you very much for inviting me to join you today.
This is a very special occasion for me, for two reasons. First of all, the person you honor, Yannos Kranidiotis was a good friend of mine. We worked very closely together about ten years ago when I was at the Embassy and then when I came back, after 1997, as the Cypriot negotiator -- I think Mr. Lyssaridis remembers this well -- and I want to acknowledge and pay respects to him, a great figure for Greece and a great figure for Cyprus. He was a very close friend, a true patriot, a dedicated servant to the Greek State, in all the best senses of the word. I will never forget -- we all have our own Yannos Kranidiotis stories -- I remember he wrote me a letter, telling me how much he had enjoyed our working together, after I had served as the Cyprus negotiator. He wrote that letter, and unfortunately he mailed it from Greece and I was stationed in Bosnia; well, (I hope I don’t offend anybody, is there anybody from Bosnia here?) mail in Bosnia does not move quickly. It took that letter a couple of weeks to get to me; by the time the letter arrived, I had heard some days before that he and his son were killed in an airplane crash. I kept that letter, and I have kept it as one of my most treasured possessions. I have kept in touch with his wife, who is now the Consul General in New York.
You are honoring the loss of Yannos Kranidiotis, you are honoring a truly dedicated man, a wonderful person; he was a warm, intelligent human being. And I think for that reason, this is a very special session.
The other reason that I am honored to be here with you today is because of my experience in the Model UN program. It goes back many years. When my son, who is now a grown man, was in high school he was not particularly interested in his studies -- I know you are all very committed students -- but he was absolutely fanatic about the Model UN. I remember very well that the one way to get him to study was to tell him that he was not going to the big Model UN in The Hague, unless his grades were ok, and it worked.
I had good reinforcement when I was stationed in Washington, where working with people in the State Department, diplomats, we started a Model UN Program in Washington DC inner city schools. They have Model UN as you all know, all over the United States, all over the world, but they did not have it in inner city schools, public high schools in Washington DC. That program started in 1991 and it continues today. I am very proud that last month Secretary of State Powell honored this program for the work it has done in a number of schools, we’ve had over 100 volunteers. This is an extremely important program not only in that it teaches about the world, but also I think more importantly, about the messages of life.
When we stop and sit back, and I am sure you all know this very well, but there are many people who do not know that Model UN -- the students in inner city schools in Washington DC did not know this -- is not just about geography but it is about how you get along, it is about how you solve problems, it’s about how you face seemingly irreconcilable differences and decide that you have to work on them. It is about negotiation. It proves, teaches that everything does not have to be a zero sum game. It is about, for those who read the book “Getting to Yes,” it is about getting to “Yes”. As Mr. Lyssaridis knows very well, he and I have been working on this on Cyprus; it is a difficult problem.
It is about all of those concepts because, Paroula Perraki was absolutely right, what you learn as students, are lessons you apply later in life, whether you become diplomats, whether you go into business or whatever field you go into, whether you are going to teach, these are lessons that will stay with you and be very important later in life.
Several years after we started this program in Washington in 1991, I had been posted as the American Ambassador in Bosnia, right after the war. A more war-torn, severed country on the face of the earth that you have never seen. As crazy as it sounds, and people thought that I was crazy because when I got there, I said let’s do Model UN in the Sarajevo High Schools, and people said you have to be crazy. We did it in three high schools and it worked brilliantly. The lesson we learned from this experience is to invest in the next generation, invest in the generation coming up. And give them practical tools, like you have in the Model UN because those will be tools that will stay with you for the rest of your life, as I said before, in whatever field you choose to work in.
So thank you very much for inviting me to join you today. I wish you all well. I have looked at your program and you have got some tough, difficult problems; I know you will solve them. I noted my experience and I do pay very close attention because learning is not a one-way street. I learned a lot participating in the Model UN and observing. Sometimes people call me a coach or a teacher but I am also a student.
Thank you very much.