A living legacy: The United Nations commemorates 80 years

By Doris Abdullah

The Living Legacy memorial event at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City on Friday, Sept. 19, was an evening highlighting 80 years of achievements, advances, failures, and assessment of where we are today, while setting a goal for a future UN contained in the Pact for the Future and the Sustainable Development Goals among others. The UN Chamber Music Society greeted us with the UN National Anthem composed by Pablo Casals.

The UN member states body made up of 193 nations opened on Tuesday, Sept. 23, with the theme “Better Together: 80 Years and More for Peace, Development and Human Rights.” The air we breathe, the sun that shines upon our faces, the wind that blows, and the waters that fall from the sky or flow in the ocean depths cannot be measured on a scale as successes or failures. But we can look back 80 years and take pride in the Sustainable Development Goals empowering women and successfully measure the surge in women’s and girls’ education and their increased representation in governments.

The keynote speaker for the Living Legacy evening, Annalena Baerbock, would become the fifth woman president of the General Assembly when the 2025-2026 session opened last Tuesday. Amina Mohammed, deputy secretary general, from rural Nigeria, delivered the closing remarks of the evening. Even so, poverty, violence, backlash, and setbacks against progress by women and girls offer persistent challenges for the future.

The video presentation showed a UN born from the ashes of war in 1945 and the continuing search for peace that eludes humankind. Like the UN, I also was born in 1945 and turned 80 this year. I recalled my childhood fear of an atomic war. I was told by my teachers that the weapon would vaporize all living things. The threat of nuclear weapons still hangs over all humankind. I am still fearful that they may be used.

The UN is the only forum on earth where every nation meets and talks (and sometimes shouts) to and at each other about not just nuclear weapons, but all wars. For 80 years, a third world-wide war has been contained. The awful count of the dead—in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar, Haiti, and so many more places in conflict around the globe—hangs over the world today. They are among the UN failures, but they are still seeking resolutions. The lead-off General Assembly war discussion, that began last week’s meetings, was rooted in a resolution on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The Living Legacy event ended with a loud applause. Hope is in a living legacy, not a dead legacy.

The UN did not invent human rights. We humans are born with rights. The UN merely writes them down and carries forth discussions on them. “The UN was not created to send mankind to heaven, but to save it from hell,” are words said to have come from Dag Hammarskjold, a former UN secretary general. Neither heaven nor hell is within the domain of the UN to send or save anyone, but I think I get his meaning.