SECRETARY-GENERAL CALLS AIDS MEMORIAL QUILT
‘A PATCHWORK OF GLOBAL SOLIDARITY’
Following is the text of remarks by Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the unfolding of the AIDS Memorial Quilt:
It is an honour for the United Nations to lay out this quilt today, and I thank our friends in the AIDS Memorial Quilt Movement for bringing it to us.� The Quilt Movement is a wonderful example of the kind of response we need in facing up to HIV/AIDS.� What began almost 15 years ago, as one commemoration of a loved one who died of AIDS, has since grown to 50,000 quilts worldwide.
While the tragedy of HIV/AIDS has been unfolding, the Quilt Movement has brought people together in a common cause.� While the threat of AIDS has spread worldwide, so has the movement grown worldwide.� While the quilts consist of many different pieces, each piece fits together with the others to form a patchwork of global solidarity.
It is a response that has measured up to the scale of the pandemic.� We must all make sure that our response does the same
As delegates from all over the world gather here today for the special session on HIV/AIDS, I hope this quilt will inspire them to join together, like the panels in this patchwork, in a movement of global solidarity against AIDS.� To all the members of the Memorial Quilt Movement, and to all the people whose lives it has commemorated, I offer my profound gratitude.
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