NEW YORK- More than six decades after Emperor Haile Selassie warned world leaders that racial inequality would prevent lasting peace, his words have returned to the United Nations General Assembly through Barbados Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley.
Addressing the 81st session of the General Assembly, Mottley cited Selassie’s landmark speech delivered in the same chamber on October 4, 1963.
“If we want a UN that truly delivers for everyone, then at its core, we must treat every human being as having equal value and deserving respect,” Mottley said.
She then invited delegates familiar with Selassie’s words to recite them with her: “Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, everywhere is war.”
Mottley continued by invoking his warning against first-class and second-class citizenship and discrimination based on skin colour.
“There will be war,” she said. “But, Mr President, equally, there will be no trust and no transformation. We want peace.”
Selassie’s historic UN address
Emperor Haile Selassie delivered the original address during the 18th session of the UN General Assembly.
Speaking months after African leaders established the Organisation of African Unity in Addis Ababa in May 1963, Selassie presented racial equality, African liberation and collective security as essential conditions for world peace.
“Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned,” Selassie said, lasting peace and international morality would remain unattainable.
He declared that peace would remain elusive until countries abolished first-class and second-class citizenship, treated skin colour as no more significant than eye colour and guaranteed basic human rights to everyone regardless of race.
Selassie also condemned the colonial systems then controlling Angola and Mozambique and the apartheid government in South Africa.
“Until all Africans stand and speak as free beings, equal in the eyes of all men, as they are in the eyes of Heaven, until that day, the African continent will not know peace,” he said.
From the UN chamber to Bob Marley’s music
The words later reached a much larger global audience through Jamaican reggae musician Bob Marley.
Marley and the Wailers adapted significant parts of Selassie’s speech for the song War, released on the 1976 album Rastaman Vibration. The recording transformed the emperor’s statements into the repeated refrain “everywhere is war”.
The song is officially credited to Carlton Barrett and Allan Cole. Cole reportedly brought Selassie’s speech to Marley’s attention, while much of the recording’s language came directly from the 1963 address.
Selassie’s original UN wording did not use “everywhere is war” as the repeated refrain now widely associated with the speech. That formulation became globally recognised through Marley’s musical adaptation and was the version Mottley recited at the 2026 General Assembly.
A warning rooted in Ethiopia’s experience
The 1963 address also recalled Selassie’s appearance before the League of Nations in 1936, when he appealed for international support after Fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia.
He told the UN that collective security remained essential because smaller countries could not protect themselves against more powerful aggressors without an effective international system.
Selassie also called for nuclear disarmament and urged governments to strengthen the United Nations as an institution capable of protecting peace and human rights.
His warning about racial hierarchy has endured beyond the political circumstances of 1963, moving from the UN chamber to reggae music and, 63 years later, back to the General Assembly through Mottley’s address.
