FILE - In this June 27, 2013 file photo, large photographs of former South African President Nelson Mandela are displayed at the Nelson Mandela Legacy Exhibition at the Civic Centre in Cape Town, South Africa. The United Nations is seeking to harness the soaring symbolism of Mandela, whose South African journey from anti-apartheid leader to prisoner to president to global statesman is one of the 20th century's great stories of struggle, sacrifice and reconciliation. The unveiling of a statue of Mandela, born 100 years ago, with arms outstretched at the U.N. building in New York on Monday, Sept. 24, 2018, opens a peace summit at the General Assembly. (AP Photo, File)
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — U.N. leaders honored Nelson Mandela as an inspiration for the world body, an example for democracy and a reminder that 'differences are to be celebrated' as a statue of the late South African leader was unveiled at the organization's headquarters Monday.
'Nelson Mandela embodied the highest values of the United Nations — peace, forgiveness, compassion and human dignity,' U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said.
This year marks the centenary of Mandela's birth, and the U.N. is declaring 2019-2028 as the 'Nelson Mandela Decade of Peace.' A peace summit was scheduled in honor of the prisoner-turned-president later Monday as the U.N. General Assembly's annual meeting of world leaders began.
Imprisoned in South Africa for 27 years, Mandela became the international face of the struggle to end the country's apartheid system of white minority rule over the majority black population.
Four years after he walked out of jail in 1990, he became the country's first black president in its first multi-racial elections. Over the ensuing decades, he became a Nobel peace laureate and global statesman.
'Few people in the history of our world have left such an incredible mark on humanity,' U.N. General Assembly President Maria Fernanda Espinosa Garces said Monday.
Dignitaries and members of Mandela's family, including his widow, Graca Michel, gathered as a cloth was pulled off a life-size sculpture of a smiling Mandela, his hands outstretched. Someone in the group tucked a small South African flag in the statue's lapel.
Espinosa Garces said she hoped the figure's presence at the U.N. would serve as 'a reminder that our differences are to be celebrated' and that the world body's work 'should always be guided by the inspiration and the promise that Mandela has left us.'
In a speech at the U.N. in 1994, he said its challenge was 'to answer the question — given the interdependence of the nations of the world — what is it that we can and must do to ensure that democracy, peace and prosperity prevail everywhere!'
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said Monday that Mandela believed the U.N. 'was the most valuable instrument to advance peace in the world and to develop equality and to advance the prospects of humanity generally.'