It
is an honour to participate in the sixty-ninth session
of the General Assembly of the United Nations by
representing the people and the Government of the
Dominican Republic. I wish to express my sincere
congratulations to Mr. Sam Kutesa on his election as
President at the current session. I wish to thank the
Secretary-General, Mr. Ban Ki-moon, for the honour
bestowed on our country by inviting us to participate
in the Education First initiative. As I hope that he
was able to note in his recent visit to our country, the
priority that education is being given in the Dominican
Republic is perhaps the best indicator of the new hopes
springing up in our country. It is true that news of hope
is especially valuable these days when it is not very
abundant.
Generally speaking, the times we live in
raise major challenges for the mission of the
Organization — preserving peace, encouraging
development, making education and health the
entitlement of all inhabitants of the Earth. As we are
all aware, about six years ago, a crisis that began in
the financial sector of developed countries quickly
spread to all productive sectors and has affected the
entire planet. The consequences of the economic shock
continue to be felt and were translated into tens of
millions of unemployed, millions of evictions and deep
cuts in social benefits in our countries.
The welfare State, the instrument which produced
some of the greatest advances in development and
security in history, was jeopardized. Today, we live
the paradox of seeing how that ideal of sustainable
growth and social justice becomes more fragile in
the countries of origin, while it is being reborn in
emerging countries. While developed countries adopt
policies of austerity and structural adjustments, which
are concepts sadly familiar to Latin Americans, we
see how social programmes proliferate in different
corners of the planet, lifting millions out of poverty and
mitigating inequality.
In the Dominican Republic, we still have a long
road ahead of us, but we are taking firm steps in the
fight against poverty and inequality. We are a small
country but we do not lack ambition. We have made
the commitment to our people, our citizens, to put
them at the centre of our public policy. And we have
set ourselves the goal to become a developed and
prosperous country, where equal opportunities will be,
not an ideal, but an everyday reality.
To achieve this, we have established a major
domestic compact, which will be our top priority as a
nation: namely, education. That is why we have doubled
the current budget for public education and allocated
to it 4 per cent of our gross domestic product. This
will enable us to carry out the largest expansion of
school infrastructure ever in our history and ensure
that all girls and boys, without exception, will have
access to quality public education. I am also proud to
tell the Assembly that at the end of this year, thanks to
the efforts of thousands of volunteers, we will be in a
position to declare our country free of illiteracy.
In health, that second pillar essential to the welfare
State, we are also making significant progress. We
have eliminated the co-payment for all public hospitals.
Every year, we add 450,000 participants to the
subsidized health insurance system.
We are also giving priority to supporting small
agricultural producers. We have been visiting rural
communities every week for two years now, listening
to people and seeking ways of helping them, such as
by providing credits, training and infrastructure. The
result of this, which is being monitored by the United
Nations Development Programme, is a rebirth of the
Dominican countryside, including improving its ability
to feed the country and creating employment in rural
communities. Thanks to that and other measures, over
the past 18 months in the Dominican Republic overall
poverty has been reduced by 6 per cent and poverty
in rural areas by 9 per cent. In other words, in 18
months we have lifted more than half a million people
out of poverty. We will continue to work tirelessly,
implementing policies that put the economy at the
service of the people and taking measures to combat
poverty and inequality in a sustainable manner, and we
will continue to create the basis of what one day will be
a full welfare State in the Dominican Republic.
It is an honour for us to be one of the signatory
nations of the founding Charter of the United
Nations, which, as everyone knows, assigned to the
Organization its purpose of saving future generations
from the scourge of war. We should recognize that 2014
is presenting major challenges to that noble purpose. In
different latitudes of the world, there have been violent
conflicts between communities, peoples or States. The
contexts of those conflicts are varied, but one thing
remains constant — the extent to which past grievances
shape our identities today, and how dangerous it is to
allow oneself to be submerged by them. We watch in
perplexity and indignation the virulence with which
these violent conflicts are waged in different parts of
the world.
The Middle East is once again the scene of the
bloodiest sectarianism, which we condemn from this
rostrum in all its manifestations. In the history of all
nations or communities, without exception, there is
a long history of disagreements, misunderstandings
and quarrels that, at times, can be used to stir up the
worst passions. They can be manipulated by individuals
seeking to consolidate power or inflamed by extremist
groups that feel that they have nothing to lose. There will
always be someone who keeps old disputes alive. There
will always be someone who does not mind sacrificing
the true interests of the people at the time because of
the wrongs of the past recorded in the history books.
However, there are plenty of examples to the
contrary. Throughout the world, there are people and
countries that have managed to leave their past behind
in order to focus on building the future that they want
for their children and new generations. Whether it is
building bridges between countries once in conflict, as
the European Union did, or among communities that
decided to share the same nation, as in the case of South
Africa. Hope can and must find its way.
I would also like, if I may, to bring a note of
optimism from our Caribbean region. In the past year,
we started a dialogue process with neighbouring Haiti
that can rightly be regarded as historic. Our situation is
of course unique but not to the degree that it cannot be
echoed in other parts of the world. As members perhaps
know, since the birth of our two Republics, there has
been a long history of misunderstanding and disputes,
which led to each of our countries having a distorted
picture of the other.
It is true that in our past there were a couple of
painful chapters, which are part of our identity.
However, if we limit our identity to those few chapters,
it will be impoverished. Our history is very rich. It has
hundreds of chapters. In many of them, we can find the
inspiration to guide us towards a better future and a
more complete, richer and more human identity because
that is clearly an excellent basis for understanding. In
both countries, there are millions of people who want
better development, education, health care, security
and jobs and more opportunities. Those are concrete
demands that require specific measures. The truth is
that, by responding to them and reaching agreements
in each of those areas, in a few months we were able to
achieve the progress that we had not made in decades.
Little by little, we are moving forward. We are
discovering that old wounds do not impede advancing
on that path, but that they heal as we move forward.
Our peoples demanded that we exercise the necessary
courage to take the first step. We will continue to take
steps until we achieve our goal of two free, sovereign
and independent nations that, on the basis of their
sovereignty, cooperate for the benefit of their respective
peoples.
I wish to take this opportunity from this rostrum
at the General Assembly to make an appeal. As I have
said, a new era in Dominican-Haitian relations has
begun. In that new phase, we would like to enjoy the
support of the international community. One of our
main actions to strengthen Dominican sovereignty and
to ensure the rights of people living in our territory
is to provide them all the relevant documentation. As
members know, many of those people are Haitian. In
order to regularize their status in the territory of the
Dominican Republic, they must first have identity
papers from their country of origin, which many of them
unfortunately lack. Haiti is making an effort to reach
those Haitians and to provide them with documents
that recognize them as its nationals. However, Haiti’s
technical and economic resources are limited. In the
past, a number of international organizations and
countries have expressed their concern about the
fate of Haitian migrants. We share that concern for
humanitarian reasons and because it affects us as the
main host country.
I would therefore note that now is an excellent
time to move from words to actions. With specific and
relatively simple actions, the international community
can have a major and lasting impact on the lives of those
people. I appeal for help for Haiti. May the international
community help Haiti to document its people in its
territory and in ours, since documentation is the first
essential step for the enjoyment of a wide-ranging body
of rights. Let us not allow a few technical shortcomings
to be an obstacle to such a hopeful and necessary process
with as much potential as that new stage of cooperation
between the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
There are times when our best aspirations seem
fragile. There are times when cynical people point out,
under I do not know what law of the economy or in
history, that we are bound to repeat the mistakes of
the past. They say that poverty cannot be overcome,
that the gap of inequality will always grow and that
past grievances will be reborn in each new generation.
However, we know that none of that is true. We know
where to look to find the path of hope. We have only to
look at those who are closest, that is, our own people,
their basic daily needs and the hopes that motivate them
to continue the struggle. If we look carefully, we see
that the economy is not a prison but can be a tool for
improving the lives of people. We find that the people
are free. They are free to know which parts of their past
they wish to use as a guide to their future and which
they wish to leave aside.
We will find a way to work together, as we have
done with the neighbours with whom we share an island,
or as we found yesterday, during the climate summit,
with the other countries with which we share the planet.
The citizens that we represent, increasingly better
informed, demand that we live up to our responsibility
and our declared commitment: to preserve peace, to
promote development and to make education and health
care the right of all inhabitants of the planet.