Panama

The tragedy of the millions of human beings who are suffering the ravages of poverty affects Panama very deeply. This is a deplorable scourge which has reached intolerable levels. Those of us present here are facing the shameful paradox of having produced the highest level of wealth ever known to mankind while at the same time having the highest level of unemployment in our economies in history. Poverty and exclusion are the battlefronts that call for political and moral will. From this standpoint, Panama is concerned that the tenor of this debate on the financial or military attributes of the many aspirants to membership of the Security Council may make us forget why the Organization was created. Panama, a founding Member of the United Nations, signed the Charter of the United Nations to give a voice to those who had been silenced by colonialism and to those who clamoured for justice, freedom and 18 development; to restore dignity to peoples such as mine that had been deprived of their sovereign rights; and to give those who had been discriminated against and persecuted the right to dream about a better world in which no one would be hated for the color of his skin or his beliefs, or for being part of a given ethnic group, or of one gender or the other. Panama signed that beautiful document, a tribute to the humble of the Earth, in order to give democratic institutions, civil and political rights and multilateral forums to all those people — men and women of good will — who did not want war to return, destroying their homes, legacies, cities and towns and plots of land. They also did not want to see war rub out entire generations by sacrificing them to obsession, fanaticism and extremism. Like many others here, Panama signed the San Francisco Charter so that the poor of the world and those suffering from disease and malnutrition would have two of the simplest and most moving of human attributes: faith and hope. The more than 50 years that have passed since then have brought about considerable advances that have changed the face of the world. Many of them would not have been possible, however, if cooperation had not imprinted a new meaning and purpose on our Organization. In fact, few vestiges of colonialism remain to be solved; ethnic groups and nationalities, prohibited cultures and the prosecuted now work together in pride to design a polychromatic world that calls for equality in difference and tolerance towards diversity. The number of nations which are Members of the United Nations has increased three-fold, and its agenda reflects their pain, suffering, struggles and aspirations. Its orientation and contents have changed, and everyone has been given a forum in which to express his opinions and find support and understanding. If a planning board had tried to identify, as is now proposed, which problem had priority and deserved attention, financing and debate, the Security Council would never have met in my country, Panama, nor would that event have changed so decisively the course of negotiations when Panama attempted to regain its sovereignty and its Canal. There are important achievements in the daily life of the United Nations. However, none of them would have been possible if the United Nations had not attained the quality, the representative nature and the legitimacy that it has achieved through universality. It must be recognized that there remain unacceptably acute differences and deficiencies, which are becoming more serious and are constantly and forcibly knocking at the very doors of our homes. At the same time, thousands of people are dying before our very eyes because of hunger, intolerance, hatred, terrorism, fratricidal warfare, authoritarianism and violence; thousands of children are looking at us through television screens with languid and sad eyes, only to become mere statistics at the end of the programme. There are still those who peddle illusions, who would have us believe that conflicts reside at the end of a rifle and that they can be resolved by having more powerful rifles. The figures on what the world spends on weapons are so disproportionate when compared to expenditures for development that only mentioning them makes us ashamed. We should have already learned the lesson that when people are motivated, for whatever reason, there is no bullet or defence system, no matter how sophisticated, that can eliminate the causes of conflict; that the instruments of force can lower the fever but they cannot eliminate the turmoil which causes it; and that there is no military solution to social and political problems. History, life's teacher, shows us that violence usually is the result, not the cause, of conflict; that war is more often than not the symptom rather than the cause of the ills; and that the only way to resolve conflicts and the violence that goes along with them is to act on their true, underlying causes: hunger, malnutrition and extreme poverty and the lack of means to overcome them; ethnic, gender and cultural discrimination; intolerance and authoritarianism; fundamentalism and political and religious persecution; unemployment, slave labour and immoral salaries; humiliation and national oppression. The majority of us who came here over 50 years ago, as well as the many who arrived later, did so in order to find solidarity and to take refuge in the realm of law, not to shield ourselves in a new military alliance or to take shelter in the shadow of a cannon. Circumstances then forced us to live under an ominous nuclear balance which made the interrelations of military forces the determining factor in international relations. 19 Today — under a completely different setting in which the balance of power is measured in terms of the potential and economic strength of markets — nothing compels us to continue to live under the model of the cold war. The greatest impending threat to international peace and security is poverty, whose reach is as extensive as that of the most pervasive of plagues. Which current or future Security Council member's army will be able to put an end to the threat if it is the mother of all illnesses and resentments and harvests more human lives than any bacteria, virus or ancient or modern plague? If what we are contemplating is a resurgence of the old and festering conflicts which were frozen by the cold war, would we not be substituting the ancient balance of bipolar nuclear terror for a new and expanded military alliance to resolve those conflicts under the umbrella of the United Nations? Panama certainly does not believe that force is not necessary as a deterrent, nor are we unaware that such a tool in responsible hands is useful, particularly when it is legitimated by world-wide consensus, as the Charter proposes. What concerns us is that most of the discussion in the world about the reform of the United Nations disproportionately stresses the use of force and disregards what is important, and indeed imperative — that is to say, cooperation for development. Hence, to assert that the most important function of the United Nations is to have a big force to maintain international peace and security, while at the same time proposing the reduction, streamlining and elimination of the Organization's social and humanitarian components, raises important questions about the final nature of our reform and modernization exercise. To maintain that financial and material contributions to peacekeeping operations should be decisive in determining who can and who cannot sit on the Council, while at the same time stating that social and humanitarian tasks, development programmes and environmental protection programmes should be placed in other kinds of management and organization categories, greatly concerns us. This compendium of proposals must be rebalanced and given its proper dimension. If what we are going to discuss is the package, then the only one we should talk about is the package of the fundamental principles of the United Nations already enshrined in the Charter. From that integral perspective, the purpose of politically and financially strengthening the Organization, and the Security Council in particular, is to ensure that it can fully discharge its major mission: the promotion of social and economic and human development as the most effective way to prevent conflicts. The profound developments in the last 50 years have changed the international community. The deepest change has occurred in the parameters of, and the language used to define, relations among countries. The Powers of the past no longer exist, and new Powers are emerging — even though there are obvious military weaknesses. It is no longer war that marks the trend towards contemporary development or the course or content of international life. Why organize the United Nations on the basis of what no longer exists? Now it is peace, trade, the sharing of the fruits of knowledge and technology, and the deep changes designed to ensure higher levels of tolerance and open-mindedness that are features of international coexistence. It is not military tools to prevent war that have to be strengthened but, rather, the tools to build peace, to achieve international cooperation, as is stated in the Charter, in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all (Article 3). International peace is not guaranteed by rifles or cannons, or by one or several allied Powers. This has been proved by recent, and not so recent but no less painful, experiences. The small and brave country Uruguay, which makes the highest per capita contribution for peace-keeping, has taught us such a good lesson in this respect. If it is true that the greatest restriction on creativity, thought and intelligence is dialectically established by language itself, then we have to cast aside once and for all the language and the thinking process left over from the cold war. We must design something that more appropriately represents what we wish to do. Panama does not feel that its juridical status has been diminished when it acknowledges that some countries have special attributes or can better discharge the tasks of the Security Council. On the one hand, the problem is to define these tasks, to determine whether 20 what we want is a guardian or a promoter of development and cooperation. On the other hand, the problem relates to the degree of responsibility a member of the Council has vis-a-vis the rest of us. For, if its membership of the Council is based solely on its individual attributes — rejecting any kind of representation of us — then it can sit in that seat in the Council until someone simply wrests the seat from it by violence. Everything indicates that we should define these tasks in a coherent manner in keeping with the whole set of purposes of the United Nations. From this standpoint, each region has to determine the degree of representativity and responsibility that its members should have, as well as who can occupy those seats. It is difficult to think that after the Members of the United Nations have acquired such long and productive experience of working in regional groups and organizations, everything would be discarded in order to vote for a country on an individual basis. We would like to know what benefit there would be in reigning in a vacuum. Furthermore, neither ideological nor military blocs appear any longer on the map of the world, nor should geographical distribution alone. These have been nothing but obsolete instruments which have served to draw simplistic and arbitrary borders and, hence, to face us at times with tragedies. This new international reality must be fully recognized. The new borders that are now forming are trade, ethnic, religious, and cultural borders, and it is precisely because they were disregarded during the cold war that we are still faced today with all these upheavals. It is those upheavals that seduce even the most conservative among us into being guided by one of the left-over thoughts of the bipolar world — vis pacem para bellum. On the other hand, if we really feel comfortable with one-third of the membership not rotating and two-thirds of the membership rotating, then it would be sane and judicious for any expansion to maintain those proportions, which practice has shown to be efficient and which have been agreed to. Why, then, should we go on using language that draws a distinction between the regular budget and the peacekeeping budget? This accounting dichotomy became a policy and crudely revealed how individual interests could separate the package from the founding principles, to such an extent that they would be truly contradictory. There are those who say that it is shameful for the regular budget to have to be financed out of the peacekeeping budget. I would say that it is even more shameful that the disproportion in amounts, both in payments and in voluntary contributions, is so overwhelming that the social and humanitarian functions are now secondary to the security functions, as if, in the final analysis, civic-action programmes are dependent upon military operations. This reflects the unstated reversal of focus between the secondary: the operations for the maintenance of security, and the primary: the human-development programmes. A single budget, which conforms to a periodically agreed-upon political strategy, should respond in each case to the changing challenges of the new international dynamism. In our view, it is not compatible with the new spirit of democratization in our Organization or with the new international realities for one or a few countries to subsidize the entire budget in a disproportionate way, for this can lead to the danger of concentrating the decision- making power and thereby affecting the Organization's functioning. In the final analysis — and we do not want to give lessons to anyone — we feel that what is necessary is a good arsenal of general and flexible criteria, the key to the search for consensus — that is, representativity, legitimacy, non-discrimination, equity and legal equality. We must move from the particular and discuss individual aspirations, in order to design a compendium of criteria that would be applicable to all, whether or not their seats on the Security Council rotated. From that standpoint, we think that we should not discuss the veto in the abstract, as a privilege or as a category in and of itself. With the passage of time, there has been a distortion in the original spirit of the Charter, under which the members of the Security Council were to represent in the Security Council the general interests of the international community, not act in accordance with their exclusive military or political strategic interests. In that context, part of the reform should be the negotiation of an agreement restricting the use of the veto to what is stipulated in Chapter VII and to what was agreed in the gentlemen's agreement in London 1948. From that standpoint, we need a formula that can prevent a single country from standing in the way of the general interest. One such formula would be allowing vetoes to be overridden by a two-thirds majority. The optimal solution, of course, would be to get rid of the veto. 21 Let me here and now thank the public and private sectors of the international community for the support and solidarity given to my country during the Universal Congress on the Panama Canal. This is a good opportunity to report that Panama is continuing to take the necessary legislative and administrative steps to turn this international public service over to an agency that would be constitutionally autonomous — administratively, politically and financially. Panama is certain that scrupulous observance of this autonomous status will make the interocean waterway more competitive and more efficient and will also allow the agency to take advantage of the many opportunities that will be created by the Canal’s upcoming incorporation into the Panamanian economy. We must remember that until now military needs for the Canal have always been dominant, and this has made it impossible to exploit the Canal’s many competitive advantages for trade and international civil-maritime activities. From this standpoint, Panama’s greatest strategic concern during the transition process has been to gain complete control of the Canal so as to undertake a vast, multimillion-dollar programme to modernize and widen it. This programme includes widening the Gaillard Cut — a critical area for ships crossing from the waters of Lake Gatun — as well as the systematic studies undertaken in cooperation with the United States, Japan and the European Union in order to construct the third system of locks, which will allow passage of ships weighing up to 150,000 dead- weight tons. Given the international importance of the Panamanian interoceanic waterway, we intend to announce formally to this General Assembly session that, in order to ensure respect for the neutrality of the Panama Canal, Panama will conduct its external relations in such a way as to reduce international tension and conflict and not to get embroiled in issues that would require us to take sides for or against members of the international community with which we have friendly relations, or for or against the community as a whole. We are convinced that this new policy is the most important contribution Panama can make to international peace and security. From this standpoint, we will concentrate our efforts on contributing to understanding, cooperation and friendly relations among peoples and governments. The Panama Canal, as an international public service, must be open to all users, public and private, regardless of the flag they fly or the economic system they represent. In this regard, we are pleased by our admission to the pro tem secretariat of the Rio Group as of 1998, and we are committed from now on to undertaking intensive diplomatic efforts to strengthen the Group’s role as a leading forum for interregional and intra-regional discussion and political understanding.