Poland

At the outset I would like to offer my sincere congratulations upon Mr. Udovenko’s election to the honourable post of President of the United Nations General Assembly at its fifty-second session. The Polish delegation expresses its satisfaction that the presidency of this session has been entrusted to an eminent statesman from Ukraine, a country with which we have ties of friendship and cooperation based on common values and aspirations. The President may count on my delegation’s full cooperation in the performance of his important tasks. Please also allow me to extend expressions of appreciation and respect to Mr. Razali Ismail, a prominent representative of Malaysia, for his excellent guidance of the work of the General Assembly during its fifty-first session. I would also like to address words of the deepest respect to Mr. Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General, for the outstanding manner in which he has demonstrated his qualities of leadership and good judgement. Seven years since the downfall of a polarized world and less than three years away from the year 2000, we are already living in a new era. Are we, the citizens of the Earth, aware of the momentous changes and the new responsibilities which they entail? When looking at ourselves from the perspective of the Pathfinder on Mars, or of the space station Mir, do we see humanity in its entirety or, rather, spasmodic movements of an anthill, always prepared to fight over every scrap, devoid of the gift of synthesis and without ability to perceive the whole? These are the questions which all of us, especially here in this Hall, are confronted with. The burden of responsibility of the United Nations for resisting dangers and facing challenges, for eliminating tensions and constantly building foundations for the future, has not been relieved. It has not diminished. Perhaps it weighs even heavier today than ever before. From that moment in 1945, in San Francisco, when Arthur Rubinstein, an outstanding piano virtuoso and a great Polish patriot, proudly inaugurated the United Nations era with the notes of the Polish national anthem, until today, our Organization has given the impression of being oriented towards emergency actions rather than systematic and comprehensive work programmes. The General Assembly and the Security Council are excessively preoccupied with current issues. Nonetheless, torn apart by the global confrontation between the free world and totalitarianism, they attempted to find mechanisms of dialogue and negotiation that would protect the world from global conflict. They have fulfilled that role. No one, neither the fiercest opponents of the idea of the United Nations nor the greatest promoters of its radical modernization, can deny the United Nations achievements in maintaining world peace and security and resolving local conflicts. One has to bow to the visionary skills and political genius of the creators of the Atlantic Charter, which provided the foundation for our Organization. Their work has stood the test of time in circumstances unforeseeable when the system was established. Until now we have been concentrating on avoiding war. Shocked by the tragedy of the Second World War and the experience of ravages of previous wars, we have 14 put all our energy into the creed “Never again”. However, concentrating on avoiding war, the United Nations has not always been able to pay sufficient attention to building a world for people, a world of harmonious existence and balanced development. I should like to emphasize this point again and again. The time has come to pay more attention to building a world for all people, of all races, all religions and all cultures, for people in the wealthier North and the poorer South. An important area of international cooperation has been the effort to eliminate weapons of mass destruction: nuclear, chemical and biological. This Organization has made a significant contribution to this activity. Among the recent milestones in this domain, I should mention the enactment of the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction, as well as the signing of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. We also consider extremely important the ongoing work towards wider application and universalization of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, the basis for a global regime of nuclear-arms non-proliferation. We attach particular significance to the willingness of the United States and the Russian Federation, as confirmed at the Helsinki summit this year, to continue the START negotiations, taking them to a qualitatively new stage involving the radical reduction of nuclear arsenals. We trust that the ratification of START II by the Russian Federation, upon which these negotiations are conditioned, will soon be a fact, just as we hope that our expectations with regard to the immediate ratification by Russia of the Chemical Weapons Convention will become a reality in the near future. We welcome President Clinton’s decision to submit to the Senate for ratification the Comprehensive Nuclear- Test-Ban Treaty, as he announced from this rostrum. Both for humanitarian reasons and for reasons of our country’s security interests, we attach great importance to effective actions aimed at limiting or banning conventional weapons, including anti-personnel landmines. We welcome the momentous arrangements concerning this issue that were agreed at the recent Oslo Diplomatic Conference. We believe, however, that the consolidation and universalization of these agreements should continue to be sought persistently at the Geneva Conference on Disarmament. This would guarantee participation in the negotiations of the main manufacturers and exporters, which in turn would serve to take better into account the legitimate security interests of all countries. In this context of conventional disarmament, allow me to confess that it was with immense sadness that my delegation — just like everyone else in the world — received the news of the tragic death of Diana, Princess of Wales, a great supporter of a ban on landmines. We are currently starting a new and different stage in the history of the United Nations. The moment has come to pose truly fundamental questions about the future and to provide answers. Global peace is a primary value, but should we not reach beyond that? In our view, global peace is a fundamental precondition to the preservation of human dignity and the observance of human rights, to the enhancement of economic and political justice and to harmonious and sustainable development. But the time has come for the United Nations to open up more so as to meet other challenges of contemporary civilization. United Nations agencies have already made progress in this direction. The experience they have accumulated, as well as their lasting achievements in the definite improvement of living conditions for millions of people, constitute an important starting point. In this respect, sufficient funding aimed at specific programmes is the prerequisite for success. We welcome donations and philanthropy, which are an important source of additional funding and a clear sign of public support. However, the United Nations needs a solid foundation for its activities, and regular contributions by all Members are indispensable. The reforms proposed by the Secretary-General in his report, “Renewing the United Nations: A Programme for Reform”, provide the basis for fundamental changes in the activities of our Organization that will allow it to serve better the needs and expectations of all the Member nations facing the challenges of the twenty-first century. It is with hope and optimism that we welcome the initiatives of the Secretary-General. We believe they will lead to improved effectiveness and better management of the United Nations system. They increase the focus on development programmes and enhance the credibility of the Organization. They strengthen the relationship between Member States and the United Nations. Poland supports the proposed direction of the United Nations reforms. We are prepared to cooperate actively in this process, and we are vitally interested in further efforts to reinvigorate the United Nations system, including its economic and social sectors. 15 There is no immediate threat of a global conflict, but local conflicts might often lead to conflicts on a much greater scale. The world was not free of regional or even internal conflicts before, but either their importance and ramifications seemed less significant in the face of a threat of worldwide conflict, or they were temporarily frozen by the cold war. With the ice melting, local conflicts ignited with renewed intensity. The international community, fully aware of the threat they presented, made efforts to assist in defusing them, with varying degree of success. Understandably, the United Nations had a perception of its responsibility and took action using the means at the disposal of the Security Council. Poland supports all the efforts to institute the concept of rapid deployment in order to improve the capability of the United Nations to respond quickly to crisis situations. Our experience proves that the ability to address local conflicts should be one of the priorities in our efforts to reform the Security Council. The basic premise for balanced enlargement and reform of the Council should be the increased effectiveness of its work in an international environment which is undergoing fundamental changes. With our experience of nearly two years of participation in the Security Council, we are inclined to conclude that the effectiveness of Security Council activities is greatly enhanced when it enjoys the full support of the respective regions represented in the United Nations. Therefore, we support the aspirations of various regional groups to additional seats in the Council if its membership is expanded. At the same time, Poland would find it necessary to increase the representation of Central and Eastern Europe in the Council by an additional member. Thus, my Government is in favour of the accession of Japan and Germany to permanent seats. Poland is among the countries convinced of the necessity of reforming the Council to adapt it to current and future tasks. While implementing these reforms, we should take into consideration two parallel and sometimes conflicting tendencies: globalization and regionalization. The emerging concept of regional responsibility should undergo consolidation. Its burden is being carried by regional organizations engaged in resolving regional conflicts, prominent cases in point being the activities of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as those of the Organization of African Unity. We believe that regional organizations should be more engaged in preventive diplomacy and maintaining peace while ensuring full compatibility with the United Nations Charter. Thus, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is contributing to the fulfillment of the basic task of the United Nations — maintaining international peace and security — through active regional cooperation in both conflict prevention and crisis management, as well as in post-conflict rehabilitation. When Poland assumes the duties of OSCE Chairman-in-Office in 1998, it will make every effort to maintain and develop further a high standard of cooperation between that Organization and the United Nations. In an atmosphere of global peace there is a much better chance to stand up to conflicts as old as humanity, such as religious conflicts, those between rich and poor and those between various ethnic groups. The Polish people, with its historical experience of times of freedom and times of bondage, is gaining new experience today. As the pioneer of the 1990s breakthrough, which led to the end of a polarized world, today Poland is experiencing both joy and hardship: the joy of returning to the family of free nations and the hardship of a transformation period and the restructuring of our economy. This year Poland has been undergoing a bitter test, fighting against a natural disaster unparalleled in centuries: the catastrophic flood in the south and west of the country. May I take this opportunity to extend our heartfelt thanks to the countries, organizations and persons of goodwill that have come to our assistance. If there is any lesson to be drawn from this horrible experience, it is that massive natural disasters are a kind of danger that we all have to learn to withstand together. This year’s flood, whose destructive force struck our country, also had a disastrous effect on our neighbors, in particular the Czech Republic and Germany. We found that such disasters can be faced much more effectively if the preventive and rescue operations are organized on an international and, especially, a transboundary scale. There is an old saying that a friend in need is a friend indeed. But one can also find friends in moments of success and moments of joy. Thanks to the help of our friends, and to their satisfaction, Poland crossed two great thresholds this year. It was invited to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and to the European Union. Negotiations with NATO are already under way, and those with the European Union will commence at the 16 beginning of next year. Our readiness to shoulder responsibility and our ability to meet the requirements have been recognized. Poland is now considered a reliable and respected member of the community of democratic nations. The outcome of our recently held parliamentary elections has confirmed that this basic orientation of our foreign policy will remain unchanged and is supported by the overwhelming majority of the Polish people. The world is still imperfect. Millions of people are paying — with their freedom, their dignity and sometimes even their lives — the price of lack of democracy and lack of respect for human rights. There are forces that feed on ethnic antagonisms. Poverty is the fate of millions of people across vast territories. But other problems on a global scale are also visible — climate changes and diverse environmental concerns, the constantly widening gap between rich and poor and the insufficient reach of education and health care. The reforms which we undertake should increase the United Nations capability to address these important issues. Let me now elaborate on some of them. Through deep and carefully thought-out reform, we should equip the United Nations with mechanisms capable of ensuring respect for the human rights of all the world’s citizens to a greater degree than before. The United Nations evolution and reform introduce the human rights issue in quite a natural way to the Security Council agenda. We welcome this trend. There is a clear connection between international security and respect for human rights, which should be reflected in the activities of the Security Council. The events of the past few years in Africa have again dramatically confirmed the existence of such a relationship. 1998 will be a special year for human rights. Half a century ago the General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a catalogue of the individual’s rights and duties. However, the concept of human rights still varies from region to region. I think that on the threshold of the twenty-first century, as we emphasized in Warsaw this January when inaugurating the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is worth considering how to use this variety to build a universal concept of human rights, just as the Declaration initially assumed. At the same time, however, we oppose any attempt at the so-called revision of the Universal Declaration, which must remain a common minimal standard for all humanity. As a member of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights starting on 1 January 1998, Poland confirms its willingness to continue the dialogue and cooperation with representatives of all regional groups. Observance and promotion of human rights are for all of us a great challenge at the threshold of the twenty-first century. We also believe that closer economic cooperation with developing countries will help them overcome difficulties and actively participate in the world economy. Poland is undertaking and will continue to undertake important projects in this field. We also want to point out the important role of international institutions in providing development assistance for partners with lower levels of income. We will continue to give them our support as their tasks require and our capacity allows. A year ago, in this General Assembly Hall, the President of Poland, Mr. Aleksander Kwasniewski, formulated a proposal for the elaboration of an international convention against organized transnational crime. We were encouraged by the massive support that the Polish initiative received from the membership of this Organization. We think that the international community should take active measures to stop the spreading cancer of transnational crime. We must secure the effective cooperation of countries and organizations concerned. We believe that the United Nations will find for itself a creative and constructive role through the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice, which has been entrusted with the task of elaborating this convention. Poland is ready to cooperate with other countries to extend the scope and range of the convention if such extension would meet the needs and expectations of Member States. We appreciate the work of the Commission on this subject and hope that the Assembly will receive a final draft of the convention at its next session. Equally important are the environmental issues. The most important among them are those related to climate changes. To deal effectively with such problems as the greenhouse effect, melting of glaciers and the protection of tropical forests is a task far exceeding the ability of any single country or even region. It is hard to imagine effective action in this area unless we all join forces. It is justifiable to reconsider whether the United Nations is an organization capable of dealing with these tasks. The doubts voiced by the skeptics should not be 17 ignored. However, Poland is among the countries that believe that the United Nations system can, through the collective effort of its Members, meet the challenges. This effort has to be directed towards, among other things, understanding current and future dilemmas which reach beyond this century. It must be sustained with a vision, shared by all Members of the system, of the shape they wish to give to tomorrow. It must involve the will to develop an organizational system and make it effective, with each Member bearing its share of responsibility. Today’s Poland — democratic, economically successful, enjoying good relations with all its neighbours, binding itself to alliances with the European Union and NATO — is ready to participate in carrying out this task. We must rise to the expectations of the United Nations. As one of the Organization’s founding Members, Poland will not cease in its support of the United Nations as a global forum for resolving problems and conflicts, and especially for ensuring a just and effective system of global governance aimed at eliminating threats to humanity. Poland stands ready to do its part for the purpose of achieving these lofty goals.