85. I am happy to be here again, renewing old friendships and introducing my country and myself to those of you whom I have not had the honour to meet before.
86. To you, Mr. President, I convey the congratulations of my country. For over five years now you have been serving the General Assembly in various capacities. Today you start a term of duty most relevant to your past experience. It is not for me to say how well equipped you are for your solemn duties. Friends are partial; let others commend you. There is one thing I must say to you immediately, however: my colleagues in the Council of Ministers have requested me to convey to you all here, that the Sudanese people's support for the United Nations has always been, and will always be, unlimited, unbounded and unconditional.
87. We are renewing our faith because for six long years our authentic voice was not heard. We lived under an autocratic army regime that did not have the backing of even a minority group in the Sudan. Such Governments cannot support international institutions and organizations, except formally and timidly. The Government which I represent is the product of a popular uprising against usurpers of power, who imposed their will on a reluctant population by sheer force of arms. The world was given to understand that ours was an instantaneous eruption, but that is not the case. Ever since our democratic institutions were toppled only three years after our independence, the storm was gathering against the junta. As dictators everywhere are inclined to do, our army bosses did not allow much of our resistance to be known to the world.
88. I have no intention of wearing you with this dismal story of suppression, incompetence and dissipation, but ours is a lesson for many of our brothers in the younger countries, and I say this with all humility. Autocratic rule is incapable of building new States. It pretends that it is the fittest for our societies, but this is not so. It brings in its first flush a facade of national unity, but as time goes by we discover that our diverse traditions are drifting apart. Instead of voluntarily, and willingly, pulling together and living happily side by side, they tend to recoil and grow hostile to each other. The individual, who is usually promised the moon, shrinks smaller and smaller. Under autocratic regimes, men's faculties are paralysed because they are not used.
89. Before the military take-over, some of us were getting disenchanted. It was thought that parliament was talkative, that unions were getting out of hand, and that associations were too haughty to accept discipline. The military gave them discipline, but they soon discovered that it v/as a discipline without content, hollow. They heeded the lesson and joined our ranks, the ranks of those who rejected muzzled autocratic rule on principle. We could not see the supposed benefits in a system that ignored us callously. All the constitutional powers were vested in a single being and the house of representatives, the embodiment of the will of the people, was dissolved to be replaced subsequently by a non-sovereign and indirectly-elected central council with limited and restricted legislative powers. Moreover, one must take into consideration the powers of this single being to contest the eligibility of any candidate and to pronounce upon the validity of any measure reached by the Council with the ultimate right to veto such measure.
90. Under such circumstances, the dependence of the judiciary is almost inevitable if one appreciates the fact that the autonomy of this organ is bound to survive as a cornerstone solely in the structure of a democratic regime. The obvious implications warranted by this dependence are essentially the partiality in application of justice, the overriding of a significant requisite of the rule of law and the failure of the judiciary to hold any balance between the individual and the State.
91. At this stage, being bitterly overwhelmed by the experience recently undergone by the people of the Sudan, one feels constrained rightly to emphasize the manifest perils involved in any kind of regime proceeding on a total contempt for human rights and a complete disregard of the people’s will, and the threats inherent therein to the preservation of international security.
92. In effect it is quite timely for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the expression of the legal conscience of mankind, to become a substantive requirement for both international and constitutional law. The urge is even greater for human rights to be simultaneously national and international in character and to be enforced by national as well as international machinery.
93. It is most fitting that I should be speaking today, on Human Rights Day. It is a landmark in man’s contemporary history and I greet it and bow to it on behalf of the people of Sudan. It is the concept that impels me to do so. To attain this objective successfully, the aspirations and ideals of the Charter must be implemented, and the United Nations must have an effective role in the realm of human rights at the national and international levels. But this should by no means be construed as an attempt to interfere with the sovereignty and domestic jurisdiction of States guaranteed by Article 2, paragraph 7, of the Charter, since it is fully realized that any attempt to negate the provisions of the said Article would expose the life of the Organization to jeopardy.
94. However, notwithstanding a world immensely dominated by power politics and the narrow interpretation of that Article, one may justifiably place confidence in Member States and aspire to a balance to be devised between State sovereignty and the authority of the international Organization if the talk about world tranquillity is to be meaningful and if the promotion of human rights and the people’s will is to be looked upon as a practical reality.
95. The logic of conflict makes it a foregone conclusion when unarmed, ordinary human beings face organized military forces with all that modern science has released for destruction. Yet farmers, workers, teachers, students, university professors, officials, advocates, judges, and everybody who had legs to carry him came out in my country to face tanks and Bren guns; and the better elements in the army — the majority, I must say — proved their mettle. They intervened on the side of the people, and reason prevailed. Agonizing, protracted negotiations started between the civil and the military, and the Government which I have the pleasure to represent here was formed on 30 October 1964 — ten days after the earth was made to shake under the feet of those who had kept our voice dim here and in our regional organizations: the Organization of African Unity and the League of Arab States. The Sudan today is unbound.
96. I shall not apologize for having said so much about us in the Sudan while the big, wide world is distracted by so many problems. We believe it is time the nations of the world community passed on their moral experience to each other. It is often said that the technical brilliance of the twentieth century has not yet been matched by a parallel advance in man’s attitudes of mind and ways of conduct. We readily admit that bulldozers and earth-moving equipment are easier to export, but it is the bounden duty of those who have been trying to find ways oi life that build man, to find ways of transmitting them. We want the qualities of mind behind those machines. We do not want to work them only; automatons do that job as well. We want to be able to create those machines and fit them into a society that dominates them and lives by them, but sees to it that man, as man, grows big in stature and feeling.
97. The younger States refuse to be tools of trade. The world community outside Africa must learn to work with our souls also. I am not inviting intervention, of course. Far from it. We in the Sudan had to fend for ourselves, and this is as it should be. What I am saying is that essentially we are the same everywhere; striving for human dignity, tolerable conditions of living, and peace in the world. Without a modicum of material and moral parity the world will remain the risky place it has become at the moment. The poor cannot love the rich and the untutored cannot appreciate the cultivated.
98. The many items on the agenda concern us deeply, but I should like to stress the broad principles underlying some of them in this general statement of outlook. My delegation’s remarks on the individual issues will be put forward by its representatives on the Committees. The most pressing problem, as far as my Government sees things, is that of poverty. We, the Government and all thinking people in the Sudan, followed with keen interest the deliberations of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. To tell you the truth, we thought it was the most vital gathering of men in this latter part of the twentieth century. But we expected much more.
99. A one per cent contribution for a 5 per cent rate of growth, argued so masterfully by the Secretary-General of the Conference, was the least that could be agreed upon there and then. Instead, we were given more Committees to attend and more documents to read. At a time when even Africa, with all its God-given bounties, has been importing grain to feed its fast-multiplying populations, four months of talks in and out of the Assembly Hall at Geneva ended in preparations for further negotiations. We even saw undercurrents of the cold war creeping into the talks.
100. This session of the General Assembly would do well to apply itself rigorously to the report of that Conference and rule that simple, practical steps should be taken to implement its recommendations. It is satisfying to note that the many facets of development in one country take a sizable proportion of the items of our agenda — almost one quarter — but let us go at them with determination and self-denial. The hungry bellies will not be filled tomorrow if we so ordain, but we should not unduly prolong their suffering.
101. The essence of the work of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development was to find the ways and means by which the poor, whether as people or as countries, could be helped. The calls for holding the Conference, which have been echoed by different international gatherings, are a reflection of the needs of developing countries towards a better life and an improvement in the international economic atmosphere in order to accommodate their problems. They were not at all a request for charity, nor an expression of greed and envy. They were calls from responsible leaders faced by an economic situation appealing to the better side of man as embodied in the United Nations Charter "to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom”.
102. The economic situation in which we, the developing countries, find ourselves is a legacy of a past in which we had no say, but of which we were victims. The phenomenon we are facing is the persistent tendency towards external imbalance associated with the development process. The primary responsibility falls on the developing countries themselves, but unless the developed countries co-operate willingly with them, the solution of the problem will be a very difficult one.
103. The recommendations and resolutions of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, which come before us at this session, are mild and watered down as a result of the compromises reached for the sake of as much unanimity as possible. There is great need for genuine efforts and true co-operation in order to achieve some solutions for the pressing problems which are facing us. It is not my intention to review the recommendations of the Conference at this juncture, but I do hope that due consideration will be given to them and that the follow-up work of that Conference and future conferences will meet with more successful efforts and better understanding and appreciation by the developed countries. It is our belief that the problems of the world are the concern of us all, and that the world cannot be stable, prosperous and peaceful with the majority of its population being in poverty and finding it very difficult, if not impossible, to develop despite the great efforts and sacrifices they are making.
104. Let me repeat that the poor cannot be persuaded to wait. They are no longer politically illiterate either. They do not have to be educated to listen in on their own or their neighbour's radio set telling them, with a great deal of vanity, about the staggering sums of money misspent on this or that scheme — I need not mention nuclear weapons, studies of outer space and what-not, things which do not help people to live happily or become human beings in the strict sense of the word, things which will only add to the destruction of civilization, the destruction of all that human beings have aspired to establish, and we will see, through them, nothing but the destruction of a civilization which mankind has patiently been building for millennia, a civilization which had its origins as far back as the Greek heritage, the Arab heritage or the Roman heritage. This civilization will disappear only as a result of the fantastic sums of money spent—or, more rightly, misspent — on such projects. And poverty nowadays seems to be the lot of the Coloured. A most alarming phenomenon. The indignity they suffered over the centuries is receding, but their political emancipation was only the first step or. their long road to redemption in the broadest sense of the word.
105. Coming as I do from a region beset with problems of all sorts, I cannot help but say how we in the Sudan feel about the predicament of our brothers in the Congo, just across our border, and our fifteen-year-old problem of the Arabs, in which we are involved by birth, language, civilization and all sorts of economic and social bonds. Both problems engage our attention with equal seriousness. At times, our own progress is held up by their persistence. The existence of Israel in itself, and its determination to foment trouble in the area, threatens our own peace, our own progress and security. Let there be no mistake about this: an aggression against Syria is felt throughout our land the minute it takes place; in fact, it is taken as a slight on our integrity in the area. The new lease of life given recently to the Arab League was not only a source of pride for the individual Sudanese; it also gave him a feeling of security. Though we were tied up with our internal struggle at home against an imposter Government, we could not but applaud and associate ourselves completely with the resolutions of the Arab Summit Conference. They were the most serious decisions ever taken by an Arab gathering in respect of this very much misunderstood question and we, in the Sudan, are determined to give those resolutions teeth and meaning. It is up to the United Nations, however, to see that justice is done and that its own resolutions, at least, these resolutions, are implemented. There is no Arab State which is out deliberately to disturb the peace of the world, but there is not one single Arab country willing to watch this situation evolve towards the destruction of our way of life. We have not fought the imperialists over the years to succumb to a minion of theirs in the end.
106. We have appealed to world conscience many times from this rostrum, but we have not gotten an inch nearer to the solution. We do not have the formidable machinery of propaganda or the cunning of our adversaries, but we have light on our side and the determination to realize that right.
107. It is only an accident of geography that Jordan and sometimes Syria are molested. We would have been in the same predicament had it not been for our geographic situation. This is how everyone of us in the Arab League views the problem. The world owes us a measure of security and we are entitled to be given it.
108. On our other flank we have the problem child of Africa. Some people want to create the impression that the Congolese are not helping themselves. This is not true. Since their independence, four and a half years ago, they have been valiantly struggling against impossible odds. Extraneous elements never left the country. Under the guise of legality, mercenaries and foreign troops have plagued the country since June 1964, when the United Nations forces left. Blind vested interests made the whole affair look as if it were a military problem. Every time a sane voice is raised in favour of stability it is told that the country is free and sovereign and has the right to call on friends and hirelings to help it. Nobody is questioning these premises or even thinking of doing so, but we, the members of the Organization of African Unity, were also called upon to help the legally constituted Government. Like honest, loyal friends, we responded to that call and worked out proposals that were accepted by our sister country's legal representative. The fact of the matter is that none of those proposals has yet been implemented. The mercenaries are still there, the cease-fire has not been effected and all efforts at national reconciliation have bean frustrated. And let us face facts: there are no solutions but these and there is only one man who can effect them — the President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
109. The Congo has always been a counter in the cold war, but at this particular moment it is about the strain the relations of the Organization of African Unity with the West. We, members of this young organization, are solidly behind the resolutions of the Extraordinary Meeting of Foreign Ministers in Addis Ababa. They genuinely reflect our feelings and all must help to realize them. They were unanimously adopted and a great deal of work was done to arrive at them. Those who believe there are moderates and others within our young organization are being deluded by the look of things. We are one at the Organization of African Unity. We are not quarrelling over that issue or any other issue for that matter. We are probing for the road to our unity and searching our own hearts. There are regionalists, perhaps, and continentalists, in our midst, but we are all heading towards oneness of direction to begin with and, eventually, constitutional unity.
110. On all essential matters that concern the continent, we have moved together. The Congo is a case in point at the moment, but it is not the only one. The African Development Bank is about to start its operations, thanks to the efforts of the Economic Commission for Africa, its leaders and personnel alike, and the many other countries and individuals who, ever since that meeting of African Finance Ministers in the summer of 1963 in Khartoum, have been working at it almost day and night. So are the agencies of the Organization of African Unity; the five commissions that have been created by the Addis Ababa and Cairo summit conferences are gradually gathering momentum and there is no doubt in our minds that they will soon begin to bear fruit.
111. The world community will do. well to grasp the idea behind the Organization of African Unity. Those who conceived of it never thought of isolating Africa from the world. On the contrary, it is our medium of fostering unity, enhancing peace in the world and doing all we can to alleviate the suffering of the poor and the sick in our continent. Anybody, therefore, who gives a helping hand to our organization is doing a good turn to it, to our individual countries and to world peace. When we Sudanese stress that the resolutions of the Organization of African Unity regarding the Democratic Republic of the Congo must be helped into practical reality, we do so because of our conviction in the competence of the young organization and because of our faith in it and its organs.
112. The peace and tranquillity of the Congo is our own peace in the Sudan; indeed, the peace of the world. The country is vast and it is with good reason that people called it the heart of Africa. Ailing hearts are dangerous and time is running short; there must be determined efforts to restore the health of that heart.
113. I have noted in passing only the major problems facing the world as a whole; international peace, the cold war, the conflicts of ideologies, the threat of nuclear warfare, the lack of human understanding and absence of sufficient goodwill among nations and peoples.
114. Human experience is the heritage of us all and wisdom is often learned from humble sources. Those of us who are rich must have once been poor, and progress only follows backwardness. We all have the future to look to. The hungry millions in Africa, Asia and Latin America; those who live in the fear of the unknown in the Congo, and others in similar places; those who are trodden down by apartheid and Portuguese colonialism — they all look to the deliberations and resolutions of this Organization as their only hope for the future.
115. Peace, on the one hand, and development, on the other, are the two main ideals to which we all aspire. If we have to learn from human experience, from world history, and from all the wisdom that human philosophy, despite race, religion or way of thinking can offer us, the golden chance is in our time. As a representative of a developing country, I need not stress that our main concern is for a peaceful and settled future in which the poor have a chance to become rich, the oppressed to be free and the ignorant to be enlightened.