I am pleased to add my voice to the
unanimous acclaim of His Excellency Mr. Nassir
Abdulaziz Al-Nasser as President of the General
Assembly for this, our sixty-sixth session. A skilful and
seasoned diplomat, he has played an integral role in
establishing the State of Qatar as a central and crucial
actor in international diplomacy. I have no doubt that
he will approach his new responsibilities with similar
dedication, even-handedness and compassion.
In recent months the winds of change have
encircled the globe, reaching and reshaping the
unlikeliest corners of our planet, for good and for ill.
Those winds have swept the nation of South Sudan into
these hallowed halls as a welcome and esteemed new
member of our global family. They are blowing away
the flimsy impediments to Palestinian statehood, and
breathing fresh air into stagnant negotiating processes.
The winds of change have howled across the sands of
the Middle East and North Africa, reshaping long-held
geopolitical assumptions.
The grim economic storm clouds that formed
ominously on our global horizon three years ago have
yet to dissipate, and, indeed, seem to be multiplying.
Natural disasters, climate change, and the
accompanying non-metaphorical winds of hurricanes
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and tropical storms have buffeted my multi-island
nation and my region yet again, upending our fragile
economies and causing painful developmental
setbacks.
The United Nations finds itself in the eye of these
increasingly turbulent geopolitical and socio-economic
storms. The role that we collectively play in response
to these howling gales will determine the contours of
the post-crisis world and the relevance of this
institution in that world. Will the international
community shield the vulnerable from these winds?
Will we harness their power for positive change? Or
will we become little more than unnecessary weather
forecasters, watching and warning about which way the
winds blow, but never acting for the benefit of our
peoples’ humanization?
The President has wisely selected “The role of
mediation in the settlement of disputes” as the theme of
this general debate. That theme could not be more apt
or timely. Too often, the difficult work of mediation,
negotiation and peaceful resolution of disputes is
prematurely abandoned in the search for a quick fix of
militarism, brinkmanship or ill-advised unilateral
action. The very drafters of hard-fought Security
Council resolutions often cast aside the letter and spirit
of those documents before their ink has dried, and the
frenzied pursuit of a military solution to every dispute
is sometimes sickeningly palpable.
All too frequently, the loudest champions of
expensive and unnecessary military action are those
leaders of military Powers who sometimes seek to
shore up sagging local political fortunes with bullets,
bombs and the bodies of faceless foreigners in faraway
lands. History has never been kind to such nakedly
political crusades, and those who have sown the wind
have invariably reaped the whirlwind of their bloody
campaigns, long after the triumphalist glow has faded.
Neocolonialist and imperialist adventures, however
disguised, will never triumph before the bar of history
over a people’s right to self-determination and the
inalienable embrace of sovereignty.
The ongoing global economic and financial crisis
is a devastating storm that has shown no signs of
abating. Economies the world over remain in peril, and
none is immune from the widening and deepening
fallout of this systemic crisis of ill-regulated financial
institutions and the movement of capital. The effects of
the international global and financial meltdown are
now being felt well beyond the bottom lines of
multinational corporations. The macroeconomic and
developmental consequences of this economic tornado
are now painfully apparent, as is the terrible impact on
the lives of individuals.
The economic crisis has spurred rising global
unemployment and poverty, and has engendered a
feeling of hopelessness, especially among young
people. The continuing fallout of the economic
upheaval can be felt in streets and cities around the
world and is a major contributor to the global unrest
that has pitted disgruntled youths and others in violent
opposition to Government forces, from Tottenham to
Tripoli. Social unrest elsewhere beckons, in dozens of
countries where neither the socio-economic conditions
nor the political institutions can contain the enormous
pressures much longer.
Well into our third year of the international
economic crisis, we can now declare that the tepid and
timid responses of wealthy developed nations have
failed to heal the global economy. The uncoordinated
lurches from stimulus to austerity and back typify the
confusion of the self-appointed premier forums of our
international economic cooperation. The recovery that
they prematurely declared was false and fleeting, and
their counsel of patience and predictions of long-term
recovery are cold comfort to the suffering peoples of
countries that did not contribute to the crisis.
In small, vulnerable and highly indebted middle-
income economies such as ours, the economic debacle
threatens to have debilitating and ongoing
consequences. We cannot afford to wait for the promise
of incremental or cyclical up-ticks in the global
economy. Small States need the fiscal and policy space
to creatively spur development in ways that comply not
with the checklists of discredited economic theorists,
but with real-world particularities and people-centred
policies. The international financial institutions have
yet to sufficiently grasp this simple fact.
The General Assembly must reassert its role in
the response to the international economic crisis. In the
early days of the global economic deterioration, Saint
Vincent and the Grenadines played a leading role in the
United Nations Conference on the World Financial and
Economic Crisis and its Impact on Development.
Under the President’s leadership, the Assembly must
now meaningfully follow up on the unfulfilled
recommendations and mechanisms spelled out at that
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Conference. The Caribbean region has a vested interest
in this most urgent of matters.
This year, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines was
the subject of a United Nations resolution (65/136) that
called upon the international community to provide
assistance in the wake of Hurricane Tomas, which
caused millions of dollars of damage in our region.
While we are extremely grateful to the many countries
that contributed generously to the emergency response,
our national and regional recovery is far from
complete. In the light of the welcome call by the
President of the General Assembly to focus on disaster
prevention and response during the current session, I
remind the international community of our continuing
recovery efforts and the ongoing vulnerability of small
island developing States during the still active 2011
Atlantic hurricane season.
I remain baffled by the intransigence of major
emitters and developed nations that refuse to shoulder
the burden for arresting the climate changes that are
linked to the excesses of their own wasteful policies.
As Hurricanes Irene and Katia crept northward to
typically untouched cities in the United States and the
United Kingdom, we in the Caribbean felt saddened at
the extensive damage and tragic loss of life, which is
an annual occurrence in our region. We can only hope
that our now-common experiences can engender a level
of solidarity and constructive engagement that will lead
to binding and meaningful emissions reduction targets
and the fulfilment of commitments on adaptation
financing for vulnerable small island developing
States. Time is running out on the very existence of
many countries in the face of rising oceans and
increasingly intense storms.
I am heartened that the President of the General
Assembly has decided to place special emphasis on
sustainable development and global prosperity during
the current session. But the citizens of the world, and
indeed many of its Governments, have lost faith in
endless self-important summits that produce little in
the way of tangible results. The archives of the United
Nations are filled with grandiloquent declarations and
outcome documents from summits whose commitments
were forgotten even before representatives had boarded
their planes to return home from their exotic venues.
Next year, the issue of development returns to
Latin America for the United Nations Conference on
Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in Brazil. Rio+20
will take place one decade after Mexico’s heralded
Monterrey Consensus, in which developed countries
committed themselves to the target of devoting 0.7 per
cent of their gross national income to official
development assistance to developing countries. Today,
even accepting the liberal definitions and creative
accounting used by some States to measure
development assistance, developed countries are
contributing only 0.32 per cent of their gross national
income to official development assistance — less than
half of the Monterrey target. We just have to make this
better. We must do it right. It is just not good for us to
be taken for a ride all of these years with all of these
promises. It must come to an end sometime, and the
world is changing. Let us get it right. It is our
responsibility. Please.
In that regard, our dreams remain constantly
unfulfilled. I am reminded of the poetic inquiry of
Langston Hughes, an authentic voice of America, who
asked simply this:
“What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore —
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over —
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?”
Recent events in the streets of major cities around the
world have probably answered Langston Hughes’
queries. Talk is cheap. We must get some action.
It should be a source of alarm and international
embarrassment that the composition of the Security
Council is an ossified relic of the Second World War,
seemingly immune to the modern realities of new
countries and new global Powers. It is an outrageous
act of international irresponsibility that such an
outmoded and increasingly illegitimate body is allowed
to decisively insert itself into local and regional
conflicts. Saint Vincent and the Grenadines is adamant
that the Security Council must be reformed, and that
the reform must be underpinned by the expansion of
the Council in the permanent and non-permanent
categories alike, with full regard for the legitimate
aspirations of Africa and the necessary
accommodations for small island developing States,
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which have valuable and creative perspectives on
peacebuilding and conflict resolution.
The International Year for People of African
Descent, which was declared with much fanfare, is
almost at an end. I am grateful to the United Nations,
which has hosted a number of events to raise
awareness of the challenges facing people of African
descent and foster discussions on potential solutions to
tackle those challenges.
Racial discrimination was justified and itself
became the justification for a brutal, exploitative and
dehumanizing system. That system was perfected
during the transatlantic slave trade and ingrained over
the course of colonial domination. The structure of the
modern world is still firmly rooted in a past of slavers
and colonialist exploitation. Today, every single
country of the world with a population of majority
African descent is still trapped in the periphery of our
global economic and developmental systems. The
peoples of African descent remain disadvantaged,
individually and systemically, by the entrenched and
unyielding cycle of discrimination. Indeed, many of the
wars that the United Nations struggles mightily to quell
or avoid are rooted in the ignorant and avaricious
cartography of the European colonizers.
The people of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
have a long and proud history of resistance to slavery,
bigotry and genocide, dating back to the heroic
resistance of the Garifuna people against British
aggression in the late 1700s. While we celebrate the
noble heroism of the famous and the faceless alike who
resisted racist colonial hegemony, we must continue to
confront the legacy of this barbarism and continuing
injustice. The wounds of that era are deep, the crimes
against humanity are clear and the necessity for
apology and reparations is undeniable; we cannot duck
those. When we speak this year about the peoples of
African descent, we must highlight what is happening
in the Horn of Africa and in Haiti.
The collective voices of the international
community are rising to a crescendo in support of full
Palestinian statehood. Saint Vincent and the
Grenadines echoes the relevant portions of yesterday’s
Group of 77 ministerial declaration, which welcomed
the State of Palestine’s application for full membership
in the United Nations. The State of Palestine has
brought its case to this world Assembly in keeping with
the finest traditions of multilateralism. No one should
call the Palestinian acts unilateral. They come here to
the multilateral body. We have no doubt that its action
and the solidarity of the international community will
resuscitate the moribund negotiating process between
the Palestinian and Israeli States.
As I reflect on the sweeping geopolitical changes
being wrought in our global village, I am compelled to
raise the fact that there is no practical, legal or logical
justification for the seeming indifference of the United
Nations to the meaningful participation of Taiwan in
our important work. Surely, in the context of an ever-
expanding and inclusive United Nations, the 23 million
citizens of Taiwan can, at the very least, be allowed to
meaningfully participate in the specialized agencies of
the Organization — and that should extend beyond the
World Trade Organization and the World Health
Assembly.
Mr. Al-Nasser assumes the presidency amid a
cyclone of international turbulence and change. We
may not be able to direct those winds, but we can, and
must, adjust our sails to harness the energy and the
potential of this moment, while riding out the storms of
uncertainty and upheaval. Former United States
President Abraham Lincoln once said, in a different
context:
“The dogmas of the quiet past are
inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is
piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with
the occasion. As our case is new, so we must
think anew and act anew.”
Our stormy present requires similar resolve,
creativity and action. Let us rise to the occasion and
fulfil the immense potential of this peaceful global
Assembly. Into those swirling winds of change, let us
raise the flag of inclusiveness, equality, peace, justice
and development for all the peoples of the world to see.
May Almighty God continue to bless us all.
The Acting President: On behalf of the General
Assembly, I wish to thank the Prime Minister of Saint
Vincent and the Grenadines for the statement he has
just made.