Kyrgyzstan

At the outset, I would like to congratulate you, Sir, on your election to the important post of President of the General Assembly at its sixtieth anniversary session and to wish you every success in your responsible and difficult task. May I also extend our thanks to your predecessor, Mr. Jean Ping, for his successful presidency of the previous session of the Assembly. The summit that ended yesterday demonstrated that the United Nations remains the universal Organization capable of making an important contribution to strengthening international peace and security, achieving sustainable development and finding adequate answers to new global challenges and threats. In that regard, I hope that this sixtieth anniversary session of the General Assembly will become a major event in and give people some hope for the future. The rapid changes in today’s world have not bypassed Kyrgyzstan. Our people, not indifferent to its own destiny and future, in March of this year chose its own path to development, progress and creativity. Another page has been turned in Kyrgyzstan’s modern history. We enter the twenty-first century full of resolve to achieve our deepest aspirations and hopes for peace, prosperity, progress and freedom. We are confident that that the goals reflected in the Millennium Declaration will be achieved in the Kyrgyz Republic as elsewhere. If it is to preserve the respect and to justify the hopes of peoples, the United Nations must not lag behind the swift and ever accelerating changes taking place in the world today. It must not only adapt to current realities, but also create more effective machinery for addressing new challenges and risks. Kyrgyzstan is convinced that United Nations reform should fully reflect the will, fundamental rights and interests of all States Members and peoples. In recent years, the Security Council has been repeatedly criticized for its failures in the maintenance of international peace and security. It is therefore extremely important that the Security Council find the most effective way to meet its basic responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security. Kyrgyzstan has consistently advocated expansion of the membership of the Security Council and reform of its working methods in order to make it more representative, democratic and, above all, more effective. We believe that the reform of the Security Council should be based on the principles of universality, efficiency and broad geographic representation. The Council’s decisions must be as timely as possible and their implementation correspondingly expeditious and effective. The Kyrgyz Republic shares the position that United Nations reform will be successful only if Security Council reform is followed by reform of the General Assembly and the Economic and Social Council. We support efforts to enhance the activities of the General Assembly and to strengthen the coordinating functions of the Economic and Social Council. Effective coordination among the three principal organs is extremely important in addressing the complex problems facing the world today. We all realize how great and complex are the challenges facing the United Nations in the maintenance of peace and security. Kyrgyzstan intends to make its contribution to those tasks. For the first time, it has offered its own candidature for non- permanent membership of the Security Council for the term 2012-2013. We understand the great responsibility that membership of that crucial organ of the United Nations entails. I would venture to assure the 19 Assembly that Kyrgyzstan will make every effort to increase its cooperation with Member States in all regions and to become a reliable partner in resolving global political issues. Today, the United Nations and its agencies are more engaged with issues of development than with those of security. While many United Nations agencies deal every day with the problems of development, there is only one permanent organ that deals with security issues. In our opinion, given globalization and the interrelationship of all issues relating to man-made and natural disasters, along with international terrorism and extremism, the United Nations capacity to maintain global security must be considerably strengthened. We believe that development programmes should be endowed with preventive powers to ensure security and safety. The history of international relations in the second half of the last century shows that it is virtually impossible to preserve international peace and security when certain basic conditions of life remain unmet. Poverty and deprivation lead to tension, which in turns leads to breaches of international peace and security. It is no accident that it is precisely the poorest regions of the world that suffer the most serious regional conflicts. If it is to achieve its security and development targets, the international community must adopt a more balanced policy. The world community must work actively to overcome disparities and inequalities between the countries of the North and the South. We feel that the United Nations needs to establish interactive machinery to resolve the issues that cause the poorest countries to opt out of the process of global development and decision-making. The countries of the South should become full partners in decisions involving global problems. Kyrgyzstan remains committed to the Monterey Consensus, whereby the developed countries will increase their development assistance and poor countries will adapt themselves to using that assistance more effectively. At various high-level forums, we have come to understood the concepts of sustainable economic development and sustainable human development. We fully support those concepts, with substantive provisions reflected in our national strategy and programmes. Furthermore, the successful implementation of the national development programmes of many countries is directly linked to regional and international cooperation. It is at the juncture where all of those interests meet that the United Nations and its agencies must further enhance their role and coordinate their efforts. We support the proposal for national development strategies to be adopted by 2006 and implemented by 2015 as indicators for the implementation of the development goals set out in the Millennium Declaration. In our opinion, the United Nations should mobilize new resources, strengthen coordination and increase its contribution to the resolution of development issues. Donor countries must now move from paying lip- service to their obligations to concrete action. In that regard, the Kyrgyz Republic welcomes the decision of the European Union to allocate 0.7 per cent of its gross national income to official development assistance by 2009. Kyrgyzstan also advocates the identification of an acceptable level of indebtedness and the adoption of urgent and commensurate measures to ease the debt burden of developing countries. Kyrgyzstan is a landlocked, mountainous country. Mountain States are characterized by remoteness, difficult accessibility, the scarcity of information, harsh geo-climatic conditions, and high costs of living. While receiving financial aid from the developed countries, Kyrgyzstan itself is a donor of environmental services whose value increases yearly. So, for example, the Kyrgyz Republic is one of the principal repositories of glaciers and suppliers of fresh water in the region. Moreover, in the context of the International Convention on Biological Diversity, Kyrgyzstan also operates a network of biosphere areas and releases much less greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than most other countries of the world, thus contributing to the preservation of the planet’s ozone layer. At the same time, unfortunately, in our territory, our many stockpiles of radioactive waste are an inheritance from the military-industrial complex of the former Soviet period. Their maintenance and the prevention of further potential ecological accidents for the entire Central-Asian region are an excessive burden for Kyrgyzstan. We believe that the international community, with a coordinating role for the United Nations, should more actively involve itself in those 20 areas of environmental risk and provide more financial and technical assistance to avert global and regional ecological disasters. We also believe that the United Nations should be more active in assisting poor and developing countries regarding sustainable development by creating machinery to shift the burden of external debt to sustainable development. A significant amount of our income goes to servicing our debt, hindering the socio- economic development of mountainous areas. In addition to disaster preparedness and mitigation, Kyrgyzstan supports initiatives on the creation of a worldwide early warning system for natural disasters. As a mountain country, Kyrgyzstan regularly faces serious and frequent natural disasters, such as earthquakes, landslides, avalanches, and the flooding of cities and settlements. In our harsh experience, the consequences of such natural disasters divert huge sums from economic and social development and highlight the importance of strengthening ecological security. As a first step, Kyrgyzstan offers the use of its territory as a pilot area for the prevention and mitigation of such natural disasters. I would also like to express our support for the establishment of a committee of regional organizations under United Nations auspices. Such a committee would enable the exploitation of untapped potential of the regional and subregional organizations in the prevention and settlement of conflicts and other important regional problems. Regional structures with such potential that are now operating effectively should play a mutually complementary role in facing new threats and challenges. Kyrgyzstan supports the participation in the work of the committee of such organizations as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the Euro-Asian Economic Union and the Central Asian Cooperation Organization. We also support measures to enhance the effectiveness of peacekeeping operations and welcome the Secretary-General’s proposal on United Nations standby forces of peacekeepers and civilian police. The Kyrgyz Republic is the only country in Central Asia that participates in United Nations peacekeeping operations. We have sent military observers and staff officers to the United Nations missions in Liberia, Burundi, Sierra Leone, Serbia and Montenegro, and the Sudan. We are proud of our contribution and are resolved to continue supporting that noble endeavour. Kyrgyzstan actively supports the efforts of the international community to restore and strengthen peace in Afghanistan and has opened its territory to the forces of the counter-terrorism coalition and the Collective Security Treaty Organization to provide regional security measures. We remain committed to the establishment of a nuclear-weapon-free zone in Central Asia. The text of the agreement on such a zone has been agreed by five countries of our region and we are pleased that the Kyrgyz Republic is to be the depositary of the treaty. We feel that this is evidence of the great respect and trust in which our Republic is held with regard to the initiative to establish a nuclear-weapon-free zone. I am firmly convinced that the establishment of such a zone in our region will strengthen global security and regional stability. We hope to obtain the corresponding support of the world community. In conclusion, I would like to note that the world community is going through a difficult phase in the establishment of a new system of international relations. Clearly, it will be a long, drawn-out process. The States Members of the United Nations should affirm their readiness to find practical solutions to the most essential problems of our time: combating poverty, famine and disease and to work for sustainable development. This session of the General Assembly will be remembered as the session of reforms.