Let me begin by
congratulating you, Madam, on your election to the
presidency of the General Assembly at its sixty-first
session. Your election is a demonstration of the trust
and confidence placed in you and your country, the
Kingdom of Bahrain, by the international community.
I would also seize this opportunity to pay tribute
to your illustrious predecessor, His Excellency Mr. Jan
Eliasson of the Kingdom of Sweden, for his sound
leadership and achievements during the sixtieth
session.
Additionally, let me commend the Secretary-
General, His Excellency Mr. Kofi Annan, for his
decade of devoted and selfless service to humanity.
This great son of Africa, with his visionary leadership
of the United Nations, has provided, and continues to
provide, the embodiment of our collective aspirations
to achieve a more peaceful, just, equitable and
prosperous world. He is indeed Africa’s great gift to
humanity.
Within the next five days, Botswana will mark 40
years of its existence as a democratic, independent and
sovereign nation.
When the first President of Botswana, the late Sir
Seretse Khama, addressed the Assembly on
24 September 1969, he described Botswana, in part, as
a country faced with a problem of underdevelopment
of classic proportions.
Botswana had to contend with the harsh realities
of its history and geographical position. We were
completely surrounded by oppressive, aggressive and
racist white minority regimes. As a small, weak and
poor country, we had to begin the process of building
national institutions and laying the foundation for
social and economic development in a very hostile
environment. The United Nations and its Member
States served as a pillar of strength and gave us
political and diplomatic support.
Standing here today, we express our deep
gratitude for the support and assistance extended to us
over the years. It has been a 40-year journey of
determined and sustained effort to achieve human-
centred development.
It is a journey we have travelled with
development partners from all continents. This has
enabled us to achieve some measure of progress in
improving the human condition. At 40, we are an adult
nation and have assumed full ownership of and
responsibility for our own development. We have
adopted policies, legislation and practices aimed at
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creating an environment conducive to economic growth
and development.
Many milestones have been achieved in our
national development effort. Today, Botswana is a
middle-income developing country, but we still face
enormous challenges for which we need assistance. In
this regard, the decision of the 2005 World Summit
should be implemented to ensure that small middle-
income developing countries such as Botswana do not
fall back into the doldrums of poverty and
underdevelopment.
Botswana has been blessed with one of Africa’s
major natural resources: diamonds. It must be stated
that 65 per cent of the world’s diamonds, worth
$8.3 billion per year, come from African countries. I
am pleased to state that diamonds have done, and
continue to do, good in Botswana. The diamond
industry in Botswana has been at the cutting edge of
human development and is transforming lives for the
better, in all fields of human endeavour.
We continue to prudently manage the revenue
from the sale of diamonds and to effectively use such
revenue to educate our people, provide potable water
and health care and build an infrastructure network,
including roads, telephones and rural electrification.
This is the good that diamonds have done and continue
to do.
As a participant in the Kimberley Process
Certification Scheme, of which we currently hold the
chairmanship, Botswana is strongly committed to
working alongside other participating countries to
maintain the credibility of the Scheme and the
legitimate diamond trade. The Kimberley Process
Certification Scheme is one of the best examples of
global cooperation. The Scheme is the embodiment of
global consensus, unrelenting political will and the
determination of members to do the right thing,
underpinned by strong support and the resolutions of
the Security Council. That is important, because about
10 million people globally are either directly or
indirectly supported by the diamond industry. In
southern Africa, more than 28,000 people are employed
by the industry.
We are also here to reaffirm our commitment to
the Charter of the United Nations and our strong belief
in the Organization as the only vehicle by means of
which the enduring peace and prosperity of the human
race can be assured. We welcome the opportunity for
the nations of the world to meet here annually to
exchange views on matters which are central to our
common destiny.
There are many challenges which we must
address. But chief among them is ending the evil of
war. It is deeply regrettable that, although the human
species left the jungle many, many years ago, the
jungle remains in human beings. As a matter of fact, if
the beasts of the jungle acquired language, they could
actually claim some superiority over the human race.
While animals may fight and brutally kill each other,
they never spend time planning how to destroy one
another or thinking about how to produce weapons of
mass destruction.
Be that as it may, we still have hope and
confidence in the human spirit to do good. As human
beings, we have a shared destiny and we are therefore
our own saviours.
The responsibility to save the human species
from the scourge of war cannot be passed to anyone
else. It is for that reason that we consider that this
Assembly provides a rare opportunity for the
international community to move beyond platitudes
and to squarely address the critical challenges of our
time.
An atmosphere of international peace and
security is essential for human development.
Experience has repeatedly shown that we cannot
realistically hope to pursue a meaningful global
development agenda under conditions of war, conflict
and insecurity.
Conflicts in our world today should therefore be a
matter of grave concern to all of us. In 2000, at the
dawn of the new millennium, we gave an undertaking
that, above all else, the twenty-first century should be
an epoch of peace and prosperity. We consciously made
a commitment to reduce by half by 2015 the number of
the world’s poor. If we are to achieve that objective,
war should certainly be the first casualty.
Botswana is particularly concerned about
conflicts in Africa. Regrettably, Africa is the only
continent that is facing the bleak prospect of failing to
achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
Can we really afford the resources for war in the midst
of poverty, disease, deprivation and
underdevelopment? The answer must obviously be a
resounding “No”.
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Today, Africa is host to the largest number of
refugees, displaced persons, global poor and people
infected with and affected by HIV/AIDS. Yet, sadly,
we have the lion’s share of the world’s conflicts.
Ending conflicts is therefore as much a calling as it is a
moral and political imperative.
We should all be concerned about the atrocities in
the Darfur region of the Sudan. The perpetuation of
that conflict, in defiance of the collective will of the
international community and the Charter of the United
Nations, is totally unacceptable. Worse still, the
carnage of daily killings is an affront to the sanctity of
human life. This undermines our humanity.
We call on all parties to the conflict to comply
with and respect the Darfur Peace Agreement. Those
who have not signed the Agreement must do so as a
matter of urgency. It is only through dialogue and
mutual accommodation that durable peace can be
attained. War can beget only misery and anarchy.
The United Nations has expressed its desire to
help, through the deployment of a multinational
peacekeeping force. In principle, the African Union
Peace and Security Council has welcomed the decision
of the Security Council.
Every year we come to this rostrum to call for
progress in the Middle East peace process. For
generations that region has known no peace. If there is
any lesson to be learned, it is that the only avenue to a
lasting political settlement is through dialogue,
accommodation and compromise. It is only in an
atmosphere of negotiation that reason and common
sense can prevail over extremism and war-mongering.
Israel and Palestine must coexist as sovereign
States that share, not only a border, but a desire for
peace, security and prosperity. We urge the people of
the Middle East to summon up the courage to
recognize the folly of war and accept the virtue of
dialogue. They should start building a common future
for generations that will know no violence and conflict,
but only cooperation and concord.
My delegation shares the concern about the threat
of terrorism. Terrorism pervades every crevice of our
world, much to the detriment of humanity. In this
respect, we welcome the recent adoption of the United
Nations Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy (resolution
60/288) by the General Assembly.
When the Doha Ministerial Declaration was
adopted in 2001, we had hoped for and envisaged
negotiations lasting three years. We knew then, as we
know today, that that was an ambitious and onerous
undertaking. We have already missed several important
deadlines. That should be a source of concern for all of
us. For many of our people, a fair and equitable
international trading system is not only a noble
objective, but also a development imperative. It holds
hope and promise of prosperity and the alleviation of
poverty, which is all the more reason why we must not
allow the Doha round of trade negotiations to fail.
The indefinite suspension of the Doha round of
trade negotiations on 24 July 2006 has raised questions
about our collective commitment to development. In
this respect, the major question before us today is how
we can revive the Doha round of trade negotiations. It
took eight years to complete the Uruguay round. That
goes to show that at times it is not how fast the
negotiations are concluded but the substance and
content of such negotiations. It is clear that we are
going to miss the December 2006 deadline which we
set for ourselves in 2005.
It is therefore our collective responsibility as the
United Nations to give the necessary political direction
to the World Trade Organization, not only to revive the
negotiations, but also to ensure the necessary impetus
for their timely and successful conclusion. A successful
conclusion should address the ever-growing special
development challenges of developing countries by
upholding the development dimension of the Doha
round.
During the sixtieth session of the General
Assembly, a number of key decisions were made and
were outlined in the 2005 World Summit Outcome
(resolution 60/1). Heads of State or Government called
for the establishment of institutions with a view to
making the United Nations more effective in carrying
out its mandate under the Charter and in serving
Member States better.
This session should be an implementation
session; we must commit ourselves to collective
implementation. It is important that we demonstrate in
deeds that, here at the United Nations, we make
statements to communicate thoughts, ideas and action
plans. Such ideas are not to remain on paper; they must
be translated into programmes and projects for the
common good.
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Botswana strongly supports comprehensive, wide
and deep reform of the United Nations. Regarding the
ongoing management reform, we welcome the
decision, in resolution 60/283, to allow the Secretary-
General adequate authority to deploy resources and
staff from lower to higher priority programmes. We are
convinced that as chief administrative officer, the
Secretary-General should be accorded more leverage to
command both human and financial resources so that
the Secretariat can deliver more effectively. Member
States must recognize the importance of timely and
unconditional funding of the mandates entrusted to the
Secretary-General by the legislative bodies of the
Organization. It is incumbent upon the Secretariat to
ensure accountability and the prudent management of
such resources.
Enabling the Organization to effectively deliver is
a collective responsibility of the Member States and
the Secretariat. What is essential is for Member States
to ensure that there are efficient oversight bodies to
guarantee compliance with standing rules and
regulations.
One of the major successes of the sixtieth session
was the implementation of the World Summit decision
on the establishment of the Peacebuilding Commission.
Africa expects the Peacebuilding Commission to
effectively discharge its mandate.
The establishment of the Human Rights Council
is also one of the significant achievements of the
sixtieth session. It demonstrates our collective desire to
elevate human rights to new heights of prominence and
visibility consistent with the changing times. It is our
expectation that the new body will operate on the basis
of principles of cooperation, genuine interactive
dialogue and tolerance coupled with respect for
diversity. The importance of issues of development
should not be underestimated. In developing countries,
these issues are real challenges which should not be
overlooked. The Human Rights Council must therefore
address issues of capacity building and find ways of
responding to institutional weaknesses and resource
limitations which hamper the process of translating
constitutional and statutory human rights provisions
into reality.
Let me conclude by reaffirming Botswana’s
abiding faith in the utility and universality of the
United Nations. The United Nations is nothing else but
ourselves, the Member States, put together. It should be
greater than the sum total of all of us. We must
therefore have the courage to strengthen ourselves by
following through with reforms, including the reform
of the Security Council. The reform of the Security
Council should not pose difficulties to anyone. We are
all responsible for keeping this world safe.
It is only when Member States consider their
national interests to be an integral part of the wider
interests of the international community that they can
set aside their apprehension with regard to a Security
Council enlarged in both the permanent and non-
permanent categories.