I congratulate you, Mr Ganev, on your
election as President of the General Assembly at its forty-seventh session.
You take this important position at a very challenging time for the United
Nations and its Member States, not least for your own country, which is so
admirably consolidating the gains of the democratization process. The
Australian delegation looks forward to working closely with you as the session
progresses.
I also extend, at the outset, Australia's very warm welcome to the 13
States for which this session will be their first as Members of the United
Nations: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, San
Marino, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia
and Herzegovina. We have, I believe, in our own highly multicultural
Australian population immigrants from every one of those States, and we
already feel, as a result, that we know them well.
In the past year we have seen the total collapse of the bipolar global
structure which had underpinned international relations since 1945. The risks
of a global nuclear holocaust have receded almost to the vanishing point. So
too have the sterile ideologies of the past which for so long set obstacles in
the way of the development of a new international system of cooperation under
the authority of the United Nations and its agencies.
But while the opportunities for cooperation have never been greater, the
challenges to the international community posed by regional conflicts,
humanitarian crises and unresolved transnational problems have also never been
greater. What is expected of the United Nations system is now immense, but
there is still a very big question mark over the capacity of our system to
deliver. In the past twelve months the international community has had some
conspicuous success in meeting some of these challenges. We have seen, for
example, the signing of the Paris Agreements on Cambodia last October, the
recently completed negotiation of a chemical-weapons Convention text, the
United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) summit in Rio
in June, movement forward in the Middle East peace process, and hopes for the
resolution of the long-standing problems in Afghanistan, Cyprus and Western
Sahara.
But a number of problems have to date been beyond the capacity of the
United Nations, or international cooperative efforts more generally, to
resolve in a timely and wholly effective way. The most significant and tragic
of these have been the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Somalia.
Equally, the world has failed so far in efforts to strengthen and expand the
liberal international trading system through the Uruguay Round of multilateral
trade negotiations on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), a
failure of just as much concern to the developing nations as to the
developed.
This session of the General Assembly gives us the opportunity of
systematically reviewing where we have got to and how far we still need to go
on the range of acute problems - political, economic and humanitarian - now
confronting us around the globe. We are much assisted in this respect by the
Secretary-General's report entitled "An Agenda for Peace", on some key aspects
of which I want to focus in this statement. The report, although
concentrating specifically on the role of the United Nations in peacemaking,
peace-keeping and related areas, was of course written very much against the
background of the total challenge facing the United Nations international
system, and in particular the critical importance of finding lasting solutions
to the age-old problems of basic human survival and, in the words of the
Charter, "better standards of life in larger freedom".
If we have learned anything from the passage of years about the sources
of conflict and war, and what is necessary to achieve peace and security, it
is that these problems have to be addressed at many different levels. Threats
to security arise not only from military ambition and the race to acquire
armaments, but also from economic and social deprivation, from ignorance of
countries about each other, from a failure to address problems that by their
nature cross international boundaries, and from a failure by national leaders
to trust the sense and judgment of their own people. An effective system of
international cooperation to meet threats to peace and security itself has to
operate at all these levels simultaneously.
In the first place, when unbridled aggression occurs across national
frontiers, the international community has to have a credible collective
capacity to resist that aggression. Chapter VII of the Charter provides for
such a peace-enforcement function. There is now in the post-cold-war era a
manifest willingness in the international community to utilise interventionist
Chapter VII functions, so long rendered impotent by the veto in the Security
Council, in cases of overt aggression and other obvious cross-border threats
to international peace and security.
Of course not every case of aggression, or the deliberate infliction of
suffering, occurs across State borders or in such a way as to clearly and
unambiguously constitute a threat to international peace and security. And
there will be a number of such situations in which the intervention of the
international community could make a difference, so much so that there are
large moral and political pressures upon us all to take action. It seems
likely, unhappily, that the United Nations will increasingly be confronted
with situations in which the principle of non-intervention in internal affairs
will be matched by a compelling sense of international conscience. It may be
that our Charter will never be capable of formal amendment so as to precisely
define those circumstances in which such intervention is legitimate and those
in which it is not. But recent experience has shown that there is an emerging
willingness - which my country has certainly shared to accommodate
collective intervention in extreme, conscience-shocking cases, and it may well
be that a body of customary precedent will emerge over time and will
constitute its own source of authority for such intervention in the future.
The second level of necessary United Nations involvement in peace and
security matters is peace-keeping: that activity which falls short of actual
enforcement, but involves assistance on the ground in monitoring, supervising,
verifying and generally securing the implementation of agreements once made.
As the various peace-keeping operations now in place or planned for Cambodia,
Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere amply make clear, an increasingly wide
variety of activities, involving both military and civilian personnel, are
being subsumed under this general umbrella: none of them are very clearly
described in the letter of the United Nations Charter, but all of them are
very clearly within its spirit.
Australia strongly endorses the call by President Bush on 21 September to
strengthen United Nations peace-keeping and related operations, and welcomes
in particular the stated intention of the United States to look at ways of
ensuring adequate financial support for these activities as well as for United
Nations humanitarian activities. Financing and administration of United
Nations peace-keeping operations are obviously key areas of its activity where
decisions are necessary at this year's General Assembly. It is a source of
regret that we, the nations of the world, have still not given the
Secretary-General the financial resources or flexibility needed to undertake
United Nations peace-keeping operations expeditiously.
For its part, Australia would support the Secretary-General's call in "An
Agenda for Peace" (A/47/277) for the establishment at this session of a
peace-keeping reserve fund, and for virtually automatic approval of one third
of the anticipated budget for a peace-keeping operation to enable it to be
deployed speedily and efficiently. We would also recommend that the
Secretary-General consider further structural changes in the Secretariat as a
means of improving the administration of peace-keeping operations, including
the relocation of the Field Operations Division into the Department of
Peace-keeping Operations.
The third level of United Nations involvement in peace and security, and
the most basic and important of all, is the prevention of conflict. We in the
international community should be working hardest through the United Nations
to create conditions that minimize insecurity and threats to peace, and which
make it possible for specific high-risk situations to be addressed before they
get to the point of requiring either peace-keeping or, worse still, coercive
peace-enforcement responses.
The effective prevention of conflict and risk minimization involve three
quite distinct kinds of activity. In the first place, it involves addressing
a variety of non-military threats to security; secondly, addressing the
military risk to security posed by uncontrolled arms build-ups; and thirdly,
putting in place the most effective possible preventive diplomacy and
peacemaking arrangements to deal at an early stage with specific high-risk
situations. I want to concentrate my remarks on what we should be doing, in
this General Assembly and beyond, in each of these areas in turn.
Among the gravest of all life-threatening non-military risks are those
posed by humanitarian disasters, especially famine. The recurring tragedy of
mass starvation in Africa often made worse by accompanying military
conflict, but not wholly explained by that conflict underlines the need for
the United Nations system as a whole, and the Security Council in particular,
to strengthen its capacity to meet the problems of potential famine.
Australia proposes the establishment of a group of senior officials from
developed and developing countries and relevant United Nations agencies,
supported by a strengthened Department of Humanitarian Affairs and by a
comprehensive database, which would convene regularly to conduct high-level
reviews of the global famine situation and identify emerging crisis
situations. Such a group would be responsible for turning pledges into
timely, life-saving deliveries of food to people in need, and would seek to
ensure that donor contributions were complementary, properly coordinated and
well-targeted. That high-level review group would report regularly, with
appropriate recommendations, to the Security Council.
Famine is only the most extreme example of a much more widespread global
problem. The Secretary-General, in his address to the summit of the Movement
of Non-Aligned Countries, identified our "ultimate enemy" as poverty. He
argued for the indivisibility of peace and prosperity, of political and
economic security, of democracy and development, and environmental protection
and sustainable development, making the point that unless we meet the threat
posed by poverty, it will undermine all the advances we make elsewhere. We
need to have this firmly in mind as we act for the rest of this decade and
beyond to meet non-military threats to peace and security.
Two issues in particular will have a crucial influence on our ability to
prevail over these threats. One is the retreat to protectionism, which could
well result from a failure to reach agreement in the Uruguay Round, which will
do untold damage to many economies around the world, particularly those of the
poorest nations, which would effectively be excluded from the benefits of an
expansion in world trade. We cannot let pass the opportunity, provided by
this round of negotiations, to further liberalize world trade and establish
equitable disciplines for the new components of world trade. The recent
summit of the Non-Aligned Movement illustrated beyond a doubt that this is a
view shared equally by developed and developing countries.
The other important need in this context is for prompt and effective
follow-up to the outcomes of the United Nations Conference on Environment and
Development, and in particular the creation of an effective Commission on
Sustainable Development. We cannot waste now the opportunity offered to us at
Rio to make a serious attack on the elimination of global poverty, based on
the principles of sustainable development. Ignoring these will produce, at
best, only short-term solutions which will have little impact on our ability
to secure the future of this planet. This places a particular onus on us at
this session. Our decisions and actions will have a crucial bearing on how
the concerns identified at Rio are taken forward.
Natural disasters, acute poverty, famine and environmental degradation
are all, along with war itself, major contributors to another great
humanitarian problem and by extension security problem with which the
international system is barely coping: the problem of unregulated population
flows. Much important relief and rehabilitation work continues to be done for
refugees and displaced persons by the relevant agencies, in particular the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and some useful attention has
been recently given to the problem by the General Assembly. But crises
continue to escalate, and there are still problems evident in the coordination
of responses between operating and supervising bodies. Those problems have to
be addressed as a matter of urgency, and one obvious way to do so is, again,
to strengthen the capacity of the new Department of Humanitarian Affairs.
There is at least one other non-military threat to peace and security
that Australia hopes will get increased attention from this General Assembly,
and that is the failure of Governments to observe the fundamental standards of
human rights as set out in the Universal Declaration and the more detailed
Covenants, to which so many of us have subscribed.
The Secretary-General in his report "An Agenda for Peace" (A/47/277) very
properly emphasizes in this context the question of the rights of minorities.
It is understandable that, freed from the iron restraints of totalitarian
regimes, some ethnic and linguistic groups have sought and no doubt will
continue to seek - to establish their own political entities. As has been all
too graphically demonstrated in the States of former Yugoslavia, Iraq and
elsewhere, there is no easy answer to these aspirations, particularly when
self-determination would in such cases be synonymous with fragmentation and
itself be a source of threat to international peace and security. War,
particularly civil war, also engenders many of the greatest abuses of human
rights.
The bulk of such aspirations to self-determination might, in fact, be met
by stricter observance of human rights and guarantees of the rights of all
minorities ethnic, religious, linguistic or social within democratic
frameworks. The General Assembly will have before it at this session a draft
declaration on the rights of minorities, endorsed earlier this year by the
Commission on Human Rights. And the launch, later this session, of the
International Year of the World's Indigenous People to which Australia is
very strongly committed will be a further indication of our concern in this
regard.
Breaches of universal human rights standards remain, unhappily, all too
common. In a country such as Burma or Myanmar - the security of the State
is based on a denial of fundamental human rights and the application of
democratic processes. In South Africa, the promise of a peaceful, negotiated
transition to majority rule continues to be put at risk by recurring violence
of appalling intensity, itself an all too obvious legacy of the apartheid
system.
These and too many other examples that could be mentioned show the
dimensions of the problem still ahead of us. They confirm the importance of
next year's World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, particularly for
those Governments needing further encouragement to adopt human rights
policies - founded, I emphasize, not on so-called Western values, but on
internationally accepted, universal standards of practice. Discussion at this
session should play an important role in developing a consensus approach to
the Conference. At the very least, I hope it will resolve the outstanding
question of the agenda, which was left undecided at the recent preparatory
meeting in Geneva.
The General Assembly at this session might also usefully consider some
other steps to consolidate respect for human rights. There is, for instance,
a growing call by the international community for a mechanism to try
individuals for breaches of international humanitarian law and other
international crimes. Australia supports consideration being given to an
international criminal jurisdiction to deal with such offences, and considers
that the International Law Commission should continue its important work on
this topic, specifically by drafting a statute for an international criminal
court.
The end of the cold war notwithstanding, a major preventive effort by the
international community is still necessary in relation to the military threat
to security posed by continuing arms build-ups. The climate for such an
effort is certainly now encouraging. International endeavours in this field
are finally producing results. After over 20 years, agreement has finally
been reached on a chemical weapons Convention text. It is a historic
achievement, and one for which Australia has worked particularly hard.
Unanimous endorsement of this Convention, with a recommendation for its
universal signature and ratification, would be one of the major outcomes of
this forty-seventh session of the General Assembly.
We should also build on the success we have had in concluding the
chemical-weapons Convention to reinvigorate our efforts to reach agreement on
other elements of the multilateral disarmament agenda. The benefits to
mankind of the end of the cold war will be quickly lost unless progress, which
is being made in bilateral arms control and disarmament negotiations between
the United States and the former Soviet Union, is carried into the
multilateral arms control process.
We must redouble our efforts to achieve a world free from nuclear
weapons, and the threat of nuclear war. We must work harder to obtain
universal membership of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons
and ensure its indefinite extension unamended in 1995. We should also
continue the progress that has been made since the Gulf War to strengthen the
nuclear safeguards system of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and
tighten export controls on nuclear and nuclear-related dual-use items. We
should build on the moratorium on nuclear testing advanced by Russia and
France. And I urge Member States to support once again the draft resolution
that Australia will co-sponsor at this session on the comprehensive test-ban
treaty.
Increased transparency in military activities should continue to be a key
objective for all Members of the General Assembly. I regard the United
Nations Register of Conventional Arms Transfers, established by the
forty-sixth session of the General Assembly, as an important step in this
process. Australia welcomes the Secretary-General's report on the operation
of the Register and supports its adoption.
At the recent summit of non-aligned countries in Jakarta, leaders
expressed their deep concern over the negative impact of global military
expenditure, and their support for the attainment of security at lower levels
of armaments. We must all work to make good these pledges, thereby releasing
sorely needed funds to help free the peoples of the world from want, as well
as from the fear of war and destruction.
Pursuing an effective arms control agenda and addressing a variety of
non-military threats to security are all important ways of creating a general
environment in which risks to security are minimized. So too are the
peace-building strategies described in the Secretary-General's report, many of
which are as much applicable to pre-conflict as to post-conflict situations.
But the tools with the cutting edges in specific situations of conflict
prevention and avoidance of conflict escalation are preventive diplomacy and
peace-making.
In "An Agenda for Peace", the Secretary-General emphasized the importance
of preventive diplomacy as a cost-effective means of avoiding the human and
material costs of conflict and the burdens involved in using armed force to
resolve conflicts. Indeed, if we examine the worst conflicts over the last 12
months in the former Yugoslavia, Somalia and Afghanistan we could
plausibly argue that, at least in the first two cases, more attention to
preventive diplomacy may have avoided the catastrophes that befell those
nations and peoples. Australia considers, therefore, that the challenge
before the United Nations in the coming year will be to establish more
effective processes for converting the promise of preventive diplomacy in all
its aspects into reality.
Effective preventive diplomacy cannot be ad hoc or peripheral to the
other activities of the United Nations. What is required is a strengthened
capacity within the United Nations to encourage and assist parties to disputes
to resolve their differences peacefully. The crucial elements in making
preventive diplomacy work are timing, adequate resources and the willingness
of Member States to invest the United Nations with the authority to use all
the means available for its effective implementation.
In practice, the trigger for United Nations action, and the threshold for
defining a situation as a threat to international peace and security, has
tended to be the outbreak of armed hostilities. The earliest possible
attention to potentially significant disputes is crucial if they are to be
addressed before the parties have become committed and entrapped by their own
rhetoric and actions.
This in turn calls for the formation of a permanent unit within the
Secretariat with an enhanced capacity to gather, receive and analyse not only
basic facts, but also information about the concerns and interests of the
parties to a dispute, in order better to prepare recommendations on possible
action. This requires a more systematic approach to information-gathering and
analysis, for which a professionally dedicated support unit in the Secretariat
is essential.
This will need in turn a sophisticated level of expertise and skill in
the form of a nucleus of foreign affairs specialists and policy analysts
experienced and knowledgeable in conflict resolution, with the skills that are
necessary to encourage parties to a dispute to improve communication, minimize
inflammation, define issues and create innovative and imaginative ways of
reconciling their conflicting interests. Regular and routine field visits
should allow an improved capacity for fact-finding, early-warning information
gathering and the opportunity quietly to provide good offices. Staff should
have the capacity to develop in-depth knowledge of emerging disputes and to
gain the confidence of all parties at an early stage. An evaluation mechanism
should be developed to collect, analyse and retain experience from such
activities that could prove useful in other similar situations.
I therefore applaud the decisions Mr. Boutros Boutros-Ghali has so far
taken to create geographically based divisions within the Department of
Political Affairs, whose tasks will include the collection of information on
various regions and the early identification and analysis of possible
conflicts, and I do urge all Members to support the Secretary-General in
further efforts to establish a professional and effective mechanism for
preventive diplomacy.
There is also scope, in encouraging greater use of preventive diplomacy,
for more extensive training in the principles underpinning the concept. It is
good to hear, in this context, that the United Nations Institute for Training
and Research (UNITAR) is planning to launch a new fellowship programme in
preventive diplomacy in 1993. I think it will be important for relevant
United Nations Secretariat staff and diplomats and officials from Member
States to participate in this fellowship programme. I am pleased to announce
today that Australia will contribute US$ 50,000 to UNITAR to assist with the
costs of the first year of the fellowship. I would urge that other Member
States also consider a contribution, and participation by their officials.
A significant challenge to an enhanced Secretariat role in preventive
diplomacy will, of course, be the deep reluctance of many States to accept any
suggestion that a contentious bilateral issue be internationalized. While
there will no doubt continue to be caution about too early resort to Articles
35 and 99 which enable Member States and the Secretary-General,
respectively, to bring disputes to the Security Council there should not be
the same degree of reluctance to have regard to Article 33, which requires
parties to a dispute to first seek a solution by negotiation, mediation or the
like.
What has been lacking hitherto is any real institutional capacity within
the United Nations system to respond to such approaches on other than a wholly
ad hoc basis. The building of such a capacity for quiet diplomacy in the way
I have been describing would be a major step forward, and help over time to
increase the confidence of Members in other more formal United Nations
processes.
I have today sought to give some substance, not just rhetorical support,
to the proposition that the changed conditions of the post-cold-war world call
for new responses from the United Nations. The Secretary- General has shown
us some new directions in his "Agenda for Peace". What is needed now is
action.
In nearly all cases, no major new international machinery is called for
or necessary, because the machinery is already there in the Charter rusty,
in some cases, but still serviceable. What is needed, however, in virtually
every case, is the lubrication of adequate financing and restructuring within
the United Nations system to meet the increasing demands being made on it.
One of the really fundamental tasks we need to move forward at this session is
continuation of the process, accordingly, of United Nations reform.
There is no single, or simple, enemy to peace in the contemporary
world. The appalling situation in Somalia, and the looming crises in
Mozambique and the Sudan, are demonstrations if any are still needed - that
problems do not come in neatly defined packages. The Somalian situation
involves, simultaneously, humanitarian assistance, peace-keeping and political
negotiation, with no one of these elements being capable of delivery in
isolation. The United Nations is now organizing itself in Somalia to deliver
these elements in an integrated way, although it has been a difficult and
Protracted process to get to this point. The task for the United Nations in
the future is to learn from this experience and to devote the necessary
resources to achieving the kind of cooperation between humanitarian and
political strategies that is going to be increasingly necessary in the future
if durable solutions are to be found to many real world problems.
More and more attention is going to focus, as indeed it has already
focused in this general debate, on the role and representativeness of the
Security Council itself. As President Soeharto said last week, speaking in
this respect on behalf of the whole non-aligned Movement, the post-cold war
world is not the world as it was after the Second World War. Our guiding
light should by all means continue to be the present terms of the Charter, but
it should be within our collective capacity to work out the changes in the
composition and methods of decision of the Security Council that will ensure
that it can both fulfil its duty and command overwhelming consensus for its
decisions in the years ahead.
In many respects the task ahead of us, and ahead of the United Nations,
is daunting. It is clear that we are part of an evolutionary process, with
both the world and the United Nations adjusting to new demands. We must draw
strength from the success achieved in the last 12 months, and from the
progress we have made in improving global co-operation.
But our success has not been uniform: we were not able to respond
adequately to some key challenges. We must not ever lose sight of the goal
ahead of us: a more stable and secure world, devoid of abject poverty, with
all peoples able to enjoy basic rights and freedoms. And we must never avoid
the responsibility we all have to achieve those goals.