Allow me first of all to express the honour I feel as an Andorran at the distinction that has been conferred on our small country by this Assembly through your election, Mr. Minoves-Triquell, as a Vice-President for this year’s session of the General Assembly. I thank you for calling on me to address this Assembly and assure you of the support of the people of Andorra and, I am sure, of all those who speak the Catalan language. I must also thank the outgoing President, Mr. Diogo Freitas do Amaral, for his excellent tenure at the helm of the General Assembly during the year of the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations. I do this with the satisfaction of congratulating an illustrious Portuguese, a brother from the Iberian peninsula who has been able to give this Assembly the necessary impetus to start off on the right foot and with hope for the new era of 50 years that must take us to the one hundredth anniversary of the United Nations. I wish also to convey to the new President, His Excellency Mr. Razali Ismail, my warmest congratulations and those of my country on his election, and I have the great pleasure of assuring him of the close collaboration of the Andorran Vice-President of the General Assembly, who will always be at his service. Andorra looks to the future of the world with optimism, sure that on this Earth men and women of good will will know how to overcome intolerance and injustice. In order to advance towards these objectives of progress, we will have to count on the United Nations. Its reform, which the Secretary General, at the call of all the States, has promoted during these last years, will give us a more efficient Organization, with more coordination and less costly duplication, responsible in the financial sphere and concentrated on its mandate. My fellow citizens often ask me, “What can a small country like Andorra bring to the United Nations?” We are a State with very little land and with a population that we count in six tens of thousands, and we lack the political weight the force of arms normally provides. However, our small size has been our good fortune. We have opted to lack armies and cannons since we destroyed all our country’s fortifications in 1278. One day, we would hope, that admirable action of the thirteenth-century Andorrans will be imitated by our century’s over-armed Powers, large, mid-sized and small. Our small population has been a good school for human understanding and our individual and collective aspirations, allowing for the precision of small-scale observation. Because we are small and peaceful, and because we have a lengthy history, we bring to the United Nations a vision of the world that is patient and optimistic, and it is our belief that if we have lived in our territory without bellicose conflict for more than 700 years, the same is also possible beyond our borders, for, in the end, the men and women who live in Andorra are different from the rest of mankind only in their collective historical experience. It is the young people growing up in this latter part of the twentieth century who will pave the way to the third millennium. I should thus like to make them the main point of my statement this year in the Assembly’s general debate. Later, I will mention my State’s hopes for the young who are today being educated in an understanding of the challenges of the United Nations and of the need to promote democracy and human rights as the pillars of the peace, prosperity and justice for peoples that we are striving to attain, goals that, if we hurry in our task, we may be able to glimpse ourselves. Earlier, I indicated that Andorra trusts the future. One of the principal reasons for that trust is probably the fact that a great part of our population is young and that our demographic pyramid is very different from those of our Western European neighbours. When human beings are young, everything seems possible. The energy we all possess allows us to look forward with strength, with courage and with hope. Raisons d’état, political evils, economic imperatives, the belief that the end justifies the means — all these have difficulty taking root in the young, since youth cares more about fidelity in friendship, more about making its imprint on society. Youth has idealism — something we too often criticize but something which feeds the genuine and vital fire that compels human beings to strive for dialogue and genuine coexistence — to aspire, for example, to the United Nations. It is that aspect of the young that we must nourish if we desire a better world. Unfortunately, it is still very difficult for many young people to seek the good of mankind when in their own countries, cities or villages, 9 in their homes or in their families, they lack the most basic physical or spiritual necessities, when the education they are given is the official doctrine of a despotic regime and when — as was the case with their parents and their grandparents before them — what they eat today is the meagre wage of much sweat. In the developed countries, unemployment among the young crushes the hopes of a large part of today’s well-prepared generation, which will be forced to waste the education that decades of economic progress have enabled it to obtain. In States still striving to achieve development, in which 84 per cent of the world’s population between 15 and 24 years of age lives, the situation is very worrying: AIDS, the rural exodus, poverty, hunger, medical shortcomings, sexual exploitation, juvenile delinquency — problems that also affect the developed countries — are particularly acute. Unemployment in developing countries is also a tragic evil. We know that more than 100 million new jobs will have to be created in the next two decades to satisfy the growing young and active population of the developing countries. In confronting these problems we who govern must assume our responsibilities and give priority to policies affecting the young, especially those geared towards fighting youth unemployment. One of the first areas we must encourage is obviously that of training. Governments must coordinate economic plans with training policies so that students can learn professions that they will have some chance of practicing, as well as to prevent, insofar as possible, an excess of graduates in saturated sectors. We must also give appropriate encouragement, through programmes of coordination and technical assistance when necessary, to the integration of young people into the community. Small communities, when they work in conjunction with non-governmental organizations, pay special attention to the management of resources and are well aware of the needs of their young people. This joint effort is most appropriate when we recall that we are living in an era in which society realizes that big government and its programmes sometimes give rise to more expenditure than advantages and that fiscal responsibility is of more benefit to the economy than is the multiplication of governmental departments, especially in the developing countries, where the public sector is still suffering the consequences of large-scale programmes that have not produced the results expected. In those States, Governments will find it to their advantage to acknowledge the value of fostering microcredits for young people with entrepreneurial projects. The example of Bangladesh, where such credits have enabled many women to achieve financial independence, is noteworthy in this respect. I would also mention as an example of successful action the educational measures for young entrepreneurs that some Latin American States have taken with a view to the creation of new, small companies. At the United Nations, States must give direct support to young people and to the programmes related to them. More specifically, I am thinking of the World Programme of Action for Youth to the Year 2000 and Beyond. That Programme, which was adopted by the General Assembly on 14 December 1995, defines some of the problems that affect the world’s young people and indicates medical, educational and job-oriented priorities for the next few years. We must enlarge on that text. States Members of the United Nations must collaborate with the Secretariat in defining the Programme’s possibilities and putting it into practice in a concrete way so that its message reaches all nations. What we do with today’s youth will define the twenty-first century. For the past year Andorra has actively participated at the United Nations in the debates involving the young. On 26 October of last year, in commemorating the tenth anniversary of the International Youth Year, our Ambassador spoke in this Hall on the benefits of teaching tolerance and human rights to young people in schools. Andorra has also contributed to the United Nations Youth Fund. Earlier, at the March 1995 Copenhagen World Summit for Social Development, Andorra proposed a full and specific commitment asking the Governments of the world to foster dialogue between generations and achieved its incorporation into the Declaration by Heads of State and Government. Given the lack of specific references in many United Nations texts, this provides a good basis for subsequent studies on youth-related themes. At this juncture, I should like to say that the fact that we concentrate our attention on youth must never lead us to forget members of older generations, particularly the elderly. Dignity in ageing must be recognized and promoted, particularly today, when the progress of medicine is making possible the lengthening of human life. Intergenerational solidarity accompanied by dialogue, is an integral theme of any policy geared to the support of the young. Indeed, when we talk of giving primary attention to youth, that must not mean a glorification of the first decades of human life to the detriment of old age. On the contrary, it should mean a recognition of the 10 determining role that young people play in what will happen later. I should like for a moment to pay a tribute here to a generation of young people which the media has of late characterized as being “lost” — the young people of Bosnia and other parts of the former Yugoslavia who, not so many years ago, were confident children of Europe and who have now spent their youth amidst fratricidal struggles and “ethnic cleansing”, with all the revulsion inherent in that expression, a youth spent between death and barbarism. Andorra, which, during the Spanish Civil War and later during the Second World War, was a land of welcome and refuge for other lost generations of other wars — also fratricidal, and, indeed, if all human beings are brothers, what war is not fratricidal? — feels solidarity with these young people of Bosnia, upon whom has fallen the responsibility for building a new coexistence and for erasing from the collective consciousness these past years of propaganda and demagoguery and for breaking with the history of confrontation that afflicts the Balkans. Bosnia is not the only place where we have witnessed difficult times. Angola, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador, Burundi, Rwanda, Iraq and many other places have in recent years been affected by conflicts of great complexity. Some of these problems have already been solved or attenuated, often thanks to United Nations action. Developments in the situation in El Salvador are a good example. Other conflicts continue, a cause of great consternation to the international community. My Minister of Foreign Affairs reminded us last year, in this Assembly Hall, of the considerable increase in military personnel deployed for the United Nations in recent years. At the beginning of 1988, there were just over 9,000 Blue Helmets in the world engaged in peacekeeping operations. Seven years later, there are over 70,000 — this in spite of the fact that the military and logistical means of immediate action are not in the hands of this international Organization. Ultimately, we — the States that decide how this Organization shall act — are the ones responsible for failing to end or prevent conflicts. Criticism must be constructive. When we accuse the United Nations of a lack of action in Bosnia, let us ask ourselves why the policies of the members of the Security Council are so divergent and difficult to coordinate. We must therefore make an effort to provide information so that the public has an accurate idea of what really happens behind the flags that adorn this building. We must make the successes of the United Nations known, not just its shortcomings. We must highlight its efforts to promote international law, a body of law that will guarantee negotiated solutions instead of shows of strength, a principle that is essential for the survival of small States. We must recognize the small, quiet steps humanity takes day by day in United Nations committees, steps geared towards the promotion and application of human rights. If in a particular State some people, be it only a few, no longer suffer torture or repulsive abuse when they are arrested; if in some parts of the world blood is not shed because international shame projects itself on those countries; if in other places, nuclear tests will not shatter the peace of the people living there because we have signed a treaty prohibiting such actions, then the United Nations deserves all our support. We must foster confidence in the future of men and women, not cynicism towards international organizations. If we do not, we run the risk of encouraging movements that seek to express this cynicism through violence and terrorist acts. We have no choice but to consider the means democracy gives to its enemies that they can use to destroy it, particularly through terrorism. When the media tell us that the United Nations is a potential terrorist target, we become even more conscious of our commitment to strengthening efforts more effectively to publicize the task of our Organization. The energies of our youth must not be directed towards violent expressions of social discomfort. We must therefore channel them, as I have stated before, towards creativity in one’s work and promoting confidence in humanity’s potential. When, a few years ago, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, as witness to the end of the cold war, wrote about the end of history, he forgot about the immense creativity of human beings. When one period of history ends, another one begins. Our responsibility is to ensure that the period of history we have entered in the nineties rejects the obscurantism produced by the fear perpetuated by human beings, and reflects the qualities humanity holds highest. The framing of a Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), which I will sign tomorrow on behalf of the Andorran Government, along with many of the representatives here, is an achievement of which the United Nations Organization can feel proud and a clear example of what we can do when the peoples of the world unite with the strength of an ideal of peace. Andorra, an initial co-sponsor of the resolution that brought this Treaty to the General Assembly, adheres to 11 its principles in full, principles which provided the basis for the founding of our country. In the same fashion, not very long ago we gave top priority to acceding to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons with the hope of promoting that text of peace. Peace! The cry of alignment for the traditionally neutral States, one of the most noble cries, is — let us not fool ourselves — still far from being answered. The CTBT is only the first step, and an essential one, towards more efforts to ensure nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation, and the reduction of other types of arsenals — goals to which Andorra will devote much attention. To help achieve these objectives, the Government of Andorra has a mandate of solidarity which is enshrined in our Constitution. In its preamble, the Andorran people declare themselves eager to make every effort to promote values such as freedom, justice, democracy and social progress, to maintain and strengthen Andorra’s harmonious relations with the rest of the world on the basis of mutual respect, coexistence and peace, and willing to bring their collaboration and effort to all the common causes of humankind. At present, States, large or small, within the framework of the United Nations, have a duty to provide a source of inspiration for the ideals of youth, prevent isolationism and look beyond their borders, share experiences and show solidarity with States in distress. This notwithstanding, Governments continue to have a fundamental role in the internal activities of States, so that few United Nations efforts and initiatives can really be effective without their active cooperation. For this reason, the leaders of States who, year after year, gather in this Assembly Hall must leave here convinced of our unavoidable responsibility to promote human rights within our own borders and social and economic development in our States. In accordance with article 29 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Andorra signed and ratified less than a year ago, thus contributing to the universal process of ratification so desired by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), it is vital that Governments ensure that tolerance and human rights are taught freely and comprehensively at school in order to rear new generations that are much more sensitive to the universality and relevance of these rights. We must also encourage States still using other forms of government to adopt democratic processes, and make the rule of law a priority for leaders in the coming years. There are no peoples unprepared for democracy, only leaders with little aptitude for fostering it. I wanted to introduce a spirit of optimism in my speech today. When optimism does not conceal reality, but instead tries to transcend it, it is the best remedy against the apathy that can affect the human heart in a world full of conflict. I have spoken of youth and its optimism, and of the need to focus our attention on the problems affecting youth. I have lauded the successes of the United Nations, but I have also noted the difficulties we will have to overcome if the United Nations, is to enjoy qualitative growth. I have advocated the teaching of human rights, of democracy, of tolerance, and of social and individual responsibility for the progress of human communities. Four years before the new millennium, we must give our youth optimism and confidence in the future. One year ago, the Minister for Foreign Affairs of Andorra concluded his statement before this Assembly with some words by Robert Kennedy. Previously, my predecessor in the presidency of the Andorran Government borrowed from John Fitzgerald Kennedy the expression “Ich bin ein Berliner” to declare himself an Andorran in a speech on the particularities of small States. To make reference to the Kennedys is to make reference to an optimistic decade imprinted with the ideals and dreams that a young American President spread around the world. It was also a decade of harsh realities and contradictions, as in the world today. Ideals, however, last because there is always a new generation to adopt them. Today I reiterate the promise that President Kennedy made to the United Nations: “To that world assembly of sovereign states, the United Nations, our last, best hope in an age where the instruments of war have far outpaced the instruments of peace, we renew our pledge of support to prevent it from becoming merely a forum for invective, to strengthen its shield of the new and the weak, and to enlarge the area in which its writ may run”.