UK

Today’s world offers one clear lesson: to survive and prosper, we have to work together better. That much is clear. We share a global environment. We depend on each other for development and prosperity. Regional conflicts affect us all. Our peoples suffer together under the shadows of drugs and terrorism. We can no longer separate what we want to achieve within our own borders from what we face across our borders. Rapid change of the sort we have seen recently can inspire fear. But we must face and conquer that fear together. And if our finance, our trade, media, communications and even our culture are, day by day, more and more transnational, it would be strange and potentially dangerous if our politics remained locked in the old compartments built just after the Second World War. If the challenge is international, then the response must be international too. We must launch a new era of international partnership in which we modernize those institutions that allow us to cooperate and to work together. The United Nations has a real record of achievement. That is true. But it is true also that it has had its failures. It has stood by or intervened ineffectively when brutality was abroad. It has sometimes delivered words when action was needed. But the United Nations is no more than its Member States. Its failures are our failures. The values of the United Nations Charter are as valid now as when they were written. But we have to find new ways of applying them. So I believe in the United Nations, but I also believe it must modernize, and do so urgently. All parts of the United Nations need proper accountability to go with secure funding, better management and more effective coordination in all their activities. Our Secretary-General has given us a lead. But it is now up to us, the Member States, to give him our full support. We must not allow reform in the United Nations to falter. And let me emphasize today that we need to strengthen too the authority of the Security Council. This means broadening its composition: new permanent seats — for the developing world as well as for Germany and Japan. More non-permanent seats alone would be an unacceptable compromise. We have been talking about this now for five years. It is time for decisions. 28 We face many challenges, but none more immediate than the contagion of recession spreading from those countries currently in difficulty to affect the wider world economy. The solutions do not lie in misguided attempts to impose new panoplies of controls on international capital movements, or in a retreat from open trade. Rather, we must all recognize that the absence of proper financial structures and disciplines in individual countries, coupled with a lack of transparency, will be punished by the markets sooner or later. However, we can act. We can devise new mechanisms to support a process of change: rules to encourage greater transparency in international and national financial dealings; better supervision and regulation of financial operators; adequate resources for the international financial institutions to deal with short-term liquidity problems; structural reform programmes for countries in difficulty, programmes that take account of the social effects of the restructuring we are asking for. The only way to tackle such complex problems is a new, high-level, international collaborative effort. Global problems will require global solutions. As Chairman of the G-8, Britain will play our full part in ensuring the necessary look at the international financial architecture and how it can be improved for a new age. This is a priority, I believe, for us all. However, we know that, unlike in the 1950s, this cannot be left simply to a few developed countries. Getting the financial framework right is only a start. We must create the conditions for sustainable development in all our countries. The international community has set itself exacting targets. Most important is the target to halve the proportion of people living in abject poverty by the year 2015. Our own development effort is now geared to the eradication of poverty. I told last year’s special session that we would reverse the decline in our development assistance. Recently we have announced that we are raising our development budget by £1.6 billion, and our support for health, education and water projects in Africa by 50 per cent. We have helped pay for the World Health Organization’s campaign to roll back malaria. We are trying to put our money where our mouth is. Of course, however, these development programmes only work if the conditions are right, and too much money has been wasted over the years. That is again why the work the United Nations is doing to create strong development partnerships is so important and must be given our full backing. I call today on all parts of the United Nations system, including the Bretton Woods institutions and the World Trade Organization, to give top priority to effective coordination of their development efforts. The poor of this world will otherwise be the losers. If we want to eradicate poverty, we also need to ensure that the least developed countries benefit from this global economy. That means, for example, letting them sell their goods without imposing tariffs on them. It means actively helping them benefit from globalization. And it means rejecting any false allure of protectionism. The European Union is committed to zero tariffs for these countries by the year 2000. And I would urge all developed countries to follow suit. We also have to ease the debt burden on the poorest countries. Britain has proposed the Mauritius Mandate to speed up assistance for those in the debt trap who are genuinely ready to help themselves out of it. By the year 2000 all qualifying highly indebted countries should have embarked on a systematic process of debt reduction, with the aim of a permanent exit from their debt problems. But we need to make sure it happens. Again, a huge collaborative effort between the countries represented here today will be needed. Development must not be at the expense of the environment. We all know this. But, again, this is a challenge to us. The success of Kyoto was a close-run thing. Buenos Aires will be hard work, but it has to work. Countries with the biggest emissions must come forward quickly with credible plans to meet their Kyoto commitments. We in Britain will shortly publish a consultation paper on how we will meet our obligations. And I hope that others will come forward and do the same. The world has high expectations of the United Nations as the guardian of global peace and security. The United Nations should not get involved if regional organizations are better able to tackle a local conflict. But sometimes we must demonstrate collective global will. And if we act, we must act decisively. Clear principles must be our guiding hand. Let me set some out briefly. First, prevention is always better than cure. The resources spent on averting conflict are tiny compared to the expense of peacekeeping once the guns start to fire. The United Nations is building up its capacity in this 29 area, but it needs more support — and again Britain pledges to play its part. Secondly, where we do have to send in the Blue Helmets, they should be given a clear and achievable task. There must be no repeat of Bosnia, where peacekeepers were inserted into a live conflict and told to make safe areas safe. But they were not given the means to do so. United Nations peacekeepers need a way out as well as a way in. They must have the tools to do the job, and clear and effective command. Thirdly, the United Nations needs to be able to act and respond fast. Fast action can prevent a conflict escalating, underpin a fragile truce, save lives. Again, we in Britain are trying to play our part. The reshaping of Britain’s armed forces following our Strategic Defence Review is transforming our ability to contribute to peacekeeping and humanitarian operations: more and better equipped rapid- reaction forces, additional strategic lift and better logistics capability. I can announce today that within six months we will conclude a specific agreement with the United Nations to ensure that it can make rapid use of what we have to offer when it is needed — the first such agreement by a permanent member. Fourthly, peacekeeping has to be accompanied from the start by peace-building, to restore justice, democratic institutions, prosperity and human rights. The Security Council has to deal with the symptoms of conflict, not simply with its causes. It needs to work with the rest of the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund if it is to have lasting impact. Again, I will be asking the Secretary-General to put to us new proposals dealing with the consequences and the causes of conflict to make this a reality. Too many of those conflicts sill abound. There are few higher priorities than restoring peace to the Great Lakes region. The Middle East peace process remains an apparent deadlock. We have managed to make progress in Northern Ireland, and the support of the world community in our doing so has given us great strength and courage to carry on. We owe a debt of gratitude for that support, and I hope that the world will continue it. I believe now is the time for a further move forward in the Middle East, too. Again, we in Britain are ready to play our part in bringing this about. I want to focus, however, on one other area of urgent concern: Kosovo. It almost defies belief that, yet again, the security forces of President Milosevic´ are ignoring the clear will of the international community and inflicting brutality and repression on those they claim to see as fellow citizens. Of course, we recognize that the unacceptable actions of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army have contributed to the present appalling situation. But nothing can justify scorched-earth tactics and forcible creation of hundreds of thousands of refugees. We have some clear responsibilities in this situation as an international community. First, we must make it clear that our patience with broken promises — phoney assurances that are not honoured — is exhausted. Continuation of military repression will inevitably lead to a new kind of response. Secondly, we must impress on both sides the need to negotiate, with a realistic appreciation of what is possible, and point the way to a mutually acceptable solution. Thirdly, we must make it clear that we have to meet the immediate humanitarian needs of the refugees in Kosovo and prevent, by any means necessary, the humanitarian disaster which we can see just over the horizon as winter approaches. We propose a new Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire and demanding an urgent end to the trampling of the rights of the inhabitants of Kosovo. It should be adopted this week, and President Milosevic´ would ignore such a resolution at his peril. The international community faces another serious challenge in Iraq. The Security Council is unanimous in insisting that Iraq resume cooperation with the United Nations, and Kofi Annan courageously reached an important agreement with the Iraqi leadership about the United Nations Special Commission earlier this year. Again, this agreement has to be honoured, and we will play our part in ensuring that it is. Finally, we face two global scourges which can undermine our institutions and, indeed, our way of life: drugs and terrorism. We all know the growing links between drugs and crime and instability in so many countries. The insidiously corrupting effect drugs have on all who come near them — growers, smugglers, pushers and users alike. We have, as we know, to tackle every link of the drugs chain, but we are in danger of losing sight of the size of the mountain we have to climb. If we are honest with ourselves, this is a war that we are risking losing, but we must win. Britain, again, is spending a 30 further £200 million at the national level on our priorities, but our collective efforts need a much stronger focus. We are not short of organizations looking at this problem; indeed, there may well be too many. But we are desperately short of results: cutting supply lines, eliminating illicit crop cultivation and stopping the profits of the drug dealers. We have a new instrument, the convention against organized crime. Too many countries still provide sanctuary for the proceeds of crime. We must demand together that those countries root out the traffickers and their dirty money — hit the drug barons where it hurts. The convention will provide practical means to achieve this, but the negotiations are dragging. Let us set ourselves the task of completing them by the millennium, at the latest. The fight against terrorism has also taken on a new urgency. The past year’s global roll-call of terror includes Luxor, Dar-es-Salaam, Nairobi, Omagh and many others. Each one is a reminder that terrorism is a uniquely barbaric and cowardly crime. Each one is a reminder that terrorists are no respecters of borders. Each one is a reminder that terrorism should have no hiding place and no opportunity to raise funds, and that there should be no let-up in our determination to bring its perpetrators justice. This applies to the new phenomenon of stateless terrorism as much as to its more familiar forms. As a start, it is surely vital that all countries sign up to the 11 international conventions to ensure that terrorists have no safe haven. We have ourselves, again, in Britain, just passed new legislation to ensure we can tackle terrorist conspiracies aimed at third countries. But we must go further. We can hope to defeat terrorism only if we all devote ourselves to doing so. So I welcome the recent initiative by the President of France to tackle fund- raising for terrorism on an international basis. As Chairman of the G-8, I again offer today to host a high- level conference in London this autumn to deny the terrorists this means of support. Effective new measures on an agreed international basis could make a real difference. I have covered many points in my speech to the Assembly, but my main point is really a very simple one. We face multiple new challenges as we approach the new century. Our only hope, as we all know, of tackling these challenges successfully is tackling them together. We need effective international cooperation and modern institutions to deal with our political problems and our economic problems. We need the United Nations system pulling together as never before. We need to revitalize and modernize our international institutions to deal with the crisis in the global economy. But, above all, we need political will and a sense of urgency. The problems of our modern world are too pressing, their consequences too immediate, their impact too far-reaching for us to hesitate or to look away any longer. We are being given a warning to act, to give purpose and direction in resolving these challenges we face together, or pay the price. And the time to do it — to respond to that warning — is now.