20. It is a great pleasure for my delegation and my Government to offer to Mr, Arenales, in our first intervention in the general debate of this Assembly, our warmest felicitations on his unanimous election to the office of President. Enough has already been said by the representatives who have preceded me at this rostrum, about the experience he has had in United Nations affairs and the talents he has brought to the various tasks that preceded his assumption of this office. This is indeed the crowning achievement of his career. The coming year holds no promise of an easy passage, if one remembers events of the year just closed. We may therefore look forward hopefully to his guidance of the Assembly through the daunting tasks that lie ahead.
21. Let me also take this opportunity at the very outset to offer our felicitations and good wishes to Swaziland, whose accession to full statehood has been perfected by its being accepted as a Member of this Organization.
22. The past year has not been a year of any singular achievement. We had better look that fact squarely in the face. Much that was hopefully expected to be achieved remained elusive and unattainable. One need only read the sombre introduction of the Secretary-General to his annual report [A/7201/Add.1] to realize that international relations still remain in the penumbra of human affairs, with no immediate hope that the shadows will lift or pass over. At the moment no ray of light relieves the darkness.
23. Not many months ago the world cheered the conclusion of a nuclear non-proliferation Treaty. There were of course doubters and sceptics, but by and large it gave reasonable hope for optimism that even if the nuclear arms race cannot be reversed, the trend towards arresting it in its course has commended itself to the super-Powers. Even such limited optimism now appears to be merely wishful thinking, a terribly frightened and frustrated world seeing only what it wants to see, through rose coloured spectacles.
24. The resumed session of the twenty-second General Assembly commended the Treaty and recommended the widest possible adherence to it in spite of its obvious weaknesses, particularly with two of the five known nuclear Powers sulking away from it. The remaining three nuclear Powers have to sign and ratify the Treaty before it can come into force; and signs are not wanting that some, if not all of these Powers are losing their earlier enthusiasm for it, if one is unwilling to say they are having second thoughts.
25. Many pandits, knowledgeable in these affairs, have assured the world that the next logical step towards a complete cessation of the arms race is to extend the partial nuclear test ban Treaty of 1963 to include a ban on underground testing. This problem has been bedevilled over the years by the difficult question of verification, but the report of the latest meeting of experts which met in Tällberg, Dalarna, in Sweden, makes it possible to conclude that the techniques of detection and verification of underground explosions has now reached a stage where these difficulties are no longer insurmountable. In so far therefore as this impediment to verification now appears to have been removed, there is no longer any excuse for the creation of intellectual road-blocks aimed at barring the inclusion of underground testing in the partial nuclear test ban Treaty also in order to make the ban complete and effective.
26. This, my Government feels, will effectively dissipate the doubts and hesitations the potential nuclear Powers have understandably felt in accepting at face-value the protestations of the nuclear Powers that they mean what they say when they confidently claim that the nuclear non-proliferation Treaty will indeed advance and promote disarmament. It will also effectively counter the notorious arguments which the potential nuclear Powers have used to gain a semblance of respectability, by showing the real distinction existing between horizontal proliferation, which is prohibited, and vertical proliferation, which is permitted. My Government urges the Eighteen-Nation Committee on Disarmament, which for long has only functioned with seventeen members, to proceed with this programme leading to a ban on underground tests. When all is said and done the persistent problem of problems is that of peace-keeping.
27. It is unnecessary at this stage to recount the considerations that have revolved around the exercise of the veto in the Security Council or the search for remedies, by recourse to the General Assembly, against the veto disabling the Security Council and preventing it from taking prompt and effective action when a situation threatening to disturb the peace has arisen or is likely to do so. One may concede for the sake of argument that when the Charter conferred “primary” responsibility for peace-keeping on the Security Council it meant “exclusive”, and, for the sake of peace among the permanent members, even grant that “primary” means “exclusive" — a position volubly asserted but validly denied by the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice. But the fact remains that the Security Council, more often than not, turns away from its peace-keeping power unless the interest of one or other of the permanent members cries out for intervention.
28. The recent conclusion of the nuclear non-proliferation Treaty was accompanied by a declaration by the nuclear Powers in the Security Council that should a non-nuclear Power be threatened with nuclear attack the nuclear Powers in the Security Council would immediately act through the Security Council to deter aggression or threat of aggression. For twenty-three long years, since the Security Council began its life, attitudes to action, or more appropriately inaction, in the Security Council have inevitably fanned the flames of war, not, of course by direct incitement but indirectly. This happens when the permanent members indulge in the rhetoric of mutual bitterness and hostility, take hostile and antagonistic positions in debate, and ignore the fate of the victim who, having had the temerity to invite the Security Council to determine the existence of aggression, must inevitably stand helpless and see itself more and more irretrievably engulfed in the flames of war.
29. The Security Council resolution 255 (1968), unanimously adopted on 19 June 1968, takes the matter no further than a recognition by the nuclear-weapon-State permanent members that such aggression or threat of aggression would create a situation in which they would have to act immediately. One does not need to be a cynic to read the resolution as an admission that the permanent members had always in the past regarded themselves as having to discharge a duty in similar circumstances only dilatorily. They would now appear to have realized that a measure of urgency has been imparted to their primary duty because nuclear aggression has substituted swift destruction for the more painful processes of slow death by the employment of conventional arms. It is useful to remind ourselves that it has been stated on high authority that a nuclear holocaust would leave the few living envying the many dead.
30. Perhaps the sting of the operative part of the resolution is in its concluding words. that the nuclear-weapon-State permanent members would not only have to act immediately, but so to act in accordance with their obligations under the United Nations Charter. The history of twenty-three years has blazed a trail which permits no hope judging from the result of past expectations and therefore no comfort for the future.
31. During the debate in the General Assembly, States which proposed to sign the non-proliferation Treaty asked for the logical and minimum assurance that in return for their self-denial of the right to manufacture or acquire nuclear arms the nuclear Powers would undertake not to use nuclear arms against them. One would have thought that in the circumstances no more reasonable demand could have been made. However, the voices of those States seemed wasted and lost in the air, leaving only their echoes for an answer. Nothing could be more illustrative of the attitude of the nuclear Powers than the fact that their primary and, may I say, ill-concealed interest in the non-proliferation Treaty is to secure for themselves a nuclear monopoly for ever and ever.
32. When it is remembered that France has not only ostentatiously turned away from the purposes of the Eighteen-Nation Committee on Disarmament but is diligently and purposefully pursuing its lonely path, through which it hopes to break into the nuclear club from within the United Nations, and that another great State hopes to do so from without, what guarantee is there for the protection of the small State whose lot is cast on this pitiful planet and which feels bound by the shackles of the Treaty and the obligations of the Charter but is unable to say “a plague on both your houses” to the nuclear Powers, those which have signed the Treaty and those which have not and, so far as one can see, will not?
33. I do not intend to be hypercritical of the good intentions of the nuclear States but in the midst of all this euphoria we need to stand firm on our feet and not allow ourselves to be carried away into the turbulent seas of insecurity by the good intentions of others.
34. My country lives on the periphery — if that term has any validity in the era of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles - of a nuclear Power of immense, unknown and as yet uncontrollable potential. Only the other day it indulged its political generosity by offering North Viet-Nam tactical weapons with nuclear warheads should the leaders of North Viet-Nam need them in what it called North Viet-Nam’s struggle for survival against American aggression. How would the Security Council deal with a situation such as that when all the combatants claim that the United Nations, and certainly the Security Council, has no competence to deal with the Viet-Nam war?
35. It is therefore a matter of urgent concern to the non-nuclear Powers which cannot find the wherewithal to arm themselves adequately or appropriately that the nuclear non-proliferation Treaty be brought down from the abstract regions of vague idealism to the level of practical and predictable applicability. My Government desires to take this opportunity to commend to the consideration of the seventeen members of the Eighteen-Nation Committee on Disarmament the immediate problems, political and military, arising out of the conclusion of the non-proliferation Treaty so that the real benefit it was intended to promote can be brought within the reach of States — and indeed this means all the rest of us — which live under the menacing shadow of nuclear war.
36. My Government would in this connexion also recommend to the Security Council, enlarged as it has been since 1966 so as to be more representative of the wider membership that the United Nations has achieved, that it should be more responsive to their needs.
37. Every addition to the membership of the United Nations increases the complexities of international life and the possibilities of victimization of the smaller States by big Power attitudes in the perpetuation of power. My Government would suggest that the Security Council should not wait until a threat knocks at its doors or the shock waves of a developing threat impinge on its consciousness. It should be willing to meet periodically and take stock of world conditions, preferably with a monthly, or more frequent, report by the Secretary-General, as foreshadowed by Article 99 of the Charter. Recent experience denies us the complacency to rest inactive. The world of small States and mini-States, whose problems in their individual context are just as pressing and as urgent as those of any others, would then lie within full view of the wide open windows of the Security Council and not as now under the shadows of its enclosing walls until someone is able to breach them and let in the blinding light of reality.
38. Moreover, the Security Council cannot afford to set adrift in international waters so many States, for the acceptance of whose membership it bears primary responsibility, and leave them to their own devices in a cannibalistic international society where appetite grows by what it feeds on. It should “be vigilant of international freedom and liberty and take prompt measures, if not to prevent bush fires from being lighted, at least to quench the fires at their birth and not let them spread and consume ever-widening areas of the earth and their peoples, while suffering itself to be borne on a flood of eloquence through uncertain waters.
39. Long years ago my delegation made a suggestion to the Security Council that, at the initial stage of assuming jurisdiction over any problem under Charter VII, it should practise self-denial by not using the veto power so that the rake’s progress of unpredictable war might be arrested betimes. Rhetoric can be indulged in after the quenching of the fires, the apportioning of blame, or the effort to reverse the event. The process of determination of which Article 39 speaks might then be undertaken at leisure without aggravating the risk of the continuance of aggression. My delegation respectfully recommends to the Security Council that it should embark on that purposeful endeavour towards preserving peace in the world.
40. That brings me to a consideration of some of the particular problems that continue to endanger international security and engulf large segments of the world. First and foremost there is Viet-Nam, about which enough and more than enough has been said in successive debates in this Assembly over the years. Legalistic attitudes have prevented the matter from being brought directly before this Assembly for debate. My Government indeed wonders what the framers of the Charter had in mind when they wrote into it Article 2, paragraph 6, which reads:
“The Organization shall ensure that States which are not Members of the United Nations act in accordance with these Principles so far as may be necessary for the maintenance of international peace and security.”
41. We are not concerned with apportioning blame, but humanity owes it to itself to see that the long and tragic shadow that has stretched across that unhappy country for over a generation does not become permanent, as it threatens to do, but is lifted so that the peoples of Viet-Nam, North and South, can still find it possible to have the freedom to pursue their own destiny in their own way. To us this is no indulgence of a pious hope or a pipe dream. We live too close to Viet-Nam to let the canker that seems to have eaten into its being fester and corrode its soul and remain for ever a historical precedent for the ineffectiveness of the United Nations.
42. The other trouble spot, also in Asia, is the Middle East. My Government’s position was made clear to representatives during the debates at the Fifth Emergency session of the General Assembly. It still adheres to the position which it then took. It has seen no change in the frozen attitudes of that time that would require a re-examination of its position. No State occupying territory as the result of hostilities, however provoked, should be allowed to continue to occupy such territory as a powerful bargaining counter in multilateral negotiations designed to lead to the restoration of peace in the area, whatever justification or excuse such State can by ingenious reasoning summon to its aid, in order to persist in its wrongdoing. This position is untenable and indeed inexcusable in the face of Article 25 of the Charter, by which every Member of the United Nations agreed in advance, when it sought membership in the Organization, to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council.
43. In recent weeks, another situation arose in central Europe threatening the peace and security of the world by reactivating the cold war. Hopeful signs of a détente between the NATO and Warsaw Powers had appeared on the horizon and this latest development quite obviously cannot promote such détente.
44. Malaysia deeply regrets the action taken in Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries and views with deep concern the intervention of their troops in that country. Malaysia believes in the principles of peaceful coexistence, non-interference in the internal affairs of States and the inviolability of the territorial integrity and political independence of States, as enshrined in the United Nations Charter. Malaysia urges the withdrawal of these troops and hopes that differences between the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia will be settled peacefully on the basis of those principles.
45. These arc some of the major problems which the United Nations has had to face in the past year and my Government ventures to hope that some of the suggestions made by us earlier in this statement might help to contain these disturbances of the peace and security of the world. These are but the plainest symptoms of the attitudes of men and people in the mass to their environment, untrammelled by the ideals that found a voice in the Charter. We urge the utmost use of the regulatory mechanisms with which the creators of the Charter provided the United Nations, since, in a rapidly shrinking world, no problem and no development in any area can be isolated as unrelated to any other part of the world. The world is one and each one of us, large or small, has a duty to see that it endures and survives the errors and irritations created in any part of it.
46. With regard to Sabah, my Government’s position was fully explained on Wednesday last [1698th meeting], when my delegation, in exercising its right of reply, answered arguments put forward in support of the claim by the Philippine delegation. While reserving the right to make any further intervention that we consider necessary, I do not wish to add anything at this stage.
47. I now pass to other matters by no means of less importance. I should like, if I may, to make a brief mention of the second session of UNCTAD recently concluded in New Delhi. It is common knowledge and has often been repeated from this rostrum that the expectations created by the Conference were far from fulfilled. The problems discussed and debated at the Conference were perhaps too complex to lend themselves to simple solutions, and deep disappointment may have resulted, if only because the expectations were too high. I shall mention in that connexion at least two matters which, in our judgement, were direct results of the New Delhi Conference.
48. First, I shall recall to this Assembly that the Conference accepted the principle that developed countries as a whole should grant preferential treatment to the exports of developing countries as a group which enter the markets of the former. Malaysia welcomes that assurance. Then there was the ending of the controversy about the 1 per cent target for the net transfer of financial resources from the rich to the poor countries. That has now been agreed as a percentage of gross national product and not of national income. Some may consider that these were marginal achievements of vague content, and it is true enough that no one can yet see a precise picture with identifiable contours even at the end of the tunnel. However, in so far as those two results gave direction and purpose to the process of development of the developing States, they were not without significance. We grant that much remains to be done in filling in the details as well as maintaining the momentum towards further endeavours.
49. One matter germane to this problem of financing development which has over the years bedevilled those concerned with it is the question of whether such aid should continue to be negotiated in bilateral terms, between donor and recipient countries, and whether such assistance could not more effectively be channelled through multilateral agencies such as the United Nations Development Programme. The obvious advantages of the latter and the notorious problems and pitfalls of the former are too well known for me to list them here. My delegation is concerned to point out that these problems exist, that they should not be allowed to drift but should be tackled and that the obstacles to the harmonious development of all the developing States, each according to its needs, should be overcome.
50. There is one matter of vital importance, particularly to the developing countries, to which I should like to make a brief reference. That is the protein gap, to which of late great attention has been and is being paid, thanks to the significant initiative of our Secretary-General. The realization that the growth in world population is alarmingly outpacing the growth in food production has led to many studies not only in the techniques of growing more food but also in regard to the compulsive necessity of controlling what has been aptly called the population explosion. Until recently the problem of food production was regarded only as a quantitative problem, that is, a problem of how to increase production. However, the latest research has shown that the more crucial problem crying out to be tackled is the qualitative improvement of human food resources. We know that adequate protein is required for the maintenance of body tissues and functions — and in this the world, through lack of thought and planning, has allowed itself to be left dangerously below the line of sustenance — but the application of science and technology has now disclosed that the lack of protein in the intake of food is directly productive of mental ill-health and retardation, particularly in children. This is a disaster that threatens to overtake all plans and programmes for free and compulsory education.
51. The specialized agencies have co-operated in setting up expert groups, and the results of the studies by the Advisory Committee on the application of science and technology to development, which are to be found in the latest publication by the United Nations, Feeding the Expanding World Population: International Action to Avert the Impending Protein Crisis, are truly frightening. The fact that there are over 300 million children in the developing world today who, for lack of sufficient protein, suffer retarded physical growth and mental development underlines the urgency of the problem, which, in terms of population control, is far from being tractable.
52. It is a matter of some comfort that the United Nations specialized agencies have now made a co-ordinated effort to tackle this problem with vigour and determination. However, the solution of the problem bristles with multifarious difficulties, more particularly by reason of the fact that the solution has to begin with educating the world into a change from its long-held food habits — a notoriously difficult task. It has been said that there is perhaps no aspect of personal life less flexible than one’s eating pattern. Practical and specific proposals to tackle this problem have been studied, and the results of the studies published, so that Governments may have the direction and purpose of their activity intelligently turned towards urgent and feasible goals. However, in the view of my delegation, it is even more important to educate Governments in the developing countries to an awareness of the depth and magnitude of the problem and its inescapable urgency, for without that education begun in their minds nothing else can or will begin.
53. This year has been designated the International Year for Human Rights, thereby providing a point in time from which to lock before and after. The problem of racial discrimination, the pernicious doctrine of apartheid, renamed by South Africa into respectability as "separate development”, still persists and makes a mockery of human rights. Like all infections and diseases, it tends to spread and fester, and obviously mere resolutions of the United Nations periodically repeated cannot and will not put an end to it. Quite recently we locked on in disbelief as it entered the arena of international sports and South Africa demonstrated to the world that it could unabashedly brave the world.
54. The time has come, we venture to think, for more effective measures to be taken, as some of the specialized agencies have done. The Charter makes provision for this course, and the United Nations must avail itself of those provisions and not merely mouth the Universal Declaration of twenty years ago with periodic piety if it wishes to continue to remain a purposeful and effective agency for the promotion of human rights. Such a step might even, hopefully, lead to an amelioration of the condition of the people of Namibia who remain chained, against their will, to the chariot wheels of South Africa and therefore to apartheid.