43. It is with a very real sense of regional pride that I congratulate the President on his election to preside over the General Assembly at its twenty-third session. As a distinguished son of Guatemala, as an experienced diplomat and minister of the Latin American region and, perhaps above all, as a devoted internationalist, his election represents a source of great satisfaction to the Government and to the people of Guyana. To us, coming as we do from the same part of the world and linked as we are by the comradeship of small and developing nations, it is a special pleasure to assure him of Guyana’s support during his term of office. In so doing, I am happy to pledge the co-operation not merely of the Guyana delegation but also of our Permanent Representative who will be serving with the President during the life of this Assembly as one of the Vice-Presidents. We in Guyana are particularly gratified that this early opportunity which has been afforded to us of contributing to the organizational work of the Assembly comes at a time when so close a regional colleague occupies the President’s chair.
44. I hope — and may the future prove this to be no excess of optimism — that the months which lie ahead of us will bear witness to a world less convulsed by national and international tragedy than have the months through which we have passed since the beginning of the twenty-second session of the Assembly. For all of that troubled time this Assembly was led with assurance, with humanity and with a sensitive care for the peace of the world by the President’s distinguished predecessor, His Excellency Mr. Corneliu Manescu, Foreign Minister of Romania. My delegation wishes to pay tribute to him for the outstanding service he rendered to the General Assembly and to the United Nations.
45. As this new session begins, we need to reassess our progress towards an ordered international society and to renew our commitments to its pursuit. The President, in his inaugural statement, set before us with understanding and realism the problems which lie ahead. In the closing passages of that statement he gave expression to sentiments which many Governments must share, perhaps more particularly the Governments of smaller States, and they are sentiments which express what I believe the peoples of the world everywhere recognize as the basic necessity of our time. He said:
“What is needed is not a new organization; what is needed is simply a return to the spirit of the Charter, a return to those principles of human coexistence which at both the international and national levels, should set the standard for a humanist political philosophy.” [1674th meeting, para. 62.]
If we could make those thoughts the theme of this general debate; if we could make those thoughts the creed of this twenty-third Assembly; if, above all, we could make those thoughts the basis of international action during the life of this ensuing session, then perhaps we might begin to restore the faith of the peoples of the world in the United Nations and in its pursuits.
46. If the general debate is to achieve anything, it must proceed on a commitment to recapturing the belief of the world in our seriousness of purpose, and to rebuilding the faith of men and women everywhere in the value of our endeavours and of this great institution through which we must pursue them.
47. Conscious of these considerations, Guyana’s contribution to this debate will not be an attempt to range through the broad spectrum of international affairs; instead, it will be an effort to focus attention upon matters which seem to my Government of transcending importance and about which we feel qualified to speak with the authenticity of experience.
48. The first of these relates to the special problems of the small States in a world from which avarice, expansionism and vaulting ambition have not yet been banished. My country is a small State. We are one of the States which this Organization helped to bring to freedom. We are a community of three-quarters of a million people, and our land covers an area of 83,000 square miles. We are a racially various people whose forebears were moved mainly from Africa and Asia in the cause of enriching the treasury of metropolitan power and the prestige that once attached to empire. That time has passed. Today, as in so many of the new countries, a national identity now transcends these ethnic differences, and with the self-respect that comes with self-determination we are working to build a just, stable, democratic multiracial society.
49. Our experience may therefore hold lessons for world society and our special problems may have import for many States — certainly for all those like ourselves, who may be small in size and in population; who may be weak in a world in which strength still continues to be measured in units of missiles; who may be poor from centuries of neglected and retarded development; but who are rich in devotion to country and in their resolve to create a better life for their peoples and for those of the region whose destiny they share.
50. For us, these first years of independence have been rich and varied and stimulating. And just as they have been informed by the harsh realities of international existence, so they have been warmed by many acts of friendship and help. But that experience has been overshadowed by a neighbour’s hostility and aggression. It is an experience that has shocked our people even as it has steeled their determination to ensure that the freedom so recently won from an imperialist Power across the seas is not overborne by a new imperialism from across our borders.
51. In my address in the general debate a year ago [1581st meeting] I alluded to the Venezuelan threat to my country’s territorial integrity with deliberate restraint, in the belief that the traditions of a Hemisphere that has fought so valiantly against a colonial imposition must deter a new colonialism from within it, and in the belief also that with dialogue and diplomacy a sense of justice and of international morality founded upon a respect for treaties, and above all for boundary treaties, must in the end prevail.
52. The experience of the past year has led my Government to a reappraisal of all these assumptions as they relate to the policy of the Government of Venezuela. The sole response to our restraint at the international level has been the blatantly provocative occupation of a part of our border territory, an intensive pattern of clandestine interference in the internal affairs of our country, a studied campaign of economic aggression, of pressure and of intimidation directed at our development, and, most recently, one of the most flagrant acts of contempt for international law that the Hemisphere has seen. This aggression, this interference, this intimidation make it vital to my country that I speak more plainly now before this Assembly of nations.
53. As I do so, I invite other delegations to consider the import of our experience. The continuing dangers which confront the people of my country and the future of my State imperil the interest of all small countries and the future of all small States; they imperil the survival of all States which place their faith in an international legal order, and they place in jeopardy settled boundaries the world over. I invite other delegations to mark the lessons of our experience as a commentary on the President’s plea for a return to the spirit of the Charter.
54. Guyana’s boundaries with Venezuela were settled nearly seventy years ago, even as the nineteenth century was drawing to its close. It was settled with due formality by an international Arbitral Tribunal established under the Treaty of Arbitration? which the Government of Venezuela had freely signed. Indeed, it may be of more than historical interest that the United States, on behalf of Venezuela, had actually threatened to go to war with Britain if Britain failed to sign that treaty. It was a treaty to settle for all time the boundary between Venezuela and what was then Britain’s colony of British Guiana; and each side — Venezuela and Britain — undertook in solemn terms:
“...to consider the result of the proceeds of the Tribunal of Arbitration as a full, perfect, and final settlement of all the questions referred to the Arbitrators".
55. The Tribunal went into the most elaborate examination of the history of the occupation of the territory; the verbatim records of hearings occupy fifty-four printed volumes, with cases and counter-cases along with additional documents, correspondence and evidence. The Government of Venezuela was represented by a plethora of justices led by an ex-President of the United States, General Harrison. On 3 October 1899, exactly sixty-nine years to this very day, the international Arbitral Tribunal presented its award. The boundary was demarcated on the ground pursuant to the Treaty and the award, and an official boundary map was drawn and promulgated. Venezuela, satisfied with its achievements, proceeded towards the fulfilment of its great destiny on the basis of the vast mineral wealth which its land yielded.
56. Through those years — through most of the first half of the present century — Venezuela found no quarrel with the award; and when finally it chose to open the question of the boundary — a question which had been closed at its instance nearly fifty years earlier — it conducted its dialogue with Britain with restraint and circumspection in the manner of equals constrained to argue but resolved never to force the issue to a trial of strength.
57. But time was on the side of those in Venezuela for whom by now eastward expansion had become an imperial crusade. The ground was well prepared. At the first sign of Guyana’s movement to independence, Venezuela initiated a boundary controversy on the most tenuous grounds. The singular source of these grounds was, and remains to this day, a memorandum written by an American lawyer, Severo Mallet-Prevost, who was one of the junior counsel for Venezuela during the Hearing of the Tribunal.
58. Mr. Mallet-Prevost’s memorandum, written in 1945 just after he had received from the Government of Venezuela the Order of Liberator for his services to the Republic, was, under his strict injunction to that effect, published only after his death in 1949 — at a time when every other participant in the arbitration proceedings was long since dead. The posthumous memorandum contended that the Award of 1899, which decided the frontier between Guyana and Venezuela, was the result of a political deal between Britain and Russia carried into effect by collusion between the British judges and the Russian President of the Tribunal and agreed to in the interest of unanimity by the two American judges. The British judges on the Tribunal were the Lord Chief Justice of England and a judge of the High Court. The American judges were the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States chosen by the President of Venezuela and another Justice of the United States Supreme Court. The Russian President of the Tribunal was the distinguished international lawyer, Professor Frederick de Martens.
59. It was on this flimsiest pretext of an old and disappointed man’s posthumous memoirs, set down some forty-five years after the events they sought to relate — it was on these shreds and patches embroidered with speculations, ambiguities and allusions to new but undisclosed evidence — that Venezuela mounted its campaign of international propaganda against Guyana as we approached independence. From then on, as Guyana’s independence
drew nearer, Venezuela’s agitation grew fiercer threatening in veiled and indirect ways the advance to independence itself. It was out of this circumstance that, on 17 February 1966, three months before Guyana’s independence, the Geneva Agreement was concluded between Venezuela and the United Kingdom; to that Agreement, Guyana, on attaining independence, became an additional party. The Agreement established a Commission of Guyanese and Venezuelan representatives charged with the task of — and I quote from the Agreement:
“seeking satisfactory solutions for the practical settlement of the controversy ... which has arisen as a result of the Venezuelan contention that the Arbitral Award of 1899...is null and void”.
60. If the Commission fails to find such a solution to that controversy — and I emphasize that it is the controversy over Venezuela’s allegation that the Award of the International Court of Arbitration is invalid that the Commission is concerned with — if the Commission fails to find a solution to that controversy, then Venezuela has undertaken under the Geneva Agreement that it shall resort to the procedures for peaceful settlement of disputes set out in Article 33 of the Charter and it will then be for the parties, through those procedures, to pursue a solution to that controversy. Meanwhile, the Agreement enjoins that:
“No new claim, or enlargement of an existing claim, to territorial sovereignty in those territories shall be asserted while this Agreement is in force, nor shall any claim whatsoever be asserted otherwise than in the Mixed Commission while that Commission is in being”.
61. The Agreement was signed in February 1966. My country became independent in May of that year. Barely six months had passed before Venezuela began a studied campaign of violating its provisions. In September 1966, even as the Commission was sitting in Guyana for its second meeting and in the very month of Guyana’s admission to the United Nations, Venezuela brazenly occupied the Guyana half of the island of Ankoko, an island of strategic importance in one of the border rivers between our countries. The boundary demarcated pursuant to the 1899 Award had bisected that island and this was recorded both in the official boundary maps and by the survey on the ground. Indeed, so incontrovertible was this demarcation that less than a year before, in January 1966, the Venezuelan State of Bolivar which adjoins Guyana had formally promulgated its boundaries on the basis of the 1899 Award and had specifically acknowledged that the eastern half of the island belonged to Guyana. To compound the aggression, Venezuelan armed forces have established upon the island an airstrip capable of accommodating military aircraft and have turned the island itself into a military fortress.
62. And, even as this aggression continues, a range of new and devious measures have been adopted to promote a campaign of pressure and intimidation designed to shake our resolve.
63. In pursuit of its effort to overturn the boundary Treaty of 1899, Venezuela has secured the exclusion of Guyana from the Organization of American States. Guyana’s experience with the Treaty of Tlatelolco — the Latin American de-nuclearization Treaty — is already well known to Member States. And to what other end than pressure has Venezuela pursued its efforts to prevent Guyana from becoming a signatory to that Treaty — a Treaty which can achieve its optimum results only when it embraces all the countries of the region?
64. I regret to say that the effort to preclude Guyana’s signature of this Treaty has so far been successful in that, despite our repeated requests to the Depositary Government that a date be set for our signature in conformity with General Assembly resolution 2286(XXII) and the express undertaking and understanding of many delegations which spoke during the debate on that resolution that the need for universality would be met, Guyana has not yet been permitted to sign the Treaty.
65. More recently, but less successfully, Venezuela attempted at the Vienna Conference on the Law of Treaties in April of this year to dilute the provisions of the International Law Commission’s draft convention dealing with the sanctity of treaties — an attempt specifically directed towards providing a cloak of respectability for the abrogation of solemn treaty obligations.
66. But the violations of the Geneva Agreement have not always been overt. In 1966, Venezuelan diplomatic personnel in Guyana were engaged in clandestine attempts to interfere in the internal affairs of my country through the subversion of members of Guyana’s indigenous Amerindian community. As a result, Guyana had no alternative but to expel a second secretary of the Venezuelan Embassy in Georgetown who was responsible for organizing and financing a secret meeting of Amerindian tribes in Guyana and attempting to induce them to express support for Venezuela’s claim. The Government of Venezuela, this Government which has stirred the Hemisphere with its protest at the interference of other Governments in its internal political life and which has invoked the great tradition of non-intervention which has been one of the outstanding contributions of Latin American jurisprudence to the international legal system, this Government has been and continues to be deeply involved in activities which constitute a gross interference in the political life of Guyana.
67. This particular act of interference failed to achieve its goal of subversion. Venezuela’s pursuit of that goal continues, and even now my Government faces a situation in which a massive effort is being made to subvert the loyalty of our indigenous Amerindian people. It is an effort which has no lack of financial resources; which functions through hand-picked and trained agents working under the direction of the Venezuelan authorities from bases situated on the Venezuelan side of the border; it is an effort which is now assuming the shape of a campaign of slander directed at estranging the indigenous peoples of Guyana from the rest of our society in the hope of advancing their affection for a Venezuelan suzerainty. A more flagrant premeditated course of interference in the internal political life of a neighbouring country directed from a governmental level it would be hard to find.
68. In recent months, these attempts to force my country into submission have reached new dimensions of ugliness when the Venezuelan Government embarked on an open crusade of economic aggression against those who, through investment, might contribute to Guyana’s economic development. In April of this very year, timed to coincide with the visit of Guyana’s Prime Minister to London and designed to undermine his efforts to attract investments for Guyana’s development, the Venezuelan Government purchased advertising space in The Times of London of Saturday, 15 June and announced to the world its refusal
to recognize any concessions granted by the Government of Guyana to companies operating in the area of Guyana to which Venezuela lays claim. To companies already operating within Venezuela the Venezuelan Government has announced its intention of applying sanctions should they contribute to the development of this region of Guyana.
69. When it is recalled that what Venezuela seeks is no minor border adjustment but an area of over 50,000 square miles — two-thirds of the total area of my country — the full magnitude of this policy of economic blackmail calculated to impede Guyana’s development will be apparent to this Assembly. And this policy is undertaken during the United Nations Development Decade by one of the richest and most developed countries of Latin America against another which is among the smallest and newest and poorest of the developing countries of the world.
70. And yet this was but a prelude to the most recent and sinister episode in this campaign of lawlessness and intimidation. On 9 July of this very year, the President of Venezuela issued a decree in which he purported to annex as part of the territory of Venezuela and to assert a right to exercise sovereignty over a nine-mile belt of sea extending to within three miles of the coast of Guyana and contiguous to Guyana’s territorial waters. The decree is a manifest absurdity which my Government has repudiated for the nullity that it is. But, perhaps most significant of all for this Assembly, is the way in which it seeks to overthrow some of the fundamental principles underpinning the International Conventions on the Law of the Sea, which were the outcome of a major United Nations effort at defining and consolidating the principles of international law governing the territorial sea, the contiguous zone, the continental shelf, the régime of the high seas and fishery conservation.
71. Foremost among these principles is that which asserts that while the maximum freedom of mankind to exploit the resources of the sea is the goal of organized international effort, special rights of varying kinds attach to the coastal State, and to the coastal State alone, over the waters that are adjacent to its shores. It is not my intention to elaborate at this stage on the many respects in which this decree violates the rules of international law.
72. Matters are only made worse when it is recalled that Venezuela has signed and ratified the Conventions on the Law of the Sea without entering reservations which bear upon the present issue. Thus, by a single act Venezuela has flouted the Geneva Agreement; has abandoned its obligations under the International Conventions on the Law of the Sea and has compounded these treaty violations to buttress the abrogation of its solemn undertakings under the Treaty of 1897.
73. What this decree proclaims to the world — and there should be no doubt about its implication in the challenge it throws down to all maritime nations and to international society in general — is not merely the absurdity of a belt of Venezuelan territorial waters interposed between Guyana’s territorial sea and the high seas and superimposed upon Guyana’s contiguous zone and above Guyana’s continental shelf, but the abandonment by the Government of Venezuela of all semblance of regard for international obligations, least in so far as those obligations seem to stand in the way of its usurpation of my country’s territory.
74. Nor is this a matter that we can treat with complacency as an empty gesture leaving the defiance of international law to be requited at the hands of international society generally. My Government has been obliged to take note that this decree has specifically charged the armed forces of Venezuela with its implementation. Guyana has unquestioned and unimpeachable authority under international law to exercise its tights as the coastal State over the contiguous zone, to use the waters of the zone as high seas and to carry out within them and beyond acts ancillary to exploitation for the benefit of our people of the natural resources of the continental shelf beneath them. Any attempt by the Government of Venezuela to hinder or otherwise interfere with the exercise of those rights by the Government or people of Guyana or by anyone acting under the authority of the Government of Guyana will constitute an act of aggression against our State.
75. Yet we must assume as a Government that the Government of Venezuela will be no more deterred by obligations under the Charter of the United Nations than it has been so far by its obligations under a miscellany of treaties. We must be prepared, therefore, for aggression from across our borders and we must let the world know of the peril which confronts us and of the danger to the peace of the Hemisphere which now exists. Within past months we have taken what steps we could to alert the international community. Copies of my Government’s notes of protest at the Venezuelan decree were forwarded to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, who is the custodian of the Geneva Agreement, with a request that they be brought to the notice of all Member States. Beyond this we must remain ready to invoke the procedures of the Charter to secure the integrity and safety of our State and to take all such other steps consistent with the Charter which may be open to us.
76. Let me repeat that what Venezuela seeks in this attempt to break a treaty of seventy years standing is no minor border adjustment, but the absorption of over two-thirds of my country and one-sixth of our people — people who represent all the several racial strains of our multiracial society who differ in origin, culture and tradition from the people of Venezuela, a people newly freed from a century and a half of a colonial imposition and
who will not submit to a new colonialism in whatever guise it comes.
77. This has been the experience of Guyana’s first years of independence. It is not a heartening commentary on the emergence of an ethos of international legality and it is a depressing reflection on how readily some of the most important traditions by which countries have lived, including in this case principles of national self-determination and resistance to imperial domination, can become tarnished by power and a frenzied ambition.
78. But it is an experience which could be the experience of any small State anywhere in the world. Indeed, it could be the experience of any State at the hands of some powerful neighbour, once boundary settlements lose their sanctity and become forever arbitrable in response to the dictates of power. My Government invites this Assembly to consider the chaos and confusion into which most of the world’s frontiers would be thrown if all that one party to a boundary settlement need to do to secure that boundary’s revision is to constitute itself a judge in its own cause; to assert that the settlement is not valid; to proclaim a new boundary consonant with its own ideas and to assume the right, once it has the strength and power, to extend its frontiers into the territory of a neighbouring State. It is preposterous and unthinkable that such a situation can be tolerable twenty-three years after the signing of the Charter, and yet this is ii:e course upon which the
Government of Venezuela has embarked.
79. What are small nations to do faced with threats of this kind? It is Guyana today, but who knows who may be the victim of expansionist ambition tomorrow? There is one direct and immediate answer. Meet aggression with force, be ready whatever the cost, whatever the sacrifice, to defend the State against those who violate its territorial integrity. Yet, is this the answer that the collective voice of the international community is to give to the smaller States of the world at this stage of organized international effort? At a time when that society, as a whole, acknowledges the universal importance of advancing as rapidly as possible the economic development of the less developed countries, is that same world society powerless to create conditions in which the small, the developing countries, may be freed of the burden of bearing arms in defence of their right to survive as sovereign States? Must it be the case that they can never be secure in devoting all their slender resources, both human and material, to the essential tasks of change and development to which they are committed, and in the success of which all nations have a deep and continuing interest?
80. Every million dollars that a developing nation spends on defence, whether it be on aircraft or on ships or on a standing army, or on any of their several adjuncts, represents a million dollars diverted from development. Indeed, in some cases, it may represent a much greater diversion, dependent on the terms of bilateral or multi-lateral assistance available to the State for projects of development. At its most conservative, however, and I use units of cost that are relevant to my country, every million dollars spent on arms would provide school places for 50,000 children, would settle 1,000 families in developing areas, would build fifty miles of secondary road into new areas of land development, would provide ten medical clinics for the men, women and children on whom the burden of development must really fall. A single military aircraft at conservative cost of $5 million could build schools for a quarter of a million children; twenty such could provide the hydroelectric power needed to bring the economy to the take-off stage in industry and agriculture, with all that this means to an entire generation.
81. And this is to say nothing of the diversions of human resources, of expertise, of manpower, of energies from the urgent tasks of social and economic change to which they ought to be applied. These diversions of resources, both human and financial, are the real effects of aggression, of intimidation, of pressure, directed at a developing State. Those who embark upon them bear a heavy responsibility to all mankind.
82. If this world Organization is serious in its commitment to the economic growth of the developing countries, can it fail to recognize that this growth must be forever stultified if a larger and larger share of the national product of the developing countries must go to the purchase of arms — inevitably from the developed countries — merely to ensure their survival as States? If that commitment is both serious and sincere, is it not time that all nations acknowledge that international guarantees of territorial security must be the handmaiden of an international effort for development; and is it not already a blemish on that international effort that this wasteful diversion of men and money away from the essential tasks of development could be substantially, if indeed not entirely, prevented by a collective action which may cost little more than a collective resolution?
83. It is not so long ago that a distinguished representative of the Republic of Brazil, opening the general debate of the nineteenth session of the General Assembly, advanced bold and imaginative ideas on the peace-keeping role of the United Nations and called for a new chapter on peace-keeping operations to be written into the Charter. He acknowledged then the difficulties so far encountered in adapting the Charter to the new requirements of the world, and I am mindful now, as he was then, of the problems to be surmounted if these ideas are ever to be implemented.
84. But these ideas are particularly relevant to the need for preventive action to which my Government calls attention. For what Brazil was advancing was a new and vigorous concept of peace-keeping operations altogether different from the enforcement measures contemplated in Chapter VII of the Charter — a concept of an international effort, in no sense dominated by the larger Powers, whose objective would be to preserve peaceful conditions, in contrast to operations of a coercive character undertaken against transgressors of international order.
85. The course of international events since 1964 has only served to strengthen the arguments advanced on that occasion; we have seen all too clearly the limits upon coercive action; the world’s aggressors have learnt all too effectively how to exploit the gap in the system of international security which results from the absence of established arrangements for peace-keeping operations of a preventive character. Guyana lends its voice to the plea for this gap to be closed—at least in relation to the developing
countries — and will lend its support to every reasonable proposal to this end.
86. At this moment of deep disillusionment with the results of the Development Decade an international guarantee of the frontiers of the less developed nations would contribute materially to offsetting the acknowledged failure to generate either a flow of increased aid from the developed to the developing countries or even to maintain the real levels of existing aid, for it would increase the capacity of developing nations to contribute to their own development. It would in effect amount to a new and important accession of aid and the value of the resulting release from the uncertainties and instabilities which attend the threat of aggression would be incalculable. It would represent a significant step towards a return to the spirit of the Charter and a major advance in international co-operation and coexistence.
87. Bound as we now are by the need to divert our resources to the protection of our frontiers, we share in addition the bitter problems which all developing countries face in the loss of their skilled men and women to the lucrative employment markets of the developed countries. But this too is a problem which this Organization can help to relieve. My Government recognizes that the seriousness of the brain-drain has become a focus of international attention and concern and we are particularly pleased that the agenda of this session contains under item 47 a consideration of the “outflow of trained professional and technical personnel at all levels from the developing to the developed countries, its causes, its consequences and practical remedies for the problems resulting from it”. My Government regards this matter as both grave and urgent, and my delegation will have more to say on it when item 47 is being considered.
88. But my Government also believes that this Organization, which has at its disposal a significant corps of expertise, should not evade its own role of leadership in this field. We believe that national experts who serve under the flag of the United Nations should be permitted to serve in technical capacities in their countries of birth. By making this possible under its Development Programme the United Nations would contribute materially to our development, for all of our development plans will come to nothing if we cannot afford the skills to implement them — and more especially the skills of those who understand the environment in which those plans must be executed. It is our hope that this session of the General Assembly will accept and endorse as a general principle that, whenever it may be appropriate, technical assistance to a developing country should permit the employment of the nationals of that country who can contribute to its development programmes in expert, executive and advisory positions. This imaginative beginning could lead to the adoption of similar arrangements by the developed countries in their own programmes of bilateral aid.
89. We shall also, in the appropriate Committee, draw attention to the urgent need for greater realism on the part of aid-donor countries in such matters as interest rates, project priorities and the tying of aid to their own goods and services if we are to maximize the development value of aid — a result which must surely be the common aim of developed and developing countries.
90. Meanwhile, we in the Caribbean sub-region of Latin America have not stood still. Guyana has sought to play its part along with Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and the West Indian Associated States in establishing a Caribbean Free Trade Area, which we envisage as a first step towards integrating production and consumption patterns throughout the area. The Free Trade Area which came into operation on 1 May of this year, which now comprises eleven States and is still growing, is a great step forward for this sub-region of Latin America. We are currently involved in negotiations for the establishment of a regional development bank in which friendly donor countries such as the United States of America, the United Kingdom and Canada — themselves old and distinguished Members of this Organization — have expressed a desire to participate. The region is subscribing no less than 60 per cent of the all too modest equity of the bank in an endeavour to pull itself out of the economic doldrums in which centuries of colonial rule have left us. I am glad to say that organs of this world body, in particular the United Nations Development Programme, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, are playing a leading role in these exciting developments.
91. In the view of my Government, these are some of the ways in which this Organization might advance the development of the small and weak countries of the world; but we know too well the lessons of interdependence to deceive ourselves into believing that we can achieve our objectives of development irrespective of the tensions which persist in the international community.
92. We cannot ignore, for example, that, amidst the tensions of the Middle East, the fundamental precept of the Charter that territory shall not be acquired by force continues to be in jeopardy. We cannot ignore that the experience of Czechoslovakia might be that of many a small State if the abandonment of the spirit of the Charter, which lies at the base of recent events in that unhappy country, were to become pervasive in international society.
93. Nor can we ignore that the principles of self-determination and non-intervention which have been breached in Czechoslovakia are no less threatened by the continuing tragedy of the conflict in Viet-Nam. We urge on all who have it in their power to contribute to a successful conclusion to the negotiations now proceeding in Paris the very deep concern we feel for a swift end to this wasteful conflict on a basis which ensures a just respect for the rights of all the people of that troubled land.
94. We have watched, as a brother watches, with anguish and agony, the tragic struggle among the peoples of Nigeria and the loss of life which the resolute efforts of so many have failed to prevent. We have noted the resolution passed by the Organization of African Unity on 16 September which was subscribed to by an overwhelming majority of African States. We hope that this call from the substantial voice of Africa will not go unheeded. It has been a long night for Nigeria; we pray for its end and that with the dawn the leaders of that great nation may be guided through the no less critical problems of peace by those same principles of respect for human dignity which were the foundations of the united national movement to self-determination.
95. Earlier in this statement, I said that I would attempt to speak out of the experience of my own country. I said that we are a racially various people, with our origins mainly in Africa and in Asia. As such a people, we are deeply involved in what must surely now be acknowledged as the racial crisis which confronts the world.
96. As long ago as 1964, the Group of Experts established in pursuance of the Security Council resolution of 4 December 1963, under the chairmanship of Sweden’s Mrs. Myrdal, to examine methods of resolving the present situation in South Africa drew the attention to this world body to the gravity of the problems and the fact that
“...a race conflict starting in South Africa must affect race relations elsewhere in the world, and also, in its international repercussions, create a world danger of first magnitude”.
Those repercussions are being felt, and that danger is with us. The racial rumblings which echo around the world with such frightening regularity and the several racial tremors which in so many societies are silent messengers of social upheaval are, after all, part of our contemporary experience.
97. The situation in southern Africa is grave indeed. How can men anywhere, how can Governments, remain unmoved by the injustices, the indignities, the violence, the oppression meted out to the non-white people of South Africa, of Namibia, of Rhodesia, of Mozambique and of Angola? In the face of such colossal lapses from the ideals of the Universal Declaration on the part of the régimes responsible for these atrocities against human dignity, and the lamentable restraint which continues to condition the reaction of some Governments to them, it is perhaps not surprising that a mood of cynicism should have settled on the international effort for the advancement of human tights, more especially in the area of race relations. However, if this effort is to succeed, if the world racial Crisis is to be resolved in favour of racial justice, this is no time for cynicism. Despite the formidable impediments to total success that the remaining fortresses of racial bigotry and oppression represent, the siege upon them must continue and, in the nature of things, it must be a siege from without — from organized international opinion conditioning both national and international action.
98. Nowhere has this effort to end racial bigotry and oppression been attended by greater frustration than in Namibia — a ward of the international community. By persisting in its illegal control over Namibia and by extending its intolerable policy of apartheid to the region, South Africa not only has continued to affront the sensibility of all mankind but has also demonstrated its moral incapacity to continue in the membership of this
Organization. As a member of the United Nations Council for Namibia, Guyana shares with special acuteness the frustration and moral outrage which the intransigence of the South African régime generates. My country will, nevertheless, continue to participate with even greater determination in the work of that Council in the hope that Members of this Organization and, above all, the Security Council will be stimulated to a greater awareness of their responsibilities to the people of Namibia.
99. This is the International Year for Human Rights — a Year, I am happy to recall, initiated on a proposal by a fellow Caribbean State, Jamaica — and I cannot leave this area of my remarks without placing on record the admiration of my Government for the efforts of this Organization and of the many non-governmental organizations associated with it in the area of human rights. We believe that the dedicated work that has been done in advancing the cause of human rights throughout the world has already served to awaken the consciences of millions to the injustices which exist, to the urgency of the need for change and, perhaps most important of all, to the righteousness and the legitimacy of change.
100. Yet much remains to be done; in particular, much more is required of the Governments of Member States than pious declarations of their acceptance of the imperative of human dignity. If the world racial crisis is to be resolved, that imperative must be obeyed by all States and must be obeyed over a much wider area of action than has hitherto been acknowledged. The effort that is required is an effort for ail mankind, and its urgency is such that it cannot be allowed to falter. Among the several endeavours of this world Organization in the year ahead the pursuit of racial justice must remain a matter of paramount importance, for failure here must make it impossible for us to meet the need for a return to the spirit of the Charter and to the principles of human coexistence.