I should like at the outset to convey to all members
friendly greetings from Guinea, its people and its
President, General Lansana Conté. To the President of
the General Assembly at its sixty-second session and to
the Secretary-General of our Organization, I wish to
convey the same greetings and to express our heartfelt
wishes for every success.
The agenda of the sixty-second session of the
General Assembly places before us all the essential
issues challenging the world: the maintenance of
international peace and security, the development of
Africa, the promotion of human rights, climate change,
the promotion of justice and international law,
disarmament, the fight against illicit drugs and the
fight against terrorism. Those subjects are timely today,
but they were also timely yesterday and will probably
remain so tomorrow. They are part of man’s long
attempt to meet the principal challenge facing him
since the dawn of his existence nearly 3 million years
ago: his survival.
Today more than ever before, that survival is
threatened by a serious lack of respect for the
environment. Man emerged from a hostile natural
environment, which he tamed in many ways before he
began to dangerously threaten it through his appetite
for absolute power and his desire for comfort and well-
being. Where will this tyranny end? Science has
sounded the alarm, although the mobilization consists
more of words than of deeds, more of intention than of
reality. In this very Hall, during the High-level Event
on Climate Change, we absorbed all the information
provided by scientists, who concluded that action was
urgent. It is paradoxical to note that, after having
searched desperately for life on other planets without
finding it, man does not realize that, for the time being,
he is unique in the immensity of the cosmos.
That unique existence in the Milky Way must
continue at all costs, and that is within our reach. The
determination that inspired the Organization’s founding
nations to put the world’s affairs in order and forever
banish the spectre of war should be the same
determination that leads all nations of the Earth to take
concrete and immediate measures to put an end to
environmental degradation.
Every time human beings have wanted to do
something, they have been able to do it. However, that
resolve should not contain secret vices. For example, it
should not consist of imposing restrictions on poor
countries’ use of their forest resources, as if such
restrictions were an angelic service to humanity. A
balance is possible between environmental protection
and the essential will to achieve development. A
number of great world leaders have advocated just
compensation to Africa for the exploitation of its
natural resources. Africa should be grateful for that.
But the continent’s needs go well beyond that.
Africa no longer wants to be confined to the simple
role of supplier of raw materials; it wishes to process
them in order to create more jobs and added value so as
to create more wealth. The technologies that need to be
transferred today are those that guarantee better
productivity while respecting the ecosystem.
The issues facing humanity today cannot be
addressed by any one country in isolation. The United
Nations, because it embodies our common destiny,
must be the place where our fears, our anxieties, our
visions and our proposals, but also our hopes, come
together. But if it is to play such a role, the United
Nations must be just and equitable both in its structures
and in its decision-making mechanisms.
The Second World War, which was the tragic
vehicle that fortunately led to the establishment of the
United Nations, spared no nation, race or continent.
Reform of the Security Council in particular and of
other United Nations organs in general must take
account not only of that historic reality, but also of the
inevitably universal nature of the problems besetting
us.
How can we put an end to terrorism unless we
take into account the ferment that would characterize
the dialogue among civilizations, cultures and religions
and enhance mutual understanding and tolerance? How
can we overcome HIV/AIDS if profit remains the
criterion that guides the pharmaceutical laboratories?
How do we put an end to the inexorable degradation of
the environment when powerful corporations care little
for the future of the planet? How do we eradicate the
scourge of drugs when drug traffickers are irresistibly
drawn to easy money? All of those questions call for
solidarity, vision and joint action. We cannot improve
on the brilliant and poignant analyses that have already
been made here in this legendary Hall, but the
difference that we can make is to take action.
We should remember that many of the
commitments entered into on many fronts have not
been respected by the United Nations, nor by the
groups of countries represented in specific
organizations. Allow me to give you several examples.
In 1974, the most highly industrialized countries
promised to eliminate world poverty in the year 2000.
That was a mythical year, the year 2000. For that
purpose, they undertook to allocate 0.7 per cent of their
gross domestic product to official development
assistance.
In 1989, 15 years later, amidst the euphoria
arising from the fall of the Berlin Wall, the same
Powers foretold an era of universal peace by the end of
the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-
first century. They foretold that the funds previously
dedicated to the arms race would henceforth be
devoted to accelerating the eradication of poverty,
which they said would become effective in 2000.
Unfortunately, those predictions were disproved by
reality.
Poverty in the world has certainly not been
eliminated, it has increased since the beginning of the
1990s. Over 100 million people joined the ranks of the
poor in 2003 alone. In September 2000, in this same
Hall that, at the time, applauded those aborted hopes,
the heads of State and Government of the world
adopted the Millennium Declaration. The Declaration
implicitly recognized the inescapable nature of poverty,
rejecting the goals set in 1974 and admitted that it
would only be possible to halve the number of poor
people in the world by 2015.
Today, midway towards the achievement of the
goals of that Declaration, which did, however,
crystallize so many dreams and hopes for the younger
generations of the world, all the experts’ reports agree
that the Millennium Development Goals will only be
achieved if we change the strategies and rules that
shape our world today.
Instead of a new dawn of global peace, localized
wars that rip through the protective membrane of the
entrenched and now-defunct bipolar global system now
appear in successive waves in Europe, Africa and Asia.
The nuclear threat has not disappeared. Is nuclear
energy, whether put to civilian or military uses,
actually essential to the life of mankind? Nuclear
power certainly is useful when used for civilian
purposes, but will always be a threat to humankind
both for those who possess it and those who aspire to
possess it when used for military purposes. It is the
logic of rivalry between nations that has led to the
logic of the arms race and the theory of deterrence is
only a subset of that logic. The best deterrence is the
total absence of nuclear weapons.
The effort to combat terrorism is another
challenge, the challenge that is played out in a
Manichean manner, evil and good opposing each other.
Although no attenuating circumstances can be granted
to those who subscribe to the philosophy of terror, the
realities on which that philosophy seems to be based
must nevertheless be eradicated: injustice in the
management of world affairs, intolerance in the
perception of differences between cultures and
cynicism expressed in the theory of natural differences
among races.
The success of human rights and worldwide
democracy is to be won at that price. Indeed, the great
Western Powers, who have guaranteed so much to their
peoples in terms of freedom, equality and respect for
the fundamental values of mankind must show greater
rigor in peacefully promoting the same principles at the
global level. They currently give us cause to believe
that they frequently choose their immediate interests
above the principles in which they believe, although
they have good reason to believe in those principles.
All of the heads of State and Government of the
African continent and of many other countries that
have come before this rostrum have eloquently
addressed the issues confronting poor countries. I
would like to only briefly touch upon them. Trapped in
a vicious circle resulting from the conjunction of bad
governance, ever-growing poverty and the Gordian
knot of irreducible external debt and unfair capital
markets, poor countries are steadily deteriorating.
Often transformed into sanctuaries for rebel armed
groups, they have become the site of civil wars, with
their trails of refugees and massive population
displacements. Those devastated societies feed
migratory flows and provide an ideal refuge for the
mafia networks of organized crime. The traffic in small
arms and light weapons knows no borders and the
weapons end up in the trained hands of child soldiers.
I do not believe in the inevitability of poverty nor
in that of war. Failures in those areas can be clearly
explained. The dominant groups of the rich countries
and the elites who are charged with governance in poor
countries are both responsible for the failure of the
fight against poverty and for not having met the
commitments taken in 1974. What is worse, they have
given preference to commercial, financial and
technological policies and strategies that have
reinforced the causes of the ongoing impoverishment
of poor populations worldwide. With respect to the
failure of the pledge for universal peace, it is due to the
concepts and political strategies put in place by the
dominant groups and leaders of the world who have
opted for reaction over prevention.
There are solutions to counter poverty and to
bring the world out of this pattern of permanent war.
Inspired by the shared destiny of mankind, our dream
of universal peace still has every chance of coming
true. It would involve promoting a global economic
system based on a series of common goods and global
public services that must be provided and overseen by
the global collective. That is certainly not out of reach.
To eradicate poverty, we must declare it illegal in
principle and unacceptable as a phenomenon.
Declaring that poverty is illegal means specifically
abolishing the legislative and administrative provisions
that sustain the mechanisms that create and maintain
poverty around the world. It is that new momentum of
commitment and collective responsibility towards the
eradication of poverty and towards guaranteed peace
that will open the way to resolving the many other
major challenges that face our time. Of course, the
question remains; is our contemporary society, replete
with its unprecedented global capacities in the area of
know-how, technologies, finance and mobilization of
human resources made up, in its essence, not of
conquerors but of builders of peace and security who
are sufficiently courageous and daring to be able to
change the current patterns that mould and forge our
world?
Let us take an example from the nineteenth
century, which was a time when the world was
successful in initiating the process of completely
eradicating the age-old practice of slavery, which had
until then been considered to be natural and immutable.
That required the courageous leaders of the time to
declare the practice illegal, at the cost of their own
lives at times. The heroic victory of the Allies during
the Second World War was due to a commitment of a
similar nature. Similarly, was it not thanks to their firm
commitment that the major leaders of the world
recently succeeded in abolishing the shameful system
of apartheid and replacing it with a democracy of
exceptional vitality?
If leaders of that calibre illuminated our past, I
am confident that there still exist today those who are
capable of changing our world to make a happy legacy
for future generations.
In January and February 2007, the Republic of
Guinea was beset by an unprecedented socio-political
crisis that threatened its social stability and the
foundations of its institutions. The cause was the
convergence of a cumulative lack of good governance,
rampant poverty and an overall economic situation in
which all of the financial and monetary indicators were
in the red. These tragic events, marked by considerable
loss of human life, led to massive destruction of public
buildings and involved a great erosion of State
authority, creating, at the same time, profound rifts in
the social fabric.
Fortunately, the outcome, although it remains
fragile, was a peaceful one and is under the auspices of
the Economic Community of West African States
(ECOWAS) and the United Nations. It is owes its
existence to the combined efforts of the presidential
authority, the unions, civil society, eminent persons and
friends of Guinea worldwide.
From this rostrum, I express the deep gratitude
and great thanks of the people and the Government of
Guinea to all those entities and individuals who were
involved to ensure that civic peace would reign in our
country.
The Government that came out of these events, a
Government that it is my privilege to lead, is doing its
utmost to try to meet the many expectations of a people
that has become impatient because it has waited far too
long. A minimum emergency plan was crafted for the
short and medium terms.
Let me conclude by saying that the initiatives
planned for by my Government, as promising as they
are, continue to be dependent upon the interest that
world leaders give to all the subjects that I raised due
to my deepest convictions. Beyond the commitment of
our elites and civil society to good governance and
democracy, the Republic of Guinea needs an effective
partnership in keeping with its specific and pressing
needs. This partnership, for which the Guinean people
wholeheartedly calls, will be more appropriate,
effective and lasting if the dominant groups of the
world agree to commit to global solidarity in the
service of humankind’s development.