It is with a profound sense of anticipation
that I welcome Mr. Kerim’s assumption of the
presidency of the General Assembly at its sixty-second
session. In accepting the presidency, he succinctly
outlined an exciting raison d’être for a modern, active
and engaged United Nations, namely, a focus on
multilateral cooperation to combat the challenges of
globalization, climate change, terrorism, immigration
and sustainable development. I have every confidence
that, under his enlightened presidency, the General
Assembly will fashion positive, tangible and creative
solutions to those global challenges.
Our recent history has taught us that triumphalist,
imperialist unilateralism is a consistent cause, but an
infrequent solution, to the problems confronting
today’s world. But it is at this moment, as the
philosophy of unilateralist misadventure is in its death
throes, that a modern, multilateral United Nations must
seize the day, fill the vacuum and live up to the noble
and immutable principles of its Charter. That modern
and multilateral United Nations, under Mr. Kerim’s
presidency, should never sacrifice principle for an
ignoble practicality, but should instead be suffused
with a fairness that views the world through the eyes
not of imperial tsars, indifferent diplomats or apathetic
agencies to whom suffering is but a television event
easily erased with the flick of a remote-control
button but through the eyes of the vast majority of
the world’s citizens, who struggle daily for survival,
who dodge bullets in their backyards, who coax a
meagre living from parched and exhausted soils and
who have been globalized to the brink of extinction. It
is not idealistic or naive to assert that engaged, fair and
genuinely concerned States working together can solve
the seemingly intractable problems besetting our
imperfect planet. Our problems are largely man-made;
so too are the solutions.
The recent focus by the United Nations on the
issue of climate change and global warming is a
welcome development. It is the prayer of humankind
that this belated momentum has not come too late to
reverse the damage already inflicted on our planet.
After all, we are short-term caretakers of the Earth, and
it is our sacred duty to preserve it for future
generations. This is a great cause of our time, and we
must not be timid or doubtful in the face of any great
cause.
I would like to remind the General Assembly that,
15 years ago, the 1992 United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change recognized that global
warming would have a special impact on small States,
countries with low-lying coastal areas and countries
with areas prone to natural disasters. In Saint Vincent
and the Grenadines, for example, the overwhelming
majority of our hard-won infrastructural developments,
by way of geographic necessity, lie mere inches above
sea level and perilously close to the coastline. Through
absolutely no fault of our own, the physical
manifestations of our emerging post-colonial State can
be obliterated by inexorably rising sea levels.
The Caribbean’s vital banana industry, already
buffeted by the winds of iniquitous globalization, has
been repeatedly devastated in recent years by
increasingly intense hurricanes, which have placed a
hitherto dominant economic sector on veritable life
support. In any event, the environmental damage
caused in producing quality bananas for the European
Community over the recent decades is ignored by those
whose consumerist demands engender further
environmental damage.
The solutions to the problem of climate change
are multifaceted, but an indispensable component must
be the adoption by the States parties to the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change of
the climate change Adaptation Fund for
environmentally challenged African, Asian, Caribbean,
Latin American and Pacific States. The Fund would put
flesh on the skeletal commitments of the Convention
on Climate Change, which compelled developed
countries to provide additional financial resources to
assist developing countries that are particularly
vulnerable to the adverse effects of global warming.
The Fund should be a source both of disaster relief and
of the technological and infrastructural support needed
to adapt to climate change.
The developed States Members of the United
Nations can no longer afford to view the increasingly
frequent and intense natural disasters as individual
events, capable of narrow prescriptive solutions and
subject to the vagaries of donor fatigue. They must live
up to their obligations, both legal and moral, to assist
the developing world in dealing with challenges that
were born in the smoke-belching factories and
car-clogged highways of the polluters.
The quest for energy self-sufficiency and
environmentally friendly energy consumption has led
to a rush towards the production of ethanol in some
countries. This, however, requires careful thought and
sensible implementation. For example, the use of corn
to produce ethanol is driving up the price worldwide of
grain, beef, chicken and milk. The poor will suffer
unless a prudently balanced approach is adopted. The
United Nations has a vital role to play in that regard.
As a proud citizen of the Republic of Macedonia,
the President is all too familiar with the terrors
wrought by wars born of ethnic conflict. It is my
earnest prayer that his personal experience will lend
urgency to what has been the seemingly heartless
neglect on the part of the United Nations, in practical
terms, of the genocidal campaign being waged in
Darfur. While recent developments including the
Security Council resolution 1769 (2007), authorizing
the establishment of the African Union-United Nations
Hybrid Operation in Darfur, and the recent
appointments of Rodolphe Adada as the Joint African
Union-United Nations Special Representative for
Darfur and General Martin Luther Agwai as Force
Commander are somewhat encouraging, let us not
delude ourselves: the force on the ground is still
insufficient, its mandate is ambiguous and its emerging
presence is years too late. For too long we have looked
the other way. We in the United Nations have caused
the world to wonder about the relative worth of a
Sudanese or Rwandan life versus an Israeli, Chinese,
American or European life. What is happening in
Darfur is genocide. Let us call it what it is. The United
Nations must remain committed to alleviating the
suffering of the men, women and children of Darfur.
In the same vein, the Government and people of
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines stand unequivocally
with the people of Myanmar in their current struggle
for democracy and life without tyranny.
The drama of war, the fight against global
terrorism, insecurity and poverty, the struggle for
reparation for the descendants of African slaves in the
New World and the insidious impacts of climate
change must continue to hold the collective attention of
the General Assembly. But there are other eminently
avoidable ills afflicting the developing world that also
demand our focus. The Caribbean faces the worst
epidemic of chronic non-communicable disease in the
Americas. In 2004, the six leading causes of death in
the Caribbean were heart disease, cancer, diabetes,
stroke, injuries and hypertensive disease each of
which claimed more lives in the region than
HIV/AIDS.
That looming health crisis, although largely self-
inflicted, has an obvious global component.
Globalization has spawned a creeping cultural
hegemony and homogeneity with a distinct mass-
consumption bias. Our home-grown Caribbean culture
and our Caribbean civilization are being challenged
and undermined by a shallow consumer ethic driven by
multinational corporations whose sole interest is to
create a standardized population of global purchasers.
The explosion in media and information technology,
for all its obvious benefits, has been an all-too-willing
handmaiden to that cultural invasion. The
homogenized, vapid and consumerist culture of the
multinationals’ empire is exported worldwide, beamed
directly to our computers, televisions, newspapers and
cinema screens. It is devoid of context, yet rich in
subtext. Its message, in a nutshell, is simple: our
culture, our civilization, is better than yours. It is a
subliminal message that too many of our people have
unfortunately been accepting at a faster rate than the
ability of our health care systems to adapt. Colonialist,
imperialist, mindless and homogenizing globalization
has wrought havoc. Its deleterious contemporary
manifestations must be resolutely resisted.
The acceptance of a core of universal human
values does not mean a submission to the consumerism
of any empire. A quest by some to establish a global
hegemony in everything will never be able to erase or
subjugate the legitimacy of the particularity of
civilizations, including our Caribbean civilization. In
that context, the call for an alliance of civilizations has
our support. It is likely to be more uplifting and
enduring than a quest for dominance by one over the
other.
The erosion of trade preferences at the
multilateral level has brought with it new challenges to
the small and vulnerable economies of the Caribbean,
requiring Governments to engage in structural
adjustments and fiscal calisthenics to keep our
economies afloat. At the same time, the development
deliverables that the Doha Round promised to our
countries which, like the Biblical manna, are
urgently needed for our sustenance have yet to
materialize, owing to the floundering negotiations of
that Round. Let us recall that the first and last of the
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) speak,
respectively, to the eradication of poverty and to global
partnership for development. But for small and
vulnerable economies the attainment of those two goals
will be significantly compromised if the multilateral
trade rules and provisions are not sufficiently
accommodating to the special needs of countries like
ours.
Special and differential treatment for developing
countries is vital to offset the potential losses that are
occasioned by globalization and the liberalization of
markets. That is why aid-for-trade and a mobilization
of resources must be on the agenda of multilateral
organizations, to be used as an instrument for
economic growth and capacity-building in developing
countries. The recent launch of the MDG call to action
by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is an
initiative that my Government supports, and it may
well act as a much-needed spur to get us back on track
to achieving the MDGs by the target date of 2015.
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines yet again pleads
with the United Nations to permit Taiwan to be
accorded its rightful admission to the United Nations
and its specialized agencies. Taiwan, a democratic and
progressive country of 23 million people, remains a
legitimate and vibrant political expression of the
ancient and magnificent Chinese civilization. There is
no adequate justification for the continued exclusion of
Taiwan from participation in the numerous global
exchanges in the United Nations and other
international bodies. We urge Secretary-General Ban
Ki-moon to accept and deal with Taiwan’s membership
application in accordance with the Charter. Taiwan
possesses all the attributes and qualifications for
membership of the United Nations. Let it therefore be
done. Furthermore, the United Nations must play its
role in reducing tensions across the Taiwan Strait.
Aggressive conduct must be restrained in a context
where Taiwan is committed to peace and a
comprehensive political dialogue.
I shall conclude as the Assembly President began,
by urging swift and effective multilateral action to
tackle the challenges of the modern world. As the
Cuban poet and national hero José Martí once said, “It
is a sin not to do what one is capable of doing”. By that
measure, the sins of omission and commission of the
United Nations are manifold and manifest, despite its
successes. Our collective multilateral and principled
penance must be measured even more by our actions
from this day onward. We must therefore now act
together on each of the world’s enduring challenges.
Each nation and each person has a vital role to play. An
arrogance born of triumphalism that seeks to exclude
so many who look askance at an imperial agenda must
cease. The master poet from Martinique, Aime Cesaire,
addresses this issue well in his famous Cahier d’un
retour au pays natal:
No race has a monopoly on beauty, on
intelligence, on strength ... There is room for
everyone at the convocation of conquests ... We
know now that the sun turns around our Earth,
lighting the parcel designated by our will alone ...
[and that] every star falls from sky to Earth at our
omnipotent command.