May I start by expressing to
you, Mr. President, my Government’s congratulations
on your election as the President of the General
Assembly at its sixty-second session.
Let me also use this occasion to thank the
outgoing President, Sheikha Haya Rashed Al-Khalifa,
for the excellent manner in which she presided over the
General Assembly at its sixty-first session.
Every year the General Assembly provides the
world’s leaders with an excellent opportunity to focus
our attention on the challenges we commonly face.
While some of the challenges can be addressed
nationally, the most critical are often not confined to
national borders and therefore require a concerted
global effort. Hence the centrality of the United
Nations in providing the leadership and platform to
address global challenges.
That is why it is vital that the United Nations
continues to undergo comprehensive reforms to render
it more versatile, effective and efficient. As the
Secretary-General correctly observed in his report on
this subject, the United Nations is “not optimally
configured.
Some of the ongoing reforms such as the
implementation of “one programme, one budgetary
framework and one office” at the country level is a
good start for rendering this international body more
responsive. We are pleased that Rwanda was selected
as one of the eight first pilot countries for this reform.
In the same context of the ongoing reforms, the
proposal to restructure the gender portfolio is most
welcome. We agree with the findings of the High-level
Panel that the United Nations contributions to gender
issues have been incoherent, under-resourced and
fragmented. The proposed reforms will assist in
overcoming those shortcomings.
However, we still eagerly await the reform of the
Security Council to render it more representative of the
world community and more transparent in its
operations and decision-making processes. We believe
that this would equip the United Nations with greater
legitimacy and capacity to maintain world peace and
security.
Let me briefly touch on a number of pressing
challenges the global community currently faces.
While our continent has been consolidating peace and
security, there are persistent problem areas that need
attention. Today in the Great Lakes region, those who
committed genocide in Rwanda in 1994 continue their
destructive activities. Almost 14 years after their deeds
in our country, they are still sowing mayhem in the
region. They rape, murder, terrorize and plunder with
impunity. Their leaders are active in Africa, Europe,
America and other places, where they continue to
promote the ideology of genocide. There can be no
doubt that those terror groups constitute a threat to
international peace and security. The presence of the
costly United Nations peacekeeping mission in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo has not diminished
their activities.
I once again call upon the international
community, in collaboration with the Government of
the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to end the
threat posed by those negative forces once and for all.
Rwandans and the region as a whole need peace and
stability so that we can concentrate on the business of
economic growth and development.
For our part, we pledge renewed commitment to
making our contribution to the restoration of peace and
stability in the Great Lakes region and in other parts of
our continent. In that respect, we express our solidarity
with the long-suffering people of Darfur and commit
ourselves to contributing to peace efforts in that part of
the world, in close cooperation with the Government of
the Sudan, the African Union (AU) and the United
Nations. Rwanda welcomes Security Council
resolution 1769 (2007) authorizing the creation of the
United Nations-AU hybrid peacekeeping force in
Darfur, and calls for its speedy deployment. In the
same spirit, we urge the international community to
support peacebuilding efforts in Somalia. It is critical
that resources be made available on an urgent basis to
enable the deployment of the pledged peacekeeping
forces by African countries.
Through the United Nations, we express our
collective determination to promote socioeconomic
transformation for greater and more rapid wealth
creation, which in turn will permit improved lives. On
that note, we also join the many other countries that are
putting forward the suggestion of a moratorium on the
death penalty as a way of improving those lives and
valuing them. That challenge remains daunting in the
developing world, where extreme poverty still affects
millions of people.
The solutions include increased productive
capacities on the part of the developing world, side by
side with the opening of global markets to the
developed world to permit greater trade and
investment. A fair global trading system is central to
wealth creation. Improving the quality of development
aid would supplement that effort, based on a shared
understanding that aid is most effective when it is
aligned with national development priorities.
Our ultimate goal of improving lives globally
cannot be realized if the challenge of climate change
and the associated widespread environmental
degradation is not sufficiently tackled. Rwanda
appreciates the convening of the high-level meeting on
climate change by the Secretary-General earlier this
week. We also look forward to the United Nations
climate change conference scheduled to take place in
Bali, Indonesia, this December, which should provide a
clear road map of how we are to consolidate our gains
and gather pace in protecting our environment.
The global challenges of poverty, ignorance,
terrorism, conflict and climate change require us to act
collectively in a manner that the founders of this
Organization captured eloquently in the words We the
peoples of the United Nations. As we begin this sixty-
second session of the General Assembly, let us
recommit to our common aspirations and
responsibilities for realizing peace, prosperity and
freedom above any narrow interests. Only then can we
hope to realize the ideals contained in the Charter of
the United Nations “to save succeeding generations
from the scourge of war” and to “promote social
progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.