Permit me to congratulate
you, Sir, on your election as President of the Assembly.
As a member of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM),
the Bahamas takes special pride in the election of one
of our region’s own — the third such person to be so
elected over the years. You may be assured of our full
support as you attend to the duties of the high office
to which you have been elected and for which you are,
if I may say so, superbly qualified. We consider it a
privilege to extend Ambassador Paulette Bethel to your
office as Chef de Cabinet, and we wish her well as well.
Permit me also to express my condolences and
those of the Bahamas to the President and people of
Kenya following the tragic attack on innocent civilians
in Nairobi just last week.
This year we in the Bahamas are celebrating
our fortieth year of independence. It is appropriate,
therefore, that we should pause today and look back to
1973, when our nation was founded and our membership
in the United Nations began. In addressing the General
Assembly for the first time on 1 October 1973, our
then Prime Minister, Sir Lynden Pindling, spoke of
our journey from the dehumanizing experiences of
slavery and colonialism to the liberating achievements
of freedom, majority rule and independence. He spoke,
too, of the “perpetual interdependence of the big and
the small,” and the fervent wish of the Bahamian people
to be neither “dominated nor coerced.” He also had this
to say:
“We have the means to give new hope to
mankind, to create a stable international order
dominated by total and absolute political and
economic self-determination and human and moral
values which make human beings paramount, not
things or abstractions.” (A/PV.2135, para. 28)
Sir Lynden’s call for us to be faithful to the
responsibilities of our nationhood and world citizenship
is as relevant and compelling today as it was when we
were welcomed into the family of the United Nations
40 years ago. As the present Prime Minister of the
Bahamas, I have therefore come here today, on behalf
of the people of the Commonwealth of the Bahamas, to
renew our pledge to play our part to help make our planet
the place of peace and stability and of collaborative
endeavour and mutual support that it was intended to
be, and must be, for the good of all humankind.
But we need to ensure that such pledges are not just
so many catchy phrases. We need to not only talk the talk
but walk the walk. We in the Bahamas are determined
to do just that. That is why, to cite one very recent
example, my Minister of Social Development, Melanie
Griffin, on Tuesday of this week here in New York,
signed the United Nations Convention on the Rights
of Persons with Disabilites on behalf of the Bahamas.
This is an important step forward that we have taken,
marrying our rhetoric to our actions and synching our
domestic agenda with our international obligations. We
intend to ratify the Convention in the shortest possible
time, and later this year we will introduce the necessary
legislation in our Parliament to protect the rights of the
disabled and to give full effect to our obligations under
the Convention. The end to discrimination against the
disabled in the Commonwealth of the Bahamas is now
clearly in sight. Indeed, it is now imminent.
I would also submit today that we are all of us
under a moral obligation to ensure that the policies
and aspirational goals that the General Assembly sets
for itself, and to which all Member States subscribe,
are in fact reflected in the way that we govern our
respective nations internally and, to no less a degree,
in the way that we interact with each other as Member
States in the international community. For example, we
cannot, on the one hand, proclaim that we believe in
free trade, then implement policies that inevitably bring
about the destruction of agriculture as we know it in
the Caribbean, and, in response to the resulting moral
outcry, simply shrug our shoulders and piously lament
that the old order changeth.
We have to become more conscious of the practical
outcomes of what we do. Too often, in the headlong
rush for change, we damage the vulnerable and the
weak. We then make pledges to help but seldom live
up to those pledges in any sustained way. We simply
cannot build a credible new world order on the basis of
such practices. They run completely counter to our lofty
pronouncements about the need for interconnectedness
and mutual support in the pursuit of economic progress
for all the nations of the world, be they large or small,
developed or developing.
We see the same dynamic at work in the
ongoing economic aggression of many of the more
developed countries against small, offshore financial
service-based economies, especially in the Caribbean
region of which the Bahamas is a part. Some have used
their power, either unilaterally or in small groups of
high-powered nations, to impose their will, arguing that
there is something fundamentally immoral, something
intrinsically sinister, about the accumulation of wealth
in offshore jurisdictions.
We reject that premise and we criticize in the
strongest possible terms the efforts of some to maim and
cripple, if not destroy, the offshore economies within
our region. Ironically, the anti-money-laundering,
anti-terrorism funding and anti-criminal regulatory
regimes of many of our countries are far more robust and
demonstrably far more effective than the corresponding
regulatory regimes in many of the same countries that
are leading the fight against us.
We firmly believe that offshore financial services
can be responsibly operated and regulated. We believe
that the sector represents true tax competition and, in
the great majority of cases, that it affords an honest
opportunity for families and individuals alike to
protect their privacy while accumulating lawfully
earned capital for themselves and future generations.
Moreover, the evidence is overwhelming that most of
the investment of that offshore wealth takes place in
and generally benefits the developed world.
Unilateralism and diplomacy by coercion are not
the way the world should be dealing with that issue.
Instead, we need to challenge the United Nations to
take the lead in developing and refining multilateral
global mechanisms for the governance of the offshore
financial services sector — mechanisms that will meet
the legitimate demands of the developed world for
the protection of their fiscal systems and their need
for greater security, while at the same time allowing
offshore financial-service economies to continue to
grow in an orderly and properly regulated way.
Let us not forget that the destruction of those
offshore financial-service economies will destabilize
the countries that depend upon them for their
livelihood. To destroy that sector in the Caribbean
would effectively cause tens of thousands of newly
empowered middle-class citizens to slip back into
poverty or to migrate to the developed world. The
middle class of which I speak constitutes the anchor
of social stability for the countries of our region. If it
is taken away, social destabilization will emerge as a
risk of the most ominous kind. And should that risk
materialize, the developed world may well end up
finding that it has solved one problem only by creating
an infinitely bigger one for itself.
The need for greater multilateralism is also evident
in many of the other problems confronting the Bahamas
and our region. A matter of the highest national priority
for us revolves around our ongoing problem with illegal
migration to our shores. We in the Bahamas suffer from
the illegal migration of tens of thousands of desperate
people from our sister Caribbean Community State
of Haiti — an exodus undeniably driven by crushing
poverty.
We also have a problem with illegal migration from
other countries in the Caribbean, albeit to a much lesser
extent. Of special note in that regard are migrants from
Cuba. We believe that the policies rooted in the Cold
War that largely account for that migration ought to be
brought into alignment with the realities of the modern
era.
Our archipelagic nation, though comparatively
small in population, covers a vast area. With our
hundreds of islands, the opportunities for illegal
migration are greatly multiplied. At a time when it is
imperative that we invest in the education and health
and future of our people, we are forced instead to devote
an ever-growing share of our resources to the problems
associated with illegal migration.
The Bahamas, like the rest of the world,
understandably places a great deal of emphasis on
the human rights of migrants, but we also believe that
there must be similar concerns for the ill-effects on
migrant-receiving States such as ours. In particular,
we are concerned about the increasingly unsustainable
costs that are being incurred and the resulting erosion
in the quality of life for the citizenry of the Bahamas.
Our country, the Commonwealth of the Bahamas,
simply does not have the financial resources and
infrastructural capacity, much less the psychological
stamina, to endure that dilemma indefinitely.
That should also remind us of the economic
disparities within our region and of the need to intensify
global efforts to eliminate poverty and structural
imbalances that impede economic growth within
certain segments and sections of the Caribbean. For
as long as those disparities persist, illegal immigration
to the shores of countries that are comparatively more
prosperous will continue to grow.
Another problem that is of special concern to us
is the continuing influx of guns and the increase in
gun-related criminality, not only in the Bahamas but
throughout the region. As a world community, there
is, I am convinced, a great deal more that we can and
should be doing to fight that common menace.
The Bahamas has this year signed the Arms
Trade Treaty, and we encourage all States that have
not already done so to sign the Treaty as well. And
we implore those countries that produce the guns that
end up taking innocent lives and causing terror in our
communities to become more proactive in controlling
the export of guns. We implore them to step up the
policing of their own borders against arms traffickers.
We therefore call for more robust surveillance and
reconnaissance measures to be instituted. We already
have the experience of joint anti-drug operational
activities with the United States of America. However,
more resources ought to be employed in a region-wide
effort to fight crime. In particular, we call for a massive
increase in joint tactical operations so that more air
and maritime assets can be consistently deployed
and the thousands of square miles that constitute the
territorial waters of Caribbean States can be more
effectively patrolled. We in the Bahamas stand ready
to play our part in those joint efforts, without which
the war on arms trafficking, human smuggling and the
transshipment of illicit drugs will never produce the
victory we all strive for.
In a recent talk that I gave to a meeting of the
International Monetary Fund that the Bahamas hosted
for the region, I made the point that we must all seek
to mitigate the vulnerabilities of our small States in
the CARICOM region. Of particular concern in that
regard is the fact that we have as yet been unable to
disabuse the international financial organizations of
their conviction that gross domestic product per capita
is by itself an accurate measure of the wealth of a nation
or of its state of development.
The result of the continuing adherence to that
dogma and the policies that have flowed from it is
that the international financial assistance needs of
countries in our region are being erroneously assessed
and misunderstood. I therefore again join all of those
calling for a revamping of the criteria in that regard
so that the true financial assistance and development
needs of developing countries can be evaluated in a
fairer and more balanced and pragmatic way.
Another significant vulnerability for my country
concerns the environment and the need to address
comprehensively issues of climate change. The Bahamas
is surrounded by the sea and is low-lying. Indeed, 80 per
cent of the land mass of the Bahamas is less than five
feet above sea level. The implications of climate change
and associated rises in sea level are therefore obvious
for my country and its people. I would submit that the
world, particularly the developed world, has a stake in
resolving those issues, for while countries such as ours
may be the victims of climate change, we are not among
the countries that are, in fact, largely responsible for
the climate change that threatens our future and that of
the planet.
In the Bahamas, we are waging our own battles. We
are putting our fiscal house in order. We are introducing
innovative tools to fight crime. We are training a new
generation for twenty-first century jobs. We are creating
new partnerships to tackle our most pressing problems.
We are aggressively pursuing renewable energy. We
are revamping and modernizing our structure of
governance to make it more responsive to the needs of
the twenty-first century. And by the increased use of
the referendum machinery, we are demonstrating our
commitment to a deepening of our democracy.
We are a small country with strong convictions and
big ideas. But as we look beyond the borders of our
nation and of the region to gaze upon the global scene,
we see much eloquence and many handshakes and the
ceremonial signing of one treaty after another. Rarely,
however, do we see concrete steps or enforcement
mechanisms with teeth. Ringing declarations have been
made from Rio to Copenhagen and beyond, and we are
constantly being challenged by our own citizens to
demonstrate to them that real and measurable progress
is being achieved at the global level.
We need to see more courage, more leadership, more
sustained action on the global stage. So as the leader
of a small but proud nation, I take the opportunity to
say to the big and powerful nations: Find your courage
because the hour grows late.