I would like to congratulate you, Mr. President, on
your election. I also thank Mr. Treki, the outgoing
President, for his strong leadership in support of
United Nations reform.
I would also like to express our great sympathy to
the Government and people of Pakistan and to our
fellow United Nations Members whose people have
suffered the terrible effects of natural disasters over the
past year. I also thank the Secretary-General and his
staff for coordinating international relief efforts.
We have had a long week of formal meetings and
sideline discussions, and there is still much more to be
done before we all go home. So, at this time, I would
like to be brief and offer a statement of support for
what our people regard as the most important aspect of
the work of the United Nations. By this I mean the
work of our United Nations agencies, their experts,
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their advisers and above all their volunteers in the
field.
I think the theme for this year’s debate underlines
the importance of their work. It asks us to recognize
the central role of the United Nations in global
governance and I have no difficulty in doing this.
Achieving security, progress and development is, of
course, our own individual responsibility. But as last
week’s high-level discussions on the Millennium
Development Goals made extremely clear, many of the
challenges we face reach beyond single nations and
even single regions. They are international in the full
sense of the word.
So we need help, experience and expertise and
for me, this is what the United Nations agencies offer.
As we all know, their support continues all year, every
year. In my own country it is taking place right now as
we speak, through the United Nations Development
Programme, the United Nations Environment
Programme, UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Health
Organization and we are most grateful for their help.
They work in vital areas of national development,
education, health, agriculture, communications and
infrastructure. They meet with people directly, they
listen, they discuss, and they teach, train and
encourage. They work closely with our local
authorities and sometimes they do even more than that.
I think that we learned this during last year’s
influenza A (H1N1) health crisis. As the Assembly can
imagine, for a small nation like ours this was very
serious indeed. It could have almost closed us down
and could have certainly caused widespread panic. But
it did not. I think this was very largely due to one fact:
our people knew that they were not alone. They had the
guidelines given to us by the World Health
Organization and this gave them the confidence they
needed during that extremely worrying time; we could
not have made it without them.
Returning to our theme this year: it invites us to
reaffirm and, as I have said, I am happy to do this and I
do it without reservation. I reaffirm our respect and
deep appreciation for the work of all United Nations
agencies. We are delighted to be working with them
and we warmly congratulate the Secretary-General on
their work.
In the words of our theme, the United Nations
does indeed play a central role. In my view, without its
agencies the concept of global governance can only be,
at best, an idea and, most of the time, only words. It is
the agencies that help us turn ideas into real substance
and to change words into actions that our people
understand, respect and welcome.
In fact, I would like to end by saying that they are
much more than agencies. For countries such as ours,
they can help us to become far more than small
developing nations. I think this can be summed up
simply: they make us part of a United Nations that is
truly united.