Belize

There is, of course, a special resonance to the congratulations we offer the President on his election to this high post at the fiftieth session of the General Assembly. In this watershed year, his job will be particularly challenging. The delegation of Belize pledges its fullest cooperation in helping to ensure the success of his stewardship. All the world is conscious of the historic significance of this fiftieth anniversary year. And a lot of work has gone into the process leading up to this session. We also at this juncture, then, express our thanks to the President’s predecessor, His Excellency Mr. Amara Essy, and those whose job it has been to supervise and implement the preparatory effort. If this is a year of celebration, it is also a year of reckoning. Inevitably, the jubilee has concentrated attention as never before on our Organization. Can we withstand the scrutiny we provoke? Is our record one that, on balance, vindicates the vision of the founders? And in a world that is almost unrecognizably transformed since 1945, are we equipped for the changing role the United Nations must now play? Well over 100 States have come into being since 1945. The myriad issues that now dominate the global agenda are attended by a host of problems. The duties and burdens of the United Nations system have therefore proliferated hugely. Can the United Nations cope? And are we, the Member States, prepared to invest our enterprise with the resources necessary to deal with the new realities. These, it seems, are the questions most urgently in need of answers. In thinking of the future, though, we would do well to look at the past. And I would wish briefly now to examine our historical record, highlighting some issues of special relevance to small countries such as Belize. Just four days ago, Belize celebrated the fourteenth anniversary of its independence. It was an independence long delayed by the territorial claim of a neighbouring country. But it the end it was an independence made possible in no small measure by this Organization and its role in world affairs. One of the things that in the first place made our aspiration for sovereignty realistic, was the seminal 1960 General Assembly Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. And the United Nations thereafter became our guiding star as we steered our course between the Scylla of the historical colonialism from which we were escaping and the Charybdis of the recolonization that was inherent in the territorial claim. During the years of our independent existence, this Organization has similarly continued to be a bedrock of our viability. The principles enshrined in the Charter, and the international legal order derived from those principles, have been a welcome guarantee of our sovereignty. The territorial claim has not gone away. But the norms imposed by the United Nations, especially those requiring pacific settlement of disputes among Member States, have at least helped to keep it from confounding our integrity. Who can doubt that, in one form or another, this salutary experience of Belize with the United Nations has been replicated by any number of small countries? Because of the multiplication of new States, especially since 1960, the international order has been characterized by an unprecedented differentiation in underlying power capabilities between the huge and the tiny. Very weak States can, of course, never seriously hope to influence international behaviour solely through the use of their national power capabilities. What the United Nations has done for us, then, has been to offer a plenitude of sustenance via its many entities and constituent groupings. In effect, the set of opportunities created by the character of post-Second-World-War international organizations that have been the United Nations and its progeny has made sovereign equality a very real concept, power asymmetries notwithstanding. For small States, certainly, the political and diplomatic vitality of the United Nations system is a matter of undeniable fact. Nevertheless, the United Nations should continue to enhance cooperation with regional organizations, as it did last session when this Assembly resolved to institutionalize cooperation with the Caribbean Community. Belize was honoured to introduce that resolution. Likewise, the principle of inclusiveness should be employed to ensure that States in the various regions of the world, including Asia and the Pacific, are not confined to incomplete participation in the international order. 22 I turn now to the economic sphere. The record of our Organization is, I am afraid, rather less compelling. It is true that various organs of the United Nations system — the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) — have provided small States with an unprecedented forum for the articulation of our concerns. Even now, Belize prepares to assume its elected seat on the Executive Board of the United Nations Development Programme. But continuing large disparities in wealth between rich and poor countries, the debilitating debt consuming us in the developing world, the unemployment, the persistent poverty, speak volumes as to the absence of sufficient progress on this front. Since the last general debate, the World Trade Organization has come into being. In the Americas, the Hemispheric Summit is now a matter of record. But we note with regret that, even as liberalization advances, the call of the disadvantaged for special and differential treatment goes unheeded. This is accompanied by the continuing volatility of the international trading and financial systems, and the well-known vulnerability of small countries to external shocks. For us in Belize, negative economic trends among our major trading partners have had a baneful effect. This, in turn, has served to heighten our concern over the nature and pace of globalization. The structural changes that fragile economies need to make in order to be in step threaten to swamp us. But no one seems to be paying attention. Perhaps new forms of regionalism are the answer. One arguable example is the new Association of Caribbean States, which will create the world’s fourth or fifth largest market area and of which Belize is the geographical centre and the cultural bridge. Yet it is essential, we contend, that the international community exhibit full sensitivity to the condition of smallness. We remain highly susceptible to changes in the global marketplace; and adverse developments then impose additional setbacks on us in the areas of competitiveness, development finance and overall fragility. For Belize, the recent crisis in neighbouring Mexico, starkly dramatized our own precariousness. Generally, we think, the impact of the events in Mexico on the markets and economies of other countries serves as a clear warning. It is foolhardy to believe that inflexible social and economic formulas can be applied uniformly to our differing circumstances. Heedless adjustment and implacable time-tables might well condemn small economies to extinction. Indeed, many of our small countries have already made strenuous efforts at stabilization and reform. We have liberalized trade, reduced fiscal deficits and privatized State enterprises. But where are the rewards? We continue to be overcome by debt, by poverty and by woefully inadequate social and physical infrastructures. And our difficulties are exacerbated rather than solved by the austerities that reduce government spending and curtail our public sector investment programmes. Time is not on our side, as economic and fiscal orthodoxy bear inexorably down on us. Our constituencies continue to press us: Where is the understanding of our plight? Why is there is no capital inflow revival? What is to be done about the alarmingly high rate of unemployment? When will we see the special mechanisms to assist us with retraining, the moulding of new technologies, and the critically needed human resources development? Can we ever seriously hope for the dedicated financial resources that must underpin any serious effort at diversification? We are being told that this liberalization advance — this march of the martinets — is the panacea for our ills, but the evidence to the contrary is quite startling. For our domestic producers, for our banana farmers, it is a bitter joke. Global free trade, it seems to many of us, is like the Holy Roman Empire: not holy, not Roman, not an empire. The Bretton Woods institutions certainly need to demonstrate more creativity. Their too-rigid reliance on the prevailing orthodoxy is choking us. Democracy in small countries will not be worth a fig if this auto-da-fé- type insistence on these articles of faith is not leavened by a real appreciation of our peculiar needs. It is in this context that we also call for this Organization to promote true global cooperation in efforts towards sustainable development. This shared quest must be the essence of the economic relations and the development dialogue between the North and the South and among the developing countries themselves. My Government certainly pledges full support for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Unit on South-South Cooperation, well exemplified by the Ruta Maya tourism project of our Central America. We also 23 call for support for strengthening the Alliance for the Sustainable Development of Central America, a major initiative for developing what we call our delicate filigree isthmus. And we welcome such relationships as Belize’s recently concluded joint implementation pilot programme under the Climate Change Convention. The overarching goal of our precursors was “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”. Well, how have we been doing on that score? In the sphere of peace and security, some grave developments have taken place in various parts of the world. In several places genocidal impulses have been let loose, with predictably devastating results. Paradoxically enough, the end of the cold war has resulted in an upsurge of civil and territorial strife. Fratricidal conflicts have been launched to the drumbeat of overblown notions of history and dangerous concepts of ethnicity. For all the Assembly’s efforts, we continue to experience a relative stalemate in Cyprus and elsewhere. The Balkan conundrum still seems intractable, though we note with encouragement that this Organization has recognized that there is a limit beyond which forbearance ceases to be a virtue. Rwanda refuses to go away. Yet we hail now the breakthrough in Palestine, and we again rejoice at the continuation of peace and stability in South Africa. In Namibia, Mozambique and Angola, the United Nations has assisted, or is assisting, in bringing civil wars to an end. In my own part of the world, the continuing United Nations partnership with the people of Haiti is consolidating reconstruction and democracy in that Caribbean country. Despite the limitations on our resources, Belize is happy now to be able to play a commanding role in the Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM) sub-unit of the United Nations Mission in Haiti. Likewise, the United Nations Observer Mission in El Salvador is successfully overseeing efforts to cement the newly minted peace. In Guatemala, the dialogue between the URNG and the Government, begun under the auspices of our Secretary-General, is proceeding apace. My Government takes great satisfaction in the calm that reigns almost universally on our continent, from Hispaniola to Tierra del Fuego. The disappearance of authoritarian Governments in Latin America and the resolution of most of our internal conflicts is bringing liberty and democracy to all our peoples. Our efforts can therefore be committed fully now to the business of fostering economic and social development, human rights and the protection of the environment. As the first-ever Defence Ministerial Meeting of the Americas confirmed, our militaries are fully cognizant of the new role they must play in supporting this process. We therefore applaud the strong and clear views on nuclear sanity expressed during the Conference on the extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and currently being reiterated. This delegation reaffirms its own view that the parties to the NPT have now invested in the nuclear Powers a trusteeship that those Powers must zealously discharge. At the same time, we must be equally aware of the other danger: the continued production, trade and use of all types of so-called conventional weapons that harm, maim and kill. In the context of more general concerns, we cannot escape the overdue obligation to rationalize also the structure of the Security Council, so that the veto is tamed and equity and democratization take centre stage. We continue to insist that all regions obtain balanced and equal representation as permanent members; small countries be brought into the Council’s decision- making; and consideration be given to such devices as multipartite seats or constituency groupings. One final word on the question of peace and security. The Secretary-General has stressed the multitude of new demands for peace-keeping made upon the Organization as conflicts erupt around the world. The caution has been expressed that the increased burdens in this regard should not displace the attention that economic and social questions demand. Of course, the two are interrelated. It is a truism that there can be no development without peace. We would content ourselves, then, with merely urging that we put in place a more coordinated system to embrace peace-keeping and conflict resolution as well as human rights and social and economic development. Also, the non-traditional threats to peace and security must be addressed. In recent years we have witnessed growing links among organized crime, drug trafficking, terrorism and the spread of armaments. The dangers from this phenomenon are all the more insidious for being 24 novel. We must therefore quickly develop the international cooperation measures to deal with it. So, as this Organization completes its fiftieth year, we in Belize are well convinced of its continuing vitality. The jeremiads of those that bemoan its failures are not for us. While we are not going to be Pollyannaish about what is admittedly a mixed record, we see enough to be sanguine about. There is extraordinary cooperation on the part of States, other political entities and non-governmental organizations in the dozens of areas of substantive concern of the United Nations organs; in the burgeoning, multidimensional sphere of sustainable development; in the territory where humane concerns and values, social ordering and cultural norms coalesce; and in the field of peace-keeping, of providing States and peoples with security from violence and disorder. Of course there is still a long way to go. And we will never truly realize the vision of the founders unless Member States agree to provide the future United Nations system with adequate, reliable and predictable resources. Let us therefore, during this our half-century session, determine to enhance our effectiveness. Let us rationalize, let us economize. Let us pay our dues in full and on time. And let us intensify the quest for agreement on autonomous financing for the Organization and for related activities. Above all, let us dedicate ourselves to universality and pledge to enlarge our image and re-energize the world. For that day may still be greatly postponed when our resolutions and decisions, rather than blood and iron, will summarily determine the great international questions. But in continuing efforts at global conflict avoidance, we are still, if the Assembly will forgive the colloquialism, the only game in town. In other words, true international peace and security can only ever come by way of the United Nations, which remains the last, best hope for mankind.