157. Mr. President, it is a great pleasure and honour for me to associate the Barbados delegation with previous speakers who have congratulated you on your appointment to the high office of President of this twenty-second session of the General Assembly. I wish at the same time to record our deep appreciation of the tremendous contribution to the cause of world peace made by your predecessor, Mr. Pazhwak of Afghanistan, in the course of three strenuous sessions since September last year.
158. It is a little less than a year since I had the honour to address this Assembly on the occasion of my country's admission to full membership in the United Nations. Barbados is the baby of the Organization. However, independent countries, unlike some members of the animal kingdom, are born with their eyes wide open. I regret to say that what we have seen in these past ten months has not given cause for satisfaction. From where we stand there is one highly visible thread woven throughout the pattern of international relations in the economic, social and political spheres. It is a kind of selective and arrogant disdain by most of the great Powers towards the practice of genuine international co-operation.
159. Nowhere is this more evident than in connexion with the question of South West Africa. The delegation of Barbados participated in the fifth special session of the General Assembly earlier this year, held against the background of General Assembly resolution 2145 (XXI), That resolution, representing the sovereign act of 114 Members of this Assembly, declared that South Africa had failed to fulfil its obligations to South West Africa under the Mandate. It therefore terminated the Mandate, and put South West Africa under the direct responsibility of the United Nations. At the same time, the resolution charged an Ad Hoc Committee to recommend practical means by which the Territory should be administered "so as to enable the people... to exercise the right of self-determination and to achieve independence".
160. Some of the most powerful nations of the world gave their assent and approval to that resolution. Perhaps ingenuously, we believed that when nations were prepared to commit themselves to the search for practical means of bringing South West Africa under direct United Nations administration, that commitment would be honoured in the spirit and in the letter. We were wrong. When the day of decision came and this Assembly was faced with the reasoned, moderate, and balanced resolution jointly sponsored by nearly all the African, Asian and Latin American countries, we found the now familiar formula repeated once more: the smaller and less developed countries of the world on one side, and the larger and more developed countries on the other. On the one hand, we were told that we were being unrealistic because the resolution asked too much; on the other hand, we were told we were being unrealistic because the resolution asked too little.
161. My Government stands firm by its commitment to assist in bringing about the liberation of the peoples of South West Africa through the machinery of the United Nations. It will therefore give all the support of which it is capable to the United Nations Council for South West Africa in its difficult task.
162. The crisis in the Middle East, which has lain simmering for the last eighteen years, boiled up to a full head of violence in the early days of June. There are few international problems which touch the small countries of the world more closely than this longstanding conflict, and there are few in which the responsibility of the so-called great Powers is more directly engaged. It Was these Powers that sponsored the creation of the State of Israel; their negligence, their pursuit of shifting and contradictory policies, have been largely to blame for the tragedy that has overtaken more than a million Arab refugees and for the sorry, wasteful belligerence that has hung like a miasma over the region since 1948.
163. My Government cannot accept without protest the systematic maintenance of a state of belligerence between Members of this Organization. We cannot afford to. Small countries must insist upon their right to exist and to be recognized. It was for this reason that the delegation of Barbados at the fifth emergency special session of the General Assembly was proud to co-sponsor the balanced resolution of the Latin American countries, which called for a withdrawal of Israel's forces from the territories captured in the recent war and for an end to belligerence by all parties to the conflict. This is the position which we shall continue to hold, for it springs from our conviction that international life can operate on no other basis than the mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity which the Charter of this Organization prescribes.
164. There are permanent members of the Security Council Who are eager, when it suits them, to remind us of the primary responsibility which the Charter places on them for the maintenance of world peace. I wish to say that in the Middle East they have fallen for short of fulfilling that responsibility.
165. In Viet-Nam we have witnessed the distressing spectacle of a great Power harnessing to the destructive works of war its enormous potential for the constructive works of peace. This wastage of human and material resources in a world of hunger, poverty and disease is one of the tragic ironies of our time.
166. The voice of our Secretary-General has been a leading one in the call for a settlement by negotiation. We of the smaller territories, even though we cannot pretend to be more than baffled and frustrated bystanders, can and must raise our voices in the call for peace.
167. I scarcely think that it is a coincidence that the Organization now finds itself in greater difficulties on the question of peace-keeping. To put it mildly, we cannot help wondering if all the arguments about the constitutional and financial difficulties of setting up viable peace-keeping machinery do not represent a smoke-screen rather than a set of valid problems. We could have no clearer demonstration of the need for this machinery than the recent events in the Middle East. If the Organization had had the capacity to interpose itself quickly and effectively between the conflicting parties, the limited success of the United Nations Emergency Force and the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization would not have vanished in the smoke of battle. Let us hope that this will serve to give a greater sense of urgency and realism to the work of the Special Committee on Peace-keeping Operations.
168. Let us turn now to some problems which are of central concern to all the developing countries, large or small. Last year, from this rostrum, I spoke of the moral and political implications of the inequitable distribution of the world's wealth. While we could not have realistically hoped for any dramatic changes in the world economic situation in one brief year, we scarcely expected that no progress at all would have been made towards arresting the dangerous tendency for the rich to become richer and the poor poorer.
169. Indeed, It is easy for us in the developing areas to take a pessimistic view when we see that even the modest aims of the United Nations Development Decade have not been achieved. The report of the Secretary-General points out [A/6701, p. 81] that the rate of over-all growth in the developing countries, which had slowed down slightly between 1964 and 1965, further declined to between 3 and 4 per cent between 1965 and 1966. Over the same period the rate of growth of the developed market economies increased by 5 per cent in real terms, and that of the European centrally-planned economies by more than 7 per cent.
170. It is for those reasons that my country strongly supports every initiative that leads to a greater and more effective involvement of the United Nations in the global problem of economic development. We want to see more attention paid to Article 55 of the Charter, which has a meaning and an urgency that was perhaps not fully foreseen by those who drafted it. For it is now more obvious than ever that the conditions of stability and well-being which are necessary for friendly relations among nations cannot be achieved without the promotion of higher standards of living, full employment, and conditions of economic and social progress and development.
171. No developing country wishes to remain permanently a ghetto-dweller on the fringes of world society, complacently awaiting hand-outs from the kitchen windows of the advanced nations. And it is only In this Organization that we see any prospect of ending the immoral and illogical arithmetic by which the poor countries can actually be penalized for increasing their productivity.
172. For this is very largely a question of morality and logic. The Secretary-General's progress report on the outflow of capital from the developing countries tells its own story. The policies of some advanced countries do little to dissipate the clouds of uncertainty that hang over the future of our exports. Our hopes are further frustrated by a panoply of restrictions on access to markets in the advanced countries for manufactures from developing countries.
173. These conditions of economic frustration notwithstanding, the Government and people of Barbados dare to hope with the Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development that the second Conference to he held at New Delhi In 1968 will be an opportunity for frank examination and real progress on those important issues. In particular, the representatives of Barbados will be looking for concrete advances towards the Improvement of export possibilities for raw materials, and preferential treatment for manufactures and semi-manufactures from developing countries.
174. In this context, my Government must welcome the establishment of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization. Small as our country is, industrialization nevertheless has great importance for us. We shall be particularly interested to see what assistance that Organization can offer countries in our peculiar circumstances in our life-and-death battle to free ourselves from the dangerous dependence on one or two primary products which is a legacy of our recent colonial past.
175. Because of that past, and because of the close historical and cultural ties which bind us, my Government is deeply interested in developments in the new States in the Caribbean which have a status of association with the United Kingdom Government. While we scrupulously refrain from intervention in their domestic affairs, it is natural that we should feel a deep and friendly concern for their problems. The present constitutions provide the associated States with full internal self-government, but the United Kingdom Government retains responsibility for their defence and external affairs. There can be no question, therefore, that it is the United Kingdom Government which is answerable to the United Nations for all constitutional developments in these Territories towards complete self-government in the context of General Assembly resolution 1514 (XV). It would, indeed, be contrary to the spirit of the Charter if those communities were cut off from all effective contact with this Organization by even the most benevolent constitutional device.
176. The need for this kind of contact was particularly felt in the recent discussions at the United Nations on the so-called Anguilla question. My own Government, at the invitation of the Government of the United Kingdom and the Government of the unitary State of St, Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, undertook to join with three other independent Caribbean countries in the search for a peaceful solution to the constitutional problem created by the purported secession of Anguilla. That search continues in the context of the need to reconcile respect for the territorial Integrity of the State with a proper concern for the inalienable rights of the community of the island of Anguilla.
177. One of the urgent tasks confronting an independent country which has recently emerged from the wilderness of colonialism is the inescapable obligation to chart a new course based on the imperatives of realism and self-interest. Although my country has no intention of completely severing the cultural and economic ties which link us to Great Britain, we are convinced that our best interests lie in vigorous promotion of the cause of regional co-operation. That is why my Government has taken active steps, in conjunction with the Governments of Guyana and Antigua, to create a free trade area as a hopeful prelude to the establishment of a wider Caribbean common market.
178. Our search for new horizons has naturally increased our awareness of our hemispheric destinies. My Government is gratified that its application to join the Organization of American Stages was approved by acclamation on Wednesday last [4 October]. We are convinced that such regional institutions provide the best framework for pursuing common goals, so long as the approach is always consistent with the basic principles of the United Nations Charter.
179. The Government of Barbados welcomes the steps taken by the Latin American Governments to conclude a Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America. We support that initiative because we recognize that any efforts to limit the spread of nuclear weapons by creating nuclear-free zones is a vital contribution to disarmament and the peace and security of the world. It is therefore regrettable that one of the provisions of that Treaty should have the effect of excluding certain countries in the hemisphere from immediate accession to the Treaty. That is a potentially dangerous loophole which weakens the whole purpose of such an accord.
180. In this address I have dealt largely with the degree to which we in the developing countries consider that the achievements of this worthy Organization have fallen short of its own declared ideals and the aspirations of the majority of mankind. We on our part pledge our fullest support to you, Mr. President, and the other Members of the United Nations in closing this gap between achievement and expectation in the year that lies ahead and in the years to come.