Do not be surprised at the presence on this rostrum of a representative of the Republic of Haiti. I have the honour to represent a small country, small in a geographical sense, but a country with a great history, the very existence of which is the most striking affirmation of the principles underlying the United Nations. The proclamation of the independence of Haiti on 1 January 1804 was, through the abolition of slavery, an enshrinement of the principle of human liberty and, in the entrance of a people of Negro origin into the society of civilized nations, a confirmation of the principle of the equality of races.
37. Haiti is the second oldest independent State of the Americas, coming immediately after the Northern United States. After having gained its independence without outside aid and by virtue of its own efforts, it helped Simon Bolivar to emancipate the Spanish colonies on the American continent, thereby giving to the world the very highest example of brotherly solidarity at a time when its own security was still in peril. Although its population has lost nothing of its warlike qualities, Haiti has always tried to settle even its gravest disputes with other nations by pacific means. It was with a loyal and sincere heart that it offered its collaboration to the Pan American Union, to the League of Nations, and now to the United Nations, for the maintenance of peace based on a justice opposed to the teachings of hate and violence which aim at setting races, nations and classes at odds with each other.
38. Twice in these last thirty years Haiti has gone to war: in 1914, at the side of France and its allies; and in 1941, at the side of the United States and its allies. After victory was won, Haiti was glad to join with the other forty-nine States which, on 24 October 1945, founded the United Nations, thereby affirming their profound faith in the dignity of the human person and the equality of nations great and small ; manifesting their intention to hasten social progress and establish the best possible conditions for spiritual and material life for all men in all countries, without distinction of race, colour, sex, class, language or belief; promising to unite their efforts to maintain a peace based on justice and equity, on respect for treaties and the rules of international law; and undertaking to establish, in order to ensure the maintenance of peaceful relations between peoples, a system of collective security capable of resisting any display of violence and any overt or hidden attempt by totalitarian imperialism, in whatever form and whatever guise it might adorn its leering countenance.
39. Ten more State have associated themselves with the original fifty Members, and when the United Nations has embraced those States which are still denied membership for political reasons, it will constitute the greatest world-wide federation that has ever existed in the history of mankind. Today, in this Organization and in it alone, more than a thousand million men, women and children — a majority of the people of the world — put their most fervent hopes for peace, security and prosperity.
40. One of the merits of the Charter of the United Nations is that it has linked the problem of peace with the problem of economic progress and social justice. All our countries are really parts of vast system of economic interdependence, and collectively they can improve the economic and social position of their respective populations through technical assistance, exchange of goods or capital advances. The founders of the United Nations created the Economic and Social Council, and conferred far-reaching powers upon it in order to apply this policy of solidarity and co-operation.
41. After the bloody horror and the cruel destruction of the last world war, the peace-loving nations had thought that they could adopt the slogan: “If you desire peace, prepare for peace” — Si vis pacem, para pacem. They demobilized their armies and prepared a vast programme of technical, economic and financial assistance, with the aim of restoring the weakened economies of Europe and Asia and developing the prosperity of under-developed countries to the maximum by methodical use of their natural resources and rational employment of their human resources. But a disastrous policy, the authors of which it is your mission and ours to seek out and punish, has once more imposed upon the free peoples the old slogan : “ If you desire peace, prepare for war ” — Si vis pacem, para bellum, and has thereby embarked these nations on to the course of costly armaments, obliging them to abandon or reduce the efforts in the field of social justice, in which most of them had been engaged, to raise the cultural and material standards of their working classes.
42. This tragic necessity has compelled France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway, who have suffered so much through war — and it would be absurd, even criminal, to accuse them of warmongering — to spend fabulous sums on armaments which in two or three years may be out of date.
43. If one has lived in the United States, as I have, and studied the history of that country’s amazing development, if one realizes that it is in peace and through peace that it has reached such a high degree of prosperity, even if one can reproach it for having too long followed a selfish policy of isolation for fear of involvement in the quarrels of a too often divided Europe, the accusation of war-mongering against the American people and its Government seems startling. We cannot really believe that, with the aim of pursuing some vain dream of totalitarian hegemony, the United States, at the risk of ruining its own economy and that of its friends, agrees willingly to take away from the work of social progress those thousands of millions of dollars which are being used to manufacture bombs, build submarines, construct arsenals, establish military bases and maintain under arms millions of men who could be more usefully employed in the fields, factories, universities, research laboratories and hospitals for the advancement of science, the production of more and more wealth, and the struggle against ignorance, poverty and disease.
44. This tragic necessity of arming in order to defend themselves and in order to check any attempt at aggression will continue to burden the peace-loving nations until the United Nations organizes a system of collective security affording genuine guarantees.
45. This has been made plain by the aggression in Korea. Although that bloody venture has shaken human conscience to the core, the immediate resistance to the attack launched by the Chinese and North Koreans has at least demonstrated the solidity of the United Nations system of collective security. The small nations have a particular interest in the organization of a system of collective security because they know only too well that they cannot by their own resources ensure their defence, maintain their independence and preserve their territorial integrity against the criminal ventures of a powerful aggressor.
46. In this connexion, I would recall that the advisory conference of Ministers of Foreign Affairs of American States, which met at Washington from 26 March to 7 April 1951, and which extended such a cordial welcome to the President of the French Republic, Mr. Vincent Auriol, fully approved the action of the United Nations in the present crisis.
47. In a declaration which was unanimously adopted by the conference, it was stated that the present world situation demanded effective support on the part of the American Republics so that it would be possible, first, to ensure the collective defence of the hemisphere through the Organization of American States, and, secondly, to co-operate within the United Nations in order to prevent aggression in other parts of the world.
48. The declaration in question was followed by a formal recommendation to the American Republics to organize within their armed forces units which could be placed at the disposal of the United Nations in case of need, in accordance with the resolution entitled “Uniting for Peace” adopted by the General Assembly in November 1950. That speaks for itself. The regional arrangement that the organization of the twenty-one American Republics constitutes is fully in keeping with the principles of the United Nations as regards collective security and the necessity of resisting by force, if need be, all acts of aggression wherever they may occur in the world.
49. The dialogue conducted yesterday from this rostrum by Mr. Acheson and Mr. Vyshinsky afforded us an opportunity of appreciating the wisdom of Plato’s dictum that no discussion should be started without the terms to be used first being defined. It was quite plain to any listener that agreement between the two speakers was impossible because, differing in mentality, they employed the same words to mean different and even contradictory things. The word “peace” in Mr. Acheson’s vocabulary meant “war” in that of Mr. Vyshinsky. Truth for one was falsehood for the other. “Resistance to aggression”, as understood by Mr. Acheson meant a plot against the Soviet Union to Mr. Vyshinsky. It is a sign of the times that words have lost their original meaning, and that a flagrant insult, such as might perhaps in other days have provoked war between two nations, produces no other effect today than a contemptuous smile or a burst of laughter if, as is not always the case, it happens to be delivered with wit.
50. To cite the most striking example of linguistic, not to say mental, confusion, we all know that in the etymological sense the word “democracy” means “power or government by the people ”, and Abraham Lincoln defined the word most succinctly and completely by saying that it was “government of the people, by the people, for the people” . Yet it has been thought worthwhile to precede the word “democracy” by the word “people’s” which amounts to saying: “People’s government of the people The dramatic thing about this superfluous, pleonastic and tautological addition, which, at most, might have provoked a linguistic dispute, is that it is a line of demarcation between two blocs of nations and raises between them what I might almost have been inclined to call an iron curtain had I not learned yesterday, to my great joy, that the iron curtain is now nothing but a piece of scrap iron preserved in the archives of the State Department in Washington for the edification of tourists with a taste for antiquities.
51. Can we claim that our unqualified democracies have achieved the ideal of Lincoln’s definition? That is far from being the case. Each of them should seriously examine its conscience. Which of them could testify in all good faith that they have established at home that democracy for which they ask their citizens to be ready to fight and die? Which of them, within their own territory, have taken the necessary steps to prevent men from exploiting one another? Which of them have seriously attempted to ensure to all their citizens, without discrimination, equal opportunities for a decent and worthy existence? Which of them have conscientiously practised towards their national minorities or their colonial populations the Christian law of the brotherhood of man? Every one of our democracies has sins upon its conscience. Raymond Poincare used to say that “peace is a continuous creation”, and we might well paraphrase that famous remark by saying that democracy is a continuous creation. The honour of each of us, however, lies in abolishing injustices practised to the detriment of the weak and in seeking, in close collaboration with other nations, to establish in the world a new order based on true human freedom, on genuine justice and on real racial equality both within each country and in international relations.
52. The Economic and Social Council of the United Nations is engaged on that task and it is with a view to offering its whole-hearted co-operation in such endeavours that the Republic of Haiti has asked you to support its candidature for one of the vacant seats on the Council.
53. The horrors of the last war have confirmed most forcefully the principle that the legal conscience of the civilized world demands that the individual should be accorded rights that cannot be violated by the State. Those horrors have also demonstrated how necessary it is that responsibility for a criminal act should be placed on individuals, not merely on the legal entity represented by the State, but also on the real or physical persons representing that State, or in other words, the governments which ordered or performed the criminal act. Thus, it became possible to set up the international Nurnberg Tribunal, which has established what is called the “ law of Nurnberg ”. The American judge at that unique court, Mr. Francis Biddle, proposed at the time the adoption of an international penal code to define the cases where there might legitimately be intervention on humanitarian grounds for the repression of crimes against the human person, a dictum that had already been advocated by the Viennese school of Hans Kelsen, who maintained that international law was above domestic law.
54. The declaration of human rights which was voted upon and approved at Bogota by the Organization of American States in May 1948, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in Paris in December 1948, condemn all racial persecution. We hope that the draft covenant to be submitted to this Assembly will specify the penalties against States or persons infringing the principles of justice and humanity laid down in international treaties. If such principles and such penalties had existed before Hitler’s time, the civilized powers would have had the authority to intervene in Germany in protest against the collective persecutions which were a prelude to the bloodiest mass slaughter in history.
55. I would merely recall here that at the advisory conference of Ministers of Foreign Affairs of American States in Washington in April 1951, the Republic of Haiti urged that special attention should be paid to this question of higher international morality.
56. In the world of today, like that of yesterday, the horrors of concentration camps are unfortunately still being perpetrated, and at a time when entire cities filled with the accumulated treasures of centuries of human endeavour are threatened with destruction by the atomic bomb, while moral values are being systematically destroyed by “ science without conscience ” and by a philosophy of despair which teaches hatred and violence, it may appear futile and even childish to speak of freedom for the individual, the dignity of the human person, the brotherhood of man, social justice, international solidarity and equality between men. Nevertheless, we believe that our civilization can be saved if the forces of goodwill are firmly attached to the principles of universal ethics on which our democratic societies are based. You statesmen who hold in your hands the destinies of your peoples, men of every race, colour, nationality, class, language, creed, philosophy, and ideology must remember that you have it in your power to save humanity from the mortal danger which threatens it, if you will but practise the eminently human Christian doctrine of brotherly love. For if you collaborate thus, to accomplish your mission, you will create that great human federation to which our hearts and minds aspire.