79. It goes without saying that the Togolese delegation shares the general concern on hearing of the unfortunate accident which has befallen Mr. Fanfani, the President of our Assembly. Through you, Mr. Vice-President, and through the Italian delegation, my delegation would like to offer him our hearty good wishes for a speedy recovery. Although he is absent, Mr. Fanfani is still among us; I shall therefore not make any changes in my statement.
80. Like the speakers who have preceded me at this rostrum, I should like to take the opportunity of the general debate - to express my delegation’s deep satisfaction at seeing our work start normally under your Presidency, Mr. Fanfani. For the Togolese delegation this is a double reason for satisfaction.
81. Mr. President, your almost unanimous election to this high international office is a tribute to your human attributes and qualities and to your great merits as a distinguished professor and an eminent economist, and does honour to your ability as an outstanding statesman of world renown. This honour that is done to you is done also to your country, Italy; it is an honour to Rome, the spiritual capital of Catholic Christianity and the political capital of Italy. All those who have spoken from this rostrum have welcomed the opportunity to emphasize what modern civilization owes to the Romans, both in the legal, constitutional and artistic spheres and in the literary field. When we speak of culture in general, we think of Athens but we cannot fail to think also of Rome.
82. Be that as it may, the General Assembly has elected you, Mr. President, to guide our work because we are all convinced that you will fulfil your difficult and delicate task with all the authority and the competence which have marked your career as a politician. And it is because you are from Italy, a country with which my Government maintains the most friendly relations, that my delegation feels a twofold satisfaction as this session opens.
83. Your role, Mr. President, will be difficult, because of the mistrust which prevails in international relations, the spirit of domination of some and of intolerance of others, the division of the world into zones of influences, and all the existing or latent problems which await a solution.
84. The arms race, is, of course, a product of these factors.
85. The budgetary difficulties facing our Organization did not arise yesterday. A recent speaker at this rostrum said that the financial situation of the United Nations had for long been a constant concern of the Secretary-General, and, emphasizing the expedients to which there had been recourse, stated:
"... for none of us has a really clear idea of what the financial balance sheet of the United Nations may be today. What with the expenses falling on the Organization, the debts of every kind that it has contracted on all sides, the distinction to be made between budgetary operations and treasury operations, taking into account what has been borrowed from one fund or another, whose resources, however, are definitely earmarked, I wonder what Member State could find its way about in this situation without hesitation?" [1341st meeting, para. 89.]
86. Thus however alarming the financial difficulties of the Organization may seem, they are neither surprising nor novel to any of us. The representative of France has analysed them, enumerated their causes and proposed a solution which has the full support of my delegation.
87. Yet it was on the basis of these financial difficulties that some Powers which call themselves friends of Africa unjustifiably launched a crisis that paralysed the work of the nineteenth session, which was presided over by a representative of Africa, and indeed of black Africa. Since these Powers were able to come to an understanding immediately, from the very beginning, to avoid a confrontation, because all of them had a major interest in keeping the United Nations in being, and since these Powers knew in their hearts that they would eventually have to find an acceptable solution, why did they initiate such an absurd crisis?
88. The distinguished representative of a brother country has spoken here of a feeling of frustration. Should we not go further and say quite frankly that what Africa felt was humiliation combined with indignation?
89. But as President, Mr. Quaison-Sackey was able to draw, from the very sources of Nego-African standards of civilization, wisdom and authority to overcome the difficulties which some had seen fit to heap artificially in his way. We should like to pay a tribute to bis qualities of diplomacy and tact.
90. If, however, black Africa has been able to draw its conclusions from the situation, the States of the third world have not failed to understand the meaning and the scope of the other objective of this crisis: namely, to force the General Assembly to become aware of the fact that the United States and the Soviet Union are the two essential pillars of the Organization and then to induce it, willingly or unwillingly, to accept the prerogatives of the Security Council as they are defined by the Charter twenty years ago.
91. These are the political realities of the crisis, which has by no means been overcome by the resolution submitted by the Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations and adopted by the General Assembly at the end of its nineteenth session [resolution 2006 (XIX)].
92. The club of the great Powers, not to say their directorate, deliberately turning its back on the great revolution which has taken place in international relations during the last twenty years, is stubbornly trying to protect privileges which the necessary development of relations between States proscribes.
93. The Minister for Foreign Affairs of France stated on 29 September 1965:
"The United Nations is first of all a statute, a law, which is called the Charter. It is next a policy, entailing the need to judge, i.e., to seek, to determine, not only what is desirable but also what is possible. The Charter itself foreshadowed this policy in the balance which it established between the various organs and in the precautions which it took with respect to United Nations action.
"Indeed, such action was wisely reserved to the Security Council alone, and the oft-invoked resolution [377 (V) ] that was improvised during the 1950 crisis has been unable to affect this rule." [1341st meeting, paras. 94 and 95.]
94. Although there were slight differences in the statement made on this matter on 23 September 1965 by the representative of the United States, it was in the same vein. He said that the General Assembly should intervene to initiate action only "when the Security Council is unable to act" [1334th meeting, para. 81]. But when can it reasonably be said that the Council is unable to act?
95. It has become quite clear that the permanent members of the Security Council stubbornly refuse to recognize the principal reality of the last twenty years, namely, the admission of more than seventy-one new States to membership of the Organization and the need to rationalize the Charter on a fairer basis. In these circumstances, how can the overwhelming majority of Members of the United Nations feel bound by the financial consequences of an action which is decided upon by a small minority, even if that minority thinks that it has special responsibilities, in the world? My Government finds that disturbing. But for Africans, however distressing this situation is, it is of minor importance compared with what is going on in Rhodesia.
96. Are we not entitled to ask what the real motive of the United Kingdom Government was when in 1960, at a time when decolonization was proceeding rapidly in black Africa, it entrusted to a minority of white settlers the absurd power to tyrannize over the black majority? We refuse to interpret the admirable decolonization carried out by the United Kingdom elsewhere in Africa as a golden curtain designed to hide the replica in Rhodesia of the iniquitous constitutional precedent of South Africa.
97. The United Kingdom cannot evade its heavy responsibility before world public opinion by sheltering behind a pretext of non-intervention in the internal affairs of a territory which, legally, is still a Crown Colony.
98. The Minister for Foreign Affairs of Senegal referred in the Security Council, and recently in this forum, to the evils of the inhuman policy of the white adventurers in Rhodesia and invited the United Kingdom Government to act, as he puts it, ''before it is too late” [1334th meeting, para. 131].
99. The United Kingdom knows perfectly well that, in the event of a unilateral declaration of independence, the threat of economic sanctions alone or; of nonrecognition of the so-called Government of Salisbury will not be calculated to disturb Ian Smith. In the opinion of my delegation, only force will be able to bring the Rhodesian adventurers to reason in this matter. General de Gaulle showed political realism and wisdom by acting in this way in Algeria.
100. In addition, the Government of the United Kingdom has itself just established a precedent. On 25 September 1965, Her Britannic Majesty’s Government suspended the Constitution which it had given to Aden on 1 October 1962 and invested Sir Richard Turnbull, the High Commissioner, with full powers to enable him to take direct charge of the administration of the territory.' In this connexion, a communique published by the Foreign Office is significant. It stated:
"Following the rapid deterioration of the situation in Aden in recent weeks, the United Kingdom Government has felt compelled to resort to the suspension of the powers of the Ministers and the Legislative Council of the Colony."
101. Since the United Kingdom Government found it possible to remember that Aden was still a Crown Colony, are we not entitled to ask that country to recall that Rhodesia has the same legal status and that, in view of the deterioration of the situation in that territory, it can and must act with the same rigour? There is still time.
102. I now come to the problem of South Africa. I shall not say much on this subject, since the Special Committee on Apartheid has been dealing with this question for many years and has emphasized the atrocities committed against the African population day after day by the demented Pretoria authorities. I shall confine myself to expressing the indignation that my delegation feels at seeing among us, seated with impunity, the representative of a country which has declared, with us, its "faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women", which has freely accepted all the provisions of the Charter, which systematically refuses to respect its obligations towards the Organization and to comply with the injunctions in the various resolutions condemning the policy of apartheid and which denies United Nations missions the right to visit the territory of South West Africa, which is under its trusteeship.
103. Obviously, if the great Powers did not place their trading interests above their solemn undertakings to the United Nations and if they had applied the provisions of the resolutions adopted by the General Assembly concerning apartheid, the reactionary Government of Pretoria would undoubtedly have abandoned its infamous policy long ago. My delegation will therefore enthusiastically support any resolution advocating the severe punishment of the Afrikaners and, if necessary, the expulsion of the Republic of South Africa from the United Nations so long as that country has the misfortune to be afflicted with a non-representative Government.
104. For the same reasons, my delegation is ready to support any draft resolution recommending the merciless application of sanctions against Portugal, whose Government has the audacity to claim that Angola and other African countries are in Portugal.
105. Let us quickly leave that question, which remains the shame and ignominy of mankind, and come now to one of the basic objectives of the Charter: "to maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace ...". How can we attain such a noble and broad objective, which responds to the supreme aspirations of humanity and* how can the action of the United Nations be truly effective when the country with the greatest population in the world remains outside the Organization?
106. The argument put forward by certain representatives that the People’s Republic of China cannot be admitted to our international family because of its bellicose or imperialist policy and its aggressiveness does not stard up to analysis. Obviously, if Communist China consents to become one of us, it will doubtless be because it will have accepted the fundamental principles of international morality: peaceful coexistence, establishment of friendly relations based on respect for the principle of equal rights of peoples and their right to self-determination, respect for sovereignty, and so on.
107. Should we not be frank with ourselves? Has there ever been any question of excluding from the United Nations Member States which have violated the provisions of the Charter and used force to settle
their disputes whenever their interests appeared to be endangered? The People’s Republic of China is not a Member of the United Nations. That being so, how can we blame. it if it feels free to settle its problems in its own way? How could China consent to consider itself bound by decisions taken in its absence by an Organization of which it is not a member?
108. In my delegation’s opinion, wisdom demands the admission of the People’s Republic of China to the United Nations, and the sooner the better. Each day its continued exclusion increases the threat to peace. In other words, my delegation favours the admission of the People’s Republic of China but my Government will defend this position only in so far as it will not result in the exclusion of another Member State, namely. Nationalist China.
109. Togo remains faithful to its friends but it also considers that the universality of our Organization is incompatible with ostracism and exclusion. The admission of a new State enriches and strengthens the Organization; the exclusion of a Member weakens it and makes it poorer.
110. My delegation , would therefore like to take this opportunity to welcome the Gambia, Singapore and the Maldive Islands to our ranks. On behalf of my Government, I offer those countries my warmest congratulations and my best wishes for the prosperity and happiness of their peoples.
111. I should not like to end this part of my statement, which is concerned with the political problems that are still unsolved, without saying something of my Government’s attitude towards the formidable questions of the reunification of Germany, Korea and Viet-Nam. Article 1 (2) of the Charter stipulates that the. purposes of the United Nations include the development of. "friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples ....". Since the principle of the self-determination of peoples has been accepted by all Members States, should it not be applied to peoples who have been arbitrarily divided for reasons which may once have been honourable but which today cause them serious hardship? These men and women of the same race, the same language and common traditions are crying out for reunification.
112. My delegation, basing itself on the provisions of the Charter and remembering the sorrow and indignation felt by all the Togolese people during the iniquitous and arbitrary division of my country, will vigorously support any draft resolution requesting that free elections should be held as soon as possible on the basis of universal adult suffrage and under United Nations supervision, in Germany, Korea and Viet-Nam so that these divided peoples can decide their own destiny. The United Nations would thus be performing an act of justice.
113. The attitude of my delegation towards the People’s Republic of China leads me quite naturally to speak briefly about the problem of peace, and more specifically the problem of disarmament. Voices of greater authority than mine have spoken of this grave problem for many years and have tried in vain to find a final solution to it. In fact, it is like squaring the circle; the main obstacle is mistrust and fear. The great Powers mistrust one another and the small States fear the big States. How can one State disarm without the assurance that a rival State does not remain armed? Mistrust and fear are engendered.by the vanity of nations, by their thirst for hegemony and domination, and hence for power. As long as such a state of mind exists, disarmament conferences will merely be a dialogue between deaf people.
114. The international situation today, however, is such that we can no longer discuss disarmament, without the participation of Communist China. For that reason, my delegation, without any illusions, voted in favour of resolution DC/224 calling for a world disarmament conference. If such a conference were convened, it would at least allow of the necessary confrontation of divergent views and thus throw a clearer light on the magnitude of the difficulties. But would anything positive emerge?
115. Togo is among the sponsors of resolution DC/225 y because this resolution assigns to the Eighteen-Nation Committee clearly defined tasks, which are: "... to develop a treaty on general and complete disarmament under effective international control... consider as a matter of priority the question of extending the scope of the partial test-ban treaty to cover underground tests ... also accord special priority to the consideration of the question of a treaty or convention to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons" and to convert "to programmes of economic and social development of the developing countries a substantial part of the resources gradually released by the reduction of military expenditures".
116. The partial test-ban treaty is a step forward along the path to disarmament, but another step could be taken in the field of nuclear disarmament if agreement could be reached on the proposal submitted last month by the Soviet Union Government to the Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The immediate measures proposed by the Soviet Union may be summarized as follows: first, abstention from the use of nuclear weapons; secondly, the adoption of immediate measures with a view to concluding an international agreement concerning the prohibition of the use of atomic weapons; and thirdly, efforts to further the success of negotiations concerning the elimination and prohibition of atomic weapons, and total disarmament. The advantage of the Soviet Union proposals lies in the fact that they would render the production of atomic and thermonuclear weapons useless, since their employment would be prohibited.
117. While the Togolese people are happy and proud to have succeeded, without, bloodshed, in achieving freedom and dignity, in a word, political independence, they are convinced that economic independence is the sine qua non of national independence. We have therefore become engaged in the battle for the development of our resources and their maximum utilization. A five-year plan has already been launched and will soon be submitted to all friendly States which are willing to give us their assistance and support without any political conditions. Our appeal will be addressed to the private and public sectors, both foreign and Togolese.
118. The open-door policy followed by my Government in economic and customs matters is perfectly compatible with the smallness of Togo's territory and allows all States, without discrimination, to enter into trade relations with us. Moreover, the Togolese investment code, together with our political stability, which is the result of the wise policy of national union and reconciliation followed by President Grunitzky, guarantees the security of invested capital.
119. But this is only part of the battle. Underdevelopment constitutes the major handicap of most non-aligned countries and the problems to which it gives rise are therefore common to all of us.
120. Because of the disadvantages inherent in the operation of a national economy within a narrow market, the African States will turn more and more towards regional arrangements in the search for an integrated and complementary economy based on a more extensive market. At the same time, as the representative of Senegal so eloquently pointed out in his statement [1334th meeting], the highly industrialized countries must embark upon a more dynamic and more realistic economic policy which will include the organization of the markets for raw materials, the progressive industrialization of under-developed countries, together with its essential accompaniment, more substantial aid to development. In my opinion, only such a policy, through the spirit of international solidarity which it generates, will be able to create among States, both rich and poor, a better climate of understanding and co-operation based on justice and peace.
121. At the beginning of my statement I dealt with the existing or potential problems which are still awaiting a solution. Speakers who have preceded me at this rostrum have drawn up a balance-sheet for the United Nations. I shall not dwell on that subject but the failures which have been noted enable us to appreciate more deeply our successes, which are due not only to the Members of the United Nations but above all to the constant and untiring efforts and devotion of the Secretary-General, U Thant, who has the full sympathy and support of my Government.
122. In conclusion, I should like to recall the statement made on behalf of the Togolese Government by our Permanent Representative on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the United Nations. He said:
"Twenty years of constant, unremitting efforts to persuade.men to understand each other better, to respect each other, to love one another. Twenty years of efforts to lead peoples from the state of dependency to international sovereignty. Twenty years of efforts to impart to this Organization its oecumenical character. The essential objectives are admittedly • far from being attained. Certain sovereign States should already have become Members of the Organization. Peoples are still suffering under the foreign yoke. The armaments race persists, and so does international tension. Prejudice and intolerance have not been disarmed. But the Organization represents for humanity progress and an ideal — an ideal of justice, an ideal of peace. It is and will remain for States the supreme tribunal for the settlement of international difficulties. Finally, it is for mankind a hope and a promise. Its vision of the total man, the man of flesh, the man of the spirit, whose great needs must be progressively satisfied, tends to diversify its activities and make them more universal. Henceforth, nothing that is human is foreign to it...
"The Republic of Togo, which yesterday was a Trust Territory, is today a sovereign State and acknowledges what it owes to the efforts of the United Nations. Today, as yesterday, it affirms its devotion to the United Nations.
"The Government and people of Togo believe in the ideals of justice and peace of the United Nations and will everywhere and at all times support and assist it."