At the outset, Saint Vincent and the
Grenadines expresses its solidarity with the people of
Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica and the United States of America,
who have been savagely battered in quick succession
by Hurricanes Gustav, Hanna and Ike. Within the
Caribbean and our America, the heroism, bravery and
resilience of the Cuban, Haitian and Jamaican people
and ordinary Americans are a well-documented source
of pride to us all. We wish you all, the afflicted nations
and peoples, a speedy recovery, and we stand with you
in your rebuilding efforts.
Allow me to express my pleasure in noting that
the presidency of the General Assembly is now held by
a man whose native shores are kissed by the
magnificent Caribbean Sea. I am comforted by the
knowledge that he has a full appreciation of the
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majesty of our landscape and seascape, the
opportunities and challenges facing our region, and the
nobility of our Caribbean civilization. Mr. President,
your dream that another world is possible, as
courageously outlined in your inaugural presidential
statement, is both timely and prescient. I
wholeheartedly endorse your call for frankness,
democratization and a focus on the needs of the poor,
all under the redemptive and transformative rubric of
love and solidarity with our fellow human beings.
It is in that spirit of love and frankness that I
come before the Assembly today. In all candour, I must
affirm what you, Mr. President, have already
concluded: that the United Nations, as the supreme
multilateral institution of a profoundly troubled and
iniquitous world, can and must do more, in the form of
decisive action, to improve the condition of our planet,
the living conditions of the less fortunate and the safety
of our global family.
The late Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia once
stated:
“Throughout history, it has been the inaction of
those who could have acted, the indifference of
those who should have known better, the silence
of the voice of justice when it mattered most that
has made it possible for evil to triumph.”
There can be no doubt that the right-thinking and
civilized peoples of the world are aware of the
challenges facing us and of the path to peace,
prosperity, and progress upon which we must
collectively embark. However, the work that we have
entrusted to the United Nations is compromised by
apathy and inaction by too many of us and by the
crippling pursuit of narrow self-interest by a handful of
powerful countries. In this session, we have an historic
opportunity to reassert the relevance and credibility of
this body by keeping the promises that we have made
to ourselves and the world.
The United Nations is charged with tackling the
weighty problems that beset the world, not with the
refinement of the art of impotent diplomacy. I have no
doubt that the principles concealed in the language of
“mandate review”, “system-wide coherence” and
“revitalization” are important, and doubly so to the
professional diplomats who look inward rather than
outward and who lose sight of the forest for the trees in
their endless quest to choreograph the dancing of ever
more angels on the head of a pin.
One year ago, I stood at this very podium and
denounced the failure of the international community
to end the genocide in Darfur. One year ago, there were
promising, though belated, signs that the United
Nations was finally beginning to act decisively in this
regard. One year ago, I stated that “the force on the
ground is still insufficient, its mandate is ambiguous
and its emerging presence is years too late”
(A/62/PV.10, p. 15). Today, one year later, I am
shocked by our collective failures in Darfur. Last
month, Force Commander Martin Luther Agwai
compared his role to that of a boxer in the ring with his
hands tied behind his back, because his promised force
of 26,000 personnel is still less than 10,000 strong.
I thus reflect as to whether our promises of
“never again” and our commitments to the memories of
one million Rwandans mean anything, as the blood of
hundreds of thousands of Africans again stains the soil
of the continent and our collective conscience. As a
people whose past and future are inextricably
interwoven with the continent, we, the citizens of Saint
Vincent and the Grenadines, ask ourselves, in the
words of the Caribbean Nobel Laureate from Saint
Lucia, Derek Walcott, “How can I face such slaughter
and be cool?! How can I turn from Africa and live?”
The conflict in Darfur is over five years old, and the
time has long since past for genuine international
action to halt that unspeakable human tragedy.
While I congratulate the General Assembly on
finally clearing the way towards intergovernmental
negotiations on Security Council reform, it cannot be
an illusory or insincere process. The credibility of the
decisions made by the United Nations in the name of
peace and security hinges on the existence of a
Security Council that is democratic and representative
of the regional and development diversity of our body.
As we are all well aware, the scarcities and
escalating prices of basic foodstuffs have already led to
riots and political instability worldwide and within our
own Caribbean Community. While Saint Vincent and
the Grenadines has confronted the crisis with a creative
national food production plan that mixes agricultural
incentives with education and assistance, our local
measures are only ameliorative and cannot totally
insulate us from what is largely an imported problem.
We are again buffeted by the winds of unequal
trade liberalization, in which the agricultural subsidies
of developed States force our own nascent
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agro-industries into an uncompetitive demise. We are
witness to a world where crops are grown to feed cars
while people starve, and where climate change ruins
age-old farming and fishing livelihoods. The so-called
food crisis that we now face is but a symptom of
deeper structural flaws in our global economic system
and consumerist culture. It represents the human face
at the confluence of countless systemic flaws and
poorly conceived strategies, including trade barriers,
the mad rush to biofuels, adverse climate changes and
anaemic development assistance. Any meaningful
attempt to alleviate the suffering of the poor and
hungry people of the world must start with those
systemic issues and resist the urge to treat the
symptoms while ignoring the disease and its causes.
The banana farmers of Saint Vincent and the
Grenadines continue their heroic struggles to eke out a
living in the face of international corporate greed,
thinly disguised as principled globalization. Our
farmers, tradesmen and private sector are still waiting
for the oft-promised opportunities that supposedly
accompany globalization. However, the evidence to
date suggests that the international community has
inadvertently institutionalized and entrenched poverty
within a system of global winners and losers. The
ironically titled Doha Development Round looks less
and less like a negotiating process and more and more
like a suicide pact within which the World Trade
Organization (WTO) and the major economic Powers
want everything and concede little or nothing to the
poor and developing nations of the world.
The solutions to our economic crises hinge upon
genuine negotiation and compromise in the interests of
the world’s least privileged. We are ill-served by
benign neglect, unequal enforcement and concepts of
welfare colonialism. The recent troubles in the world’s
premier financial and banking countries exacerbate the
profound challenges facing developing nations.
Six years ago, world leaders gathered in Mexico
and gave birth to the Monterrey Consensus, in which
they pledged their objective to eradicate poverty,
achieve sustained economic growth and promote
sustainable development as we advance to a fully
inclusive and equitable global economic system. I
prayed at the time that the Conference would not
devolve into a dragon’s dance upon a decorous
platform of the finest diplomatic language which few
are determined to embrace for action.
Six years later, Monterrey is remembered as the
site of grand, unfulfilled commitments to the
developing world, much as Africa recalls the empty
promises of Gleneagles. The four decade-old promise
to devote 0.7 per cent of gross national income to
official development assistance remains more illusion
than reality. Countries like ours are therefore forced to
scour the globe for friends willing to partner with us
for the development of our people, while others would
rather sit in judgement of our development decisions
and priorities than rise to offer a helping hand.
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines once again
pleads with the international community to be
cognizant of the plight of Taiwan’s 23 million people.
Even though the United Nations historical neglect of
the Taiwan issue has not been a source of pride, the
Government of Taiwan has acted responsibly and
without confrontation to subordinate many of its
legitimate political claims into efforts aimed at
reducing cross-Strait tensions, promoting peace and
building relations with the People’s Republic of China.
The United Nations must now act to ensure the
survival of that fledgling rapprochement. Taiwan
should be encouraged on its path to peace by
permitting its meaningful participation in the
specialized agencies of the United Nations. Much as
Taiwan’s vibrant economy is recognized through its
participation in WTO, there is no compelling reason
why its equally vibrant people should be denied
participation in the World Health Organization and
other specialized agencies.
The Caribbean is in the midst of its annual
hurricane season and the awesome winds, sea surges
and torrential rains of Gustav, Hanna and Ike have
brought the issue of climate change into sharp relief. It
is a matter of life and death to the people of the
Caribbean and other small island developing States.
Similarly, the cost of adaptation to the changes
wrought by our industrialized brothers and sisters must
be borne adequately and responsibly by those who
have so profoundly altered our global environment.
Hurricanes remind us in the Caribbean of our
existential oneness. Accordingly, the effort of
Caribbean nations to fashion a more perfect union is to
be fully supported as a vital strategic necessity.
The geographic happenstance that has placed the
innocent people of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in
the path of increasingly intense storms has also located
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us unfortunately between the supply and demand that
fuel much of the West’s narcotics trade. As a result, our
scarce resources are increasingly being diverted to
stem the tide of drugs and small arms flowing through
our region.
To the people of Saint Vincent and the
Grenadines, disarmament means not the eradication of
nuclear weapons, which we lack the will and resources
to build, but the elimination of small arms, which
threaten to shoot holes in the fabric of our democracy
and compromise the values of our civilization. We are
assailed by guns, which we do not build, and by deadly
narcotics such as cocaine, which we do not produce.
The United Nations must act to protect the innocent
victims of the world from the scourge of small arms
and light weapons.
In recent months, I have been profoundly
troubled by the creeping return of cold war rhetoric to
the language of international and hemispheric
discourse. In this globalized and interconnected world,
it is no longer possible to divide the planet into
competing hemispheres or to completely quarantine or
indeed blockade ideological foe from friend. We must
guard against the return of discarded philosophies and
learn from the recent past, in which developing
countries were used as pawns and proxies for the
hegemonic ambitions of others.
Our multipolar experiment is too young for the
developing and globalizing world to return to the old
rhetoric and recriminations that invariably blossom
into violence and death, most often visited on the
peoples of developing countries. It is my sincere prayer
that this body will hew more closely to the principles
of multilateralism and the sovereign equality of all
States, and resist any pressures for the United Nations
to devolve into a playground for the triumphalist
ambitions of presumptive super-Powers.
Mr. President, you sit at the helm of a body
entrusted with the well-being and safekeeping of
humanity. We have gradually strayed from the noblest
of our goals and increasingly paid only lip service to
problems that are well within our ability to solve. In
countless spheres, we have promised action. Let us
now keep those promises for the good of our global
family.
The poetic summation of the American poet
Robert Frost is apt:
“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less travelled by,
and that has made all the difference.”
Let us choose with courage the road less travelled by.
Each of us can make a difference, accordingly.