I
received the news of your election to the General
Assembly presidency, Sir, with a brother’s pride.
Twenty-one years ago, it was through war in Central
America that we became acquainted. Today it is peace
that allows us to meet once more. In the name of the
people of Costa Rica, and in my own name as well, I
am honoured to extend to you a brotherly Central
American greeting.
I have come here to speak words of the urgency
that any leader feels at decisive moments in history.
This is not just any year. While we hold this General
Assembly, millions of people who used to be able to
meet their most basic needs have seen the face of
poverty once again. Hunger, that abominable monster
that we had escaped for so many years, has returned to
chase away the dreams of humanity. Pessimism and
hopelessness have taken control of our economies, and,
as always, the poorest among us will pay the
consequences. World military spending has reached
$3.3 billion per day, but international aid continues to
reach the poorest countries at a snail’s pace and fails to
reach middle-income countries altogether. Brutal
hurricanes and intense droughts remind us that this
planet reacts to our irrationality, and the time that
remains for us may be a countdown to disaster if we do
not make a change.
It may be that in no other General Assembly have
issues more global than now been discussed. Our
interdependence has made us all vulnerable, but in that
interdependence also lies our strength. In the past, a
nation could avert its gaze from distant suffering and
scorn the pain of others. Today, that option does not
exist. Every victory and every failure is shared.
The man who, motivated by hunger, cuts down a
tree in the virgin Amazon rainforest unwittingly
deprives us of a fraction of the air we breathe in this
room. The European mother who is forced to buy less
food because she cannot afford the costs unwittingly
affects the economy of all nations in the world. The
African child who drops out of school because of a
lack of resources unwittingly determines the future
performance of our species. We are all united in that,
and perhaps for the first time in history, no one can
look in another direction. We are seated simultaneously
at the prosecutor’s bench and at the defence table, in
the public gallery and in the judge’s chair.
We must take advantage of this moment when
equality among nations is seen in the equality of our
challenges. We will not be able to face our realities
unless we understand them completely. We will not be
able to shine the light of reason upon our Earth if we
intentionally leave some regions in the dark. If we are
seriously to take up the challenges of our time it is
right that like that old protagonist of the Charles
Dickens tale, we open our eyes to our past, our present
and our future; we must guarantee peace and justice for
the past, peace and development for the present, peace
and nature for the future.
In the Preamble to the United Nations Charter,
the States that make up this Organization undertook to
establish conditions under which justice can be
41 08-51839
maintained. Of those conditions, perhaps the most
important is will: the will to demand that our
obligations are fulfilled; the will to speak out when
international law is violated; and, above all, the will to
ensure that acts that are an affront to all humankind do
not go unnoticed.
Evil springs not only from action but also and,
above all, from omission. To keep silent when crimes
are grave and responsibilities are clear is not to remain
neutral but is to side with the aggressors. Our recent
past is marked by horrendous, unpunished crimes that
call out, not for vengeance, but for justice. We cannot
accept that evil is banal. If we do not want to repeat the
painful history of Kosovo and Bosnia, of Rwanda and
Kampuchea, then it is time for the international
community to demand that those responsible for the
crimes committed in Darfur be judged before the
international criminal court. Costa Rica will oppose
any attempt to avoid such a path, which is the path of
peace. Forgiveness is based on memory, not on
dissimulation; and peace will be possible only through
memory. We must understand, in the words of Elie
Wiesel, “that the memory of evil will serve as a shield
against evil; that the memory of death will serve as a
shield against death”.
If the spirit of the past calls on us to hold people
responsible for the violation of human rights, the spirit
of the present calls on us to ensure that those rights are
fulfilled today. Governments can indirectly hurt their
peoples in many ways, one of which is excessive
military spending. In developing nations, in particular,
every long-range missile, every helicopter gunship and
every tank is a symbol of the deferred needs of our
people. On a planet where one sixth of the population
lives on less than a dollar a day, spending $1.2 trillion
on arms and soldiers is an offence and a symbol of
irrationality because the security of a satisfied world is
more certain than the security of an armed world. Latin
America is not immune to this phenomenon. Last year
Latin American military spending reached $39 billion,
in a region that has never been more peaceful or more
democratic.
I know of no greater perversion of values and no
greater misplacement of priorities. With a small
percentage of world military spending we could give
drinking water to all of humanity, equip all homes with
electricity, achieve universal literacy, and eradicate all
preventable diseases. I am not talking about the utopia
of a world without armies. Unfortunately, that is an
idea whose time has not yet come. I am talking about
tiny percentages of an expenditure that could be
reduced without harming the ability of countries to
defend themselves — particularly developing
countries. That is why my Government has presented
the Costa Rica consensus, an initiative that would
establish mechanisms to forgive debts and use
international financial resources to support developing
nations that spend more and more on environmental
protection, education, health care and housing for their
people and less and less on arms and soldiers. I am
convinced that that will bring us greater development,
greater security and greater peace than all the money
that we have now set aside for our armies. I humbly
ask members today to support this initiative.
I also ask for members’ support for the arms trade
treaty that Costa Rica is advocating within this
Organization, to prohibit the transfer of arms to States,
groups or individuals if there is sufficient reason to
believe that those arms will be used to violate human
rights or international law, or to interfere with
sustainable development. The destructive power of the
world’s existing 640 million small arms and light
weapons, most in the hands of civilians, deserves the
same attention or even more attention than military
spending.
However, no matter how urgent it may be to
ensure the present development of our peoples, it is
equally important to ensure their future development.
The spirit of the future, as we look ahead to it, offers
us a desolate image. Imagine an unending desert, a
cracked ground too hot to stand on. Imagine a planet
where life has been displaced and only cockroaches, if
anything, can survive. Imagine a world whose range of
colours, which until now has been endless, is reduced
to grays and dark browns. Imagine polluted air,
impossible to breathe. “This is not a poor copy of
John’s delirium during his exile on Patmos” as Gabriel
Garcia Márquez once said. I am not describing the
Apocalypse but simply the world that awaits us if we
do not take action right away to declare “peace with
nature”.
Sixty years ago an illustrious Costa Rican, a
visionary and brave man, José Figueres Ferrer,
abolished my country’s army. What had been the
general headquarters of the Costa Rican armed forces
is today our main national museum. Our children have
never seen a column of soldiers on the march; they
know only the march of columns of ants. No Costa
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Rican children know the difference between this or that
missile, or this or that combat plane, but they can
distinguish among the trees of the forest and the
animals of the sea; they know the importance of the
water cycle, of wind energy, of rivers and of sun. Ours
is a nation of peace among humans, but we also aspire
to be a nation of peace with all forms of life.
We have set a goal of becoming carbon-neutral
by 2021. Last year we became the world leader for the
number of trees per capita and square kilometre,
planting 5 million trees. In 2008 we will plant
7 million more. We are leading an international crusade
against global warming and environmental destruction,
with a special focus on the planet’s primary forests.
Today, Assembly members, I ask you to join us.
The march of humanity through history is neither
linear nor continuous. It is marked by detours and
pitfalls, and even by painful setbacks. As in Pedro
Calderón de la Barcá’s play La Vida es Sueña, one
morning we awake as princes and the next we are no
more than beggars. But not everything in life is a
dream. There are concrete realities that we have been
able to build. There are indisputable achievements in
the history of humankind. This Organization is one of
them. Members may tell me that the United Nations is
founded on the search for peace, understanding among
peoples and respect for international law. That is all
true. But I dare to say that more than anything else this
Organization is founded on hope, the hope that our
march is upward, that our future will be better, and that
a promised land lies behind the deserts of violence and
injustice that, with courage, we have been able to
cross.
I assure this Assembly that if we confront the
spirit of our past, of our present and of our future, if we
build peace on a base of justice, development and
nature, and if we turn away from forgetfulness, arms
and environmental destruction we will reach that
promised land some day and our children and our
children’s children will never again be beggars in the
kingdom of their dreams.