I wish to take this
opportunity to warmly congratulate Mr. Miguel
d’Escoto Brockmann on his election as President of the
General Assembly at its sixty-third session. He has the
full support of my delegation, and I wish him every
success as he guides the important deliberations of the
session at this most critical time. I also wish to take
this opportunity to express my delegation’s
appreciation to his predecessor, Mr. Srgjan Kerim, who
successfully presided over the General Assembly at its
sixty-second session.
These are turbulent times indeed. The world
today is not getting safer by any standard. Alas, there
seems to be a vortex of perennial conflicts and crises.
The fires in Afghanistan and Iraq have not been
extinguished; to the contrary, they continue to
smoulder and intensify, punctuated by misleading,
short-lived lulls. The intractable conflict situations in
the Middle East are not nearer to a solution today. In
Somalia, humanitarian suffering of unparalleled
magnitude continues to unfold, although it remains
largely ignored by the international media.
Furthermore, the war in Georgia, with its potential
fallout for global polarization is symptomatic of, and
underscores, the extremely fragile security
environment that prevails in our troubled world today.
To add to that gloomy mix, the world is also
witnessing volatile and speculative fluctuations in the
price of fuel oil, an unprecedented hike in food prices
and a recent spate of insolvency of financial
corporations that in combination are driving the global
economy towards recession. Rapid climatic changes
resulting from progressive environmental degradation
and the resulting spell of more frequent floods and
droughts, as well as pandemics that are affecting
millions of people, complete the grid of the immense
challenges that our global community is facing today.
These multifaceted problems stem from multiple
causes.
At the same time, it cannot be denied that many
of those problems have been exacerbated, if not
instigated, by the misguided and domineering policies
of the United States Government. Indeed, the
fingerprints of the sole super-Power are discernible in
most of the conflict situations that are raging in many
parts of our globe, with the deleterious economic,
financial and humanitarian ramifications that they
invariably entail.
The perplexing feature of that overarching and
negative development is the emergence of the concept
of management by crisis as a new tool of policy
promotion. These days, candid efforts are not exerted
to prevent and manage conflicts. On the contrary,
crises are deliberately spawned and allowed to fester
and the resulting necessity for management then
provides the United States with opportunity and
latitude for control, in a situation of permanent
instability. The absence of countervailing forces in a
unipolar world has only aggravated the situation.
Principal among those is the weakness of the United
Nations in pursuing an independent line and acting as a
bulwark of robust multilateralism.
The strong misgivings that I have expressed are
attested to by the multiple situations of turbulence that
continue to unfold in our part of the world. Allow me
to illustrate this grim reality through a brief description
of the causes and complications of such turbulence.
In the border war between Eritrea and Ethiopia,
both parties had ultimately agreed to resolve the
dispute through binding arbitration on the legal basis of
the sanctity of the colonial boundaries. These are
cardinal principles of international law enshrined in the
United Nations Charter as well as in the Constitutive
Act of the African Union. Furthermore, these
commitments were solemnly enshrined in the Algiers
Peace Agreement that was signed by the parties in
December 2000. The Algiers Agreement was
comprehensive in its details. Essentially, it had two
components: first, confidence-building provisions and
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measures through the deployment of a modest United
Nations peacekeeping force; and secondly, settlement
of the border dispute through final and binding
arbitration on the basis of the colonial treaties and
international law.
As members know, the parties went through
lengthy and meticulous legal litigation in The Hague in
2001. The Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission — a
five-member arbitration panel of international
jurists — announced its unanimous final and binding
decision on 13 April 2002 and made serious efforts for
five years, until the completion of its work in
November 2007. From November 2007 onwards in
particular, Ethiopia’s military presence on sovereign
Eritrean territories has been one of blatant occupation.
This is so because the Boundary Commission has
decided to complete its demarcation functions —
which were disrupted and held hostage by Ethiopia for
five long years — through precise representation of the
boundary by coordinates.
Throughout these years, Ethiopia’s reckless acts
of destabilization and aggression were supported by the
United States, and they continue to be. Throughout
these years, the United States not only used its
formidable clout in the United Nations system to
forestall appropriate measures against Ethiopia
pursuant to the Algiers Agreement and that were based
on Chapter VII of the Charter, but it concocted various
formulas — special envoys and extensions of the
mandate of the United Nations Mission in Ethiopia and
Eritrea (UNMEE), among other things — of
“management by crisis”, to perpetuate the conflict and
derail enforcement of the Commission’s legal decision.
The tragedy in Somalia is another extremely
grave humanitarian situation that has been exacerbated,
if not brought about, essentially because of wrong
United States policies. Half a million Somalis are today
displaced and living in abysmal conditions mainly as a
result of Ethiopia’s military invasion in 2007.
Thousands of innocent civilians have been killed.
United States warplanes occasionally pulverize Somali
villages in the name of the war on terrorism.
Were these interventions legal or justified? The
portrayal of Somalia and the Union of Islamic Courts
(UIC) as the epicentre or hub of terrorism was neither
true nor candid. Somalis should and could have been
given a chance to sort out their own problems through
the reconciliation processes that they had begun in
earnest. But all of those efforts were nipped in the bud
through a pre-emptive invasion by Ethiopia at the
instigation of the United States that resulted in massive
humanitarian tragedy that dwarfs other contemporary
crises in Africa.
Nor is the situation in the Sudan any different,
either. While the complexities of the long and varied
conflicts cannot be downplayed, the fact remains that
United States policy in the Sudan is driven by other
objectives and considerations. The net outcome has
been and remains an aggravation of the multiple
problems there, whether in relation to the
implementation of the Comprehensive Peace
Agreement between the North and South or with
respect to the situation in Darfur.
Recently, the United States, which has a military
base in Djibouti, has fabricated a new conflict situation
between Djibouti and Eritrea to keep alive the hot spots
of tension in the region. As I explained earlier, due to
United States influence, the Security Council has been
paralysed and rendered impotent in the face of
Ethiopia’s occupation of sovereign Eritrean territories,
including the town of Badme. At the same time, the
United States doggedly tried to use the Security
Council platform during its presidency last June to
fabricate a non-existent problem and establish a case
against Eritrea.
All those destabilizing acts are sometimes
portrayed as unavoidable consequences or collateral
damage of the war on terror. The fact is that the war on
terror was derailed long ago from its original
objectives and intentions in order to undermine and
subvert forces and Governments that do not toe
Washington’s line. Furthermore, the dragnet has been
widely extended to involve the transparent interference
of the United States in the subregional and regional
organizations in our part of the world.
This untenable state of affairs cannot go on and
should not be tolerated. The human sufferings have
been and are too great, the time too long. Therefore,
the collective international efforts to check United
States excesses are timely and imperative — all the
more so because those failures are widely recognized
and acknowledged by significant segments of public
opinion in the United States itself.
The perils of unchecked unipolarism have
become glaringly obvious in the past few years. That
reality can only accentuate the need to bolster the
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United Nations to make it a democratic and robust
institution of multilateralism through prolonged and
concerted collective efforts.
The need for prompt action requires great
urgency, particularly in our region. For that to happen,
first of all, illegal occupation of sovereign territories
must be terminated and the rule of law and the Charter
of the United Nations fully respected. Secondly, the
invasion of Somalia must come to an end and the
perpetrators of war crimes must be held accountable.
Thirdly, the interferences in and complications of the
problems in the Sudan must cease, and a conducive
climate must be created to bring about a lasting
solution. Lastly and most importantly, United States
meddling in the affairs of the Horn of Africa region,
which has invariably led to the instigation of crises,
must be terminated.
The consequences of failing to act are dire
indeed. Unless effective measures are taken to remedy
the multiplying problems that our global community is
confronting today, we run the risk of further widening
and exacerbating them. The situation in the Horn of
Africa may in fact spiral out of control unless those
destabilizing practices are brought to an end.
In conclusion, I sincerely hope that our plea will
be heeded so that further turmoil and suffering in our
region may be avoided.