At the outset, the Government and people
of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines take this
opportunity to extend deepest condolences to the
people of the Philippines and the Socialist Republic of
Viet Nam for the lives tragically lost in the wake of
tropical storm Ketsana. Our thoughts, prayers and
solidarity are with them as they grapple with that
catastrophe.
It is with great pleasure that we welcome
Mr. Treki to the leadership of the General Assembly at
its sixty-fourth session. His experience and abilities are
well known and respected, and he has our full support
in the coming year. Indeed, we in Saint Vincent and the
Grenadines are particularly pleased that the presidency
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has moved from Nicaragua, a country touched by the
Caribbean Sea, to a continent that is the ancestral home
of the vast majority of our citizens. We have, in
essence, kept the presidency within our extended
family. We trust that he will continue the exemplary
work of his predecessor, Father Miguel d’Escoto
Brockmann, who fearlessly and tirelessly championed
the role of the “G-192” in addressing global
challenges.
We face many challenges within our international
community, but at their most basic, the majority are
symptomatic of a single underlying issue: a struggle by
the powerful to cling to their dominion long after the
legitimate bases of their power have faded. We find
ourselves in a world governed by outdated norms and
assumptions, and our failure to adapt has wrought
disastrous consequences on our peoples.
In his welcome and inspiring maiden statement to
the General Assembly last Wednesday, our esteemed
brother and friend President Barack Obama of the
United States correctly identified the challenges to our
multilateral unity as “rooted in a discontent with the
status quo” (see ). We wholeheartedly agree
and endorse that assessment.
It is a discontent with the status quo of a 63-year-
old Security Council, which continues to administer
our collective security unchanged and impervious to
the logic of a new world. It is a discontent with the
role, effectiveness and mandate of the 65-year-old
Bretton Woods institutions, which were created in a
bygone era to address bygone circumstances. It is a
discontent with a 49-year-old blockade on the noble
people of our neighbour Cuba, the continued illegal
application of which is illogical when viewed through
the prism of geopolitics, economics or
humanitarianism, and can be successfully explained
only by reference to narrow local political
considerations.
It is a discontent, even, with the stagnation of
efforts to change the status quo in other critical
respects: the eight years of unresolved negotiations of
the Doha Development Round, the 12 years of the
toothless commitments of the Kyoto Protocol, and the
seven years of unfulfilled Monterrey Consensus
promises to achieve a 0.7 per cent of gross national
product for official development assistance, a full 40
years after this modest percentage was first mooted.
Through it all, the geopolitical status quo
remains. The structural bases of international
interaction are distressingly similar to their decades-
old antecedents. Those structures were forged in the
fires of World War II, hardened in the frost of the Cold
War and entrenched by the legacies of colonialism and
exploitation. But World War II has long since ended,
the Cold War is relegated to history books, and the
reach of formal colonialism continues to recede. The
structures spawned by those historical episodes are no
longer valid.
Our discontent is born not only of stagnation but
also of exclusion. Although we have a seat in this
hallowed building, it is often the seat of a spectator in a
historical drama. The directors and actors script history
not in the General Assembly, but in other rooms and
locales, without our input or knowledge. In many
significant ways we are attendees, rather than
participants, on the international stage.
We are in the midst of a global financial and
economic crisis of unparalleled depth and scope. Saint
Vincent and the Grenadines played no part in the
reckless speculation and corruption that precipitated
this crisis, yet the people of our country are hard hit by
its effects. Our tourism industry is suffering,
remittances are shrinking, foreign direct investment is
scarce, and the spectre of unemployment is a real and
gathering regional threat. However, we are actively
excluded from the solutions to this problem.
Last week, we learned that the Group of 20
(G-20) anointed itself “the premier forum for our
international economic cooperation”. Saint Vincent and
the Grenadines is not a member of the G-20, nor were
we consulted on its ascension to the ranks of arbiters of
our economic fate. While there is an undeniable logic
to a small group of the world’s largest economies
meeting informally to thrash out matters that affect
only their own large economies, the logic fades in the
face of a crisis that has spread rapidly and
comprehensively to every corner of the globe.
Additionally, the G-20 faces a serious legitimacy
problem. Aside from the Group’s being non-inclusive
and unofficial, many of the countries at that table
represent the champions of the financial and economic
orthodoxies that led the world down the rabbit hole to
its current economic malaise.
Further, the G-20’s recent self-congratulatory
pronouncements of “mission accomplished” in the
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midst of this economic upheaval are of cold comfort to
the suffering peoples and countries of the world. While
the G-20 may claim that its actions have “worked”, and
claim a “sense of normalcy”, the people of Saint
Vincent and the Grenadines and our Caribbean region
are under no such illusions. The invisible hand of the
market is still clasped firmly around the throats of poor
people and the developing countries of the world. We
see none of the so-called green shoots that populate the
fantasies of discredited economic cheerleaders.
Indeed, the seeds sown by this crisis may produce
the strange and bitter fruit of increased poverty,
suffering and social and political upheaval. The crisis
itself, with its disproportionate impact on the poor, will
only widen and deepen the yawning gap between
developed and developing countries.
It is not merely the economic crisis against which
the people of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
continue to struggle heroically. Today, we face the
triple threat of being globalized, climatized and
stigmatized. We have already been globalized by the
World Trade Organization (WTO) out of our trade in
bananas, which, until very recently, was the engine of
our economic growth. We are on the verge of being
climatized out of our reliance on tourism as its
development substitute, as climate change wreaks
havoc on our weather systems, intensifies our
hurricanes, destroys our coral reefs, damages our costal
infrastructure and erodes our beaches.
Now, we face being stigmatized out of our
transition into financial services, as the G-20, the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development and other non-inclusive bodies seek to
scapegoat and root out so-called tax havens in a
pathetic effort to cast a wide and indiscriminate net of
blame across a swath of legitimate and well-regulated
countries’ development efforts.
We note the irony of hearing these paternalistic
prescriptions from the same countries that are unable to
stem corruption and mismanagement within their own
borders, where corporations recklessly squander
trillions of dollars and a single buccaneer investor can
make $50 billion — an amount greater than the
combined annual budget expenditures of the entire
Caribbean Community subregion — disappear into thin
air.
The unholy trinity of exogenous assaults on our
development prospects posed by globalization,
climatization and stigmatization cannot be ignored, nor
can the security threats engendered by the illicit trade
in firearms and narcotics. We in Saint Vincent and the
Grenadines find ourselves unfortunately located
between the supply of and demand for these poisons
and weapons, and their deleterious effects rip holes in
our cohesive social fabric. The Caribbean, which
produces not one single firearm or one single kilo of
cocaine, is awash in drugs and guns, and is now the
subregion with the world’s highest per capita murder
rate.
Our plight cannot be ignored. Indeed, we are
heartened that the United Nations Office on Drugs and
Crime, which inexplicably ended its presence in our
region, has now seen fit to reconsider its decision to
cede the Caribbean to drug cartels and murderers. We
hope that it represents a genuine and generous
recommitment to our regional challenges.
As a small archipelagic State, we, more than
most, are affected and threatened by the ravages of
climate change. We, more than most, recognize the
critical importance of a meaningful, measurable and
enforceable global compact on climate change.
However, we do not simply want to “seal the deal” at
Copenhagen, as posited by the sloganeers of the United
Nations. We want to seal the right deal, the just deal,
and the deal that ensures our continued survival. We
most emphatically will not seal a suicide pact that will
assure the elimination of small island States and our
way of life.
The Alliance of Small Island States has recently
issued a declaration that contains what we consider to
be the essential contours of any meaningful agreement
on climate change. We trust that our blameless position
on the front lines of climate change fallout will be
considered and respected in the global effort to seal the
deal. We cannot, as in the case of the world economy,
be excluded in any way from the solutions to a problem
that so fundamentally affects us.
The theme of exclusion is equally applicable to
our friends in Taiwan. The United Nations and its
specialized agencies must find ways to ensure the
meaningful participation of the 23 million people of
Taiwan. Just as their economic strength has merited
inclusion in the WTO and the universality of global
health challenges have logically compelled their
participation in the World Health Assembly, so too
should the global reach of climate change merit their
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meaningful participation in the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The interconnected networks of global air travel
and our shared safety concerns similarly mandate the
participation of Taiwan in the International Civil
Aviation Organization. The Government and people of
Taiwan have advanced a reasonable and responsible
policy of engagement to usher a new era in cross-strait
relations. The international community can and should
encourage and reward this fledgling rapprochement
with meaningful participation in the relevant
specialized agencies.
Any cursory analysis of the excluded and the
included, of the discontented and the defenders of the
status quo, will quickly reveal that many current
inequities are rooted in our colonial history and that the
struggle for geopolitical balance and inclusiveness is
indeed the last struggle of decolonization as we, the
former colonial territories, remain excluded from the
inner sanctums and power structures that were
established by and for the colonizers in a time long
since passed.
On 27 October this year, Saint Vincent and the
Grenadines will celebrate its thirtieth anniversary of
independence. However, we recognize that
independence is a process, not a one-time event. Our
independence journey continues today. Thirty years
after gaining formal independence, we retain the Queen
as our Head of State, and our highest judicial appeals
travel from our shores to the United Kingdom to be
decided by Her Majesty in Council. While we cherish a
special, modern and respectful relationship with the
United Kingdom, we do not intend to tarry on colonial
premises a moment longer than is necessary.
Even as we wage a wider war of attrition against
geopolitical colonialism, our citizens are preparing to
vote on a new and home-grown constitution that will
break the chains of outmoded dependence and place
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines firmly on its two feet
as a truly independent republic. This new proposed
constitution, the product of six years of open,
transparent and inclusive public consultations, is
testament to the political maturity of our people and to
the value of locally tailored solutions to externally
imposed impediments.
In a similar manner, our brothers and sisters in
the developing world, including Cuba, the Bolivarian
Republic of Venezuela, Turkey, Mexico, Malaysia,
Iran, Libya, Brazil and many others, have forged new
links and bonds of friendship, cooperation and
solidarity with our country that go beyond historical,
geographical or colonial linkages. We value these
friendships and partnerships as important additions to
our traditional and treasured allies in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Taiwan, Canada and the
European Union.
Just as our myriad bilateral friendships and
partnerships span geographic, economic and
ideological divides, so too must our multilateral
cooperation be inclusive and participatory. We can no
longer maintain the illusion of holding hands in
artificial solidarity across the moats and turrets of
structural and systemic inequalities. Modern
multilateralism cannot proceed on the bases of the
included and the excluded, of the political haves and
have-nots, nor can token assimilations of individual
developing countries serve to mask the necessity for
deep structural changes to existing power
arrangements.
We urge our brothers and sisters who have gained
limited access to the halls of power to not only be a
voice for their excluded brothers and to not only
remember where they came from, but also to view
themselves as the tip of the spear, the thin edge of the
wedge that will use their newfound privileges to
dismantle these structures from within, even as we
continue to make our presence felt outside the citadels
of stasis and indifference.
Psalm 118 of the Bible teaches that the stone that
the builder rejected shall become the cornerstone. We,
the poor and developing countries of the world, are the
stones that the builders of this body refused and
ignored. In rebuilding and revitalizing, either we will
become the cornerstones of this institution, or this
edifice of multilateral cooperation will crumble into
irrelevance and illegitimacy.
Addressing the economic crisis, poverty and
development is not an academic exercise. Climate
change is not a theoretical event. Reform of global
governance is not a diplomatic parlour game. They are
the clear and present dangers of our time, and they
reflect the need for the real and inclusive participation
of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, the Caribbean and
the developing world. They represent also a need to
reflect and address our discontent with the status quo
perpetuated for far too long.
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We stand now in the autumn of our discontent,
but, as Gandhi said, “Healthy discontent is the prelude
to progress”. The challenge of the discontented is to
rise above ancient animosities and artificial
balkanization to achieve the clarity of vision, unity of
purpose and political will to finally and successfully
storm the castles of stagnation and status quo and to
drive our peoples, our politics and our planet into a
new era of genuine inclusiveness, equity and
meaningful, people-centred progress.