I extend my congratulations on your election, Madam,
and my respects to His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa
Al-Khalifa and to the Government and people of the
Kingdom of Bahrain. I assure you of Brunei
Darussalam’s full support in the coming year and wish
you great success during your term of office.
I would also like to thank your predecessor,
Mr. Jan Eliasson, for his excellent leadership of the
Assembly over the past year.
Finally, may I express my special appreciation to
our Secretary-General. For many years, he has been the
United Nations most public figure. That has never been
easy, but he has served us with great distinction. His
programmes of action have strengthened our voice. His
personal leadership has inspired us, and I thank him
most warmly for that.
During the past few years, we have regularly
discussed United Nations reform, and I am sure that
discussions will continue in the coming years.
Therefore, at the opening of the sixty-first session of
the General Assembly, I would like to take this
opportunity to mention a few of our own feelings in
Brunei Darussalam about the question of United
Nations reform.
I would like to start by acknowledging the fine
work done for so many years by our United Nations
agencies in the field, particularly by the World Health
Organization, the United Nations Economic and Social
Commission for Asia and the Pacific, the United
Nations Children’s Fund, the United Nations
Development Programme, and the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, and
by United Nations volunteers all over the world. Those
agencies can truly be called our body’s life blood, and
at times literally so. Every day of every year, they
attempt to bring hope, confidence and meaning to the
lives of ordinary people. They provide people with the
simplest and most basic definition of security. By that,
I mean that they give people a feeling that even the
most severe problems can be faced and solved. I thank
them with great respect for their dedication and their
professionalism. They represent the United Nations at
its best.
Consequently, I believe that any reform of our
Organization should be considered with one crucial
primary question in mind: Does it directly strengthen
the work of our agencies and people in the field? That
is becoming more and more important to the ordinary
people we represent.
The new century has brought a host of new
challenges. The past year, like every year of this new
century, has presented problems that are typical of
those the United Nations is increasingly going to face
and expected to solve. They are, sadly, all the stuff of
regular breaking news: natural and environmental
disasters, health, economic and security disasters,
countless political failures and the enormous human
suffering that follows.
The immediate impression is a dramatic one. Our
new century seems to be defining itself in images of
disaster — landslides, earthquakes, tsunamis and
terrorist bombings. The most lasting images are human
ones. Those are the countless victims of events over
which they had no control and of which they had no
knowledge or warning. The long-term result is a deep
sense of insecurity. It is reaching into the lives of every
individual, every family and every community in every
country we represent.
Many people are feeling so insecure that they are
engaged in finding any way they can to salvage some
hope for themselves. In Asia, Africa and the Americas,
they are doing so in their hundreds of thousands. They
are leaving their families and homelands to emigrate.
They often put their lives at enormous personal risk in
the search for somewhere where they hope to find
hope.
That presents a bleak vision of the future for
millions of our people. It would be even bleaker
without the United Nations. Sometimes, in the refugee
camps, in the disaster areas and in all the other arenas
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of destruction, the United Nations offers all they have
by way of hope. Hence, the second consideration we
give to proposals for reform is a human one. We ask a
simple question: Is the proposal relevant to ordinary
peoples’ personal lives and problems?
Those lives are increasingly dominated by the
extremely complex challenges of our new century.
Those challenges are global. They are scientific,
technological, economic, environmental and political.
They now involve over six and a half billion people.
Those people are becoming more and more dependent
on each other for survival. That means, I believe, that
we must continue to stress the need for more than just
administrative reform. So our third consideration
regarding reform is practical.
Does the proposed reform reflect the current
century, its priorities, its special challenges and its
changing character? In other words, are we certain that
we are not trying to solve twenty-first-century
problems with the mechanisms, priorities and
procedures of the twentieth century and sometimes
even of the nineteenth century?
We look forward to continuing our discussions
with colleagues in the coming year on this critical
matter of effective and lasting reform. We are starting
to see what the twenty-first century is presenting, both
the good and the disturbing. We are also seeing the
demands it is making on the United Nations. They are
considerable. We believe, however, that the
considerations I have mentioned are the essential basis
for reforming the United Nations in a manner that will
ensure that our world body is well capable of meeting
the twenty-first century on twenty-first century terms.