Allow me to express the warmest congratulations of
the delegation of Niger to Ms. Al-Khalifa upon her
election to the presidency of the General Assembly at
its sixty-first session. She is the third woman in the
history of the United Nations called upon to take up
this office, and her election is richly symbolic on
several counts. In her we have a seasoned diplomat of
great competence and sure qualities that augur well for
the positive results that we will see under her
presidency.
We also congratulate her predecessor, Mr. Jan
Eliasson, President of the Assembly at its sixtieth
session, for the remarkable work he accomplished
during his presidency.
Finally, allow me to reiterate the congratulations
of the Republic of Niger to the Secretary-General,
Mr. Kofi Annan, who will be leaving the Organization
after ten years of intense activity, ingenious initiatives
and staunch devotion. There can be no doubt that the
vigour he brought to the Organization, the important
reforms he launched and the new bodies that have been
created during his mandate stand out in the annals of
the United Nations.
More than ever before, the international
community is confronted by challenges to peace and
security. Despite noteworthy progress in this area and
despite multiple efforts, horror and despair continue to
reach us from certain areas of conflict.
Some positive developments have certainly been
recorded in Africa in the area of conflict resolution,
notably in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi,
Liberia and Sierra Leone. Those developments remind
us that we need an operational and effective decision-
making mechanism so that we can quickly deal with
any threat to international peace and security,
irrespective of its complexity. Only substantial reform
of the Security Council, along with revitalization of the
General Assembly, can enhance legitimacy and
effectiveness, especially if it takes into account
equitable representation accompanied by an
improvement in working methods. For Niger, only
equitable enlargement of the Security Council can
improve its functioning and make it possible to
establish the bases for decisions that will be acceptable
to and accepted by everyone.
In Côte d’Ivoire, the United Nations must
redouble its efforts to reach a definition of a new
transition in consultation with all parties, ECOWAS
and the African Union so that the matter can be dealt
with calmly after 31 October 2006.
The situation in the Middle East — especially in
Lebanon, which has held the attention of the
international community over recent weeks — proves,
if proof were needed, that the United Nations is still
the prime forum for promoting negotiations on
preserving international peace and security.
The same degree of attention should be paid to
the resurgence of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. The
establishment of a comprehensive peace in the
subregion involves going back to the negotiating table
in order to make progress in implementing the road
map towards the creation of a sovereign and viable
Palestinian State, in conformity with the relevant
resolutions of the United Nations.
With regard to Western Sahara, the United
Nations must pursue and intensify its efforts with a
view to finding a definitive solution to the question. As
to Jammu and Kashmir, the Niger encourages India and
Pakistan to continue with their talks.
Another serious threat to international peace and
security is posed by nuclear weapons. In this regard,
the Niger would like to reaffirm its support for the
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commitments made within the framework of the Treaty
on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT),
while recognizing the importance and the usefulness of
research for peaceful purposes. However, the
increasingly marked division which this issue
engenders requires an appropriate response in the
ongoing quest for consensus through the current
negotiations.
The Niger welcomes the establishment of the
Peacebuilding Commission, which is one of the first
concrete achievements to emerge from the World
Summit. We should give it our full support so that it
can provide effective assistance to countries in post-
conflict situations. In my capacity as a representative
of the country currently holding the chairmanship of
the Economic Community of West African States
(ECOWAS), a region which is still ravaged by
conflicts, I am happy to report on the progress that has
been made in our subregion in the area of conflict
prevention and resolution. Sierra Leone, Liberia and
Guinea-Bissau, which I referred to just now, today are
countries in a post-conflict situation. They therefore
need to be effectively helped in order to consolidate
their return to peace and to create the conditions for an
environment that is favourable to their economic and
social development. In order to maintain the ban on the
circulation of illegal weapons, which, as every one
knows, have stoked many conflicts in our subregion,
the heads of State and Government of the member
countries of ECOWAS have decided to convert the
moratorium on small arms and light weapons into a
legally binding convention, in order to strengthen the
capacity of Member States to fight effectively against
this scourge.
The Niger also welcomes the establishment of the
new Human Rights Council. This body merits the
approval and backing of all Member States, which
should fully cooperate with it. For its part, the Niger
undertakes to do everything in its power to participate
effectively in its activities.
In another area, the United Nations Central
Emergency Response Fund (CERF) will certainly help
us to exercise greater control over such scourges as
food insecurity and cyclical droughts, which have
caused so much damage and have plunged a substantial
portion of the populations of some West African
countries into an unacceptably precarious situation
owing to the slow reaction of the international
community. For the Niger, as well as for other
countries of the subregion, the human development
index would have been higher if development
cooperation had seen qualitative and quantitative
increases in line with the commitments contained in
the Monterrey Consensus with regard to official
development assistance (ODA) and other initiatives on
the subject.
The debates at the current session are particularly
important for the Niger because they come one year
after the historic Summit of 2005. The High-level
Plenary Meeting which prepared the above Summit
already stressed the importance of partnerships,
particularly with respect to achieving the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs). In this regard, the central
theme of the sixty-first session, namely, the
implementation of a global partnership for
development, is very appropriate because it illustrates
perfectly the need and the importance of a multilateral
and collective approach in order to find the most
appropriate solutions to the current problems in the
world.
I would like here, on behalf of the Niger, to
commend the initiatives taken to find new sources of
funding in order to provide an initial response to the
insufficiency of resources noted during the evaluation
of the 2005 Summit. I would particularly like to
welcome the International Drug Purchase Facility
(UNITAID) initiative launched by the French
Government to finance the fight against AIDS and
malaria. The Niger is one of the first 17 countries to
have endorsed the tax on airline tickets.
It is also within the framework of this kind of
partnership that the positive nature of international
migration could be stressed and could be included in
our search for appropriate responses, which would take
into account the concerns of the countries of origin,
transit and destination.
I would like to end my statement by pointing out
that, for the Niger, the effective implementation of the
actions planned to deal with global issues must be
multilateral in character and must assign a central role
to the United Nations system.
And here I would reiterate the faith that the Niger
has in the United Nations, not only because the
Organization remains the most appropriate framework
and the most relevant multilateral mechanism with
which to promote development, but also because it
pursues the noble causes which it embodies. The
49 06-53005
United Nations therefore must be revitalized in order to
be in a position to satisfy the deepest aspirations of the
peoples and nations of the world, particularly those
that are weakest.