Antigua and Barbuda, 1994

I wish first to

extend to Foreign Minister Essy and the people of the

Republic of Côte d’Ivoire congratulations on his election to

the presidency of the forty-ninth session of the General

Assembly. I pledge to him my delegation’s full support as

he carries out the weighty responsibilities of his office. In

welcoming him and wishing him well in his stewardship of

the momentous work of this Assembly, I recall that he

replaces in this important office a son of my own

subregion, the Caribbean. Ambassador Rudy Insanally of

Guyana served the presidency of the General Assembly

with distinction, and I thank him for demonstrating the

ability and talent of the Caribbean people.

The Caribbean people, their aspirations in the global

community and the place of the United Nations in their

consideration are at the heart of the presentation that I will

make here today. Thirteen years ago my country was

admitted to this body as an independent Member State. As

Foreign Minister at that time, I said to this Assembly:

“I represent a people living in the reality of

underdevelopment. I am before you as a

representative of the wretchedness that is the residue

of colonialism, a wretchedness which includes

unemployment and underemployment, inadequate

housing and insufficient medical facilities.

“And yet, despite our condition, my people are

part of mankind’s universal relationship; by our very

existence we are intertwined in the destiny of all

humanity. In that sense, regardless of the wealth of

some men, mankind will never be rich while we

remain disinherited. dislocated and disenchanted.”

(A/36/PV.53, pp. 22 and 23-25)

Since I spoke those words in this Assembly, there has

been little action by the developed nations to help alter

these conditions in my country. Indeed, they have done

little in the Caribbean as a whole. If anything, the terms of

our involvement in international economic relations have

worsened as prices for our commodities have decreased, the

costs of our imports have increased and our access to

preferential markets has diminished. At the same time, our

calls on the conscience of the rich countries to be mindful

of the conditions that fracture the economic and political

structures of our society seem to fall upon deaf ears. This

body knows well that the targets set within the United

Nations itself for official development assistance are met by

only a handful of nations.

Today the Caribbean subregion occupies the

attention of the international community because of events

in Haiti. Eleven years ago it was events in Grenada that

catapulted the Caribbean into the consciousness of global

concern. In both cases what drove our subregion onto the

agenda of international deliberation was not a remedy for

the conditions that precipitated crises in these countries,

but a desire by some to curtail a threat to security

interests — security interests that were defined, in large

measure, by their own domestic considerations. It seems

that unless the Caribbean is perceived to pose a threat to

larger and more powerful States, we remain no more

than, on the one hand, picture postcards of white sand

beaches and swaying coconut trees, an idyllic playground

for tourists, and, on the other, a forgotten backwater of

human and economic underdevelopment as represented by

the world-wide television pictures of today’s Haiti.

Year in, year out, the underlying problems that

afflict our economic and human condition and that lend

themselves to the crises that we witnessed 11 years ago

in Grenada and are witnessing today in Haiti go unnoticed

and unattended. Yet in eight months’ time we will mark

the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the United

Nations Charter, a Charter that proclaimed that we are

determined

“to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in

the dignity and worth of the human person, in the

equal rights of men and women and of nations large

and small, and ... to promote social progress and

better standards of life in larger freedom.”

But can this body truly say that in almost 50 years

it has overseen the promotion of social progress and

better standards of life of nations large and small?

Between 1980 and 1988 real gross domestic product per

person in Latin America and the Caribbean steadily fell

by an annual average of 0.9 percent. In some States real

income dropped by as much as one quarter during the

1980s. With very few exceptions, most countries now

have per capita gross domestic products lower than those

of a decade or even two decades earlier.

Despite this decline in real gross domestic product,

many countries in our region are forced to repay debt that

is wrapped tightly around their necks, strangling their

efforts to breathe life into their economies. Mark you,

this is debt that they have repaid many times over if the

onerous interest rates are discounted. Yet they are able

to see little reduction in the sum of the debt. In the

meantime, the massive haemorrhage of foreign exchange

15

occasioned by this intractable debt burden seriously

hampers the long-term social and economic prospects for

some of our States.

For example, debt servicing in the case of Jamaica is

between 14 per cent and 16 per cent of export earnings; a

recent World Bank report suggests that 70 per cent of

Government revenue in Guyana will be consumed this year

by debt servicing repayments while as much as 43 per cent

of the population lives in poverty. In my own country’s

case, debt has been incurred by the Government acting as

a catalyst for economic development in the absence of

sufficient official development assistance or private

investment flows despite generous incentives. Our arrears

have been rising even with debt repayment and now amount

to more than $200 million.

This burden of debt upon small countries calls for a

change in the rules of the International Monetary Fund

(IMF) and the World Bank to allow for the forgiveness of

debt. It also urges a relaxation by Organization for

Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries

in particular of their position on bilateral debt. If our

countries are to maintain political stability and promote

economic progress, we need relief from the great burden

that debt places upon us.

It is significant that, as the IMF and World Bank mark

the fiftieth anniversary of their establishment this week,

private aid agencies, led by the Oxford Committee for

Famine Relief (Oxfam), have accused them of undermining

the relief of poverty, of making people poorer and giving

short-term economic aims, such as the reduction of

inflation, higher priority than the reduction of poverty.

Only a few would today deny the need for drastic

reform or the dismantling of State bureaucracies in favour

of private investment and more open economies, but the

structural adjustment which this entails should do more than

pay lip-service to the challenges of providing better

education and health facilities in developing countries. The

multilateral financial institutions, and the major Powers

which control them, must become less ideologically

inflexible and more alert to the deleterious effect of some

of their policies on poor States.

It is a startlingly telling measure of the wide

divergence of views between developed and developing

countries that this week developing countries rejected out

of hand a proposal by major Powers in the IMF on ways to

increase world monetary reserves.

There is an urgent need for urgent, meaningful and

sincere dialogue between representatives of the rich and

poor nations to bridge this gap in consultation and

consensus-building. If such a dialogue does not begin,

and begin soon, we may well witness a stand-off in

relations that will paralyse economic cooperation and

progress on a global scale.

I urge that within the institutions of the Organization

itself — specifically within the Economic and Social

Council and the United Nations Conference on Trade and

Development (UNCTAD) — such a dialogue should

begin with the resolve of reaching a practical programme

on which both rich and poor have agreed.

If the Organization and its Member States fails to act

to promote such a dialogue I fear that it will reinforce the

view that the United Nations is captive to the dictates of

the rich, and powerless to respond to the needs of the

poor.

We in the developing countries of the Caribbean

urgently need to develop our human stock and to widen

the space of economic opportunity; to provide more of

our young people with better education; to provide

facilities that will keep our populations healthy and

productive; to provide incomes that will encourage our

people to save and to convert such savings into low-

interest loans for productive enterprise; and to concentrate

on exports and undertakings such as tourism to earn

foreign exchange.

If we are to tackle this task effectively, the yoke of

debt in particular must be eased from our backs. It is not

beyond the international community to set standards to

achieve both repayment of debt and an easing of the

burden of such repayment. To do so, two standards

should be set. The first is on the extent of forgiveness of

existing debt.

Debt forgiveness should be a minimum of 50 per

cent of existing debt, the original principal of which, as

I pointed out earlier, has long been repaid. Forgiveness

of 50 per cent of debt is the only figure that makes any

sense. A lower percentage would simply make realistic

repayment unachievable unless we were to impoverish our

countries even further.

Secondly, the international community should also

establish a standard to set a fixed percentage of export

revenue for the repayment of debt. Without a standard,

indebted countries will face the prospect of worsening

16

poverty for decades to come. We should recall that the

precedent of debt forgiveness was set by two members of

the Security Council, Britain and the United States. In

1946 the terms of a large United States loan to war-torn

Britain stipulated that interest should be waived altogether

should such interest exceed 2 per cent of British export

revenues in any given year. That standard helped Britain

to survive. We ask for no more.

Worsening poverty has grave implications for

development and democracy in our region — implications

which, in the long term, may cost the multilateral financial

institutions and their wealthier members more than the debt

they could forgive, or cause to be forgiven, in the short

term.

Among these implications is the problem of refugees.

We should recall that apart from large-scale violence,

difficult economic circumstances are what creates refugees.

Refugees are not only those people who clamber on board

boats and take to the open sea hoping to reach an

accommodating shore where economic conditions are better.

They are also people, many highly qualified, who

reluctantly leave their homelands, illegally settling in other

countries in search of jobs and better living conditions.

The migration of such people causes problems both for the

countries from which they move and the countries which

receive them. In the case of the receiving countries,

increasing numbers lead to destabilizing immigration

pressures, particularly in inner cities. For the sending

countries vital skills are lost, skills that could contribute to

the social and economic development of the sending

countries.

Even at its summit meeting in January 1992, the

Security Council acknowledged that threats to international

peace and security can come from

“non-military sources of instability in the economic,

social, humanitarian and ecological fields”. (S/23500,

p.3)

In this regard, preventive measures need to be taken by the

international community, led by this Organization, to

mitigate root causes of emigration. Among such preventive

measures must be action to guarantee stability in developing

countries.

We in Latin America and the Caribbean are not simply

sitting on our hands in the expectation that our fortunes will

somehow be dramatically altered by a sudden change of

heart on the part of the richer States of the world. Within

the Caribbean subregion, the member States of the

Caribbean Community (CARICOM) are working at

deepening our integration arrangements to explore ways

in which we can strengthen our economies by our own

efforts. The measures we have adopted, such as a

common external tariff and open markets, have been

difficult for some of us in the short term, but we have

taken the medicine, bitter though it is, in the expectation

that in the medium to long term we will have created a

stronger subregional economy, one capable of sustaining

us all. We have also looked beyond the insular Caribbean

to the wider Caribbean, including every country of the

littoral.

I am proud to say that on 24 July this year, 25

States of the Latin America and the Caribbean region

established the Association of Caribbean States (ACS).

Its objectives are economic integration and the creation of

an enhanced space for free trade and cooperation among

the countries of the Caribbean. We expect that one of the

major benefits of the ACS will be the promotion of the

interests of our grouping in international economic and

trade forums. These actions, which we ourselves are

taking, are part of the set of preventive measures to

guarantee stability in our region.

It is a tribute to the commitment of the people of the

Caribbean to the processes of democracy that we have not

witnessed greater upheaval and that in 11 years the

United Nations has had only two new crises from our

subregion with which to deal. The international

community should not assume, however, that the crisis in

Haiti arose only from internal factors. Much of its

genesis resides in the attitude of major international actors

motivated by their own domestic concerns.

Haiti’s independence in 1804, born of the uprising of

black slaves against the colonial Power, caused it to be

ostracized from the world community. When Toussaint

Louverture led his successful revolt, Haiti was the richest

colony in the world, producing more and trading more

with Europe and the United States than the rest of the

Caribbean colonies combined. But the hostile

international environment in which it was born reduced it

from the richest colony in the world to the poorest nation

in the Western Hemisphere.

The price for its limited participation in international

trade was an agreement in 1825 to pay its former colonial

master an indemnity of 150 million gold francs in six

annual instalments. As the respected historian and former

17

Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Mr. Eric Williams,

put it,

“Thus was imposed on the infant independent State a

heavy financial burden which effectively crippled

development of its social services.”

Since then, international actors have continued to

influence events in Haiti, accommodating in their own

interests dictatorial regimes and military Governments and

ignoring the country’s growing poverty and the utter

disregard for human rights. Is it any wonder that Haitians

risked their lives in the most dangerous conditions on the

open sea to become refugees?

In this context, let me digress for a moment to take

the opportunity to call upon the United States and Cuba to

open a dialogue to end the impasse that has characterized

their relationship for the past 30 years, threatening the

stability of Latin America and the Caribbean. Recently

those two countries demonstrated in this very city their

capacity to sit at the table of peace and negotiate an

agreement to end the movement of so-called refugees from

Cuba to the United States. Surely the capacity to reach

such an agreement shows that other agreements are

possible. The willingness of the United States and Cuba to

act now in their own interest would avert not only the

continued hardship the Cuban people endure, but would

eliminate any perception of threats to their individual

security and the security of our region as a whole.

My small country agreed to provide a safe haven for

Haitian refugees, just as we agreed to contribute one eighth

of our small military force to the multinational expedition

authorized by Security Council resolution 940 (1994). We

did so out of genuine concern for the lives of many

thousands of Haitian people. We did so because we wanted

to see an end to their suffering. We did so because we

wanted to stamp out the cancer of dictatorship and human

rights abuse in our subregion. As it turned out, our

motivation to bring order and justice to Haiti coincided with

the motivation of others who have the resources to commit

to the military undertaking, which became imperative after

diplomatic efforts, especially by representatives of the

United Nations itself, had been fully exhausted.

But while Antigua and Barbuda supports the objectives

of Security Council resolution 940 (1994) and the use of

force contemplated in it to remove the Cédras regime in

Haiti, I am still troubled by the increasing resort to Chapter

VII of the Charter as a basis for acting to end conflicts

within a State. Since the end of the cold war the Security

Council has had to invoke Chapter VII, which provides

for “Action with respect to threats to the peace, breaches

of the peace, and acts of aggression”, in relation to Iraq,

Liberia, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia and, now, Haiti.

In each of the countries where the Security Council

took action, there was clearly a need for humanitarian

intervention. My Government supports the growing body

of opinion that holds that the international community

must not remain a passive spectator when Governments

massacre their own people or cause them to starve. In

such cases the United Nations must act, and should be

allowed to do so under the Charter, without having to

resort to Chapter VII.

Therefore, it is my view that the nations of the

world should amend the Charter of the Organization to

confer power on the United Nations to intervene in cases

where humanitarian intervention is warranted. But in

doing so they absolutely must balance safeguarding

human rights with protecting a State’s right to autonomy.

We must all be mindful that respect for State sovereignty

is a fundamental cornerstone of the international legal

order. Intervention for humanitarian purposes must not

be capable of use for violating the sovereignty of States

in pursuit of the interests of any member of the Security

Council.

As co-Chairman of the Commission on Universal

Governance, Sir Shridath Ramphal said recently:

“An activist United Nations will not long survive as

a legitimate andeffective actor if it is used simply as

a cover for the intervention of major Powers.

Intervention should follow principled criteria and

should be consistent and even-handed. Above all,

intervention should not be unduly influenced, much

less determined, by the interests or domestic political

agendas of powerful nations acting within a region

or globally.”

In this connection, and particularly if we pursue the

notion of amending the Charter to provide for United

Nations-authorized humanitarian intervention, the

membership of the Security Council itself must be

revisited to change the anachronistic nature of the Council

and make it more representative of the nations of the

world.

No State or group of States can proclaim the

overarching importance of democracy, nor can any nation

or group of States claim to intervene in another State in

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the interest of upholding democracy, if that nation or group

of States is unwilling to democratize the Security Council

itself. The time has come to move away from the

anachronism of five permanent members and to establish

arrangements which are capable of change with the passage

of time and the evolution of events. The time has come for

equity for all nations — large and small — in the

membership of the Council.

I return now to the point at which I started — the role

that the United Nations has played in the almost 50 years

since the Charter was signed “to promote social progress

and better standards of life in larger freedom”.

For much of its existence the Organization was

hampered by the cold war and the struggle for supremacy

between the major Powers. Witnessing events and

responding to them through this prism of cold-war rivalry,

the United Nations has not been as effective as it could

have been in defining a world, strong in the pursuit of order

and justice, where States could live in peace and the rule of

law would replace the law of the jungle.

During the greater part of the life of the United

Nations, the strong have dictated to the feeble, the big to

the small, the mighty to the weak. While there has been

order, it has been without justice and without equity. In

this context, while the United Nations has been a symbol of

hope for people from small countries such as mine, much

remains for it to do before it can represent to them an

organization which champions their dignity and worth as

human beings, which upholds the rights of their small

nations, which promotes their social progress and better

standards of life.

As the United Nations approaches its fiftieth

anniversary no longer shackled by the cold-war rivalry of

the major Powers as it looks to the future, it has an

extraordinary opportunity to fulfil the aspirations of the

Charter which have so long remained mere words. In

doing so, it can advance the interests of all mankind by

providing a meaningful forum for genuine dialogue between

the rich and poor for the establishment of conditions for

development, and thus, for peace.

As the Secretary-General has himself pointed out:

“It must be remembered that the sources of

conflict and war are pervasive and deep. Political

stability is not an end in itself; it is a prerequisite for

economic and social development. The inseparable

links between peace and development must be

acknowledged and fully understood because the

deterioration of economic and social conditions can

give root to divisive political strife and military

conflict.”

The end of the cold war should encourage a

reformed, refreshed and representative Security Council

to look beyond conventional security to security born of

political stability and economic progress for all nations —

large and small. My own small country is willing to do

its part. It is my hope that the larger, richer and more

powerful States Members of this Organization can

recognize the need — and act on it — to apply

democratic principles to their relations with poor States

by contributing to the creation of a world free from the

threat of military and economic pressure, a world strong

in the pursuit of equity and justice for all, a world in

which the United Nations is cast in a pivotal role as a

powerful mediator for good in the interest of all mankind.