Australia, 1992

I congratulate you, Mr Ganev, on your

election as President of the General Assembly at its forty-seventh session.

You take this important position at a very challenging time for the United

Nations and its Member States, not least for your own country, which is so

admirably consolidating the gains of the democratization process. The

Australian delegation looks forward to working closely with you as the session

progresses.

I also extend, at the outset, Australia's very warm welcome to the 13

States for which this session will be their first as Members of the United

Nations: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, San

Marino, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia

and Herzegovina. We have, I believe, in our own highly multicultural

Australian population immigrants from every one of those States, and we

already feel, as a result, that we know them well.

In the past year we have seen the total collapse of the bipolar global

structure which had underpinned international relations since 1945. The risks

of a global nuclear holocaust have receded almost to the vanishing point. So

too have the sterile ideologies of the past which for so long set obstacles in

the way of the development of a new international system of cooperation under

the authority of the United Nations and its agencies.

But while the opportunities for cooperation have never been greater, the

challenges to the international community posed by regional conflicts,

humanitarian crises and unresolved transnational problems have also never been

greater. What is expected of the United Nations system is now immense, but

there is still a very big question mark over the capacity of our system to

deliver. In the past twelve months the international community has had some

conspicuous success in meeting some of these challenges. We have seen, for

example, the signing of the Paris Agreements on Cambodia last October, the

recently completed negotiation of a chemical-weapons Convention text, the

United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) summit in Rio

in June, movement forward in the Middle East peace process, and hopes for the

resolution of the long-standing problems in Afghanistan, Cyprus and Western

Sahara.

But a number of problems have to date been beyond the capacity of the

United Nations, or international cooperative efforts more generally, to

resolve in a timely and wholly effective way. The most significant and tragic

of these have been the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Somalia.

Equally, the world has failed so far in efforts to strengthen and expand the

liberal international trading system through the Uruguay Round of multilateral

trade negotiations on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), a

failure of just as much concern to the developing nations as to the

developed.

This session of the General Assembly gives us the opportunity of

systematically reviewing where we have got to and how far we still need to go

on the range of acute problems - political, economic and humanitarian - now

confronting us around the globe. We are much assisted in this respect by the

Secretary-General's report entitled "An Agenda for Peace", on some key aspects

of which I want to focus in this statement. The report, although

concentrating specifically on the role of the United Nations in peacemaking,

peace-keeping and related areas, was of course written very much against the

background of the total challenge facing the United Nations international

system, and in particular the critical importance of finding lasting solutions

to the age-old problems of basic human survival and, in the words of the

Charter, "better standards of life in larger freedom".

If we have learned anything from the passage of years about the sources

of conflict and war, and what is necessary to achieve peace and security, it

is that these problems have to be addressed at many different levels. Threats

to security arise not only from military ambition and the race to acquire

armaments, but also from economic and social deprivation, from ignorance of

countries about each other, from a failure to address problems that by their

nature cross international boundaries, and from a failure by national leaders

to trust the sense and judgment of their own people. An effective system of

international cooperation to meet threats to peace and security itself has to

operate at all these levels simultaneously.

In the first place, when unbridled aggression occurs across national

frontiers, the international community has to have a credible collective

capacity to resist that aggression. Chapter VII of the Charter provides for

such a peace-enforcement function. There is now in the post-cold-war era a

manifest willingness in the international community to utilise interventionist

Chapter VII functions, so long rendered impotent by the veto in the Security

Council, in cases of overt aggression and other obvious cross-border threats

to international peace and security.

Of course not every case of aggression, or the deliberate infliction of

suffering, occurs across State borders or in such a way as to clearly and

unambiguously constitute a threat to international peace and security. And

there will be a number of such situations in which the intervention of the

international community could make a difference, so much so that there are

large moral and political pressures upon us all to take action. It seems

likely, unhappily, that the United Nations will increasingly be confronted

with situations in which the principle of non-intervention in internal affairs

will be matched by a compelling sense of international conscience. It may be

that our Charter will never be capable of formal amendment so as to precisely

define those circumstances in which such intervention is legitimate and those

in which it is not. But recent experience has shown that there is an emerging

willingness - which my country has certainly shared to accommodate

collective intervention in extreme, conscience-shocking cases, and it may well

be that a body of customary precedent will emerge over time and will

constitute its own source of authority for such intervention in the future.

The second level of necessary United Nations involvement in peace and

security matters is peace-keeping: that activity which falls short of actual

enforcement, but involves assistance on the ground in monitoring, supervising,

verifying and generally securing the implementation of agreements once made.

As the various peace-keeping operations now in place or planned for Cambodia,

Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere amply make clear, an increasingly wide

variety of activities, involving both military and civilian personnel, are

being subsumed under this general umbrella: none of them are very clearly

described in the letter of the United Nations Charter, but all of them are

very clearly within its spirit.

Australia strongly endorses the call by President Bush on 21 September to

strengthen United Nations peace-keeping and related operations, and welcomes

in particular the stated intention of the United States to look at ways of

ensuring adequate financial support for these activities as well as for United

Nations humanitarian activities. Financing and administration of United

Nations peace-keeping operations are obviously key areas of its activity where

decisions are necessary at this year's General Assembly. It is a source of

regret that we, the nations of the world, have still not given the

Secretary-General the financial resources or flexibility needed to undertake

United Nations peace-keeping operations expeditiously.

For its part, Australia would support the Secretary-General's call in "An

Agenda for Peace" (A/47/277) for the establishment at this session of a

peace-keeping reserve fund, and for virtually automatic approval of one third

of the anticipated budget for a peace-keeping operation to enable it to be

deployed speedily and efficiently. We would also recommend that the

Secretary-General consider further structural changes in the Secretariat as a

means of improving the administration of peace-keeping operations, including

the relocation of the Field Operations Division into the Department of

Peace-keeping Operations.

The third level of United Nations involvement in peace and security, and

the most basic and important of all, is the prevention of conflict. We in the

international community should be working hardest through the United Nations

to create conditions that minimize insecurity and threats to peace, and which

make it possible for specific high-risk situations to be addressed before they

get to the point of requiring either peace-keeping or, worse still, coercive

peace-enforcement responses.

The effective prevention of conflict and risk minimization involve three

quite distinct kinds of activity. In the first place, it involves addressing

a variety of non-military threats to security; secondly, addressing the

military risk to security posed by uncontrolled arms build-ups; and thirdly,

putting in place the most effective possible preventive diplomacy and

peacemaking arrangements to deal at an early stage with specific high-risk

situations. I want to concentrate my remarks on what we should be doing, in

this General Assembly and beyond, in each of these areas in turn.

Among the gravest of all life-threatening non-military risks are those

posed by humanitarian disasters, especially famine. The recurring tragedy of

mass starvation in Africa often made worse by accompanying military

conflict, but not wholly explained by that conflict underlines the need for

the United Nations system as a whole, and the Security Council in particular,

to strengthen its capacity to meet the problems of potential famine.

Australia proposes the establishment of a group of senior officials from

developed and developing countries and relevant United Nations agencies,

supported by a strengthened Department of Humanitarian Affairs and by a

comprehensive database, which would convene regularly to conduct high-level

reviews of the global famine situation and identify emerging crisis

situations. Such a group would be responsible for turning pledges into

timely, life-saving deliveries of food to people in need, and would seek to

ensure that donor contributions were complementary, properly coordinated and

well-targeted. That high-level review group would report regularly, with

appropriate recommendations, to the Security Council.

Famine is only the most extreme example of a much more widespread global

problem. The Secretary-General, in his address to the summit of the Movement

of Non-Aligned Countries, identified our "ultimate enemy" as poverty. He

argued for the indivisibility of peace and prosperity, of political and

economic security, of democracy and development, and environmental protection

and sustainable development, making the point that unless we meet the threat

posed by poverty, it will undermine all the advances we make elsewhere. We

need to have this firmly in mind as we act for the rest of this decade and

beyond to meet non-military threats to peace and security.

Two issues in particular will have a crucial influence on our ability to

prevail over these threats. One is the retreat to protectionism, which could

well result from a failure to reach agreement in the Uruguay Round, which will

do untold damage to many economies around the world, particularly those of the

poorest nations, which would effectively be excluded from the benefits of an

expansion in world trade. We cannot let pass the opportunity, provided by

this round of negotiations, to further liberalize world trade and establish

equitable disciplines for the new components of world trade. The recent

summit of the Non-Aligned Movement illustrated beyond a doubt that this is a

view shared equally by developed and developing countries.

The other important need in this context is for prompt and effective

follow-up to the outcomes of the United Nations Conference on Environment and

Development, and in particular the creation of an effective Commission on

Sustainable Development. We cannot waste now the opportunity offered to us at

Rio to make a serious attack on the elimination of global poverty, based on

the principles of sustainable development. Ignoring these will produce, at

best, only short-term solutions which will have little impact on our ability

to secure the future of this planet. This places a particular onus on us at

this session. Our decisions and actions will have a crucial bearing on how

the concerns identified at Rio are taken forward.

Natural disasters, acute poverty, famine and environmental degradation

are all, along with war itself, major contributors to another great

humanitarian problem and by extension security problem with which the

international system is barely coping: the problem of unregulated population

flows. Much important relief and rehabilitation work continues to be done for

refugees and displaced persons by the relevant agencies, in particular the

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and some useful attention has

been recently given to the problem by the General Assembly. But crises

continue to escalate, and there are still problems evident in the coordination

of responses between operating and supervising bodies. Those problems have to

be addressed as a matter of urgency, and one obvious way to do so is, again,

to strengthen the capacity of the new Department of Humanitarian Affairs.

There is at least one other non-military threat to peace and security

that Australia hopes will get increased attention from this General Assembly,

and that is the failure of Governments to observe the fundamental standards of

human rights as set out in the Universal Declaration and the more detailed

Covenants, to which so many of us have subscribed.

The Secretary-General in his report "An Agenda for Peace" (A/47/277) very

properly emphasizes in this context the question of the rights of minorities.

It is understandable that, freed from the iron restraints of totalitarian

regimes, some ethnic and linguistic groups have sought and no doubt will

continue to seek - to establish their own political entities. As has been all

too graphically demonstrated in the States of former Yugoslavia, Iraq and

elsewhere, there is no easy answer to these aspirations, particularly when

self-determination would in such cases be synonymous with fragmentation and

itself be a source of threat to international peace and security. War,

particularly civil war, also engenders many of the greatest abuses of human

rights.

The bulk of such aspirations to self-determination might, in fact, be met

by stricter observance of human rights and guarantees of the rights of all

minorities ethnic, religious, linguistic or social within democratic

frameworks. The General Assembly will have before it at this session a draft

declaration on the rights of minorities, endorsed earlier this year by the

Commission on Human Rights. And the launch, later this session, of the

International Year of the World's Indigenous People to which Australia is

very strongly committed will be a further indication of our concern in this

regard.

Breaches of universal human rights standards remain, unhappily, all too

common. In a country such as Burma or Myanmar - the security of the State

is based on a denial of fundamental human rights and the application of

democratic processes. In South Africa, the promise of a peaceful, negotiated

transition to majority rule continues to be put at risk by recurring violence

of appalling intensity, itself an all too obvious legacy of the apartheid

system.

These and too many other examples that could be mentioned show the

dimensions of the problem still ahead of us. They confirm the importance of

next year's World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, particularly for

those Governments needing further encouragement to adopt human rights

policies - founded, I emphasize, not on so-called Western values, but on

internationally accepted, universal standards of practice. Discussion at this

session should play an important role in developing a consensus approach to

the Conference. At the very least, I hope it will resolve the outstanding

question of the agenda, which was left undecided at the recent preparatory

meeting in Geneva.

The General Assembly at this session might also usefully consider some

other steps to consolidate respect for human rights. There is, for instance,

a growing call by the international community for a mechanism to try

individuals for breaches of international humanitarian law and other

international crimes. Australia supports consideration being given to an

international criminal jurisdiction to deal with such offences, and considers

that the International Law Commission should continue its important work on

this topic, specifically by drafting a statute for an international criminal

court.

The end of the cold war notwithstanding, a major preventive effort by the

international community is still necessary in relation to the military threat

to security posed by continuing arms build-ups. The climate for such an

effort is certainly now encouraging. International endeavours in this field

are finally producing results. After over 20 years, agreement has finally

been reached on a chemical weapons Convention text. It is a historic

achievement, and one for which Australia has worked particularly hard.

Unanimous endorsement of this Convention, with a recommendation for its

universal signature and ratification, would be one of the major outcomes of

this forty-seventh session of the General Assembly.

We should also build on the success we have had in concluding the

chemical-weapons Convention to reinvigorate our efforts to reach agreement on

other elements of the multilateral disarmament agenda. The benefits to

mankind of the end of the cold war will be quickly lost unless progress, which

is being made in bilateral arms control and disarmament negotiations between

the United States and the former Soviet Union, is carried into the

multilateral arms control process.

We must redouble our efforts to achieve a world free from nuclear

weapons, and the threat of nuclear war. We must work harder to obtain

universal membership of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons

and ensure its indefinite extension unamended in 1995. We should also

continue the progress that has been made since the Gulf War to strengthen the

nuclear safeguards system of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and

tighten export controls on nuclear and nuclear-related dual-use items. We

should build on the moratorium on nuclear testing advanced by Russia and

France. And I urge Member States to support once again the draft resolution

that Australia will co-sponsor at this session on the comprehensive test-ban

treaty.

Increased transparency in military activities should continue to be a key

objective for all Members of the General Assembly. I regard the United

Nations Register of Conventional Arms Transfers, established by the

forty-sixth session of the General Assembly, as an important step in this

process. Australia welcomes the Secretary-General's report on the operation

of the Register and supports its adoption.

At the recent summit of non-aligned countries in Jakarta, leaders

expressed their deep concern over the negative impact of global military

expenditure, and their support for the attainment of security at lower levels

of armaments. We must all work to make good these pledges, thereby releasing

sorely needed funds to help free the peoples of the world from want, as well

as from the fear of war and destruction.

Pursuing an effective arms control agenda and addressing a variety of

non-military threats to security are all important ways of creating a general

environment in which risks to security are minimized. So too are the

peace-building strategies described in the Secretary-General's report, many of

which are as much applicable to pre-conflict as to post-conflict situations.

But the tools with the cutting edges in specific situations of conflict

prevention and avoidance of conflict escalation are preventive diplomacy and

peace-making.

In "An Agenda for Peace", the Secretary-General emphasized the importance

of preventive diplomacy as a cost-effective means of avoiding the human and

material costs of conflict and the burdens involved in using armed force to

resolve conflicts. Indeed, if we examine the worst conflicts over the last 12

months in the former Yugoslavia, Somalia and Afghanistan we could

plausibly argue that, at least in the first two cases, more attention to

preventive diplomacy may have avoided the catastrophes that befell those

nations and peoples. Australia considers, therefore, that the challenge

before the United Nations in the coming year will be to establish more

effective processes for converting the promise of preventive diplomacy in all

its aspects into reality.

Effective preventive diplomacy cannot be ad hoc or peripheral to the

other activities of the United Nations. What is required is a strengthened

capacity within the United Nations to encourage and assist parties to disputes

to resolve their differences peacefully. The crucial elements in making

preventive diplomacy work are timing, adequate resources and the willingness

of Member States to invest the United Nations with the authority to use all

the means available for its effective implementation.

In practice, the trigger for United Nations action, and the threshold for

defining a situation as a threat to international peace and security, has

tended to be the outbreak of armed hostilities. The earliest possible

attention to potentially significant disputes is crucial if they are to be

addressed before the parties have become committed and entrapped by their own

rhetoric and actions.

This in turn calls for the formation of a permanent unit within the

Secretariat with an enhanced capacity to gather, receive and analyse not only

basic facts, but also information about the concerns and interests of the

parties to a dispute, in order better to prepare recommendations on possible

action. This requires a more systematic approach to information-gathering and

analysis, for which a professionally dedicated support unit in the Secretariat

is essential.

This will need in turn a sophisticated level of expertise and skill in

the form of a nucleus of foreign affairs specialists and policy analysts

experienced and knowledgeable in conflict resolution, with the skills that are

necessary to encourage parties to a dispute to improve communication, minimize

inflammation, define issues and create innovative and imaginative ways of

reconciling their conflicting interests. Regular and routine field visits

should allow an improved capacity for fact-finding, early-warning information

gathering and the opportunity quietly to provide good offices. Staff should

have the capacity to develop in-depth knowledge of emerging disputes and to

gain the confidence of all parties at an early stage. An evaluation mechanism

should be developed to collect, analyse and retain experience from such

activities that could prove useful in other similar situations.

I therefore applaud the decisions Mr. Boutros Boutros-Ghali has so far

taken to create geographically based divisions within the Department of

Political Affairs, whose tasks will include the collection of information on

various regions and the early identification and analysis of possible

conflicts, and I do urge all Members to support the Secretary-General in

further efforts to establish a professional and effective mechanism for

preventive diplomacy.

There is also scope, in encouraging greater use of preventive diplomacy,

for more extensive training in the principles underpinning the concept. It is

good to hear, in this context, that the United Nations Institute for Training

and Research (UNITAR) is planning to launch a new fellowship programme in

preventive diplomacy in 1993. I think it will be important for relevant

United Nations Secretariat staff and diplomats and officials from Member

States to participate in this fellowship programme. I am pleased to announce

today that Australia will contribute US$ 50,000 to UNITAR to assist with the

costs of the first year of the fellowship. I would urge that other Member

States also consider a contribution, and participation by their officials.

A significant challenge to an enhanced Secretariat role in preventive

diplomacy will, of course, be the deep reluctance of many States to accept any

suggestion that a contentious bilateral issue be internationalized. While

there will no doubt continue to be caution about too early resort to Articles

35 and 99 which enable Member States and the Secretary-General,

respectively, to bring disputes to the Security Council there should not be

the same degree of reluctance to have regard to Article 33, which requires

parties to a dispute to first seek a solution by negotiation, mediation or the

like.

What has been lacking hitherto is any real institutional capacity within

the United Nations system to respond to such approaches on other than a wholly

ad hoc basis. The building of such a capacity for quiet diplomacy in the way

I have been describing would be a major step forward, and help over time to

increase the confidence of Members in other more formal United Nations

processes.

I have today sought to give some substance, not just rhetorical support,

to the proposition that the changed conditions of the post-cold-war world call

for new responses from the United Nations. The Secretary- General has shown

us some new directions in his "Agenda for Peace". What is needed now is

action.

In nearly all cases, no major new international machinery is called for

or necessary, because the machinery is already there in the Charter rusty,

in some cases, but still serviceable. What is needed, however, in virtually

every case, is the lubrication of adequate financing and restructuring within

the United Nations system to meet the increasing demands being made on it.

One of the really fundamental tasks we need to move forward at this session is

continuation of the process, accordingly, of United Nations reform.

There is no single, or simple, enemy to peace in the contemporary

world. The appalling situation in Somalia, and the looming crises in

Mozambique and the Sudan, are demonstrations if any are still needed - that

problems do not come in neatly defined packages. The Somalian situation

involves, simultaneously, humanitarian assistance, peace-keeping and political

negotiation, with no one of these elements being capable of delivery in

isolation. The United Nations is now organizing itself in Somalia to deliver

these elements in an integrated way, although it has been a difficult and

Protracted process to get to this point. The task for the United Nations in

the future is to learn from this experience and to devote the necessary

resources to achieving the kind of cooperation between humanitarian and

political strategies that is going to be increasingly necessary in the future

if durable solutions are to be found to many real world problems.

More and more attention is going to focus, as indeed it has already

focused in this general debate, on the role and representativeness of the

Security Council itself. As President Soeharto said last week, speaking in

this respect on behalf of the whole non-aligned Movement, the post-cold war

world is not the world as it was after the Second World War. Our guiding

light should by all means continue to be the present terms of the Charter, but

it should be within our collective capacity to work out the changes in the

composition and methods of decision of the Security Council that will ensure

that it can both fulfil its duty and command overwhelming consensus for its

decisions in the years ahead.

In many respects the task ahead of us, and ahead of the United Nations,

is daunting. It is clear that we are part of an evolutionary process, with

both the world and the United Nations adjusting to new demands. We must draw

strength from the success achieved in the last 12 months, and from the

progress we have made in improving global co-operation.

But our success has not been uniform: we were not able to respond

adequately to some key challenges. We must not ever lose sight of the goal

ahead of us: a more stable and secure world, devoid of abject poverty, with

all peoples able to enjoy basic rights and freedoms. And we must never avoid

the responsibility we all have to achieve those goals.