The Bahamas, 2013

Permit me to congratulate

you, Sir, on your election as President of the Assembly.

As a member of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM),

the Bahamas takes special pride in the election of one

of our region’s own — the third such person to be so

elected over the years. You may be assured of our full

support as you attend to the duties of the high office

to which you have been elected and for which you are,

if I may say so, superbly qualified. We consider it a

privilege to extend Ambassador Paulette Bethel to your

office as Chef de Cabinet, and we wish her well as well.

Permit me also to express my condolences and

those of the Bahamas to the President and people of

Kenya following the tragic attack on innocent civilians

in Nairobi just last week.

This year we in the Bahamas are celebrating

our fortieth year of independence. It is appropriate,

therefore, that we should pause today and look back to

1973, when our nation was founded and our membership

in the United Nations began. In addressing the General

Assembly for the first time on 1 October 1973, our

then Prime Minister, Sir Lynden Pindling, spoke of

our journey from the dehumanizing experiences of

slavery and colonialism to the liberating achievements

of freedom, majority rule and independence. He spoke,

too, of the “perpetual interdependence of the big and

the small,” and the fervent wish of the Bahamian people

to be neither “dominated nor coerced.” He also had this

to say:

“We have the means to give new hope to

mankind, to create a stable international order

dominated by total and absolute political and

economic self-determination and human and moral

values which make human beings paramount, not

things or abstractions.” (A/PV.2135, para. 28)

Sir Lynden’s call for us to be faithful to the

responsibilities of our nationhood and world citizenship

is as relevant and compelling today as it was when we

were welcomed into the family of the United Nations

40 years ago. As the present Prime Minister of the

Bahamas, I have therefore come here today, on behalf

of the people of the Commonwealth of the Bahamas, to

renew our pledge to play our part to help make our planet

the place of peace and stability and of collaborative

endeavour and mutual support that it was intended to

be, and must be, for the good of all humankind.

But we need to ensure that such pledges are not just

so many catchy phrases. We need to not only talk the talk

but walk the walk. We in the Bahamas are determined

to do just that. That is why, to cite one very recent

example, my Minister of Social Development, Melanie

Griffin, on Tuesday of this week here in New York,

signed the United Nations Convention on the Rights

of Persons with Disabilites on behalf of the Bahamas.

This is an important step forward that we have taken,

marrying our rhetoric to our actions and synching our

domestic agenda with our international obligations. We

intend to ratify the Convention in the shortest possible

time, and later this year we will introduce the necessary

legislation in our Parliament to protect the rights of the

disabled and to give full effect to our obligations under

the Convention. The end to discrimination against the

disabled in the Commonwealth of the Bahamas is now

clearly in sight. Indeed, it is now imminent.

I would also submit today that we are all of us

under a moral obligation to ensure that the policies

and aspirational goals that the General Assembly sets

for itself, and to which all Member States subscribe,

are in fact reflected in the way that we govern our

respective nations internally and, to no less a degree,

in the way that we interact with each other as Member

States in the international community. For example, we

cannot, on the one hand, proclaim that we believe in

free trade, then implement policies that inevitably bring

about the destruction of agriculture as we know it in

the Caribbean, and, in response to the resulting moral

outcry, simply shrug our shoulders and piously lament

that the old order changeth.

We have to become more conscious of the practical

outcomes of what we do. Too often, in the headlong

rush for change, we damage the vulnerable and the

weak. We then make pledges to help but seldom live

up to those pledges in any sustained way. We simply

cannot build a credible new world order on the basis of

such practices. They run completely counter to our lofty

pronouncements about the need for interconnectedness

and mutual support in the pursuit of economic progress

for all the nations of the world, be they large or small,

developed or developing.

We see the same dynamic at work in the

ongoing economic aggression of many of the more

developed countries against small, offshore financial

service-based economies, especially in the Caribbean

region of which the Bahamas is a part. Some have used

their power, either unilaterally or in small groups of

high-powered nations, to impose their will, arguing that

there is something fundamentally immoral, something

intrinsically sinister, about the accumulation of wealth

in offshore jurisdictions.

We reject that premise and we criticize in the

strongest possible terms the efforts of some to maim and

cripple, if not destroy, the offshore economies within

our region. Ironically, the anti-money-laundering,

anti-terrorism funding and anti-criminal regulatory

regimes of many of our countries are far more robust and

demonstrably far more effective than the corresponding

regulatory regimes in many of the same countries that

are leading the fight against us.

We firmly believe that offshore financial services

can be responsibly operated and regulated. We believe

that the sector represents true tax competition and, in

the great majority of cases, that it affords an honest

opportunity for families and individuals alike to

protect their privacy while accumulating lawfully

earned capital for themselves and future generations.

Moreover, the evidence is overwhelming that most of

the investment of that offshore wealth takes place in

and generally benefits the developed world.

Unilateralism and diplomacy by coercion are not

the way the world should be dealing with that issue.

Instead, we need to challenge the United Nations to

take the lead in developing and refining multilateral

global mechanisms for the governance of the offshore

financial services sector — mechanisms that will meet

the legitimate demands of the developed world for

the protection of their fiscal systems and their need

for greater security, while at the same time allowing

offshore financial-service economies to continue to

grow in an orderly and properly regulated way.

Let us not forget that the destruction of those

offshore financial-service economies will destabilize

the countries that depend upon them for their

livelihood. To destroy that sector in the Caribbean

would effectively cause tens of thousands of newly

empowered middle-class citizens to slip back into

poverty or to migrate to the developed world. The

middle class of which I speak constitutes the anchor

of social stability for the countries of our region. If it

is taken away, social destabilization will emerge as a

risk of the most ominous kind. And should that risk

materialize, the developed world may well end up

finding that it has solved one problem only by creating

an infinitely bigger one for itself.

The need for greater multilateralism is also evident

in many of the other problems confronting the Bahamas

and our region. A matter of the highest national priority

for us revolves around our ongoing problem with illegal

migration to our shores. We in the Bahamas suffer from

the illegal migration of tens of thousands of desperate

people from our sister Caribbean Community State

of Haiti — an exodus undeniably driven by crushing

poverty.

We also have a problem with illegal migration from

other countries in the Caribbean, albeit to a much lesser

extent. Of special note in that regard are migrants from

Cuba. We believe that the policies rooted in the Cold

War that largely account for that migration ought to be

brought into alignment with the realities of the modern

era.

Our archipelagic nation, though comparatively

small in population, covers a vast area. With our

hundreds of islands, the opportunities for illegal

migration are greatly multiplied. At a time when it is

imperative that we invest in the education and health

and future of our people, we are forced instead to devote

an ever-growing share of our resources to the problems

associated with illegal migration.

The Bahamas, like the rest of the world,

understandably places a great deal of emphasis on

the human rights of migrants, but we also believe that

there must be similar concerns for the ill-effects on

migrant-receiving States such as ours. In particular,

we are concerned about the increasingly unsustainable

costs that are being incurred and the resulting erosion

in the quality of life for the citizenry of the Bahamas.

Our country, the Commonwealth of the Bahamas,

simply does not have the financial resources and

infrastructural capacity, much less the psychological

stamina, to endure that dilemma indefinitely.

That should also remind us of the economic

disparities within our region and of the need to intensify

global efforts to eliminate poverty and structural

imbalances that impede economic growth within

certain segments and sections of the Caribbean. For

as long as those disparities persist, illegal immigration

to the shores of countries that are comparatively more

prosperous will continue to grow.

Another problem that is of special concern to us

is the continuing influx of guns and the increase in

gun-related criminality, not only in the Bahamas but

throughout the region. As a world community, there

is, I am convinced, a great deal more that we can and

should be doing to fight that common menace.

The Bahamas has this year signed the Arms

Trade Treaty, and we encourage all States that have

not already done so to sign the Treaty as well. And

we implore those countries that produce the guns that

end up taking innocent lives and causing terror in our

communities to become more proactive in controlling

the export of guns. We implore them to step up the

policing of their own borders against arms traffickers.

We therefore call for more robust surveillance and

reconnaissance measures to be instituted. We already

have the experience of joint anti-drug operational

activities with the United States of America. However,

more resources ought to be employed in a region-wide

effort to fight crime. In particular, we call for a massive

increase in joint tactical operations so that more air

and maritime assets can be consistently deployed

and the thousands of square miles that constitute the

territorial waters of Caribbean States can be more

effectively patrolled. We in the Bahamas stand ready

to play our part in those joint efforts, without which

the war on arms trafficking, human smuggling and the

transshipment of illicit drugs will never produce the

victory we all strive for.

In a recent talk that I gave to a meeting of the

International Monetary Fund that the Bahamas hosted

for the region, I made the point that we must all seek

to mitigate the vulnerabilities of our small States in

the CARICOM region. Of particular concern in that

regard is the fact that we have as yet been unable to

disabuse the international financial organizations of

their conviction that gross domestic product per capita

is by itself an accurate measure of the wealth of a nation

or of its state of development.

The result of the continuing adherence to that

dogma and the policies that have flowed from it is

that the international financial assistance needs of

countries in our region are being erroneously assessed

and misunderstood. I therefore again join all of those

calling for a revamping of the criteria in that regard

so that the true financial assistance and development

needs of developing countries can be evaluated in a

fairer and more balanced and pragmatic way.

Another significant vulnerability for my country

concerns the environment and the need to address

comprehensively issues of climate change. The Bahamas

is surrounded by the sea and is low-lying. Indeed, 80 per

cent of the land mass of the Bahamas is less than five

feet above sea level. The implications of climate change

and associated rises in sea level are therefore obvious

for my country and its people. I would submit that the

world, particularly the developed world, has a stake in

resolving those issues, for while countries such as ours

may be the victims of climate change, we are not among

the countries that are, in fact, largely responsible for

the climate change that threatens our future and that of

the planet.

In the Bahamas, we are waging our own battles. We

are putting our fiscal house in order. We are introducing

innovative tools to fight crime. We are training a new

generation for twenty-first century jobs. We are creating

new partnerships to tackle our most pressing problems.

We are aggressively pursuing renewable energy. We

are revamping and modernizing our structure of

governance to make it more responsive to the needs of

the twenty-first century. And by the increased use of

the referendum machinery, we are demonstrating our

commitment to a deepening of our democracy.

We are a small country with strong convictions and

big ideas. But as we look beyond the borders of our

nation and of the region to gaze upon the global scene,

we see much eloquence and many handshakes and the

ceremonial signing of one treaty after another. Rarely,

however, do we see concrete steps or enforcement

mechanisms with teeth. Ringing declarations have been

made from Rio to Copenhagen and beyond, and we are

constantly being challenged by our own citizens to

demonstrate to them that real and measurable progress

is being achieved at the global level.

We need to see more courage, more leadership, more

sustained action on the global stage. So as the leader

of a small but proud nation, I take the opportunity to

say to the big and powerful nations: Find your courage

because the hour grows late.