Belarus, 1992

Allow me to

congratulate you. Sir - the representative of Bulgaria, a State friendly to

ours, and of a people so close to the people of Belarus in its spiritual and

cultural traditions - on your election to the presidency of the General

Assembly at its forty-seventh session. By electing you, representatives have

paid tribute to Bulgaria and have given expression to the respect that you

enjoy in the international community. In the performance of your quite

complex duties you may rely on all possible support from our delegation.

We should like to express our most sincere congratulations to the States

that have become new Members of the United Nations. We regard their entry

into the United Nations with great satisfaction since .the accession of new

States to membership in the Organization enriches the collective thinking of

the international community with the wisdom of each one of them.

Happy indeed is a people that reaps the fruits of centuries of steady

development development in the context of stable statehood and within a

national culture unclouded by oppression. But there is another fate as well

that of going through centuries before re-establishing one's own State,

without allowing the light of one's culture to be extinguished, and finally

achieving the long-awaited goal of sovereignty and independence. This too is

happiness - a particular kind of happiness, a difficult happiness.

It is precisely the words "difficult happiness" that I would use to

express the essence of the present mood and feelings experienced by my

people. Yakub Kolas, one of the titans of the culture and national spirit of

Belarus, in his poem "New Land", wrote with tremendous power concerning the

everlasting dream of a poor peasant in Belarus about land that would belong

only to him, where he would be the master, independent of the caprice of an

alien will.

Belarus, one of the ancient centres of Slavdom, is a new land, a new

country regained by its people. The goals of freedom, of the enjoyment of

full ownership rights in one's own country and of liberation from oppression

in all of its manifestations have nourished the historic will of our people

for centuries and are now beginning to be fully realized.

A year ago, at the last session of the General Assembly, the delegation

of Belarus, in its statement, outlined the programme of its priorities in the

sphere of foreign policy: a series of diplomatic recognitions, the

establishment of a commonwealth of sovereign States in place of the Union of

Soviet Socialist Republics, non-nuclear status and neutrality for Belarus.

Today, in a brief review of the year, I should like to note with

satisfaction that a great deal has been achieved. As we foresaw, the

Commonwealth of Independent States born at Viskuli, on the soil of Belarus -

has been established in place of the USSR. More than 100 States of the world

have recognized the Republic of Belarus, and we have established diplomatic

relations with 60 of them. Our State has become a full and equal member of

the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE); it has joined the

International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, as well as other international

financial institutions; and it is now the host country for an office of the

United Nations and the United Nations Development Programme.

Tactical nuclear weapons have been completely withdrawn from Belarus.

Having become a party to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and its Lisbon

Protocol, Belarus has also committed itself to the withdrawal of strategic

weapons over a period of seven years. Possibly the process will be completed

even sooner. We have distanced ourselves from participation in military and

military-political alliances and blocs. Everything achieved thus far has

established for our State a primary foundation, a base from which we can

advance further.

There are certain invisible threads that link the present and the past

into a whole the spiritual potential of culture as an element of political

choice, of fateful decisions taken at stages of drastic transition in

history. Having established the necessary basis for its statehood and foreign

policy, Belarus today may be said metaphorically to be standing at a

crossroads of history. The problem of choice, of orientation, is particularly

consonant with the present transitional stage of our life. Which way and how

will Belarus move? What values will feed the roots of its State tree? What

do the near and the distant future hold for our people, which has suffered so

much? I think that hardly anyone would dare to give categorical and

unambiguous answers today to these and many other complex questions. We can

only make certain long-term assumptions and, so far as the prognosis is

concerned, state a number of ideas and principles relating to several spheres

of our activities.

In the economic sphere, our point of reference is the Commonwealth of

Independent States as a form of economic interaction.*

Events have put to shame those sceptics who foretold the imminent and

inevitable disintegration of the Commonwealth. Today it may indeed still

remind us of a weak child, but a child who, in our opinion, is destined to

stand firmly on his own feet. The Commonwealth whatever its membership may

be will endure and stand because under present conditions it is a form of

mutual economic survival. It is a form that has been forced on us but an

inevitable one, without which it would be difficult to count on the formation

of an East European economic market. It should be understood that the

structure which is now being established by its members cannot instantly

become the model of a developed, contemporary market. For 10 to 15 years we

shall continue to stumble along a bumpy road, but gradually we shall move

towards a state of market civilization which will ultimately enable us to

raise seriously the question of integration into the European Community - the

Common Market.

We are convinced that for a relatively long time to come there will be

two economic formations in Europe the European Community and what we might

term the emerging East European economic community which will develop

parallel to each other and gradually move closer together. For Belarus it is

not so much a civilized form of economic divorce as an opportunity for

creating a new quality of life, for getting ready, together with the other

States of the Commonwealth, to become part of an all-European market.

In other words, for us and, we hope, for a number of other States, the

Commonwealth represents not isolation and economic autarky but rather a form

of development, an inner transformation, whose fundamental essence and final

goal is a new Europe. The idea of a common home for Europeans will become a

reality only when the levels of economic development are equalized.

At present we are still struggling to prevent our economic potential from

declining too far. The specific characteristic of Belarus' approach to the

reforms is that the dynamics of the establishment of the new market structures

should and does fully match the fading away of the old economic structures.

Such a harmonious approach enables us to avoid extremes: on the one hand,

rushing forward without good reason and, on the other, rigidly clinging to

what is outmoded. We are convinced that, having overcome its difficulties,

the people of Belarus will realize its age-old dream, in the words of

Yanka Kupala, "to become the equal of other peoples in glory and power".

In the political sphere we shall continue to act in strict conformity

with the constitutional principles of a neutral and non-nuclear State. We

perceive each of these not as a "given", not as a "moment of truth", but as a

goal born in the depths of our national consciousness as we lived our tragic

history.

We view the movement towards neutrality and non-nuclear status as a

process of consolidating the independence and sovereignty of Belarus,

acquiring our own political identity and breaking free of the traps that could

in the future prevent our free and conscious integration into the structures

objectively necessitated by world development.

We realize clearly that the notion of classical neutrality is undergoing

a radical change of content. Perpetual neutrality does not and cannot exist

in a Europe and a world which are interdependent, just as no perpetual-motion

machine exists or can exist in nature. The steps recently taken by European

countries that had been neutral on the basis of tradition or treaties are

evidence of this.

We, the people of Belarus, on the basis of our tragic past, have been and

continue to have a romantic concept of neutrality. This has become simply a

matter of national instinct. There have been so many attempts to annihilate

us, so many attacks upon us, that we still have the feeling that if we become

neutral, our security will be guaranteed.

But Belarus can become truly neutral only when the new Europe is free of

blocs, when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ceases to exist just

as the Warsaw Pact did in the recent past, when the freedom of movement of

ideas, people, capital, goods and services becomes an everyday reality.

The third trend is democratic institutionalization. There is no doubt

that our main hopes in this area are associated with the adoption of a new

Constitution which will make the process of democratization irreversible. I

believe that this may happen in the coming months in the course of the second

reading of our draft Constitution, which is scheduled for October of this

year. The draft Constitution includes the following fundamental values and

principles: deideologization and political pluralism; primacy of the norms of

international law; the separation of legislative, executive and judicial

power, with reciprocal checks and balances between the three branches of State

organization; the introduction of norms for direct action with respect to

human rights, any potential violation of which would automatically cause the

judicial bodies to intervene; the undertaking of a thorough and complex

judicial reform aimed at reforming the civil code and the code of civil

procedure, the code of labour law, the criminal code and the code of criminal

procedure, and the establishment of trial by jury; the creation of a

constitutional court; and strict observance of the rights of national

minorities on the basis of the recommendations of the 1990 Copenhagen meeting

of CSCE on the human dimension and the 1991 Charter of Paris.

In this area, in keeping with our traditional principles of tolerance in

all spheres, including the religious sphere, we intend to continue to maintain

a high standard even under the conditions of a turbulent Europe. We take

pride in the fact that all through the many centuries of our history, despite

the Pale of Settlement, we have never had such extreme chauvinistic phenomena

as anti-Jewish pogroms or any other similar actions on our national soil. Our

firm principles - a genuine love of peace, respect for others, tolerance,

honouring the right of each ethnic group, regardless of its size, to have its

own national identity and equal civil rights - will be preserved and augmented

by us in contemporary Europe.

This is demonstrated by the present-day situation in a

multi-denominational Belarus, where a religious minority, the Catholics of

Belarus, has been granted the right to celebrate its main religious holidays

as officially established non-working days. If I am not mistaken, this is one

of a very few such examples in Europe.

It is our hope that the unique interfaith balance that has historically

developed in Belarus will be valued and respected by all and will not become

the subject of external manipulations. We in Belarus do not equate the

religious denomination of the citizens of Belarus with the ethnic groups to

which they belong.

To say that we are living in an extraordinary time is nowadays often

merely to mouth a cliche. The time has come, however, to go both beyond mere

declarations that changes have taken place and beyond simple-minded

sentimentality at the sudden disappearance of earlier global tensions. It is

true that the disintegration of the totalitarian system, both as a social and

political system and as a system of States, has led to the actual disappearance

of the central line of tension between the two opposing global military and

ideological groups. One pattern of international relations, which

characterized most of the twentieth century, is being or has been replaced by

another. But this still does not automatically mean the absence of

conflicts. Paradoxically, the new pattern is reminiscent of the one that was

laid down by the Vienna Congress and characterized the Europe of the

nineteenth century, especially its latter half, with its multitude of centres

of power and the abundance of inter-State and intra-State conflicts, often

ethnic in content. No doubt the analogy is not exact, but its points of

resemblance give cause for concern, a concern actively reinforced by the

bloody conflicts in Yugoslavia, Nagorny Karabakh, Georgia and Moldova, all of

which seemed inconceivable to Europe just a few years ago. And after all, we

all recall the catastrophic convulsions with which that international

structure ended at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The political structure adopted thereafter was that of post-Versailles

Europe, which also proved counterproductive. The creation of subregional

groupings, such as the Little Entente, and an amorphous system of

pseudo-collective security eventually demonstrated the complete inability of

the League of Nations to function and failed to save the world from the

conflagration of the Second World War.

The situation today is similar in many respects. It is thought that

unless urgent measures are taken, Europe will totally fail to approach

complete prosperity and tranquillity. Internal tensions on the continent are

increasing. A broader interpretation of CSCE is drawing it into new crises in

the European-Asian area and making it more difficult to achieve any concrete

results at the initial stage of emerging conflicts. Is it possible that we

have not learned anything from the sad experiences of the past? It is true

that the nuclear threat is receding, but the number of victims of

conventional-arms conflicts is nevertheless terrifying.

I am far from being a prophet of doom. Moreover, achieving our common

strategic goal - the creation of a unified European home is a thoroughly

realistic and attainable one. But we must not forget that the complications

we face on the path I have just outlined are also real. We must see them

clearly and overcome them in order to move forward through joint efforts

towards our chosen goal.

The main advantages of the new world order over that of the last century,

in our view, lie in mankind's accumulated bitter experience, which we must

prevent from recurring, and in the existence of a functioning and universally

respected Organization of States whose task it is to ensure international

peace and security.

It is important, however, to enable the United Nations, through our joint

efforts, to play an active, practical role in preventing conflicts and

"extinguishing" those that nevertheless arise.

At the present time it is both necessary and possible to strengthen the

role of the United Nations in monitoring the compliance of States with their

commitments under existing international covenants and conventions in the

sphere of human rights. The issue of radically strengthening the role of the

United Nations in this respect may become one of the items on the agenda of

the World Conference on Human Rights, to be held at Vienna next year.

It is essential to prevent the world from being split into groups on the

basis of different degrees of well-being. Closed "oases of prosperity" cannot

exist forever; they make the world unstable. Today, as never before, it is

necessary to mount a multifaceted attack on world-wide economic problems.

The removal of the threat of nuclear war and the growing burdens

technology imposes on the global environment, which have reached and even

exceeded the limit, have made clear the gravity of the problems that beset the

environment. In this sphere too, the international community must choose not

confrontation but cooperation in order to preserve the Earth's ecosystem.

Without idealizing the results of the Rio de Janeiro Conference, Belarus

shares the view that this is only the beginning of a long and difficult road.

Here, in addition to everything else, it should be borne in mind that on the

moral scale of values, the modest offerings of the poor are often much more

precious than the donations of the rich.

Belarus supports the idea of convening in 1995 the year marking the

fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations - a special session of the General

Assembly during which another summit meeting in the interests of the Earth

would be held, for the first comprehensive review of the implementation of

"Agenda 21", the agenda for the twenty-first century, and at which the

Earth-95 Charter, which may be developed on the basis of the 1992 Rio

Declaration, would be discussed.

We regard the unique summit meeting of the United Nations Security

Council, held on 31 January of this year, as a milestone in preparing the

United Nations for its role, which is totally new in its effectiveness. We

highly commend the Secretary-General's report "An Agenda for Peace", and we

are prepared to take part actively and as constructively as possible in

discussing the recommendations put forward in that report.

I can, however, declare even today our favourable attitude towards

enhancing the activities of the United Nations in carrying out peace-keeping

operations and, in general, in settling conflicts, many of which stem from

inter-ethnic disputes. In particular, we are prepared to participate actively

in the search for peaceful ways to resolve the Nagorny Karabakh conflict. We

have agreed to hold an international conference at Minsk on this issue, and

despite all our economic difficulties, we have done everything possible to

enable it to begin its work.

On the whole, Belarus' reserves of stability, both internally and on our

borders, its traditions of cultural and national tolerance, its aspirations to

the strict observance of human rights and its geopolitical position give it,

in our opinion, the potential to play an active role as a peace-keeping

mediator or coordinator in a number of situations, particularly in regions of

the former USSR but also in a broader context. We are ready to make use of

that potential in the interests of peace, cooperation and genuine respect for

human rights. As we see it, the realization of this potential will be helped

by another dimension in Belarus' foreign policy: our aspiration to balanced

consistency, constructiveness and predictability of action.

Speaking from this rostrum as the representative of a country that was

stricken by the worst nuclear accident in human history and of a State going

through an extremely difficult stage in its transition from one type of

economy to another, I must express today our anxiety concerning two aspects of

the General Assembly's activities.

The Republic of Belarus is troubled by the delay in the implementation of

the General Assembly resolution on strengthening international cooperation and

coordinating efforts to study, mitigate and minimize the consequences of the

Chernobyl disaster - or, to be more precise, by the Assembly's almost total

inactivity with regard to implementing that resolution. The ineffectiveness

of the United Nations, about which much has already been said from this

rostrum, can be vividly illustrated inter alia by this example, which is

particularly close and painful to us. We have learned from our own experience

that resolutions in this particular case resolution 45/190, which was

adopted by consensus and, I should point out, sponsored by 129 States - may be

adopted, but the results of such seemingly active measures are minimal. The

years that have elapsed since the disaster convince us that today we are

essentially at the mercy of a capricious fate and must rely first of all on

our own capabilities, on people of goodwill and on various international

charitable and religious organizations, to which we are immeasurably grateful

for their moral support and their assistance.

Even the small secretariat that was established to oversee the

implementation of that resolution is silently watching events from far-away

Vienna, clearly not intending to relocate to one of the three capitals of the

affected countries, closer to the scene. Apparently this is a much simpler

and calmer way of proceeding. And what good would it do to try to take the

Chernobyl issue outside of the United Nations, the United Nations General

Assembly and the Economic and Social Council?

It is evident that policy relating to Chernobyl is becoming hostage to

the current weaknesses and the inherent characteristics of the United

Nations. Need we explain why, in the light of this situation, the prestige of

such a universal Organization as the United Nations may be waning in the minds

of many people in Belarus?

A number of United Nations administrative and budgetary policies also

need to be seriously revised. First and foremost, the scale of assessments of

the States Members of the United Nations deserves criticism.

Regrettably, in the course of its recent work the Committee on

Contributions recommended to the General Assembly that the share contributed

by the Republic of Belarus to the United Nations budget should be sharply and

substantially increased. The state of our economy, especially during the

transitional period, gives no grounds for such an increase. We wish to

declare our profound disagreement with such an unjustified approach, and we

insist that the amount of our Republic's contribution to the Organization's

budget should be reconsidered. Furthermore, we are prepared to assume

financial obligations, but, first and foremost, we are prepared to do so only

in respect of financial obligations as from the time of the juridical

disappearance of the USSR, that is to say, from December 1991.

The poetic metaphor of a crossroads, which is so dominant for Belarus

today, involves another important symbolic feature, that of departing and

leaving something behind. As it passes through the present difficult

crossroads, Belarus leaves behind forever the obsolete ballast of implausible

stereotypes that were imposed upon us, bound us hand and foot and prevented us

from being free and happy. We look forward with confidence to the new

horizons now opening, we are ready to work indefatigably for our homeland, to

make the life of the people of Belarus prosperous and secure, and we shall

continue to make our contribution to the world community's constructive

efforts.

We are making our choice. We have made it already.