Dominican Republic, 2014

It

is an honour to participate in the sixty-ninth session

of the General Assembly of the United Nations by

representing the people and the Government of the

Dominican Republic. I wish to express my sincere

congratulations to Mr. Sam Kutesa on his election as

President at the current session. I wish to thank the

Secretary-General, Mr. Ban Ki-moon, for the honour

bestowed on our country by inviting us to participate

in the Education First initiative. As I hope that he

was able to note in his recent visit to our country, the

priority that education is being given in the Dominican

Republic is perhaps the best indicator of the new hopes

springing up in our country. It is true that news of hope

is especially valuable these days when it is not very

abundant.

Generally speaking, the times we live in

raise major challenges for the mission of the

Organization — preserving peace, encouraging

development, making education and health the

entitlement of all inhabitants of the Earth. As we are

all aware, about six years ago, a crisis that began in

the financial sector of developed countries quickly

spread to all productive sectors and has affected the

entire planet. The consequences of the economic shock

continue to be felt and were translated into tens of

millions of unemployed, millions of evictions and deep

cuts in social benefits in our countries.

The welfare State, the instrument which produced

some of the greatest advances in development and

security in history, was jeopardized. Today, we live

the paradox of seeing how that ideal of sustainable

growth and social justice becomes more fragile in

the countries of origin, while it is being reborn in

emerging countries. While developed countries adopt

policies of austerity and structural adjustments, which

are concepts sadly familiar to Latin Americans, we

see how social programmes proliferate in different

corners of the planet, lifting millions out of poverty and

mitigating inequality.

In the Dominican Republic, we still have a long

road ahead of us, but we are taking firm steps in the

fight against poverty and inequality. We are a small

country but we do not lack ambition. We have made

the commitment to our people, our citizens, to put

them at the centre of our public policy. And we have

set ourselves the goal to become a developed and

prosperous country, where equal opportunities will be,

not an ideal, but an everyday reality.

To achieve this, we have established a major

domestic compact, which will be our top priority as a

nation: namely, education. That is why we have doubled

the current budget for public education and allocated

to it 4 per cent of our gross domestic product. This

will enable us to carry out the largest expansion of

school infrastructure ever in our history and ensure

that all girls and boys, without exception, will have

access to quality public education. I am also proud to

tell the Assembly that at the end of this year, thanks to

the efforts of thousands of volunteers, we will be in a

position to declare our country free of illiteracy.

In health, that second pillar essential to the welfare

State, we are also making significant progress. We

have eliminated the co-payment for all public hospitals.

Every year, we add 450,000 participants to the

subsidized health insurance system.

We are also giving priority to supporting small

agricultural producers. We have been visiting rural

communities every week for two years now, listening

to people and seeking ways of helping them, such as

by providing credits, training and infrastructure. The

result of this, which is being monitored by the United

Nations Development Programme, is a rebirth of the

Dominican countryside, including improving its ability

to feed the country and creating employment in rural

communities. Thanks to that and other measures, over

the past 18 months in the Dominican Republic overall

poverty has been reduced by 6 per cent and poverty

in rural areas by 9 per cent. In other words, in 18

months we have lifted more than half a million people

out of poverty. We will continue to work tirelessly,

implementing policies that put the economy at the

service of the people and taking measures to combat

poverty and inequality in a sustainable manner, and we

will continue to create the basis of what one day will be

a full welfare State in the Dominican Republic.

It is an honour for us to be one of the signatory

nations of the founding Charter of the United

Nations, which, as everyone knows, assigned to the

Organization its purpose of saving future generations

from the scourge of war. We should recognize that 2014

is presenting major challenges to that noble purpose. In

different latitudes of the world, there have been violent

conflicts between communities, peoples or States. The

contexts of those conflicts are varied, but one thing

remains constant — the extent to which past grievances

shape our identities today, and how dangerous it is to

allow oneself to be submerged by them. We watch in

perplexity and indignation the virulence with which

these violent conflicts are waged in different parts of

the world.

The Middle East is once again the scene of the

bloodiest sectarianism, which we condemn from this

rostrum in all its manifestations. In the history of all

nations or communities, without exception, there is

a long history of disagreements, misunderstandings

and quarrels that, at times, can be used to stir up the

worst passions. They can be manipulated by individuals

seeking to consolidate power or inflamed by extremist

groups that feel that they have nothing to lose. There will

always be someone who keeps old disputes alive. There

will always be someone who does not mind sacrificing

the true interests of the people at the time because of

the wrongs of the past recorded in the history books.

However, there are plenty of examples to the

contrary. Throughout the world, there are people and

countries that have managed to leave their past behind

in order to focus on building the future that they want

for their children and new generations. Whether it is

building bridges between countries once in conflict, as

the European Union did, or among communities that

decided to share the same nation, as in the case of South

Africa. Hope can and must find its way.

I would also like, if I may, to bring a note of

optimism from our Caribbean region. In the past year,

we started a dialogue process with neighbouring Haiti

that can rightly be regarded as historic. Our situation is

of course unique but not to the degree that it cannot be

echoed in other parts of the world. As members perhaps

know, since the birth of our two Republics, there has

been a long history of misunderstanding and disputes,

which led to each of our countries having a distorted

picture of the other.

It is true that in our past there were a couple of

painful chapters, which are part of our identity.

However, if we limit our identity to those few chapters,

it will be impoverished. Our history is very rich. It has

hundreds of chapters. In many of them, we can find the

inspiration to guide us towards a better future and a

more complete, richer and more human identity because

that is clearly an excellent basis for understanding. In

both countries, there are millions of people who want

better development, education, health care, security

and jobs and more opportunities. Those are concrete

demands that require specific measures. The truth is

that, by responding to them and reaching agreements

in each of those areas, in a few months we were able to

achieve the progress that we had not made in decades.

Little by little, we are moving forward. We are

discovering that old wounds do not impede advancing

on that path, but that they heal as we move forward.

Our peoples demanded that we exercise the necessary

courage to take the first step. We will continue to take

steps until we achieve our goal of two free, sovereign

and independent nations that, on the basis of their

sovereignty, cooperate for the benefit of their respective

peoples.

I wish to take this opportunity from this rostrum

at the General Assembly to make an appeal. As I have

said, a new era in Dominican-Haitian relations has

begun. In that new phase, we would like to enjoy the

support of the international community. One of our

main actions to strengthen Dominican sovereignty and

to ensure the rights of people living in our territory

is to provide them all the relevant documentation. As

members know, many of those people are Haitian. In

order to regularize their status in the territory of the

Dominican Republic, they must first have identity

papers from their country of origin, which many of them

unfortunately lack. Haiti is making an effort to reach

those Haitians and to provide them with documents

that recognize them as its nationals. However, Haiti’s

technical and economic resources are limited. In the

past, a number of international organizations and

countries have expressed their concern about the

fate of Haitian migrants. We share that concern for

humanitarian reasons and because it affects us as the

main host country.

I would therefore note that now is an excellent

time to move from words to actions. With specific and

relatively simple actions, the international community

can have a major and lasting impact on the lives of those

people. I appeal for help for Haiti. May the international

community help Haiti to document its people in its

territory and in ours, since documentation is the first

essential step for the enjoyment of a wide-ranging body

of rights. Let us not allow a few technical shortcomings

to be an obstacle to such a hopeful and necessary process

with as much potential as that new stage of cooperation

between the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

There are times when our best aspirations seem

fragile. There are times when cynical people point out,

under I do not know what law of the economy or in

history, that we are bound to repeat the mistakes of

the past. They say that poverty cannot be overcome,

that the gap of inequality will always grow and that

past grievances will be reborn in each new generation.

However, we know that none of that is true. We know

where to look to find the path of hope. We have only to

look at those who are closest, that is, our own people,

their basic daily needs and the hopes that motivate them

to continue the struggle. If we look carefully, we see

that the economy is not a prison but can be a tool for

improving the lives of people. We find that the people

are free. They are free to know which parts of their past

they wish to use as a guide to their future and which

they wish to leave aside.

We will find a way to work together, as we have

done with the neighbours with whom we share an island,

or as we found yesterday, during the climate summit,

with the other countries with which we share the planet.

The citizens that we represent, increasingly better

informed, demand that we live up to our responsibility

and our declared commitment: to preserve peace, to

promote development and to make education and health

care the right of all inhabitants of the planet.