Ethiopia, 1995

I would like first of all to

extend sincere congratulations to the President on his

unanimous election at this historic fiftieth session of the

General Assembly. While expressing my delegation’s full

confidence that he will steer our deliberations to a

successful conclusion, I wish also to seize this opportunity

to assure him of my delegation’s full support and

cooperation in the discharge of this heavy responsibility

entrusted to him.

It gives me great pleasure to commend my colleague,

your predecessor, His Excellency Mr. Amara Essy, Foreign

Minister of Côte d’Ivoire, for the very able and outstanding

manner in which he presided over the General Assembly at

its forty-ninth session.

Let me also take this opportunity to pay tribute to our

Secretary-General, Mr. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, for all the

efforts he has been making to ensure that the United

Nations is as effective and as efficient as possible.

As we enter the second half of the last decade of the

twentieth century, there are two interrelated and vital issues

which will continue to pose major challenges to the

international community: peace and development. There can

be no doubt that the degree to which the United Nations is

effective in promoting peace and in ensuring development

for all is the most appropriate yardstick for judging how

effective and vital the United Nations has been and will be

in fulfilling the purposes for which it came into being. We

pay tribute to the Secretary-General for having accorded

these two major concerns of the international community

the importance they so rightly deserve in his Agenda for

Peace and Agenda for Development.

The few years that have elapsed since the end of the

cold war confrontation have made us all realize that peace

and security can hardly be ensured through mere concord

between and among the major Powers. The removal of

the threat hanging over humanity that was the undesirable

symbol of the cold war is, and will remain, a major

achievement that can never be minimized. All those

devoted to peace must and should, within the United

Nations and other forums, continue to contribute their due

share towards ensuring that humanity is absolutely secure

from the potential dangers posed by nuclear weapons, a

noble task towards the achievement of which a genuinely

comprehensive test-ban treaty constitutes a major step

forward and a top priority. It is the earnest hope of

Ethiopia and of Africa that this goal would be attained as

soon as possible.

However, as much as we derive satisfaction from the

removal of threats to peace and security associated with

the period of the cold war, what the past few years have

made abundantly clear is that the challenges we face in

ensuring peace and security are no less daunting, and no

less of serious concern today, than they were in the cold

war period.

The types of conflicts that have been manifesting

themselves in recent years, not only in Africa, but also in

other parts of the world, have been more of an intra-State

than an inter-State nature. The Secretary-General of our

Organization has justifiably argued in a convincing

manner in his “Supplement to An Agenda for Peace'”

(A/50/60) how difficult it has become for the United

Nations, under these circumstances, to fulfil effectively its

peace-keeping obligations. No doubt, no matter how

difficult the task, the United Nations should and must

continue to assume major responsibility for international

peace and security in all parts of the world, including

Africa.

We, member States of the Organization of African

Unity (OAU), have, in the course of the past few years,

been in the process of augmenting OAU’s capacity to

play a meaningful role in the area of the prevention,

management and resolution of conflicts on our continent.

This effort will continue. But it is vital that the

international community lend its support to this African

initiative as some have already done. Above all, it is

imperative that a more effective cooperation be created

between the United Nations and the Organization of

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African Unity in this area, and we are looking forward to

the consultation at the highest level between the two, which

is scheduled to take place soon. In this regard, on its part

as the current Chairman of the Organization of African

Unity, Ethiopia is fully committed to the promotion of full

cooperation between the two organizations.

It is the view of my delegation, however, that no

matter how effective the United Nations becomes in

mobilizing resources for peace-keeping, no matter how

refined the techniques utilized are, the achievement of

peace would remain as remote as ever as long as the

underlying causes of conflict, in Africa or elsewhere, are

not removed or mitigated. The search for peace, it is said,

is in our minds; but it also has to do with conditions under

which people live.

In Africa, certainly, and this could be true in other

parts of the world as well, the major sources of conflicts

are in one way or another intertwined with economic

hardship and social problems confronted by the majority of

our peoples. It is impossible to assume that the difficulty

we have had in freeing the African continent from the

scourges of war is unrelated to the despair and the loss of

confidence in the future on the part of the majority of our

peoples - despair and lack of confidence in the future, the

explanation for which lies in the ever-deteriorating

economic situation faced by the overwhelming majority of

our countries.

It was largely as a result of the precipitous decline of

the economies of African States in the 1980s - rightly

characterized as a lost decade for Africa - that the General

Assembly adopted in December 1991 the United Nations

New Agenda for the Development of Africa in the 1990s as

a framework of partnership between Africa and the

international community. It is now obvious that the

commitments made by Africa’s development partners have

so far remained unfulfilled. However, the majority of

African countries have made substantial progress towards

meeting their commitments in political areas and in

carrying out the functioning of their economies more

efficiently.

In an era when the interdependence of nations is all

too apparent and at a time when we all acknowledge that

peace and security have become indivisible, the lack of

sufficient commitment to the removal of obstacles to the

development of Africa and other areas experiencing a

similar situation, should be seen as a source of serious

concern, with its immense implications for regional and

international peace and security. To the extent that, in areas

of the world such as Africa, peace can never be made to

be durable without development, the best approach to and

the most effective method for the prevention of conflicts

is one that focuses on preventive measures in economic

and social fields.

As a minimum measure, developing countries,

particularly African States, which dominate the list of

least developed countries, need to be freed from the

various impediments retarding and stunting their

economic growth and development. One such very critical

problem faced by African economies is the debt burden

and the debt-servicing obligations, which continue to

frustrate the ability of African countries to pull

themselves out of the economic crisis that they have been

facing for well over two decades. No part of the world

has been as much affected by the debt burden as Africa.

We do acknowledge some steps that have been taken, and

the promises made with respect to bilateral debt, including

at the Group of Seven Summit in Halifax. But the

magnitude of the problem faced by African countries is

such that nothing less than the most determined effort,

political will and commitment by creditor nations to assist

Africa overcome this major constraint would suffice for

Africa to relaunch and revitalize itself for economic

growth and development.

On the eve of the twenty-first century, one-fifth of

the world’s population is struggling amidst abject poverty.

All the circumstances indicate that unless the problem of

massive poverty is solved, it will be difficult for people

to actively participate in development in any meaningful

way under conditions of freedom and democracy. Thus,

it is absolutely necessary to assist poverty-eradication

measures in African countries in an integral and

multidimensional manner. In this regard we emphasize the

urgency of implementing the Programme of Action of the

World Summit for Social Development, which aims at the

eradication of poverty. We also appreciate the concern

voiced on the preponderance of poverty at the recent

Group of Seven Summit in Halifax, Canada.

It is also imperative that Africa’s partners in

economic cooperation take the necessary steps to ensure

that full access to their markets is ensured to Africa’s

exports. We still have to contend with the paradox that

while liberalization is promoted as a condition for

partnership with Africa, the same nations that lay down

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such prescriptions are often seen to be failing to live up to

those standards.

The newly created situation in world trade following

the establishment of the World Trade Organization has

made the difficulty faced by Africa and other developing

countries in this area all the more complex and daunting,

and if flexibility in the application of agreements is not

introduced, in favour of African countries, the consequences

could be very serious.

It is the conviction of the Ethiopian delegation that, in

the final analysis, each of our countries, including those of

Africa, should assume full responsibility for the economic

and political future of its peoples. The call on the

international community to do the maximum possible for

Africa in the economic area is an appeal to help remove the

obstacles hindering the development of the continent so that

Africa can regenerate itself through the efforts of its own

peoples.

This is most particularly true with respect to food

security, without which Africa, including my own country,

can never regain its self-respect and dignity and be taken

seriously as an effective actor on the international scene. I

wish, in this regard, to commend the Food and Agriculture

Organization of the United Nations (FAO) for its proposal

to convene a world food summit in 1996, a move which

has been fully endorsed by African Heads of State and

Government.

It is true that we in Africa also need to put our own

house in order. We cannot afford to look for external

excuses for maladies that are sometimes of our own

creation. In this respect, Africa’s economic ills are not

totally unrelated to the mismanagement of its economies by

its own leaders. Nor can it be denied that some of the

conflicts in our continent have been caused by

ill-governance and by the denial of democratic rights to the

peoples of the continent. The path that my own country,

Ethiopia, has traversed during the past two decades is very

instructive in this regard.

It was little more than four years ago that the

Ethiopian peoples managed to get rid of a military

dictatorship that had for 17 years brutalized the society,

brought its social fabric to the breaking point, almost

destroyed the country’s economy through mismanagement

and the imposition of stifling State control, and militarized

the society. For our new Government, which was

established soon after the overthrow of the military

dictatorship, the responsibilities of restoring peace and

security to the country, introducing democracy and respect

for human rights, and rehabilitating and reforming the

economy were daunting tasks that needed to be tackled

simultaneously and immediately. But we feel that we have

passed the test, and our success in putting in place in our

country the first-ever democratically elected Government

in the long history of Ethiopia is a source of great

satisfaction to our peoples.

Our vision for Ethiopia is one in which all its

peoples would be proud of belonging to it. This is an

Ethiopia inspired by grass roots democracy and a genuine

devolution of power within a federal system as stipulated

in the Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of

Ethiopia - a country which would be one of the pillars of

peace and cooperation in its own subregion and in the

African continent as a whole. My country attaches great

importance to full cooperation with countries of its

subregion with a view to promoting peace and laying the

foundation for joint efforts aimed at the economic revival

of our area.

No part of our continent has suffered as much as the

Horn of Africa in the past two decades, as a result of

civil wars and instability. Some of the conflicts in our

subregion still remain unresolved. There are many reasons

why the countries and the peoples of our subregion

should and must be preoccupied with the need to establish

durable peace. But this is by no means an easy task,

particularly when some find it difficult to live within the

bounds of international legality, to respect the principles

of international law governing inter-State relations and to

observe the norms of civilized international behaviour.

But no matter how challenging the task, Ethiopia will

continue to be committed to promoting peace, stability

and cooperation throughout Africa in general and in its

subregion in particular.

This is a very historic session of the General

Assembly. We are preparing to celebrate the fiftieth

anniversary of the establishment of our Organization. As

a founding Member of the United Nations, Ethiopia takes

pride in its achievements. We also long for increased

contributions to the promotion of the sacred principles

enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, whose

implementation is so vital for ensuring peace, security and

development for all.

If the global community could not effectively

respond to the call for poverty alleviation, economic and

social development, the achievement of peace and

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stability, nothing less would be at stake than the survival of

our Organization itself.

This unique opportunity should be seized to chart a

new path for the Organization - a new beginning whose

features should be a more democratic and a more

representative United Nations. The various organs of the

United Nations, including the Security Council, should

conduct their business with absolute transparency and

accountability. It is my delegation’s earnest hope, therefore,

that at this session important steps will be taken to make

the United Nations more credible, more legitimate and more

effective.

I wish to close my statement by reiterating and

reaffirming my country’s commitment to the United

Nations and its devotion to efforts designed to protect and

to revitalize the Organization.