Guyana, 1993

As I stand today at this rostrum, a

flood of memories rushes to my mind. I recall appearing as

Premier before the United Nations Committee on

decolonization in 1961 to plead the case of my country’s

independence. Like so many other colonies after the Second

World War, Guyana was anxious to secure its freedom and

exercise its right to self-determination.

The road, however, was far from easy. Along the way

there were many stumbling-blocks and casualties. It was not

until 1966, long after most subject peoples had been set free,

that we became independent and took our place in the family

of nations.

The world today is radically different from what it was

then. The total membership of the United Nations has

grown significantly. The cold war, which had bedevilled

international relations since 1947, has ended, with a promise

of a new and more democratic world order. With the

collapse of the Soviet Union, one of the two super-Powers,

there are severe difficulties for the new structures which

have been established. Nevertheless, hope is alive for the

construction of an era of peace, based on respect for all

peoples and the promotion of their general welfare. It is an

exciting moment in world history, and for the United

Nations there is a defining role.

Guyana has been honoured by the unanimous election

of its representative to the presidency of this forty-eighth

session of the General Assembly. This session will

undoubtedly be a challenging one. I wish to thank the entire

membership for its vote of confidence in our ability to

undertake this lofty responsibility. It is, after all, an

acknowledgement that all States, irrespective of their size,

can play an important role in the Organization’s work. I am

especially grateful to the Caribbean Community

(CARICOM) group and the wider Latin American and

Caribbean Group for their full endorsement of our

candidacy. I must also pay a tribute to His Excellency Mr.

Stoyan Ganev for his capable direction of the forty-seventh

session and to our distinguished Secretary-General for his

efforts to promote the continuing success of our world

Organization.

Success in these volatile times is often tempered. For,

notwithstanding its important accomplishments, the United

Nations cannot be said to have fulfilled the highest

aspirations of its creators. The scourge of war is still

rampant in many places. Colonialism is certainly not extinct,

and today it threatens to survive in different forms. Many

aspects of colonialism are evident in the ever-widening gap

between the developed and the developing countries and the

dependence of impoverished millions on the largesse of a

few. This prevailing economic and social disparity provides

a breeding ground for hunger, disease and poverty and

ultimately constitutes a threat to international peace and

security.

As the focal point of multilateralism, the United

Nations must continue to explore the full limits of

international cooperation in order to eliminate, or at least

alleviate, the problems of the disadvantaged. I should like

to think that there is now agreement that the grave situation

requires collective action. Whatever its limitations, it is still

the best forum available to States for diplomacy, dialogue

and negotiation, and thus for the avoidance of conflict. We

should seek, therefore, to enhance its ability to address our

common goals.

As a small developing State, Guyana is fully committed

to the ethos of multilateral cooperation which is embodied

in the United Nations. We have come here to renew

publicly our faith in the Organization and to urge all

Members to pledge to deepen and strengthen multilateralism

as a foundation for inter-State relations. Experience has

shown that no nation, however powerful, can exist in

isolation. Its borders are not impervious to encroachment by

universal ills. Ultimately, it must come together with the

rest of the world to find common solutions to common

problems. AIDS, narcotic drugs, poverty and pollution are

striking examples of the pandemic which affects us all.

Control of these scourges requires concerted action by the

United Nations as a whole. Added to these are natural

disasters, such as the recent earthquake in India. Our

deepest sympathy goes out to the Indian people and

Government.

We note with some disappointment that international

conflicts continue to undermine the capacity of the

Organization to promote the cooperation which is deemed

essential for reaching solutions to current global problems.

The real value of the United Nations in this period will

depend on its collective ability to respond effectively to this

wave of international conflicts, and to find acceptable means

of peace-keeping and peacemaking which will not be a

burden on its membership.

Such a development will inspire confidence among

member nations to refer issues to the United Nations body,

and to restore their reliance on the Organization’s ability to

resolve disputes before they resort to the battlefield.

Our first effort at constructing a framework for

international peace and security through the League of

Nations ended in failure. The reason can be found in the

inherent weakness of the League, in the resultant inability to

contain rampant nationalism, particularism and insularity and

in the lack of respect for its fundamental principles. The

United Nations is a second experiment, prompted by the

disasters consequent upon the failure of the League. At San

Francisco we vowed to spare succeeding generations from

the scourge of war. We have before us today another

opportunity to secure an era of real peace and stability, to

deploy fully the resources of the Organization in the service

of humanity, and to reach for a broad-based, sustainable

development and some measure of prosperity and fulfilment

for the peoples of this planet.

In our efforts to bolster international peace and security,

the report, "An Agenda for Peace", which was prepared by

the Secretary-General in response to the Security Council’s

request, sets out a number of proposals which merit serious

consideration. While recognizing the need to provide the

Council with enforcement capacity under Chapter VII of the

Charter, we place special importance on preventive

diplomacy, which would obviate recourse to physical

intervention. As the experience of some recent peacemaking

and peace-keeping operations has shown, these measures are

fraught with uncertain political consequences. Moreover,

they have proved extremely costly, particularly to small

States such as ours which can ill afford such expenditures.

So diverse are the origins of conflict that each situation

must be examined in depth to determine the most

appropriate means of peaceful solution. In some cases the

dispute may have legal implications and may therefore be

best handled by a suitable judicial body. More often than

not, however, the roots of conflict are embedded in a history

of complicated political, economic and social factors. In

such instances the ground must be carefully prepared for the

cultivation of peace and stability. Fortunately, the

advantages of the diplomatic approach are not lost in the

United Nations, which increasingly is using the good offices

of the Secretary-General and his representatives to induce

solutions to long-standing conflicts.

We believe that these examples reaffirm the virtue of

dialogue and negotiation. However, although promising for

the future, other situations remain tenuous and require

constant monitoring. Somalia and Sudan must be carefully

nurtured back to normalcy. In Europe, Bosnia and

Herzegovina stands out as an horrific example of man’s

inhumanity to man, and compels us to search for a quick end

to the wanton killing of innocent thousands. Indeed, the

Forty-eighth session - 1 October l993 3

United Nations must hasten to devise new strategies to deal

with these persistent convulsions in the global body politic.

The Middle East has been embroiled in conflict for

much too long. With the recent signing of the declaration of

principles for Palestinian self-rule, the road ahead is

encouraging. Peace and stability throughout the region now

seem to be within our grasp. We hope also that the

territorial problems between Iraq and Kuwait can be

amicably settled.

As far as South Africa is concerned, the announcement

of a date for elections, coupled with supporting structures,

gives rise to the hope that majority rule is not far off and we

may in the near future welcome that country back into the

fold of the international community. We urge the peoples of

South Africa to eschew further violence and to come

together for their common good.

I wish to record with satisfaction the view that a return

to democratic traditions and respect for good governance and

human rights has helped to further promote peace. Guyana

will support any confidence-building mechanism which

favours dialogue over confrontation as the means of choice

for the pacific settlement of disputes. Because of the

inherent correlation between peace and development it

behoves each member of the international community to

continue the search, where needed, for creative ways to

settle disputes that could otherwise imperil not only

international peace and security but also national

development.

In this hemisphere, of which Guyana forms part, we are

concerned that, despite the end of the cold war, Cuba

remains outside the inter-American family. We truly believe

that this is a serious anomaly in the context of the

Organization’s efforts to build a new world order based on

mutual understanding and respect among all States in a

united international community. We appeal to the United

States and Cuba to demonstrate their good will and seek

urgently to reconcile their long-standing differences. The

Caribbean Community (CARICOM), which has a vested

interest in the early rapprochement between these two major

partners, stands ready to play a role in this process.

We are particularly pleased that the Central American

region, which for far too long has been entrapped by

anachronistic economic and social structures, has emerged

from a vicious cycle of internecine violence. CARICOM

welcomes the opportunity which this development offers for

closer cooperation between two neighbouring regions. We

are equally pleased that, after being held hostage by a

military dictatorship unwilling to heed the popular will, Haiti

is once again free to pursue a democratic path. We offer to

President Aristide and his government our ready cooperation

in the urgent task of reconstruction for social progress.

Guyana has itself only recently emerged from a difficult

electoral process that, under international vigilance, proved

to be free and fair. We are particularly grateful for the role

the United Nations played in ensuring that the democratic

will of our people was fully respected. After all, the right

to choose one’s government is a fundamental human right,

which should never be denied. We commend the United

Nations for providing electoral assistance at the request of

those who seek it, and with due respect for the principle of

national sovereignty. Elections alone, however, do not

guarantee the preservation of democracy: they must be

accompanied by the establishment of machinery that protects

every individual in our societies. I am pleased to report that

one of the first steps my Government took upon assuming

office was to accede to the Optional Protocol to the United

Nations Human Rights Covenants. We followed that with

the establishment of an Inter-Agency High-Level Committee

on Human Rights, whose function it is to ensure that Guyana

complies with its reporting responsibilities under the Human

Rights Conventions.

It is not enough, however, to satisfy the civic and

political rights of our citizens: their fundamental economic

and social entitlements to food, clothing, shelter and so on

must also be provided. Human rights are indivisible, and to

prefer one above the other is to deny their essential

interrelatedness. The Vienna Conference appears to have

recognized this fact and to have confirmed the need for a

holistic approach. My own Government is dedicated to the

proposition that human development must be comprehensive

if our society’s welfare is to be secured. Our stated policy,

therefore, is to create an environment in which democracy

will work to fulfil our people’s spiritual and material needs.

To implement our development programme, however, we

shall require the cooperation of the international community

to supplement our own limited resources.

As I observed earlier this year at a Conference entitled

"Poverty in Guyana - Finding Solutions", we are in a

situation of crisis. For, while we have recently begun to

experience high growth rates, the economy continues to be

weak: unemployment is high; human and financial resources

are scarce; and basic infrastructure has deteriorated, leaving

the social sectors vulnerable to all the ills of poverty. We

have been somewhat successful in raising production and

productivity levels, but are seriously limited by a heavy debt

burden. Some 90 cents of each dollar earned now go

4 General Assembly - Forty-eighth session

towards the repayment of the national debt. And the

proportion of our external commercial earnings for payment

of our foreign debt is nearly three times the average of the

47 least developed countries - an unbearably heavy burden.

Even though we attempt to manage expenditure judiciously,

through good governance - efficient management, a clean

and lean administration and fullest respect for human rights -

we cannot perform miracles. At the end of the day, we must

look for assistance to buttress our domestic efforts and to

preserve our tender democracy. With nearly 80 per cent of

our people below the poverty line, we shall succeed in

consolidating democracy only through economic

development with social justice.

At the present time, however, the prospects for such

support appear rather bleak. There has been a noticeable

contraction in development aid as the economies of some

donor countries experience difficulties. Their own

electorates appear increasingly concerned with domestic

problems, such as unemployment and falling living

standards. Whatever limited resources are available are

allocated by the developed nations largely on the basis of

strategic concerns. The international agenda is therefore

being set more and more at the sacrifice of the developing

world. There is consequently an urgent need to reorder our

priorities and to place development at the top of our agenda.

At best, however, development aid is no more than a

palliative. Significant economic and social progress will

come to the developing countries only when inequitable and

unjust economic and trade practices in the global system are

removed. As the 1992 human development report pointed

out, we are denied some $500 billion in market opportunities

annually, 10 times what we receive as foreign assistance,

primarily because of protectionist policies still being pursued

by the developed countries. We call, therefore, on those

countries to open up their markets to our goods at prices that

compensate us fairly for our labour and production. In this

context, we urge the industrial nations to expedite the

conclusion of trade negotiations, taking fully into account the

interests of our small, developing economies. We would

also wish and ask that the formation of large regional

economic groupings - the megablocs as they are called -

guard against the further marginalization of our economies

and our countries.

Additionally, a definite solution must be found, during

the current decade, to the third world’s crushing external

debt problem. In Latin America and the Caribbean, with

181 million out of 441 million people living below the

poverty line, in the mire of destitution, how can human

development take place when, despite onerous debt

payments, the stock of debt continues to grow? A

prospective Economic Commission for Latin America and

the Caribbean (ECLAC) study for the region over the

1985-1995 period shows a serious aggravation in terms of

poverty, unemployment and foreign debt during the decade.

Between 1981 and 1990, the region’s foreign debt payments

were $503 billion, of which $313 billion were interest

payments. However, in the same period, the region’s

consolidated foreign debt increased from $297 billion in

1981 to $428 billion in 1991. Little wonder that the United

Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) publication entitled

"Children of the Americas" commented that this mechanism,

whereby the more you pay the more you owe, is perverse

and must be stopped.

Debt relief in the form of debt cancellation, grants, soft

loans and rescheduling is urgent if the developing countries

are to eradicate poverty, protect the environment and play a

meaningful role in expanding world trade and ending

stagnation and recession in the industrially developed

countries. Debt relief must be seen as an investment not

only in the development of poor countries but also in the

security of the rich nations.

Recognizing the link that exists between poverty, trade,

population, development and the environment, we must

hasten to implement the Rio programme of action outlined

in Agenda 21. The developing countries urgently require the

resources - both financial and technological - necessary to

fulfil their obligations under that compact. As proof of its

commitment to protect the environment, Guyana has set

aside nearly 1 million acres of its tropical forests for

research, management and development of our rich

biodiversity. With the welcome of entities such as the

Commonwealth Secretariat, the United Nations Development

Programme and the Global Environment Facility, the

Iwokrama project, as it is now known, has been fully

launched. At the commissioning ceremony held on World

Environment Day this year, I dedicated the enterprise to our

indigenous peoples, who are not only the principal

inhabitants but also the custodians of our forests. It is

fitting, especially in this, the International Year of the

World’s Indigenous People, that full recognition be given to

the important role they play in harmonizing man’s

relationship with the Earth on which he lives.

We also urge full support for the Global Conference on

the Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing

States, scheduled to commence in Barbados in April 1994.

We trust that there will be adequate preparation and the

widest participation in that Conference.

Forty-eighth session - 1 October l993 5

In a spirit of genuine cooperation, therefore, let us

proceed to address the proposed agenda for development,

which we have accepted as a natural concomitant to "An

Agenda for Peace". Indeed, peace cannot prevail in the

absence of development. Our attempts at peacemaking and

conflict resolution in general will not succeed if inequitable

and unjust economic and social conditions are allowed to

persist. Of late, many of the organs and agencies engaged

in the development process have had cause to lament the

growing diminution of resources available to them, a

problem now aggravated by continuing diversion of funding

to a multiplicity of peace-keeping operations. Obviously,

one recognizes the importance of maintaining global peace.

However, it should not be at the cost of a disproportionate

sacrifice of development, which leads to peace-keeping

becoming an end in itself instead of a means of encouraging

economic and social welfare.

The United Nations, whose universal membership

encompasses both developed and developing nations,

remains the ideal forum for forging a consensus on the

major issues of peace and development. It is evident,

however, that, as currently conceived and structured, it

cannot adequately perform the role expected of it. That

realization has led us to undertake the exercise of reforming

and restructuring the Organization. To this end, we must

ensure that the changes we make are not simply cosmetic

but serve effectively to enhance the Organization’s capacity

to deal with the challenges of the post-cold-war period. Our

reforms must therefore seek to establish the United Nations

as the principal forum in which macro-political, economic

and social policies are collectively and consensually devised.

If truth be told, the United Nations is still largely

perceived, notwithstanding its recent successes in the

political field, as a "talk shop". Like the old Congress of

Vienna, which was described as a "perpetual dance", it is

viewed in the eyes of our peoples - particularly the poor and

the suffering - as an endless round of dilatory debate which

produces fine resolutions but precious little by way of

concrete action. To survive and succeed, therefore, the

United Nations must become relevant to the lives of men,

women and children everywhere.

Urgent action is required at this explosive period of

mounting external debt, falling economic growth, falling

third-world commodity prices, increasing unemployment,

environmental destruction, underdevelopment and the

persistence of poverty. Our troubled planet calls for

statesmanship, political will and cooperation for meaningful

change. Market forces alone are not providing the people

with adequate opportunities to participate in and benefit from

economic growth and development. We have a paradox of

growing poverty in the midst of potential plenty. Science

and technology have the capacity to eradicate poverty in the

not too distant future and to halve it by the end of the

century. Instead, we have today, both in the developed and

in the developing countries, only about half the growth rate

of a decade ago and the catastrophic phenomenon of "jobless

growth" - fewer and fewer jobs and more and more poverty

and inequality.

It is necessary to ascertain the root causes of global

poverty and to develop an integrated strategy for its

eradication. This necessitates a comprehensive world view

and a recognition of the major contradiction of our time: the

tremendous growth of the means of production and the

anachronistic relations of production and the collective will

to resolve this contradiction.

In the intense competition in a shrinking global

market - owing in large part to the increasing poverty and

the widening gap between the rich and poor in both the

North and South, and between the North and the South - the

three centres of the industrialized world - North America,

Western Europe and Japan - are resorting to even more

capital-intensive growth and the use of more and more

sophisticated technology: computers and robots, cybernetics

and automation. How can the poor and unsophisticated in

the third-world countries survive in the "global village", in

the "borderless world" when collectively these countries have

not attained the target projected long ago of 25 per cent in

the production of industrialized goods and with the great

majority light-years behind in human-resource development

and burdened by the dead weight of unconscionable and

immoral debt payments? The rapid advance to robots and

automation in the North also poses a threat to the

advantageous position of competitive wage rates in many

countries of the South. And the industrialized countries with

budget deficits, growing numbers of jobless and retirees and

inadequate welfare funds cannot afford the Keynesian luxury

of pump-priming and "workfare".

In a situation of confusion and uncertainty, and with no

solution in sight, the reactionary ultra-rightists and

neo-fascists are getting stronger politically and becoming

more vocal and strident. There is no answer to the

hopelessness and despair of the more than 30 million

unemployed in the countries of the Organization for

Economic Cooperation and Development. Despair is leading

to alcoholism, narcotics use, crime and suicide. Meanwhile

nationalism, xenophobia and neo-fascism are on the rise,

leading to racial and ethnic tensions and growing civil strife.

6 General Assembly - Forty-eighth session

The North-South dialogue has been languishing and has

become a dialogue of the deaf. In the South, rising

unemployment and abject poverty are interacting with rapid

population growth, urbanization, overcrowding, disease, the

production and use of narcotic drugs, increased flows of

refugees across international frontiers and irreversible

damage to the environment. Whereas it was said previously

that the Berlin Wall prevented peoples in the Soviet Union

and Eastern Europe from travelling to the West, now new

walls are being erected to prevent people from entering the

developed, industrialized countries.

It is not enough to treat the symptoms of the global

malaise. Radical reforms are urgently needed. Structural

adjustment is as necessary for the developed countries as for

the developing countries, but reforms must be predicated on

social justice and have a human face. Human needs and

human security should be the object of development. In this

regard, greater emphasis must be placed on human capital

and natural capital, and much more must be done to speed

up disarmament so that the despairing and hungry of the

world can benefit from greatly enhanced savings.

The development agenda must include a critical analysis

of possible options and must deal with the international

competitiveness of the third world, the basis of new

modalities of international cooperation for development and

the financing of development. It must also address core

problems: alleviation of poverty, expansion of productive

employment and enhancement of social integration,

particularly of the more disadvantaged and marginal groups.

To attain these objectives, the people - I repeat, the

people - must play a central role. They must be fully

involved in all aspects of life to take advantage of their

initiatives and creativity in the fashioning of a better future

and a peaceful and prosperous world.

As the leader of a small nation which continues to

believe in the vast potential of this Organization for making

the world a better place in which to live, I appeal to the

Assembly to devote itself to this urgent task. Let us work

together to advance the cause of global peace and

development.