Lebanon, 1995

In a few days the United Nations will be marking the first

half-century of its existence. This historic occasion, which

the world with its different races, ethnic groups, religions,

and creeds will celebrate, will reach its peak here at

United Nations Headquarters, where world leaders and

Heads of State will meet.

This occasion, while it should reaffirm the need for

the United Nations, and underline its importance and the

importance of its principles, objectives, and activities,

will, at the same time, pose certain questions about the

current state of the Organization and where it stands

today. Such questions must be viewed in the context of

the principles that governed the establishment of the

United Nations and the objectives it was meant to

achieve. For it must be recalled that mankind wanted the

United Nations to be an enterprise for peace, harmony,

solidarity, dialogue, and rapprochement amongst peoples

and cultures of the world.

Through this legitimate dream, mankind sought to

build an edifice for rights, justice and peace. The United

Nations was meant to be an arbiter, a forum where people

could seek to defend their rights whenever they are

denied, and to redress injustice whenever oppression

prevails. By establishing the United Nations, humanity

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wanted to put an end to the era of war and to open the door

to peace, national sovereignty, independence, and territorial

integrity, and to protect peoples’ freedom of choice.

In the era of the communications and transportation

revolution, when political, economic, demographic, security

and cultural barriers are lowered, people need the United

Nations more than ever. They need a forum for constructive

dialogue and an effective and permanent mechanism for

consultation, cooperation, and coordination.

We are witnessing a scientific and technological

revolution that intensifies the need for a greater synergy

that would enable us to meet increasingly complicated

demands and challenges, to bridge the widening gap

between nations and, together, to do what no nation can do

alone.

The world’s demographic explosion has put the

Earth’s environment under constant pressure to cater to the

increasing demands made upon it. Competition for the

world’s resources is on the rise, as is the imbalance

between human needs and disposable resources. The

accumulation of lethal and sophisticated nuclear, chemical,

and bacteriological weapons, and the concomitant increase

in their destructive capabilities across continents, increase

peoples’ risk of annihilation. Their proliferation and

possession by some States that lack even the absolute

minimum of credibility and fail to provide any political

guarantees regarding the decision to use such weapons,

increases the world’s need for guarantees and controls on

armament.

The information revolution is contributing to the rapid

dissemination of information about political, scientific, and

economic achievements across boundaries. Unequal access

to information by some societies is accentuating their

isolation and causing them to be bound by their traditions,

either because they want to protect their national identity,

or because they are unable to assimilate such achievements.

Extremist and fundamentalist tendencies express the fear

haunting these societies against what are often perceived as

threats to their national identity.

All these risks make it more important than ever

before to reactivate United Nations machinery and to

reinvigorate confidence in its justice and credibility, to free

its decisions from hegemony, to redress its imbalances, and

to apply the same standards in its approach and

commitment. That is the path we should take if the United

Nations is to remain a world authority and an alternative to

heated confrontations.

So, where do we stand at present with regard to the

moral authority and credibility of United Nations

resolutions? How can we apply one standard across the

board?

The world has witnessed and continues to witness a

number of local and regional crises. Lebanon, which has

suffered from the scourge of war, follows what is

happening around the world with grave concern and

interest.

Rwanda and Bosnia and Herzegovina are two clear

examples of our inability to act in the face of horrible

atrocities. More than 20 years have passed and the

Cypriot problem still awaits settlement, despite numerous

relevant resolutions adopted by the General Assembly and

Security Council to unify the island and to protect its

independence and territorial integrity. The question of the

islands of the United Arab Emirates still awaits a solution

that would ease tension in the region.

Four years ago the Madrid Conference was

convened. We were optimistic about the invitation, the

content, and the sponsorship. As the co-sponsors were

super-Powers, and the Conference was to be convened on

the basis of establishing a just, comprehensive, and lasting

peace anchored in the principle of “land for peace”, and

on the basis of Security Council resolutions 242 (1967),

338 (1973), and 425 (1978) respectively, we accepted the

invitation, assuming that those who accepted it were also

in agreement with its content and that what remained to

be done was to discuss the questions of mechanisms and

schedules.

However, years have passed and months have gone

by while some waited for the results of elections and for

the arrival of the opportune moment at the domestic level.

Time has passed while some awaited circumstances that,

they bet, were bound to strengthen their positions, or

conducted secret negotiations that they expected to

weaken, isolate or single out some other side. The result

has been that we are still discussing today the basic

principles which were supposed to have been settled at

the very beginning of the Conference.

The principle of land for peace still awaits the

materialization of the concept of “land”. The principle of

withdrawal is still being obfuscated by the term

“redeployment”. We are told that resistance must cease,

without any guarantee that withdrawal or liberation will

ever take place. We are told that the boycott must end,

but no guarantee is given that usurped rights will be

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restored. We are required to engage in multilateral

negotiations on complementary subjects while the

fundamental bilateralism remains frozen and while we

know not whether there will be peace, or what the form and

content of that peace will ever be.

We are required to shake hands and to celebrate

before we know what exactly we are supposed to celebrate.

We, the victims of aggression, are required to give security

guarantees to the aggressor. Those who do not possess

weapons are required to reassure those who possess one of

the largest nuclear and chemical arsenals which the world

could not make subject to the Non-Proliferation Treaty

when the Treaty was extended.

The media hype that surrounded the recent signing of

the second Protocol between the Palestinian Authority and

Israel, which glorified the event and amplified its content,

makes us wonder about the extent of the authority that will

be exercised by the Palestinian people, the size of the

territories that would be returned and, ultimately, to wonder

about the fate of three quarters of the Palestinian people

who were displaced from the land of Palestine. What about

their right to return, their right to a nationality, to an

identity? What about those whose status was never

discussed either at Oslo or at Taba? We wonder: Could

those tiny specks of land — in which an authority less than

that of a municipality will be exercised — be called the

Palestinian homeland? Doesn’t the isolation of those tiny

specks into so-called security islands mean additional

prisons in which anger and rancour will fester?

Will the 400,000 Palestinians who are now in Lebanon

and others who are elsewhere in the world ever enjoy their

long-awaited right of return? How can we have faith in a

country that boasts of its desire for peace and its intention

to restore legitimate rights to people while it continues to

violate those rights, to build settlements and to occupy and

confiscate land? It cannot be credited unless it desists from

such actions forthwith, particularly in southern Lebanon,

where it has recently confiscated lands.

Could this bloated glorification by the media serve as

an alternative to the restoring of legitimate rights? Could

this anaesthetization of international public opinion, this

illusion of a solution, actually put an end to the problem?

We in Lebanon are patiently and diligently continuing

to rebuild our homeland after the destruction of a ravaging

war. We are continuing to build our institutions and our

security. Those who had emigrated are continuing to return

to their homeland, and those who were displaced are

continuing to return to their villages. Laws are being

enacted so that Lebanon may regain its natural place in

the Middle East on the economic, political and cultural

levels.

Lebanon has suffered for far too long from the

consequences and reverberations of the Middle East

crises. Lebanon has paid its heavy dues. Once again it

proves that it is capable of facing difficulties and rising

up to challenges and that its unity formula is much

stronger than was once believed, because it is the only

definitive reality.

Lebanon will once again prove that certain nations

have a history that is more extensive than their geography

and a role that is much larger than their physical size. As

long as Lebanon’s sovereignty and independence continue

to be compromised; as long as major parts of its land

continue to be out of its control; as long as the Lebanese

State continues to be unable to extend its full sovereignty

over all its national territory by its own legitimate

national forces; as long as Israel continues to occupy

Lebanon’s territories 17 years after the adoption by the

Security Council of resolution 425 (1978) which

demanded Israel’s complete withdrawal from Lebanon; as

long as Lebanese citizens continue to languish in Israeli

prisons and detention camps, ignored by the international

community in clear violation of their human rights — as

long as all this continues, the wounds will never heal and

the bleeding will never stop.

So long as the occupation of more than one eighth

of our national territory continues; so long as Israeli raids

daily sow our land with cluster bombs, fission bombs,

scatter bombs and booby traps for the killing of children;

so long as such criminal acts continue to be perpetrated

against a people that refuses to surrender; so long as our

women continue to mourn the loss of their loved ones and

so long as our children cry out, the cries of anguish will

continue to haunt the world and the voices raised against

injustice will grow louder than the roar of the guns that

defend a senseless occupation.

The occupier has used all the means available to it,

but has failed to contain this anger. Israel’s logic of

security zones inside Lebanese territories and security

belts has failed also. The cost has by far outweighed the

returns.

The Security Council’s method in dealing with

Lebanon’s complaints does not represent the optimum

means of performing the role of that important body. We

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have waited so long for the implementation of Security

Council resolutions. Instead, the Council has refrained from

condemning aggression, and if it happens to do so, it tends

to equate the aggressor with the victim of the aggression.

When it fails to condemn, it uses as a pretext the desire not

to cause any distortion to the peace process.

The peace negotiations, however, do not absolve the

Security Council from the obligation to perform its

appointed role at any given moment, especially when an act

of aggression is committed in the shadow of a peace

process. Nor do they absolve the Council from its

responsibility towards international peace. Discriminating in

the application of United Nations resolutions for some and

depriving others of the right to call for implementation;

discriminating in the application of the stipulations of

Chapter VII of the Charter on some trouble-makers while

refraining from such application on others in a sort of

cover-up for the practices of those protected others, will

deprive the United Nations of credibility as an arbiter to

whom the nations of the world have recourse in search of

justice.

The days when the problems of people were confined

to their own countries are over. The days when State

boundaries were barriers that contained a country’s crises

are over as well. Regardless of how distant any country

may be from a crisis area, it can none the less remain

subject to repercussions of such crisis. Thus every country

remains vulnerable to the political, economic,

environmental, demographic and security problems of other

countries.

The Middle East must not forever be a fiery volcano

that threatens international peace and security. This way,

the region will not see better days nor will time be forever

on the side of those who seek peace.

We have to realize that peace must be equitable, not

biased; just, not unjust; genuine, not ceremonial; balanced,

not deficient. Peace must help the refugee to return rather

than consecrate his displacement. Peace must satisfy those

who rebel against injustice, not provoke their anger.

The new tendency to weigh the suitability of

resolutions, to selectively enforce some and freeze some, to

elaborate different interpretations to different resolutions, an

enterprise that is engaged in, from time to time, in the

wings of the Organization under the pretext of having to

interpret resolutions with reference to the circumstances

under which they were adopted, all this threatens credibility

of the United Nations as a whole.

This then is the situation we face today, and it is

against the backdrop of this situation that I congratulate

the President on his election at this session and extend

appreciation to his predecessor, to the Secretary-General

and to the commanders, officers, and soldiers of the

United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL),

whom I wholeheartedly thank for their valuable efforts

under difficult circumstances.

May God guide us to peace and to acquitting

ourselves in the eyes of the generations to come.