Saint Lucia, 2000

Humanity, our greatest

concern, is the reason why we are gathered here today.

Humanity stands at a defining moment in world

history. The challenge before us is to harness the

collective consciousness and will of the international

community to address the problems of planet Earth.

During the course of the past century, the

disparities between and within nations have widened.

Poverty, ill-health, illiteracy and hunger among the

world's people have increased. The world's ecosystem,

the foundation upon which we all depend for survival,

is rapidly deteriorating. That is why we must regard

this moment as significant in human history, despite

Fukuyama's claim that history has ended. The Third

Millennium offers us the opportunity to break away

from the shackles of the past and create new

beginnings. The choices that we make can change the

face of humankind and lead to the accepted goals of

global peace, economic and human security and the

greater good of humanity.

The past century was replete with examples of

nations preening themselves for conquest and

domination. The conquistadors who plundered the New

World are still at large, using global institutions, new

technologies and weapons of destruction to oppress and

dominate the weak, the innocent and the dispossessed

sectors of mankind. The message that Saint Lucia

brings to this Millennium Assembly comes from the

pen of Saint Lucia's Nobel Prize Laureate Derek

Walcott, who reminds us that, “There are no worlds to

conquer/But worlds to re-create”.

Minds that are historically poisoned with

conquest can hardly experience the essential

equanimity and calm of re-creation. The theme of this

millennium Assembly reaches out in the direction of

re-creation: a people-centred reshaping of the role and

function of the United Nations and a purposeful moral

thrust in re-creating the battered, demoralized societies

in which we live.

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That is why we must embrace the United Nations

Millennium Summit's theme, “We the peoples: The

Role of the United Nations in the twenty-first century”.

The attainment of meaningful transformation in the

world system calls for a United Nations capable of

assuming a vanguard role in development and in

advancing human society and security. The United

Nations system must play a critical role in promoting

global responsibility. Global responsibility implicitly

involves some form of moral commitment to human

welfare. It is the formulation of economic programmes

designed to bring about economic redistribution, to

safeguard against economic crises and to formulate

developmental policies that are in keeping with

environmental protection and sustainability.

The United Nations should be strengthened to

play a more central role in development, ensuring

equity and security for its small, vulnerable Members

like Saint Lucia against the greed of profit-driven

Powers. Instead, we are witnessing a consistent,

systemic weakening of the United Nations' role in

development, with development issues being left to

undemocratic institutions like the World Bank, the

International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World

Trade Organization (WTO), which perpetuate global

economic inequities and ignore the development issues

and concerns of developing countries.

The United Nations Development Programme

(UNDP), the United Nations' primary development

agency, is now reoriented to giving advice in

governance and democratic elections. The United

Nations therefore plays a peripheral role in

development, and small States like Saint Lucia are left

on their own to be devoured by powerful States backed

by powerful transnational corporations.

Saint Lucia joined this Organization and

entrusted it with our hopes of peace, security and

development. This Organization has passed on our trust

to a few dominant Powers and corporations. If the

United Nations has a diminished role in ensuring

development, peace and security for its small and

vulnerable Members, then our presence here is an

unnecessary diversion of our scarce resources. In these

circumstances we feel threatened and vulnerable that

our trust has been betrayed.

The greater good of human security cannot be

fostered simply through peacekeeping operations and

humanitarian missions. There must be a global drive to

empower people, through the elimination of the

adverse conditions that cause the incapacitation of the

human spirit and the imprisonment of the imagination.

Hence, the United Nations of the twenty-first century

must be capable of playing a significant role in

liberating the human spirit and imagination through

education and real opportunity. It must be able to

reposition itself to give practical meaning to the rising

tide all over the world as the common man aspires to

higher and wider horizons.

In reaffirming our faith in the United Nations and

its Charter, it is again with the hope of saving

succeeding generations from the scourge of war. The

threat to peace does not necessarily emanate from

military warfare. There are new forms of war currently

being waged on the small, the weak and the vulnerable.

In previous addresses to this Assembly, and in the

statement of our Head of Government to the

Millennium Summit, we pointed out the injustice

perpetrated on Saint Lucia and other banana-producing

countries of the Caribbean by the WTO, through its

rejection of the marketing regime for bananas in

Europe as being WTO-incompatible. That ruling has

condemned our countries to the prospect of economic

ruin, in that the stabilizing force of our economy has

been dealt a mortal blow.

Since that ruling by the WTO, which granted an

unreasonably limited time to adjust our economy, we

have lost 50 per cent of our foreign exchange earnings,

while thousands of farmers have become unemployed

and poverty and crime are on the increase. Yet, despite

our urgent economic situation, negotiations between

the European Union (EU) and the United States have

been stalled. Saint Lucia calls on the United States to

resume discussions with the European Union on a new

marketing system for bananas that could be acceptable

to all, giving due consideration to the Caribbean

proposal. But that is a pipedream. Our hopes have

slipped on a banana skin, because there is a new

sweetheart deal between Britain and the United States.

Resilient a people as we are, we are moving to

diversify our economies and to build another sector —

financial services. Again, the economic giants are

determined to crush our development efforts and

subject our people to poverty by attacking yet another

sector of our narrow economic base.

Saint Lucia has acted in good faith in fulfilling

our obligations to the Charter of the United Nations,

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assuming equality of all Member States. We have

respected the territorial integrity and political

independence of other Member States and have never

interfered in the internal affairs of another State.

Today, the Organisation for Economic

Cooperation and Development (OECD) has chosen to

dictate the tax policies of Saint Lucia and other

Caribbean islands by labelling our tax regime as a

harmful tax haven and is threatening to impose

sanctions for non-compliance with its prescribed

changes to our tax policies.

It is Saint Lucia's sovereign right to determine its

taxes. We cannot tell the OECD countries what taxes to

impose, nor do we expect interference in the exercise

of the sacred right entrusted to us by our citizens. Our

development options are few and limited, and we

consider the OECD action a violation of our basic

human right to development and to pursue a decent

standard of living for our people.

Our peace is threatened, our democracy is being

undermined. The conditions for conflict are being

created in my country and in the region, and yet,

instead of addressing development, we are being asked

to strengthen the United Nations to intervene in

national crises.

Within the context of a globalized world, the

concept of sovereignty is fast becoming an endangered

species. No self-respecting nation would willingly

abandon its sovereignty for the illusion of a better

world, when all the signals from this brave new world

are destructive and negative. In respect of

peacekeeping interventions, one can surrender

sovereignty to avoid a holocaust but certainly not to

permit well-heeled rapacious countries to hog the

capital flows in the financial services sector.

Last week, through our Heads of State and

Government, we reaffirmed our faith in the United

Nations and its Charter as indispensable foundations

for a more peaceful, prosperous and just world. This

reaffirmation is of particular significance to small

developing States like Saint Lucia, lacking the size and

resources to urge the international community to give

due consideration to our concerns and interests. We

agreed to entrust the United Nations with ensuring

equality among States. It is of paramount importance to

us that the United Nations does not flinch in its role of

fostering international dialogue and consensus

building, so that the concerns and interests of all

Member States are adequately addressed and reflected

in the work of the Organization. We do not expect our

trust to be given to more powerful influences to

determine our collective future. We rededicated

ourselves to upholding the principle of equality of

States and expect that equality to be realized in policy

directives of the United Nations with a balance in

representation of the interests of Member States and

regions.

Saint Lucia calls on the United Nations to assume

its rightful, central role in development and the

governance of globalization, to promote democracy

and good government nationally and internationally, to

stand for right and the protection of its weak and

vulnerable Members against the powerful and

dominant and to seek equality and justice for all. This

should be the focus of the United Nations in the new

millennium if poverty is to be eradicated and peace

enjoyed.

Saint Lucia cannot be enthusiastic about other

issues until development and equity in the global

economy become a priority. Our decline in revenues

denies us the capacity to increase our contribution to

peacekeeping, and we will be reluctant to do so until

there is an increase in our participation and benefit

from the global economy. Man cannot live by

governance alone or peace alone. Our people must find

the sustenance that will enable them to participate in

governance and peace. Saint Lucia therefore eagerly

looks forward to the convening of the

intergovernmental conference on financing for

development to discuss in a holistic manner issues of

trade, finance and monetary matters in the context of

globalization and trade liberalization.

We have always promoted an integrated approach

to development and global issues, and this age of

technology and interdependence lends itself more than

ever to the integrated approach of assessing and

addressing the issues at hand.

We continue to view the financing for

development process as the missing and the critical

link in the development agenda for a sustainable and

lasting resolution to poverty and threats to peace. We

hope that through this process the United Nations will

reclaim its legitimate role in development, entrusted to

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it in the Charter, and promote the effective

participation of all its Member States in the governance

of the global economy and globalization, for the

benefit of all the peoples of the world.

The greatest threat to world peace and democracy

is the systemic imbalances and inequities in the global

economy and the institutions that govern it. This

situation is unsustainable and explosive. The thrust of

many statements made during the Millennium Summit

and this session has been to strengthen peacekeeping

efforts with resources and personnel. We recognize that

there is need for improvement in peacekeeping efforts

to make them more effective. However, equal emphasis

and effort are not being committed to addressing the

real threats to peace and the primary causes of war.

Developing countries are threatened by continued

deprivation and inequities in the global economy.

Unless these inequities and imbalances are corrected,

we will continue to create situations of unrest and

threaten intervention while causes go unaddressed.

Similarly, we parade the fashionable notion of

poverty eradication in isolation, ignoring the complex,

multi-faceted nature of poverty and the causes of

poverty, including global economic inequities. This

façade to placate the poorest is fooling some of the

people, but not all of the world's poor. The holistic

nature of development takes precedence over the

palliative of poverty eradication. International

cooperation in development should instead be

demonstrated through meeting the United Nations

target of 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product in

overseas development assistance, through debt

cancellation, special and differential treatment on a

contractual basis for developing countries and adequate

financial support for the United Nations' development

programmes.

We have reaffirmed our commitment to

promoting democracy, albeit with the emphasis on

democracy at the national level. The inherent problem

in achieving this objective is clear, since democracy at

the national level is undermined by the lack of a

commensurate level of democracy at the international

level. The world's peoples and leaders will rightly

mock the call for democracy if this principle is not

equally applied in the Security Council, the Bretton

Woods Institutions and the World Trade Organization,

the main institutions that currently govern world affairs

in peace, security and the world economy, respectively.

The United Nations must demonstrate leadership of

democracy at the global level if we are to believe in

this principle as a foundation for peace and prosperity

in the new millennium. All Member States must be

able effectively to participate in matters of peace,

security and the global economy in order to give real

meaning to democracy and governance.

The symbolism of the United Nations is

universally recognized, but our role in this millennium

is to redefine its goals, sharpen its focus and make it a

more efficient instrument for effecting global change

and development. But this institutional change must be

inspired and fired by the commensurate determination

of Member nations to re-create their own societies. The

resonance and sympathetic vibration of our visionary

Secretary-General Kofi Annan is not enough. We as

Member nations must set about the task of societal re-

creation, within the parameters of our own societies, to

offset the negative influence of moral degradation,

crime, drugs and anti-social behaviour. These are the

benchmarks of the uncivil society.

In the re-creation of our own societies we face the

structural disadvantages of unemployment, illiteracy

and the tyranny of consumerism and materialism. Our

young people are cannon-fodder for the blandishments

of cable television. They lap up a culture and a lifestyle

that militate against their own self-development. They

fail to understand the nexus between earning and

spending and develop an appetite for consumer

durables which their economic base could never

support. They become aggressively fired-up with

demands and rising expectations that neither the

resources of the State nor their flimsy work ethic can

entertain. They develop a culture of carping criticism

that leaves no space for a culture of appreciation.

Caribbean Governments look on almost helplessly at a

growing phenomenon that threatens to disturb the

rhythm of projected economic growth and breeds a

kind of lawlessness which conventional law-and-order

techniques cannot contain.

As globalization erodes the economic and social

bases of our islands, international and bilateral aid

dwindles. As ideologies and ideals give way to

pragmatism, the weak social and political fabric of

these fledgling nations is laid bare. The vocabulary of

containment and patience can no longer hold back the

anarchist tide of popular revolt. Small nations will

encounter their own Seattles, with no National

Guardsmen to come to the rescue, no sustaining

philosophies to stem the tide, only the grim statistics of

falling revenues and rising expectations.

Nations which attempt to grapple with these

social problems have incurred the wrath of large

countries, culminating in isolation and the imposition

of sanctions. Countries like Cuba and Libya have felt

the crush of sanctions. The United Nations system must

rethink the strategy of imposing sanctions and must

devise other means of ensuring compliance within the

international community. The imposition of sanctions

is often inhumane and is usually accompanied by

devastating economic consequences and fails to

produce the desired effect in targeted countries. The

international community should realize that

interventions, embargoes and sanctions do not a

democracy make.

Because of the untold suffering inflicted on

civilian populations, a twenty-first century United

Nations system cannot continue to endorse the

imposition of sanctions. What is even more devastating

is that the general will of this Assembly is often flouted

and ignored when the international consensus calls for

a removal of sanctions. Is democracy merely a

convenient attitude? If so, it begs the question as to the

insistence that countries like Cuba should conform to

the principles of democracy when these principles

themselves are being compromised and rejected as a

matter of convenience. It is these injustices and

violations that have turned world opinion in favour of

the embattled Caribbean country Cuba and have made

its leader Fidel Castro a living symbol of the

unconquerable spirit of our people to triumph over

adversity and incredible odds.

More than ever, the positives of a reformed

United Nations will become a refuge, a bastion of hope

for nations nonplussed by events that seem suddenly

out of their control. In my previous address to this

time-honoured institution, I alluded to the plight of

Africa. I should like to reiterate that as Africa was the

last impression of the twentieth century, poetic justice

demands that it must be our first preoccupation in the

twenty-first century.

In the process of re-creation, Saint Lucia and the

Caribbean must strive to become a catalyst for peace in

the international forum. We must use our collective

influence to contain the border disputes that threaten to

create friction in Latin America and the Caribbean. We

must also be wary of importing conflicts into our

region.

In the case of Taiwan and China, it is vital that

we pursue the line of working towards a one-China

policy instead of fuelling the hostilities that

characterize the existing relationship between these

two countries. An early resolution of the impasse

between Taiwan and China will strengthen the

solidarity of the developing world.

In the case of Africa, the Caribbean has always

enjoyed a peculiarly symbiotic relationship with

Africa. Men like Padmore, C.L.R. James, Eric

Williams, Sir Arthur Lewis and Walter Rodney have all

worked assiduously at the side of African leaders like

Nkrumah, Nyerere, Sékou Touré and Léopold Senghor

in order to realize the ultimate dream of a united Africa

liberated from the bondage of poverty, disease and

exploitation. This noble tradition must continue. Once

again, Saint Lucia calls on its CARICOM colleagues to

pursue the possibility of obtaining observer status at

the Organisation of African Unity.

The peoples of the African continent face the

onslaught of the AIDS pandemic that threatens to

decimate the population of the entire continent. But the

devastating effect of AIDS is felt not only on the

African continent. Today the world is confronted with

the greatest health crisis in human history. The effects

of this disease can destabilize fragile democracies and

economic progress in both the developing and the

developed world.

We welcome President Clinton's efforts to create

an African AIDS Trust Fund and the pledge of one

billion US dollars to combat AIDS in sub-Saharan

Africa. We also welcome Cuba's undertaking to send

three thousand Cuban doctors to Africa. However,

given the transnational nature of the disease, the United

Nations should use its institutions to launch a

movement aimed at the complete eradication of this

scourge. If the world is to survive the ravages of this

plague, we must not only pledge financial resources

towards research and the development of

pharmaceuticals, but we must make those

pharmaceuticals affordable and accessible and also

continue to sensitize the international community to

preventive measures.

At year's end, the General Assembly will witness

the end of the first International Decade for the

Eradication of Colonialism. Much remains to be done

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before the United Nations is successful in carrying out

its statutory mandate to ensure complete and absolute

political equality for the peoples of the relevant

territories. This must remain the guiding principle of

the international community. That the majority of the

remaining Non-Self-Governing Territories are small

islands does not mean that the self-determination of

their peoples is less important than for former

territories which achieved sovereign status. We must

resist all attempts to legitimize the present unequal

colonial arrangements, which do not provide for full

and absolute political equality. Saint Lucia therefore

fully endorses the proclaiming of a second Decade for

the Eradication of Colonialism and calls on Member

States and United Nations organizations to fulfil their

responsibilities under the Charter and relevant General

Assembly resolutions.

On the initiative of the Government of Canada, a

debate has started in the forum of the Organization of

American States on the subject of global human

security. It is comforting for developing States, and

especially small developing States, to feel that the

conscience of the international world has been pricked

into focusing on the security of the entire globe — the

entire globe. On a discordant note, the United States of

America is now concentrating its attention on a

national missile defence system aimed at protecting the

United States from missile attacks. At this strategic

juncture in the new millennium, when world leaders

are gingerly nurturing a culture of peace and

disarmament, this action runs counter to the mood for

reconciliation and universal nuclear disarmament. This

unfortunate and myopic emphasis on the protection of

one nation and one people might well trigger a rash of

self-protective nuclear explosions, effectively eroding

the fragile trust which underpins the hope for global

human security.

There are no worlds to conquer, but worlds to

recreate. The recreation of the United Nations must be

posited on the basis of mutual respect between rich and

poor, mutual respect between large and small nations.

As small and desperate as our islands appear to be, we

should hold fast to the principles that inform the

operations of the United Nations.

We challenge the paradigm shift which the

developed nations are cleverly manipulating to shunt

the focus of the United Nations towards peacekeeping

and humanitarian assistance. Saint Lucia states clearly

and unequivocally that the United Nations focus should

zero in on development as a radical instrument for

eradicating poverty and war.

No $600 million carrot will tempt us to abandon

the principle of a nation's capacity to pay. No Congress

should determine the scale of assessments for the

United Nations, and there should be no conditionality

for paying arrears and meeting one's obligations to this

Organization.

The hungry sheep look up and are not fed. The

wolves run amok and batten on their hunger, and the

cycle goes on in its impropriety. This Organization

must not flinch in its millennial resolve to end the

carnage.

“So I come to you from the weary battlefield of

time

Armed with the disappointments of yesterday

The sufferings of today and the dreams of

tomorrow

In the struggle I may die

But let's not forsake another tomorrow”.