Malaysia, 2000

I join other

speakers in congratulating you, Sir, on your election as

President of the General Assembly at its fifty-fifth

session. I am confident that with your vast experience

and diplomatic skills you will be able to guide the

proceedings of this Assembly to a successful

conclusion.

I would also like to express my delegation's

gratitude to your predecessor, Mr. Theo-Ben Gurirab,

for the effective manner in which he guided the work

of the last session of the General Assembly.

Let me also take this opportunity to commend the

Secretary-General for his great dedication to the

Organization and the many contributions he has made

in the service of the international community.

There are great expectations on the part of the

international community that in the new century the

United Nations will be a more effective Organization.

Indeed, its continued relevance, especially to the

developing countries, which comprise the majority of

the membership of the United Nations, will, to a large

degree, depend on their perception that it is attuned to

their concerns and responsive to their needs. The

Organization must continue to serve the interests of all

its Members, big or small, strong or weak. It must be

more transparent and democratic in its decision-making

processes and work methods.

In this context, the reform and restructuring of the

Organization continues to be a matter of great

importance. Much has been done through the process

of reform effected by the Secretary-General, but reform

is a continuous and ongoing process and should

continue to be vigorously pursued to ensure the United

Nations increased effectiveness and efficiency,

especially in facing up to the challenges of the new

century. As modernization of the Organization entails

additional resources, the critical issue of financing the

United Nations must also be seriously addressed and

resolved as soon as possible.

More intensified efforts should be made to bring

to conclusion the deliberations on one of the most

important aspects of the reform process: the

restructuring of the Security Council. Clearly, the

necessary compromises must be made if the ongoing

deliberations on the reform of the Council are to make

any progress at all. We look forward to your leadership,

Mr. President, in unblocking the current impasse so

that this important organ of the United Nations can be

fully revamped, modernized and made more effective.

Malaysia continues to support expansion of the Council

in both categories of its membership. Any expansion in

the permanent category should include both the

industrialized and the developing countries. If there is

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no agreement on expansion of the permanent

membership, the Council should be enlarged for the

time being in the non-permanent category.

A central objective of reform of the Security

Council should be to ensure its effectiveness in the

maintenance of international peace and security.

Equally important is the need to enhance the Council's

unity of purpose among its members, especially the

permanent members, so as to avoid the situation that

necessitated the taking of international action outside

the Council by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization

(NATO), as in the case of Kosovo, when the Council

was unable to act. Notwithstanding the special

circumstances of Kosovo, future international

interventions should be made only with the express

approval of the Security Council, in the interest of

preserving the role and authority of the Council as

enshrined in the Charter, as well as of ensuring the

legality and legitimacy of all such actions.

Another aspect of the work of the Security

Council that should be thoroughly reviewed relates to

the imposition of sanctions on Member States, which

have often brought untold suffering on the general

populace, particularly women and children. Sanction

regimes of the future should be established only when

absolutely necessary and should be specifically

targeted, time-bound, subject to regular review and

lifted when no longer necessary. The interests of all

parties to the conflict should be addressed in order to

achieve a just and lasting peace. We have seen too

many conflicts that seem to be resolved on paper but

continue to remain outstanding on the ground.

We should strive in the new century to make our

world a safer place. We should strive to get rid of

weapons of mass destruction — particularly nuclear

weapons, but also chemical and biological weapons.

We must intensify global efforts to reduce existing

stocks of these horrendous weapons, culminating in

their total elimination. The major Powers and others

that possess and manufacture these weapons bear a

special responsibility. We should all play our part in

ensuring that there is no let-up in the global efforts

towards nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament.

We should also limit the production and

deployment of ultra-sophisticated, high technology

conventional weapons, many of which are being used

in the wars of developing countries, resulting in the

ironic situation of third world countries fighting their

wars with first world weapons, thanks to the aggressive

marketing efforts of arms vendors of the developed

countries. The developing countries can ill afford the

arms race that this will trigger, nor the huge defence

expenditures to sustain the use of these weapons.

We must ensure that genocide, “ethnic cleansing”

and other crimes against humanity that were

perpetrated, for instance, in Rwanda, Bosnia and

Herzegovina and Kosovo, are never allowed to be

committed again anywhere else in the world. More

strenuous efforts should be made to apprehend indicted

war criminals so as to send a stern warning to others.

They should not be allowed to get away with their

heinous crimes with impunity.

Undoubtedly, the maintenance of international

peace and security can be better served through more

effective use of preventive diplomacy. This has been

highlighted by the Secretary-General in his Millennium

Report (A/54/2000) and should be seriously

considered.

The Organization will have to develop a more

effective early-warning capability and deal with

emerging conflict situations through more effective use

of the mechanism of preventive diplomacy. A more

proactive approach in preventive diplomacy would

require even closer coordination and collaboration

between the Security Council and the Secretary-

General, who would have to put his good offices role to

even greater use.

However, that should not become an excuse to

impose anything on Member States or to interfere in

their internal affairs. There are growing tendencies for

the developed countries, in the name of civil society,

democracy and human rights, to set standards in

accordance with their own moulds for the developing

countries to follow. We even ignore the fact that many

of the problems confronting the developing countries

are the vestiges of the colonial past. We want to leave

yesterday behind and move to today and the future, but

the pace appropriate to the particular country

concerned should be followed.

United Nations peacekeeping operations should

be empowered with clear and well-defined mandates,

adequate resources and strong international support,

irrespective of where they take place. There should be

no perception of selectivity in their launching. In this

regard, it is especially important that peacekeeping

operations in Africa — notably in Sierra Leone, the

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Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ethiopia and

Eritrea — be strongly supported by the international

community. At the same time, for peace to be viable it

is essential that peacekeeping missions incorporate the

necessary elements of disarmament, demobilization

and reintegration of ex-combatants, with the necessary

support of the international community.

My delegation commends the frank and forthright

report (A/55/305) of the Brahimi Panel on United

Nations Peace Operations. The Panel's bold

recommendations deserve the detailed and careful

consideration of the membership of the Organization.

Thereafter, we must demonstrate the urgency,

seriousness and political will to follow up on those

laudable recommendations, lest the Panel's report meet

the fate of many United Nations reports in the past for

lack of the necessary political will.

On another conflict situation, it is a matter of

great concern to Malaysia that one of the longest-

running conflicts of this century, the Arab-Israeli

conflict, remains unresolved. Successive opportunities

were not grasped due to the lack of seriousness on the

part of the Israeli Government to pursue the path of

peace. We are disappointed that the Israeli Government

fails to live up to the expectations of the international

community and lacks the boldness of vision, as well as

the will and courage, to grasp the once-in-a-lifetime

window of opportunity to seal a lasting peace between

Israel and Palestine and Syria in the interest of regional

peace and security.

The aspirations of the Palestinian people for an

independent and sovereign homeland can no longer be

denied. We look forward to welcoming in the very near

future an independent State of Palestine among the

community of nations here at the United Nations, as

well as in other international organizations. Equally, we

look forward to the return of Syrian Golan without

further delay. Israel must bury the suspicion and

distrust of the past and look to the future in an

environment that will create opportunities and

challenges in a peaceful and stable Middle East.

Since the East Asian financial crisis there has

been increasing recognition of the nature of the

problem of, and the need for reform of, the existing

global financial and economic systems, which

Malaysia has strongly advocated. It is my hope that

efforts in that direction will continue to be pursued by

the Bretton Woods institutions, even if the worst for the

affected Asian economies may now be over and those

countries are now recovering. It is dismaying that some

quarters are suggesting that, with the end of the crisis,

there is now no urgency or even necessity for reform.

Given the universality of its membership, the United

Nations is well placed to make an important

contribution to promoting the reform process,

particularly in the context of its own increasing

dialogue and interaction with those institutions. It

would be the height of folly and irresponsibility to wait

for another round of speculative currency attacks to jolt

us into action.

East Asia's traumatic experience is also a strong

reminder of the negative effects of globalization on

developing countries. While globalization is inevitable

and is becoming a permanent feature of the new

international order and system, it is far from being a

panacea. Indeed, the United Nations Human

Development Report indicates that globalization has

led to the marginalization of many developing

countries, resulting in an increasing disparity in

economic attainment between nations. This conclusion

is not surprising, given the existing inequitable

international economic order and the differing access to

technology.

With all its potential benefits, globalization in its

unfettered form is likely to do more harm than good to

the small, vulnerable economies, at least in the short

and medium terms, unless measures are put in place to

protect them. It will bring about not free trade, but an

unfair and inequitable exchange: the inflow of capital,

goods and services from the developed North in return

for the outflow of hard-earned foreign exchange from

the poor countries of the South. The notion of a level

playing field, which is the central creed of

globalization, would perpetuate the present inequities

in favour of the strong, developed economies at the

expense of the vulnerable economies of the developing

world. It would only ensure the continued domination

of the weak by the strong.

For globalization to be universally embraced

without reservation there must be in place certain

ground rules to regulate the conduct of free trade in

goods and services to ensure an equitable exchange

between unequal partners predicated on a win-win

proposition. At the same time, the principle of

transparency should be applied across the board to

include currency traders and market manipulators, who

are now somehow exempted from such a requirement,

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as well as from payment of taxes. Until and unless

these measures are instituted, globalization will be seen

by the developing world as a largely predatory

ideology of the rich nations for the exploitation and

subjugation of poor ones.

That impression is further reinforced by the

intolerance of dissenting of some of its promoters

views in their zeal to prescribe the one-size-fits-all

approach towards globalization. The developing

countries should be allowed to pursue globalization at

their own pace so as to enable them to develop social

and institutional structures to fully benefit from the

process while minimizing its negative impact. For

many countries, the price to be paid for globalization as

presently interpreted, particularly the loss of

independence, would be simply too great for them to

bear. This is not the time for us to re-examine the

concept of the nation State and the sovereignty of

nations in order to accommodate the needs of the giant

multinational companies that operate across borders.

In the meantime, in order to brace themselves for

the full impact of globalization, developing countries

must forge enhanced cooperation among themselves in

a true spirit of South-South cooperation and on the

basis of mutually beneficial “smart partnerships” with

the involvement of the private sector. This would

facilitate a useful exchange of ideas and experience

among them on the globalization process. Malaysia is

pleased to share those ideas and experiences with its

partners from the developing countries, and has done

so in the past several years in the context of the

Langkawi international dialogue. We are pleased to see

that those dialogues have been emulated by Africa

through the South African international dialogue.

Indeed, in an increasingly complex future world it is

only appropriate for the developing countries to

develop such synergies through strategic linkages

among themselves as well as with the developed

countries.

To assist in the process of globalization, it is

incumbent upon the international community to ensure

that the developing countries, particularly the least

developed among them, continue to receive

development assistance to enable them to make the

leap out of chronic poverty. Indeed, given the intrinsic

link between peace, security and development, the

Organization must continue to be in the vanguard of

global developmental efforts, upon which so much of

the world depends. It is imperative for the United

Nations to carry out its developmental mission with

even greater vigour at a time of increasingly scarce

resources and exploding populations. This is where the

continued role of the United Nations Development

Programme (UNDP) can be especially critical, with

additional resources and more effective programmes,

particularly for vulnerable small island and landlocked

States and States in Africa, where in a number of cases

economic performance has fallen back rather than

progressed since independence.

Notable gains have been made in several African

countries. However, Africa's ability to rise out of

chronic poverty can be attained only with continued

international assistance, including forgiveness of its

countries' external debt, without which many of them

will remain trapped in the vicious circle of poverty,

violence and natural or man-made disasters. In this

regard, Malaysia reiterates its strong support for, and

looks forward to, the convening of an international

conference on financing for development in the year

2001 involving all major stakeholders, including the

private sector. The convening of such a forum is

imperative, as there can be no development without the

necessary financing to support it.

Along with the Millennium Summit, this session

of the General Assembly will be remembered for,

among other things, paving the way for the kind of

United Nations that will eventually emerge to serve the

international community, at least in the early decades

of the twenty-first century. While the shifting patterns

of relationships among nations have yet to find a final

form and the future is far from clear, there is no

denying that in the increasingly complex and

interconnected world of tomorrow, the United Nations

is likely to play an increasingly critical role. To that

end the Organization must continuously place itself at

the forefront in the search for solutions to global

problems.