Panama, 1997

The tragedy of the millions of human beings who are

suffering the ravages of poverty affects Panama very

deeply. This is a deplorable scourge which has reached

intolerable levels. Those of us present here are facing the

shameful paradox of having produced the highest level of

wealth ever known to mankind while at the same time

having the highest level of unemployment in our

economies in history.

Poverty and exclusion are the battlefronts that call

for political and moral will. From this standpoint, Panama

is concerned that the tenor of this debate on the financial

or military attributes of the many aspirants to membership

of the Security Council may make us forget why the

Organization was created.

Panama, a founding Member of the United Nations,

signed the Charter of the United Nations to give a voice

to those who had been silenced by colonialism and to

those who clamoured for justice, freedom and

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development; to restore dignity to peoples such as mine that

had been deprived of their sovereign rights; and to give

those who had been discriminated against and persecuted

the right to dream about a better world in which no one

would be hated for the color of his skin or his beliefs, or

for being part of a given ethnic group, or of one gender or

the other.

Panama signed that beautiful document, a tribute to

the humble of the Earth, in order to give democratic

institutions, civil and political rights and multilateral forums

to all those people — men and women of good will — who

did not want war to return, destroying their homes, legacies,

cities and towns and plots of land. They also did not want

to see war rub out entire generations by sacrificing them to

obsession, fanaticism and extremism.

Like many others here, Panama signed the San

Francisco Charter so that the poor of the world and those

suffering from disease and malnutrition would have two of

the simplest and most moving of human attributes: faith

and hope.

The more than 50 years that have passed since then

have brought about considerable advances that have

changed the face of the world. Many of them would not

have been possible, however, if cooperation had not

imprinted a new meaning and purpose on our Organization.

In fact, few vestiges of colonialism remain to be solved;

ethnic groups and nationalities, prohibited cultures and the

prosecuted now work together in pride to design a

polychromatic world that calls for equality in difference and

tolerance towards diversity.

The number of nations which are Members of the

United Nations has increased three-fold, and its agenda

reflects their pain, suffering, struggles and aspirations. Its

orientation and contents have changed, and everyone has

been given a forum in which to express his opinions and

find support and understanding.

If a planning board had tried to identify, as is now

proposed, which problem had priority and deserved

attention, financing and debate, the Security Council would

never have met in my country, Panama, nor would that

event have changed so decisively the course of negotiations

when Panama attempted to regain its sovereignty and its

Canal.

There are important achievements in the daily life of

the United Nations. However, none of them would have

been possible if the United Nations had not attained the

quality, the representative nature and the legitimacy that

it has achieved through universality. It must be recognized

that there remain unacceptably acute differences and

deficiencies, which are becoming more serious and are

constantly and forcibly knocking at the very doors of our

homes.

At the same time, thousands of people are dying

before our very eyes because of hunger, intolerance,

hatred, terrorism, fratricidal warfare, authoritarianism and

violence; thousands of children are looking at us through

television screens with languid and sad eyes, only to

become mere statistics at the end of the programme.

There are still those who peddle illusions, who would

have us believe that conflicts reside at the end of a rifle

and that they can be resolved by having more powerful

rifles. The figures on what the world spends on weapons

are so disproportionate when compared to expenditures

for development that only mentioning them makes us

ashamed.

We should have already learned the lesson that when

people are motivated, for whatever reason, there is no

bullet or defence system, no matter how sophisticated,

that can eliminate the causes of conflict; that the

instruments of force can lower the fever but they cannot

eliminate the turmoil which causes it; and that there is no

military solution to social and political problems. History,

life's teacher, shows us that violence usually is the result,

not the cause, of conflict; that war is more often than not

the symptom rather than the cause of the ills; and that the

only way to resolve conflicts and the violence that goes

along with them is to act on their true, underlying causes:

hunger, malnutrition and extreme poverty and the lack of

means to overcome them; ethnic, gender and cultural

discrimination; intolerance and authoritarianism;

fundamentalism and political and religious persecution;

unemployment, slave labour and immoral salaries;

humiliation and national oppression. The majority of us

who came here over 50 years ago, as well as the many

who arrived later, did so in order to find solidarity and to

take refuge in the realm of law, not to shield ourselves in

a new military alliance or to take shelter in the shadow of

a cannon. Circumstances then forced us to live under an

ominous nuclear balance which made the interrelations of

military forces the determining factor in international

relations.

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Today — under a completely different setting in which

the balance of power is measured in terms of the potential

and economic strength of markets — nothing compels us to

continue to live under the model of the cold war.

The greatest impending threat to international peace

and security is poverty, whose reach is as extensive as that

of the most pervasive of plagues. Which current or future

Security Council member's army will be able to put an end

to the threat if it is the mother of all illnesses and

resentments and harvests more human lives than any

bacteria, virus or ancient or modern plague?

If what we are contemplating is a resurgence of the

old and festering conflicts which were frozen by the cold

war, would we not be substituting the ancient balance of

bipolar nuclear terror for a new and expanded military

alliance to resolve those conflicts under the umbrella of the

United Nations?

Panama certainly does not believe that force is not

necessary as a deterrent, nor are we unaware that such a

tool in responsible hands is useful, particularly when it is

legitimated by world-wide consensus, as the Charter

proposes.

What concerns us is that most of the discussion in the

world about the reform of the United Nations

disproportionately stresses the use of force and disregards

what is important, and indeed imperative — that is to say,

cooperation for development.

Hence, to assert that the most important function of

the United Nations is to have a big force to maintain

international peace and security, while at the same time

proposing the reduction, streamlining and elimination of the

Organization's social and humanitarian components, raises

important questions about the final nature of our reform and

modernization exercise.

To maintain that financial and material contributions

to peacekeeping operations should be decisive in

determining who can and who cannot sit on the Council,

while at the same time stating that social and humanitarian

tasks, development programmes and environmental

protection programmes should be placed in other kinds of

management and organization categories, greatly concerns

us. This compendium of proposals must be rebalanced and

given its proper dimension.

If what we are going to discuss is the package, then

the only one we should talk about is the package of the

fundamental principles of the United Nations already

enshrined in the Charter.

From that integral perspective, the purpose of

politically and financially strengthening the Organization,

and the Security Council in particular, is to ensure that it

can fully discharge its major mission: the promotion of

social and economic and human development as the most

effective way to prevent conflicts.

The profound developments in the last 50 years have

changed the international community. The deepest change

has occurred in the parameters of, and the language used

to define, relations among countries. The Powers of the

past no longer exist, and new Powers are emerging —

even though there are obvious military weaknesses.

It is no longer war that marks the trend towards

contemporary development or the course or content of

international life. Why organize the United Nations on the

basis of what no longer exists? Now it is peace, trade, the

sharing of the fruits of knowledge and technology, and

the deep changes designed to ensure higher levels of

tolerance and open-mindedness that are features of

international coexistence. It is not military tools to prevent

war that have to be strengthened but, rather, the tools to

build peace, to achieve international cooperation, as is

stated in the Charter, in solving international problems of

an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character,

and in promoting and encouraging respect for human

rights and for fundamental freedoms for all (Article 3).

International peace is not guaranteed by rifles or cannons,

or by one or several allied Powers. This has been proved

by recent, and not so recent but no less painful,

experiences.

The small and brave country Uruguay, which makes

the highest per capita contribution for peace-keeping, has

taught us such a good lesson in this respect.

If it is true that the greatest restriction on creativity,

thought and intelligence is dialectically established by

language itself, then we have to cast aside once and for

all the language and the thinking process left over from

the cold war. We must design something that more

appropriately represents what we wish to do.

Panama does not feel that its juridical status has

been diminished when it acknowledges that some

countries have special attributes or can better discharge

the tasks of the Security Council. On the one hand, the

problem is to define these tasks, to determine whether

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what we want is a guardian or a promoter of development

and cooperation. On the other hand, the problem relates to

the degree of responsibility a member of the Council has

vis-a-vis the rest of us. For, if its membership of the

Council is based solely on its individual attributes —

rejecting any kind of representation of us — then it can sit

in that seat in the Council until someone simply wrests the

seat from it by violence.

Everything indicates that we should define these tasks

in a coherent manner in keeping with the whole set of

purposes of the United Nations. From this standpoint, each

region has to determine the degree of representativity and

responsibility that its members should have, as well as who

can occupy those seats. It is difficult to think that after the

Members of the United Nations have acquired such long

and productive experience of working in regional groups

and organizations, everything would be discarded in order

to vote for a country on an individual basis. We would like

to know what benefit there would be in reigning in a

vacuum.

Furthermore, neither ideological nor military blocs

appear any longer on the map of the world, nor should

geographical distribution alone. These have been nothing

but obsolete instruments which have served to draw

simplistic and arbitrary borders and, hence, to face us at

times with tragedies.

This new international reality must be fully

recognized. The new borders that are now forming are

trade, ethnic, religious, and cultural borders, and it is

precisely because they were disregarded during the cold

war that we are still faced today with all these upheavals.

It is those upheavals that seduce even the most conservative

among us into being guided by one of the left-over thoughts

of the bipolar world — vis pacem para bellum.

On the other hand, if we really feel comfortable with

one-third of the membership not rotating and two-thirds of

the membership rotating, then it would be sane and

judicious for any expansion to maintain those proportions,

which practice has shown to be efficient and which have

been agreed to.

Why, then, should we go on using language that draws

a distinction between the regular budget and the

peacekeeping budget? This accounting dichotomy became

a policy and crudely revealed how individual interests could

separate the package from the founding principles, to such

an extent that they would be truly contradictory. There are

those who say that it is shameful for the regular budget to

have to be financed out of the peacekeeping budget. I

would say that it is even more shameful that the

disproportion in amounts, both in payments and in

voluntary contributions, is so overwhelming that the social

and humanitarian functions are now secondary to the

security functions, as if, in the final analysis, civic-action

programmes are dependent upon military operations. This

reflects the unstated reversal of focus between the

secondary: the operations for the maintenance of security,

and the primary: the human-development programmes.

A single budget, which conforms to a periodically

agreed-upon political strategy, should respond in each

case to the changing challenges of the new international

dynamism. In our view, it is not compatible with the new

spirit of democratization in our Organization or with the

new international realities for one or a few countries to

subsidize the entire budget in a disproportionate way, for

this can lead to the danger of concentrating the decision-

making power and thereby affecting the Organization's

functioning.

In the final analysis — and we do not want to give

lessons to anyone — we feel that what is necessary is a

good arsenal of general and flexible criteria, the key to

the search for consensus — that is, representativity,

legitimacy, non-discrimination, equity and legal equality.

We must move from the particular and discuss individual

aspirations, in order to design a compendium of criteria

that would be applicable to all, whether or not their seats

on the Security Council rotated.

From that standpoint, we think that we should not

discuss the veto in the abstract, as a privilege or as a

category in and of itself. With the passage of time, there

has been a distortion in the original spirit of the Charter,

under which the members of the Security Council were to

represent in the Security Council the general interests of

the international community, not act in accordance with

their exclusive military or political strategic interests.

In that context, part of the reform should be the

negotiation of an agreement restricting the use of the veto

to what is stipulated in Chapter VII and to what was

agreed in the gentlemen's agreement in London 1948.

From that standpoint, we need a formula that can

prevent a single country from standing in the way of the

general interest. One such formula would be allowing

vetoes to be overridden by a two-thirds majority. The

optimal solution, of course, would be to get rid of the

veto.

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Let me here and now thank the public and private

sectors of the international community for the support and

solidarity given to my country during the Universal

Congress on the Panama Canal.

This is a good opportunity to report that Panama is

continuing to take the necessary legislative and

administrative steps to turn this international public service

over to an agency that would be constitutionally

autonomous — administratively, politically and financially.

Panama is certain that scrupulous observance of this

autonomous status will make the interocean waterway more

competitive and more efficient and will also allow the

agency to take advantage of the many opportunities that

will be created by the Canal’s upcoming incorporation into

the Panamanian economy.

We must remember that until now military needs for

the Canal have always been dominant, and this has made it

impossible to exploit the Canal’s many competitive

advantages for trade and international civil-maritime

activities. From this standpoint, Panama’s greatest strategic

concern during the transition process has been to gain

complete control of the Canal so as to undertake a vast,

multimillion-dollar programme to modernize and widen it.

This programme includes widening the Gaillard Cut — a

critical area for ships crossing from the waters of Lake

Gatun — as well as the systematic studies undertaken in

cooperation with the United States, Japan and the European

Union in order to construct the third system of locks, which

will allow passage of ships weighing up to 150,000 dead-

weight tons.

Given the international importance of the Panamanian

interoceanic waterway, we intend to announce formally to

this General Assembly session that, in order to ensure

respect for the neutrality of the Panama Canal, Panama will

conduct its external relations in such a way as to reduce

international tension and conflict and not to get embroiled

in issues that would require us to take sides for or against

members of the international community with which we

have friendly relations, or for or against the community as

a whole. We are convinced that this new policy is the most

important contribution Panama can make to international

peace and security.

From this standpoint, we will concentrate our efforts

on contributing to understanding, cooperation and friendly

relations among peoples and governments. The Panama

Canal, as an international public service, must be open to

all users, public and private, regardless of the flag they fly

or the economic system they represent.

In this regard, we are pleased by our admission to

the pro tem secretariat of the Rio Group as of 1998, and

we are committed from now on to undertaking intensive

diplomatic efforts to strengthen the Group’s role as a

leading forum for interregional and intra-regional

discussion and political understanding.