Philippines, 1992

It is with special pleasure that the

Government and the people of the Philippines extend to you, Sir, their warm

felicitations on your assumption of the presidency of the General Assembly at

this session. You were one of the most prominent and vigorous advocates

of freedom and democracy in your country. We in the Philippines watched your

struggle with interest and sympathy, and we joined the rest of the world in

applauding the triumph of that struggle as the triumph of us all. That

triumph led to your elevation to the high office you now hold in your country

and, now, to your election as President of the General Assembly. Your

election, therefore, is a source of special satisfaction for us.

At the same time, we congratulate your predecessor. His Excellency

Ambassador Samir S. Shihabi of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, for his excellent

leadership in presiding over the Assembly at its forty-sixth session.

My delegation also warmly welcomes Mr. Boutros Boutros-Ghali. He brings

to his arduous and exalted mission decades of experience in and deep insight

into the relations among nations and the nature and work of the United

Nations. In less than a year in office, Mr. Boutros-Ghali has demonstrated

not only an unflinching devotion to the work of our Organization but also a

keen sense of the direction it must take in dealing with the great

international issues of our time.

Permit me at this point to express the heartfelt appreciation and

gratitude of the Philippine Government and of the Filipino people for the

generous assistance extended by the members of the world community and

international organizations to the hundreds of thousands of victims of floods

and mud flows from Mt. Pinatubo, whose fury has described by scientists as

"the volcanic eruption of the century". Their dire prediction is that

Mt. Pinatubo's mud flows, which have already buried towns and villages and

turned the once green fields of Central Luzon into a grey and desolate

landscape, will continue its destruction for several more years. As we embark

on large-scale relief and rehabilitation efforts in the affected areas, my

Government would like once more to appeal for assistance from the members of

the international community and organizations even as we thank them for the

help already extended since Mt. Pinatubo erupted in June 1991.

We hold this session of the General Assembly at a moment in history that

has seen the wave of democracy and national freedom sweep the world with

astounding and unprecedented rapidity. This is manifested by, among others,

the roster of new countries admitted to the United Nations this year nations

newly emerged from the confining and oppressive darkness of totalitarian

imperialism: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Georgia,

Kazakhstan, Krygyzstan, the Republic of Moldova, Slovenia, Tajikistan and

Turkmenistan. This list of new States, new Members of the United Nations,

reads like a roll of honour in the annals of freedom in our era. We welcome

them, as we also do San Marino, to these halls.

We Filipinos take pride in having been early in the ranks of democracy's

march in recent history. In 1986, through the exercise of people power, we

restored the institutions of democracy in our country. This democratic

restoration found both fulfilment and renewed strength in the national

elections our people conducted five months ago and in the peaceful transfer of

power that resulted from the supreme exercise of the democratic process.

The very fact of that peaceful transfer of power through free elections

has affirmed, for all to see, the political stability of our land and, no

doubt, contributed to the climate of peace and stability in our region.

In pursuance of national stability and peace, our new leadership, under

President Fidel V. Ramos, has embarked on a policy and mission of

reconciliation among our people, closing divisions, healing wounds and

reaching out to all. Among the measures we have taken is the granting of

amnesty to those disaffected groups which had taken the path of rebellion of

whatever ideological or religious persuasion they might be, to whatever

organizational or ethnic affiliation they might belong.

Elected under the banner of people empowerment, our new leadership has

chosen, through its policies, to ride the crest of the wave of economic

liberalization that has inexorably rolled across the world and has, in so many

nations, improved so many lives in so short a time. We have chosen this path

for the same reason others have done because we believe that it is the best

road to sustained economic growth and a better life for our people.

Our new leadership, immediately upon assuming office, committed itself

unequivocally to the liberalization of our trading regime and of the rules

governing investments in our country. We have removed virtually all

foreign-exchange controls, thus facilitating the international movement of

currency. The privatization of key public industries proceeds apace.

Consistent with the new primacy of commerce and economics in relations between

nations, we have placed trade and economic relations at the top of our

diplomatic priorities.

Only a few weeks ago, in Jakarta, the capital city of our Indonesian

neighbour, we joined the Non-Aligned Movement, in which the Philippines had

been an observer for many years. Far from being rendered irrelevant by the

end of the cold war, the Non-Aligned Movement, we found, was larger, stronger

and even more relevant than ever before. Many of the old divisions in the

Movement had closed, and a new cohesion had been found. Moreover, the

Movement had turned more of its attention to problems of trade, finance,

technology and all those other things that make up economic relations between

nations.

The end of the cold war may have greatly diminished the likelihood of

worldwide conflict and global cataclysm, but it has given rise to new

challenges that are just as threatening for the peoples of many nations and

regions, even as many of the old issues remain unresolved.

The weight of their external debt continues to crush the economies of

many developing countries, including those countries, like the Philippines,

which have made strenuous efforts to pay their debts religiously. Surely,

with some imagination and creativity, and a modicum of good will and

enlightened self-interest, the nations of the world can, together, arrive at

some solution that would allow the debtor countries to develop and get out

from under the crushing burden of their debt. At the very least, the debtor

countries should be given access to their actual and potential markets without

any artificial restrictions, to allow them to develop their economies and

improve the lives of their peoples while they continue to service their debts

from meagre resources.

More and more of the world's nations have adhered ever more strongly to

the proposition that economic liberalization is vital to the improvement of

industrial productivity and the generation of economic growth. And yet, most

ironically, protectionist barriers continue to rise and to hamper the flow of

goods and services. The world's peoples call upon the international

community, in particular upon the developed countries, to lay aside narrow

self-interest and push forward the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade

negotiations to a speedy and successful conclusion.

The formation of trading blocs in some areas has aroused the apprehension

of countries outside those blocs with respect to their potential for

artificially diverting trade and investment, diversions damaging to the

efficiency of the global economic system. We in the Association of South-East

Asian Nations (ASEAN) have committed ourselves to the formation of an ASEAN

free trade area that would facilitate trade among ourselves. But we are

determined to keep ourselves open to world trade, on which our economies

depend so much.

Each country has an inalienable right to development. And the United

Nations has a paramount role in seeing to it that it is realized. The ongoing

restructuring and revitalization process in the economic and social fields

should therefore be geared towards the effective discharge of this role by the

United Nations system.

The continuing scourge of poverty, the rapid increase in population, the

uneven rate of economic growth among countries and the asymmetry in the

economic and social structures of nations, together with the dazzling advances

in transportation and communication, have given rise to a new phenomenon of

our times: the massive migration of labour. As one of the largest sources of

this migration, the Philippines is convinced that it is now time for the

international community to deal with this phenomenon no longer in haphazard

and isolated ways, but on a planned and strategic basis and on an

international scale.

In so doing, we would do well to heed the appeal of the Secretary-General

to accord deeper understanding and respect to the rights and needs of the more

vulnerable groups of society. A substantial part of the migration of labour

is the thousands of young women from many developing countries who venture

forth to more affluent countries in search of a better life for themselves and

their families, only to fall victim to unspeakable abuse, in many cases to

violence, sometimes ending in death, simply because they are women. Roaming

the streets of the world are 145 million children homeless, hungry,

neglected, in most cases victims of abuse and mistreatment by adults.

Thousands of the disabled and the aging, particularly in the developing

countries, are cast away, stripped of their dignity, from the mainstream of

society.

The untrammelled population growth in many regions, the profligate use of

the Earth's resources and the pollution of the land, water and air have

severely damaged the Earth's life-sustaining ecology in many places,

threatening the livelihoods of farmers and fishermen and the health of

everyone. It was therefore with a keen sense of hope and high expectations

that the Philippines participated in the United Nations Conference on

Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro last June. At that Conference,

the collective will of the international community was marshalled at the

highest level of leadership on behalf of the sustainable development of our

Earth and its resources. The Philippines applauds its considerable

achievements and remains committed to its goals and ideals, as embodied in

Agenda 21, the implementation of which requires adequate new and additional

financial resources.

To carry out on a national scale the objectives set forth in Agenda 21,

my President has created the Philippine Council for Sustainable Development,

which counts non-governmental organizations and, particularly, the youth among

its members. I am also pleased to announce that, in observance of the

International Year for the World's Indigenous People, the Philippines will

host in April next year a Global Youth Earth Summit or Global YES in

cooperation with the United Nations Environment Programme's Global Youth Forum

and with the full endorsement and support of the United Nations Development

Programme, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural

Organization, and the International Labour Organisation. I appeal to the

world to support this undertaking.

The cold war's end has lifted a great pall of global threat from over the

Earth and closed a fundamental division in the international community. It

has thus opened new vistas of hope for peace and global security, directly

leading to major advances in some of the world's hitherto intractable

conflicts: Afghanistan, Cambodia, the Middle East, Central America, South

Africa. Nevertheless, intra-regional and intra-national conflicts continue to

ravage people's lives and homes.

The end of super-Power confrontation and the dissolution of empires and

blocs have freed nations and dismantled tyrannies. They have also unleashed

age-old hostilities between antagonistic groups and released them to erupt in

tragic violence. These conflicts, new and old, have taken various forms and

dimensions.

In the Middle East, movement in the peace process has given rise to new,

albeit modest, hopes. However, hope must be tempered still, as the basic

cause of conflict the denial of a homeland and sovereignty to the

Palestinian people remains unresolved.

In South Africa, the institutions of apartheid have been dismantled, a

hopeful development that can be attributed in no small measure to the resolute

and patient efforts of the United Nations and the international community. We

are heartened that the stalled negotiations on the future of that country may

finally get back on track with the expected resumption of the Convention for a

Democratic South Africa. In Somalia, intertribal warfare conspires with the

cruelties of nature to inflict upon the people of that unhappy land death by

violence or starvation. The people of Bosnia and Herzegovina, specifically

its Muslim population, are subjected to the barbarity of ethnic cleansing and

the horrors of fratricidal war while the international community helplessly

looks on. Similar forms, if not similar degrees, of ethnic violence have

erupted in some places in the former Soviet Union.

In our own region of South-East Asia, in Cambodia, a peace agreement

painstakingly worked out by the United Nations, the Association of South-East

Asian Nations (ASEAN), other interested Governments and the Cambodian

factions themselves has provided for and led to the mounting of the largest

peace-keeping operation of the United Nations and the assumption of one of its

gravest responsibilities, the United Nations Transitional Authority for

Cambodia, to which the Philippines has contributed a contingent of policemen

and naval observers. However, one of the factions has, of late, chosen not to

participate further in the peace process until its conditions, some of which

go beyond the terms of the Paris peace Agreement, are met. It is now the

responsibility of the international community to ensure that the fabric of

imminent peace does not unravel and to place the peace process back on track.

Conflicting claims in the South China Sea have given rise to acute

concern among the countries involved and other States with interests in the

area. Last July the Foreign Ministers of ASEAN issued in Manila the ASEAN

Declaration on the South China Sea, calling on all claimants to settle their

disputes peacefully, pledging to embark on cooperative endeavours in the area

and inviting all parties concerned to subscribe to the Declaration. Dialogues

have been taking place in the region involving officials and academicians from

the claimant States and other interested parties. It is our hope that these

dialogues will help to avert misunderstanding and conflict and eventually lead

to the day when this vast, vital and strategic portion of the sea can be

transformed from an area of incipient tension into a region of enduring peace

and cooperation. All these fall squarely under the purposes and principles of

the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation in South-East Asia, which the

signatories, including the Philippines, are requesting the General Assembly to

endorse at this session.

Thus, even as the world welcomes the cold war's end and the march of

freedom and democracy across the earth, in the relations among nations old

wounds fester, break out and recur and new ones are opened. And yet hopes run

higher than they have ever done since the last great war. These hopes are

focused especially on the new possibilities for the United Nations in its

mission of preventing war, making peace, keeping the peace and building for

peace. In this new era of opportunity it is both possible and imperative for

the United Nations to discharge the role envisioned for it by the Charter as

the primary keeper of peace and security in the world.

It is therefore extremely fitting that in his first report on the work of

the Organization our new Secretary-General dwells almost exclusively on this

role of the United Nations and the opportunities opened for it by the historic

changes of recent times.

The Philippines welcomes the Secretary-General's report, "An Agenda for

Peace Preventive diplomacy, peacemaking and peace-keeping," and is studying

it with great attention. We commend it to the world for serious

consideration, for it seeks to bring the United Nations back to its roots as

an organization with an effective capacity to make peace and keep the peace.

The report is filled with wise, timely and practical prescriptions, and I

should like to single out a few.

We support the Secretary-General's call for an enlarged and more

effective role for the International Court of Justice. We join the

Secretary-General in reaffirming the Manila Declaration on the Peaceful

Settlement of International Disputes, as approved by the General Assembly. We

endorse his recognition of the need to relieve the economic difficulties of

States that are affected by sanctions imposed on another State under

Article 41 of the Charter.

We commend for especially close consideration the Secretary-General's

bold proposals for giving life to Chapter Vll of the Charter, particularly

Article 42, which authorizes the Security Council to take military action to

maintain or restore international peace and security, and Article 43, which

mandates Members of the United Nations to place armed forces and facilities on

call for this purpose.

Granting the United Nations increased power and greater authority for

peace-keeping and enforcement action would gain stronger support from the

international community if the Security Council could function with a greater

degree of democracy than heretofore. Why, for example, should a region with

approximately 15 per cent of the world's population and 23 per cent of the

total membership of the United Nations have 40 per cent representation in the

Security Council this year, with three having the power of veto?

Clearly, that is a legitimate question. However, the composition of the

Security Council is but one of the provisions in the Charter that could stand

improvement. My delegation appreciates current efforts to restructure and

revitalize the economic and social sectors of the United Nations and to reform

both the General Assembly and the Secretariat. We note, however, that such

efforts are often limited by a hesitation to review the United Nations Charter

itself.

Addressing the work of the Special Committee on the Charter and the

Strengthening of the Role of the Organization during the twenty-ninth session

of the General Assembly, the then Philippine Foreign Minister,

General Carlos P. Romulo, said:

"At no time in history has it been more clear that the many and

closely interrelated global problems that beset us will not yield to

piecemeal and national solutions. The paramount importance of the United

Nations as the capstone of human society has been reaffirmed with great

force by the momentous events even of this single year. The design of a

new world economic order, the mobilizing of world agriculture, a global

approach to population problems, the equitable redistribution of world

economic resources, the achievement of disarmament and peace all

require an ever more effective and more efficient world Organization.

"For these reasons, it is more than ever appropriate that we are

continuing our consideration of the improvement of the United Nations

itself. The centrality of the United Nations is obvious and

inescapable. The increasing value of the United Nations is undoubted.

But its rate of adaptation to rapidly moving world affairs is doubted;

its adequacy to perform the functions thrust upon it by its Members, and

simply by the urgent course of world history, is doubted.

"When we began this discussion in 1970, on the twenty-fifth

anniversary of our world Organization, the effort seemed pertinent

enough. But now, as we continue, the accelerating pace of change in the

world has already caught up with us and threatens to pass us by. The

mechanisms of the United Nations are increasingly creaky and primitive in

light of the task of plenary management that the Organization is

increasingly called upon to assume. While the prescience of the founders

was remarkable, and they succeeded in designing a flexible and adaptable

Organization with a Charter of enduring worth, at the same time it was

wholly impossible for them to anticipate the speed with which events

would carry us into the interdependent global age and the requirements

that would be placed on our world body."

General Romulo, who happened to be my father and one of the founders of

the United Nations, made these remarks in 1974. He might as well be making

them today. I do not wish to state the obvious, but I know that my father's

message rings loud and clear in this Hall. Let us now proceed to rectify the

omissions of the past.

Towards this end, the Philippine delegation submits that the time has

come for the United Nations to avail itself of the provisions of Article 109

regarding the convening of a General Conference to review the Charter. My

delegation will consult with like-minded Members in the coming year with a

view to definitively addressing this proposal, specifically through a

resolution calling for such a review conference, which, according to the

Charter itself, should have been placed on the agenda of the General Assembly

10 years after its adoption in 1945.

We are only three years shy of the fiftieth anniversary of our

Organization. Its celebration, we believe, would be further enhanced by the

adoption and implementation of such a resolution. Through it, we hope to

contribute to the noble work of making the United Nations a truly effective

instrument, as the signatories envisioned it to be, for saving "succeeding

generations from the scourge of war" and for promoting "social progress and

better standards of life in larger freedom". The confluence of historic

events in our time presents us with a unique opportunity to fulfil the mandate

from our founders. Let us prove ourselves worthy of their trust.