Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, 2008

At the outset, Saint Vincent and the

Grenadines expresses its solidarity with the people of

Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica and the United States of America,

who have been savagely battered in quick succession

by Hurricanes Gustav, Hanna and Ike. Within the

Caribbean and our America, the heroism, bravery and

resilience of the Cuban, Haitian and Jamaican people

and ordinary Americans are a well-documented source

of pride to us all. We wish you all, the afflicted nations

and peoples, a speedy recovery, and we stand with you

in your rebuilding efforts.

Allow me to express my pleasure in noting that

the presidency of the General Assembly is now held by

a man whose native shores are kissed by the

magnificent Caribbean Sea. I am comforted by the

knowledge that he has a full appreciation of the

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majesty of our landscape and seascape, the

opportunities and challenges facing our region, and the

nobility of our Caribbean civilization. Mr. President,

your dream that another world is possible, as

courageously outlined in your inaugural presidential

statement, is both timely and prescient. I

wholeheartedly endorse your call for frankness,

democratization and a focus on the needs of the poor,

all under the redemptive and transformative rubric of

love and solidarity with our fellow human beings.

It is in that spirit of love and frankness that I

come before the Assembly today. In all candour, I must

affirm what you, Mr. President, have already

concluded: that the United Nations, as the supreme

multilateral institution of a profoundly troubled and

iniquitous world, can and must do more, in the form of

decisive action, to improve the condition of our planet,

the living conditions of the less fortunate and the safety

of our global family.

The late Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia once

stated:

“Throughout history, it has been the inaction of

those who could have acted, the indifference of

those who should have known better, the silence

of the voice of justice when it mattered most that

has made it possible for evil to triumph.”

There can be no doubt that the right-thinking and

civilized peoples of the world are aware of the

challenges facing us and of the path to peace,

prosperity, and progress upon which we must

collectively embark. However, the work that we have

entrusted to the United Nations is compromised by

apathy and inaction by too many of us and by the

crippling pursuit of narrow self-interest by a handful of

powerful countries. In this session, we have an historic

opportunity to reassert the relevance and credibility of

this body by keeping the promises that we have made

to ourselves and the world.

The United Nations is charged with tackling the

weighty problems that beset the world, not with the

refinement of the art of impotent diplomacy. I have no

doubt that the principles concealed in the language of

“mandate review”, “system-wide coherence” and

“revitalization” are important, and doubly so to the

professional diplomats who look inward rather than

outward and who lose sight of the forest for the trees in

their endless quest to choreograph the dancing of ever

more angels on the head of a pin.

One year ago, I stood at this very podium and

denounced the failure of the international community

to end the genocide in Darfur. One year ago, there were

promising, though belated, signs that the United

Nations was finally beginning to act decisively in this

regard. One year ago, I stated that “the force on the

ground is still insufficient, its mandate is ambiguous

and its emerging presence is years too late”

(A/62/PV.10, p. 15). Today, one year later, I am

shocked by our collective failures in Darfur. Last

month, Force Commander Martin Luther Agwai

compared his role to that of a boxer in the ring with his

hands tied behind his back, because his promised force

of 26,000 personnel is still less than 10,000 strong.

I thus reflect as to whether our promises of

“never again” and our commitments to the memories of

one million Rwandans mean anything, as the blood of

hundreds of thousands of Africans again stains the soil

of the continent and our collective conscience. As a

people whose past and future are inextricably

interwoven with the continent, we, the citizens of Saint

Vincent and the Grenadines, ask ourselves, in the

words of the Caribbean Nobel Laureate from Saint

Lucia, Derek Walcott, “How can I face such slaughter

and be cool?! How can I turn from Africa and live?”

The conflict in Darfur is over five years old, and the

time has long since past for genuine international

action to halt that unspeakable human tragedy.

While I congratulate the General Assembly on

finally clearing the way towards intergovernmental

negotiations on Security Council reform, it cannot be

an illusory or insincere process. The credibility of the

decisions made by the United Nations in the name of

peace and security hinges on the existence of a

Security Council that is democratic and representative

of the regional and development diversity of our body.

As we are all well aware, the scarcities and

escalating prices of basic foodstuffs have already led to

riots and political instability worldwide and within our

own Caribbean Community. While Saint Vincent and

the Grenadines has confronted the crisis with a creative

national food production plan that mixes agricultural

incentives with education and assistance, our local

measures are only ameliorative and cannot totally

insulate us from what is largely an imported problem.

We are again buffeted by the winds of unequal

trade liberalization, in which the agricultural subsidies

of developed States force our own nascent

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agro-industries into an uncompetitive demise. We are

witness to a world where crops are grown to feed cars

while people starve, and where climate change ruins

age-old farming and fishing livelihoods. The so-called

food crisis that we now face is but a symptom of

deeper structural flaws in our global economic system

and consumerist culture. It represents the human face

at the confluence of countless systemic flaws and

poorly conceived strategies, including trade barriers,

the mad rush to biofuels, adverse climate changes and

anaemic development assistance. Any meaningful

attempt to alleviate the suffering of the poor and

hungry people of the world must start with those

systemic issues and resist the urge to treat the

symptoms while ignoring the disease and its causes.

The banana farmers of Saint Vincent and the

Grenadines continue their heroic struggles to eke out a

living in the face of international corporate greed,

thinly disguised as principled globalization. Our

farmers, tradesmen and private sector are still waiting

for the oft-promised opportunities that supposedly

accompany globalization. However, the evidence to

date suggests that the international community has

inadvertently institutionalized and entrenched poverty

within a system of global winners and losers. The

ironically titled Doha Development Round looks less

and less like a negotiating process and more and more

like a suicide pact within which the World Trade

Organization (WTO) and the major economic Powers

want everything and concede little or nothing to the

poor and developing nations of the world.

The solutions to our economic crises hinge upon

genuine negotiation and compromise in the interests of

the world’s least privileged. We are ill-served by

benign neglect, unequal enforcement and concepts of

welfare colonialism. The recent troubles in the world’s

premier financial and banking countries exacerbate the

profound challenges facing developing nations.

Six years ago, world leaders gathered in Mexico

and gave birth to the Monterrey Consensus, in which

they pledged their objective to eradicate poverty,

achieve sustained economic growth and promote

sustainable development as we advance to a fully

inclusive and equitable global economic system. I

prayed at the time that the Conference would not

devolve into a dragon’s dance upon a decorous

platform of the finest diplomatic language which few

are determined to embrace for action.

Six years later, Monterrey is remembered as the

site of grand, unfulfilled commitments to the

developing world, much as Africa recalls the empty

promises of Gleneagles. The four decade-old promise

to devote 0.7 per cent of gross national income to

official development assistance remains more illusion

than reality. Countries like ours are therefore forced to

scour the globe for friends willing to partner with us

for the development of our people, while others would

rather sit in judgement of our development decisions

and priorities than rise to offer a helping hand.

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines once again

pleads with the international community to be

cognizant of the plight of Taiwan’s 23 million people.

Even though the United Nations historical neglect of

the Taiwan issue has not been a source of pride, the

Government of Taiwan has acted responsibly and

without confrontation to subordinate many of its

legitimate political claims into efforts aimed at

reducing cross-Strait tensions, promoting peace and

building relations with the People’s Republic of China.

The United Nations must now act to ensure the

survival of that fledgling rapprochement. Taiwan

should be encouraged on its path to peace by

permitting its meaningful participation in the

specialized agencies of the United Nations. Much as

Taiwan’s vibrant economy is recognized through its

participation in WTO, there is no compelling reason

why its equally vibrant people should be denied

participation in the World Health Organization and

other specialized agencies.

The Caribbean is in the midst of its annual

hurricane season and the awesome winds, sea surges

and torrential rains of Gustav, Hanna and Ike have

brought the issue of climate change into sharp relief. It

is a matter of life and death to the people of the

Caribbean and other small island developing States.

Similarly, the cost of adaptation to the changes

wrought by our industrialized brothers and sisters must

be borne adequately and responsibly by those who

have so profoundly altered our global environment.

Hurricanes remind us in the Caribbean of our

existential oneness. Accordingly, the effort of

Caribbean nations to fashion a more perfect union is to

be fully supported as a vital strategic necessity.

The geographic happenstance that has placed the

innocent people of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in

the path of increasingly intense storms has also located

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us unfortunately between the supply and demand that

fuel much of the West’s narcotics trade. As a result, our

scarce resources are increasingly being diverted to

stem the tide of drugs and small arms flowing through

our region.

To the people of Saint Vincent and the

Grenadines, disarmament means not the eradication of

nuclear weapons, which we lack the will and resources

to build, but the elimination of small arms, which

threaten to shoot holes in the fabric of our democracy

and compromise the values of our civilization. We are

assailed by guns, which we do not build, and by deadly

narcotics such as cocaine, which we do not produce.

The United Nations must act to protect the innocent

victims of the world from the scourge of small arms

and light weapons.

In recent months, I have been profoundly

troubled by the creeping return of cold war rhetoric to

the language of international and hemispheric

discourse. In this globalized and interconnected world,

it is no longer possible to divide the planet into

competing hemispheres or to completely quarantine or

indeed blockade ideological foe from friend. We must

guard against the return of discarded philosophies and

learn from the recent past, in which developing

countries were used as pawns and proxies for the

hegemonic ambitions of others.

Our multipolar experiment is too young for the

developing and globalizing world to return to the old

rhetoric and recriminations that invariably blossom

into violence and death, most often visited on the

peoples of developing countries. It is my sincere prayer

that this body will hew more closely to the principles

of multilateralism and the sovereign equality of all

States, and resist any pressures for the United Nations

to devolve into a playground for the triumphalist

ambitions of presumptive super-Powers.

Mr. President, you sit at the helm of a body

entrusted with the well-being and safekeeping of

humanity. We have gradually strayed from the noblest

of our goals and increasingly paid only lip service to

problems that are well within our ability to solve. In

countless spheres, we have promised action. Let us

now keep those promises for the good of our global

family.

The poetic summation of the American poet

Robert Frost is apt:

“I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —

I took the one less travelled by,

and that has made all the difference.”

Let us choose with courage the road less travelled by.

Each of us can make a difference, accordingly.