Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, 2011

I am pleased to add my voice to the

unanimous acclaim of His Excellency Mr. Nassir

Abdulaziz Al-Nasser as President of the General

Assembly for this, our sixty-sixth session. A skilful and

seasoned diplomat, he has played an integral role in

establishing the State of Qatar as a central and crucial

actor in international diplomacy. I have no doubt that

he will approach his new responsibilities with similar

dedication, even-handedness and compassion.

In recent months the winds of change have

encircled the globe, reaching and reshaping the

unlikeliest corners of our planet, for good and for ill.

Those winds have swept the nation of South Sudan into

these hallowed halls as a welcome and esteemed new

member of our global family. They are blowing away

the flimsy impediments to Palestinian statehood, and

breathing fresh air into stagnant negotiating processes.

The winds of change have howled across the sands of

the Middle East and North Africa, reshaping long-held

geopolitical assumptions.

The grim economic storm clouds that formed

ominously on our global horizon three years ago have

yet to dissipate, and, indeed, seem to be multiplying.

Natural disasters, climate change, and the

accompanying non-metaphorical winds of hurricanes

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and tropical storms have buffeted my multi-island

nation and my region yet again, upending our fragile

economies and causing painful developmental

setbacks.

The United Nations finds itself in the eye of these

increasingly turbulent geopolitical and socio-economic

storms. The role that we collectively play in response

to these howling gales will determine the contours of

the post-crisis world and the relevance of this

institution in that world. Will the international

community shield the vulnerable from these winds?

Will we harness their power for positive change? Or

will we become little more than unnecessary weather

forecasters, watching and warning about which way the

winds blow, but never acting for the benefit of our

peoples’ humanization?

The President has wisely selected “The role of

mediation in the settlement of disputes” as the theme of

this general debate. That theme could not be more apt

or timely. Too often, the difficult work of mediation,

negotiation and peaceful resolution of disputes is

prematurely abandoned in the search for a quick fix of

militarism, brinkmanship or ill-advised unilateral

action. The very drafters of hard-fought Security

Council resolutions often cast aside the letter and spirit

of those documents before their ink has dried, and the

frenzied pursuit of a military solution to every dispute

is sometimes sickeningly palpable.

All too frequently, the loudest champions of

expensive and unnecessary military action are those

leaders of military Powers who sometimes seek to

shore up sagging local political fortunes with bullets,

bombs and the bodies of faceless foreigners in faraway

lands. History has never been kind to such nakedly

political crusades, and those who have sown the wind

have invariably reaped the whirlwind of their bloody

campaigns, long after the triumphalist glow has faded.

Neocolonialist and imperialist adventures, however

disguised, will never triumph before the bar of history

over a people’s right to self-determination and the

inalienable embrace of sovereignty.

The ongoing global economic and financial crisis

is a devastating storm that has shown no signs of

abating. Economies the world over remain in peril, and

none is immune from the widening and deepening

fallout of this systemic crisis of ill-regulated financial

institutions and the movement of capital. The effects of

the international global and financial meltdown are

now being felt well beyond the bottom lines of

multinational corporations. The macroeconomic and

developmental consequences of this economic tornado

are now painfully apparent, as is the terrible impact on

the lives of individuals.

The economic crisis has spurred rising global

unemployment and poverty, and has engendered a

feeling of hopelessness, especially among young

people. The continuing fallout of the economic

upheaval can be felt in streets and cities around the

world and is a major contributor to the global unrest

that has pitted disgruntled youths and others in violent

opposition to Government forces, from Tottenham to

Tripoli. Social unrest elsewhere beckons, in dozens of

countries where neither the socio-economic conditions

nor the political institutions can contain the enormous

pressures much longer.

Well into our third year of the international

economic crisis, we can now declare that the tepid and

timid responses of wealthy developed nations have

failed to heal the global economy. The uncoordinated

lurches from stimulus to austerity and back typify the

confusion of the self-appointed premier forums of our

international economic cooperation. The recovery that

they prematurely declared was false and fleeting, and

their counsel of patience and predictions of long-term

recovery are cold comfort to the suffering peoples of

countries that did not contribute to the crisis.

In small, vulnerable and highly indebted middle-

income economies such as ours, the economic debacle

threatens to have debilitating and ongoing

consequences. We cannot afford to wait for the promise

of incremental or cyclical up-ticks in the global

economy. Small States need the fiscal and policy space

to creatively spur development in ways that comply not

with the checklists of discredited economic theorists,

but with real-world particularities and people-centred

policies. The international financial institutions have

yet to sufficiently grasp this simple fact.

The General Assembly must reassert its role in

the response to the international economic crisis. In the

early days of the global economic deterioration, Saint

Vincent and the Grenadines played a leading role in the

United Nations Conference on the World Financial and

Economic Crisis and its Impact on Development.

Under the President’s leadership, the Assembly must

now meaningfully follow up on the unfulfilled

recommendations and mechanisms spelled out at that

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Conference. The Caribbean region has a vested interest

in this most urgent of matters.

This year, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines was

the subject of a United Nations resolution (65/136) that

called upon the international community to provide

assistance in the wake of Hurricane Tomas, which

caused millions of dollars of damage in our region.

While we are extremely grateful to the many countries

that contributed generously to the emergency response,

our national and regional recovery is far from

complete. In the light of the welcome call by the

President of the General Assembly to focus on disaster

prevention and response during the current session, I

remind the international community of our continuing

recovery efforts and the ongoing vulnerability of small

island developing States during the still active 2011

Atlantic hurricane season.

I remain baffled by the intransigence of major

emitters and developed nations that refuse to shoulder

the burden for arresting the climate changes that are

linked to the excesses of their own wasteful policies.

As Hurricanes Irene and Katia crept northward to

typically untouched cities in the United States and the

United Kingdom, we in the Caribbean felt saddened at

the extensive damage and tragic loss of life, which is

an annual occurrence in our region. We can only hope

that our now-common experiences can engender a level

of solidarity and constructive engagement that will lead

to binding and meaningful emissions reduction targets

and the fulfilment of commitments on adaptation

financing for vulnerable small island developing

States. Time is running out on the very existence of

many countries in the face of rising oceans and

increasingly intense storms.

I am heartened that the President of the General

Assembly has decided to place special emphasis on

sustainable development and global prosperity during

the current session. But the citizens of the world, and

indeed many of its Governments, have lost faith in

endless self-important summits that produce little in

the way of tangible results. The archives of the United

Nations are filled with grandiloquent declarations and

outcome documents from summits whose commitments

were forgotten even before representatives had boarded

their planes to return home from their exotic venues.

Next year, the issue of development returns to

Latin America for the United Nations Conference on

Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in Brazil. Rio+20

will take place one decade after Mexico’s heralded

Monterrey Consensus, in which developed countries

committed themselves to the target of devoting 0.7 per

cent of their gross national income to official

development assistance to developing countries. Today,

even accepting the liberal definitions and creative

accounting used by some States to measure

development assistance, developed countries are

contributing only 0.32 per cent of their gross national

income to official development assistance — less than

half of the Monterrey target. We just have to make this

better. We must do it right. It is just not good for us to

be taken for a ride all of these years with all of these

promises. It must come to an end sometime, and the

world is changing. Let us get it right. It is our

responsibility. Please.

In that regard, our dreams remain constantly

unfulfilled. I am reminded of the poetic inquiry of

Langston Hughes, an authentic voice of America, who

asked simply this:

“What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore —

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over —

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?”

Recent events in the streets of major cities around the

world have probably answered Langston Hughes’

queries. Talk is cheap. We must get some action.

It should be a source of alarm and international

embarrassment that the composition of the Security

Council is an ossified relic of the Second World War,

seemingly immune to the modern realities of new

countries and new global Powers. It is an outrageous

act of international irresponsibility that such an

outmoded and increasingly illegitimate body is allowed

to decisively insert itself into local and regional

conflicts. Saint Vincent and the Grenadines is adamant

that the Security Council must be reformed, and that

the reform must be underpinned by the expansion of

the Council in the permanent and non-permanent

categories alike, with full regard for the legitimate

aspirations of Africa and the necessary

accommodations for small island developing States,

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which have valuable and creative perspectives on

peacebuilding and conflict resolution.

The International Year for People of African

Descent, which was declared with much fanfare, is

almost at an end. I am grateful to the United Nations,

which has hosted a number of events to raise

awareness of the challenges facing people of African

descent and foster discussions on potential solutions to

tackle those challenges.

Racial discrimination was justified and itself

became the justification for a brutal, exploitative and

dehumanizing system. That system was perfected

during the transatlantic slave trade and ingrained over

the course of colonial domination. The structure of the

modern world is still firmly rooted in a past of slavers

and colonialist exploitation. Today, every single

country of the world with a population of majority

African descent is still trapped in the periphery of our

global economic and developmental systems. The

peoples of African descent remain disadvantaged,

individually and systemically, by the entrenched and

unyielding cycle of discrimination. Indeed, many of the

wars that the United Nations struggles mightily to quell

or avoid are rooted in the ignorant and avaricious

cartography of the European colonizers.

The people of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines

have a long and proud history of resistance to slavery,

bigotry and genocide, dating back to the heroic

resistance of the Garifuna people against British

aggression in the late 1700s. While we celebrate the

noble heroism of the famous and the faceless alike who

resisted racist colonial hegemony, we must continue to

confront the legacy of this barbarism and continuing

injustice. The wounds of that era are deep, the crimes

against humanity are clear and the necessity for

apology and reparations is undeniable; we cannot duck

those. When we speak this year about the peoples of

African descent, we must highlight what is happening

in the Horn of Africa and in Haiti.

The collective voices of the international

community are rising to a crescendo in support of full

Palestinian statehood. Saint Vincent and the

Grenadines echoes the relevant portions of yesterday’s

Group of 77 ministerial declaration, which welcomed

the State of Palestine’s application for full membership

in the United Nations. The State of Palestine has

brought its case to this world Assembly in keeping with

the finest traditions of multilateralism. No one should

call the Palestinian acts unilateral. They come here to

the multilateral body. We have no doubt that its action

and the solidarity of the international community will

resuscitate the moribund negotiating process between

the Palestinian and Israeli States.

As I reflect on the sweeping geopolitical changes

being wrought in our global village, I am compelled to

raise the fact that there is no practical, legal or logical

justification for the seeming indifference of the United

Nations to the meaningful participation of Taiwan in

our important work. Surely, in the context of an ever-

expanding and inclusive United Nations, the 23 million

citizens of Taiwan can, at the very least, be allowed to

meaningfully participate in the specialized agencies of

the Organization — and that should extend beyond the

World Trade Organization and the World Health

Assembly.

Mr. Al-Nasser assumes the presidency amid a

cyclone of international turbulence and change. We

may not be able to direct those winds, but we can, and

must, adjust our sails to harness the energy and the

potential of this moment, while riding out the storms of

uncertainty and upheaval. Former United States

President Abraham Lincoln once said, in a different

context:

“The dogmas of the quiet past are

inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is

piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with

the occasion. As our case is new, so we must

think anew and act anew.”

Our stormy present requires similar resolve,

creativity and action. Let us rise to the occasion and

fulfil the immense potential of this peaceful global

Assembly. Into those swirling winds of change, let us

raise the flag of inclusiveness, equality, peace, justice

and development for all the peoples of the world to see.

May Almighty God continue to bless us all.

The Acting President: On behalf of the General

Assembly, I wish to thank the Prime Minister of Saint

Vincent and the Grenadines for the statement he has

just made.