South Africa, 2003

May I congratulate you, Sir,

for assuming the mantle of the presidency for this

session of the Assembly and thank the outgoing

President, Mr. Jan Kavan. I would also like to echo

what other speakers have said about the death of the

dedicated United Nations workers who lost their lives

in the bombing of the United Nations headquarters in

Baghdad last month, including Sergio Vieira de Mello,

an outstanding international civil servant.

When we met here last year, we were all

concerned about what would happen in Iraq. At the

same time, we were concerned about what role the

United Nations would play in the resolution of the Iraq

affair. Dramatic events since then have provided

answers to those questions. However, those dramatic

events have raised important and disturbing questions

about the very future of the United Nations. Central

among them is the question, does the United Nations

have a future as a strong and effective multilateral

organization enjoying the confidence of the peoples of

the world and capable of addressing the matters that

are of concern to all humanity?

Quite correctly, as we meet here this time, while

still preoccupied by the issue of the future of Iraq, I am

certain that none of us wants to rehash the debate that

took place on this matter in the period following the

last general debate in the General Assembly. While for

some time after that general debate we were concerned

to provide answers to questions about the role of the

United Nations in Iraq, today we have to answer

questions about the impact of the Iraq affair on the

future of the United Nations. Matters have evolved in

such a manner that to our limited understanding it

seems extremely difficult to resolve the issue of the

role of the United Nations in Iraq, unless we answer

the question about the future of the United Nations as a

legitimate expression of the collective will of the

peoples of the world and the principal guarantor of

international peace and security, among other global

issues.

Put differently, we could say that what is decided

about the role of the United Nations in Iraq will at the

same time decide what will become of the United

Nations in the context of its Charter and of the

important global objectives that have been set since the

Charter was adopted.

This is not a case of the tail wagging the dog;

rather, history has placed at our feet an urgent and

practical test case that obliges us to answer the

question: what do we, collectively, want the United

Nations to be? What do we do to distinguish the trees

from the forest? In that regard we must make the point

directly, that as South Africans, we are partners and

activists who campaign in favour of a strong and

effective United Nations. We do so because of the

place our country and people occupy in the

contemporary world.

We believe that everything that has happened

places an obligation on the United Nations to reflect on

a number of fundamental issues that are of critical

importance to the evolution of human society. We are

convinced that this General Assembly would

disappoint the expectations of the peoples of the world

and put itself in jeopardy if, for any reason whatsoever,

it did not address these issues.

We speak as we do because we represent the

people who are more sensitive to the imperatives of

what the world decides, given our experience during a

period when apartheid South Africa was correctly a

matter of focused and sustained interest by the United

Nations and the peoples of the world, including

ordinary folk, even in the most marginalized areas of

our globe.

This Organization, and all of us singly and

collectively, has spoken and frequently speaks about

the phenomenon of globalization. Correctly, we speak

of a global village driven by recognition of the fact of

the integration of all peoples within a common and

interdependent global society.

24

Certainly, humanity is more integrated today than

it was when the United Nations was established more

than fifty years ago. However, many have drawn

attention to the fact that, whereas objective social

processes have led to the emergence of the global

village, all of our political collectives have not yet

succeeded in designing the institutions of governance

made necessary by the reality of the birth of this global

village.

Correct observations have also been made that the

use of the image and concept of the village does not

imply that the residents of this village are equal. The

reality is that the same processes that bring all of us

closer together in a global village are simultaneously

placing the residents of the global village in different

positions. Some have emerged as dominant, and the

rest as the dominated, with the dominant being the

decision makers and the dominated being the recipients

and implementers of those decisions.

To the same extent that our political collectives

have not designed the institutions responsive to the

evolution of the global village, so have they failed to

respond to the imbalance in the distribution of power

inherent in contemporary global human society. We

speak here of power in all fields of human activity. Left

to its internal and autonomous impulses, the process of

globalization will inevitably result in the further

enhancement of the domination of the dominant and

the entrenchment of the subservience of the dominated,

however much the latter might resent such domination.

This will include the perpetuation of the

dominant positions by those who are dominant to

ensure the sustenance of their capacity to set the

agenda of the global village in the interest of their own

neighbourhoods within that village. Inherent within

this is, necessarily, reliance on the use of superior

power, of which the dominant dispose, to achieve the

objective of the perpetuation of the situation of an

unequal distribution of power.

In this situation, it is inevitable that the pursuit of

power in itself will assert itself as a unique legitimate

objective, apparently detached from any need to define

the uses of such power. This also signifies the

deification of force in all its forms as the final arbiter

in the ordering of human affairs.

However, from the point of view of the

disempowered, the struggle to ensure the use of such

power to address their own interests becomes a

strategic objective they cannot avoid. Necessarily this

means that power would have to be redistributed. That

would be done to empower the disempowered and to

regulate the use of power by those who are powerful.

Thus we come back to what I said earlier.

Because we are poor, we are partisan activists for a

strong, effective and popularly accepted United

Nations. We take those positions because there is no

way in which we could advance the interests of the

people, the majority of whom are poor, outside the

context of a strong, effective and popularly accepted

United Nations. An autonomous process of

globalization, driven by its own internal regularities,

can only result in the determination of our future

within the parameters set by those who enjoy the

superiority of power. The powerful will do this in their

own interests, which might not coincide with ours.

When this Organization was established 58 years

ago, its objectives and institutions necessarily reflected

both the collective global concerns as then perceived

and the then balance of power.

Among other things, our esteemed Secretary-

General, Mr. Kofi Annan, has drawn attention to the

fact that the United Nations started off as an

Organization of 51 States and is now composed of 191

States. Undoubtedly, the perceived and real collective

global concerns of our day are, to some extent at least,

different from those that prevailed more than 50 years

ago, when the Organization was about a quarter of its

present size.

For more than a decade, this Organization has

been involved in discussions about its transformation.

Once more, the Secretary-General has reflected on this

challenge. The truth is that our discussions have gone

nowhere. Earlier this morning the Secretary-General

announced steps he will take to facilitate the adoption

of decisions that will help all of us to effect the

necessary and inevitable transformation of the United

Nations. We support the decisions he announced.

The global resolve to defeat such organizations as

al Qaeda has emerged out of our understanding that

international aggression should not necessarily be

expected to come from formal and recognized State

institutions. We have all come to understand that such a

threat coming from non-State institutions would

express itself as the most inhumane and despicable

terrorism, as was most painfully demonstrated on 11

September 2001.

25

Our collective experience stretching from New

York and elsewhere in the United States on 11

September 2001; and reaching back to Nairobi and

Dar es Salaam, in Africa, earlier still; and, more

recently, to Bali, Indonesia; to Morocco; to the conflict

between Israel and Palestine; to Algeria, India, Russia

and elsewhere; and even our own country tells us

that the United Nations, working in defence of the

collective interests of the peoples of the world, must

ensure that we act together to defeat the threat of

terrorism, collectively defined.

At the same time, we have to take on board the

conviction among some of our Member States that they

constitute special and particular targets of global

terrorism. Understandably, the argument is advanced

that it would be unreasonable and irrational to expect

such States not to act to deter such terrorist actions

against themselves. None of us can defend

international rules that prescribe that any one of us

should wait to be attacked knowing in specific ways

that we were going to be attacked by identified

terrorists, and then act against those who had attacked

us, with such horrendous costs as were experienced by

the United States during the 11 September attacks. I do

not imagine that any one of us would seek to impose

such a costly and unsustainable burden on any of our

Member States, which would also violate the self-

defence provisions of Article 51 of the Charter of the

United Nations.

We also have no choice but to deal with the brute

reality that the reform process of the United Nations

and all its bodies, and other multilateral organizations,

has got to recognize the reality of the imbalance of

power, as represented by different countries and

regions. At the same time, we must proceed from the

position that such distribution of power is not

necessarily in the interests of the peoples of the world,

or even in the interests of those who today have the

power to determine what happens to our common

world. That includes acceptance of the fact that,

depending on the place we occupy in the global

community, we have different priorities. Among other

things, the rich are concerned about ways and means to

maintain the status quo, from which they benefit. In

practical terms that means that all matters that threaten

to destabilize the status quo must necessarily be

anathema to such people. Such matters will therefore

be an issue of principal concern to them. Necessarily

and understandably, they will then seek to get the rest

of the world to accept their assertion that the

maintenance of the status quo must be a universal

human preoccupation, precisely the kind of issue on

which the United Nations must take a united position.

On the other hand, the poor are interested in

changing their conditions for the better. Accordingly,

they will not accept the maintenance of the status quo,

which perpetuates their poverty. Accordingly, among

other things, the poor billions of the world will argue

for action by the United Nations to ensure the transfer

of resources to themselves, which will enable them to

extricate themselves from their condition of poverty

and underdevelopment, consistent with the

implementation of the Millennium Development Goals,

the objectives of the Johannesburg World Summit on

Sustainable Development and other international

agreements. Inevitably, that will run counter to the

propositions of those who are more powerful than the

poor, namely, the Governments, peoples and countries

that keep them afloat with development assistance.

That will require whether it is stated or not that

the recipients of that assistance understand that such

assistance can dry up.

Important shifts in the global balance of power

and global objectives have taken place since the United

Nations was established, 58 years ago. The

Organization has not substantially changed, in terms of

its structures and mode of functioning, to reflect those

changes. That has served as a recipe for an inevitable

crisis, a disaster waiting to occur. And so as we meet

today we are confronted by global challenges that the

global Organization cannot solve. Impelled by the

urgent issues of the day, some of the powerful will not

wait for all of us to respond to the problems we have

raised, and which they face. They will act to solve

those problems; their actions will make the statement

that they do not need the United Nations to find

solutions to those problems. Simultaneously, that will

make the practical statement that the United Nations is

irrelevant to the solution of the most pending problems

of our day. The disempowered will continue to look to

the Organization, understanding, correctly, that they are

too weak to advance their interests singly outside the

collective voice of the United Nations. In that regard,

they expect that the United Nations will be informed by

its founding documents and other solemn decisions it

has taken since it was established, all of which have

been approved by successive sessions of the General

Assembly.

26

Global poverty and underdevelopment are the

principal problems that face the United Nations.

Billions across the world expect that the General

Assembly will address that challenge in a meaningful

manner. The masses of people of our world expect that

the statements we will make at this session of the

General Assembly as representatives of various

Governments will indicate a serious commitment to

implement what we say. The poor of the world expect

an end to violence and war everywhere. They want an

end to the killing that is taking too many Israeli and

Palestinian lives. They want Africans to stop killing

one another, continuing to convey the message that we

are incapable of living in peace among ourselves. They

desire the realization of the democratic objective

universally: that the people shall govern. They believe

that we are seriously committed to the objective of the

eradication of poverty and the provision of a better life

for all. They think that we mean it when we say that we

will not allow the process of globalization to result in

the further enrichment of the rich and the

impoverishment of the poor within and between

countries. They believe us when we say that our

collective future is one of hope, and not despair. They

are keenly interested to know whether our gathering,

the United Nations General Assembly, will produce

those results.

To collectively meet those requirements will

require that each and every one of us both rich and

poor, the powerful and the disempowered commit

ourselves practically to act in all circumstances in a

manner that recognizes and respects the fact that none

of us is an island sufficient unto ourselves. That

includes the most powerful. The latter face the

interesting challenge, important to themselves in their

national interests, that the poverty and

disempowerment of the billions will no longer serve as

a condition for their success and their possibility to

prosper in conditions of peace.

What we have said today may not be heard,

because we do not have the strength to have our voice

heard. Tomorrow we may be obliged to say, No more

water; the fire next time. As the fires burn, the United

Nations will die, consumed by the flames. So will the

hopes of the poor of the world die, as they did at

Cancun, Mexico, not so long ago. We must act together

to say in our words and in our actions, as countries and

as the United Nations, that there will be water next

time, and not fire.