Dominican Republic, 1995

May I first of all on behalf of the

Dominican Republic and on behalf of its Constitutional

President, Mr. Joaquín Balaguer, express our sincerest

congratulations to the President of the fiftieth session of

the General Assembly.

Secondly, I wish to express our profound gratitude

to the Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Republic of

Côte d’Ivoire, His Excellency Mr. Amara Essy, who

presided over the forty-ninth session and, particularly, to

the Secretary-General, who, by his extraordinary efforts

and tireless dedication in a world marked by challenges

and breaches of the peace, wages a daily combat for the

full implementation of the purposes and principles of the

United Nations Charter.

The Dominican Republic can affirm with pride on

this fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the United

Nations its role as a founding Member of the United

Nations, which signed the San Francisco Charter within

the international order that rose from the ashes of the

Second World War, whose fiftieth anniversary we also

commemorate, and as a country that defends the principle

of sovereignty as the inalienable right of the people.

Fifty years after the creation of the United Nations

in 1945, the world is in a state of transition toward what

has been termed a new world order, moving from

bipolarity to unipolarity in a multipolar world, following

upon the world built in Yalta and in the Bretton Woods

agreements.

The 1945 order was based on a balance of power

and on the United Nations as a reflection of the real

desire to seek security and universal peace — and the

Organization has managed, since its creation, to avert

another nuclear holocaust.

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Fiftieth session 13 October 1995

Small countries such as the Dominican Republic,

staunch guardians of their national sovereignty, have

witnessed during the five decades since 1945 this order

created through the United Nations and its specialized

agencies, with Bretton Woods, the North Atlantic Treaty

Organization (NATO), the Council for Economic Aid

(COMECON), the Warsaw Pact, and the European

Economic Community — today the European Union; the

evolution of countries with market economies and those

with centrally planned economies, and the decolonization

processes which have resulted in the establishment of many

independent States. All this has left an indelible imprint on

the annals of contemporary history and has been rich in

lessons for all the nations of the world — lessons, in a

word, on relations between North and South.

The order which emerged from Bretton Woods was

reflected in the International Monetary Fund (IMF); the

International Bank for Reconstruction and Development

(IBRD); and the aborted International Trade Organization

of 1947, which was replaced by the General Agreement on

Tariffs and Trade (GATT), from which the agricultural

sector, services and intellectual property were excluded. All

this explains why 46 years later, with the Uruguay Round

of Multilateral Trade Negotiations and the birth, in 1993, of

the World Trade Organization (WTO), we are giving

multilateral shape to world trade in order to overcome

bilateral barriers and, above all, the protectionism that was

practised by the industrial countries.

In these five decades, the small countries had to

struggle mightily to uphold the principles of democracy,

including respect for human rights, and to defend their right

to access to the markets of the industrialized countries

against tariff and non-tariff barriers, quotas, and downward

spiralling in the prices of their raw materials. We can,

however, point with pride to the way we fought for our

demands for greater symmetry and fairness in commercial

and economic relations. This in the end led to the

establishment of the United Nations Conference on Trade

and Development (UNCTAD).

The San Francisco Charter illuminated like a

powerful beacon the road to the future of the countries that

had had to experience the difficult period of the bipolar

world. For its part, the Dominican Republic, committed as

always to the principles of the Charter, was able to attain

the functional democracy we enjoy today. This took place

within a world that has some 30 integration processes and

has seen the emergence of three strong economic-

integration blocs with their spheres of influence — such as

the European Union and the North American Free Trade

Agreement (NAFTA) — in addition to the Free Trade

Zone of the Americas, which will probably be established

in the year 2005; and, for Eastern Asia, the Asia-Pacific

Economic Cooperation Council (APEC). There are also

the political repercussions these processes have had on a

world where the dreams for centrally planned economies

have faded. Our country is now a member of the recently

established Association of Caribbean States (ACS).

This new world order that has now become the

global village foreseen by Marshall McLuhan, within a

globalized, international economy, will not be without

tensions, for we do not yet fully grasp the cultural

plurality of nations and the strong search for identity in

regions and within ethnic and religious groups. Contrary

to the popular phrase, history has not come to an end. A

new process is beginning with the expression by peoples

and regions of their national identity.

The globalization of trade would seem to transcend

the borders of the nation-State and create a concept of a

region-State, given the fragmentation of national

aggregate assets.

Within the family of nations we feel proud to have

been not only one of the 51 States that participated in the

San Francisco Conference, but also one of the first to

have ratified, in resolution 962 of our National Congress,

the Charter of the United Nations, which was promulgated

by our Executive Branch on 11 August 1945.

On the fiftieth anniversary of that memorable date

we wish to pay tribute to those members of the

Dominican delegation who signed that historic document:

Manuel Peña Batlle, Emilio García Godoy, Gilberto

Sánchez Lustrino, Tulio Franco y Franco and Minerva

Bernardino. We are a nation deeply committed to the

proper functioning of democratic institutions, having

attained a commendable political stability in our

continent’s community of nations.

In this context, the United Nations will be making a

praiseworthy contribution to the process of maintaining

stability in our country by responding to the request of

the Dominican Republic for reimbursement of the funds

spent in implementing the economic embargo imposed on

our neighbour, Haiti. The Dominican Republic has

submitted that request to the Secretariat and our

Government is now awaiting a response.

As a developing country the Dominican Republic

must face many challenges in the sensitive areas of drug

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Fiftieth session 13 October 1995

trafficking and drug consumption. This is a problem our

country has met with a State policy that provides for severe

punishments for offences related to this crime against

humanity. At the present time legislation is pending in our

National Congress to punish money-laundering, which is an

activity related to the criminal drug traffic. We are also

coordinating our policies with the international community,

since in this field more than any other international

cooperation is required.

It is fitting here to congratulate the United Nations

Secretariat on the successful holding of the Fourth World

Conference on Women at Beijing. That Conference

represents a milestone in the Organization’s history because

of the recognition it has granted to that noble human being

who makes up half of all humanity and is the mother of the

other half.

In that connection we would reiterate at this fiftieth

session, just as we did at the last session, our concern at the

Secretary-General’s proposal to merge the International

Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of

Women (INSTRAW) with the United Nations Development

Fund for Women (UNIFEM). The General Assembly

should recall Economic and Social Council resolution

1979/4 of 9 May 1979, which established the permanent

headquarters of the Institute in the Dominican Republic.

We wish to reiterate — with the utmost courtesy, but

also with the utmost firmness — our request that

INSTRAW and UNIFEM not be merged, maintaining the

commitments contained in General Assembly resolution

34/157 of 17 December 1979 and the agreement that

established INSTRAW in Santo Domingo so that our first

city of America may remain the headquarters of that

important Institute. This would also be in keeping with the

extraordinary importance of the recently concluded

Conference on Women.

We are now only six years from the beginning of the

twenty-first century, in the year 2001, and our thoughts turn

to an assessment of the past 50 years since the founding of

the United Nations. We should also be visualizing the

foundations and the shape of the new world order for the

building of a future based on security and world peace.

This will require a qualitative change in the United Nations,

removing the sacrosanct aura surrounding the veto power of

the great Powers in the Security Council and promoting a

democratic system of coexistence among States and

peoples.

The United Nations and we, its Member States, will

have to meet the challenge of the demographic or so-

called population bomb with growth estimated at 84

million persons per year, and related problems, such as

the fact that in 1990 only 40 per cent of the world’s

population lived in rural sectors and over 50 per cent in

urban centres of over 100,000 inhabitants. The number of

persons suffering malnutrition is estimated to reach 512

million by the end of the century. Children without

schooling will number 315 million, and there will be 889

million illiterate persons. Those living without sanitation

systems will reach 1,750 million. Dealing with those

problems will be a real challenge.

The new context of the world order will require a

three-pronged approach involving an ecological response,

a political response and an economic response.

Although the United Nations Environment

Programme was an important step forward for the

protection of the biosphere, consideration should be given

the possibility of creating, after proper study, an

ecological response embodied in a United Nations

environmental security council composed of Member

States with a permanent 15-member executive committee

and a secretary-general with executive powers.

The political response would come from the reform

of the United Nations Charter. In this connection, we

should bear in mind that Article 109 of the Charter,

which was written in 1945, provides for the convening of

a General Conference within a 10-year period for the

purpose of reviewing the Charter. In addition, on 22 April

1991 a number of former Heads of State and political

leaders appealed for a renewal of the United Nations.

Today, it is appropriate to envisage the inclusion of

Germany, Japan and India as members of the Security

Council, as well as the inclusion of representatives of

third-world countries.

Charter reform would, of course, imply the exercise

of the powers of the Secretary-General supported by

under-secretaries for environmental, political and

economic affairs.

In addition, the economic response should come

from a clear and precise definition of the role of the

United Nations within the new order. Since, in the

economic sphere, the Group of 7 has already been

coordinating its policies through a kind of security

council, with the recent addition of Russia, we might

envisage its incorporation into the United Nations as a

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sort of Economic Council that might include, in addition,

the countries of southern Asia and the Pacific, as well as

Latin America and other regions. It could eventually

become a Group of 18, linked to the General Assembly, the

Economic and Social Council, the specialized agencies and

the regional commissions.

The Dominican Republic hopes that the ideas and

suggestions that have been put forward, many now under

study and being proposed in various forums, will be viewed

as a good-will contribution by a small nation — a nation

that is small but proud of its participation in the

international community.

For that reason, we cannot, as a small nation that

believes in unity within diversity, fail to mention our

support for the agenda item — proposed by Burkina Faso,

Costa Rica, Dominica, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea-

Bissau, the Solomon Islands, Nicaragua, Niger, Panama,

the Central American Republic, Saint Lucia, Saint

Vincent and the Grenadines, Swaziland and our country,

the Dominican Republic — regarding the special situation

of the Republic of China in Taiwan in the international

context, based on the principle of universality and in

accordance with the established model of parallel

representation of divided countries in the United Nations.

The Republic of China on Taiwan, a Founding

Member of the United Nations, has a population of

21 million, a high level of economic development and full

political democracy. It has been a model to all developing

nations. Its aspiration to participate in the United Nations

once again is something positive for the international

community. The Organization must not ignore its

existence. The Dominican Republic supports the

establishment of an ad hoc committee to seek a

satisfactory resolution of this matter.

At this fiftieth session, the General Assembly should

take stock of the achievements of the United Nations in

its 50 years of existence as well as of the unfulfilled

objectives in the area of the maintenance of international

peace and security. But above all it should adopt a vision

of the future that will enable us to build a democratic

system of coexistence among States and peoples, inspired

by the profound human aspiration to lasting peace. May

merciful God help us attain these goals.