The Bahamas, 2004

It is my honour to

congratulate you, Sir, on behalf of the Prime Minister,

the Government and the people of the Commonwealth

of the Bahamas, on your election to the presidency of

the General Assembly at its fifty-ninth session. I would

also like to take this opportunity to congratulate your

predecessor, Mr. Julian Hunte, of our sister Caribbean

State of Saint Lucia, for his outstanding leadership

during the fifty-eighth session. His legacy is one of

which we in the Caribbean can be proud, and we wish

him well in his future endeavours.

I would also like to pay tribute to the Secretary-

General for his stalwart defence of multilateralism and

the rule of law.

Hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne

have ravaged the Caribbean islands and parts of the

United States. Lives were lost in Haiti, the Dominican

Republic, Grenada, Jamaica, Cuba, the United States

and the Bahamas. The damage to homes and

infrastructure and the interruption to normal life and

commerce compel us to stress the need for immediate

and dramatic measures to ensure reconstruction and

rehabilitation. What has been on offer to the region so

far is woefully inadequate.

Our country’s northern islands — Grand Bahama

and Abaco — received double hits. First, Hurricane

Frances struck on 13 September, leaving hundreds

without food, water, homes and power. Then came

Jeanne, two weeks later, over the same islands that

were hit by Frances, further exacerbating the problems.

The Bahamas has many islands and, fortunately for us,

tourism facilities remain open in the capital, Nassau,

and facilities on other islands in the chain will be

operational shortly. That, unfortunately, will not be the

case in Grenada.

Regional heads have called for an international

donor conference to meet the needs of all countries

adversely affected by the hurricanes. The Bahamas

supports such a conference. We hope that, as a result of

that conference, if not before, there will be a

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moratorium on Grenada’s debt repayment. We also

recommend that a regional disaster relief fund be

established to support the reconstruction effort.

The word “hurricane” comes from a word first

used by the indigenous people of the Caribbean region,

the Arawaks. That pre-Columbian civilization must

have seen the phenomenon so often that it invented the

word for it. That means it has been around for some

time, and it is likely to be with us for some time to

come. It behooves us, therefore, to understand the

phenomenon that we are facing, including its

connection — if any — to climate change, which low-

lying States have been warning about for years. These

facts also demand that our own societies should better

plan for the eventualities that have been, and that we

know are going to continue to be, a part of our lives.

We cannot let lack of planning be a possible cause of

the undermining of our sovereignty in this way.

The world is soon wary and weary; the

phenomenon of donor fatigue sets in. And we lose our

dignity if we cannot be seen to help ourselves. But if,

as the scientific evidence suggests, the hurricanes that

we now experience are related to climate change, it is

clear that we cannot defend ourselves alone. A major

shift on the part of the most active polluting countries

is required. They must shift gears if the people in small

island developing States are going to survive. It is a

moral imperative for them to shift gears.

In this regard, the Bahamas welcomes the

preliminary moves by the Government of Britain, as

well as the Governments of Japan and of Russia,

towards putting climate change closer to the top of the

agenda. We urge them to continue to use their

influence on their friends to cause a major shift in

attitude. The implementation of the Barbados

Programme of Action for the Sustainable Development

of Small Island Developing States, adopted at the

Global Conference in Barbados in 1994, becomes even

more urgent. The follow-up meeting on this issue in

Mauritius in January 2005 now takes on even greater

significance.

In this context, I would also like to highlight the

region’s efforts to designate the Caribbean Sea as a

special area in the context of sustainable development.

We also reiterate our grave concern about the serious

threat posed to the security and economic development

of Caribbean countries by the trans-shipment of

nuclear waste through the Caribbean Sea. We continue

to call on States involved in trans-shipment to desist

from that practice.

The scenes of death and destruction as a result of

the hurricane that affected Haiti in recent days

reminded us of the political turmoil that that country

has endured during the past year. The Bahamas extends

its deepest condolences to the Haitian nation for the

tremendous and sad loss of life. The year, which began

with so much hope with the celebration of the deeds of

Toussaint L’Ouverture and the two hundredth

anniversary of independence on 1 January, fell quickly

into the abyss of despair on the fateful evenings of

28 and 29 February. No one will ever know what truly

happened on that night as an elected President left his

country with armed rebels nipping at his heels, but it

filled the entire Caribbean with sadness. It raised the

spectre of mistrust of friends. That feeling has still not

died, but we must soldier on if we are to help the

people of Haiti achieve democracy, economic uplift

and a just and fair society.

The Bahamas stands ready to do what it can to

assist the people of Haiti in these developments. Haiti

sits 90 miles from our southern shores, and each year

thousands of migrants looking for a better way of life

seek to enter the Bahamas illegally from Haiti. We

have practical reasons, therefore, to ensure that justice

and democracy prevail in Haiti. We echo the call of all

countries of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM)

for the return to democratic order in Haiti, and we

pledge to help.

We regret the failure of the Security Council to

act in a timely fashion when Haiti’s friends begged for

the authority to intervene or to authorize an

intervention. Perhaps that failure heralds the need for

the Council’s reform. The Bahamas supports such

reform efforts and awaits the report of the High-Level

Panel appointed by the Secretary-General. But the

United Nations must never stop trying to address the

issues that face Haiti, because there is a moral

imperative to eliminate hunger, poverty, disease and

discrimination. In this regard, we welcome the work of

President Lula da Silva of Brazil and President Chirac

of France, Pope John Paul and other world leaders in

seeking to ensure that the moral imperatives to which

we have referred are placed at the forefront of the

world’s agenda. We must never forget what Haiti has

done for our region and for the world.

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While the fight against those who would subvert

our democratic values by attacks on civilian and

military targets remains high on our agenda, we must

not allow the drums of war to drown out the calls of

the world’s poor and disenfranchized. In 2000, we gave

ourselves a set of goals with respect to development

with a human face, and we must do all that we can to

achieve them. The Bahamas has committed itself to the

fight. We offer our heartfelt condolences to the

survivors of all who have lost their lives in such

senseless attacks, particularly in the United States,

Kenya, Spain, Tanzania and Indonesia. But we also

admonish all States that terrorism cannot be an excuse

to limit freedom and to dispense with the very liberties

that we are trying to defend and that form the

foundations of free and democratic societies.

All States ought to act with caution in putting in

place rules and regulations for travel, lest the denial of

those rights cannot be defended by logic or objectivity.

That is especially so where we note that developed

countries argue in favour of free trade and

globalization but deny the benefits of that trade to

legitimate travellers by administrative discrimination

and bureaucratic procedures and delay. The appeal

therefore is to bring some sense of balance, before we

lose the very thing we seek to save.

As part of this overall process of reflection, my

delegation welcomes the high-level reviews planned

for 2005 of our commitments with respect to social

development and the advancement of women. We must

ensure that we undertake an unflinching examination

of the progress made in achieving the priority goals of

the Copenhagen Programme of Action and the Beijing

Platform for Action to determine how far we have

come and what remains to be done. It is critical that the

outcomes of the respective appraisals will acknowledge

the gaps in implementation and allow States and the

international community as a whole to move forward

and achieve the timely and effective implementation of

the commitments undertaken at Copenhagen, Beijing

and beyond. We must also make certain that the results

of our deliberations feed constructively and

synergistically into the high-level event in September

2005, so as to ensure that no ground is left uncovered.

HIV/AIDS continues to threaten to undermine

decades and centuries of progress in health care and in

developing healthy populations that facilitate economic

growth throughout the world. The Bahamas is a leader

in the fight against HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean region.

We urge the continued and unrelenting fight against the

disease, to rescue the world’s developing nations from

the clutches of that scourge. It must take all of the

political will and financial power of the world’s nations

to ensure that the scourge is brought under control and

then eliminated.

In that context, the Bahamas welcomes the recent

grant to the Pan-Caribbean Partnership from the Global

Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. That

grant will provide a much-needed infusion of resources

for prevention, care and treatment programmes. The

Bahamas also welcomes the convening of the June

2005 high-level meeting to review the progress

achieved in realizing the commitments set out in the

Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS. The

Bahamas acknowledges the pledge made by the United

States to set aside $15 billion to fight HIV/AIDS

throughout the world, including in Haiti and Guyana in

the Caribbean region.

It is an inescapable fact that there can be no

meaningful social or economic development without

security. For many of us in the Caribbean in particular,

that security is being undermined by the activities of

those trafficking in illicit drugs, illegal weapons and

undocumented aliens. By virtue of its geographical

location, the Bahamas is an unwitting transit point for

such illegal activities. In the case of illicit drugs, the

Bahamas is neither a producer nor the final destination

for them. However, as a trans-shipment point, the

Bahamas, as do other transit countries, experiences the

illegal activities associated with that trade. Those

activities tend to undermine the economic and social

fabric of our nations.

We therefore welcomed the convening in June

2004 of the first session of the Open-ended Working

Group to Negotiate an International Instrument to

Enable States to Identify and Trace in a Timely Manner

Illicit Small Arms and Light Weapons, some of the

tools undermining our safety and security and our

economic and social fabric. That meeting was a small,

but important, first step in reaching agreement on an

instrument on tracing, to enable States affected by that

illicit trade to more effectively identify lines of supply,

put measures in place to interdict existing lines and

prevent new ones, and to cooperate with other States at

the bilateral, regional and international levels. At the

same time, we continue to call on developed countries

to take the same extraordinary measures they use in

seeking to stop drug trafficking into their countries to

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stop illegal small arms from reaching our shores from

their countries.

The Bahamas joins with other countries of the

Caribbean Community in voicing our concern about

the persistent attempts on the part of some of the

developed world’s un-elected multilateral bodies to

exclude developing countries from decision-making

and norm-setting processes, thereby undermining our

economies. Chief among those is the Organization for

Economic Cooperation and Development. The

decisions of those bodies are not friendly acts. We

repeat the call we made last year about the need for a

global forum to deal with those unfair practices.

We welcome the work that has been done in the

Economic and Social Council to redress the imbalance

in favour of a level playing field. The arrangements for

dealing with international tax matters in particular are

a source of concern. We pledge to continue to work

with the United Nations towards establishing a world

body that will deal with those matters in a fair and

balanced way.

Yesterday I was in our capital city, Nassau, in the

Bahamas, where we marked 275 years of continuous

representative, parliamentary democracy. This, then, is

a propitious time to reaffirm the commitment of the

Bahamas to the principles enshrined in the Charter of

this great Organization, which will stand as a guiding

beacon as we continue to chart a rocky, yet crucial,

course towards peace, security and sustainable

development for all the world’s inhabitants. While

progress may seem meagre, we must not be swayed

from our course and we must remain confident that the

benefits of our activities and efforts will redound to

future generations. I say again that, now more than

ever, the world needs the United Nations.