United States, 1995

It is

a privilege to speak to the General Assembly today on

behalf of the United States.

A half-century ago the General Assembly first met

here in New York, across the river in a converted skating

rink at Flushing Meadows. In those modest surroundings

our predecessors began to put in place an ambitious

framework that they hoped would keep the peace as

successfully as they had prosecuted the war.

In the years since, the United Nations has helped

bring peace, prosperity and hope to countless people

around the world. Technological change has brought

nations closer together than the founders of the United

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Nations could possibly have foreseen. The United Nations

itself has been challenged in unforeseen ways. It has had to

manage complex humanitarian emergencies, from civil wars

to mass movements of refugees to health epidemics. This

evolution has placed great strains on the Organization and

has revealed the necessity for far-reaching changes in how

it is run.

The Clinton Administration has vigorously made the

case to our Congress and our people for continued

American leadership at the United Nations. The United

States made a commitment to the United Nations Charter

50 years ago, and we are determined to keep our

commitment, including our financial obligations.

We will always remember that for millions of people

around the world, the United Nations is far from a faceless

institution. It is, as Harry Truman once said,

“a case of food, a box of school books; it is a doctor

who vaccinates children; it is an expert who shows

people how to raise more rice and more wheat.”

To millions more around the world, it is the difference

between peace and war.

Economic and social development, as well as the

protection of human rights, remain central to the United

Nations mission. But the United Nations must change to

meet new needs more effectively. When money is wasted

in New York, Geneva or Vienna, when time is lost in

bureaucratic inertia, the people who pay the price are those

most vulnerable to famine, disease and violence.

It is time to recognize that the United Nations must

direct its limited resources to the world’s highest priorities,

focusing on the tasks that it performs the best. The United

Nations bureaucracy should be smaller, with a clear

organizational structure and sharp lines of responsibility.

Each programme must be held to a single simple standard:

it must make a tangible contribution to the freedom,

security and well-being of real people in the real world.

In the last year, under the leadership of Secretary-

General Boutros-Ghali, the groundwork for substantial

change has been laid. The United Nations has an office

with the functions of an inspector general and a mandate to

crack down on waste and fraud. Under-Secretary-General

Joe Connor has embarked on an aggressive campaign to

improve the United Nations management culture, and we

fully support his good work. The United Nations Secretariat

has moved in the right direction by submitting a budget that

begins to restrain spending, and now this momentum for

reform must accelerate.

Let me propose a brief, concrete agenda for reform.

First, we must end United Nations programmes that

have achieved their purpose, and we must consolidate

programmes that overlap, especially in the economic and

social agencies. The United Nations has more than a

dozen organizations responsible for development,

emergency response and statistical reporting. We should

consider establishing a single agency for each of these

functions. We should downsize the United Nations

regional economic commissions. We should ensure that

the functions of the United Nations Conference on Trade

and Development do not duplicate those of the new

World Trade Organization (WTO), and we should adopt

a moratorium on big United Nations conferences once the

present series is completed, concentrating instead on

meeting the commitments of those conferences that we

have already held.

Secondly, we need to streamline the United Nations

Secretariat to make it more efficient, accountable and

transparent. Each part of the United Nations system

should be subject to the scrutiny of an inspector general.

The United Nations must not tolerate ethical or financial

abuses, and its managers should be appointed and

promoted on the basis of merit.

Thirdly, we should rigorously scrutinize proposals

for new and extended peace-keeping missions, and we

should improve the United Nations ability to respond

rapidly when new missions are approved. We must agree

on an equitable scale of peace-keeping assessments that

reflects fully today’s economic realities. And we should

have a unified budget for peace-keeping operations.

Finally, we must maintain the effectiveness of the

Security Council. Germany and Japan should become

permanent members, and we should ensure that all the

world’s regions are fairly represented, without making the

Council too large and unwieldy.

We welcome the formation of the high-level group

on reform, initiated under the leadership of the outgoing

President of the General Assembly, Mr. Essy. Our goal

must be that of a practical blueprint for United Nations

reform and to ensure that it is adopted before the General

Assembly finishes the work of its fiftieth session next

fall. The way forward is clear; we have already seen and

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studied countless studies and reports. Now the time has

come to act on the best proposals.

As the Assembly knows, in my country there have

been serious efforts to curtail our support for the United

Nations. The President and I, and our entire Administration,

believe it would be reckless to turn away from an

Organization that helps mobilize the support of other

nations for goals that are consistent with American and

global interests. But to sustain support for the United

Nations among the American people and among the people

of other nations, it is not enough that we defend the

institution. The best argument against retreat is further

reform. Tangible progress in that direction will help us win

the battle for United Nations support that we are waging in

the United States.

The United Nations must emerge from the reform

process better able to meet its fundamental goals, including

the preservation of peace and security. From Korea to the

Persian Gulf to Haiti, the United Nations has provided a

mandate to its Members as they carried out their

responsibilities. The United Nations own Blue Helmets

have helped nations create the basic conditions of peace in

some of the most difficult situations imaginable around the

world, even though they have not always achieved their

intended purpose.

Recently, a young Haitian father was asked what the

peace-keeping forces had achieved in his country. He

answered,

“We walk freely. We sleep quietly. There are no

men who come for us in the night.”

In Haiti, as, for example, in Cambodia, Mozambique and El

Salvador, the United Nations has shown that peace-keeping,

despite its limitations, has been an enormously useful

instrument.

One region where United Nations forces and the

international community have played a critical role is the

Middle East. Another historic milestone will be marked this

Thursday, in Washington, when Israel and the Palestinians

sign their agreement to implement phase two of the

Declaration of Principles. That agreement will bring to life

a goal first set many years ago in the Camp David accords:

to protect Israel’s security and to give Palestinians

throughout the West Bank control over their daily lives.

The international community and the United Nations must

continue to support this process, both diplomatically and

economically.

There is no question that the United Nations has

never undertaken a mission more difficult than the one in

the former Yugoslavia. The limitations of that mission are

all too well known, but we all must recognize that it has

provided relief for hundreds of thousands of people and

has saved literally thousands of lives. Today, diplomacy

backed by force has given the United States and the

international community an opportunity to move forward

on a track that is producing genuinely hopeful results. The

United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty

Organization (NATO) are working effectively together to

try to bring peace to the region. On 8 September in

Geneva, the parties to the conflict accepted the

fundamental goal that the Security Council has often

expressed: the continuation of the Republic of Bosnia and

Herzegovina as a single State within its internationally

recognized borders. I will be meeting with the Foreign

Ministers of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia later today, and

at that time I will urge them — implore them — to

maintain the momentum towards peace and to establish

constitutional structures for Bosnia.

The framers of the Charter of the United Nations

created this institution to meet threats to peace and

security posed by aggression and armed conflict. Those

threats are still, unfortunately, very much with us. But

today, the world also faces a new set of security

challenges, including proliferation, terrorism, international

crime and narcotics, as well as the far-reaching

consequences of damage to the environment. These have

assumed a new and dangerous scope in a more

interdependent world. As President Clinton said in San

Francisco in June, the

“new forces of integration carry within them the

seeds of disintegration and destruction”.

While, as I said earlier, new technologies have

brought us closer together, they also have made it easier

for terrorists, drug dealers and other international

criminals to acquire weapons of mass destruction, to set

up cocaine cartels and to hide their ill-gotten gains. The

collapse of communism has shattered dictatorships, to be

sure, but it has also left the political and legal institutions

of newly liberated nations even more vulnerable to those

who seek to subvert them.

Although these threats are sometimes sponsored by

States, they increasingly follow no flag. Each of us must

vigorously fight these enemies on our own, but we will

never be truly secure until we effectively fight them

together. That is the new security challenge for the global

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community, and it must be the new security mission for the

United Nations.

There is no single area in which the United Nations

can make a more significant contribution than in that of

non-proliferation. Fifty years ago, the United States was the

only country capable of making a nuclear bomb. Today

many countries have the technology that would enable them

to turn a fist-sized chunk of plutonium into a bomb as

small as a suitcase. That is one reason why more than 170

nations agreed, at a conference held here last May and

effectively chaired by Ambassador Dhanapala, to extend for

all time the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear

Weapons. That is an achievement we must rejoice in but

also build on.

I should like to outline some steps in the field of

non-proliferation. First, we should have a comprehensive

test-ban treaty ready for signature by the time we meet here

next September. As President Clinton announced last

month, the United States is committed to a true zero-yield

test ban. We urge other nations to join us in that

commitment.

Secondly, we should immediately start negotiations on

a fissile material cut-off treaty. Those who have been most

vocal in calling for nuclear disarmament should recognize

that it is essential to ban future production of fissile

material for nuclear weapons.

Thirdly, we should push forward with the historic

reductions of the nuclear arsenals of the United States and

countries of the former Soviet Union. I call on the United

States Senate, as well as on the Russian Duma, to approve

the treaty on further reduction and limitation of strategic

offensive arms (START II) so that we can lock in deep cuts

in our strategic nuclear arsenals. In addition, Presidents

Clinton and Yeltsin are working together to ensure the

safety, transparency and irreversibility of nuclear-arms

reductions.

As part of this process, President Yeltsin will host a

nuclear safety and security summit in Moscow next spring.

This summit should have a very ambitious agenda,

including a declaration of principles on nuclear safety. We

look to this summit to address the worldwide problems of

nuclear-waste management, including those of ocean

dumping. The summit should also promote a plan of action

to safeguard nuclear materials, a plan that should include

new measures to prevent criminals and terrorists from

acquiring nuclear materials for use in weapons.

Finally, we should push for the earliest possible

entry into force of the Chemical Weapons Convention.

President Clinton has urged the United States Senate to

act promptly on its ratification, and to stop holding the

START II Treaty and the Chemical Weapons Convention

hostage to unrelated issues. The world has witnessed the

effects of poison gas too many times in this century — on

European battlefields during the First World War, in

Ethiopia and Manchuria during the 1930s, and against

Iranian soldiers and innocent Kurdish civilians in the

1980s. The Chemical Weapons Convention will make

every nation safer, and we need it now.

The United Nations is also playing an invaluable

role in focusing attention on pressing regional

proliferation problems. In Iraq, the United Nations Special

Commission (UNSCOM) and its Chairman, Rolf Ekeus,

continue to uncover horrific details about Saddam

Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

Under Saddam Hussein, Iraq developed a deadly

biological-weapons capacity hidden from view. It was

conducting research to turn some of the most toxic

substances known to man into weapons of war. We know

that Saddam succeeded in putting anthrax and botulism in

bombs and missile warheads. In December 1990, he

deployed these weapons, with every intention of using

them against the international coalition and innocent

civilians. He was dissuaded from doing so only by the

steadfast determination of the United States and the

international community.

In the light of what Ambassador Ekeus has

uncovered in Iraq, we can conclude only that for the last

four and a half years, Saddam Hussein has lied about the

full scope of Iraq’s weapons programmes. There should

be no easing of the sanctions regime against Iraq until its

Government complies with all the demands of the

Security Council and clearly demonstrates that it has

changed its ways.

The United Nations should also promote

responsibility and restraint in the transfer of conventional

weapons. At last year’s session of the General Assembly,

President Clinton proposed, and the Assembly approved,

the eventual elimination of anti-personnel mines. On my

recent trip to Cambodia, I saw the terrible damage these

hidden killers can do. This year, we will again call on

other countries to join us in putting an end to the export

of land-mines.

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Two years ago, President Clinton called on the

international community to devise a true international

system governing the transfer of conventional weapons and

sensitive dual-use technologies. I am pleased that the

Russian Federation has joined with the United States and 26

other countries to agree on a common principle to control

the build-up of dangerous conventional arms. We hope to

activate this global regime, which is called the New Forum,

by the end of this year.

The proliferation of weapons worldwide has added a

disturbing dimension to another threat we all face: the

threat of international terrorism. Indeed, this year’s sarin

gas attack in Tokyo is a grim warning of what can happen

when terrorists acquire weapons of mass destruction.

More nations are joining the fight against those

individuals and groups that attack civilians for political

ends. The United Nations has supported this effort in

important ways. The Security Council recognized the

importance of countering State-sponsored terrorism by

imposing sanctions against Libya for the bombing of Pan

Am 103 and UTA 772.

Terrorists must be treated as criminals and there must

be no place where they can hide from the consequences of

their acts. States that sponsor terrorists should feel the full

weight of sanctions that can be imposed by the international

community. Let us not deceive ourselves: every dollar that

goes into the Government coffers of a State-sponsor of

terrorism such as Iran helps pay for a terrorist’s bullets or

bombs. Iran’s role as the foremost State-sponsor of

terrorism makes its secret quest for weapons of mass

destruction even more alarming. We must stand together to

prevent Iran from acquiring such threatening capabilities.

The United States has taken a leading role in meeting

the international terrorist threat. We have intensified our

sanctions against Iran. Last January President Clinton issued

an Executive Order prohibiting financial transactions with

terrorist groups and individuals that threaten the Middle

East peace process. We are urging our Congress to tighten

our immigration and criminal laws to keep terrorists on the

run or put them behind bars.

The United States strongly supports the counter-

terrorism measures the G-7 and Russia announced at the

Halifax Summit, and we expect the G-8 Ministerial Meeting

on Terrorism in Ottawa to produce a concrete-action plan

to implement these measures that were adopted at the

Halifax Summit.

Other kinds of international crime also threaten the

safety of our citizens and the fabric of our societies. And

globalization brings new and frightening dimensions to

crime. The threat of crime is a particular menace to

young democracies. It weakens confidence in institutions,

preys on the most vulnerable in our societies and

undermines free-market reform.

Of course, every country must take its own measures

to combat these criminal threats. The Administration that

I represent is now completing a review of our approach

to transnational crime, a review that will lead to a

stronger, more coordinated attack on this problem.

To help other States deal with criminal threats, the

United States and Hungary have created the International

Law Enforcement Academy in Budapest to train police

officers and law-enforcement officials from Central

Europe and the States of the former Soviet Union. We are

providing similar help bilaterally, and through the United

Nations International Drug Control Programme, to those

countries whose laws are challenged by international drug

cartels.

A particularly insidious form of crime and corruption

is money-laundering. All nations should work together to

implement the recommendations of the Organization for

Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to

attack this insidious money-laundering. The nations of this

hemisphere should also advance the anti-money-

laundering initiative introduced at last December’s

Summit of the Americas. Together, we must work to

squeeze the dirty money out of the global financial

system.

Through the United Nations conventions on drugs

and crime the international community has set strong

standards that we must now act to enforce. We call on

Member States which have not already joined the 1988

drug Convention to do so promptly, and we call on those

countries which have approved the Convention to move

quickly to implement its important provisions.

We are also increasingly aware that damage to the

environment and unsustainable population growth threaten

the security of our nations and the well-being of our

peoples. Their harmful effects are evident in famines,

infant mortality rates, refugee crises, and ozone depletion.

In places like Rwanda and Somalia, for example, they

contribute to civil wars and emergencies that can be

resolved only by extremely costly international

intervention. We must carry out the commitments we

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made last year at the Cairo Conference, as well as the

important commitments made at the Rio Conference three

years ago.

Never have our problems around the world been more

complex. It has never been more evident that these

problems affect all nations, developed and developing alike.

Only by working together can we effectively deal with the

new threats we all face that I have outlined here today.

That is why in this fiftieth anniversary year we must

shape the United Nations agenda as if we were creating the

institution anew. Just as the founders of the United Nations

devised a new framework to deter aggression and armed

conflict, the United Nations, in particular the Security

Council, must now assign the same priority to combating

the threat posed by proliferation, by terrorism, by

international crime, by narcotics and by environmental

pollution. We should dedicate our efforts in the United

Nations and elsewhere to turning our global consensus

against these threats into concrete and effective action. We

must renew and reform the United Nations not for its sake,

but for our own.