Text Of Clinton's Remarks To The United NationsSept. 22, 1997
PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: Mr. President, Mr. Secretary General,distinguished guests.
Five years ago, when I first addressed this assembly, the Cold War had onlyjust ended and the transition to a new era was beginning. Now, together, weare making that historic transition.
Behind us, we leave a century full of humanity's capacity for the worst, and itsgenius for the best. Before us, at the dawn of a new millennium, we canenvision a new era that escapes the 20th century's darkest moments, fulfills itsmost brilliant possibilities, and crosses frontiers yet unimagined.
We are off to a promising start. For the first time in history, more than half thepeople represented in this assembly freely choose their own governments.
Free markets are growing spreading individual opportunity and nationalwell-being. Early in the 21st century, more than 20 of this assembly'smembers, home to half the earth's population, will lift themselves from theranks of low-income nations.
Powerful forces are bringing us closer together profoundly changing the waywe work and live and relate to each other. Every day millions of our citizenson every continent use laptops and satellites to send information, products andmoney across the planet in seconds.
Bit by bit, the Information Age is chipping away at the barriers -- economic,political and social -- that once kept people locked in and ideas locked out.
Science is unraveling mysteries in the tiniest of human genes and the vastcosmos.
Never in the course of human history have we had a greater opportunity tomake our people healthier and wiser, to protect our planet from decay andabuse, to reap the benefits of free markets without abandoning the socialcontract and its concern for the common good.
Yet today's possibilities are not tomorrow's guarantees. We have work to do.
The forces of global integration are a great tide inexorably wearing away theestablished order of things. But we must decide what will be left in its wake.People fear change when they feel its burdens but not its benefits.
They are susceptible to misguided protectionism to the poisoned appeals ofextreme nationalism and ethnic, racial and religious hatreds.
New global environmental challenges require us to find ways to work togetherwithout damaging legitimate aspirations for progress.
We are all vulnerable to the reckless acts of rogue states and to an unholy axisof terrorists, drug traffickers and international criminals. These 21st centurypredators feed on the very free flow of information and ideas and people wecherish. They abuse the vast power of technology to build black markets forweapons, to compromise law enforcement with huge bribes of illicit cash, tolaunder money with a keystroke of a computer.
These forces are out enemies. We must face them together because no onecan defeat them alone.
To seize the opportunities and move against the threats of this new global era,we need a new strategy of security.
Over the past five years, nations have begun to put that strategy into placethrough a new network of institutions and arrangements with distinct missionsbut a common purpose: to secure and strengthen the gains of democracy infree markets while turning back their enemies.
We see this strategy taking place on every continent -- expanded militaryalliances like NATO, its Partnership for Peace, its partnerships with ademocratic Russia and a democratic Ukraine; free trade arrangements like theWTO and the Global Information Technology Agreement; and the movetoward free trade areas by nations in the Americas, the Asia-Pacific regionand elsewhere around the world; strong arms control regimes. like theChemical Weapons Convention and the Nonproliferation Treaty; multinationalcoalitions with zero tolerance for terrorism, corruption, crime and drugtrafficking; binding international commitments to protect the environment andsafeguard human rights.
Through this web of institutions and arrangements, nations are now setting theinternational ground rules for the 21st century, laying the foundation forsecurity and prosperity for those who live within them, while isolating thosewho challenge them from the outside. This system will develop and endureonly if those who follow the rules of peace and freedom fully reap theirrewards. Only then will our people believe that they have a stake insupporting and shaping the emerging international system.
The United Nations must play a leading role in this effort, filling in the faultlines of the new global era.
The core missions it has pursued during its first half century will be just asrelevant during the next half century -- the pursuit of peace and security,promoting human rights, and moving people from poverty to dignity andprosperity through sustainable development.
Conceived in the cauldron of war, the United Nations first task must remain the pursuit of peace and security.
For 50 years the U.N. has helped prevent world war and nuclear holocaust. Unfortunately, conflicts between nations and within nations has endured. From 1945 until today they have cost 20 million lives. Just since the end of the Cold War, each year there have been more than 30 armed conflicts in which more than a thousand people have lost their lives, including of course a quarter of a million killed in the former Yugoslavia and more than half a million in Rwanda.
Millions of personal tragedies the world over are a warning that we dare not be complacent or indifferent. Trouble in a far corner can become a plague on everyone's house.
People the world over cheer the hopeful developments in Northern Ireland; grieve over the innocent loss of life and the stalling of the peace process in the Middle East; and long for resolution of the differences on the Korean peninsula, or between Greece and Turkey, or between the great nations of India and Pakistan as they celebrate the 50th anniversaries of their birth.
The United Nations continues to keep many nations away from bloodshed -- in El Salvador and Mozambique, in Haiti and Namibia, in Cyprus, and in Bosnia where so much remains to be done, but can still be done because the bloodshed has ended.
The record of service of the United Nations has left a legacy of sacrifice.
Just last week, we lost some of our finest sons and daughters in the crash of an UN helicopter in Bosnia. Five were Americans; five were Germans; one Polish and one British -- all citizens of the world we are trying to make, each a selfless servant of peace, and the world is poorer for their passing.
At this very moment, the United Nations is keeping the peace in 16 countries, often in partnership with regional organizations like NATO, the OAS, ASEAN and ECOWAS, avoiding wider conflicts and even greater suffering.
Our shared commitment to more realistic peacekeeping training for UN troops, a stronger role for civilian police, better integration between military and civilian agencies -- all these will help the United Nations to meet these missions in the years ahead.
At the same time, we must improve the UN's capabilities after a conflict ends to help peace become self-sustaining. The UN cannot build nations, but it can help nations to build themselves by fostering legitimate institutions of government, monitoring elections and laying a strong foundation for economic reconstruction.
This week, the Security Council will hold an unprecedented ministerial meeting on African security, which our secretary of state is proud to chair, and which President Mugabe, chairman of the Organization of African Unity, will address. It will highlight the role the United Nations can and should play in preventing conflict on a continent where amazing progress toward democracy and development is occurring alongside still too much discord, disease and distress.
In the 21st century, our security will be challenged increasingly by interconnected groups that traffic in terror, organized crime and drug smuggling.
Already these international crime and drug syndicates drain up to$750 billion a year from legitimate economies. That sum exceeds thecombined GNP of more than half the nations in this room. These groupsthreaten to undermine confidence in fragile new democracies and marketeconomies that so many of you are working so hard to see endure.
Two years ago, I called upon all the members of this assembly to join in thefight against these forces. I applaud the UN's recent resolution calling on itsmembers to join the major international anti-terrorism conventions, makingclear the emerging international consensus that terrorism is always a crimeand never a justifiable political act.
As more countries sign on, terrorists will have fewer places to run or hide.
I also applaud the members -- the steps that members are taking toimplement the Declaration on Crime and Public Security that the UnitedStates proposed two years ago, calling for increased cooperation tostrengthen every citizen's right to basic safety, through cooperation onextradition and asset forfeiture, shutting down gray markets for guns and falsedocuments, attacking corruption, and bringing higher standards to lawenforcement in new democracies.
The spread of these global criminal syndicates also has made all the moreurgent our common quest to eliminate weapons of mass destruction. Wecannot allow them to fall or to remain in the wrong hands. Here, too, theUnited Nations must lead, and it has, from UNSCOM in Iraq to theInternational Atomic Energy Agency, now the most expansive globalinspection system ever devised to police arms control agreements.
When we met here last year, I was honored to be the first of 146 leaders tosign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, our commitment to end all nucleartests for all time. The longest-sought, hardest- fought prize in the history ofarms control. It will help to prevent the nuclear powers from developing moreadvanced and more dangerous weapons. It will limit the possibilities for otherstates to acquire such devices.
I am pleased to announce that today I am sending this crucial treaty to theUnited States Senate for ratification. Our common goal should be to enter theCTBT into force as soon as possible, and I ask for all of you to support thatgoal.
The United Nations' second core mission must be to defend and extenduniversal human rights and to help democracy's remarkable gains endure.Fifty years ago the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights stated theinternational community's conviction that people everywhere have the right tobe treated with dignity, to give voice to their opinions, to choose their leaders,that these rights are universal -- not American rights, not Western rights, notrights for the developed world only, but rights inherent in the humanity ofpeople everywhere.
Over the past decades these rights have become a reality for more peoplethan ever, from Asia to Africa, from Europe to the Americas, in a world thatlinks rich and poor, north and south, city and countryside, in an electronicnetwork of shared images in real time.
The more these universal rights take hold, the more people who do not enjoythem will demand them.
Armed with photocopiers and fax machines, e-mail and the Internet,supported by an increasingly important community of non- governmentalorganizations, they will make their demands known, spreading the spirit offreedom, which as the history of the last ten years has shown us, ultimatelywill prevail.
The United Nations must be prepared to respond, not only by settingstandards, but by implementing them. To deter abuses we should strengthenthe U.N.'s field operations and early warning systems. To strengthendemocratic institutions, the best guarantors of human rights, we must pursueprograms to help new legal, parliamentary and electoral institutions get of theground.
To punish those responsible for crimes against humanity, and to promotejustice so that peace endures, we must maintain our strong support for theU.N.'s war crime tribunals and truth commissions. And before the centuryends we should establish a permanent international court to prosecute themost serious violations of humanitarian law.
The United States welcome the secretary general's efforts to strengthen therole of human rights within the U.N. system, and his splendid choice of MaryRobinson as the new high commissioner. We will work hard to make surethat she has the support she needs to carry out her mandate.
Finally, the United Nations has a special responsibility to make sure that asthe global economy creates greater wealth, it does not produce growingdisparities between the haves and have-nots, or threaten the globalenvironment, our common home.
Progress is not yet everyone's partner. More than half the world's people aretwo-days walk from a telephones, literally disconnected from the globaleconomy. Tens of millions lack the education, the training, the skills they needto make the most of their God-given abilities.
The men and women of the United Nations have expertise across the entirerange of humanitarian and development activities. Every day they are makinga difference. We see it in nourished bodies of once starving children, in thefull lives of those immunized against disease, in the bright eyes of childrenexposed to education through the rich storehouse of human knowledge, andrefugees cared for and returned to their homes, in the health of rivers andlakes restored.
The United Nations must focus even more on shifting resources fromhandouts to hand-ups, on giving people the tools they need to make the mostof their own destinies. Spreading ideas and education and technology, thetrue wealth of nations, is the best way to give people a chance to succeed.
And the U.N. must continue to lead in ensuring that today's progress doesnot come at tomorrow's expense. When the nations of the world gather againnext December in Kyoto for the U.N. climate change conference all of us,developed and developing nations, must seize the opportunity to turn backthe clock on greenhouse gas emissions so that we can leave a healthy planetto our children.
In these efforts the U.N. no longer can and no longer need go it alone.Innovative partnerships with the partnerships with the private sector NGOsand the international financial institutions can leverage its effectiveness manytimes over.
Last week a truly visionary American, Ted Turner, made a remarkabledonation to strengthen the U.N.'s development and humanitarian programs.His gesture highlights the potential for partnership between the U.N. and theprivate sector in contributions of time, resources and expertise.
And I hope more will follow his lead.
In this area and others, the secretary general is aggressively pursuing the mostfar-reaching reform of the United Nations in its history -- not to make the UNsmaller as an end in itself, but to make it better.
The United States strongly supports his leadership. We should pass thesecretary general's reform agenda this session.
On every previous occasion I have addressed this assembly, the issue of ourcountry's dues has brought the commitment of the United States to the UnitedNations into question. The United States was a founder of the UN. We areproud to be its host. We believe in its ideals. We continue to be, as we havebeen, its largest contributor.
We are committed to seeing the United Nations succeed in the 21st century.
This year, for the first time since I have been president, we have anopportunity to put the question of debts and dues behind us once and for all,and to put the United Nations on a sounder financial footing for the future.
I have made it a priority to work with our Congress on comprehensivelegislation that would allow us to pay off the bulk of our arrears and assurefull financing of America's assessment in the years ahead.
Our Congress's actions to solve this problem reflects a strong bipartisancommitment to the United Nations and to America's role within it.
At the same time, we look to member states to adopt a more equitable scaleof assessment.
Let me say that we also strongly support expanding the Security Council togive more countries a voice in the most important work of the UN.
In more equitably sharing responsibility for its successes, we can make theUN stronger and more democratic than it is today. I ask the GeneralAssembly to act on these proposals this year so that we can move forwardtogether.
At the dawn of a new century so full of hope but not free of peril, more thanever we need a United Nations where people of reason can work throughshared problems and take action to combat them, where nations of good willcan join in the struggle for freedom and prosperity, where we can shape afuture of peace and progress and the preservation of our planet.
We have the knowledge, we have the intelligence, we have the energy, wehave the resources for the work before us. We are building the necessarynetworks of cooperation.
The great question remaining is whether we have the vision and the heartnecessary to imagine a future that is different from the past, necessary to freeourselves from destructive patterns of relations with each other and within ourown nations and live a future that is different.
A new century in a new millennium is upon us. We are literally present at thefuture, and it is a great gift it is our obligation to leave to our children.
Thank you very much.
(APPLAUSE)
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