REPUBLICA DE CABO VERDE

Missao Permanente de Cabo Verde Junto das NACOES Unidas

ADDRESS

by

The Minister of Foreign Affairs and Communities

of the Republic of Cape Verde

H.E.MR. RUI ALBERTO DE FIGUEIREDO SOA

At the general debate of the 55^TH Session

of the United Nations General Assembly

Mr. President,

Let me congratulate you on your election to preside over this fifth-fifth session of the General Assembly. I am confident that your well-known experience in the fields of politics and diplomacy will ensure the success of our work.

To your predecessor, Minister Ben Gurirab, I must convey my delegation's appreciation of his dynamic and successful leadership of the fifty-fourth session.

I would also like to congratulate the Secretary-General, Mr. Kofi Annan, for the remarkable contribution made by his report,” We, the Peoples,” which indeed provides a stable foundation for our discussions and for our common efforts to place this Organization increasingly in the service of our community of nations.

It is with satisfaction that I extend my warmest congratulations to Tuvalu, a member of the community of small island developing States, on its admission to the United Nations.

Mr. President,

Important events involving issues crucial to the life of the international community, including financing for development; racism and racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance; and the development of the least developed countries, will take place during the current session of the General Assembly.

These global meetings will certainly significantly enrich the set of consensus documents which we .have successfully produced, particularly during the 1990s, and which are intended to provide us with essential frameworks for the optimization of an updated international cooperation.

As we know, this capital has not been exploited to any great extent. North-South dialogue continues to be affected by reciprocal accusations between worlds separated by gross disparities in level of well-being.

The world needs to be governed well and in cooperation if we really wish to achieve development, justice, and peace in a climate of social stability. And yet, on both the national and the international level, the privileged continue to deny others open participation and a fair share. Thus, the question of governance arises at all levels. But in each level, those in whose interest it is to maintain the status quo use the other level's deficiencies to justify their own inaction. It is a perverse logic to think that our partners' errors others authorize us to err as well. This is a pattern of behaviour, and even an assertion, which has been portrayed as reflecting a reality; how this is to be overcome has yet to be clarified.

Mr. President,

It will be some time before we see even the immediate results of that great dialogue between world leaders, the Millennium Summit. However, we are confident that they will not fail to emerge.

At the highest level, the meetings between international leaders have served as a platform for the growing, insistent affirmation that we have the know-how and the means to solve the problems of our societies and of the common ground on which we live. What we lack is the appropriate implementation of decisions and the necessary will to do so.

By this I mean the political will to accomplish collectively what is necessary and sufficient so that we may achieve progress for all mankind, a longtime goal of our ideology and our discourse. Awareness of the need for this political will stems from the underlying belief that we make up, and are part of, an interdependent international community whose essence links the destinies of all to the success or failure of a single endeavour.

Meanwhile, in the blend of competition and cooperation that characterizes international relations, the scale is still weighted in favour of a framework of inequalities, assymetries and egotism that increasingly impairs our capacities and our imagination in the effort to achieve general progress and well-being.

Thus, a vital question is that of the extent to which we will see, at the international level and particularly in the case of those who benefit the most from the current situation; a growing belief in the existence of true independence and in the urgency of the need for coordination and cooperation commensurate with such global interdependence.

At the same time, we need to view globalization not as it is today - exclusive, fragmented and offering opportunities only to a select few - but rather as a process that will increasingly reveal and establish the world as a single body.

Mr. President,

The Millennium Summit once again posed the question of the role of the United Nations in the twenty-first century. I believe that our universal Organization has an essential role to play as a catalyst for the tangible realization of the concept of international community, inscribed within its Charter and as a basis for its political vision.

In the world of today and tomorrow, where events are the result of action by a variety of decision-makers, the promotion of such an endeavour by the United Nations presupposes the involvement of all parties concerned: governments, of course, but also parliaments, the general public, organizations of civil society, the private sector, the media, etc. All of them can and should be included in this undertaking, the purpose of which is to reveal the convergence transcending the apparent contradictions.

As a free, universal association of States, the United Nations has as its mission, and should make itself able to gather the world's voices and to give them room for dialogue in pursuit of higher platforms of understanding. In that regard, the fundamental values embodied in the Millennium Declaration provide a lasting source of inspiration.

In the short term, however, we need a consistent set of measures in order to create an enabling environment for development in which, poverty eradication can be sustainably achieved.

The priorities to be considered in developing such measures will vary to some extent. In the areas of greatest poverty, such as the African continent, it is certainly essential to reverse the decline in public health and to devote the necessary resources to improving the quality and expanding the scope of public education.

In today's world, there can be no development unless the people have reached a -minimal level of health and education and unless the country in question has reached a reasonable level of infrastructure, without which it cannot viably accept the economic investment that it needs.

Furthermore, countless developing countries continue to hope for lasting solutions to the core problem of an unsustainable debt burden, solutions to replace the long string of half-measures, always too little and too late, with which this issue has been addressed in the past.

Even with adequate economic policies, a responsible administration and a productive society, States' capacity to make real, continued progress will be significantly limited if they face restricted access to international markets and if tariff and non-tariff barriers are imposed on them. Particularly in the case of the least-developed countries, these constraints may make it impossible for them to integrate into the global economy.

Mr. President,

Before closing, I wish to express my deepest concern at the form and intensity of the conflicts that continue to affect the daily lives of various countries and their people, with disastrous consequences at the internal and regional levels.

In that regard, it is with the greatest apprehension that we view the current situation in Sierra Leone, a country of our subregion, and we hope that the recently-developed measures involving the coordination of efforts by the United Nations and the Economic Community of West African States will help restore to the people of Sierra Leone the peace and stability to which they are entitled.

Cape Verde continues to follow closely the situation in Angola, a country with which we share a long history. Owing to the refusal of UNITA to respect the relevant Security Council resolutions and to comply with the provisions of the Lusaka Protocol, the humanitarian drama that affects the Angolan people and, in particular, the massive numbers of refugees and displaced persons, has reached intolerable levels. The international community should therefore give the highest priority to providing humanitarian assistance to Angola.

In East Timor, the laudable efforts of the United Nations augur well for the exercise of direct sovereignty and self-determination in the near future. However, there are signs of continued efforts to disrupt this process. The recent murder of international civil servants serving as peacekeepers merits the deepest condemnation of the international community and the taking of adequate measures by the Security Council.

Mr. President,

The role of the United Nations, increasingly focused on the value and dignity of human beings, requires each of us, both large and small, both rich and poor, to wager confidently on the solidarity of our common efforts as the touchstone in our collective search for solutions to the problems affecting our planet.

I thank you.