Your Excellency, Co-Presidents, Mr. Secretary-General:

On the occasion of this Millennium Summit, I am honored to participate in this historic session on behalf of His Excellency Dr. Charles Ghankay Taylor, President of the Republic of Liberia.

Permit me to congratulate you, our Co-presidents for your preferment to Chair this Millennium Summit.

Mr. Secretary-General, I wish to also salute and extend deepest thanks and appreciation to you on this historic occasion for your efforts in the search for international peace and understanding.

This Millennium Summit cannot, and should not follow the traditional pleasantries of congratulations and self-indulgence so characteristic of high profile meetings of this sort. Rather, this Summit should be a forum for members of the international community to express their concerns, as sovereign equals under the finest tradition of the universal values of equity, social justice, freedom and equality.

If we should, in that process, offend others in our common community because we proclaim our rights as equally as the responsibility we assume, then we do so without regret. We Liberians, like the rest of you, joined the United Nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples. By equal rights, we pronounced the equality of cultural identity in a diverse world. We did not view equality in the context of numerical ratios, but by the intrinsic equality of the worth of human beings, the right to self-determination consistent with the cultural identity and value of a free people; a people free of the imposition of a perceived superior moral value system, one based upon the narrow view of moral superiority and ethnocentrism.

In essence, we advocate the co-existence of cultural diversity based upon the principle of the right of self-determination. This cultural identity is embodied in the legal context of the modem nation-state; an entity, that is disparate in geographical size, population, wealth, power, and resources, but equal in the right of a people to determine their fate.

Today, there is the disparity of bigness. Bigness as it relates to wealth, technology, and military power. A bigness so overwhelming, that its wealth, technological advancement, and military strength, could, with ease, reduce poverty, eradicate disease, educate youths, provide basic social services, combat aids and malaria, care for refugees and provide security. Yet, this bigness has been used to sustain disparities- between the North and the South. Some have argued that the poor must learn to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, while others have urged the North to assist the South because the creation of viable markets would serve the self-interest of the North. Yet, any realist would easily tell you that no nation guided by the principle of competition would shun disparities.

However, the South is so small compared to the bigness of the North. The disparities are exponential. Removing the disparities, even if willed, would indeed require a miracle. What options exist? The first step could be to end the debt burden, the bondage of the poor to the wealthy; a debt burden acquired out of loans given in the pursuit of influence in the Cold War, and not in the interest of the borrower; a debt burden that has denied little children food, education, health care, and jobs for their parents. The debt burden is a bondage that will continue to stifle the welfare of the South into the new millennium. We must, however, commend those few states that have cancelled the debts of the Least Developed States.

We must also intercede for the transfer of technology. The bold steps of humanity in the sphere of research were intended to liberate all of humanity of its backwardness. It was never intended to benefit only a few or to separate humanity? Why are Nobel Laureates honored? Is it not because of their dedicated services to humanity? A technology that liberates only the North and not the South is indeed a mixed blessing; it is a gun that has been used to both liberate and kill. Are we condemned to be raw material suppliers in the new millennium? Suppliers of goods, the prices of which are determined by the buyers and not the sellers? Shall we continue to remain in a position where we cannot afford essential technology in the fields of medicine and agriculture? We call not for the erasure of the disparities created by the Buyers of the North, but to have access at the baseline, to engage in more equitable terms of trade.

Bigness is further expressed in the information exchange between the North and South. The Western Press with its domination of satellite transmission of information and access to the Internet can through sheer exposure destroy small states incapable of mustering the resources to respond to a global public relations campaign. The depiction of other cultures, small states, is prejudiced by stereotypical portrayals of a hopeless Southern Hemisphere; a hemisphere prejudiced by lack of understanding and information, racism, and ethnocentrisms. The bigness of the Western media and its impact on small states, different cultures; is so profound that it threatens their very existence and welfare. And yet, because of their powerful influence, governments succumb to them, rather than regulate them; sometimes even using them as instruments of their foreign policy.

Who do we raise these concerns with today? Who shall guarantee the conditions upon which we collectively agreed to associate as a community of universal norms? What is the fate of our community in this post-Cold War unipolar system? Should we be guarded by the words of the U.S. scholar George F. Kennan when he wrote, in 1948 that:

"We have 50% of the world's wealth, but only 63% of its population... In this situation we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships that will allow us to maintain this position of disparity... We should cease to talk about the raising of the living standards and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. "

Likewise, in 1996 at the U.S. Democratic National Convention, Jamie Rubin said, " The UN can only do what the U.S. will let it do. "

Perhaps the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Mr. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, did take a cue when he asked the question:

"How can we ask nations to accept democratic practice within their borders if they see no hope for democracy among nations? "

Or shall we be optimistic at the new wave of humanism characterized by a global coalition for the protection of human rights? Optimism must be based upon sincerity. Immanuel Kant would insist that the moral imperative must be categorical and not hypothetical. Our actions cannot be predicated by mere expediency in the calculation of accrued benefit, rather, our actions must be done because we perceive and know them to be right.

At this juncture, this new millennium, we must defend and preserve the universal truths to which we have committed our common association. Truths are simple and self-evident. If we must succeed in preserving the integrity of the United Nations, then we must: 1) reject the inequitable representation of the world's people as reflected by the present structure of the Security Council; 2) reject the undemocratic processes of decision making in the Security Council; and 3) reject the continuous violation of the UN Charter by the powerful. If we fail to make these rejections a reality in this millennium, then let us agree that all the talk of moral imperatives and human rights is but mere political expediency.

Nevertheless, we the free people of the world will always insist as the American jurist Learned Hand did, that:

"Right knows no boundaries, and justice no frontiers; the brotherhood of man is not a domestic institution. "

I THANK YOU.