United Nations Daily Highlights, 99-09-21

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From: The United Nations Home Page at <http://www.un.org> - email: unnews@un.org

DAILY HIGHLIGHTS

Tuesday, 21 September, 1999

Latest Developments

HEADLINES

• President Clinton says UN "indispensable" in meeting challenges of new millennium.
• Drug traffickers and terrorists threaten Latin American tranquillity and good government, President of Peru tells UN General Assembly.
• Zimbabwe President calls on international community to support African peace initiatives.
• Guatemala President stresses key role of UN in helping country through difficult task of building peace and development.

Addressing the General Assembly this morning, President Clinton stressed that the United Nations was "indispensable" in meeting

President Bill Clinton

those challenges. He noted that it was precisely because his country was committed to the UN the United States believed it must be managed effectively.

"But we also have a responsibility to equip the UN with the resources it needs to be effective. I have been fighting to meet that obligation and I will continue to do so," the President said.

Emphasizing the urgent need to fight against poverty, Mr. Clinton said that globalization was not inherently divisive. "We must refuse to accept a future in which one part of humanity lives at the cutting edge of a new economy, while another lives at the edge of society."

In another of his three "resolutions" for the new millennium, President Clinton said the international community had a shared responsibility to prevent atrocities. "Secretary-General Kofi Annan spoke for all of us during the Kosovo conflict, and more recently in regard to East Timor, when he said that ethnic cleansers and mass murderers will find no refuge in the United Nations, no source of comfort or justification in its charter," Mr. Clinton said.

Urging the international community to resolve to "protect our children against the possibility of that nuclear, chemical and biological weapons will ever be used again," President Clinton said the global consensus against proliferation was strong. He said the Convention on Physical Protection of Nuclear Materials had to be strengthened to keep existing stocks from falling into the wrong hands. "And today, I again call on the US Congress to approve the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty," he said.

Opening the second day of the Assembly's annual general debate, President Fujimori said that those criminal activities had in some cases achieved a power "vast enough to challenge governments," since illegal drug money may have infiltrated productive, commercial and even political activities.

President Alberto Fujimori

President Fujimori said that along with terrorism and drug trafficking, poverty and racial discrimination were the "high barriers" to glimpsing the proposed new era in the next millennium of peace, progress and well-being.

The concepts of democracy and fairness should prevail, President Fujimori stressed, and should be promoted not only within countries but also between nations. "Democracy does not only apply to the internal organization of the states but to the international relations that determine the destinies of the world," he said.

Speaking during the second day of the annual debate of the General Assembly, he said that the success or failure of a peace mission to the Democratic Republic of the Congo will be determined by the availability of both human and material resources. "We are, however, worried that an inadequately funded Democratic Republic of the Congo peacekeeping operation would be a clear manifestation of Africa's increasing marginalization in the new world order, " he said. "We trust, therefore, that the UN will now render requisite support to sustain this achievement."

President Robert Mugabe

Mr. Mugabe said the gains in the Congo peace process were being negated by the renewed bloodbath in Angola where, for the second time this decade, the rebel movement UNITA has resumed war, disregarding the 1994 Lusaka Peace Accord. "We, therefore, call upon the international community to put in place effective mechanisms that tighten the embargo against UNITA."

The Zimbabwean President also called upon the UN to support "with the necessary technical and other resources" the Eritrea-Ethiopia peace initiative brokered by the Organization of African Unity to end the war between the two countries.

The advances his country has made since the signing of the 1996 Peace Agreements have been supported by the UN, whose partnership has enabled the country to maintain optimism and hope in the difficult task of building peace and development, President Irigoyen told the Assembly on the second day of its annual high-level debate.

The President stressed the key role of the UN Human Rights Verification Mission in Guatemala (MINUGUA) in implementing the various phases of the Agreements and said his Government attached similar importance to the UN's other initiatives in support of the country's society.

The 1996 Agreements are the strategic elements of a "profound, global and all-embracing" effort to change Guatemala, President Irigoyen emphasized. "They represent the basic guidelines for the fundamental transformation necessary to build a different Guatemala, one that is profoundly democratic and committed to the integral and sustainable development of her people," he said.

From the United Nations home page at <http://www.un.org> - email: unnews@un.org

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