TRANSCRIPT OF PRESS CONFERENCE BY PRESIDENT OF GENERAL ASSEMBLY RAZALI ISMAIL (MALAYSIA)

Press Release
GA/9093

TRANSCRIPT OF PRESS CONFERENCE BY PRESIDENT OF GENERAL ASSEMBLY RAZALI ISMAIL (MALAYSIA)

SAMIR SANBAR, Assistant Secretary-General for Public Information: Colleagues, it is a great pleasure to welcome this morning the President of the fifty-first session of the General Assembly, Ambassador Razali Ismail. He is no stranger to, in fact, all of you. He has been a Permanent Representative for several years. He has worked with the media, and he has been open with the media. He served twice as President of the Security Council, Vice-President of the Economic and Social Council, Chairman of the Commission on Sustainable Development in 1993, and most recently as Vice-Chairman, representing Asia, of the Preparatory Committee for the Fiftieth Anniversary of the United Nations.

Ambassador Razali has been very actively involved in many United Nations activities, and he will be responding to your queries. I just want to say that with us also this morning are our colleagues in Vienna and Geneva, so we will have a sort of teleconferencing. We will open the floor here with certain questions, after, of course, listening to opening remarks by President Razali. Then we will have a few questions from Vienna and Geneva -- two from Geneva and two from Vienna -- after a few questions from New York.

President Razali Ismail, you have the floor.

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. First, good morning, New York, and good morning, Vienna or Geneva. It isn't morning there, though, so good day.

I have no intention of making another statement. I think it would be a mistake to make too many statements in less than a week. I do not want to seem to be preaching from the pulpit. I do not know how to do that.

I stand by what I said in my statement before the General Assembly. If you care to look at it, you will see quite a few things. Of course, I am not so arrogant as to think that that is like a State of the Union address, but I worked pretty hard on that statement, because I wanted to "ghost" the kind of year I would hope to have. I do not think that I was overly critical of the United Nations. My views are not isolated; people have similar views, and I will work with people in the Secretariat, in the governmental process, civil society, with people who have similar views to mine, to try to see what we can do for this year.

I have no illusions as to whether this will have a permanent impact or not. I can deal with that. But in the one year that I am around, I'm going to try my best.

Basically, what I said is that the United Nations is being looked at very closely and receiving great scrutiny from outside, and some of the answers -- some of the impressions people have of the United Nations -- are negative, so there are problems with having to deal with that.

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Over the years, what is really valid or what is justified or not justified becomes all caught up in confusion. People just bash the United Nations, which is a pity and unfair. There are some very wonderful achievements of the United Nations, but that is forgotten. The other aspect, of course, is that people look so much at what happens in the Security Council, not paying enough attention to all the other aspects of the United Nations. It is such a big Organization that it is very easy to take potshots at one aspect or another.

Nevertheless, we have to take into account that people are making these criticisms. They are not coming just from inside here, the governments, but from outside. So something has to be done about it.

I think, in many ways, the General Assembly is the one area that has not reacted actively or clearly enough in terms of saying what it is. What is this commodity item called the General Assembly? Nobody is really clear about this. How do you market it? How do you produce things coming out of the General Assembly that you could use as collateral to the bank, for example? I am not so sure myself, but if we don't come up with the answers then there is nothing to write. You don't have to write anything and we can go through the motions as we do every year. It really means nothing and the position of the United Nations goes down, because the General Assembly puts together the whole intergovernmental process. If that process cannot somehow or other relate to the needs outside, then this is just an esoteric exercise. What you do here means nothing outside.

This is basically what I was saying in my speech. When you look at the United Nations, obviously there are two things that must be put together. If they were to come together that would be an ideal situation, but usually they do not come together. These are the programmes and principles involved. For us in the General Assembly, looking at the committees and all that, a lot of it has to do at least with getting the programme right. But if you deal with principles at a summit, you must come here with programmes to operationalize these principles. There must be a way of making tangible content out of what came out of Copenhagen. Some of the best, most beautiful, descriptive and impactful words were used in Copenhagen. I had recommended to my Government that these could be used as part of an election manifesto with real meaning.

But how do you translate that into practical, tangible things? For some reason, the Third Committee is not able to do this or somebody else is unable. Why? I mean, is this the end of the road for the United Nations? Then you can only conceptualize, define and, at times -- if I can be partisan -- just prescribe it to the countries of the South and that's that. The job's done. But that is not enough, and if it continues nobody is going to spend time to take you very seriously after a while.

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So this is it. The programme and the principles must be made to come together. We have to look at the six Main Committees of the United Nations for this year. I will have lunch today with the people concerned and would like to pluck out some aspects of some priority areas in each of the Committees. We can all look at it. You know what it is. If you look at the First Committee, you are talking about disarmament. Is there something that, despite contending forces, can be moved on disarmament? Can we take into account the aspirations of humanity for a world free of nuclear weapons? Can we begin to move in that direction as a political process? As to the international arms Register, can we not move from what is a very basic, preliminary Register to something more?

These are all things that the Chairmen of Committees must examine. Once they have prioritized the areas that can be addressed, they should work along those lines and not take on too many things that would not amount to anything at the end of the year, when the job's done. The First Committee could be like that. Then, there are such areas as political-security issues in the Middle East. I would be embarrassed if the General Assembly cannot at this session say something about the promotion and protection of the peace accords in the context of development now. If you cannot do that, if politics comes in the way of making a contribution towards promoting progress and underlining the necessity of getting the peace accords moving, then it would only mean that that job has been assigned to a few Powers to accomplish. That would be a pity.

The Committee concerned -- the First Committee -- should hang its head in shame if that is the situation. Clearly one can find something to say about that. I accept the strong injection of power politics into everything we do. But I would hope that those who advocate a strong injection of politics will take into account the principles, and the fact that it is in their interests that such principles are taken into account and put together as a package. I hope that civil society will underline such questions for the governments concerned. Anyway, that's the First Committee.

Then you have the Second Committee. I am not sure how far we can go. Maybe we can deal with trade, development and debt. But they are not issues with which the United Nations has had much delivery success. Somebody else decides; the Bretton Woods institutions. But even with regard to those issues, I have talked about the need for the United Nations to be the main agent in trying to achieve macro-coordination -- coordination at a macroeconomic level, at a high level. The decisions taken in Rio de Janeiro, Copenhagen and Beijing must begin to impact directly on the decision-making process in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, in the development committee and the interim committee. I hope that the countries of the South will not just deal with environmental ministers, but that the ministers who attend the conferences of the World Bank will take the message there. That is the way it should be.

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Then, of course, the Third Committee. The Third Committee is the one body in which there is value for money, and it is the one body I think the United Nations should really concentrate on. It deals with principles of social justice, marginalized people, the environment -- all the things that can get a global community of support. This is one area in which I believe that the United Nations has not done enough, not maximized its options. We want to look at that aspect in the Third Committee this year. A very good example of the way to start is the review of the decisions of Rio. That is coming up next year. Surely, we are not going to do the review simply because we agreed five years ago to do a review, and go through the same business of using beautiful words to paper over cracks, do nothing else, and come back quite satisfied, so that politicians can go home and make an impact through the press. That is not going to help. I think that if the United Nations does that it will be a casualty of greater irrelevance. I believe that the United Nations has a special opportunity to eke out a profile of what it can do here in terms of embarrassing governments about the fact that they didn't deliver on the decisions they took in Rio. I am not saying that just to the North -- it applies to the South, too. The United Nations has a special role to play, and I hope that something good and tangible will come out of the United Nations with regard to the review.

Other than that, of course, there is the Working Group. You can ask me about the Working Group; everybody will ask me about the Working Group. I want to bring it to some convergence of views on some of these issues. I do not have to go into details.

Another thing is the United Nations and its relationship with the rest of the world, with civil society. I believe that a lot more can be done. When we deal with that we have to take into account the private sector, privatization, the effect of globalization, how we deal with the international business council and people like that. I do not think it should be done only on the basis of consultations within the Secretariat or eminent-persons groups. I do not put much stock in that kind of thing. I think it is the intergovernmental process of the United Nations that must relate to those people. I have thoughts about opening more doors to civil society under this item. I think that civil society should be invited in. I do not mean civil society merely in terms of non-governmental organizations coming here to talk about this or that issue. I mean a lot more than that.

When we talk about the United Nations and the rest of the world, inevitably you have to deal with the United Nations and the United States. And it is my impression that the United Nations and the United States belong to each other; there is nothing they can do about it. And I don't think you can say that the United States does not need the United Nations. Of course, the United Nations needs the United States badly, that's for sure. But the United States needs the United Nations. Although some people may not admit to that, it's true. To me it's astounding that we are here in New York, and despite all

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the things that we do, despite all this cacophony of voice and sound and speeches that we make here, there's so little reporting in the American papers about the United Nations.

It's as if -- I'm not complaining about what Barbara Crossette has done for me, I'm more than flattered that I deserve two or three mentions -- but why have we, why has the Western media not reported about the real issues of the North-South debate? These are the things that will win sentiment and support from the American population. At this moment, that aspect of it is either not reported or it is misreported. It is a pity, because if you want to get the Americans interested in this, they should know exactly what the debate is. It is not a question of the South demanding money under official development assistance (ODA) to be sent to Malaysia or anywhere. It has nothing to do with that. I think that there are a lot of misconceptions being held by the American public about what the United Nations is: it's just money being drained out from United States, from Fort Knox or something. It's not like that at all. Here the media has done themselves and the United Nations a disservice.

Then there's this business of household matters or the internal aspect of things. We must be responsible in what we do. The day of lunches and of starting late -- all those things are over. I will work very hard with my friends to try to bury the whole concept of the leisurely days of the United Nations. Myself, I will not accept lunch that lasts beyond 2:30 p.m. -- whose lunch it is I do not care. And I will not allow the General Assembly to be delayed because there has to be something done at 9:30 a.m. by some body or some agency of the United Nations. There's the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) ceremony coming up. I have insisted: they can have it, but at 10 o'clock I'm going to start my meeting. This is the way it has to be. I mean, everybody was involved in the General Committee yesterday, everybody accepted all those things, so it's got to be done. That's all there is to it.

And we have got dates when we will start the United Nations and when we will finish. There should be no real reason for any resumed session. We should be very ashamed if we have one. I mean, this is where the intergovernmental process must come up for very close examination, and you shouldn't allow us to do this.

And the Secretariat is the same. The Secretariat should remind the intergovernmental process if they are going astray, and we have to remind the Secretariat that they are going astray, if they're not doing their job. The Secretariat, if I may say so, is so steeped in past traditions. All the things that have been put together over 50 years. There must be some creative energies in looking at other things. There must be another way of doing things. I am told, "This has been done over the last 50 years, this is the way it's done". That's fine, that's important enough. But if there's another way of doing it, why not? I mean, yesterday there was a General Committee meeting

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that was slotted for three sessions. I'm not boasting about it, but we finished it in one session. Everything's done; it was a proper examination of the issue of Taiwan; 50-odd countries spoke; all these things were done, and it was done between 10 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. What's the big deal? Thank you.

Mr. SANBAR: Thank you very much. I will also say that we in the Secretariat look forward to working with President Razali and having the delegates also work with us on various established practices which were done by joint precedence. The floor is open.

QUESTION: On behalf of the United Nations correspondents, and today on behalf of our colleagues in Geneva and Vienna, we welcome you and congratulate you on your accession to power, if that's the expression for it.

My first question is: The relationship between the General Assembly and the Security Council: have you had any thoughts about giving the General Assembly more input into what the Security Council does? As you know there have been complaints about that very point for many years.

THE PRESIDENT: There have been complaints; people are not happy with the relationship. But nobody has really come up with a formula on how to do this. Here, when you talk about the relationship between the Council and the General Assembly, you are treading on very slippery ground. The power in the United Nations is loaded very much in the Security Council. You can demand to build something to make them feel that it is to their advantage to deal with the larger community, with this General Assembly.

We have, for example, the election: the selection of a Secretary- General. That will be an occasion when the General Assembly should demonstrate its ability to play a constructive role in bringing about a selection process that takes into account political acceptability and qualifications, and that the larger community can feel satisfied that they have seriously looked at the qualifications of candidates and they have been involved in some genuine fashion in making the selection. As I said, it is not going to be like smoke coming out of chimneys. That is a good example of doing it. There are other ways.

In the reform of the Security Council we will begin to -- I should not say this as President, but I would hope the relationship would be spelled out.

QUESTION: Mr. President, you just said how the General Assembly should demonstrate its ability to bring about a constructive role, particularly in the selection of the Secretary-General. Now, is this going to be the chance for the General Assembly to somehow step out of being marginalized? As you know, the General Assembly was not accidentally marginalized. In particular, the American Ambassador, Madeleine Albright, said yesterday that the job description of the Secretary-General has varied between an administrative

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officer, a diplomat and a statesman. She made it clear that what is needed now, for the twenty-first century, is simply an administrative officer who is in charge simply of reform. Is this your view? Is this what you would like the General Assembly to do?

THE PRESIDENT: The General Assembly has a role to play -- and I stand on what I said -- a constructive role to play in the selection of the Secretary- General. I do not think one should worry too much about what Mrs. Albright said, meaning it is her point of view and, of course, it will count. But, I represent -- I would have to aggregate -- the views of a huge community of countries. While what she says is important, in the General Assembly the one thing I want to prevent is to be seen as just rubber-stamping whatever is given to us. I mean, it is not as if, if you want to use a more polite word, we should not be seen as just anointing what decisions have been taken on a particular person for the secretary-generalship. I do not think we will do it that way.

In this instance, given the developments on the issue, there is a chance for the General Assembly to demonstrate its relevance in the selection process. Mind you, I mean, we are not threatening anything, but if a huge number of countries in the General Assembly feel that whoever has been sent to us is inadequate in terms of qualifications for some reason or other, there is no reason why the General Assembly could not send it back to the Security Council. But I am not stalwart; I respect the rights of the Security Council. They are the ones that determine this, but we should be involved from the very beginning.

QUESTION: But the description: do you agree that the United Nations now needs simply, only, an administrative officer, not a diplomat, not a statesman?

THE PRESIDENT: I am sure Mrs. Albright was not thinking in terms of just one facet or one characteristic. There are many other aspects that might be brought into the picture; it is not just that of an administrator.

QUESTION: Even before you get, though, to the anointment part -- since this whole subject of choosing the Secretary-General has received a lot of criticism because it is so vague and it is so unfocused and it waits so long -- is there any way the General Assembly can open this whole issue to debate earlier than that, even informally? That is to say, what kind of a Secretary-General the nations of the world want, in fact to set out some sort of a profile even before the Security Council gets to the actual choice?

THE PRESIDENT: I am not sure debate is very helpful, any kind of debate. In the first place, there are very sensitive areas, and one has to take into account first the feelings of the Africans. The Africans have taken a position, and, speaking as a Malaysian, I respect that, and even as President,

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I take it very seriously that the Africans should have a second term. So nothing should be done that will detract from what the Africans want in getting somebody from Africa to have a second term, as it were.

But the General Assembly, I hope, will be consulted very early in the process, and if the way I look down the road is correct, maybe in November things will have to be looked at. I am looking forward to the presidency of Indonesia in the Security Council, and there is no reason why two Asian countries cannot work usefully for the benefit of the United Nations as a whole.

QUESTION: Your predecessor, Professor Freitas do Amaral, made his top priority reform of the institutions over which the General Assembly has some authority, and he personally chaired the four different Working Groups that are working on reform. His sole ambition was not actually to see any reforms come into action, but actually just to produce a blueprint. He was not even able to do that. I wonder, first, if you intend to make reform a top priority, and, if so, do you intend to personally chair these Working Groups yourself? And, if so, what sort of legacy do you think the Professor has left you?

THE PRESIDENT: I have a great deal of admiration for Professor Freitas do Amaral. This is a person who had not been involved in the United Nations system, and he came in here and within one year he has made a great impact. He worked very, very hard and touched base with a lot of people. He has brought some results to the various Working Groups.

Yes, indeed, I would like to work on each of the Groups, and I will try to chair them. But I have total confidence in the Vice-Chairmen concerned. What I am trying to say is, in order to get anything going in terms of being able to work out a package, whether it is the reform of the Security Council or the strengthening of the United Nations, you have to get a lot of people on board. It is not an elitist approach. Nothing in the United Nations should be an elitist approach, anyway. When you talk about the Secretariat, I only wish that governments and management would get together very early in the game. Then you would not have a problem, such as the recent problem in the Fifth Committee. It does not have to be like that. I will try to consult as many people as possible, including the Secretariat and the governments concerned, to see what kind of package can be put together, even on the reform of the Security Council. If you cannot get a consensus, it is possible to seek recourse to a two-thirds majority. My point is, you have to come to some kind of acceptance of a result. If you do not, you go on every year, going round and round, and in that way you will lose the public interest. I think we have got one or two more years to really produce something that will make an outstanding difference to the United Nations, whether it is reform of the Security Council, strengthening of the United Nations, money or so on. But if you are not able to do that, then people will lose interest completely.

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QUESTION: Some people feel that the entire institution has to be reorganized, and in your introductory remarks you gave good reasons for that. What do you feel about that?

THE PRESIDENT: I do not think it is possible to spectacularly reorganize the United Nations. If you do that, then you are rejecting the past. A lot of good things have happened in the past. You make a house anew. I think changes in the United Nations, by their own process, will be more incremental than spectacular. I do not see reform in the Security Council, for example, being such that you will suddenly have a whole system that deals with decision- making processes that are entirely different from what is now residing with the permanent five. I don't think so.

Mr. SANBAR: We now go to Geneva. I hope that someone there will ask a question, if you hear me.

QUESTION: We hear you, Sir. Mr. Razali, the publicly stated position of your Government is that Mr. Boutros-Ghali should not have a second term because he allegedly failed over Bosnia. Do you share this assessment? Secondly, I should like clarification on the Security Council issue. According to the German Government, you have indicated your intention to put the expansion issue up for a vote this fall. Is this correct, and are you confident that there will be a sufficient majority this fall already?

THE PRESIDENT: It must be a figment of someone else's imagination to think that I would put the issue of the Security Council up for decision this fall. There is not one iota of possibility of doing that. I have nothing to do with that. And as far as statements made by me or my Government on the incumbent, we stand by them, but I can give you very clear assurances that my position and my Government's position will not in any way impair my ability to put together a constructive role for the General Assembly in terms of selecting a Secretary-General.

QUESTION: Mr. Razali, in your speech yesterday you mentioned the need for responsible and inspired leadership for the future of the United Nations. Haven't you seen this in the past four years?

THE PRESIDENT: When I talk about inspired leadership, let us not think in terms only of the leadership of the Secretary-General. What is lacking in the United Nations, and part of its problem, is that international leadership has been absent. There have been a lot of attempts by one country to take over, but there is no sustained pattern of international leadership available in the United Nations where the issues are concerned. There are always a lot of twists and turns, and it is quite selective if the issue is strong in terms of what you can draw in domestic politics that there is leadership for. So the United Nations has been made into a kind of a political football.

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But that is one aspect. Of course, there must be inspired leadership in the Secretariat too. But we are not placing all the onus on one man. There are many brilliant people. Why can't we think in a lateral sense? Why is that there must be only an apex in looking at things?

Mr. SANBAR: We move now to the first question from Vienna.

QUESTION: First of all, I should like to congratulate you on your election as President of the fifty-first General Assembly.

Now, we here in Vienna are hoping to become the headquarters for a new organization mandated to monitor the CTBT. What is the outlook for the setting up of this organization, in your opinion? Can we see it being set up, say, next year? And what are the next steps in the process of this being set up?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, my answer will prove to you that I am a very fallible President. I do not know the answer to that. I admit that I have no idea how to answer that question. I will try to find out. Obviously, it is important for me to find this out, and thank you for showing up my ignorance.

QUESTION: It is open for signature next week, and I believe that President Clinton will be the first person to sign this. After the Treaty is signed, do you have any idea at all what the process is?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I am aware that the signing ceremony will be held on the 24th. But speaking as the Malaysian Ambassador, we do not think it stops there. Various efforts have to be made to commit all governments to a time-bound framework. But as President I cannot say that, so if you say that I said it I will deny it.

QUESTION: What do you think about a female United Nations Secretary- General? I heard that there are some female candidates.

THE PRESIDENT: Marvelous! Let's have all the candidates out. I think it's about time that all the candidates came out from wherever they are and showed interest that they want to be Secretary-General. The process at the moment is so quiet and everything is done without any transparency.

I wish everybody would come out and, if there are lady candidates, we should hear about them. They should declare. I don't know why people are so shy about putting up a flag saying "I'm interested".

QUESTION: You have mentioned that you expect a lot to be done to promote the peace process in the Middle East. Would you explain more about that?

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THE PRESIDENT: So far, the General Assembly has had very little influence in terms of moving the process forward on the peace accords or issues dealing with the Middle East. We have adopted resolutions and all that, but I do not think that we have really impacted to the extent that we have contributed to progress towards peace in the Middle East. Maybe in the earlier years we did, but not anymore. I am not saying that this is necessarily wrong. Sometimes these things cannot be done by so many countries together, but a few countries could do the job.

But at this point in time, when there is a serious possibility of the peace process being halted or derailed, it is important that the delegates who come here, representing their countries as part of the international community, pronounce on how valuable the peace process should be and on how it should be defended. This is all I am saying.

QUESTION: You mentioned the five-year review of the Rio summit coming up next year. Do you think this five-year review can really make a difference in getting the implementation of the Conference back on track?

THE PRESIDENT: Oh yes. I think one should not be defeatist about this. This is where, if you have a groundswell of support from people outside and you really work well with it, you can get results. You can embarrass governments by reminding them and asking them why they have not helped, why they have not got going on their commitments. You can, I really believe so.

The Working Group on An Agenda for Development is bogged down because it doesn't know where to go. I have a feeling that, if you could work out something in the review of Rio at this session, you could actually piggy-back the Agenda for Development. If you could do something on sustainable development in terms of means of implementation, identification of resources and allocation of responsibilities, not just at the national level but at the global level -- if you could find consensus on some of these things, you would elevate the whole Agenda for Development itself. I am quite hopeful about this.

Mr. SANBAR: Thank you very much, Mr. President.

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