SECRETARY-GENERAL OPENS ANNUAL NGO CONFERENCE, MEETING ALSO HEARS QUEEN NOOR OF JORDAN AND NOBEL LAUREATE OSCAR ARIAS
Press Release
NGO/312
PI/1174
SECRETARY-GENERAL OPENS ANNUAL NGO CONFERENCE, MEETING ALSO HEARS QUEEN NOOR OF JORDAN AND NOBEL LAUREATE OSCAR ARIAS
19990915The revolution of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the globalization process were defining phenomena of our times, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said this morning at the opening meeting of the fifty-second annual NGO Conference, organized by the Department of Public Information (DPI).
The Secretary-General told representatives of more than 800 NGOs who had gathered in New York for the three-day Conference that people had interacted across the planet for centuries. Globalization, however, had distinguished the present era by the speed with which that interaction occurred, by the tools driving it forward, and by the new rules and actors determining the course and fate of the global interaction.
Governments, he added, urged by civil society, came together in such actions as creating the International Criminal Court. "That is the international community at work for the rule of law." Governments needed non-governmental partners because the private sector could not by itself give global markets a human face, nor could it reach the millions on the margins. The United Nations was committed to deepening its alliance with non-governmental partners by today launching an enhanced web site for civil society.
Queen Noor al-Hussein of Jordan said it was time to place the human face at the centre of the globalization debate and frame comprehensive approaches to the threats to human security posed by marginalization, poverty and human rights abuses. Thus, innovations designed to meet the comprehensive globalization challenge must balance concern for profits with concern for people. Governments, businesses and NGOs formed a three-pronged plug through which the power of globalization could flow. An alliance between them could foster cooperation in the development process and promote human welfare everywhere.
Nobel Prize laureate and former President of Costa Rica, Oscar Arias, said that perhaps what made the economic exploitation and hardship of today more insidious was the fact that it existed alongside tremendous wealth and abundance. Condescending or trickle-down solutions to world problems must be rejected and movements that allowed ignored and depreciated populations to become political actors must be highlighted. Communities must be allowed to decide which forms of development were appropriate for them and which forms of materialism they need not support. And those communities, and not an elite few, had to be empowered to enact economic plans. In the new millenium, NGOs would have to lead the way in the quest to advance the new understandings of security, democracy and justice.
DPI/NGO Annual Conference - 1a - Press Release NGO/312 PI/1174 15 September 1999
Kensaku Hogen, Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information, in his opening remarks, said that the annual DPI/NGO Conference had become the premiere NGO-related event at Headquarters and highlighted the United Nations special partnership with the non-governmental community. It was fitting that the complex process of globalization would be explored at the United Nations. Also addressing the Conference this morning were Elaine Valdov, Chairperson of the NGO/DPI Executive Committee, and Carl Murrell, Chairman of the NGO/DPI Conference Planning Committee.
The Conference will meet again at 3 p.m. today in Conference Room 4 to hold a panel discussion on trade and finance.
Conference Work Programme
The fifty-second annual DPI/NGO Conference met this morning to begin its three-day session. The theme of this year's Conference is "Challenges of a Globalized World: Finding New Directions".
Statements
KENSAKU HOGEN, Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information, welcomed participants for the fifty-second annual DPI/NGO Conference, which he said had become the premiere NGO-related event at Headquarters, and he highlighted the United Nations special partnership with the non-governmental community. It was fitting that the complex process of globalization would be explored at the United Nations. The exchanges over the next three days would help to advance the debate around globalization.
KOFI ANNAN, the Secretary General, welcomed over a hundred Ghanaians attending the Conference, the largest developing-country contingent present. He said the non-governmental organization (NGO) revolution and globalization were defining phenomena of our times. No individual and no country existed in isolation. All lived simultaneously in communities and in the world at large, with the separation between the two realms "shrinking as quickly as one can say fax, e-mail or CNN".
"We are all consumers of the same global economy and are all influenced by the same tides of political, social and technological change", the Secretary- General continued. Humans had interacted across the planet for centuries, but globalization distinguished this era by the speed with which the interaction occurred, by the tools driving it forward, by the rules that existed or did not exist, and the actors determining the course and fate of the global interaction.
In its broadest sense, Mr. Annan continued, the element that bound the international community together was the shared vision of a better world for all people, as set out in the United Nations Charter. The Charter contained the framework of international law to address such common vulnerabilities as climate change and weapons of mass destruction, as well as to promote shared opportunity through building common markets and institutions, such as the United Nations.
Mr. Annan said there were sceptics who claimed the international community did not exist, or that it had no real meaning, or that it was a mere vehicle for emergencies or scapegoating. Those sceptics were wrong. The international community existed and had achievements to its credit, as when governments, urged by civil society, came together to create the International Criminal Court. "That is the international community at work for the rule of law". The political will must be summoned for correcting the international community's frequent failings, as when it did not do enough to stop the genocide in Rwanda.
Governments needed non-governmental partners, Mr. Annan concluded. The private sector, as vital and dynamic as it was, could not by itself give global markets a human face, nor could it reach the millions on the margins. The United Nations was committed to deepening its alliance with non-governmental partners by today launching an enhanced web site for civil society.
(For full text of the Secretary-General's statement, see Press Release SG/SM/7133-NGO/313-PI/1166.)
Queen NOOR AL-HUSSEIN of Jordan, said the hopes for globalization had not materialized. According to the United Nations Development Programmes (UNDP) human
development index, scores of countries had fallen significantly in standard of living in the past year, including 10 out of 17 Arab nations, with Jordan among them.
She said it was time to place the human face at the centre of the globalization debate and frame comprehensive approaches to the threats to human security posed by marginalization, poverty and human rights abuses. The comprehensive challenge of globalization was not only to design strong systems of governance, but to create a new sense of global responsibility. Those innovations must balance concern for profits with concern for people.
It was difficult to reconcile the insecurity brought on by "globality's" new emphasis on speed and flexibility and governments' need to provide security and predictability for citizens, she went on. Indeed, the definition of security itself was changing: true security was not a matter of protecting borders from military or market aggression, but of providing a stable environment to enable all citizens to participate fully in commercial and political life. Fortunately, suspicions among business, NGOs and governments were also changing, as NGOs were increasingly recognized as major development partners.
In that connection, she said governments could be more flexible, like business; business could be more attuned to social and ecological problems, like NGOs; NGOs could be more organized and streamlined, like business; business could focus more on human needs, like governments. By joining forces and capitalizing on each others' strengths, those institutions could create a sophisticated web -- strong, flexible and responsive enough to find solutions to the global challenges faced by all.
Business, government and NGOs formed a three-pronged plug through which the power of globalization could flow. An alliance between them could foster Cupertino in the development process and promote human welfare worldwide.
Globalization was about networks, not hierarchies, she continued. It was not simply a system imposed by one part of the world on the rest, and it need not mean global homogenization, but rather the opportunity for the entire world to gain from the unique wisdom of all of its disparate parts. More than ever, minority, even individual, opinion played a major role in forging the larger consensus.
One of the paradoxes of globalization was that small changes could make a big difference, she said. Small web sites could get the message out to the world, micro-financing could turn small farms or craftsworkers into entrepreneurs with a global market. It must not be forgotten that the new "globality" was made up of billions of individuals, each with a face, a voice and a dream. The technology existed to provide everyone with the opportunity to participate in the new interconnected universe, thereby bringing individual talents to bear on neighbourhoods, nations and the world. With ideas as the new world currency, "let us spend ours wisely".
Nobel Prize laureate and former President of Costa Rica, OSCAR ARIAS, said that NGOs played a vital role in the fight for peace and reconciliation, in the struggle for human rights and human dignity, and in the drive for equality and social justice. When governments had not been responsive to the desires and aspirations of people, NGOs had acted as the conscience of society, forcing policy-makers to address the truly important issues of the day. The willingness of NGOs to work for positive change ensured that the voices of the poor, the weak and the oppressed were heard.
The NGOs were often at the forefront of efforts to create a safer and better world, he continued. For example, faced with the need to eliminate the landmines that killed and maimed civilians, a coalition of civil society organizations instigated and propelled the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. Today, that coalition of 1,100 groups could take much of the credit for the fact that 135 nations had signed a treaty prohibiting the use, stockpiling, production and transfer of anti-personnel mines and providing for their destruction. Moreover, in an age in which the perpetrators of war crimes, torture and genocide all too often went unpunished, NGOs were leading the way in the drive to create an international criminal court. Clearly, they were now a fundamental part of the international system.
Facing the dawn of a new millenium, there were new challenges of an increasingly globalized world to be confronted, he said. The financial and technological innovations that brought the world together must be accompanied by a change in consciousness. For some, the new economic system meant being able to make investments with a worldly perspective, minimizing labour costs and maximizing profits. For others, it meant facing the end of job security and, at the same time, witnessing the reappearance of sweatshops. The frantic quest for quick riches had created a hollow, speculative economy, unattached to human labour and unaccountable to human need.
Today, there was a much deeper crisis underlying the financial panic, he said. It was an economic crisis when nearly a billion and a half people had no access to clean water, and a billion lived in miserably substandard housing. It was a leadership crisis when wealth was allowed to be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, so that the world's three richest individuals had assets that exceeded the combined gross domestic product (GDP) of the poorest 48 countries. It was a spiritual crisis when -- as Gandhi said -- many people were so poor that they could only see God in the form of bread. It was a moral crisis when 40,000 children died each day from malnutrition and disease. Also, it was a democratic crisis when 1.3 billion people lived on incomes of less than one dollar a day.
He said that the first step towards global thinking required an adoption of a definition of peace that went beyond the short-sighted demands of national security. To that end, the UNDP stressed the need to think of peace in terms of human security. The second step in global thinking was to expand the understanding of democracy. True democracy was not merely the distribution of political power, but also the distribution of economic power.
Perhaps what made the economic exploitation and hardship of today more insidious was the fact that it existed alongside tremendous wealth and abundance, he said. Condescending or trickle-down solutions to world problems must be rejected, and movements that allowed ignored and depreciated populations to become political actors must be highlighted. And those communities, and not an elite few, had to be empowered to enact economic plans.
In the new millenium, NGOs would have to lead the way in the quest to advance the new understandings of security, democracy and justice, he said. While NGOs could promote the cause of progress in many different ways, the need for demilitarization was one of the most important challenges that the organizations would face in the coming years. Without a doubt, military spending represented the single most significant perversion of worldwide priorities today. Today in East Timor, he continued, the true cost of military spending in its most terrible form could be seen, as members of the Indonesian armed forces and their paramilitary allies terrorized the civilian population, simply because the people chose to
exercise their right to self-determination, their right to be free. World leaders must stop viewing militaristic investment as a measure of national well-being.
In pursuing true solutions to contemporary defence concerns, and in creating policies that would allow a focus on human security, urgent work was needed to limit the availability and spread of deadly weaponry, he said. For that reason, he had advocated an International Code of Conduct on Arms Transfers. That agreement demanded that any decision to export arms should take into account several characteristics pertaining to the country of final destination. The recipient country must endorse democracy, defined in terms of free and fair elections, the rule of law, and civilian control over the military and security forces.
Moreover, its government must not engage in gross violations of internationally recognized human rights. The Code would not permit arms sales to any country engaged in armed aggression -- against other nations or against its own people. Individuals, groups and community leaders had expressed their belief that such a Code was not only a morally sound idea, but also a politically necessary agreement. It was those people, and the force of their convictions, that turned possibility into progress and turned impractical ideas into reality.
ELAINE VALDOV, Chairperson of the NGO/DPI Executive Committee, said that at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, earlier this year, Bishop Desmond Tutu had said that, at the height of apartheid, those fighting its repression in South Africa had known it would be defeated because goodness was stronger than its opposite and would, therefore, always prevail. The prevailing attitude about globalization seems to be the widespread fear of a global corporate take-over, rather than a perception of globalization having anything to do with helping humankind evolve. But just as those fighting the repression of the apartheid system won out against a system seeming to have all the power, so the humanitarian goodness of human nature would win out in the corporate world, which must be seen to be on the side of goodness.
The most exciting breakthrough of the next century would not be technological advancement, but the expanding concept of what it meant to be human and how humanness could be globalized, Ms. Valdov said. The NGOs played a critical role in that process, because they could decrease the widening gap of disparity and could bring humanness to globalization. The NGOs must work together to stop the marginalization of the vulnerable and of those lacking the skills to be part of the fast-growing world of technology. They must also stop the fast- growing illiteracy rate. Because of the great possibilities of globalization's positive face, the NGOs could reach out to all of humanity.
CARL MURRELL, Chairman of the NGO/DPI Conference Planning Committee, said that a conversation about globalization was ultimately a conversation about the direction of civilization in the future. The Committee's attempts to settle on an approach for the Conference highlighted the need for the globalization process to be monitored, restructured and rethought to ensure that new directions would benefit wider segments or humanity. The Conference would examine the effect of globalization on human rights and on the potential for individual prosperity. It would also take a forward look at partnerships and structures at all levels, aimed at finding ways to promote access by more members of the human family.
He said if the NGO community - a leading human rights advocate - were to meet the needs of the many marginalized segments of society, it must redouble its future efforts. Hopefully, the essential oneness of humanity would emerge as a standard for deliberations at the Conference. Despite the difficulties imposed by such conditions as poverty, war, violence and fanaticism, a common homeland situation in a planet of justice and peace was being forged. * *** *