CONFERENCE ON DISARMAMENT OPENS 2001 SESSION

Secretary-General Urges Conference

To Take Firm Action to Reach Consensus on Work Programme

(Reissued as received.)

GENEVA, 23 January (UN Information Service) -- The Conference on Disarmament, the world's sole multilateral forum for disarmament negotiations, this morning opened the first part of its 2001 session and adopted its agenda which includes the following items:  cessation of the nuclear arms race and nuclear disarmament; prevention of nuclear war, including all related matters; prevention of an arms race in outer space; effective international arrangements to assure non-nuclear-weapon States against the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons; new types of weapons of mass destruction and new systems of such weapons; radiological weapons; comprehensive programme of disarmament; transparency in armaments; and consideration and adoption of the annual report and any other report, as appropriate, to the General Assembly of the United Nations.

Vladimir Petrovsky, Director-General of the United Nations Office at Geneva, Secretary-General of the Conference on Disarmament and Personal Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General, read out a statement from Kofi Annan in which he urged the Conference to take firm and concerted action to overcome its inability to reach consensus on a comprehensive programme of work.  The first task before the Conference was to overcome the disturbing lack of political will that prevented its Member States from making full use of the resources available to it last year. 

The President of the Conference, Ambassador Christopher Westdal of Canada, said there was consensus that the Conference would discuss all issues that it would like to take up within the framework of this agenda.  The presidency of the Conference rotates between its Member States for four-week periods according to the English calendar.  The Conference also decided to resume its consultations on the review of the document.

Ambassador Westdal said he had been undertaking intensive consultations which had shown that several Member States still had reservations on a draft programme of work proposed by Ambassador Celso Amorim of Brazil at the previous session.  He said the draft, or something very close to it, remained the best option available to the Conference.

The Representatives of Germany and Pakistan also took the floor.

The Conference agreed to allow the following 34 States to participate in its work during 2001 as observers:  Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Brunei Darussalam, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Gabon, Georgia, Greece, Holy See, Iceland, Jordan, Latvia, Lebanon, Libya, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Mauritius, Nepal, Philippines, Portugal, Qatar, San Marino, Singapore, Slovenia, Thailand, The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Zambia.

At the beginning of the meeting, Ambassador Westdal conveyed the condolences of the Conference to the family of assassinated President Laurent Kabila of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as to the Government and people of that country.

The next plenary of the Conference on Disarmament will be held at 10 a.m. on Thursday, 25 January.

Statements

CHRISTOPHER WESTDAL (Canada), President of the Conference, said he wanted to report to the Conference briefly on the outcome of his consultations to date.  As mandated and instructed, he had been active and had consulted intensively.  He had naturally found great frustration among delegations that the Conference has not been used to much purpose at all for years now.  He had also found confirmation of the value invested in document CD/1624, the work programme proposed by Ambassador Celso Amorim of Brazil last August.  The programme was the result of years of hard work and refinement aimed to reflect and accommodate the diverse views and interests of all members, and its virtues were considerable.  He must also add that he had also confirmed that several parties had reservations and problems with the proposal and were not yet prepared to join a consensus in its favour.  However, he wanted to emphasize that in none of his consultations had he found closed minds to fresh textual analyses.

Ambassador Westdal said the Conference was vitally important to shared hopes for stricter arms control, non-proliferation and disarmament.  Given widespread concerns about global strategic stability and fear of new arms races, it was surely a striking anomaly that the means of engagement available at the Conference were currently almost entirely unused.  He would try hard to do something about that and to put the Conference back to work.  His judgement, widely shared, was that CD/1624, or something very close to it, remained the best option available and would indeed represent a worthy fulfilment of the fundamental responsibility of the Conference.

Ambassador Westdal said that with the support of the Member States of the Conference, he would complete the current circle of talks and would sustain the search for consensus.  He urged delegations to put the Conference to immediate good use, the lack of an agreed work programme notwithstanding.  He noted that the speaker lists for the plenaries were very short and worried what signal that sent.  He urged all to use these plenaries to share assessments of CD/1624 and the way forward in current global security circumstances.  He called on the Conference to adopt the draft programme of work with its coverage of fissile material for weapons, security assurances, the prevention of an arms race in outer space and nuclear disarmament, along with transparency, anti-personnel mines and CD membership, agenda and functioning.

VLADIMIR PETROVSKY, Director-General of the United Nations Office at Geneva, Secretary-General of the Conference on Disarmament and the Personal Representative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, read out a message from Kofi Annan to the Conference.  In the message, Mr. Annan said the Conference, a unique forum for multilateral disarmament negotiations, was opening its 2001 session at a unique time in multilateral diplomacy.  Among other developments, the Millennium Summit Declaration had spelt out the need to work for the elimination of weapons of mass destruction -- particularly nuclear weapons -- and for an end to illicit trafficking in small arms and light weapons.  Yet the Conference was once again unable to reach consensus on a comprehensive programme of work in the same millennium year.  The lack of consensus had led to a stalemate which was a source of considerable concern to the Secretary-General and an indication that the Conference has been unable to live up to its full potential.

The United Nations Secretary-General said firm and concerted action must be taken to overcome this state of affairs.  The Conference must work for a political climate conducive to the full use of the body as a negotiating forum.  This required restoring a necessary degree of harmony among the main players.  Only then would the Conference be able to strike the right balance between the disarmament priorities of all Member States, in particular those related to consolidation of the nuclear non-proliferation regime and to the process of nuclear disarmament, while preserving and enhancing strategic stability.  The first task before the Conference was to overcome the disturbing lack of political will that prevented its Member States from making full use of the resources available to it.  Last year, the Conference had made commendable progress in developing consensus on the appropriate mechanisms to deal with two outstanding issues:  nuclear disarmament and prevention of an arms race in outer space.  He urged the Conference to follow up on this process with determination and to use it to build a critical mass of political will that could trigger agreement on a workable and balanced programme of work which addressed the priorities and concerns of all States.

GUNTHER SEIBERT (Germany) said the first presidency of the session was the most difficult and challenging one.  According to the ambitious rules of the Conference, Member States should take major decisions on its agenda and programme of work, and it should create subsidiary bodies to cover agenda items in the first two weeks of the session.  It would be a challenge to try and accomplish in two weeks what efforts to overcome the stalemate in the past two years had not done.

Ambassador Seibert said that last year, he had expressed his misgivings about the way the agenda had been handled in the past, pointing out that its items were outdated and had lost all significance for the Conference and its work.  The Conference must deal with this unsatisfactory situation.  What was the purpose of the agenda if the Conference had to adopt its programme of work before it could discuss the agenda.  He noted that proposals last year had included appointment of special coordinators on the review of the agenda and functioning and membership of the Conference.  On these and other issues, general agreement had existed for some time.  But no action had been taken because of the disagreement on the two main issues.  In fact, there was general agreement that these two issues be dealt with in two subsidiary bodies, but the mandates of these bodies were disagreed upon.

In conclusion, Ambassador Seibert said the first objective of the Conference must be to get down to substantive work as soon as possible.  The Conference on Disarmament had to re-examine the way that it was conducting its business and the role of its agenda.

MUNIR AKRAM (Pakistan), speaking after the Conference adopted its agenda, said the Chairman had just made a statement in which he said that this adoption did not preclude the Conference from taking up other issues under the agenda.  He stressed that the international community now fully accepted that arms control and disarmament at the global level must be complimented by measures at the regional and sub-regional levels.  Both global and regional disarmament must be pursued simultaneously.  Pakistan intended to pursue this under an appropriate agenda item.

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