    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book II)]
    [September 22, 1997]
    [Pages 1205-1209]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the 52d Session of the United Nations General Assembly in
    New York City
    September 22, 1997

        Mr. President, Secretary-General, distinguished guests: Five years
    ago, when I first addressed this Assembly, the cold war had only just
    ended, and the transition to a new era was beginning. Now, together, we
    are making that historic transition.
        Behind us we leave a century full of humanity's capacity for the
    worst and its genius for the best. Before us, at the dawn of a new
    millennium, we can envision a new era that escapes the 20th century's
    darkest moments, fulfills its most brilliant possibilities, and crosses
    frontiers yet unimagined.
        We are off to a promising start. For the first time in history, more
    than half the people represented in this Assembly freely choose their
    own governments. Free markets are growing, spreading individual
    opportunity and national well-being. Early in the 21st century, more
    than 20 of this Assembly's members, home to half the Earth's population,
    will lift themselves from the ranks of low-income nations.

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        Powerful forces are bringing us closer together, profoundly changing
    the way we work and live and relate to each other. Every day millions of
    our citizens on every continent use laptops and satellites to send
    information, products, and money across the planet in seconds. Bit by
    bit, the information age is chipping away at the barriers, economic,
    political, and social, that once kept people locked in and ideas locked
    out. Science is unraveling mysteries in the tiniest of human genes and
    the vast cosmos.
        Never in the course of human history have we had a greater
    opportunity to make our people healthier and wiser, to protect our
    planet from decay and abuse, to reap the benefits of free markets
    without abandoning the social contract and its concern for the common
    good. Yet today's possibilities are not tomorrow's guarantees. We have
    work to do.
        The forces of global integration are a great tide, inexorably
    wearing away the established order of things. But we must decide what
    will be left in its wake. People fear change when they feel its burdens
    but not its benefits. They are susceptible to misguided protectionism,
    to the poisoned appeals of extreme nationalism, and ethnic, racial, and
    religious hatred. New global environmental challenges require us to find
    ways to work together without damaging legitimate aspirations for
    progress. We're all vulnerable to the reckless acts of rogue states and
    to an unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers, and international
    criminals. These 21st century predators feed on the very free flow of
    information and ideas and people we cherish. They abuse the vast power
    of technology to build black markets for weapons, to compromise law
    enforcement with huge bribes of illicit cash, to launder money with the
    keystroke of a computer. These forces are our enemies. We must face them
    together because no one can defeat them alone.
        To seize the opportunities and move against the threats of this new
    global era, we need a new strategy of security. Over the past 5 years,
    nations have begun to put that strategy in place through a new network
    of institutions and arrangements with distinct missions but a common
    purpose: to secure and strengthen the gains of democracy and free
    markets while turning back their enemies.
        We see this strategy taking place on every continent: expanded
    military alliances like NATO, its Partnership For Peace, its
    partnerships with a democratic Russia and a democratic Ukraine; free-
    trade arrangements like the WTO and the global information technology
    agreement and the move toward free-trade areas by nations in the
    Americas, the Asia-Pacific region, and elsewhere around the world;
    strong arms control regimes like the Chemical Weapons Convention and the
    Non-Proliferation Treaty; multinational coalitions with zero tolerance
    for terrorism, corruption, crime, and drug trafficking; binding
    international commitments to protect the environment and safeguard human
    rights.
        Through this web of institutions and arrangements, nations are now
    setting the international ground rules for the 21st century, laying a
    foundation for security and prosperity for those who live within them,
    while isolating those who challenge them from the outside. This system
    will develop and endure only if those who follow the rules of peace and
    freedom fully reap their rewards. Only then will our people believe that
    they have a stake in supporting and shaping the emerging international
    system.
        The United Nations must play a leading role in this effort, filling
    in the faultlines of the new global era. The core missions it has
    pursued during its first half-century will be just as relevant during
    the next half-century: the pursuit of peace and security, promoting
    human rights, and moving people from poverty to dignity and prosperity
    through sustainable development.
        Conceived in the caldron of war, the United Nations' first task must
    remain the pursuit of peace and security. For 50 years, the U.N. has
    helped prevent world war and nuclear holocaust. Unfortunately, conflicts
    between nations and within nations has endured. From 1945 until today,
    they have cost 20 million lives. Just since the end of the cold war,
    each year there have been more than 30 armed conflicts in which more
    than a thousand people have lost their lives, including, of course, a
    quarter of a million killed in the former Yugoslavia and more than half
    a million in Rwanda.
        Millions of personal tragedies the world over are a warning that we
    dare not be complacent or indifferent. Trouble in a far corner can
    become a plague on everyone's house.
        People the world over cheer the hopeful developments in Northern
    Ireland, grieve over the innocent loss of life and the stalling of the
    peace

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    process in the Middle East, and long for a resolution of the differences
    on the Korean Peninsula or between Greece and Turkey or between the
    great nations of India and Pakistan as they celebrate the 50th
    anniversaries of their birth.
        The United Nations continues to keep many nations away from
    bloodshed, in El Salvador and Mozambique, in Haiti and Namibia, in
    Cyprus and in Bosnia, where so much remains to be done but can still be
    done because the bloodshed has ended.
        The record of service of the United Nations has left a legacy of
    sacrifice. Just last week, we lost some of our finest sons and daughters
    in a crash of a U.N. helicopter in Bosnia. Five were Americans, five
    were Germans, one Polish, and one British, all citizens of the world we
    are trying to make, each a selfless servant of peace. And the world is
    poorer for their passing.
        At this very moment, the United Nations is keeping the peace in 16
    countries, often in partnership with regional organizations like NATO,
    the OAS, ASEAN, and ECOWAS, avoiding wider conflicts and even greater
    suffering. Our shared commitment to more realistic peacekeeping training
    for U.N. troops, a stronger role for civilian police, better integration
    between military and civilian agencies, all these will help the United
    Nations to meet these missions in the years ahead.
        At the same time, we must improve the U.N.'s capabilities after a
    conflict ends to help peace become self-sustaining. The U.N. cannot
    build nations, but it can help nations to build themselves by fostering
    legitimate institutions of government, monitoring elections, and laying
    a strong foundation for economic reconstruction.
        This week the Security Council will hold an unprecedented
    ministerial meeting on African security, which our Secretary of State is
    proud to chair and which President Mugabe, chairman of the Organization
    of African Unity, will address. It will highlight the role the United
    Nations can and should play in preventing conflict on a continent where
    amazing progress toward democracy and development is occurring alongside
    still too much discord, disease, and distress.
        In the 21st century, our security will be challenged increasingly by
    interconnected groups that traffic in terror, organized crime, and drug
    smuggling. Already these international crime and drug syndicates drain
    up to $750 billion a year from legitimate economies. That sum exceeds
    the combined GNP of more than half the nations in this room. These
    groups threaten to undermine confidence in fragile new democracies and
    market economies that so many of you are working so hard to see endure.
        Two years ago, I called upon all the members of this Assembly to
    join in the fight against these forces. I applaud the U.N.'s recent
    resolution calling on its members to join the major international
    antiterrorism conventions, making clear the emerging international
    consensus that terrorism is always a crime and never a justifiable
    political act. As more countries sign on, terrorists will have fewer
    places to run or hide.
        I also applaud the steps that members are taking to implement the
    declaration on crime and public security that the United States proposed
    2 years ago, calling for increased cooperation to strengthen every
    citizen's right to basic safety through cooperation on extradition and
    asset forfeiture, shutting down gray markets for guns and false
    documents, attacking corruption, and bringing higher standards to law
    enforcement in new democracies.
        The spread of these global criminal syndicates also has made all the
    more urgent our common quest to eliminate weapons of mass destruction.
    We cannot allow them to fall or to remain in the wrong hands. Here, too,
    the United Nations must lead, and it has, from UNSCOM in Iraq to the
    International Atomic Energy Agency, now the most expansive global system
    ever devised to police arms control agreements.
        When we met here last year, I was honored to be the first of 146
    leaders to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, our commitment to end
    all nuclear tests for all time, the longest sought, hardest fought prize
    in the history of arms control. It will help to prevent the nuclear
    powers from developing more advanced and more dangerous weapons. It will
    limit the possibilities for other states to acquire such devices. I am
    pleased to announce that today I am sending this crucial treaty to the
    United States Senate for ratification. Our common goal should be to
    enter the CTBT into force as soon as possible, and I ask for all of you
    to support that goal.
        The United Nations' second core mission must be to defend and extend
    universal human rights and to help democracy's remarkable gains endure.
    Fifty years ago, the U.N.'s Universal

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    Declaration of Human Rights stated the international community's
    conviction that people everywhere have the right to be treated with
    dignity, to give voice to their opinions, to choose their leaders; that
    these rights are universal, not American rights, not Western rights, not
    rights for the developed world only but rights inherent in the humanity
    of people everywhere. Over the past decade, these rights have become a
    reality for more people than ever, from Asia to Africa, from Europe to
    the Americas. In a world that links rich and poor, north and south, city
    and countryside in an electronic network of shared images in real time,
    the more these universal rights take hold, the more people who do not
    enjoy them will demand them. Armed with photocopiers and fax machines,
    E-mail and the Internet, supported by an increasingly important
    community of nongovernmental organizations, they will make their demands
    known, spreading the spirit of freedom which, as the history of the last
    10 years has shown us, ultimately will prevail.
        The United Nations must be prepared to respond not only by setting
    standards but by implementing them. To deter abuses, we should
    strengthen the U.N.'s field operations and early warning systems. To
    strengthen democratic institutions, the best guarantors of human rights,
    we must pursue programs to help new legal, parliamentary, and electoral
    institutions get off the ground. To punish those responsible for crimes
    against humanity and to promote justice so that peace endures, we must
    maintain our strong support for the U.N.'s war crime tribunals and truth
    commissions. And before the century ends, we should establish a
    permanent international court to prosecute the most serious violations
    of humanitarian law.
        The United States welcomes the Secretary-General's efforts to
    strengthen the role of human rights within the U.N. system and his
    splendid choice of Mary Robinson as the new High Commissioner. We will
    work hard to make sure that she has the support she needs to carry out
    her mandate.
        Finally, the United Nations has a special responsibility to make
    sure that as the global economy creates greater wealth, it does not
    produce growing disparities between the haves and have-nots or threaten
    the global environment, our common home. Progress is not yet everyone's
    partner. More than half the world's people are 2 days' walk from a
    telephone, literally disconnected from the global economy. Tens of
    millions lack the education, the training, the skills they need to make
    the most of their God-given abilities.
        The men and women of the United Nations have expertise across the
    entire range of humanitarian and development activities. Every day they
    are making a difference. We see it in nourished bodies of once starving
    children, in the full lives of those immunized against disease, in the
    bright eyes of children exposed to education through the rich storehouse
    of human knowledge, in refugees cared for and returned to their homes,
    in the health of rivers and lakes restored.
        The United Nations must focus even more on shifting resources from
    hand-outs to hand-ups, on giving people the tools they need to make the
    most of their own destinies. Spreading ideas in education and
    technology, the true wealth of nations, is the best way to give people a
    chance to succeed.
        And the U.N. must continue to lead in ensuring that today's progress
    does not come at tomorrow's expense. When the nations of the world
    gather again next December in Kyoto for the U.N. Climate Change
    Conference, all of us, developed and developing nations, must seize the
    opportunity to turn back the clock on greenhouse gas emissions so that
    we can leave a healthy planet to our children.
        In these efforts, the U.N. no longer can and no longer need go it
    alone. Innovative partnerships with the private sector, NGO's, and the
    international financial institutions can leverage its effectiveness many
    times over. Last week, a truly visionary American, Ted Turner, made a
    remarkable donation to strengthen the U.N.'s development and
    humanitarian programs. His gesture highlights the potential for
    partnership between the U.N. and the private sector in contributions of
    time, resources, and expertise. And I hope more will follow his lead.
        In this area and others, the Secretary-General is aggressively
    pursuing the most far-reaching reform of the United Nations in its
    history, not to make the U.N. smaller as an end in itself but to make it
    better. The United States strongly supports his leadership. We should
    pass the Secretary-General's reform agenda this session.
        On every previous occasion I have addressed this Assembly, the issue
    of our country's dues has brought the commitment of the United States to
    the United Nations into question. The

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    United States was a founder of the U.N. We are proud to be its host. We
    believe in its ideals. We continue to be, as we have been, its largest
    contributor. We are committed to seeing the United Nations succeed in
    the 21st century.
        This year, for the first time since I have been President, we have
    an opportunity to put the questions of debts and dues behind us once and
    for all and to put the United Nations on a sounder financial footing for
    the future. I have made it a priority to work with our Congress on
    comprehensive legislation that would allow us to pay off the bulk of our
    arrears and assure full financing of America's assessment in the years
    ahead. Our Congress' actions to solve this problem reflects a strong
    bipartisan commitment to the United Nations and to America's role within
    it. At the same time, we look to member states to adopt a more equitable
    scale of assessment.
        Let me say that we also strongly support expanding the Security
    Council to give more countries a voice in the most important work of the
    U.N. In more equitably sharing responsibility for its successes, we can
    make the U.N. stronger and more democratic than it is today. I ask the
    General Assembly to act on these proposals this year so that we can move
    forward together.
        At the dawn of a new century, so full of hope but not free of peril,
    more than ever we need a United Nations where people of reason can work
    through shared problems and take action to combat them, where nations of
    good will can join in the struggle for freedom and prosperity, where we
    can shape a future of peace and progress and the preservation of our
    planet.
        We have the knowledge, we have the intelligence, we have the energy,
    we have the resources for the work before us. We are building the
    necessary networks of cooperation. The great question remaining is
    whether we have the vision and the heart necessary to imagine a future
    that is different from the past, necessary to free ourselves from
    destructive patterns of relations with each other and within our own
    nations and live a future that is different.
        A new century and a new millennium is upon us. We are literally
    present at the future, and it is the great gift, it is our obligation,
    to leave to our children.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 10:50 a.m. in the General Assembly Hall at
    United Nations Headquarters. In his remarks, he referred to Minister of
    Foreign Affairs Hennadiy Udovenko of Ukraine, President, U.N. General
    Assembly; U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan; President Robert Mugabe of
    Zimbabwe; Mary Robinson, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights; and
    Ted Turner, vice chairman, Time Warner, Inc.