[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.