    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
    [September 21, 1999]
    [Pages 1563-1567]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the 54th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in
    New York City
    September 21, 1999

        Thank you very much. Mr. President, Mr.
    Secretary-General, members of the United Nations
    General Assembly, good morning. I hope you will forgive me for being a
    little hoarse today. I will do the best I can to be heard.
        Today we look ahead to the new millennium, and at this last General
    Assembly of the 20th century, we look back on a century that taught us
    much of what we need to know about the promise of tomorrow. We have
    learned a great deal over the last 100 years: how to produce enough food
    for a growing world population; how human activity affects the
    environment; the mysteries of the human gene; an information revolution
    that now holds the promise of universal access to knowledge. We have
    learned that open markets create more wealth, that open societies are
    more just. We have learned how to come together, through the U.N. and
    other institutions, to advance common interests and values.
        Yet, for all our intellectual and material advances, the 20th
    century has been deeply scarred by enduring human failures, by greed and
    lust for power, by hot-blooded hatreds and stone-cold hearts.
        At century's end, modern developments magnify greatly the dangers of
    these timeless flaws. Powerful forces still resist reasonable efforts to
    put a human face on the global economy, to lift the poor, to heal the
    Earth's environment. Primitive claims of racial, ethnic, or religious
    superiority, when married to advanced weaponry and terrorism, threaten
    to destroy the greatest potential for human development in history, even
    as they make a wasteland of the soul.
        Therefore, we look to the future with hope but with unanswered
    questions. In the new millennium, will nations be divided by ethnic and
    religious conflicts? Will the nation-state itself be imperiled by them
    or by terrorism? Will we keep coming closer together instead, while
    enjoying the normal differences that make life more interesting?
        In the new century, how will patriotism be defined, as faith in a
    dream worth living or fear and loathing of other people's dreams? Will
    we be free of the fear of weapons of mass destruction or forced to teach
    our grandchildren how to survive a nuclear, chemical, or biological
    attack?
        Will globalism bring shared prosperity or make the desperate of the
    world even more desperate? Will we use science and technology to grow
    the economy and protect the environment or put it to risk, put it all at
    risk in a world dominated by a struggle over natural resources?
        The truth is that the 20th century's amazing progress has not
    resolved these questions, but it has given us the tools to make the
    answers come out right, the knowledge, the resources, the institutions.
    Now we must use them. If we do, we can make the millennium not just a
    changing of the digits but a true changing of the times, a gateway to
    greater peace and prosperity and freedom. With that in mind, I offer
    three resolutions for the new millennium.

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        First, let us resolve to wage an unrelenting battle against poverty
    and for shared prosperity so that no part of humanity is left behind in
    the global economy. Globalism is not inherently divisive. While infant
    mortality in developing countries has been cut nearly in half since
    1970, life expectancy has increased by 10 years. According to the U.N.'s
    human development index, measuring a decent standard of living, a good
    education, a long and healthy life, the gap between rich and poor
    countries on this measure has actually declined.
        Open trade and new technologies have been engines of this progress.
    They've helped hundreds of millions to see their prospects rise by
    marketing the fruits of their labor and creativity abroad. With proper
    investment in education, developing countries should be able to keep
    their best and brightest talent at home and to gain access to global
    markets for goods and services and capital.
        But this promising future is far from inevitable. We are still
    squandering the potential of far too many: 1.3 billion people still live
    on less than a dollar a day; more than half the population of many
    countries have no access to safe water; a person in South Asia is 700
    times less likely to use the Internet than someone in the United States;
    and 40 million people a year still die of hunger, almost as many as the
    total number killed in World War II.
        We must refuse to accept a future in which one part of humanity
    lives on the cutting edge of a new economy, while the other lives at the
    knife edge of survival.
        What must we do? Well, we can start by remembering that open markets
    advance the blessings and breakthroughs we want to spread. That's why we
    in the United States have worked to keep our markets open during the
    recent global financial crisis, though it has brought us record trade
    deficits. It is why we want to launch a new global trade round when the
    WTO meets in Seattle this fall; why we are working to build a trading
    system that strengthens the well-being of workers and consumers,
    protects the environment, and makes competition a race to the top, not
    the bottom; why I'm proud we have come together at the ILO to ban
    abusive child labor everywhere in the world.
        We do not face a choice between trade and aid but instead the
    challenge to make both work for people who need them. Aid should focus
    on what is known to work: credit for poor people starting business;
    keeping girls in school; meeting the needs of mothers and children.
    Development aid should be used for development, not to buy influence or
    finance donors' exports. It should go where governments invest in their
    people and answer their concerns.
        We should also come to the aid of countries struggling to rise, but
    held down by the burden of debt. The G-7 nations adopted a plan to
    reduce by up to 70 percent the outstanding debt of the world's poorest
    countries, freeing resources for education, health, and growth.
        All of us, developed and developing countries alike, should take
    action now to halt global climate change. Now, what has that to do with
    fighting poverty? A great deal. The most vulnerable members of the human
    family will be first hurt and hurt most, if rising temperatures
    devastate agriculture, accelerate the spread of disease in tropical
    countries, and flood island nations.
        Does this mean developing countries then must sacrifice growth to
    protect the environment? Absolutely not. Throughout history, a key to
    human progress has been willingness to abandon big ideas that are no
    longer true. One big idea that is no longer true is that the only way to
    build a modern economy is to use energy as we did in the industrial age.
    The challenge and opportunity for developing countries is to skip the
    cost of the industrial age by using technologies that improve the
    economy and the environment at the same time.
        Finally, to win the fight against poverty, we must improve health
    care for all people. Over the next 10 years in Africa, AIDS is expected
    to kill more people and orphan more children than all the wars of the
    20th century combined. Each year diseases like malaria, tuberculosis,
    pneumonia leave millions of children without parents, millions of
    parents without children. Yet, for all these diseases, vaccine research
    is advancing too slowly, in part because the potential customers in need
    are too poor. Only 2 percent of all global biomedical research is
    devoted to the major killers in the developing world.
        No country can break poverty's bonds if its people are disabled by
    disease and its government overwhelmed by the needs of the ill. With
    U.N. leadership, we've come close to eradicating polio, once the scourge
    of children everywhere. We're down to 5,000 reported cases worldwide.
    I've asked our Congress to fund a major increase

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    to finish the job; I ask other nations to follow suit.
        We've begun a comprehensive battle against the global AIDS epidemic.
    This year I'm seeking another $100 million for prevention, counseling,
    and care in Africa. I want to do more to get new drugs that prevent
    transmission from mothers to newborns, to those who need them most. And
    today I commit the United States to a concerted effort to accelerate the
    development and delivery of vaccines for malaria, TB, AIDS, and other
    diseases disproportionately affecting the developing world. Many
    approaches have been proposed, from tax credits to special funds for the
    purchase of these vaccines.
        To tackle these issues, I will ask public health experts, the chief
    executive officers of our pharmaceutical companies, foundation
    representatives, and Members of Congress to join me at a special White
    House meeting to strengthen incentives for research and development, to
    work with, not against, the private sector to meet our common goals.
        The second resolution I hope we will make today is to strengthen the
    capacity of the international community to prevent and, whenever
    possible, to stop outbreaks of mass killing and displacement. This
    requires, as we all know, shared responsibility, like the one West
    African nations accepted when they acted to restore peace in Sierra
    Leone; the one 19 democracies in NATO embraced to stop ethnic cleansing
    in Bosnia and Kosovo; the one Asian and Pacific nations have now assumed
    in East Timor, with the strong support from the entire United Nations,
    including the United States.
        Secretary-General Annan spoke for all of us
    during the Kosovo conflict, and more recently in regard to East Timor,
    when he said that ethnic cleansers and mass murderers can find no refuge
    in the United Nations, no source of comfort or justification in its
    charter. We must do more to make these words real. Of course, we must
    approach this challenge with some considerable degree of humility. It is
    easy to say, ``Never again,'' but much harder to make it so. Promising
    too much can be as cruel as caring too little.
        But difficulties, dangers, and costs are not an argument for doing
    nothing. When we are faced with deliberate, organized campaigns to
    murder whole peoples or expel them from their land, the care of victims
    is important but not enough. We should work to end the violence.
        Our response in every case cannot or should not be the same.
    Sometimes collective military forces is both appropriate and feasible.
    Sometimes concerted economic and political pressure, combined with
    diplomacy, is a better answer, as it was in making possible the
    introduction of forces in East Timor.
        Of course, the way the international community responds will depend
    upon the capacity of countries to act and on their perception of their
    national interests. NATO acted in Kosovo, for example, to stop a vicious
    campaign of ethnic cleansing in a place where we had important interests
    at stake and the ability to act collectively. The same considerations
    brought Nigerian troops and their partners to Sierra Leone and
    Australians and others to East Timor. That is proper so long as we work
    together, support each other, and do not abdicate our collective
    responsibility.
        I know that some are troubled that the United States and others
    cannot respond to every humanitarian catastrophe in the world. We cannot
    do everything everywhere. But simply because we have different interests
    in different parts of the world does not mean we can be indifferent to
    the destruction of innocents in any part of the world.
        That is why we have supported the efforts of Africans to resolve the
    deadly conflicts that have raged through parts of their continent; why
    we are working with friends in Africa to build the Africa crisis
    response initiative, which has now trained more than 4,000 peacekeepers
    from 6 countries; why we are helping to establish an international
    coalition against genocide, to bring nations together to stop the flow
    of money and arms to those who commit crimes against humanity.
        There is also critical need for countries emerging from conflict to
    build police institutions, accountable to people and the law, often with
    the help of civilian police from other nations. We need international
    forces with the training to fill the gap between local police and
    military peacekeepers, as French, Argentine, Italian, and other military
    police have done in Haiti and Bosnia. We will work with our partners in
    the U.N. to continue to ensure such forces can deploy when they're
    needed.
        What is the role of the U.N. in preventing mass slaughter and
    dislocation? Very large. Even

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    in Kosovo, NATO's actions followed a clear consensus expressed in
    several Security Council resolutions that the atrocities committed by
    Serb forces were unacceptable, that the international community had a
    compelling interest in seeing them end. Had we chosen to do nothing in
    the face of this brutality, I do not believe we would have strengthened
    the United Nations. Instead, we would have risked discrediting
    everything it stands for.
        By acting as we did, we helped to vindicate the principles and
    purposes of the U.N. Charter, to give the U.N. the opportunity it now
    has to play the central role in shaping Kosovo's future. In the real
    world, principles often collide, and tough choices must be made. The
    outcome in Kosovo is hopeful.
        Finally, as we enter this new era, let our third resolution be to
    protect our children against the possibility that nuclear, chemical, and
    biological weapons will ever be used again.
        The last millennium has seen constant advances in the destructive
    power of weaponry. In the coming millennium, this trend can continue, or
    if we choose, we can reverse it with global standards universally
    respected.
        We've made more progress than many realize. After the collapse of
    the Soviet Union, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine courageously chose to
    give up their nuclear weapons. America and Russia have moved forward
    with substantial arms reduction. President Yeltsin and I agreed in June, even as we await Russian
    ratification of START II, to begin talks on a START III treaty that will
    cut our cold war arsenals by 80 percent from their height.
        Brazil has joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty, capping a process
    that has almost totally eliminated the threat of nuclear proliferation
    in Latin America. We banned chemical weapons from the Earth, though we
    must implement the commitment fully and gain universal coverage. One
    hundred and fifty-two nations have signed the Comprehensive Test Ban
    Treaty, and while India and Pakistan did test nuclear weapons last year,
    the international reaction proved that the global consensus against
    proliferation is very strong.
        We need to bolster the standards to reinforce that consensus. We
    must reaffirm our commitment to the NPT, strengthen the Biological
    Weapons Convention, make fast progress on a treaty to ban production of
    fissile materials. To keep existing stocks from the wrong hands, we
    should strengthen the Convention on Physical Protection of Nuclear
    Materials. And today, again, I ask our Congress to approve the
    Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
        We must stop the spread of nuclear weapons materials and expertise
    at the source. Since 1992, we have worked with Russia and the other
    nations of the former Soviet Union to do that. We are expanding that
    effort because challenges remain. But thus far, we can say that the
    nightmare scenario of deadly weapons flowing unchecked across borders,
    of scientists selling their services, en masse, to the highest bidder
    has been avoided. Now we must work to deny weapons of mass destruction
    to those who would use them.
        For almost a decade nations have stood together to keep the Iraqi
    regime from threatening its people and the world with such weapons.
    Despite all the obstacles Saddam Hussein has
    placed in our path, we must continue to ease the suffering of the people
    of Iraq. At the same time, we cannot allow the Government of Iraq to
    flout 40--and I say 40 successive U.N. Security Council resolutions and
    to rebuild his arsenal.
        Just as important is the challenge of keeping deadly weapons away
    from terrorist groups. They may have weaker capabilities than states,
    but they have fewer compunctions about using such weapons. The
    possibility that terrorists will threaten us with weapons of mass
    destruction can be met with neither panic nor complacency. It requires
    serious, deliberate, disciplined concern and effective cooperation from
    all of us.
        There are many other challenges. Today I have just spoken about
    three: the need to do something about the world's poor and to put a
    human face on the global economy; the need to do more to prevent killing
    and dislocation of innocents; the need to do more to assure that weapons
    of mass destruction will never be used on our children. I believe they
    are the most important. In meeting them, the United Nations is
    indispensable. It is precisely because we are committed to the U.N. that
    we have worked hard to support the management--effective management of
    this body.
        But the United States also has the responsibility to equip the U.N.
    with the resources it needs to be effective. As I think most of you
    know, I have strongly supported the United States meeting all its
    financial obligations to the

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    United Nations, and I will continue to do so. We will do our very best
    to succeed this year.
        When the cold war ended, the United States could have chosen to turn
    away from the opportunities and dangers of the world. Instead, we have
    tried to be engaged, involved, and active. We know this moment of unique
    prosperity and power for the United States is a source of concern to
    many. I can only answer by saying this: In the 7 years that I have been
    privileged to come here to speak to this body, America has tried to be a
    force for peace. We believe we are better off when nations resolve their
    differences by force of argument, rather than force of arms. We have
    sought to help former adversaries, like Russia and China, become
    prosperous, stable members of the world community, because we feel far
    more threatened by the potential weakness of the world's leading nations
    than by their strength.
        Instead of imposing our values on others, we have sought to promote
    a system of government, democracy, that empowers people to choose their
    own destinies according to their own values and aspirations. We have
    sought to keep our markets open, because we believe a strong world
    economy benefits our own workers and businesses as well as the people of
    the world who are selling to us. I hope that we have been and will
    continue to be good partners with the rest of you in the new millennium.
        Not long ago, I went to a refugee camp in Macedonia. The people I
    met there, children and adults alike, had suffered horrible, horrible
    abuses. But they had never given up hope because they believed that
    there is an international community that stood for their dignity and
    their freedom. I want to make sure that 20 or 50 or 100 years from now,
    people everywhere will still believe that about our United Nations.
        So let us resolve in the bright dawn of this new millennium to bring
    an era in which our desire to create will overwhelm our capacity to
    destroy. If we do that, then through the United Nations and farsighted
    leaders, humanity finally can live up to its name.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 10:35 a.m. in the Assembly Hall. In his
    remarks, he referred to United Nations General Assembly President Theo-
    Ben Gurirab; United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan; President
    Boris Yeltsin of Russia; and President Saddam Hussein of Iraq.