[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 38 (Monday, September 27, 1999)]
[Pages 1779-1784]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
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

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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.
    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

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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 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.

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    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 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

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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 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.

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    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; and President 
Saddam
Hussein of Iraq.