STATEMENT BY VARTAN OSKANIAN AT THE 62ND SESSION OF THE UN GENERAL ASSEMBLY
ArmRadio – Public Radio, Armenia
Oct 4 2007
Speaking at the 62nd Session of the UN General Assembly, Mr. Vartan
Oskanian, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic Of Armenia,
said:
"Mr. President,
Each opportunity to speak from this podium is a humbling experience,
knowing that every country in the world is listening to the other,
trying to discern where common approaches and interests lie.
Those of us representing small countries have a sense that this is
the forum where large states address the ills of the world, and we,
smaller ones, ought to adhere to topics that are specific to us,
to our regions. As if, addressing overarching, global issues would
be pretentious, and they are best left to those with the power to do
something about them.
This is my 10th year here, and I will risk breaking that unwritten
rule. This year, as financial calamities have compounded political
and natural disasters, it is so evident that although our common
problems and challenges threaten us all equally, they affect us
unevenly. Small countries, with less of everything – diversity,
resources, maneuverabilitiy, options and means – are at greater peril,
greater risk, greater vulnerability than those with bigger territory,
larger population, greater potential.
At the same time, the major political, social and environmental issues
on this Assembly’s agenda – peace and security, economic growth and
sustainable development, human rights, disarmament, drugs, crime,
international terrorism – know no borders. None of us can tackle them
individually if we expect to resolve them effectively.
Their solutions are in our common interest. The problems are vast
and touch all of humanity. Because they cannot be solved within our
borders alone, does not mean anyone has the right, or the luxury,
to abdicate responsibility for their consequences.
When the speculative market drives the price of a barrel of oil to
$80, those too small to have significant reserves are more quickly
affected. And just as large countries with huge appetites for fuel
make deals sometimes inconsistent with their politics, so do we. For
us, energy security is much more than a matter of global arithmetic;
it’s a matter of life and death.
When climate change causes significant environmental transformation,
it doesn’t take much for prolonged droughts and excessive rains to
harm our agriculture and damage our economy, or for rising shorelines
to reach our cities. But we lack the diversity and the space to adapt
and cope.
When it is news that there are no explosions in Iraq, and when large
scale destruction is a daily occurrence, we in small countries become
more keenly aware of our vulnerability and susceptibility to the will
and capacity of the international community, to their tolerance for
distant violence and humiliation.
When development depends on an absence of bad weather, disease and
war, and when the capacity to ward off at least two of those three
ills lies in the hands of those with huge ability to heal and to make
peace, small countries are at risk and helpless.
When disarmament and arms control cease to be the means to world
peace, and instead become the means to score political dividends,
small countries resort to their own means of self-protection. In
other words, we become part of the problem, because the solution is
neither straightforward, nor within reach.
When Darfur becomes shorthand for hopelessness, we in the small
corners of the world realize that power has become a substitute
for responsibility. The ubiquitous language of human rights cannot
compensate for political will. Genocide must be prevented, not
commemorated. Generation after generation, we find new names for man’s
appalling tolerance for what we think are inhuman machinations, new
names for the places of horror, slaughter, massacre, indiscriminate
killing of all those who have belonged to a segment, a category, an
ethnic group, a race or a religion. Nearly 100 years ago, for Armenians
it was Deir-El-Zor. For the next generation, it was Auschwitz, then
the killing fields of the Cambodians. And most recently Rwanda. If
in each of those cases, together with genocide, these names evoked
ignorance, helplessness, wartime cover, today Darfur is synonymous
with expediency, evasion and simple inconvenience. Darfur is synonymous
with shame.
My appeal, on behalf of small countries, is that the international
community tackle each of these problems in their own right, for
their own sake, and not as pieces in a global power puzzle. When
tensions among the world’s great powers grow, there is an increase in
polarization and a decrease in the effectiveness of the hard-earned
— and costly — policies of complementarity and balance of small
countries. Our own room to maneuver, to participate in global
solutions, diminishes.
But Mr. President and colleagues, let me say the obvious. We rely
on the ability of global powers to put aside their own short-term
conflicts and divergences and to recognize that their power and
influence does not make them immune to the range of problems that
afflict us. It also does not make them immune from the impact of the
failure of appropriately using that power and influence – for the
good of humanity.
Mr. President,
Last year we celebrated 16 years of Armenia’s independence, we have
weathered sea changes, and been swept up in regional and global
developments which daily affect our lives.
We can only be proud of what we’ve accomplished — an open, diversified
economy, high growth, strong financial systems; also, improved
elections, stronger public institutions, a population increasingly
aware of its rights. This makes us more determined to solve the
remaining economic ills – uneven growth, rural poverty and low wages –
and further empower people and deepen the exercise of democracy.
We’ve done all this despite a still unresolved conflict and artificial
restrictions, and in the absence of regional cooperation.
The Nagorno Karabakh conflict is included on the agenda of this
General Assembly session under the topic of protracted conflicts. But
Mr. President any resolution that places all conflicts in one pot
is necessarily flawed. Each of these conflicts is different. The
Nagorno Karabakh conflict doesn’t belong there. This issue should
not be discussed at the UN, because it is being negotiated in the OSCE.
First, the Nagorno Karabakh conflict is not frozen. We continue to
negotiate and we are inching towards resolution. Second, there is
a well-developed negotiating document on the table, based not on
wishful thinking, but on the core issue and the consequential issues.
Together, they add up to a balanced solution. Third, at the core
of the process lies the issue of the right of the people of Nagorno
Karabakh to determine their own future. Indeed, the people of Nagorno
Karabakh don’t want anything that is not theirs – they want a right
to live in peace and security and to determine their own future,
they want to exercise the right that every people here has exercised
at some point in their history.
Mr. President, we follow very closely developments on Kosovo. We
hear the international community loud and clear, that Kosovo cannot
be a precedent for other conflicts. While we have no intention to use
Kosovo as a precedent for our conflict, since that would contradict our
own position that all conflicts are different. But at the same time,
we won’t understand or accept the reverse logic – that if Kosovo is
given independence, no other people can achieve self-determination. No
one should tell us that there is a quota on liberty and security.
Mr. President, at the end of the day, small countries’ awareness of
and place in global processes cannot, will not, substitute for those
with extensive resources and the political will and ability to act.
In this age of openness and inclusion, there is no room for the old
instruments of coercion and exclusion. Instead, the new instruments
of compromise and consensus are necessary to reach humanity’s enduring
goals of peace and prosperity."