Background
The First Committee (Disarmament and International Security) met this morning to continue its general debate on the whole range of arms limitation and security arrangements.
Statements
RAFTAM MOHD ISA (Malaysia) said 2003 was a significant year in disarmament terms because it marked the 25th anniversary of the first special session of the General Assembly devoted to disarmament. However, that was no cause for celebration, since so little had been achieved. In that context, he referred to the United States’ war against Iraq, which had failed to uncover the alleged weapons of mass destruction; the withdrawal of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT); and the dismal performances of the Disarmament Commission and the Conference on Disarmament.
To counter the lack of progress in the field of disarmament, he suggested the building of mutual trust between States, and he stressed that such trust could only be achieved if States actually adhered to the treaties and conventions to which they were parties. There was no room for selectivity and double standards. Acknowledging that all States agreed that the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction constituted a serious threat to humanity, he emphasized that there was no such thing as “good proliferation.” Recognizing that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had a verification mechanism at its disposal, he stated that political will was required to ensure that such mechanisms worked properly.
Turning to his region, he expressed its commitment to nuclear disarmament, and told delegates that his country would continue negotiations within the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) to establish a nuclear-weapon-free zone there. After all, international peace and security could not advance without progress in the field of disarmament. He also stressed that it was important for favourable conditions to exist, in order for States to follow the provisions of the United Nations Charter and actively work towards disarmament. In that regard, an international commitment to multilateralism was essential. Addressing the recent talk of revitalizing the General Assembly, he said the First Committee should also be energized.
STEPHEN RADEMAKER,
United States Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, said that the First Committee must shape itself into an effective multilateral body –- one that was relevant to the security threats of today and of the future, and that could meaningfully enhance international peace and security. In order to do so, members must be prepared to make some hard choices regarding the agenda and the way in which they did business. The session was taking place at a crossroads for multilateral arms control. In one direction lay the old cold war-era thinking that had paralysed achievable and practical progress in the disarmament field for far too long.
He said that in today’s dangerous times too many nations still oriented themselves by the anachronistic coordinates of the past. The results had been years of “disappointing drift and growing irrelevance”. In seeking to address today’s challenges, too many nations continued to rely on the machinery endorsed a quarter of a century ago by the First Special Session of the General Assembly Devoted to Disarmament (SSOD I), with no consideration of how to adapt that machinery to address new and emerging threats.
The old direction had also led to impasses and deadlocks, which had become routine in some multilateral arms control forums, he said. It had become nearly impossible to deal with a given arms control or disarmament issue without facing demands that other unrelated subjects be dealt with on an equal basis and at the same time. Recently, the Conference on Disarmament showed signs that its work programme stalemate could be lifted. That was encouraging. Obviously, seven years of inactivity there had wrought damage to the reputation of the Conference.
He said that some believed that the objective of consensus was to ensure that all proposals had equal weight, or were made to be equally acceptable. That kind of thinking proved itself repeatedly during the cold war and beyond to be a “recipe for inaction and failure”, as subjects that did not enjoy consensus simply should not, and could not, be given equal standing, let alone priority over subjects that did enjoy consensus. Attention should be paid to those issues that could command consensus now. Both of those factors, cold war thinking and linkages to non-consensus items, contributed to the failure of the Disarmament Commission last spring to reach consensus on either of its two agenda items.
Now more than ever, as the world faced the many new challenges to international peace and security, the question was whether the United Nations and the international disarmament machinery could still make a contribution, or whether it would be left behind. “We must work to ensure that this Committee takes the road less travelled and becomes, once again, an effective multilateral forum”, he said. The United States did not believe in multilateralism for its own sake. Rather, it was committed to an effective multilateralism properly targeted at today’s security threats, contributing in real ways to enhancing international security, and free of political linkages or outmoded cold war icons.
Listing a few examples of the continued commitment of the United States to effective multilateralism in the field of arms control and non-proliferation, he sited support for efforts to strengthen the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), including efforts to strengthen the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); its own meeting of obligations under Article VI of the NPT, which concerns nuclear disarmament; its leadership to pursue alternative approaches to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention; its very active role in efforts to ensure effective implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention; its active participation in the 2003 Group of Governmental Experts on the United Nations Register of Conventional Arms; and a leading role in meetings to subject anti-vehicle landmines to the same restrictions as anti-personnel landmines.
He said that, in various relevant forums, the United States had raised its concerns about non-compliance and had “named names”. It had consistently urged the Security Council to act on last February’s referral by the IAEA Board of Governors of North Korea’s violation of the NPT, and it had been disappointed with the Council’s failure to act on that matter. It was also working with members of the IAEA Board to support thorough inspections that addressed the many serious outstanding questions regarding the scope and nature of Iran’s clandestine nuclear activities.
Continuing, he said that the mass of evidence arrayed against Iran in the IAEA Director General’s past two reports led to the “unequivocal conclusion” that Iran was in violation of its Safeguards Agreement and was working hard to cover up that “pattern of covert non-compliance”, he said. In September, the Board gave Iran a final opportunity to redress its behaviour before its non-compliance was reported to the Security Council. The Board found that it was “essential and urgent” for Iran to remedy its failure and fully cooperate with the IAEA by the end of the month. No one should doubt that it was hard cases, such as North Korea and Iran, which would ultimately determine the degree to which multilateralism would remain relevant to the security challenges of the 21
st century.
Terrorists and non-state actors seeking access to weapons of mass destruction, as well as the sponsors of such terrorism, was the other paramount threat to global security. Unfortunately, no civilized nation was immune from the barbarity of terrorism. Those who would direct attacks against innocent civilians with conventional weapons should be assumed to be equally willing to commit atrocities with weapons of mass destruction –- a prospect that convinced the United States that that problem must be challenged on every front and defeated in an effective, hopefully multilateral way. The international community had no time to spare, and no margin for error in that endeavour.
