YouSaid · the spoken record

Ralph GONSALVES

lines on the record: 229
first: 2004-09-24
most recent: 2023-09-24
sittings or episodes: 11
sources: un-general-debate

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It is an outrageous act of international irresponsibility that such an outmoded and increasingly illegitimate body is allowed to decisively insert itself into local and regional conflicts. Saint Vincent and the Grenadines is adamant that the Security Council must be reformed, and that the reform must be underpinned by the expansion of the Council in the permanent and non-permanent categories alike, with full regard for the legitimate aspirations of Africa and the necessary accommodations for small island developing States, 19 11-51360 which have valuable and creative perspectives on peacebuilding and conflict resolution. The International Year for People of African Descent, which was declared with much fanfare, is almost at an end.”
2011-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 66 (2011)
“In that regard, our dreams remain constantly unfulfilled. I am reminded of the poetic inquiry of Langston Hughes, an authentic voice of America, who asked simply this: “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore — And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over — like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?” Recent events in the streets of major cities around the world have probably answered Langston Hughes’ queries. Talk is cheap. We must get some action. It should be a source of alarm and international embarrassment that the composition of the Security Council is an ossified relic of the Second World War, seemingly immune to the modern realities of new countries and new global Powers.”
2011-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 66 (2011)
“Rio+20 will take place one decade after Mexico’s heralded Monterrey Consensus, in which developed countries committed themselves to the target of devoting 0.7 per cent of their gross national income to official development assistance to developing countries. Today, even accepting the liberal definitions and creative accounting used by some States to measure development assistance, developed countries are contributing only 0.32 per cent of their gross national income to official development assistance — less than half of the Monterrey target. We just have to make this better. We must do it right. It is just not good for us to be taken for a ride all of these years with all of these promises. It must come to an end sometime, and the world is changing. Let us get it right. It is our responsibility. Please.”
2011-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 66 (2011)
“Time is running out on the very existence of many countries in the face of rising oceans and increasingly intense storms. I am heartened that the President of the General Assembly has decided to place special emphasis on sustainable development and global prosperity during the current session. But the citizens of the world, and indeed many of its Governments, have lost faith in endless self-important summits that produce little in the way of tangible results. The archives of the United Nations are filled with grandiloquent declarations and outcome documents from summits whose commitments were forgotten even before representatives had boarded their planes to return home from their exotic venues. Next year, the issue of development returns to Latin America for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in Brazil.”
2011-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 66 (2011)
“I remain baffled by the intransigence of major emitters and developed nations that refuse to shoulder the burden for arresting the climate changes that are linked to the excesses of their own wasteful policies. As Hurricanes Irene and Katia crept northward to typically untouched cities in the United States and the United Kingdom, we in the Caribbean felt saddened at the extensive damage and tragic loss of life, which is an annual occurrence in our region. We can only hope that our now-common experiences can engender a level of solidarity and constructive engagement that will lead to binding and meaningful emissions reduction targets and the fulfilment of commitments on adaptation financing for vulnerable small island developing States.”
2011-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 66 (2011)
“The Caribbean region has a vested interest in this most urgent of matters. This year, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines was the subject of a United Nations resolution (65/136) that called upon the international community to provide assistance in the wake of Hurricane Tomas, which caused millions of dollars of damage in our region. While we are extremely grateful to the many countries that contributed generously to the emergency response, our national and regional recovery is far from complete. In the light of the welcome call by the President of the General Assembly to focus on disaster prevention and response during the current session, I remind the international community of our continuing recovery efforts and the ongoing vulnerability of small island developing States during the still active 2011 Atlantic hurricane season.”
2011-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 66 (2011)
“Small States need the fiscal and policy space to creatively spur development in ways that comply not with the checklists of discredited economic theorists, but with real-world particularities and people-centred policies. The international financial institutions have yet to sufficiently grasp this simple fact. The General Assembly must reassert its role in the response to the international economic crisis. In the early days of the global economic deterioration, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines played a leading role in the United Nations Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and its Impact on Development. Under the President’s leadership, the Assembly must now meaningfully follow up on the unfulfilled recommendations and mechanisms spelled out at that 11-51360 18 Conference.”
2011-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 66 (2011)
“Well into our third year of the international economic crisis, we can now declare that the tepid and timid responses of wealthy developed nations have failed to heal the global economy. The uncoordinated lurches from stimulus to austerity and back typify the confusion of the self-appointed premier forums of our international economic cooperation. The recovery that they prematurely declared was false and fleeting, and their counsel of patience and predictions of long-term recovery are cold comfort to the suffering peoples of countries that did not contribute to the crisis. In small, vulnerable and highly indebted middle- income economies such as ours, the economic debacle threatens to have debilitating and ongoing consequences. We cannot afford to wait for the promise of incremental or cyclical up-ticks in the global economy.”
2011-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 66 (2011)
“The macroeconomic and developmental consequences of this economic tornado are now painfully apparent, as is the terrible impact on the lives of individuals. The economic crisis has spurred rising global unemployment and poverty, and has engendered a feeling of hopelessness, especially among young people. The continuing fallout of the economic upheaval can be felt in streets and cities around the world and is a major contributor to the global unrest that has pitted disgruntled youths and others in violent opposition to Government forces, from Tottenham to Tripoli. Social unrest elsewhere beckons, in dozens of countries where neither the socio-economic conditions nor the political institutions can contain the enormous pressures much longer.”
2011-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 66 (2011)
“History has never been kind to such nakedly political crusades, and those who have sown the wind have invariably reaped the whirlwind of their bloody campaigns, long after the triumphalist glow has faded. Neocolonialist and imperialist adventures, however disguised, will never triumph before the bar of history over a people’s right to self-determination and the inalienable embrace of sovereignty. The ongoing global economic and financial crisis is a devastating storm that has shown no signs of abating. Economies the world over remain in peril, and none is immune from the widening and deepening fallout of this systemic crisis of ill-regulated financial institutions and the movement of capital. The effects of the international global and financial meltdown are now being felt well beyond the bottom lines of multinational corporations.”
2011-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 66 (2011)
“Too often, the difficult work of mediation, negotiation and peaceful resolution of disputes is prematurely abandoned in the search for a quick fix of militarism, brinkmanship or ill-advised unilateral action. The very drafters of hard-fought Security Council resolutions often cast aside the letter and spirit of those documents before their ink has dried, and the frenzied pursuit of a military solution to every dispute is sometimes sickeningly palpable. All too frequently, the loudest champions of expensive and unnecessary military action are those leaders of military Powers who sometimes seek to shore up sagging local political fortunes with bullets, bombs and the bodies of faceless foreigners in faraway lands.”
2011-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 66 (2011)
“The role that we collectively play in response to these howling gales will determine the contours of the post-crisis world and the relevance of this institution in that world. Will the international community shield the vulnerable from these winds? Will we harness their power for positive change? Or will we become little more than unnecessary weather forecasters, watching and warning about which way the winds blow, but never acting for the benefit of our peoples’ humanization? The President has wisely selected “The role of mediation in the settlement of disputes” as the theme of this general debate. That theme could not be more apt or timely.”
2011-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 66 (2011)
“They are blowing away the flimsy impediments to Palestinian statehood, and breathing fresh air into stagnant negotiating processes. The winds of change have howled across the sands of the Middle East and North Africa, reshaping long-held geopolitical assumptions. The grim economic storm clouds that formed ominously on our global horizon three years ago have yet to dissipate, and, indeed, seem to be multiplying. Natural disasters, climate change, and the accompanying non-metaphorical winds of hurricanes 17 11-51360 and tropical storms have buffeted my multi-island nation and my region yet again, upending our fragile economies and causing painful developmental setbacks. The United Nations finds itself in the eye of these increasingly turbulent geopolitical and socio-economic storms.”
2011-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 66 (2011)
“I am pleased to add my voice to the unanimous acclaim of His Excellency Mr. Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser as President of the General Assembly for this, our sixty-sixth session. A skilful and seasoned diplomat, he has played an integral role in establishing the State of Qatar as a central and crucial actor in international diplomacy. I have no doubt that he will approach his new responsibilities with similar dedication, even-handedness and compassion. In recent months the winds of change have encircled the globe, reaching and reshaping the unlikeliest corners of our planet, for good and for ill. Those winds have swept the nation of South Sudan into these hallowed halls as a welcome and esteemed new member of our global family.”
2011-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 66 (2011)
“Some States boast ownership of boundless territory, vast natural resources and potent firepower; but none of those factors by themselves, or a combination of all three, guarantee peace or prosperity. In some other States poverty, hunger conflict and disease are the norm. If, instead of investing in war — knowing its certain side effect of the waste of young, innocent lives — nations cooperated with each other, striving for ways to solve problems common to all, it is just possible that the world we bequeath to our children will be more peaceful and richer in the ways that matter and boasting cleaner air and a healthier environment. Internationally, and in our own countries, let us emphasize the power of love rather than the love of power. Let us extol not the rightness of power but the righteousness contained in our human condition.”
2004-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 59 (2004)
“Since Saint Vincent and the Grenadines became an independent State, it has had unbroken diplomatic 11 relations with the Republic of China on Taiwan. We see that country of liberty and democracy as a most important component of the magnificent Chinese civilization. Taiwan has the world’s seventeenth largest economy and the fifteenth largest trading volume internationally, and is third in the global ranking of the extent of foreign exchange reserves held. Taiwan’s 23 million people ought properly to be represented in this universal body by the Government of their choice. It is a mistake to continue to deny Taiwan international membership of organizations. The relations between Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Taiwan have been exemplary. Our friendship demands that we plead their just cause. I conclude with these observations.”
2004-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 59 (2004)
“It is the terrorism of war, poverty, illiteracy and disease, including HIV/AIDS. We must never forget, either, that daily hunger for 1 billion persons worldwide is truly a weapon of mass destruction. Together we must fight that terrorism too. Developed countries cannot allow trade regimes and market conditions to further impoverish the poor, as has been the case with banana farmers in the Caribbean, and still trumpet that they are helping the poor. The case for a judicious and balanced reform of the United Nations to better reflect the reality of the twenty-first century is unanswerably strong. We must redouble our collective efforts to persuade those who fear, unreasonably, the consequences of a just reform. We must not permit entrenched power to defeat right reason.”
2004-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 59 (2004)
“Since 11 September 2001, the fight against international terrorism has intensified on all fronts. It is right and proper that rich and poor countries be engaged in the ongoing war on the barbarism of terror. Saint Vincent and the Grenadines is a reliable partner in the global struggle against the evil of terrorism. Still, it is necessary for me to point out that the cost of being a reliable participant in that war is a heavy burden on the meagre resources of developing countries like Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Our international obligations and circumstances necessarily pull us into that war, which we did not occasion or initiate. Yet we bear that imposed burden with equanimity and pain. This body, however, must be reminded yet again that there is another terrorism that we must fight relentlessly.”
2004-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 59 (2004)
“The genocide of yesterday in Rwanda stands as a monument of shame to the international community. As an international community we must today take the shame out of our eyes in Darfur with urgent practical measures. A similar effort is required to address the harsh conditions of life of other peoples, including the heroic nation of Palestine, whose humanity is being daily assailed by outside forces. I would like to express, on behalf of the people of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, our deepest sympathy to the Government and people of the Russian Federation on the tragic and inexplicable events in Beslan on 3 September. A tragedy of that magnitude, and especially the slaughter of so many innocent children, cannot fail to cause heartfelt sorrow.”
2004-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 59 (2004)
“But the question we must nevertheless ask ourselves is this: has the international community reacted in an appropriate way to this calamity, or have we merely engaged in the usual perfunctory and routine denunciations? The images and reports coming out of Darfur are a chilling reminder of man’s inhumanity to man and a haunting condemnation of those who can truly help but who stand by idly or downplay this humanitarian disaster callously. In that regard, the Government of Sudan must shoulder its responsibility to its citizens and to humanity. Three months have gone by since I wrote to the Secretary-General, and this massive human tragedy continues to unfold before our appalled eyes. I suggest that we cannot allow the bloodbath to continue. We must save those who can still be saved in what have become the killing fields of Africa.”
2004-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 59 (2004)
“The death and destruction occasioned by Hurricane Jean in Haiti demand our humanitarian assistance, not our political engagement with the Haitian regime. The dire situation in the Darfur region of Sudan has caused great distress to the Government and people of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. My own personal grief prompted me to write letters in May of this year to several world leaders, including Secretary-General Kofi Annan, offering the slender resources of my country to assist in whatever small way we could to alleviate the suffering of the afflicted Sudanese people. Most of those I addressed responded positively. It is true that — thanks in large measure to the diligence of various journalists and the news media — this tragedy has now been brought forcefully to international attention.”
2004-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 59 (2004)
“The draft resolution presented by CARICOM to the Security Council was noted but politely ignored. The rest is history. The Government and people of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines are anxious to help the Haitian people in the sorry plight in which they currently find themselves. But before engaging politically with the so-called interim Government of Haiti, we must see, among other things, unequivocal evidence on the ground of advances in democracy and freedom and credible guarantees of free and fair elections within a reasonable time. A regime that tries an indicted murderer at midnight, one who was hailed by the very regime as a liberator, and then frees him before the first cock crows, has failed the most elemental tests of justice, freedom and democracy.”
2004-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 59 (2004)
“We saw an elected head of State removed in circumstances that bring no credit to our hemisphere. We remain deeply troubled by the controversial interruption of the democratic process that took place in the early hours of the morning of 28 February this year in Port-au-Prince. It is worth remembering that CARICOM States were instrumental in preparing a plan of Action for Haiti to ensure that the Constitution of that country was respected and to create the basis for a mobilization of resources to avert a humanitarian disaster. On 25 February 2004, CARICOM was successful in having the matter raised at a meeting of the Security Council. On that occasion, we went to the Council armed with a draft resolution. We pleaded for the 10 international community to respond to the rapidly deteriorating situation in Haiti.”
2004-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 59 (2004)
“Accordingly, the crisis in Grenada, occasioned by nature, prompts Saint Vincent and the Grenadines to give the highest priority to the international conference to be held in Mauritius in January of next year, when the specific and distinct problems of small island developing States will be highlighted. We will be stressing the need for the international community to take urgent action on the problem of global warming and climate change, which, if left unchecked, could lead to a global human and economic calamity in this century. The international community must become focused on the avoidance of that threatened apocalypse. Since we met here last year, the Caribbean Community has faced another crisis in our region — this time, a political one — as one of our member States, Haiti, descended into chaos, violence and anarchy.”
2004-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 59 (2004)
“That is a sort of vanity that we can ill-afford. It is tragic that it takes a catastrophe of this nature to hammer home the point that the small island developing States have been making for some time, namely, that there is a need for special and differential treatment because of, among other things, our vulnerability to natural disasters. I repeat, without exaggeration, that Hurricane Ivan, in a few short hours, reduced Grenada to rubble and, at a stroke, undid the hard work and achievements of its people since independence in 1974. We in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines feel their pain and know that, but for the grace of God and the vagaries of nature, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines would have suffered the same fate.”
2004-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 59 (2004)
“Simply put, Grenada has moved from the status of a middle-income developing country with a modern, sophisticated society and well run, democratic State machinery to a devastated land in a matter of three hours of pounding from hurricane Ivan. Today in Grenada there is no functioning economy and a highly traumatized civil society. Arising from all that is a strategic issue in our quest to turn Grenada’s setback into a regional advance for a more profound and meaningful Caribbean integration. Hurricane Ivan has spoken eloquently to the fact that nature has made our region one. History has further moulded us as one people who were drawn originally from diverse lands and cultures. Yet we in the Caribbean continue to buck, rather than accommodate ourselves appropriately to, both nature and history.”
2004-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 59 (2004)
“We offer our profound condolences to the families and loved ones of those who have died in the hurricanes. Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and other Caribbean nations have reached out a helping hand to Grenada, but the magnitude of the devastation in that country on 7 September is beyond the capacity of the Caribbean to address satisfactorily by itself. Indeed, Grenada has become an international responsibility. I therefore reiterate the call of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) for the urgent convening of an international donors’ conference to address the matter of Grenada’s utter devastation and its reconstruction.”
2004-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 59 (2004)
“President, on your assumption of the presidency of the fifty-ninth session of the General Assembly. We are confident that you will perform your duties with dignity and skill. Let me just say that you have a hard act to follow. Your predecessor, our Mr. Julian Hunte, is a distinguished son of the Caribbean who hails from our sister island, Saint Lucia. He made us proud in his role as President of the General Assembly. The peoples of the Caribbean and the southern United States are still traumatized by the devastation caused by hurricanes this season. Jamaica, the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, Haiti, Cuba and other Caribbean countries, including my own, have been severely affected. But our nearest neighbour, Grenada, has suffered cataclysmic destruction and is now in a state of national crisis.”
2004-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 59 (2004)
“The fifty-ninth session of the General Assembly coincides with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the independence of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. The last quarter of a century has presented a mighty challenge for the people of my country: to develop in a world increasingly indifferent to the particular problems of small, poor, developing States. But it is a challenge that the citizens of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines have embraced with courage, fortitude and hope — 9 never doubting our ability to survive, thrive and ultimately prosper as we contribute to the uplifting of our unique, independent, distinctive and noble Caribbean civilization. Our country has made progress thus far, but much more remains to be done. We look forward to succeeding in our quest for self-mastery. I would like to congratulate you, Mr.”
2004-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 59 (2004)