unitex@rubbs.fidonet.org (unitex) (10/12/89)
UN ASSEMBLY SESSION -- TAKE 2
Posting Date: 10/09/89 Copyright UNITEX Communications, 1989
UNITEX Network, USA ISSN: 1043-7932
The Acting President of the Assembly, ISACK MUDENGE (Zimbabwe),
called the meeting to order at 3:14 p.m.
ALEJANDRO SERRANO CALDERA (Nicaragua) said that mass
communication had made the world smaller; nothing that took
place failed to have world-wide significance.
The world had heard much lately about the expanding dialogue of
the super-Powers and the onset of a multipolar world. This was
to be celebrated, he said, but this political co-operation must
be completed with an economic co-operation.
World-wide development was required for human survival, he
continued. Peace could not coexist with misery, injustice and
exploitation.
Those who were trying to portray the changes that were taking
place in today's world and the new climate of detente as the
universal consecration of capitalist economics and political
liberalism, were committing a basic conceptual error, he said.
Nicaragua was a country that had endured three foreign military
occupations in this century and one in the last, and which had
carried out a revolution whose essence and reason for being was,
first and foremost, the recovery of identity, he said.
Nicaragua believed in representative democracy based on
universal suffrage, the rule of law and the separation of
powers. But, he said, democracy that was limited to normative
and institutional forms was a partial and relative democracy.
That was why, he went on, it was necessary to complete its
concept and practice with participatory democracy, in which all
members of society, and not just the privileged classes, had
access to the material and spiritual assets of the community.
In order for full democracy to be possible, it was necessary to
eliminate the use of force to attack others; the principles of
self-determination and sovereignty of the peoples must be
respected; and the norms of international law must be observed
and the rulings of the International Court of Justice obeyed, he
continued.
Democracy was hurt by the current system of international
economic relations, by unfair terms of trade, by prices paid in
world markets for goods produced by poor nations, and by trade
embargoes and other coercive economic measures used as
instruments of political pressure, he said.
It was dishonest, he continued, to judge others' faults while
poor peoples were being exploited through unfair terms of trade
and international economic relations, and while foreign debt and
unconscionable interest rates strangled peoples' survival.
Nicaragua had proposed that specialized international agencies
be entrusted with the task of verifying observance of human
rights in each and every one of the countries of Central
America, he said.
* Origin: UNITEX --> Toward a United Species (1:107/501)
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