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) --- Patt Haring | United Nations | Did u read patth@sci.ccny.cuny.edu | Information | misc.headlines.unitex patth@ccnysci.BITNET | Transfer Exchange | today? -=- Every child smiles in the same language. -=-