Speech
of
His Excellency Fidel V. Ramos
President of the Philippines
At the 49th Anniversary of the United Nations and
Launching of the 50th Anniversary of the United Nations

[Delivered in Malacañang, Manila, October 24, 1994]

A peaceful home
for humankind

THIS AFTERNOON’S CEREMONIES are significant in two ways. First, as we do on the 24th of October of every year, we commemorate the foundation of the United Nations, which marks its forty-ninth anniversary this year.

Second, we mark the eve of the first half-century of the United Nations. Next year’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations will be bigger than this year’s, but the time for assessing the contributions of the U.N. system to world peace and prosperity begins today.

The vitality of the United Nations

It is a sign of the United Nations’ vitality—and, indeed, the continuing necessity for its existence—that its importance in global affairs has grown, rather than diminished, over the past half-century.

Unique among all the organizations and alliances that the nations of the world have entered into human history, the United Nations alone can claim to have survived this long and this well.

The United Nations has done this by ennobling every member-country with the dignity of a voice in the concerns of humankind—indeed, by identifying and upholding the universal interests of humankind above the national and changing interests of individual countries and governments, no matter how powerful.

It has mitigated brute power with reason and compassion; it has taken a firm stand on behalf of the poor, the oppressed and the disadvantaged everywhere, delivering to them the means by which they might deliver themselves.

Far from being merely a global bureaucracy, the United Nations, through its many agencies, has been an activist organization, intervening where and when necessary to ensure that no opportunity for peace and prosperity is wasted—and that the world and its peoples realize the full potentials of modernization.

And so today we congratulate the United Nations on its anniversary and, in so doing, we reaffirm the Philippine commitment to its founding principles, taking pride in our country’s intimate participation with the United Nations since its creation.

Filipinos on the United Nations

I am also honored to acknowledge the role that distinguished Filipinos have played within the United Nations system.

I recall that General Carlos P. Romulo, the late father of our present Secretary of Foreign Affairs, held the position of president of the Fourth United Nations General Assembly in 1949, and was also elected president of the Security Council twice, in 1957 and in 1980.

General Romulo’s lead was followed by many others, among them:

1 Justice Cesar Bengzon, who was a member of the International Court of Justice from 1967 to 1976;

2 Rafael Salas, who was executive director of the United Nations Fund for Population Activities in 1969 until his death in 1986;

3 Senator Leticia Ramos Shahani, who was United Nations assistant secretary general for Social Development and Humanitarian Affairs for several years;

4 Senator Blas Ople, who was president of the Sixtieth International Labor Conference in 1975;

5 Ambassador Domingo Siazon, who was director general of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization from 1985 to 1992;

6 Romeo Reyes, who was vice-president of the governing council of the United Nations Development Program in 1989;

7 Secretary Nieves Confesor, who was elected this year as chairperson of the International Labor Organization’s governing council.

These eminent Filipinos, we might say, and among many other countrymen and countrywomen, were both world-class and truly global citizens.

The U.N. and the Philippines

As we have contributed to the growth of the United Nations, so has the United Nations been vitally instrumental in Philippine development efforts.

The United Nations has been important for developing countries like the Philippines in two important ways:

One, it has served as the global forum where member states have equal rights to express their views on different issues.

Two, through its work of drafting and promulgating declarations, resolutions, conventions and treaties, the United Nations has symbolized “the common standard of achievement” provided for in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by which to gauge our own efforts toward securing the basic rights and freedoms of our people.

In the words of Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, who died in a plane crash while on a peacekeeping mission in the Congo in 1960, the United Nations has served as “the main platform—and the main protector of the interests—of those many nations who feel themselves strong as members of the international family but who are weak in isolation.”

But most important of all, the existence of the United Nations has prevented the recurrence of conflict on a global scale which twice ravaged the world.

We have the United Nations to be grateful for in bringing about conditions and circumstances in the international arena that have pushed, far into the background, the prospect of another world conflict and a nuclear holocaust.

The U.N. and human rights

Armed conflicts nevertheless continue. Their being confined to certain limited geographic areas has not taken any of the horror, misery and suffering that these have caused.

Some have said that the present conflicts are complex, intractable and traceable to their ancient roots in history. I would like to believe otherwise and attribute the underlying cause of these conflicts to the “disregard and contempt for human rights.”

These are words taken from the second preambular paragraph of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This document, almost fifty years old, remains the one universal and powerful standard against which we are called to measure ourselves in terms of protecting and promoting human rights and fundamental freedoms within our national societies and also within the context of our regional and international interactions.

The U.N.’s landmark achievements

The United Nations’ other landmark achievements in recent years have been the convening of the Conference on the Environment and Development in 1992, the drafting of the Convention on the Law of the Sea, which will enter into force next month, the convening of the Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993, and the Cairo Conference on Population, Sustained Progress and Sustainable Development last month.

The Philippines attaches great importance to all of these events and is actively engaged in all aspects of international cooperation with a view to implementing the provisions of these conventions and agreements.

To enable all Filipinos to realize the wider and fuller enjoyment of their human rights and fundamental freedoms, our Government is pursuing a program of people empowerment guided by three vital priorities.

First, poverty alleviation, because poverty is the single biggest obstacle to the enjoyment of these rights and freedoms;

Second, employment expansion, to provide the workforce with productive sources of livelihood and income, thus increasing the people’s range of choices;

Third, social integration, to enable all social groups to live and work together in productive harmony.

My Administration has set the target year of 2000 by which time the Philippines should have attained a level of social and economic development comparable to that enjoyed by the more vigorous economies of this region.

This development program will be realized democratically, for the benefit of the many and not just of the few, and through the integration in the process of the majority of the people.

Our commitment to human development

All of this is embodied in the Philippine Medium-term Development Plan for 1993-98. The Plan stresses this vital consideration: “The goal of economic development is to develop the human person and improve the quality of life.”

And here, the Philippines shares in the United Nations philosophy of human development, which sees development as more than a matter of economic growth, but as a process of enabling people to make better choices for themselves.

We have made this more explicit in our 1994 social reform agenda, consisting of the following main elements:

1 Ensuring quality services to meet basic human needs and to enable the people to live decent and productive lives;

2 Addressing inequities in the ownership, distribution management and control of productive resources and access to economic opportunities;

3 Adopting reforms in decision-making to enable effective citizen participation, either as individuals or through social organizations.

It is an agenda to put people, especially the poor, back in the center of development, both as beneficiaries and as actors. It is an agenda to effect a genuine democracy of means and opportunities among those who are most in need.

What the U.N. still must do

Because of its specific socioeconomic political conditions and because of its current stage of economic development, the Philippines would like to urge member-states of the United Nations to take positive steps preparatory to signing the International Convention on the Protection of Migrant Workers and Their Families.

The United Nations decade for the world’s indigenous peoples will start in December this year. This is of special significance to us Filipinos as nearly 20 percent of the population of the Philippines is composed of a wide diversity of indigenous communities and cultural groups. We consider them and their traditional ways of customs one of the country’s most valuable and irreplaceable resources. Some of these social groups have been living and interacting in harmony with the tropical rain-forest ecosystem since ancient times.

We value their knowledge and wish to incorporate their collective wisdom in the protection and judicious management of our natural resources. In this connection, we welcome the drafting of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and look forward to implementing them.

I pray that the era of global warfare lies irreversibly behind us and that limited armed conflicts will eventually be resolved, if not extinguished forever.

We cannot deny that national and regional competition and rivalries in international trade, economics and finance are still with us, and may even intensify. This has resulted in the existence of pockets of affluence in the developed countries on one hand and vast regions of poverty and abject misery in the developing countries on the other.

It will be the United Nations’ task to manage these rivalries and conflicts in an atmosphere of fairness and equity, without diminishing the salutary effects of economic competition fueled by private initiative.

Toward social and political harmony

I hope that another fifty years from now, when our great-grandchildren commemorate the centenary of the United Nations, they will take pride in the success of the United Nations not only in promoting and maintaining world peace, but also in its achievement of social and political harmony among its member countries.

Fellow citizens of the world: We live in challenging times, under conditions that put to the test our resolve to survive and to succeed—not only as citizens of our nations, but as the species privileged by the Almighty to exercise its dominion over our earth home and to be the main steward of its resources.

This requires of us that we think, feel and act as one humankind. In the United Nations, that spirit of oneness has found its home.

Let us do all we can to strengthen that shelter and that spirit.