UNESCO. General Conference; 30th; Records ... - unesdoc - Unesco

I would also like to express my gratitude to the Director-General of UNESCO for having taken action in
accordance with 29 C/Resolution 14 to include the World Solar Programme in the regular budget of UNESCO
and to transform it into an interdisciplinary programme. These measures will go a long way towards ensuring the
effective implementation of the World Solar Programme.
6.9 Madam President, we hail the Executive Board’s decision to include in the current session of the
General Conference an item on “The transatlantic slave trade and slavery: a crime against humanity”. This is a
very important issue to which we hope the General Conference will give serious consideration. The transatlantic
slave trade will remain a glaring example of man’s inhumanity to man. It is one of the greatest man-made
disasters to affect Africa. It led to an enormous loss of life and destroyed budding civilizations. It created some of
the negative racial attitudes which we still witness even to this day. While Africa can forgive, she cannot forget
this sad chapter in her history. UNESCO has thus taken a very important step by making this issue part of the
agenda of the General Conference. We earnestly hope that this Conference will lay bare the full spectrum of the
destructive consequences this practice has had on our continent.
6.10 I now wish to revert to my earlier allusion to the culture of peace. A culture of peace can no longer be
seen as the absence, merely the absence, of conflict between States. It is above all a question of values, attitudes
and individual and collective behaviour that will ultimately create the spirit of peace, tolerance and democracy.
UNESCO must be commended for its efforts to build and strengthen this idea, which has become a guiding
beacon for the entire United Nations system. We are concerned that the new millennium may not successfully
mark the transition from the prevailing culture of war to a culture of peace should the glaring asymmetries
between rich and poor nations, as well as between the rich and the poor within nations, persist. It is not only sad
but totally unacceptable that despite our serious and concerted efforts to better ourselves, we in the developing
countries continue to suffer declining official development assistance, declining terms of trade, a resurgence of
protectionism on the part of the developed world, and a ballooning and excruciating foreign debt burden.
External resource flows into our African continent have largely been in the form of official development
assistance, ODA. It is sad, therefore, to note that this assistance fell from US $14.2 billion in 1992, to
US $12.8 billion in 1996, and continues to decline progressively to this very day. While the United Nations
General Assembly set, in 1974, an ODA target of 0.7% of the GNP of donor countries, a mere 0.25% has on
average been made available. The net effect of all these developments is that ODA has fallen far short of the
US $30 billion per year which some economists estimate is necessary for the eradication of poverty in Africa.
6.11 Alongside these sad developments, Madam President, is Africa’s increasing debt burden. While we
welcome relief measures like the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative, we observe that these are
not only inadequate in themselves, but are also coming in rather too late. The ultimate effective solution lies in
the summary cancellation of this debt. Indeed, we are concerned that, should Africa enter the new millennium
with this crippling debt burden, the prospects for peace and development will also continue to be elusive. Such
patterns of economic growth, which perpetuate existing inequalities, are neither sustainable nor worth sustaining.
These asymmetries at a global and national level, which lead not only to poverty and exclusion but also to
inhuman conditions of life, are, as a UNESCO report says, the origin of the conflicts which haunt many parts of
the globe today. A recently released report by the United Nations shows that the assets of the three richest
families in the world now exceed the combined gross national products of all the least developed countries and
that if the world’s 200 richest persons each donated only 1 per cent of his or her wealth per year, they could
ensure access to primary education for every child in the world. If this is the kind of world in which we live
today, can we seriously hope for a transition from a culture of war to a culture of peace? Can we hope to build
the defences of peace in the minds of women and men who are poor, uneducated and hungry? Can we teach them
the values of democracy when they lack the basic needs which are taken for granted by their counterparts in the
developed world and by a very small minority in their own countries?
6.12 Africa has been responding to the multifarious challenges facing it on the eve of the third millennium.
Thus, for instance, subregional cooperation arrangements have been put in place, in line with the continent’s
Lagos Plan of Action. These subregional arrangements are the building blocks for the envisaged African
Economic Community which we now expect to attain by the year 2030 – and will comprise the Maghreb Union,
the Economic Community of West African States, the Inter-Governmental Authority for Development, the
Common Market for East and Central Africa and the Southern African Development Community. It is our earnest
hope that the Community that will emerge by 2030 will be sufficiently buoyant to enable our continent to
confront successfully the risk of marginalization that the process of globalization poses.
6.13 Further, Madam President, we have also carried out positive and forward-looking initiatives in our
continent’s efforts towards the prevention and management of conflicts. It was in this spirit, therefore, that we set
up, at the continental level, the Organization of African Unity’s Mechanism for the Prevention, Management and
Resolution of Conflicts and, at the subregional level, the Southern African Development Community’s Organ on
Politics, Defence and Security. Zimbabwe is greatly honoured to be the current chair of this subregional entity. In
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