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Mr President, on this commemoration of International Women’s day and the seventh anniversary of the entry into force of the Mine Ban Convention, may I thank you and colleagues for the kind words that you have said about me and my country.
It has been a sobering experience attending the Conference on Disarmament these past four years. It has often seemed to me that we are more concerned to air our differences than we are to find common ground. This is all the more perplexing if one accepts that the element we have most in common is our concern for something as fundamental as our very national and collective security.
Mr President, I would like to be able to say in my final report to my Government as I complete my assignment today that slowly but surely we are getting to grips with that verity. Whether this is because collectively we have come to accept that the viability of this Conference is on the line or because several frustrated countries like mine laid down our particular challenge during the 60th General Assembly of the United Nations, is not important. What is important is that this Conference has begun to take its own future much more squarely in its hands.
To my mind, evidence of a new sense of purpose is beginning to accumulate. It includes these factors:
1 Informal recognition throughout last year of the need for continuity between successive Presidents has found much more concrete expression in the collaboration that has already occurred this year;
2 The development of a timetable for the entire working year represents a small but practical way in which to underpin this new Presidential continuity and at the same time help us to change up a gear in the CD;
3 The increased level of engagement and the tone of that engagement on all sides demonstrates, it seems to me, a new readiness to put not only the barren years behind us but a conscious effort across the membership to begin to try to compensate for the absence of an outcome on disarmament and arms control at last year’s Summit of the United Nations;
4 The greater frequency with which we are meeting in this Chamber and our readiness to hold our discussions on the record of the Conference augurs well for our future;
5 There seems to me also to be more widespread acceptance that the integrity of the CD depends not simply on how often we meet or how often we speak or how formal or well structured our debates are or how flexibly we task our Friends of the President but on what the results of this increased activity are;
6 And I sense that we are becoming progressively more relaxed about the latitude we allow our Presidents in exercising their presidential prerogative. This flows logically from the greater degree of co-ordination amongst successive presidents.
We must ask ourselves whether it also represents an increased level of trust in one another. I hope so.
These are perhaps small beginnings, but cumulatively they may help us overcome our comparative lassitude and develop some momentum. We are coming to this Chamber not just to listen but to interact. I am more hopeful than at any time during the past four years that the rhetoric that has marked our sessions is giving way to pragmatism. That as much as we would like to give prominence to the core or other issues to which we are particularly attached, we will have to proceed on a narrower front and in a more graduated way.
The litmus test of such momentum and pragmatism will lie in our collective readiness to bring more transparency to our proceedings, to greater inclusiveness of civil society including, I must say, access to our Chamber for authors of the annual Women’s Day address, and to our ability to put flesh on the bones of what - at the working level- we mean by “confidence building measures”.
And, more speculatively, I would hope that we would try to think of how we couch our programme of work in more simple terms than we have done in the past. We may not be able to develop a work programme that is devoid of constructive ambiguity, but that should not stop us from trying a minimalist approach to see whether we can find a way forward.
To my mind a pragmatic programme of work is one that entails two parallel but not necessarily equal activities. The first is the negotiation of a treaty dealing with fissile materials in a subsidiary body whose mandate will be to draft and adopt an effective agreement to secure discontinuation of the production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons or other explosive devices. I haven’t used the words “without preconditions” because they in themselves are conditional. We believe that FMCT is ripe for treatment because of the negotiating status given to it in the most widely supported proposals for our work programme.
The second parallel activity is the discussion of mandates primarily but not exclusively for subsidiary bodies on nuclear disarmament, PAROS and negative security assurances. These discussions would be allocated such time as was necessary to ensure the effective treatment of these issues while leaving sufficient time for comprehensive and effective treatment of the first activity.
In other words, we would essentially rely on our negotiating skills after the adoption of the programme of work rather than, as now, trying to be overly prescriptive in advance. If it transpires that our latent energies are not consumed in negotiating a FMCT as a new vehicle for nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation, then it stands to reason that we will want to intensify our efforts on PAROS, NSAs or other aspects of nuclear disarmament.
I readily concede that this approach may be simplistic but is it illogical? We would like to hear a contrary view if there is one. In any event, the choice for the CD, it seems to my country, is getting down to work quickly on the basis of a simple recipe or becoming irrelevant. Given our collective investment in our national and international security, the latter prospect is one that is surely unthinkable. When I said earlier that our future is in our hands, I did not do so lightly.
For my part I will continue to be more than an interested observer in the work of the Conference. I thank all colleagues and all those who underpin our work so expertly for their camaraderie and support during my time as New Zealand’s representative to the CD.
