ADRESS BY

New York, September 8, 2000

Mr. President

We are here to represent our peoples, 6 billion human beings.

We are ail equal but different, united by the common thread of our natural rights, which can be summarized in a rather simple formula: we shouldn't do unto others, what we do not want done to us.

To transform this formula into reality, we Uruguayans have shared throughout the 20th Century in All initiatives aimed at organizing the life of the peoples along the lines of peace and freedom.

Already in 1906, at the Peace Conference in The Hague, our country proposed mandatory arbitration as a means of settling disputes. Later we became Members of the League of Nations. We were founding members of the United Nations and participated in the core group of drafters of its Charter. We were the first to accept the compulsive jurisdiction of the International Court. of Justice and from 1952 to this day have without interruption participated in U.N. peacekeeping missions and operations.

The United Nations Charter is a font of unquestionable political wisdom. To uphold it in good faith and without duplicity is our greatest challenge. If we were to act that way, many of our problems would be reduced or vanish.

Maintaining the peace and poverty reduction are fundamental goals of the international community. But war, violence and poverty are the effects of deep rooted causes. We will not honor our commitments simply by addressing these effects. What it is essential to address the causes.

Freedom is indivisible. There will not be political freedom if all other freedoms do not exist at the same time.

Throughout their lives, human beings organize themselves into societies, building families, assuring the continuity of the species, imbuing their children with shared moral values and applying their energy and talent to multiple forms of work.

When this vital of the human family is frustrated because its are not allowed to reach the world markets, the nations weaken. are impoverished, become - easy prey to demagogy, lies, injustice, backwardiness, and sink into violence, as we have witnessed so many times throughout the past century.

That is why one of the most important tasks of the United Nations in the next millennium must be to guarantee our right to create and to produce, as well as our right to offer and to sell our products. Free trade, so much talked about and so little practiced, is more necessary than ever in a planet made smaller and much more interdependent by globalization.

Our region and Uruguay within it, already underwent a period of globalization, during the so-called Atlantic civilization, in the second half of the 19th Century and beginning of the 20th. It was useful for everybody. We grew and consolidated in it the existence of a nation where equity, justice and freedom prevail.

That globalization had one great advantage. Markets were opened to the fruits of our labor -and to the products of our land. Today, the reality is different, and that is a negative factor in the lives of our peoples.

This Assembly is the great Assembly of the peoples that we, the Heads of State and Government, represent. It is in this forum, the highest and the most representative, that we must make the decisions and undertake the commitments that will determine our future life and the life of future generations.