INTERVENTION OF H.E. MR. M. MORSHED KHAN, MP,
THE HON'BLE FOREIGN MINISTER OF BANGLADESH AT THE MINISTERIAL MEETING OF THE NON-ALIGNED MOVEMENT

HAVANA, 13 SEPTEMBER 2006

Mr. Chairman,

Let me begin by congratulating you, Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque for chairing the Ministerial Meeting. I also take the opportunity to thank my esteemed friend Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar of Malaysia for his excellent leadership of the Movement during the past three years. Also, please allow me to convey our best wishes for the early recovery of President Fidel Castro.

I listened very carefully to your inaugural statement and the intervention of your esteemed predecessor and other colleagues. It leaves no doubt in my mind that we are all committed to making NAM more effective and action-oriented and uphold the cause of multilateralism.

Mr. Chairman,

This is the 21st century and NAM has to address the new and emerging challenges of this millennium. In my view, NAM must remain focused on the issue that affects the vast majority of us - the issue of poverty and economic deprivation. Our Movement must continue to be a powerful voice and exert moral influence on the international community to safeguard and promote our political, social and economic security. In this context, NAM will have to develop a mechanism that will ensure for it a more effective role in the functioning of the United Nations and other multilateral organizations.

Mr. Chairman,

Today, we are discussing the ways and means to revitalize the Movement and to give it a new sense of direction and purpose. For this, we would first need to take an inventory of our successes and failures. Only a dispassionate analysis of our past performance would give us the insight to make our Movement more purposeful and effective.

Our Movement, we would all agree, played a critical role in supporting the independence struggle of numerous African nations, in ending apartheid and in spreading the message of freedom, sovereign equality and peaceful co-existence. During the past four and half decades, we have been the voice of conscience, and the arbiter of reasons, in a world of power politics and high-handed maneuvers. The Movement can take pride in upholding the rights of individuals, as well as that of the member states. Our history has also witnessed confusions, schisms and wavering. Often, we failed to take a united stand against an act of aggression, either by a super-power or by a larger neighbor, even when it fundamentally undermined our ideals.

The Movement has also been largely reactive, not necessarily pro-active. A crisis either predated our existence or we waited for it to happen before we would act. There has been little effort, and also scope, on our part to pre-empt and prevent crises. This is true, not just for the Movement but also for the international community at large. Even when we managed to respond, our voice was often weak and divided, not because the responses lacked rhetoric and hyperbole, but because these did not come with a clear vision and a plan of action. This realization brings us to the topic of today's inter-active session.

Reinvigoration of the Movement would need more than mere self-criticism. It would require, more than anything else, our renewed commitment for an action-oriented approach. We must improve our collective capacity to analyze and assess current events because the outcome of an action-oriented approach would largely depend on how well we understand the problem. For collective capacity building, I propose, NAM should strengthen and vitalize its expert groups. I believe that there should be at least three such groups, each comprising no more than twelve members and they should be: 1. an expert group on political and security issues, 2. an expert group on economic issues, 3. an expert group on human rights issues.

We should agree on a mechanism as to how these experts would function and how they would contribute to facilitate the work of the Movement. I propose that member countries should nominate and finance their experts, given that the Movement does not have a standing fund to meet such expenses. I also propose, apart from their periodic reports, the Political and Security expert Group should develop an 'early warning system' to detect potential crisis and recommend appropriate course of actions. Likewise, the expert group on economic issues, in consultation with G-77 and China, should work to formulate a common NAM position for meetings such as the IMF-World Bank Annual Meetings, the Annual Bank Conference on Development Economics (ABCDE) and other international conferences on economic issues.

Mr. Chairman,

I read with great interest the guidelines proposed by the Cuban delegation. I fully agree that the Movement's work should not overlap or duplicate the mandate of G-77 and China. Taking this into consideration, paragraph VIII of the proposed Guidelines rightly identifies the economic issues pertinent to the Movement - Official Development Assistance, the external debt issue, preferential market access, transfer of technology and equitable distribution of benefits of globalization. Although these issues fall under broad economic headings, in reality, they all have strong political determinants. For example, how much ODA flows into a country is largely driven by political considerations and we must work together to resist unilateral imposition of political conditionalities in offering economic assistance. It is not the quantity rather the quality of foreign aid that matters. We must, for example, be vigilant to ensure that the bulk of economic assistance is not plowed back to the donor countries, in the form of consultants' fees and tied-procurements from the country providing the aid. Our experts should be able to develop a collective strategy to make foreign aid 'development-friendly'.

Please allow me to underscore two other points on official development assistance. First, our Movement should strive to improve the solidarity among the member states to prevent, what I call, the 'race to the bottom'. The donor countries often pit us against each other to force us accept detrimental and self-defeating conditionalities. This, we must resist. Our experts should develop and recommend a transparent set of criteria for accepting assistance from our development partners. This should be our 'code of conduct' and we should abide by it to prevent a 'divide and rule' policy of the developed countries. Secondly, we should adopt the concept of 'peer review' to assess our own development performance and not subject ourselves to politically motivated and divisive performance evaluations conducted by our development partners. The 'Peer Review' mechanism, which our experts should formulate, would help us learn from each other's experience in development and optimize the benefits of the development assistance.

Mr. Chairman,

On the question of protection and promotion of human rights too, our experts can play a critical role. The Movement's commitment to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and all other human rights instruments is unequivocal and unconditional. But, we also see human rights not just an end in itself, but also as a means to an end. The 'rights-based' approach to development shows a fundamental shift in our thinking. This means that we can no longer view human rights in absolute terms. It is rather an incremental process that can also facilitate development. Our expert group should identify the human rights parameters that support faster economic development. Protection and promotion of those rights should be our number one priority. Our Movement, in the coming days, can play the critical role of a catalyst to put peace and security, economic development and human rights in the perspective of a mutually reinforcing simultaneous equation. For this to happen we must act and we must act now.

Thank you.