UN General Assembly
1997

impossible choices. We are indeed hopeful that some of the latest initiatives that countries are in the process of taking bilaterally and the emerging trends encouraging renewed focus on Africa, such as the ministerial-level meeting of the Security Council convened last week, will help to increase the international community’s sensitivity to the development challenges of Africa. Genuine partnership is required to make sustainable development a reality in Africa. We hope that the Secretary-General next his report to the Security Council and the General Assembly next February, will forward concrete recommendations that would spare us a repetition of past disappointments. It may not always be appropriate to see an immediate causal link between poverty and lack of economic development, on the one hand, and conflict and lack of security, including terrorism, on the other. But there is little doubt that the despair, hopelessness and malaise engendered by poverty and economic and social difficulties provide the fuel for ensuring the degeneration into all-out fratricidal war of political frictions, whatever their sources, with consequent social breakdown and the implosion of societies.