UN General Assembly
1994

I wish to congratulate the President on his appointment to this highly responsible and important post. My delegation will work constructively with him during the course of this, the forty-ninth session of the General Assembly of the United Nations. Since the end of the Second World War, the fiftieth anniversary of which we shall be celebrating next year, the world has been engaged in peace-building. It has been a long road, and it has not been without its dramatic moments. Over the past half century the world has come to the brink of nuclear war many times. Now, with the end of the cold war, with the dissolution of the bipolar world, a new challenge has arisen in the shape of a series of wars and conflicts based on ethnic and religious intolerance that have exploded in many different areas of the world. In his report "An Agenda for Peace" the Secretary General spoke of the concentration of efforts towards preventive diplomacy, of steps for increasing international confidence-building and achieving early recognition of