UN General Assembly
2008

The challenges that we have to tackle immediately are numerous. They are related to peace, security, and threats to people’s lives and to nations, heightened by the food, energy and financial crises, as well as natural disasters and climate change. By placing emphasis on the notion of solidarity, which we fully support, you have certainly illustrated, Mr. President, the risk we run of losing our identity, an option that can only offer partial, even uncertain, solutions to the challenges that confront us. Here, we reaffirm that the United Nations offers us the ideal framework to work together in search of lasting solutions. That is the meaning underlying our ongoing attachment to multilateralism. Recent events in different parts of the world, particularly in Europe, remind us that peace and security rest on a fragile foundation, even where such matters seem to have been solved definitively. Africa, still at the heart of the concerns of the international community and top of the agenda of the Security Council because of the conflicts that continue to jeopardize progress and to hinder implementation of