However, before giving His Excellency the floor. I would like to make a first introductory statement on the occasion of today's assumption of the presidency of the conference by Chile. The first point I would Rke to make, is an expression of gratitude to the outgoing president Ambassador Christopher Westdal for the effort he has made for us to be able to get down to work. We have all been witness to his tireless energy and the service of achieving the necessary consensus to adopt the program of work of the conference. We have also bom witness to the soundness of his principles around the crucial issues of peace. Hence, to our gratitude I should like to add a personal tribute.

You are all very aware of the situation in which we are. At the plenary meeting last Thursday Ambassador Westdal did put before the conference an exhaustive analysis of his consultations on the program of work and some important conclusions, which are thought provoking. Among these conclusions he pointed out the difficulties to achieve agreement on this program. Chile is taking over the presidency of the conference for the first time. We joined the Conference of Disarmament in 1996. My country is convinced of the importance of this body as an instrument of the intemational community to generate better security conditions for all the inhabitants of the our planet. The value we attach to multilateral areas is well known. We believe that in these spaces or areas mankind has the ability to recognize the principle of equality of all its members and to grant the necessary dignities to their values and needs. Moreover, particularly when the issues that the multilateral world is to address have to acquire the legitimacy of argurnent over above the logic of force and power.

We have firm convictions in the area of intemational security and disarmament. These are structured on the basis of a guiding principle of human security and postulate the indivisibility of international security and its prevalence over the security requirements of individual states as our country has maintained at this same conference, national security cannot exist unless a nation and cannot be invoked to undermine that of others. We are also a member state of the Group of 21, which in its statements grants particular importance to nuclear disarmament. Hence we are interested in highlighting the validity and the need to observe the principle of irreversibility of both the nuclear disarmament process as well as the controlled and reduction of these weapons and other related armaments without prejudice to these clear convictions weIl known to all as a result of consistent diplornacy in these five years, Chile assumes this responsibility to render a service to all members of the conference and also to observer states. Hence, we shall be speaking less of what we believe. I intend to be very mindful and to listen to all of you and to try and be faithful interpreters of general sentiments.
As I do not belong to the world of disarmament experts I took pains to review the records of earlier years and I think it is very difficult to be original on problems that were recorded by all presidents assuming these brief but intense mandates. Indeed, these problems have been with us for some time now. The conference is steeped in a stalemate that cannot be protracted indefinitely without risking damaging its credibility and effectiveness. We know that the responses to the approval of a program of work must to a very large extent stem from the intemational environment, but at the same time we must wonder whether the conference itself has some sort of power to influence that environment. At the same time if the intemational community has acquired an intemational forum to negotiate disarmament issues, it is because it felt it necessary to establish a global forum where decisions are taken collectively. In other words the existence of the conference meets the need to provide a collective response to the requirement of permanent: stability and security, which are also of a global nature. In this challenge the entire intemational community has duties and rights in the interest of preserving a common good, a common heritage. Hence, the members to the conference, the parties to the conference have primary responsibility of the fate of the conference, whose existence and effectiveness we are all interested in preserving because ¡t is part of a process which is not easy to replicate and which we must have evolved to keep pace with the new times.

This does not mean that the president of the Conference on Disarmament would shirk his role. Quite the contrary, today more than ever he must be at its service placing his best efforts to help in the solution of the situation affecting us. This and the understanding that it will be difficult for the president to do or go beyond what the parties want to do. In other words, his nature as a facilitator should be understood in the context of the autonomy of the will of its members. Hence, no presidency can take from itself the responsibility that devolves him of all.

The stalemate around the program of work is a problem that is our problem, which I cannot solve just by myself. We must all make efforts to make progress. We'll be doing so on a basis of document CD/ 1624, which represents the culmination of a negotiating process and textual fine tuning that has brought us close to a consensus. The Amorim proposal, which in the report of the CD to the year 2000 general assembly has the support of the conference as a basis for new consultations configures a political heritage, which we shall carefully preserve. This is the best expression of a process, which has involved a large number of the presidents of the conference in recent years.

My mandate consists in pursuing those consultations and I thank all groups that have confirmed this notion. We shall also be exploring any and all ideas around complementary actions to the main report, which would enable us duly to tap the resources of the conference. I must however tell you that expressions such as Plan A or Plan B, which are graphic and attractive entail a danger by leading us to think these are altemative options. In fact, I think we have before us just one final destiny, the program of work. So I would prefer to talk about complementary actions and studying them as conference to the program of work. We shall try and listen to all and consult with all. We shall attempt to formulate and references to material as our consultations progress.
We believe in the democratization of intemational fora and we shall turn transparency and frankness into our main working tool. Finally, 1 just wanted to comment with the greatest respect to the efforts that are being made and have been made that to me a newcomer when 1 was sitting down that long queue that leads countries and some ambassadors to alphabetical vagaries as in my case the presidency, my impression was to be living a situation similar to the one described by an anarchist Spanísh. historian when he recounted the history of cities. According to him, men discussed and discussed over centuries and centuries and centuries until one day by consensus they decided to found the first city. Thank you.