Reaching Critical Will

Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)

Conference on Disarmament

General Assembly First Committee

UN Disarmament Commission

Special Session on Disarmament

Statement by Ambassador Johannes Landman of Netherlands
to the Conference on Disarmament 3rd June 2008

Unofficial Transcript

Thank you Mr. President and welcome back.

Mr. President, when I took the floor in this hall for the first time in August 2006, I asked for more light, actually quoting Goethe when he was about to enter the hereafter. But amazingly, indeed something new happened, new approaches were found, allowing us so it appeared to make progress. A new era in which every member state seemed to engage in, and at the end of this whole process, in which remarkable diplomatic perseverance and ingenuity was invested and spent, we came very close to an agreement on a program of work dealing more or less simultaneously with four core issues, clearly felt to be at the heart of the disarmament agenda in our global village which is the tightly interconnected world of today.

However, what do we see now? The momentum is slipping at an incredible pace and we are in obvious danger of staying empty handed, as if nothing has happened in the last two and a half year. Worse, for the outside world and now so again, or even more so, for our own Capitals, we have not been able to do anything productive since the first signature was put on the CTBT in 1996. Twelve years of inefficiency, or to say it even more brutally, twelve years of quarrelling about a program of work, in essence, not more than a focused agenda.

Mr. President, what are we talking about today in your second week as President? We are exactly having at our disposal eleven more weeks; part of them overlapping with other important disarmament negotiations, part of them in full holiday season. So what does it mean if we agree tomorrow to this program of work we all know by heart by now? It means nothing more, but also nothing less, than that we are allowing ourselves, at last, some thorough reflection about how for heavens sake, we are going to do this in practice, these negotiations, and these three substantial discussions. In the ten weeks that are left, and by that alone, we at least take away the stigma, meriting by now the Guinness book of records of being the sole global body for disarmament not having been able to produce anything meaningful for twelve years, not even a focused agenda allowing operational reflection on such existential matters as disarmament, arms control and non proliferation.

Mr. President, diplomats are there to solve problems among themselves and for their governments. We are the chief advisors on the spot. If we are not able to agree to what are just submitted, we are really a poor lot. I myself feel ashamed, and increasingly regret ever to be offered this job, and even worse, to have accepted. If this small decision of us all, that is now imperatively required, can not be taken in the forthcoming days, it will not be taken at all.

I, for one sir, without this minimum performance, the small talking to the outside world, that we do still exist, I won’t raise my body and my voice again in this body; indeed the sole multilateral disarmament body, as had been said so often in the past years that it has become almost a religious mantra of faith, you won’t hear me anymore during the remaining of this year’s session in this hall, it would be of no use at all.

I thank you Mr. President.