Call For New World Order

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31153, 1 September 1966, Page 15

Call For New World Order

(N.Z.P. A.-Reuter—Copyright) SANTIAGO DE CHILE, August 31. The United Nation’s Secretary-General, U Thant, called last night for a new world order in which aggressive nationalism, expansionism, and extremism were banished and diversity could be preserved “without resort to prejudice and hatred.”

In a major address at the University of Chile, he said a root cause of much of the world’s current trouble was the “considerable gap” between what nations preached and what they practised. Without naming any offender, U Thant said: “It is this failure of practical behaviour to keep pace with professed ideals and aims which undermines and, in the end, can frustrate the work of peacekeeping and peace-building.”

Due to announce on Thursday whether he will continue for a second term in office, U Thant said the future of the United Nations rested to a considerable degree with the small nations—their sense of responsibility, independence, and objectivity, and, “above all. their collective determination to help attenuate and bring to an end the dangerous tensions which have affected international relations so adversely during the last 20 years.” “No Real Peace” U Thant went on: “Let me (reiterate, therefore, that we must work towards a new world order in which aggressive nationalism or expansionism are banished as a means of promoting or protecting national interests,

where extremism is no longer necessary to support a different point of view, and where diversity can be preserved without resort to prejudice and hatred.” The voices of people all over the world were raised, as never before, against war and actions likely to lead to war, but there was no real

peace in a “balance of terror” between the great nuclear powers, he said. “The greatest obstacle to the realisation of the principles of the United Nations Charter is the inescapable fact that power politics still operate, both overtly and covertly, in international relations,” U Thant said. It was an expensive and potentially disastrous anachronism. The smaller nations could play a vital role in the interests of world peace by coordinating their international policies and uniting their voices “in a strong and unmistakable call for peace, understanding, and human betterment.” The Secretary-General said

the most crucial and most challenging long-term struggle of this century was between the developed and less developed countries, the “haves” and the “have-nots” in the world. The stark fact was, he said, that with half of the United Nations development decade of the 1960 s already past, only a few of the developing countries had even neared the minimum target of an annual growth rate of 5 per cent.

Shortage of food was one of the problems, U Thant said. It was a serious one in Latin America, whose republics were importing several hundred million dollars’ worth a year.