Your Excellency President Chun Doo Hwan, The Honourable Prime Minister Chin lee Chong, Distinguished Ministers, Ladies and Gentlemen:
I have been deeply moved by the spontaneous and warm reception afforded me by you, Mr. President, and by the Government and people of the Republic of Korea from the first moment that I stepped on the soil of this friendly nation. It is an aspect of my visit that will be long remembered with sincere gratitude. Indeed, there is little that could have demonstrated to greater effect the genuine climate of human accord that exists between our two peoples than the fact that I am here at your kind invitation and the sincerity of the welcome extended to me and members of my delegation by the citizens of this country.
I am happy to say that co-operation between our two countries have steadily developed since we established diplomatic relations seventeen years ago. The friendship between us has been further strengthened by the visits made to this country by some of our ministers in recent years. This has been a cause of much satisfaction to me, believing, as I do, that exchange of high level visits have an important role to play in promoting understanding and co-operation between nations.
With regard to our bilateral co-operation, I wish to refer specifically to the practical and highly valued help we have received from the Republic of Korea for our fisheries development programmes. This is, as you will well understand, Your Excellency, a vital area of the Maldives’ economy and a sector on which we place considerable emphasis for our national development. I have every hope that this visit will add a new dimension to our collaborative efforts.
Mr. President, it is both natural and very human that when one anticipates a visit to a country of which one lacks a personal knowledge certain preconceived notions form in one’s mind, often to be disproven upon arrival. And yet in the case of a visit to the Republic of Korea, one is sure in the knowledge of certain immutable facts from which can be learnt much as to the nature and character of its people. Indeed, and especially during the last twenty years, there have been few countries who have demonstrated such vitality, versatility and such a seemingly unending initiative in the national task of establishing their country as a major industrial force. The skill and energy of the people of this land has earned them universal respect and admiration, and has been responsible for an economic growth rate that is truly phenomenal.
Your exports now reach virtually every corner of the globe, with your products ranging from textiles to machinery and transport equipment, to footwear and ready-made garments, and in short, an export range which would do credit to a country having a long-established industrial base. That this has been achieved in the short span of two decades serves well to illustrate the dynamic nature of the Korean people and serves, still further, to write a page of honour and credit in their history.
It is a fact, Your Excellency, that much of what has been achieved by this nation in recent years has been possible because of the climate of national unity and confidence which your presidency has generated from the very outset. Indeed, your Government has been characterised by its unswerving commitment to legislative reform, as witnessed by a rewritten Constitution which strengthens the protection of human rights, the freedom of the press and of public assembly. We in the Maldives are engaged also in the important task of amending our own Constitution for guaranteeing those same fundamental rights.
You, Mr. President, have also initiated the practice of the delivery of an annual policy address to your National Assembly, something I have also been doing in the Maldives as part of my own, personal endeavour to generate a climate of confidence among our people in their Government and the future of the nation. Though our two countries are geographically far apart, these two important features of political activity illustrate an almost identical approach between our two Governments in strengthening political stability and enhancing public trust in their elected leadership.
In the dignified and honourable endeavour of developing your nation, Mr. President, the Maldives wish you well and, through me, confirms an admiration for your wisdom to look ahead rather than at the past. Not that one’s past, one’s history, is unimportant. We must take pride in our respective pasts, but must never permit it to dictate our future. Yet in your past there does most certainly lie the ingredients of what may be possible in your future. For history tells us of that great and remarkable period, in the seventh century when the Three Kingdoms of Korea were united – a coming together which prompted the flowering of the Korean culture.
However distant we in the Maldives may be from these shores, the distress experienced by so many Koreans at the artificial and therefore unacceptable division of their country is by no means lost to us. The Maldives assures the people of Korea of its positive support in all endeavours made towards the peaceful reunification of their land in conformity with their national aspirations.
The Maldives, Mr. President, believes in the essential unity of the human race, believes in peaceful co-existence, in justice and international equity, an end to racial bigotry and artificial political divisions, and condemns the resort to arms to solve political disputes between states.
In the pursuit of these principles, my Government is committed to a policy of non-alignment, but which does not blind us, for example, to the glaring injustice perpetrated upon the people of Palestine through the armed occupation of their land. We call for their re-instatement in that land, and the restoration of their inalienable rights to sovereignty and self-determination, as indeed we call for universal suffrage to be granted to the long suffering people of South Africa and Namibia and with it an end to the oppressive and evil apartheid regime. In our own region, the Maldives works towards an early adoption by all states of the 1971 United Nations Resolution calling for the Indian Ocean to be declared a Zone of Peace.
On the economic front, we seek with equal vigour and conviction the establishment of a new international economic order which would usher in a new era of justice and equity between the industrialised world and the primary producing states. I take singular encouragement from the fact that we are both advocates of a higher sense of mutuality between developing countries themselves, that there should be, as you have so often pronounced, a far greater degree of South-South co-operation than what at present exists. The Maldives is a firm believer in South-South co-operation as a vital ingredient in the social and economic development of the Third World.
In such a human enterprise, Mr. President, my Government will take much encouragement and inspiration from the resoluteness shown in the past by the people of this great country.
Ladies and Gentlemen:
May I ask you to kindly rise and join me in a toast:
- to the health and happiness of His Excellency Chun Doo Hwan, President of the Republic of Korea;
- to the continued progress and prosperity of the people of Korea; and
- to the friendship and co-operation between our two countries.