1999 Foreign Policy Speech by President Ben Ali SPEECH DELIVERED BY PRESIDENT BEN ALI BEFORE THE HEADS OF DIPLOMATIC MISSIONS, ON THE OCCASION OF THE NEW YEAR 1999 Carthage, January 28, 1999 In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate The Doyen, Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, It is with great pleasure that I meet with you as this new year begins to exchange good wishes and to ask you to convey my greetings and best wishes to the leaders of your countries and to your brother and friendly peoples. I hope that this year will be one of happiness and prosperity, and that it will be marked by progress in the establishment of peace, cooperation and solidarity in the world. In thanking you for your congratulations and for the kind feelings you have expressed, I would like especially to thank His Excellency the Doyen for his cordial words and feelings regarding Tunisia and its people. I would also like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the members of the diplomatic corps accredited in Tunis for their efforts to strengthen bonds of friendship and cooperation with our country. May they be assured of Tunisia's unflagging respect of the principles of mutual understanding and solidarity among peoples and its continuing action to help reinforce the foundations of stability and development in the world. The Doyen, Your Excellencies, The past year was marked by a reinforcement of the policy of comprehensive reform we have undertaken in our country since the Change, and by a deepening of the complementarity and the close relations between the economic and the social aspects of our development effort, to protect it from the danger of regression and the phenomena of marginalization and exclusion. We also took a set of measures designed to strengthen the process of democratization and pluralism and the protection of human rights and individual and public freedoms. These measures will increase representation of opposition parties in the Chamber of Deputies and the municipal councils and will ensure plurality of candidacies for the presidency of the Republic during the 1999 elections. As an element in the succession of reforms we have introduced to foster democracy and pluralism in our country, we are striving to make the elections to be held during this year a new landmark added to all that has already been accomplished in this area, and at the same time an opportunity for our people to demonstrate their maturity and their commitment to the values inherent in democratic conduct, to a sense of responsibility, to transparency and to the principles of dialogue and sound, honest emulation. The Doyen, Your Excellencies, During 1998 we pursued our efforts to stengthen and diversify the national economy to keep in step with the requirements of openness to the outside and to endow our country with the capacity to meet the challenges of the future and the stakes of globalization. We are determined to persevere on this path, particularly since this new year will mark a decisive stage in realizing our development plan and preparing our country for the next century. We have striven to develop programs and mechanisms that will stimulate development and accelerate the rate of job creation, which is one of our greatest priorities and the essential goal of all our efforts. We have also given particular attention to foreign investment, exportation and openness to our international environment, instituting encouragements and incentives that now constitute a solid platform for the construction of fruitful partnership with sister and friendly countries, in the service of our respective interests and for the greater good of all. During the past year we stepped up the privatization program in response to the requirements of the current stage and to impart new vitality to the national economy. As we note the interest this program has elicited among our partners, we express the hope that the privatization program will be an important factor in the revitalization of partnership and the reinforcement of foreign investment. The nascent phenomenon of globalization and the attendant opportunities for development and progress hold, at the same time, dangers that have already disturbed internal equilibria in a certain number of countries and have contributed to marginalizing certain regions of the world. For this reason the international community should, today, study carefully what mechanisms could be adopted to ensure the advancement of the world economy without losing sight of the differing situation of each country, the conditions and possibilities of its population and its capacity for development. In this connection, we reaffirm our country's commitment to the principles of international cooperation and solidarity, on the basis of a humanistic approach with complementary foundations and goals and taking into consideration the imperatives of balanced development on both the regional and world levels. We are firmly convinced that universal progress is a whole that cannot be achieved if there is a break in equilibrium or an aggravation of the gap between North and South caused by different growth rates, or if entire regions are marginalized with respect to the advance of humanity. The renewed interest we note in the social aspect of development on the part of a large number of intellectual and political currents in the world, particularly in Europe, reinforces our confidence in the future. The Doyen, Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen The Arab Maghreb Union, which is entering its tenth year, continues to be for us a constant and irreversible strategic choice. We are continuing, in collaboration with our brothers the Maghreb leaders, to work responsibly and with determination to make all that has already been achieved operational and to advance the process of the Union towards achievement of the ambitions of our peoples and the realization of their objectives of progress, prosperity and invulnerability. Indeed, these efforts complement our consistent action in favor of a revitalization of joint Arab action to raise cooperation and economic complementarity among Arab states to the highest possible levels. Nevertheless, the realization of stability and development in our region will depend upon the establishment of conditions of security, stability and understanding, eradication of causes of tension, and action to favor rapid settlement of pending problems, foremost among which is the lifting of the embargo imposed on the brother Libyan people. We hope that the steps now underway will put an end to their sufferings and thereby reinforce opportunities for cooperation and complementarity in the region. We are pleased to note the progress that has been made in the association agreement between our country and the European Union, and wish to express our satisfaction at the results of the first meeting of the Association Council. We await, with confidence and assurance, the coming negotiations with the EU concerning a number of vital areas such as agriculture, services and others. In doing so, we emphasize that our goal here is to institute relations covering all fields, that go far beyond commercial and economic exchanges to include the construction of a balanced civilizational dialogue that takes into consideration the interests of all parties. At the same time we are anxious to expand our relations of partnership and fruitful cooperation with all sister and friendly countries throughout the world. During the past year we sent an itinerant diplomatic mission to a certain number of countries in Africa and Latin America in which we have no resident diplomatic mission. The reception given this mission was satisfactory, and the results encouraging. A similar mission will go to certain Asian countries this year. We hope through these efforts to strengthen cooperation with these countries, with which we have solid relations that we would like to raise to a level of universality and continuity comparable to those that characterize our relations with Japan and the United States. The Doyen, Your Excellencies, It is a source of concern that many problems endangering security and stability in the world remain without final, lasting solutions, despite the efforts of the international community. In the forefront of these problems is the Middle East peace process, which has been at a standstill for far too long and which is more and more exposed to new risks of explosion because of Israel's policy of persistently refusing to honor its commitments and of ignoring international law. Tunisia has contributed to this process since the very beginning, and we firmly declare once again that safeguarding peace and stability in the region and in the world will require greater efforts on the part of the two co-sponsors of the peace process and of the European Union and the international community in general, to persuade Israel to opt for peace on a basis of international legality, the principles of the Madrid Conference and the agreements that followed it, and more particularly the principle of «land for peace», in such a way as to guarantee the right of the Palestinian people to establish their independent state on their national soil, with Al Qods as its capital, and the restitution of their occupied territories to the two sister countries, Syria and Lebanon. Furthermore, security in the region dictates that serious efforts be made to dismantle all arms of mass destruction and to abandon the double standard that characterizes policy whenever Israel is concerned. Considering the grave developments in the Iraqi crisis, which have cost the lives of innocent civilians, Tunisia reaffirms its view that only through peaceful means and recourse to international law will it be possible to put an end to the sufferings of the brother Iraqi people. We call strongly for stepping up international efforts to lift the embargo imposed on the Iraqi population as quickly as possible, to eliminate the risks of confontation and drive back the specter of war, so that all those in the region may devote themselves to development efforts in a climate of stability, understanding and cooperation. The Doyen, Your Excellencies, The deep worldwide changes that have occurred gave rise initially to hopes for the establishment of a collective security that would assure the international community of conditions of stability and development on a basis of equal opportunities and the principles of international law. Most of these hopes have evaporated with the emergence of new, devastating conflicts, particularly in Africa and in Central Europe, the latest of these being that of Kosovo. Tunisia has always worked actively to support every effort to resolve conflicts, stop the arms race and settle existing crises, striving to remedy their deeper causes, the most important of which are poverty, underdevelopment, the burden of indebtedness and the disparity of development levels between North and South. We have endeavored to help limit certain hotbeds of tension in the world, dispatching a special envoy to the presidents of Erythrea and Ethiopia in the aim of assisting in the identification of a peaceful solution to the border dispute opposing those two sister countries, and sending two official representatives to the Syrian and Turkish leaders to help settle the dispute between their countries and attenuate tension in the Middle East area. Alongside this, we undertake discussion and action with our brothers and friends both on the African continent and elsewhere to stengthen opportunities for understanding and dialogue among peoples. During the recent visit to Tunisia of United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, we expressed to him our support for UN activities and our readiness to participate in UN forces of rapid intervention, in addition to our continued participation in peace-keeping operations in the world. The Doyen, Your Excellencies, The year 1998 was a year of intensive activity, during which we had the pleasure of meeting the leaders and high officials of your sister and friendly countries. I would like to express to you once again my satisfaction at the results of these meetings and the opportunities they have provided for discussion and cooperation, and I hope that this new year will be a highly auspicious one for the future of our relations and for security and peace in the world. Speech by President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali before the members of the Diplomatic Corps accredited to Tunis (23 January 2003) Speech by President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali before the members of the Diplomatic Corps accredited to Tunis (15 January 2002) Foreign Policy Speech by President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (29 January 2001) Foreign Policy Speech by President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (27 January 2000) Adress by President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali at the Ceremony for the Accreditation of New Foreign Ambassadors (13 January 2000) Speech by President Ben Ali at the closing of the annual conference of the heads of diplomatic and consular missions (25 August 99)