No Agreement on Final Statement : General Assembly Session Adjourns Amid Discord

The 40th anniversary session of the U.N. General Assembly ended in dispute Thursday when delegates were unable to agree on a final statement.

Despite an all-night working session, a preparatory committee was unable to agree on a section dealing with Palestine and the Middle East.

Arab representatives, led by Syria and Iraq, demanded that a statement calling for a Mideast settlement include support for “the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people and the principle of the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force.”

A version backed by the United States and its Western allies would have committed the United Nations to a “just, comprehensive and lasting settlement of the Middle East problem in all its aspects” but said nothing of the Palestinians or their right to self-determination. It said only that “we are mindful of the legitimate rights of the states and people’s parties to the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

Efforts at Compromise

Compromise efforts continued even as President Reagan, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze addressed the closing session.

But when the meeting resumed in the afternoon, instead of a vote by acclamation to adopt the declaration, General Assembly President Jaime de Pinies of Spain had to rewrite his speech as a solemn summary of problems facing the world.

“It is important to remember that the first resolution approved by the United Nations referred to the elimination of atomic weapons and the dedication of atomic energy to peaceful purposes,” De Pinies said. “Forty years later, that objective seems unattainable: the mortal danger posed by the nuclear arms race has increased rather than decreased and the conventional arms race continues its course and has produced numerous wars and uncounted deaths.

Distorted Priorities

“A world which spends approximately a trillion dollars every year for military purposes and is unable to yield even a fraction of that figure to eliminate poverty, is a world that has its sense of priorities gravely distorted,” the assembly president said.

“How can a world in which the accumulation of nuclear and conventional arms aggravates its insecurity consider itself secure? If this is recognized, there is no reason to consider it impossible to put an end to the arms race.”

After De Pinies’ speech, the delegates adjourned without any agreement on a final statement. The statement was supposed to have been a “solemn declaration” reaffirming members’ support for the U.N. Charter and committing them to efforts to resolve world problems.