Luciana Lima and Yara Aquino      Reporters Agência Brasil

Brasília – In the speech that opened the 66th United Nations General Assembly yesterday, president Dilma Rousseff stated her opposition to military intervention in countries in north África and the Middle East where anti-government uprisings, known as the Arab Spring, have taken place.

“We vehemently repudiate the brutal repression against civilian populations. We are convinced that it should be a norm in the international community that the use of force must be the last resort,” she declared.

Dilma called for the UN Security Council to act more efficiently in conflict resolution. “The nations gathered here must find a more legitimate and efficient manner to assist societies that clamor for reforms, while permitting those societies to control the reform process. The quest for world peace and security cannot be limited to interventions in extreme situations.”

Dilma concluded by saying that Brazil favored the position taken by the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, that is, to “prevent conflicts,” rather than fight them as the United States has chosen to do. The ideal, Dilma said, was unrelenting exercise of democracy and the promotion of development.

“Today the world suffers the painful consequences of interventions that have aggravated conflicts, giving rise to terrorism where it did not exist, inaugurating new cycles of violence, multiplying the number of civilian victims. Another problem is that while much is said about the responsibility of protecting [the innocent]; little is done about the responsibility [of the intervenor] while protecting them; these are two concepts that must go hand in hand.”

Dilma pointed out that many Arabs have immigrated to Brazil where they have found an ideal that does not belong to any single culture because it is universal: liberty.

Allen Bennett – translator/editor The News in English

Link - Na ONU, Dilma repudia uso da força para conter manifestações em países muçulmanos