Namibia Joins the U.N. as 160th Member State : Third World: The General Assembly session will concentrate on the plight of poor nations.

UNITED NATIONS —  Namibia joined the United Nations on Monday as its 160th member state and promised, as a small nation, to do “do our little bit” toward maintaining world peace.

The admission of the former German colony, ruled by South Africa for the past 75 years, coincided with the opening of a five-day special session of the General Assembly called to seek ways to lift the burden of poverty and a $1.3-trillion debt from the developing world.

As the blue, red and green Namibian flag rose between those of Nicaragua and New Zealand, the new country’s prime minister, Hage G. Geingob, received congratulations from Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar and other officials of the world organization, which for four decades has been the chief advocate of Namibian independence.

At a news conference later, Geingob cited his country’s place in the ranks of the Third World. He said that, while it is better off than many of its African neighbors, it will begin its independence with an inherited deficit of $192 million. He said trade with South Africa will have to continue in spite of Namibia’s disapproval of its former ruler’s system of apartheid but that full-fledged diplomatic ties between the two cannot come until apartheid ends.

“Even our food, at the moment, comes from South Africa,” Geingob said.

Geingob said he hopes that an international oil embargo applied to Namibia as part of South Africa will be lifted soon. Doubt remains about this, however, because all ocean shipments must come through Walvis Bay, a deep-water port that South Africa has retained in the face of Namibia’s claim to the facility.

As debate began on the special session’s theme of “revitalization of economic growth” of the world’s poor nations, an unspoken fear among them was that the task of rebuilding Eastern Europe dominates the West’s attention today, at the expense of the Third World. West German Minister for Economic Cooperation Juergen Warnke sought to reassure the latter.

“The upswing that Eastern Europe will experience with the reintroduction of market economies will bring demand for goods from the Third World,” Warnke predicted.

The presence here together of Warnke and his East German counterpart, Hans Wilhelm Ebeling, was seen as an indication of growing cooperation between the two Germanys. The two ministers traveled here on a West German air force plane and paid a joint visit to Perez de Cuellar.