/MILLENNIUM SUMMIT/POLITICS: Is Summit Yet Another Talk-Fest?

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 27 2000 (IPS) - When the United Nations celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1995, one of the notable absentees at the summit of world leaders was Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad of Malaysia.

Asked why he had decided to boycott the celebrations, the outspoken Mahathir was blunt: he could not find any justification to glorify an institution whose failures in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda were unforgivable sins.

Mahathir said the United Nations was not only being manipulated by the big powers but that it also had little cause to celebrate – particularly in view of some of its disastrous failures in peacekeeping, and its inability to resolve the growing problems of Third World poverty and debt.

Pointing out that the anniversary summit allowed world leaders only five minutes of speaking time, Mahathir told reporters: “In five minutes, you only have time to say how good things are. I am not good at saying how good things are, when things are bad.”

But five years later, a cash-strapped United Nations is still not out of the woods: its coffers are near-empty, its blue-helmeted peacekeepers under fire, its development budgets on the decline, and its poverty alleviation programmes yielding little concrete results.

And next week, the world body will be hosting a Millennium Summit, where over 150 world leaders, up from an estimated 125, are expected to adopt a declaration that will project a global vision for the 21st century.

The summit is due to take place Sep. 6-8 immediately following a similar meeting of the world’s religious leaders where the Tibetan spiritual head, the Dalai Lama, has been barred from the UN premises because of China’s political sensitivities.

In a scathing editorial, The Wall Street Journal said last week the UN lacks political backbone for “shamelessly kowtowing” to China.

Mahathir is one of several key world leaders who, along with Cuba’s Fidel Castro, will skip the Millennium Summit, joining other non- participating heads of state from countries such as Syria, Brazil, Oman, Iraq, Libya, Thailand, Tanzania, Laos, Barbados and Kyrgyzstan.

The pronouncements made at the 50th anniversary celebrations included proposals for the restructuring of the UN system, the reform of the Security Council, the acceleration of global disarmament, the alleviation of poverty, the elimination of Third World debts and a solution to the UN’s financial crisis through new global taxes.

But five years later, most – or virtually all – of these proposals remain unimplemented for political or other reasons.

The United States remains the key player in a post-Cold War UN – even as it continues to hold back some 1.5 billion dollars in unpaid dues; the Security Council is still crying out for reform; India and Pakistan have joined the nuclear club increasing the dangers of a potential nuclear war; and the number of poverty stricken people in the world has increased, not decreased.

Is the Millennium Summit, therefore, going the way of most other summits: just another occasion for political merrymaking and public grandstanding? No, says Deputy Secretary-General Louise Frechette, because summit meetings have always helped turn the spotlight on some of the key political or economic issues of the day.

If everything else fails, the summit will at least provide an opportunity for world leaders to discuss their bilateral problems. At the 50th anniversary summit, Frechette said, there were 703 bilateral meetings.

The Millennium Summit itself is being run on a tight schedule, with speakers being requested to confine their speeches to only five minutes. But already President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who broke ranks from the international community last week by being the first head of state to visit sanctions-hit Iraq, has protested the time slot.

Chavez, who says that five minutes is too short a time to talk about the global vision for the 21st century, is planning to speak for about half an hour threatening to create a logistical nightmare at an event where everything is expected to fall into place with clockwork precision.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan says that among the most challenging issues facing the world body in the 21st century are how to pull billions of people out of abject poverty, strengthen UN peacekeeping operations, and deal more effectively with the world’s environmental problems.

Annan has asked the summit participants to commit themselves to a number of time-bound targets. One such target is, to halve the proportion of people living in extreme poverty by 2015, and to reduce and begin to reverse the spread of HIV-AIDS, and provide basic education for all boys and girls equally.

“I would expect the leaders to agree to specific target dates and identify issues on which we are going to bring our collective influence to bear and try to resolve in the next 15 or 20 years,” he said.

But the poorest of the world’s poor – about 1.3 billion people living on less than a dollar a day – is expected to keep growing.

By the next decade, the number of people living in extreme poverty may rise to 1.5 billion out of a global population of more than 6 billion people. And by 2015, the United Nations predicts, the number will rise even higher, to 1.9 billion – provided there are no concerted efforts to fight poverty globally.

But a Millennium Declaration, to be adopted by world leaders, has already split the world body because of wide political disagreements even before the summit could get off the ground.

A nine-page draft, still in the process of being finalised, does not contain any concrete commitments on two key demands made by the world’s poorest nations: a substantial increase in development assistance and overall cancellation of Third World debts.

Judging by the proposed Millennium Declaration, the world leaders attending the summit are not making any commitments on either the reform of the United Nations or the restructuring of the Security Council.

The 188 members have been so sharply divided that they are unable to agree either on the size of the proposed new Security Council or who its new members should be. A Working Group on the reform of the Security Council, which was expected to come up with a compromise formula during the 50th anniversary celebrations in 1995, has continued into a new century with no substantive achievements.

The United States, Britain, China, France and Russia, the five permanent members of the Council, want to hold onto their seats and their veto powers in any proposed restructuring exercise. But some Third World nations want the veto either diluted or abolished, primarily because it violates the one- nation, one-vote principle enshrined in the UN charter.

David Malone, President of the New York-based International Peace Academy and author of several publications on UN reforms, is confident that the reform of the Security Council, specifically to accommodate more developing nations, will eventually be achieved. The numbers, he says, dictate reform sooner or later.

“As to new permanent seats, the granting of new vetoes would be very unpopular, and yet a permanent seat without a veto, a sort of a second class permanent seat, is not very attractive for the candidate countries,” he adds.

Malone thinks that an enlargement of the Security Council in some form, with or without new permanent seats, will occur. But only within the next 10 years or so, he adds. Or, maybe, await the 75th anniversary of the world body, in 2015.