UN summit opens with appeal for collective action

The UN summit marking the 60th anniversary of the United Nations opened today with an appeal for collective action to prevent conflict and genocide and to protect human rights.

Facing more than 150 world leaders, Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson, the summit co-chair, warned that millions of lives will be lost if significant steps aren’t taken now to fight global poverty “and we will pass on a more unfair and more unsafe world to the next generation”.

At a time of turmoil, conflict and terrorist attacks, Persson stressed that the world needed to act together.

“We the heads of state and government owe this to coming generations,” he said. “We cannot afford to fail. We need to find collective solutions based on the rule of law and for this we need a stronger United Nations.”

Gabon’s President Omar Bongo, his co-chair, focused on the plight of Africa, seeking more support for the promotion of human rights and conflict resolution.

“It would be futile to build lasting development without peace and security,” Bongo told the chamber.

In an increasingly interdependent world, Bongo said: “the United Nations must be enabled fully to play its role. It has to be made an effective tool to build a multilateral system that will benefit everybody.”

He welcomed the agreement reached yesterday by the 191 UN member states on a final document the world leaders are expected to adopt on Friday.

But the 35-page document isn’t the sweeping blueprint that Secretary-General Kofi Annan envisioned to tackle poverty and overhaul the world body to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

Instead, it is a text that was continuously watered down during intense negotiations to win support from all UN member states.

Nonetheless, Annan and many ambassadors who spent day and night over the past week trying to reach agreement on hundreds of contested passages were relieved that there was a document for their leaders to approve.

Mark Malloch Brown, the secretary-general’s chief of staff, said the situation “was heading off the rails” on Tuesday morning, with 140 passages and 27 issues still undecided.

In what he called “a high-risk gamble”, Annan and the incoming and outgoing presidents of the General Assembly decided to drop the issues where there was no agreement, decide on language for which they thought they could win approval, and present a clean text to member states. It worked.

Late yesterday afternoon, the General Assembly approved the draft. A visibly relieved Annan arrived at a long-delayed press conference and told reporters: “The good news is that we do have an outcome document.”

“Obviously we didn’t get everything we wanted and with 191 member states it’s not easy to get an agreement,” Annan said. “All of us would have wanted more, but we can work with what we have been given, and I think it is an important step forward.”

US Under-secretary of State Nicholas Burns, who played a key role, was similarly upbeat.

“We did not get everything we wanted,” he said. “We had to compromise … (but) it’s a good beginning.”

While 16 pages focused on development, outgoing General Assembly President Jean Ping of Gabon said there wasn’t the political will among richer countries to help Africa on a massive scale with a plan similar to the US Marshall plan which helped Europe recover after the Second World War.

The compromise document also failed to give Annan the authority to move jobs and make management changes that the US, the European Union and others sought.

It didn’t define terrorism, and it dropped the entire section on disarmament and non-proliferation which Annan called “a real disgrace”.

It expressed resolve to create a Human Rights Council to replace the discredited Human Rights Commission, but left the details to the General Assembly.

Its major achievements were the creation of a new Peacebuilding Commission to help countries emerging from conflict and acceptance by all UN members of the collective international responsibility to protect people from genocide, war crimes and ethnic cleansing.

“Don’t expect Rome to be built in a day; it wasn’t,” Britain’s UN Ambassador Emyr Jones-Parry cautioned. “Against the difficulty of this negotiation, it’s complexity, this is a very substantial gain.”

“The United Nations is a reflection of the world,” Ping stressed. “We can only get as far as member states are prepared to go. … Still, I will claim that this represents major reform of the United Nations.”

When Annan called on world leaders a year ago to take “bold decisions” on the way forward, he warned that if they didn’t “history will take the decisions for you, and the interests of your peoples may go by default.”

The secretary-general said he would have preferred stronger language in parts of the text but “there were governments that were not willing to make the concessions necessary. There were spoilers also in the group; let’s be quite honest about that.”

While Annan refused to name any countries, Oxfam’s Nicola Reindorp said: “Leaders will arrive to find that Cuba, Pakistan, Egypt, Iran, Syria, the US and Venezuela have held the summit hostage.”

“There is very little to celebrate in the latest UN Summit outcome document,” she said in a statement. “We wanted a bold agenda to tackle poverty but instead we have a brochure showcasing past commitments.”

Among the leaders attending the summit are US President George Bush, who hosted an invitation-only private party last night for many heads of state and government.

The presidents of Russia, China, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan are also attending along with the prime ministers of Britain, France and Israel.

Security has been tightened, with the streets around UN’s New York headquarters closed to traffic, boats patrolling the adjacent East River, and no aeroplanes allowed overhead.