 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 14 - 20 September 2000 Issue No. 499 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
|
||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 14 - 20 September 2000 Issue No. 499
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
|
||
Egypt Region Interview International Economy Opinion Culture Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters A world of meanings
By Hani Shukrallah
The United Nations Millennium Summit, which last Friday evening concluded its three-day marathon deliberations at UN headquarters in New York, may well have been the "mother of all summits," as Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore's UN representative, was quoted by the New York Times as saying.
Accompanied by some 4,000 delegates and scrutinised by over 5,000 journalists, world leaders (including 100 heads of state, 47 heads of government, three crown princes, five vice-presidents, three highest-ranking officials, three deputy prime ministers, 23 government ministers and eight heads of mission) delivered and listened to over 190 five-minute speeches and held dozens of bilateral and multilateral meetings (including at least 185 at the UN headquarters alone, with many others held at hotels and diplomatic missions around New York).
Members of the Security Council met at the summit level to debate peacekeeping issues, especially in Africa, as did members of the Bureau of the UN's Economic and Social Council, whose first-ever summit meeting focused on plans to bridge the digital divide. Scores of world leaders and eminent personalities participated in four closed "interactive" round-tables, most prominent among which was a round table on "Dialogue Among Civilisations," sponsored by UNESCO and supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Some 85 UN member states responded to the Secretary-General's call to sign, ratify or accede to key multilateral treaties to which they are not already a party. Among these are 25 treaties identified by Annan as a "core group," which reflects the main policy goals of the United Nations. These include the treaties dealing with the elimination of land mines, the International Criminal Court, rights of women and children and climate change.
On the eve of the summit, the world's nine women heads of state and government, as well as women heads of UN agencies and organisations, held a closed meeting, chaired by Mary Robinson, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and former president of Ireland. The meeting, organised by the Council of Women World Leaders, an NGO affiliated to Harvard University, was also attended by US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Nane Annan, the wife of the UN secretary-general. On the second day of the summit, an "interactive forum" on girls' education brought together some 70 spouses of heads of state and government, as well as Mrs Annan.
Less visible but also in attendance were scores of corporate executives, potential or actual partners in Annan's "Global Compact" initiative, launched in July of this year, by which the secretary-general hopes to convince businesses to promote in their corporate practices a set of "core values" in such areas as labour standards, human rights and environment.
And, according to the New York Times, the summit ate its way (at the UN cafeteria alone) through 3,000 pounds of chicken, 2,000 pounds of beef, 300 pounds of pasta and 100 gallons of tomato sauce.
If only in terms of high-powered attendance and wealth of activity, Annan's millennium gala was not only unprecedented, in the last or any previous millennium, but also a resounding success. And like all successful parties, it had at least one gate crasher. To the chagrin of UN protocol personnel, an "interloper," Count Carlo Marullo di Condojanni of the Military Order of Malta, crashed the group photo of world leaders (see story below).
How far the summit's lofty goals and edifying rhetoric will actually improve the lives of "we the peoples" of the world, who provided the title of Annan's report to the world leaders' historic gathering, is less certain.
The Millennium Summit can boast at least one achievement, commented a chuckling East European journalist in an aside to Al-Ahram Weekly: "It succeeded in limiting Castro to a five-minute speech." The Cuban president is widely known for his three- to five-hour-long speeches. Not that the limitation detracted in any way from the leader's imposing presence, both inside the UN headquarters and outside. Indeed, very little seemed to intimidate the grand old revolutionary or quell his resolve: not the few dozen Cuban Americans calling him "murderer" from behind a police barrier at the UN Plaza; nor his relative isolation in the midst of an august gathering of world leaders, the great majority of whom welcome and/or concede as irrevocable the march of capitalist globalisation, even if many of them are unhappy with the extremely uneven distribution of its rewards. Nor yet did the Cuban leader's very real desire to see an end to the US-imposed "criminal embargo" against his country make him feel obliged to pull any punches.
"There is chaos in our world," Fidel Castro began his five-minute speech to summit, "both within countries' borders and beyond. Blind laws are offered as divine norms that would bring peace, order, well-being and the security our planet so badly needs. That is what they would have us believe."
He went on: "Three dozen developed and wealthy nations that monopolise economic, political and technological power have joined us in this gathering to offer more of the same recipes that have only served to make us poorer, more exploited and more dependent." The Cuban leader conceded none of the alleged benefits of globalisation so glowingly praised in Annan's report as in a great many leaders' speeches. "There is nothing in the existing economic and political order that can serve the interests of humankind," he said.
Castro did get to shake hands with US President Bill Clinton, however -- at a luncheon held at the UN headquarters for the world leaders, his first-ever handshake with a sitting American president. The fallout offered a classic case of the move from the sublime (the summit) to the ridiculous (American domestic politics). For even as the world's leaders were preparing their Millennium Declaration, the local US media was awash with stories, photos and newsreel footage illustrating who kissed, hugged or merely shook hands with whom (see story below).
Apparently oblivious to the uproar involving him, Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, Clinton, Hillary Clinton and Rick Lazio, the American first lady's rival for the New York senate seat, Castro, back in his familiar battle fatigues, addressed a meeting of some 2,500 American supporters at Riverside Church in the Morningside Heights neighbourhood in Manhattan. He told the flag-waving, cheering crowd that his real friends in New York lived in Harlem.
For the most part, however, the very real cleavages between North and South at the summit were expressed not so much in a Fidel-like confrontational style, but through nuance and relative emphasis. On the surface, the great bulk of the speeches, as well as the summit's Final Declaration, seemed to echo Annan's report: the United Nations must be reformed, further democratised and adapted to the great changes taking place in the world; it must be made stronger and more effective in ensuring world peace and security; peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention need to be more effective and expeditious. Poverty and the growing gap between the world's rich and poor featured prominently in the addresses of the leaders of the developed countries, as it did in those of the leaders of the poorer developing nations. Both sets of leaders asserted the importance of democracy and human rights, as they acknowledged the inviolability of the principles of equal sovereignty and non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states. And with very few exceptions, there was a consensus that globalisation promised great rewards, if only it was made more accessible to all.
Thus US President Clinton could speak, in his address to the summit, about the world leaders' "shared responsibility to free humanity from poverty, disease, environmental destruction and war." He could urge these leaders to work "to get more children to school; to relieve more debt in developing countries; to do more to fight malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS," and all this would fall on receptive Southern ears. It is when he suggests that today "We... find fewer wars between nations, but more wars within them," and when he goes on to ask, rhetorically whether these conflicts "are... part of the scourge the UN was established to prevent?", that Third World leaders, and even Russian President Vladimir Putin, must sit up and take notice. Even more worrying, from their point of view, is the fact that the American president distinguishes between internal conflicts which make it necessary for the world community to act, even while "respect[ing] sovereignty and territorial integrity," and those which "are not so clear-cut," where "legitimate aspirations pile high on both sides." For they know that, ultimately, the US president is fully confident that this kind of distinction will be made in Washington and maybe London, Paris and Berlin, not in Cairo, New Delhi, or for that matter Havana.
The Millennium Declaration issued by the summit crystallised the lofty rhetoric of the three-day meeting. It opens: "We, Heads of State and Government, have gathered at United Nations Headquarters in New York from 6 to 8 September 2000, at the dawn of a new Millennium, to reaffirm our faith in the Organisation and its Charter as indispensable foundations for a more peaceful, prosperous and just world." Ultimately, it was, as the New York Times described it, a mishmash of the conflicting concerns of the rich and developed North and developing and impoverished South.
Which seems to leave us where we started, with the realities of power on the international stage determining which of the declaration's commitments will see implementation and which will not, and in what form.
Or does it?. Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa, in an interview with Al-Ahram Weekly, was of the view that the emphasis on poverty during the summit has sounded a sufficiently strong warning that some progress may be expected in this respect. As for questions of UN reform, respect for equal sovereignty and the sticky question of humanitarian intervention -- who decides, how, and what form should it take? -- the minister's answer was blunt and to the point: "We have to be vigilant, very vigilant."
Whatever luck the summit proves to have had in putting its commitments into practice, its hopes to provide a setting for progress in the settlement of a number of regional disputes seem to have met with dismal failure. The two Koreas were supposed to hold talks on the summit's sidelines; North Korea failed to show, after its delegates were mistreated by US security personnel at Frankfurt Airport, as they were about to board a plane to New York. India and Pakistan were supposed to achieve some progress in their dispute over Kashmir. Nothing has apparently come out of that. And finally, Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, both of whom met separately with President Clinton, were expected to be whisked back to Washington by the American president to conclude a final status deal. Nothing, obviously, came of that either.
A new state was born during Millennium Summit week, however. Tuvalu, with a population of 10,000, had its flag raised over the UN headquarters, bringing the international organisation's membership to 189. Meanwhile, Arafat returned home to postpone the declaration of a Palestinian state (with a potential population of some eight million people).
See also:
Crocodile tears
Pomp and circumstances
Fighting povertyRelated stories:
A defining moment 7 - 13 September 2000
