After summit and speeches, U.N. must now turn words into action

By EDITH M. LEDERER
.c The Associated Press

UNITED NATIONS (AP) – After the world’s largest-ever gathering of
world leaders and a week of follow-up ministerial speeches, the 191
U.N. member states now have the tough job of turning words into action
to reduce poverty, fight terrorism and start reforming the United
Nations to meet 21st century challenges.

Speaker after speaker in the General Assembly, where all nations have
a voice, said their people would be watching to see whether the
leaders deliver on their promises in a 35-page document approved at
the end of their three-day summit last week.

In his speech before banging the gavel Friday evening to end the
week-long ministerial debate, General Assembly President Jan Eliasson
said the world body must move quickly on follow-up and implementation
so “the political energy” generated during the negotiations, summit,
and ministerial session isn’t lost.

“The world will be watching us closely,” Eliasson said. “The extent
to which we – all of us in this assembly – can muster a spirit of
urgency and common purpose in the coming days and weeks will
ultimately determine whether the World Summit goes down in history as
a missed opportunity for the United Nations, or – as I hope – as the
start of the most substantial reform program in the history of the
organization.”

He said he plans to make proposals on follow-up and implementation by
the end of next week and to start work quickly after consultations.

For the majority of the world’s nations, the final document’s 16-page
section on achieving U.N. Millennium Development Goals is crucial.

Some were pessimistic about meeting the goals which include cutting
extreme poverty by half, achieving universal primary education, and
stemming the AIDS pandemic, all by 2015.

“The 2005 World Summit has clearly demonstrated that, in five years,
we have not given poverty eradication the highest priority in our
international agenda,” Belize’s Foreign Minister Godfrey Smith told
the assembly on Friday. “In too many countries, it is clear that the
Millennium Development Goals will not be realized; in some, the
situation is worse than five years ago.”

Smith argued that “the most effective and consuming terrorism of our
age is the terrorism of abject poverty” and there will be no security
unless it is tackled. “Global security cannot be built on a minefield
of poverty and disease,” he warned.

The only way to assure the marginalized people of the world that its
leaders are serious about achieving the Millenium Development Goals is
“by showing them there is a global political will” to use the
35-page blueprint “as a platform for action.”

Ethiopia’s Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin said those suffering from
extreme poverty need increased international aid, debt relief and
improved trading prospects if the goals are to be met – and meeting
them “is critical to all, and not just to those directly affected.”

The final document was continuously watered down during intense
negotiations to win support from all 191 U.N. member states,
eliminating a call for all rich nations earmark 0.7 percent of their
GNP to development aid because of U.S. opposition.

Its major achievements were the creation of a Peacebuilding Commission
to help countries emerging from conflict, and agreement that there is
a collective responsibility to protect people from genocide, war
crimes and ethnic cleansing.

But the document failed to give Secretary-General Kofi Annan the
authority to move jobs and make management changes that the United
States, the European Union and others sought. It didn’t define
terrorism, and it dropped the entire section on disarmament and
nonproliferation.

While it resolved to create a Human Rights Council to replace the
discredited Human Rights Commission, it left the details to the deeply
divided General Assembly.

Annan, speaking in Washington on Friday, said leaders didn’t deliver
everything he hoped for but he said the gains in the final document
“are significant enough to say that the glass is at least half full,
perhaps more.”

The European Union was the strongest supporter of Annan’s original,
ambitious proposal to make the world body more relevant in the new
millennium.

France’s European Affairs Minister Catherine Colonna said at a
briefing Friday that the final document could be seen as “a
half-empty bottle or half full, and we decided that we’ll say that
it’s half full.”

“It is a first result, and the key question is, can we keep the
momentum?,” she said. “How can we manage to keep filling in the
bottle so it becomes a full bottle – and not a half-full bottle?”

“Everyone must have the political will to do so, every big country in
the U.N., and every group. Europe has it. We want to go on and play an
active role. I think we can do it. We have to find partners,” Colonna
said.

09/23/05 20:27 EDT