Doug Lorimer
On September 13, the UN General Assembly approved a 38-page document for submission to a summit in New York of 150 heads of governments marking the 60th anniversary of the United Nations Organisation. The document is a considerably watered-down version of a paper entitled In Larger Freedom, submitted in March by UN secretary-general Kofi Annan.
Annan's paper reaffirmed the UN's Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), adopted by the UN's 191 member countries five years ago. The MDGs set out 18 specific targets, measured by 48 indicators, to be achieved by 2015, including halving world poverty levels, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality and empowering women, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, combatting HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases that disproportionately strike the world's poor, and ensuring global environmental sustainability.
Leading the drive to eliminate the MDGs from the world summit declaration was the government of the United States, the world's richest country. Washington sought to alter the focus of the summit declaration from the issue of world poverty to support for its "war on terror", US President George Bush's code name for the use of US military power to impose US corporate domination across the Third World, particularly in the oil-rich countries of the Middle East.
According to the September 13 Washington Post, John Bolton, Bush's newly appointed UN ambassador, proposed "more than 750 amendments" to Annan's document, "eliminating new pledges of foreign aid to impoverished nations, scrapping provisions that call for action to halt climate change and deleting language urging nuclear powers to make greater progress in dismantling their nuclear arms".
The September 14 New York Times reported that "Bolton initially proposed expunging any reference to specific goals for reducing poverty, hunger and child mortality and combating pandemics of AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria ... He favored instead citing the broad declaration from which the goals were drawn."
US officials, the NYT added, wanted to ensure "that the final document reflects the president's view that development is about more than the amount of aid rich countries provide to poor ones, but also about good government, sound economic policies and private sector growth".
"They also wanted to make it plain that the administration, while agreeing on the need for increased aid, has not and will not promise to give 70 cents of every [US]$100 of national income, as European nations have recently done, with timetables for achieving that level of aid, expunging any reference to specific goals for reducing poverty, hunger and child mortality and combating pandemics of AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria."
Bolton's attempt to make the "war on terror" the central focus of the document to be adopted by the General Assembly generated considerable anger from representatives of the most poor countries in the 30-country closed-door negotiating group.
Bolton's stance even led former Australian UN ambassador Richard Butler to publicly accuse Washington of "terrorism" in attempting to remove "anything of substance" from the UN world summit declaration. On September 8, the Murdoch media website News.com.au reported that Butler told reporters in New York that the only "terrorists seeking to destroy a declaration of all countries agreeing with each other is the United States".
Butler was the head of the UN weapons inspection team in Iraq in the 1990s and knowingly allowed the CIA to use his team to spy on Iraq to select targets for illegal US and British air force bombing attacks. However, he had also played a key role with Annan in getting the MDGs adopted by the UN in 2000.
In the General Assembly session on September 14, Cuban deputy foreign minister Abelardo Moreno denounced the "lack of transparency of the negotiating process in the drafting of the document", according to the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina. "Moreno", it reported, "said the results of important UN conferences over the last five years were embarrassing and that the latest declaration related to development and its financing do not reflect the interests of the so called Third World".
While supporting the MDGs, socialist Cuba has argued that these are unattainable under the prevailing neoliberal corporate-dominated world order. A statement issued in 2003 by the Cuban UN delegation on the proposal to convene the 2005 UN world summit said in part: "The Millennium Declaration states: 'We have gathered ... to reaffirm our faith in the [UN] organisation and its charter as indispensable foundations of a more peaceful, prosperous and just world ... We have a collective responsibility to uphold the principles of human dignity, equality and equity at the global level ... We reaffirm our commitment to the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, which have proved timeless and universal.
"Everything turns out to be clearer after the illegal war in Iraq ... [I]t is obvious that the international security system set up after World War II, enshrined in the UN charter and reflected in the Millennium Declaration, has definitely been destroyed ...
"Undoubtedly, today's world is more dangerous and insecure than ... before the criminal acts of September 11, 2001. Undoubtedly, the United Nations has become more irrelevant, the charter is intended to be declared as obsolete and a world dictatorship is being established in the events based on the force of arms ...
"A world with 800 million people starving, 1200 millions surviving with less than a dollar a day, 115 million children with no access to education, of which three fifths are girls, would not be more secure for any group of states, no matter how rich or powerful they are.
"There are 876 million illiterate people worldwide, two thirds are women. More than 11 million children die each year of preventable diseases and more than 500,000 women during pregnancy or in labour.
"Out of the 42 million people infected with the AIDS virus, 39 million belong to the developing world. Tuberculosis and malaria cause 3 million deaths a year. One out of five do not have access to drinking water and 2400 million human beings lack an improved sanitation system.
"Is this the 'Global Partnership for Development' postulated by the Millennium Declaration?
"There will be no peace, security or stability without development. There will not even be prosperity for opulent societies without development in Southern countries.
"The Millennium Goals are pure illusions under the unjust, exclusive and unsustainable international order we endure, with the international financing framework that helps to plunder our countries.
"Solutions are feasible. The debt, repaid many times over, should be cancelled. The committed 0.7% of the GNP to official development assistance shall be complied with. Resources shall be taken from arms trade, speculative financial flows or the commercial publicity to ease the overwhelming needs of developing countries. Northern agricultural subsidies shall cease. Intellectual property monopoly in the field of indispensable medicines for life shall cease.
"What has happened with the Kyoto Protocol? What progress have we achieved since the conference in Johannesburg? Environmental degradation associated to the irrational consumption of industrialised countries holds for us, the rich and the poor, a common destiny ...
"The Millennium Declaration states: 'We will spare no effort to promote democracy and strengthen the rule of law, as well as respect for all internationally recognised human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the right to development.'
"The General Assembly should call to cooperation and constructive dialogue to ensure all human rights promotion and protection, which are indivisible, interdependent and interrelated for all human beings and peoples. It should also launch concrete actions to find peaceful settlements to international humanitarian problems in strict respect for principles and norms of International Law and International Humanitarian Law ...
"Democracy and civil and political rights have also been victimised by the so-called global war on terrorism. Irreversible data on information and public opinion manipulation and on citizens' exclusion from the decision-taking processes of governments allegedly representing them add now to the crisis of the political system, the lack of credibility in politicians and to abstentionism in industrialised countries' electoral processes.
"We should persevere and prevail. We should reaffirm the Millennium Declaration with spirit of resistance and not discouragement. Some day it will be accomplishable."
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, September 21, 2005.
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