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September 12, 2005
US Pressure on UN Summit: Derailment Ahead?
While much of the world continues to recoil at the devastation in New Orleans, the U.S. delegation to the United Nations appears to be wreaking its own form of havoc in the run-up to the United Nations summit that commences on September 14 in New York City. After five years of negotiation over a Millenium Development program which aims to decrease poverty and hunger by increasing support from developed countries for education and health care, the British newspaper The Independent reports that the summit is on the verge of failure before even beginning due to US objections. The proposed program sets guidelines for cutting poverty around the world by half by 2015.
The new US delegation to the UN, led by newly appointed Ambassador John Bolton, has submitted some 750 separate amendments to the document—which undermine the goals of the agreement and, according to the Independent, threatens to make the upcoming summit a “global fiasco.”
Central to the dispute, according to Inter Press Service, is the U.S. emphasis on terrorism as the world’s primary security issue, while UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, and most other members of the UN, “have repeatedly asserted that the world cannot be safer without development and poverty eradication.”
Posted September 12, 2005 11:21 PM
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