Historic Summit: Collection Of Firsts

The U.N. Millennium Summit comes to its historic close Friday with the adoption of a wide-ranging wish list that promises to cut poverty, protect planet Earth and improve the ability of the United Nations to keep the peace.

The summit declaration, negotiated for weeks but expected to be adopted by acclamation, also commits the 150 heads of state and government who gathered for the three-day meeting to promote democracy, strengthen respect for human rights and reverse the spread of AIDS.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan has warned that he would not be satisfied unless the leaders actually implement the pledges in the document. He told a press conference on the eve of the summit that he expected every one of them "to go back home and begin to do something about it."

U.S. President Bill Clinton held a private meeting with Chinese leader Jiang Zemin before the Friday morning U.N. session began. Mr. Clinton said he had assured Jiang that the U.S. Senate would approve permanent trade relations with the world's most populous country, reports CBS News Correspondent Mark Knoller.

The last day of the summit opened Friday morning with a speech by Gambian President Yahya Jammeh, at 35 the youngest African leader attending. The last scheduled speaker was Techeste Ahderom, who chaired a May summit of grass-roots organizations who gave their own advice on how the United Nations could remake itself to better address the challenges of the 21st century.

On Thursday, it was the Security Council's turn to take up that task, pledging an overhaul of U.N. peacekeeping operations so troops can respond more quickly and robustly to world trouble spots.

Oops!

Oh, brother! A United Nations interpreter was in hot water Friday after he lost his place in a speech and uttered an obscenity heard by assembled heads of state at the U.N. Millennium Summit.

The flustered English-language interpreter made the embarrassing error after pausing for a long moment during a speech in Arabic by Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.

"We in Sudan shall spare no effort to achieve these noble goals and to cooperate with all member states on the basis of the principles of...oh f---," the interpreter exclaimed.

"...that the, of the basis of foreign, er, principle of respecting the choices of others and non-interference in the affairs of other states," he continued hastily.

A U.N. fficial said he would listen to the tape of the translation. "If anything not proper has been said, we will take action," added the official.

Source: Reuters

The council's pronouncement, however, was not in the typical form of a Security Council resolution - an indication that the 15 presidents and prime ministers weren't entirely comfortable with making such concrete, legally binding pledges to better finance peacekeeping operations.

But the document will nevertheless be one of the major outcomes of the summit, which featured a notable first - a chat and handshake between President Clinton and Cuban President Fidel Castro.

But Mr. Clinton said later that the unexpected handshake resulted from Castro suddenly appearing behind him. The president said "I turned around and he was standing there."

Another summit legacy will be the apparent failure to reach a Mideast peace deal. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat on Thursday rejected Mr. Clinton's proposal to split control of Muslim and Jewish holy sites in east Jerusalem.

But the three-day meeting, which clogged New York City streets with motorcades and protests, will likely be hailed as a success merely for having occurred, drawing more leaders together than ever before to discuss the challenges confronting the globe in the third millennium.

"What's the point of stepping foot on Mars if there is still hunger in several regions of our planet?" asked Rene Preval, the president of Haiti, the Western Hemisphere's poorest country.

Such questions were raised throughout the second day of speeches Thursday and continued Friday with a speech by one of Africa's most respected leaders, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, who called for the world's wealthy countries to cancel all the debts of the developing world.

"This is the only way these countries can be given the chance to effectively plan for the improvement of living standards of their peoples," said Obasanjo, the current chair of the "Group of 77" developing countries, which actually includes 133 nations.

Mr. Clinton raised the issue of the disparities between rich and poor in his address to the council, saying it must address broader security issues related to disease, poverty, education and climate change if it wants to make a change in keeping the peace.

"Until we confront the iron link between deprivation, disease and war, we will never be able to create the peace that the founders of the United Nations dreamed of," he said.

The world body is currently engaged in 14 peacekeeping operations - most of them in the world's poorest countries - with more than 37,000 troops and civilian police deployed from East Timor to Cyprus and Sierra Leone at an annual cost of about $2.2 billion.

Nearly 1,000 U.N. civilian staff are engaged in 14 other political and peace-building missions from Afghanisan to Burundi and Guatemala.

Council members met against a sobering backdrop: the killing of three U.N. relief workers assisting refugees from East Timor; the rebel seizure of 500 U.N. peacekeepers in Sierra Leone; highly critical reports of the U.N. role in the 1994 Rwanda genocide and the 1995 slaughter of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica.

Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid said Friday that Jakarta had sent in extra forces to restore calm in West Timor and would investigate the attack of the aid workers by pro-Indonesian militias. He blamed the rampage on "criminals" who had infiltrated the ranks of Jakarta's supporters in West Timor.

"Everything is under control," he assured the leaders, who resoundingly condemned the killings and demanded Indonesia do more to disarm the militias in the heads of state Security Council meeting on Thursday.

At the end of the two-hour meeting, the council leaders - from Argentina, Bangladesh, Canada, China, France, Jamaica, Malaysia, Mali, Namibia, Netherlands, Russia, Tunisia, Ukraine, Britain and the United States - vowed "to strengthen the central role of the United Nations in peacekeeping."

They underlined the importance of rapid deployment of U.N. peacekeepers and called for realistic mandates that the soldiers can fulfill, proper training and equipment for them, and an overhaul of the U.N. peacekeeping department.

But their proclamation wasn't in resolution form. A one-paragraph resolution was adopted, but it said only that the council "decides to adopt" the attached annex, which contained the text of the council pledge.

Diplomats were divided on whether the annex itself was legally binding. It was a compromise after more than a week of closed-door negotiation. Council diplomats said several countries couldn't agree to make such specific pledges in a full-fledged resolution.

Rather than watering down the resolution to be palatable to all, they decided to adopt the declaration as an annex to a resolution, the diplomats said.

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