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"Civil" United Nations forum all but ignored
Important recommendations and civil behaviour make news at the UN's "We the People Millenium Forum" - but nowhere else
By: Mel Watkins
June 6/00 - Late last month, 1,350 representatives of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and civil society (including your intrepid columnist in his day job as President of Science for Peace) met for a week at the United Nations in New York at a "We the People Millennium Forum". We were there to offer our views on the state of the world and what might be done to improve it. These views were to be conveyed to the Heads of States, the Clintons and the Chretiens, who are holding their own meeting at the UN in September at a special Millennium General Assembly, presumably to decide the fate of the world - or more likely, to refuse to decide since this is a forum that is too democratic for the taste of the powerful.
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Indeed, though you might be faithful followers of the mass media you'd know naught of the May meeting. Losers don't make news unless they misbehave - you only have to look as far as Windsor, Ontario, this past weekend for proof of that. |
You may be thinking that when NGOs and the UN get together, it's the weak consorting with the lame, and who should care? Indeed, though you might be faithful followers of the mass media you'd know naught of the May meeting. Losers don't make news unless they misbehave - you only have to look as far as Windsor, Ontario, this past weekend for proof of that. And at the recent UN gathering, civil society was at its most civil. We even got to sit in chairs customarily occupied by the UN delegates themselves.
But you may well ask what the UN has done for anybody recently - except try to clean up the mess that the NATO intervention created in Kosovo, information which is buried deep inside the paper. War is news in a way that peacemaking isn't.
So it is that Straight Goods got this news exclusive.
Powerful pleas were made to the assembly directed at the September meeting - perhaps vain attempts, to speak truth to those in power.
Peace activist and writer Jonathan Schell, along with Japanese survivors of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki (the Hibakusha) called not for disarmament, but for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons.
An array of speakers from the Global South and the Global North insisted that the "extreme poverty" in which some 1.3 billion of the world's people live must too be abolished. The ending of the absurd and dangerous spending on the first would free up the funds necessary to achieve the second.
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Under six broad categories - peace, globalisation, poverty, pollution, human rights, reforming the UN - we assembled folk made detailed recommendations to the United Nations itself, to Governments and to Civil Society (ourselves) |
To great applause, Canadian social justice activist and scholar John Foster, told the gathering that the WTO was undemocratic, that corporate globalisation must either clean up its act or be brought, deservedly, to a grinding halt.
Simply put, we live in a world where these self-evident things have to be reiterated time and again.
I think it's newsworthy by any standard that this array of persons from around the world - albeit with the affluent North, Canada included, overrepresented because of a paucity of funding to bring people from the low-income South - was able to hammer out a consensus document with real content. Under six broad categories - peace, globalisation, poverty, pollution, human rights, reforming the UN - we assembled folk made detailed recommendations to the United Nations itself, to Governments and to Civil Society (ourselves). These were delivered to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to be conveyed to the Heads of Nations in September.
Of course, to be in the US of A, that "hunk of a country" as writer Rick Salutin recently called it, is to be reminded constantly of what the rest of the real world, outside the hallowed halls of the UN and hostile to the pronouncements of the NGOs, is really like.
Foster and the rest of us could have railed against the WTO but in that same week the US House of Representatives approved the deal with China that gives the WTO fresh reach and relevance.
The Hibakusha, by their presence, made manifest the absolute hell of a nuclear holocaust. Meanwhile, presidential candidate George W. Bush was elsewhere giving his wholehearted endorsement to the National Missile Defence system that, in lieu of abolition, would encourage any so-called rogue state to get its own bomb while discouraging China and Russia from giving any thought to giving up theirs.
Oh, and then there's the grotesque fact that in the UN Plaza itself, Donald Trump is building what is trumpeted as "The Tallest Residential Tower in the World" - "A 90-Story Condominium of Pure Luxury from $800,000s to $11,000,000." The tower has tinted glass so they can look out but we can't look in.
Enough. Some news is not fit to print, even by Straight Goods where no tree must die to make it possible.
There will be media coverage of the September gathering. After all, Clinton himself will be there and the mainstream American media won't have him to kick around all that much longer. Just remember that you read the first and truer half of the story here, hot off the screen
Mel Watkins is a political economist and a political activist who speaks and writes extensively on contemporary issues.
Get More/Do More
To view the report of the Millenium Forum, see www.un.org/millennium.
To find out more about the United Nations and Civil Society, visit www.un.org/partners/civil_society/home.htm.
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