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Third World summit ends with demand rich nations share wealth and power |
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April 16, 2000
HAVANA, APR 15 (AP) - The leaders of the world's poor nations are uniting to demand a greater say in the global economic system, insisting on greater aid and trade and a role in financial decisions that often shake their countries.
"From now on we will play our part in shaping this (world) order into one that is just, fair and mutually beneficial to all sides," said Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, chairman of the South Summit that closed late Friday night.
The Group of 77, founded in 1964 as a U.N. lobbying group, has expanded to include 133 nations. The leaders used their first summit to transform the G-77 into what could become a significant international voice for the developing world, creating a structure to pressure richer countries to consider the interests of the poor.
"We will not be mendicants (beggars) content with the crumbs that fall from the table of the North," said Jamaican Prime Minister P.J. Patterson.
About 40 heads of state or government took part, along with vice presidents or foreign ministers from some 80 other nations.
In resolutions adopted Friday, the summit demanded relief of the Third World's crushing debt, increased aid, more exports to developed countries and greater transfers of technology.
The leaders also promised greater cooperation among themselves: a vow dramatically accepted by Cuban President Fidel Castro, who promised to provide 3,000 doctors to a Group of 77 medical program. He said the overall plan "could save at least 1 million lives each year in Africa."
Obasanjo also lectured the delegates on the need to solve problems in their own countries and to end regional conflicts. "Peace is the bedrock of all human development," he said.
But most of the anger was aimed at the booming North: at its efforts to impose sometimes tough free-market policies on reluctant Third World governments and at volatile world markets that can send prices or interest rates falling or soaring, often with devastating effects on poor countries.
Many of the leaders expressed frustration that the technological revolution that has brought wealth to the rich is out of reach to billions of people, many living on the edge of starvation, with no telephones or only erratic power supplies.
As he did at the start of the three-day meeting, Castro compared the world economic system to the Holocaust.
"I hold the firmest conviction that the economic order imposed by rich countries is not only cruel, unjust, inhuman ... but it is also carrier of a racist conception of the world which in its time inspired the Nazism of the Holocaust and of the concentration camps," he said.
"In the third world, they now call them refugee centers," in which people are "concentrated by poverty, hunger and violence," Castro said.
The summit urged "a new global human order aimed at reversing the growing disparities between rich and poor," with countries of the South given the right to "participate on an equal footing in decisions which affect them."
The summit said the United Nations should take a stronger role in economic affairs.
The leaders called for "the outright cancellation of unsustainable debt," increased aid and measures to ensure that developing nations receive new technologies. They promised to try to expand their own educational systems and domestic power and telephone networks.
The summit demanded that developed countries open their markets to the farm and textile products of the South, and sought "freer movement" of workers.
Breaking with the theme of unity, Foreign Minister Abdoulaye Yerodia of the Democratic Republic of the Congo - the former Zaire - fruitlessly urged the delegates to pressure countries with troops fighting in his nation to withdraw.
"They are part of the G-77," he said, apparently referring to Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi. "Do something to make these people go home."
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