US Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, insisted Wednesday that Washington was not ignoring UN development goals but trying to make sure the Bush administration was not committed to a precise target for foreign aid when world leaders meet at a UN summit.
Secretary-General Kofi Annan had hoped a September 14-16 summit of 175 leaders would agree on how to revitalize the United Nations and map out new approaches to the international system. Rich nations were to agree on a development agenda in exchange for support on Western demands for human rights and internal management reforms.
But six months of discussions have brought out sharp divisions on how to tackle poverty, human rights, terrorism, intervention in case of genocide and UN internal reforms.
– I am telling people loosen your ties, fire up the coffee pots, get ready for the weekend, Bolton said during a break in negotiations adding: – We have got a lot of work to do.
U.S. amendments that would cut large chunks out of the development section, including references to the Millennium Development Goals,’ are controversial. The goals were aimed at following up a September 2000 Millennium Declaration adopted by world leaders and include cutting extreme poverty by half, ensuring universal primary education and stemming the AIDS pandemic, all by 2015.
Bolton said that the United States was not backing away from its support of the Millennium Declaration but said the UN secretariat had added “a more elaborate framework of goals, targets and indicators”.
In particular, he objected to a paragraph that welcomed the establishment of timetables to meet a target of 0,7 percent of a country’s gross domestic product for annual development aid, such as the European Union has done. The section also urges those who had not done so to take concrete steps to achieve this.
– We made it clear that was not something we agreed to for a target for ourselves. We have never accepted 0,7 percent through four administrations, he said.
The US government is spending a mere 0,16 percent of its GDP on nonmilitary foreign aid, although the Bush administration has doubled annual spending from 10 billion US dollar to 19 billion between 2000 and 2004.
Bolton stressed that the United States did not want to hear ”allegations later that we are not fulfilling commitments that we made because the so-called commitment is ambiguous.”
A loose commitment to an aid target was contained in the so-called Monterrey Consensus, agreed to by President George W. Bush in Mexico in 2002. But Bolton said the US had made an exception to that provision while others dispute this.
Pakistans ambassador, Munir Akram, said references to the 0,7 percent target were not new.
– They have been there for 25 or 30 years in every document on development. I do not think the world can change directions on a pinhead, Akram said.
Bolton also said that the more than 500 US amendments to the document were not recent additions.
He showed reporters four successive versions of U.S. proposals from June 24 to July 25, which had been given to a small group of diplomats, called ”facilitators,” who had been appointed to work out differences among all UN member states.
Kilde: The Push Journal
