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Civil Society Makes this Meeting Relevant - Roberto Bissio
By Alejandro Kirk
For Uruguayan civil society activist Roberto Bissio, the United Nations General Assembly special session in Geneva is of paramount political relevance, in spite of the unexpected low-key representation, because governments are being watched by non-governmental organisations back home.
“If it (the meeting) didn’t matter they (delegates) would not be fighting so much” around the wording of the final document,” Bissio told Terra Viva, referring to the negotiations that are taking place in the different committees.
“If Holland signs a document here today, it will be in all newspapers tomorrow and there is a lot of
organisations in the Netherlands who will from then on make the Dutch government accountable for its commitments,” Bissio adds.
Well known in international circles, Bissio is the head of the Montevideo-based Third World Institute, publisher of Social Watch and member of the Third World Network and other international groups.
He is not happy with those who are portraying this meeting as a failure, because most heads of government and state did not attend or send a senior delegation. For Bissio, the important
thing is to have a document that will set facts and tasks right because “even though such document is not binding and does not have the legal weight of a WTO (World Trade Organization) agreement, it becomes a political mandate for signatories.”
“The second step would be what the Dutch minister (of International Cooperation, Eveline Herfkens) has suggested: a pact, a legally-binding convention that will not leave things to the good will of signatories.”
To Bissio, political leaders are losing real power and relevance to economic operators and the bureaucracy of organisations such as the WTO, which prevail over political agreements adopted in meetings like these.
Bissio agreed with Ann Pettifor, director of the international NGO coalition Jubilee 2000, who said
this week that the leaders of the world’s most powerful countries looked “impotent” and “foolish”
compared to bureaucrats of international financial agencies such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the World Bank who frequently ignore political directives.
One such directive was the political commitment by G-7 leaders last year in Cologne, Germany, to reduce by 100 billion dollars the poorest countries’ external debt. Jubilee 2000 says that the actual reduction amounts to just two billion dollars.
“There is a dictatorship of the international bureaucracy… Who gave them so much power?” asks Bissio.
One example of such enormous power would be the report ‘A Better World for All’, launched this week by the U.N. Secretary General, Kofi Annan, along with the Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD), the IMF and the World Bank.
According to Bissio, the “report” is not such, but rather “a manifesto, a pamphlet, a press release, a political document issued at the worst time” because in practice its message to governments and civil society alike is that the world’s financial bureaucracy has already decided on the strategies to follow to fight poverty and exclusion and that the General Assembly’s conclusions do not have any real weight.
“When this meeting ends Friday with the adoption of an important policy document, it will be no news for the media, because it was pre-empted on Monday by the Secretary General’s ‘report’, that’s the reason for the noise,” he says.
Nonetheless, the final document is an important political piece, Bissio says, because “for the first
time in the UN it includes the issue of capital transactions tax (CTT), intellectual property rights
and the cancellation of the poorest countries’ external debt,” he says.
The fact that most of the world’s presidents and prime ministers chose not to attend the “summit” does not make the document irrelevant, he argues, although he admits that such absences send a political message as to how countries assess the importance of the event.
Bissio criticised journalists for concentrating their attention on known personalities but do “not bother to read the documents,” expecting passionate disagreements or plain violence when covering events such as last Sunday’s NGO rally in Geneva, which was calm and peaceful.
Some say that the rally not only lacked violence, but also passion, which Bissio strongly denies. The fact is, he says, that the rally was the result of a long and complex process of negotiations with organisations which tend not to attend rallies together but which did so in Geneva to stress their commitment.
Read TerraViva
The IPS renowned international newspaper will publish a special edition in Geneva, at the United Nations General Assembly Special Session (Copenhagen+5). Follow the conference on line day by day from June 26 through July 1, with exclusive reports by a team of 13 IPS journalists from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, North America and Latin America.
A selection of the IPS Coverage from Geneva will also be carried by TerraViva Daily Journal (New York) and TerraViva Europe (Brussels),.
Has the world lived up to its 1996 commitments..?
Solidarity 2000 starting 17th of June!
MS's big summer event Solidarity 2000 will start very soon now, with a week-long variety of debates and arrangements. The activities range from encounters between young people from Balkan, Africa and Central America to big conferences on the planet's social development and environment.
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The 1996 Copenhagen Social Summit final report in English, French and Spanish.