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WORLD SUMMIT 2002
Drawbacks and Shortcomings
- Massive Pullout from World Summit -
Many groups from around the world
say NO to their earlier planned participation at the World Summit
for Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg later this year.
Feature by John Bamau
14. May 2002
(first published in WTN, reprinting and translated publishing free,
if author and source are cited)
The mainstream Non Governmental
Organizations (NGOs) and especially those ones, who cover for the
United Nations as "representing the people", gear up for
the Development Summit. Some like the Global Youth Forum are even
paid by the United Nations (UN) to do so and others are paid to (moderately
please!) "protest". The world wonders what actually is
going on, since more and more voices are heard, which call the
Global Summit of this decade a non-starter.
The UN-selected groups as well as
some continent-hopping professional protesters will most likely
still go and sit or fight with participating governments at this
summit in South Africa, but many hundreds if not already thousands
of civil society organizations and individuals have terminated
their plans and stepped off the road to Johannesburg. The number
of resisters is growing every day. A total flop of the whole
conference is immanent and after the rather failed preparation
conference more likely than ever.
"Let these major forces, these
players and shakers do it to each other, but for us people there
are more important things to be done on the ground!" says
Maria Delgado from Peru and Prof. Tsuma Hamisi in Kenya adds:
"Even if I would be paid to participate, I will not go,
because I do not want to be part of another scam just fooling the
world - Rio was enough. In those days in Rio we still thought that
concerned people of this world could make a change through such a
conference with the so called "world leaders", but today
we know that positive change only is brought by peoples' hard and
determined work on the ground."
"Look at the deforestation
issue in Kenya", he explains, "also our President was
present in Rio in '92 and pledged to do everything for the benefit
of the environment. Ten years later many more thousand hectares of
forests have been cleared in our country and are destroyed with
governmental consent. It is only now in the last months that the
people were able to effectively stop the destruction by joining
together and becoming active themselves, by suing the government
and its accomplices in big business and by remaining steadfast. It
is us, the people, who achieved just last week a court order
halting the Kenyan Government's plans to excise some 70,000
hectares of forests, including forest areas which are the homeland
of the aboriginal Ogiek people. We work hard to stop the
Government to misuse the forest land as their chips in the
upcoming election-roulette."
"Nobody will assist us anyway
to travel to Jo'burg", says someone from UK, who names
himself only "Bud" and who is with EarthFirst!, the more
radical environmental group. "We ourselves surely will not be
assisted to participate and we don't want to be supported neither
by Governments or the streamlined and "fine" accredited
NGOs, nor by the political mob, who is paid to just disturb the
show and thereby provide for the necessary "threat" to
gear up funding for the "security-forces". EarthFirst!
is independent and we have a clear view and a clear agenda
concerning the protection of the natural environment. Therefore,
instead of wasting thousands of Dollars for air polluting travels
by plane and for staying in one of those shaggy, but expensive
places of an urban ghetto, we save our money and spirit for real,
positive and pro-active work on the front lines of nature
destruction. We don't want to be part of a conference for which
moneys are stolen from the people in order to host an event, which
only serves to cover the global deals and misdeads of the
military-industrial complex and their bootlicking governments."
"We are sad", is the view
of Aisha Saidi from Bangladesh, "because we worked so hard to
make a significant contribution at the World Summit 2002
especially for the betterment of underprivileged women in
development, but we realize now that we will not have the
slightest chance to get even heard at the summit, whose agenda and
time-tables have been structured in a way that any synergetic
interaction of concerned citizens, groups or indigenous peoples is
impossible. Everything is pre-set for a big show by the global
rulers and nothing is left for the people to decide and implement.
We therefore cancelled our bookings and continue working on our
issues at home."
"I see much clearer now"
says Sem Anvat, a local leader from West Papua. "When I was
invited by an international NGO to participate together with them
at that conference in South Africa, I was excited to be able to
let the world know about the struggle of my people against the
mining and timber industries, against the greed of the churches
and against a colonial government. But then I learned which role I
was supposed to play to get the ticket - and now I say: "Sorry,
but that is nothing for me, because I do not want to lie to myself
and others! I will stay where I am and continue our true and
honest fight without being influenced and pacified by such
meaningless favours."
"Such summits are the top of
today's pseudo-democracy, which can be pictured by eight hungry
wolves and one sheep sitting around a fireplace while voting
"democratically" what they will have for dinner!",
says Kersten Kiefer with a sad smile in Germany. Dr. Kiefer, who
holds a PhD in psychology and works within a virtual university
programme together with scholars and students in developing
countries, continues: "The safeguarding of interests prior to
and within such processes and the total majority of the
taker-societies - together with their stirrup holders in the so
called third world - is always secured long before any such event
happens and is paid for. I received the invitation to the summit,
but I have given up since long to participate in such megalomaniac
conferences, where you are invited to serve as mere props or
scapegoat, while only the players in the background really have
their fun." And she wonders: "Who actually knows
or is aware of the "World Scientists' Warning To Humanity",
issued 10 years ago, just after Rio, by the vast majority of the
living laureates of the Nobel Prize in the sciences as well as by
more than 1500 leading scientists from all continents? It can be
found easily on the internet, it's still standing there and is
still valid. But today's actual reality is already worst than then
and the prospects for the future of humanity and its natural
environment have become much more bleak."
"The summit will just be
another public relations gimmick by and for those who continued to
collect our knowledge and vision over the last thirty years since
Stockholm [the first global summit] in order to produce them as
their own bright ideas and to feed them back to us, while secretly
putting the strategic countermeasures in place against those of
our demands, which don't fit into their money oriented concepts",
Claude Dechamps, an obviously frustrated board member of a
community based organization in the south of France wrote in her
latest newsletter." And: "The UN, who even flies now
selected "slum-dwellers" from the fifferent slums of the
world to Nairobi to pose at the ongoing UN Global Cities
conference has lost any credibility. It's high time that the
people withhold that part of their taxes, which their governments
dish out to the UN for staging such shows".
In a similar way a member of the
San people in Botswana - a people who just have been driven out
again from their ancestral homeland of tenthousand years, which is
part of the Kalahari ecosystem - expresses himself in an
interview: "Here [in Botswana] we have a government, which
even dares to steal our waterpumps to get rid of us, and over
there in South Africa, where they actually hunted and killed us as
vermin until 1920, they have now even taken our language [Khoisan]
and our pictures to mark their state symbol [The new SA state seal
- the Coat of Arms]. This is to cover up that they continue to
harrass, to persecute and to oppress us, while they will never
give back to us our lands and our freedom. Nature anyway is
destroyed there - and soon will be here. Global Summit - what is
it? - will it give back to us our land and our dignity?"
"Who will benefit from the
summit?", asks Patricia Hutton in an e-mail from Canada
and she continues: "I don't believe that anything good will
come out from a conference, organized, financed and steered by a
cartel of nation governments, which can not even agree to do
something effectively against the manmade changes of the world
climate. Mrs. Hutton, who worked over 15 years with a
non-churchbased medical charity in South-America, believes:
"The poor people in the suburbs of Johannesburg might get
some bred crumbs from the table of dining and wining "leaders",
but their own way out of poverty will remain blocked or at least
unsecured and they will have to destroy their last own natural
resources, because their livelihood has been destroyed and their
resource base has been exploited by others." "Can the
summit answer questions like this one:", she closes and asks:
"What is the world community during the summit effectively
going to discusss, to agree and to do in order to for example stop
the Sudanese Government in Khartoum from driving ten-thousands of
people from their rural homes, because the Government wants to
continue to dish the land out for oil-exploitation to Canada, the
US, Russia and Europe - in order to get the petro-dollars and to
buy arms? As long such problems can and will not be tackled and
can not be solved by such a conference, it is at its best an
academic excercise, but one for which we should neither spend
money nor time. Even postponing the conference is no solution!"
So far there was only one voice who
claimed to be happy to participate in August. An employee of one
of the financially strongest conservation organizations from the
US stated: "Well, it's my job - I am paid to be present and
to lobby for our tasks. We actually preserve the last wilderness
areas by buying them. I am fully occupied to enlarge our
successful operations. I am looking forward to meet influential
likeminded people and to spent some interesting time in South
Africa, where we want to invest more."
That's what it is most likely all
about: The so called stakeholders from the front pages of the
media want to continue to be the fat "steak-holders"!,
as one cartoonist termed it. But the time seems to be near, when
again the deprived "stick-holders" team up and provide
some serious lessons to those who divide the earth among
themselves only and to those, whose NGOs stand for: Nothing Goes
On!
At the end of the last millennium
the sentence "Imagine tomorrow war would be declared - but
nobody would engage himself!" - used to be an epigram,
sprayed among other graffiti along the Berlin Wall and elsewhere.
Today: "Imagine tomorrow there is a global conference - but
nobody joins it!", seems to become the slogan for the World
Summit on Development 2002. Some of the "Nobodies" -
such they are at least in the view of more than 6 billion people -
might still meet each other in Johannesburg, but the global
bandwagon has left the people behind again. What wonder that quiet
many of the - presumed wiser - heads of state themselves are
reluctant to confirm their participation, even after Klaus Toepfer,
the UNEP boss, wrote personal letters to some, who are considered
to be important - like the German Chancellor Schröder - and urged
them to come.
Still UN Secretary General Kofi
Annan reiterates his Mantra of WEHAB (Water and sanitation, Energy,
Health, Agriculture, Biodiversity) as the five areas where
solutions are long overdue to be found. But only the officials,
who still pat on each others back, and those, who directly are
busy to make money with the conference event, or those who got the
expensive tickets for the preparation conference in Bali, an
island still unfree and occupied by Indonesia and its military,
continue to proclaim that the Global Summit will make the world a
better place. For them maybe yes, but if for the billions of
impoverished people is not only another question - it is at least
already out of that specific question, which is answered daily by
the natural world itself: It just disappears!
Nature and Humanity disappear with
lightning speed, while "global leaders" continue to meet
and meet and meet and - if at all - today only gather in extremely
policed states.
---
John Bamau is a regular writer on environment and development
issues
Copyright: WTN 2002 (reprinting and translated publishing free, if
author and source are cited).
------------------------------
Please read also:
Massive police presence planned for
summit
April 19 2002
SATURDAY STAR
By Elijah Mhlanga
Protesters at the World Summit on
Sustainable Development in Johannesburg later this year are likely
to confront a massive police and army presence.
This is central to the security
plan drawn up by the Johannesburg World Summit Company which next
week will table the document at the inter-ministerial session in
parliament.
The summit, which opens on August
26 and concludes on September 4, will bring together more than 130
heads of state from around the world.
More than 60 000 people are
expected to attend events related to the summit, such as the
non-governmental conferences.
Gatherings of world leaders have in
the past been marred by mass protests which have turned violent
resulting in deaths.
The justice, crime prevention
cluster will scrutinise the plan to ensure that the security
strategy has provisions to handle crisis situations. The cluster
involves the safety and security, defence, finance and
intelligence departments.
Although the directors-general of
the related departments have approved the security plan for the
summit the ministers have yet to scrutinise the plan and approve
it.
Based on the outcome of next week's
meeting government would mobilise state forces.
Resources would be combined to
control the expected demonstrators from anti-globalisation
organisations, including anti-Aids groups and environmentalists.
Source:
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=14&art_id=ct20020419172804301S630198&set_id=1
----------------
CIVIL SOCIETY UPSET ABOUT SUMMIT
PREPARATIONS
Civil society is particularly upset about the failure of PrepComm
III.
Some NGOs were even thinking that in the end, it might be better
to have
NO summit at all rather than a flawed one. Explore some of the NGO
positions at http://www.worldsummit2002.org/guide/civilsociety.htm
----------------
JOHANNESBURG SUMMIT PREPARATIONS BOG DOWN
NEW YORK, New York April 8, 2002 (ENS)
- World governments made little headway during
two weeks of preparatory talks for this autumn's Johannesburg
world sustainability summit that
ended in New York on Friday, raising fears of damage to the whole
process. Still, progress was
made with the official launch of an international sustainability
reporting system, the Global Reporting
Initiative.
For full text and graphics visit: http://ens-news.com/ens/apr2002/2002L-04-08-03.html
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And pls - if interested - read
also:
Summit delegates will shop till
they drop
April 05 2002 at 07:38PM
By Yolanda Mufweba
Delegates to the World Summit on
Sustainable Development (WSSD) are in for a tourist spectacular in
Johannesburg later this year.
Despite the city's lack of
environmental beauty, the City of Johannesburg has allocated areas
of interest that would attract the delegates.
An amount of R50-million has been
set aside for expenses on tourism by the city which will be used
to upgrade roads, lights, electricity, tourist sites, transport
and tours in and around the city.
| 'People
should feel that they have really seen the urban jungle' |
"Johannesburg
is a business destination. Unlike Cape Town and Durban we don't
have beaches and scenery - our biggest pull is that Johannesburg
is considered the shopping mecca of the business sector,"
said Mandy Jean Woods, director of communications, marketing and
tourism for the City of Johannesburg.
About 74 percent of visitors to the
country are African tourists who shop in the city and re-sell to
markets elsewhere.
Shopping routes to major retailers,
shopping centres and a variety of shopping areas are on the map.
Places such as Sandton, Eastgate,
Rosebank, Southgate, the Oriental Plaza, Bruma Flea Market,
Mellville, Parktown and Yeoville will be on the shopping route.
"We know that when people come
here, often the first thing they do is shop; their business here
is to shop," said Enrico Fourie, programme manager of
communications, marketing and tourism for the City of
Johannesburg.
| 'Despite
what people think, Johannesburg is actually a tourist
destination.' |
When
shoppers do feel the need to relax, a visit to Klipriviersberg
Heritage site and Melville Koppies Heritage Conservation site will
allow delegates to see some fauna and flora as well as Sotho/Tswana
villages.
"These are areas of great
interest - it's just that it's been very low-key. We are revamping
the area and training staff to work not only for the summit but to
be successful after the summit," Fourie said.
Johannesburg central business
district, which is being revived, is also on the map.
"People should feel that they
have really seen the urban jungle, especially the inner-city
architecture of buildings," Woods said.
Township tours of Alexandra and
Soweto include shebeens and craft markets, schools and muti shops.
The Johannesburg Zoo and the zoo
gardens will have night tours and outdoor art exhibitions.
Another art-focused tour will take
delegates to various art galleries in and around the city.
A one-day "struggle"
route which has marked sites related to Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson
Mandela, Hector Petersen and other historic people will provide
visitors with a wealth of information about South Africa's history.
"There are a variety of routes
available to suit the delegates. This is the strongest product we
have, so we should offer people a combination of options,"
Woods said.
-------<snip>-------
If you still want to continue to read the article, pls go to its
Source:
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?sf=14&click_id=13&art_id=ct20020405193820627S530395&set_id=1
---------
EIGHT BAWL
Environment ministers from the Group of Eight -- the world's
industrialized powers -- met over the weekend for a round of talks
in
preparation for the World Summit on Sustainable Development, to be
held later this year in Johannesburg, South Africa. Although
the
issue of climate change was not on the agenda (much to the dismay
of
some environmental organizations), yesterday's session was
dominated
by discussions of the Kyoto Protocol, and especially of the U.S.
failure to support it. The other G-8 nations -- Canada,
Great
Britain, Russia, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan -- have all
tentatively agreed to approve the treaty, and have, with varying
degrees of tact, criticized President Bush's isolationist stance
and
his claim that the agreement would harm the U.S. economy.
The talks
also focused on how to encourage the private sector to invest more
in
sustainable development.
straight to the source: San
Francisco Chronicle, Associated Press,
Tom Cohen, 15 Apr 2002
<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2002/04/15/international0441EDT0461.DTL
>
straight to the source:
Planet Ark, Reuters, David Ljunggren, 15 Apr 2002
<http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15470/story.htm>
do good: Take action to send
your leader to the World Summit
<http://www.gristmagazine.com/dogood/politics.asp?source=daily#summit>
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GLOBAL YOUTH FORUM OPENS GATE TO
JOHANNESBURG SUMMIT
ARHUS, Denmark, March 26, 2002 -
Globalization and poverty, sustainable
development and population pressure, clean air and water - these
weighty but
vital issues are the focus of attention for the 100 young people
from 60 countries
here at the Global Youth Forum.
For full text and graphics visit:
http://ens-news.com/ens/mar2002/2002L-03-26-05.html
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ONE WORLD, ONE MORE AGENCY
What the world needs is another regulatory agency. That is
the
conclusion of legal and environmental experts at the Tokyo-based
U.N.
University, who believe a new world environmental organization, as
well as an international environmental court, could help make
sense
of the more than 500 environmental agreements and agencies
operating
around the world. In a report, the U.N. University folks
called for
the idea to be debated at September's Earth Summit in
Johannesburg,
South Africa. The report said that the global body would be
analogous to the World Trade Organization (although with a very
different mandate). It said such a body was necessary
because
although environmental problems are increasingly international in
nature (think global warming), the current system of international
environmental governance is "too complicated [and] steadily
getting
worse."
straight to the source:
Planet Ark, Reuters, 02 Apr 2002
<http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15267/story.htm>
do good: Take action to send
your leader to the World Summit
<http://www.gristmagazine.com/dogood/politics.asp?source=daily#summit>
----------
'Earth Summit for All' online
The next Earth Summit ('Rio-plus
ten') is taking place this year at
Johannesburg. Over 60,000 people are expected to be attending this,
the
biggest conference Africa has ever seen. There will be delegates
from
governments and big business, as well as non-governmental
organisations
(NGOs) such as Friends of the Earth and the World Development
Movement. Ten
years on from the last Summit at Rio in 1992, many people are
calling the
last decade one of missed opportunities. The catastrophic rates of
climate
change and species loss have not been arrested, in fact they have
increased. The Jo'burg Summit is too important an opportunity to
be missed.
The Open University is developing
'Earth Summit for All', a new web portal
that aims to build partnerships for projects which can be launched
at the
Summit, the first one of the internet era. It will provide an
opportunity
for ordinary people and NGO delegates to hold on-line discussions
and
collaborate in advance of the Summit, as part of the
'multi-stakeholder'
dialogues. It provides a tool for developing the all-important
practical
projects needed to solve the major environmental and social
problems that
the Summit will be tackling. A starting set of projects for
discussion may
include Global Green Information Networks with 'green ratings';
Co-operative and Community Networks; Fair Trade Networks; a Global
Emergency Aid and Development Fund; Media Initiatives for Peace;
Schools
for Sustainability.
How will the on-line discussions
work? Our software builds upon the
innovative approaches to participative democracy developed by the
Open
Source Software community (see http://www.slashdot.org)
'Earth Summit for
All' emphasizes public polls to promote consensus, and to enable
people to
make their views count, even if they prefer not to make written
comments.
The ethos is collaboration and consensus-seeking, rather than
conflict and
competition.
At earlier summits, Rio and
Stockholm, the central focus was on governments
and binding treaties between them. In Johannesburg, that will be
much less
the case. The preparatory meeting in New York that just ended puts
a great
emphasis on partnerships with civil society. 'Earth Summit for
All' aims to
be a catalyst to such partnerships. It uses the tools of internet
technology to put the interested public and NGOs in touch with one
another,
to help develop practical projects for the Summit.
'Earth Summit for All' will be
launched publicly in late April, 2002 and
will be located at http://www.earthsummit.open.ac.uk.
For further
information, email admin@earthsummit.open.ac.uk
---
SEE THE OFFICIAL WEBSITE FOR THIS
EARTH SUMMIT II
http://www.joburgsummit2002.com
Check especially their latest fact
sheet of updates! This is regarded as
the biggest United Nations convention the world has ever seen and
shall
shape the future of a globally defined, sustainable development
agenda.
<> <>
<> <> <> <>
<> <>
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UNIC/16/2002
18 March 2002
South Africa launches wash campaign
where cholera has struck
Nairobi, 18 March 2002 The
Government of the Republic of South Africa is
launching its national campaign on WASH "Water,
Sanitation and Hygiene for
all" together with the Water Supply and Sanitation
Collaborative Council
in Ladysmith, located about 390 kms. South East of Johannesburg in
KwaZulu-Natal Province.
Ladysmith has had 8,268 cases of
cholera since November 2001, according to
government estimates. The Minister for Water Affairs and
Forestry, Mr.
Ronnie Kasrils, pledged 25 million rand (about US $2 million) to
the
campaign in the region for the provision of emergency water
services
infrastructure in January this year. These funds are over
and above the
annual amount of over 332 million rand (about US $28 million) for
basic
water supply and sanitation services in the cholera-prone rural
areas of
KwaZulu-Natal province.
Working closely with the Department
of Health which has conducted an
intensive health and hygiene education programme for the affected
communities in the Uthukela district, the Department of Water
Affairs and
Forestry (DWAF) is also assisting with water sampling and
distribution of
disinfectants. It has partnered with the Geneva-based Water Supply
and
Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC) to draw more attention to
the
problem and to encourage other communities and countries to learn
from its
experience.
The WSSCC launched the global WASH
campaign during the International
Conference on Freshwater in Bonn last December, where Minister
Kasrils
joined Sir Richard Jolly, Chair of the WSSCC and other officials
in a
"handwashing" ceremony. This symbolized the fact
that the simple, hygienic
act of handwashing with water, or even ash, after going to the
toilet, can
cut diseases by one third and save many lives from diarrhoea and
other
preventable diseases.
"The South African launch of
WASH is a landmark event, not just for this
country but also for other nations which are plagued by the
devastating
impacts of the lack of adequate sanitation affecting more than 2.4
billion mostly the poor in the developing world," said Mr.
Gourisankar
Ghosh, Executive Director of the WSSCC. "It is also a
question of human
dignity, especially for women and girls, who normally have to wait
until
dark to defecate because of the absence of these facilities in
many
countries."
Mr. Ghosh was joined at the launch
by Minister Kasrils, the Premier of
KwaZulu-Natal Province, Mr Lionel Mtshali of South Africa,
councillors,
multiple stakeholders including representatives of district
municipalities,
mayors, local authorities, community members, DWAF officials, UN
representatives and the South African Breweries, an ally in a
public/private partnership to promote better water and sanitation
services.
A locally manufactured playpump, an
innovative design that pumps water
while children are innocently at play, was also inaugurated, along
with a
"Working for Water" booklet, a WASH T-shirt and other
campaign materials
produced by DWAF and the WSSCC. Participants, which also
included school
children, were entertained by a "cholera roadshow" aimed
at educating them
and communities about safe water, sanitation and hygiene practices
in order
to cut down the incidence of disease.
South Africa is one of 60 countries
that signed the Bonn Ministerial
Declaration during the International Conference on Freshwater (December
2001) attended by over 2000 participants from more than 100
countries. The
Ministerial and Bonn Conference Declarations both assigned high
priority to
water and sanitation as vital keys to sustainable development.
They
pressed for a sanitation goal to be added to the international
development
targets mentioned in the UN Millennium Declaration of 2000.
This will be
one of the issues to be addressed at the forthcoming African
Sanitation
Conference being organized by the WSSCC and the South African
Government in
Durban (29 July-1 August) just a few weeks before the World Summit
on
Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in August/September 2002.
***
For more information on the WSSCC
and the WASH Campaign, please contact:
Water Supply and Sanitation
Collaborative Council
20 Avenue Appia, CH-1211, Geneva 27, Switzerland.
Tel. +41 22 791-3517/3544 - Fax. +41 22 791 4847
E-mail: wsscc@who.ch; Internet: www.wsscc.org
In New York: Ms. Eirah Gorre-Dale,
WSSCC, c/o UN DESA, Water, Natural
Resources and SIDS Branch, Division for Sustainable Development,
DC2-2018,
New York. N.Y. 10017.
Tel. +1(917) 327-2420 - Cell. +1(914) 309-5491 - Fax. +1(917)
327-3391
E-mail: gorre-dale@un.org
In South Africa, Mr. Babs Naidoo,
DWAF, Private Bag, x 313, Pretoria 0001,
South Africa.
Tel. +(012) 336 8264 - Cell. +(082) 807 3547 - Fax. +(012) 324
6592
E-mail: NaidooB@dwaf.gov.za
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