President Thabo Mbeki on Friday night vowed that the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), due to start on Monday, would not be a mere talk shop.
Addressing a crowd attending the ”Save Our Planet” concert ahead of the official launch of the summit on Monday, Mbeki said: ”We want action.”
He said he was certain everyone agreed that the summit had to produce practical programme to improve the quality of life of all humanity. This should be achieved through economic growth and development and an equitable distribution of wealth and income, social development and conservation of natural resources.
”We have to answer the question whether we have the will and the common sense to ensure we treat the planet as a common renewable resource. . . We have to answer the question whether we have the wisdom to organise human society that we ensure that the billions across the globe live in conditions of peace, freedom, equality and a decent life, free from poverty and want and ignorance.
”All these questions require urgent and practical answers,” Mbeki said.
In a bid to paper over the cracks ahead of the Summit Preparatory, talks got underway on Saturday.
The summit has the twin aims of reducing poverty worldwide and lowering damage to the environment, but preparatory sessions abroad failed to resolve disagreements on key issues.
Their biggest bone of contention is poverty relief objectives which the European Union says are indispensable but which the United States refuses to endorse, in line with its disdain for any new multilateral deals.
The aim of the plan is to cut in half, by 2015, the number of people who lack access to clean drinking water, to slow the rate of loss of natural resources and a call to phase out energy subsidies and boost the global share of renewable energy sources to at least 15% by 2010.
Ten years after the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, many of its promises to clean up the environment are gathering dust.
US President George Bush has already decided not to attend next week’s summit.
In Rome, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said he was awaiting results from the last-chance preparatory talks over the weekend to see it if is worth his while to attend what might turn out to be a ”show”, adding that other European leaders shared his view.
To make matters worse, extremists among the hundreds of interest groups meeting ahead of the summit have vowed to disrupt it to protest against what they see as the rich nations’ vandalism of the planet.
Topics that look likely to dominate the 10-day conference, officially known as the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development, include Zimbabwe’s confiscation of white farmers’ land at a time when six million people there are facing the threat of starvation.
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, while at the forum, is expected to defend his actions.
On Friday he dissolved his cabinet in a move that came as his government’s international isolation grew, with harsh criticism voiced by the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand.
His office said a new cabinet would be appointed on Monday.
Mbeki, whose speech interrupted an outdoor concert, told a crowd of several thousands at the Johannesburg stadium that the summit delegates should produce ”practical programmes of action”.
”We cannot and will not be satisfied merely with the fact that we gathered in Johannesburg, enjoyed one another’s company and merely decried the debilitating and unacceptable conditions of the poor and the marginalised and the immediate and long-term threat to the environment,” he said.
The stage, set on the side of a football pitch had a black backdrop with the words: SOS Save Our Planet, drawing attention to one of the major themes of next week’s summit, another of which is the drive to eradicate poverty.
Around 100 heads of state and government are expected at the summit, but US President Bush bowed out, announcing he would send Secretary of State Colin Powell in his place, a decision that infuriated activists here.
Organisers had predicted around 40 000 members of
non-governmental organisations would descend on Johannesburg, but by Friday evening only around 18 000 had registered.
Johannesburg police released 72 landless activists on Friday after arresting them on public violence charges during a march on Wednesday to demand an end to evictions from squatter camps.
They will appear in court on September 12. ”We are still committed to protesting against the summit,” National Land Committee organiser Andile Ann Eveleth, the group’s American media officer said in a prison interview: ”This is not going to affect our plans for the summit. Delegates should not believe that you can have sustainable development without land or landing up in jail.”
She was arrested on Thursday when she visited fellow activists in prison and was being held at Kempton Park police station as a prohibited person because her residence permit has expired.
Authorities said she would be deported.
South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu blessed the Greenpeace vessel Esperanza on Friday, and wished the world a clean, nuclear-free future.
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Tutu (70) told crew members of the vessel berthed in Cape Town’s harbour: ”Thank you for your work for peace and a nuclear-free world, it is wonderful and we thank you.” – Sapa-AFP