This week, the largest meeting of world leaders in history will take place in New York at the United Nations. Governments are to look at the agreements they made five years ago, in 2000, as part of the Millennium Declaration and agree key measures on ending poverty, stopping genocides, terrorism, peace-building and human rights.
The decisions made by world leaders at the UN World Summit this week in New York affect all of us and are a crucial chance for UN reform. As a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, I arrived on Monday ahead of the summit and am very excited to be here.
I am here to do my best as part of Oxfam’s team for the summit, to make sure that governments agree that they have a responsibility to protect civilians facing large-scale atrocities — such as genocide and ethnic cleansing — when the government of the people concerned is failing to do so. This could prevent the terrible atrocities that happened in my country from every happening again.
The meeting is a crucial chance for countries to commit truly to ending the terrible poverty, injustice and suffering that kill millions of people every year. We are now less than two days away from the summit, during which crucial final negotiations on the summit outcome document are taking place. Unless leaders commit to poverty reduction and their responsibility to protect civilians, the summit will fail. Usually the details of the agreement are worked out far in advance of an international meeting, but two days before the summit there is still no agreement.
Today, Tuesday, we are all waiting for the latest draft of the negotiations to arrive to see if governments have moved any closer to reaching an agreement. We are nervous that they will be back-tracking on previous international agreements. It seems that diplomats who want a good outcome for the summit are now fighting just to maintain those earlier agreements. We might not move any closer toward seeing the outcomes that we all know must be achieved.
Officials worked late into the night and over the weekend to reach an agreement, but it never came. We were told on Monday that there was a real opportunity that governments may agree to protect civilians from genocide, but the situation changes so quickly that we are not sure if that will still happen.
We were all hoping to hear from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan at a press conference earlier on Tuesday what he thought of the negotiations, but it was cancelled. I will be meeting with colleagues and officials to continue to press for changes to ensure that genocide never happens again. On Wednesday, I am taking part in a press conference to share my experiences and tell people that what happened in my country must never happen again.
I have seen in my work for Oxfam in Rwanda that it is possible even for communities that have been torn apart by genocide to resolve their differences and live together in peace. I just hope that the UN ambassadors can find a way to bridge their differences and make commitments that will help millions of people around the world. Hopefully, we will see more progress and results on Wednesday.
Grace Mukagabiro, from Rwanda, works for Oxfam and is reporting from the UN World Summit in New York
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