World leaders united on terrorism

By Paul Taylor and Evelyn Leopold

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – World leaders united on
Wednesday on the need to ban incitement of terrorism but fell
short of ambitions for a fundamental reform of the United
Nations at a summit on the agency’s 60th anniversary.

The 15-member Security Council held a rare top-level
session to adopt a resolution on terrorism proposed by Britain
following the July 7 London bombings.

“We have a solemn obligation to stop terrorism at its early
stages,” U.S. President George W. Bush told the session. “We
must do all we can to disrupt each stage of planning and
support for terrorist acts.”

Bush also issued a more nuanced appeal, saying that war
alone would not defeat terrorism if the world ignored “the
hardship and oppression of others.”

Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the gathering of kings,
presidents and prime ministers that despite some progress,
negotiators had failed to achieve the profound overhaul of U.N.
policies and institutions he sought.

He conceded that in many areas, including enlargement of
the Security Council, members remained sharply divided. “We
have not yet achieved the sweeping and fundamental reform that
I and many others believe is required,” Annan said.

“Our biggest challenge and our biggest failing is on
nuclear-proliferation and disarmament,” he told the opening
session of the three-day summit, which has turned from solving
crises to highlighting the world body’s difficulties.

Negotiations on a summit document the world leaders are to
endorse dropped disarmament proposals from Norway and South
Africa, backed by about 80 nations. The United States objected
to calls for nuclear disarmament but stressed the danger of
terrorists and rogue states obtaining unconventional weapons.

French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin served a
reminder of the topicality of the issue, warning Iran that it
faced referral to the U.N. Security Council unless it met its
obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Tehran insists it has the right to enrich uranium for what
it says is a civilian nuclear program, but Western nations
suspect it of a clandestine drive to develop an atom bomb.

The foreign ministers of France, Britain and Germany are
seeking a meeting with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Thursday in what could be a last-ditch effort to “test the
temperature of Iran’s new leadership” on the nuclear issue, a
European diplomat said.

Annan said it was a breakthrough that the international
community had agreed for the first time it had a responsibility
to intervene to protect civilians against genocide, war crimes
and ethnic cleansing.

But billions of people still depended on radical action to
achieve the Millennium Development Goals that include halving
extreme poverty by half by 2015, Annan told the gathering,
which was overshadowed by a scandal over abuses of the U.N.
oil-for-food program in Iraq.

Bush referred obliquely to the scandal, saying the United
Nations must be “free of corruption, and accountable to the
people it serves” and practice the high moral standards it
preached.

The president also insisted the United States was committed
to the Millennium Development Goals, despite Washington’s
earlier demands that references to the phrase be deleted from
the summit document. And he pledged to drop all trade barriers
if other countries did the same.

Tanzanian President Benjamin William Mkapa said it never
occurred to him that the U.N. members would have problems in
agreeing to eradicate poverty.

“When a jumbo jet crashes, we will rush in with assistance
but we forget that each day 30,000 children die unnecessarily
from poverty-related preventable causes — equivalent to 100
jumbo jets crashing every day,” Mkapa said.

In a veiled criticism of the United States, the world’s
richest nation, Dutch Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende said
the Europeans had agreed to boost development aid spending but
“we need to see more equal burden-sharing.”

Most of the delegates spent their times meeting each other,
including a handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, whose nations
have no diplomatic relations.

“I was standing and he came in a group and he joined the
group and he shook hands with me,” Musharraf said. “He asked me
how I was. I asked him how you are. And that’s very good.”