South African President Criticizes "Powerful Nations"

The President of the Republic of South Africa made an address at the U.N. Headquarters on Tuesday in which he criticized the behavior of rich and powerful nations regarding various international issues, calling for actions to be taken which would benefit the world's poor.

According to a press release issued by the United Nations on Tuesday, President Thabo Mbeki made an address to the U.N. General Assembly, criticizing the "dominant" role of some wealthy nations and calling for major efforts to fight against climate change (a.k.a. global warming). He indicated that climate change is likely to have the most harmful effect on impoverished people.

He was quoted as saying that the "skewed distribution of power" is to the disadvantage of poor people throughout the world. He praised the United Nations for effectively identifying problems in many fields and creating potential solutions for them, but said that rich nations fail to cooperate in achieving the solutions unless it happens to also promote their "narrow interests." He criticized the dominant role of powerful nations in the U.N. and other international forums.

He also called upon wealthy countries to provide more development assistance, technology transfer, investment, and trade with impoverished nations so as to help them reach the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. He pointed out that large "resource transfers" to Western Europe after World War II helped European countries recover and develop their economies. He asked why similar efforts are not applied to help poor countries at present.

According to the United Nations web site the Millennium Development Goals (which he referred to) include a number of specific achievements to be accomplished by 2015. These include decreasing the number of people who have inadequate food by half, reducing the amount of people who live on less than a dollar per day by half, establishing universal primary education for all children, eradicating gender inequality in education, reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS and malaria, and reducing the maternal mortality rate by 3/4, among other goals.

The CIA World Factbook indicates that about half of South Africans are considered to be below the poverty line. President Thabo Mbeki has been the leader of South Africa since June 1999 and is the head of the African National Congress party, which holds the majority of the seats in the National Assembly. South Africa is almost twice as large as Texas and is bordered by Namibia, Mozambique, and several other countries.

Sources:

1. United Nations, http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=23968
2. United Nations, http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/
3. CIA World Factbook, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/sf.html