Johannesburg — AllAfrica's Akwe Amosu watched on Wednesday in Johannesburg as U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the delegates at the World Summit on Sustainable Development and the Environment. In this reporter's notebook, she describes the mood of the final day.
"Everywhere I go, I'm asked to explain and justify the U.S. position," an American journalist in Johannesburg for the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) told me Wednesday.
Addressing a packed plenary session on the summit's final day, U.S. secretary of State Colin Powell encountered for himself the intense feeling that the U.S. stance has provoked here.
When Powell lauded the summit's goals - many of which the U.S. is seen as watering down or opposing during intense negotiations over the final text - the crowds seated on the spectators' benches at the back of the hall got to their feet, shouting and shaking their fists.
The tide of heckling rose as the speech proceeded, reaching a peak when Powell said: "The United States is taking action to meet environmental challenges, including global climate change."
Secretary Powell, clearly exasperated at being drowned out on several occasions by the protesters, told them at one point, ""I have heard you, now will you hear me?" Session chair, South African Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, called several times for order, describing the protestors' action as 'completely unacceptable'.
The refusal of the United States, as the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, to adhere to the Kyoto climate protocol is widely seen here as evidence that the Bush administration is not serious about offsetting the consequences of its massive use of fossil fuels.
Echoing earlier American criticism of the summit as being long on verbiage and declarations and short on action, Powell told his audience that his comments were not "just rhetoric".
"We are committed to a multi-billion dollar program to develop and deploy advanced technologies to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions," he said.
Promises here at the summit by China, Canada, Japan, and others that they will ratify the Kyoto Protocol by the end of the year have ensured that the protocol will come into force, leaving the U.S. further isolated on this issue.
Although development and environmentalist groups clearly had decided to attend the plenary en masse to make their feelings known, some members of national delegations joined the jeering on environmental issues.
Official delegates also weighed in on the issue of Zimbabwe. There were spontaneous catcalls from what appeared to be several dozen delegations when, some six paragraphs into his speech, Powell charged that the Zimbabwe government's lack of respect for human rights and rule of law had brought millions of people to the brink of starvation.
Several African delegates are known to be angry at the way that the World Trade Organization's Doha agreements have dominated much of the discussion - and particularly at attempts to give the WTO resolutions primacy over the WSSD's own agreed positions. Africans also blame rich countries for the failure to make progress on the ending of agricultural subsidies to their own producers, seen as restricting developing countries' access to markets.
U.S. announcements earlier in the summit of major projects to preserve African forests and support health, water and other projects with bilateral funding won only a lukewarm response, with journalists demanding to know how much 'new money' was involved, and to whom those implementing the projects would be accountable.
At the start of the summit, entry to the plenaries was only by ticket, with acquisition involving a time-consuming wait in line. Although new security arrangements were installed at the start of the week to coincide with the arrival of the heads of state, the rules on attending plenaries seem to have been relaxed.
On Wednesday evening, some hours after the Powell speech, the U.S. delegate told the closing plenary that his country was very satisfied with the final implementation plan - with some caveats. His comments drew further catcalls, although much muted by comparison with the action of the morning.
The plenary protests bring into focus a widening gap between government and civil society on issues relating to development and the environment. NGOs present at the meeting have widely criticised the lack of concrete progress at the summit, blaming a number of governments, not only the United States, for spoiling action.
At an NGO press conference during the final session, speakers said "unenlightened self-interest" had dominated in negotiations and that a meeting that was supposed to be about sustainability had turned into a trade negotiation.
But critics singled out Norway, Ethiopia, Germany and New Zealand as countries who had done much to maintain key 'pro-poor and pro-environment' provisions.
Canada, too, was praised by NGOs for standing firm on the inclusion, in a section of the action plan on women's reproductive health, of a clause ensuring that women's human rights should be respected -- UN 'code' (in this context) for guaranteeing the right to abortion a position which the U.S. strongly opposed.
Following the press conference, members of NGOs from the United States pinned a large U.S. flag to the wall outside the briefing room, On it they had written: "Thank you, President Bush, for making the U.S. so hated."
Despite disappointment among many official and non-official delegates about the lack of concrete guarantees for action, the summit has broken new ground in setting timetables and targets to restore the world's fish stocks and extend sanitation facilities to the poor.
Also new is a commitment to renewable energy for the first time, although the United States and oil-producing countries' opposition prevented delegates from setting any timetables or targets on this front. A push from the European Union to raise the target for global use of renewables by one percentage point over the next decade - from 14% to 15 % - was scuttled, when the U.S. government refused to abandon its opposition.
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For many, the main benefit of the summit will have been the opportunity to network and discuss collaboration across thematic and national boundaries.
There will almost certainly be a post-mortem on the way the summit was conducted. There is widespread unease about the way the meeting was dominated by line-by-line negotiation of the text of the draft plan of implementation.
A representative from the Youth Caucus a group of youth organisations working on sustainable development - told the closing plenary: "You have failed us."
"We are sick and tired of the empty promises and political posturing that we've witnessed time and time again over the past ten years. We are fed up with your bracketing and debating the placement of commas in the plan of action".
UN special envoy to the summit, Jan Pronk, told the BBC that the meeting had come "close to collapse" and implied that delegates had only managed to maintain the status quo, rather than advancing the summit's real objectives. "They were working till last night on reinforcing advances made in the past," he said. That left very little time for talking about implementation."
