By
The Associated Press
UNITED NATIONS - Secretary-General Kofi Annan yesterday urged the kings, generals and presidents descending on New York for the U.N. Millennium Summit to use the unprecedented meeting to forge peace and end poverty in the 21st century.
But some heads of state are expected to use the three days of speeches, discussions and meetings beginning today to push their own agendas - including those that are critical of the United States.
In a taste of what may come, North Korea denounced the United States as a "rogue state" yesterday, claiming the government was responsible for allegedly ordering the strip search of members of the delegation as they switched planes in Germany. The incident prompted Pyongyang to call off the summit trip by its No. 2 leader, who had been scheduled to meet South Korean President Kim Dae-jung.
North Korea's U.N. Ambassador Li Hyong Chol warned that the humiliating security check could prove "quite expensive" for U.S.-North Korean relations, even though the State Department quickly said it deeply regretted the incident.
Washington is also expected to come under fire from Cuban President Fidel Castro, who came to New York yesterday for the first time in five years. He is expected to speak out against American domination of the United Nations in his five minutes on the podium today.
Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque told a press conference in Havana last week that Cuba would lambast "the growing tendency of a small and powerful group of countries" to violate the U.N. Charter and intervene militarily in member countries without Security Council approval - a reference to the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.
The United States also can expect to get an earful from more friendly countries.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Jiang Zemin are likely to use the gathering to continue rallying international support against U.S. national missile defense plans.
President Clinton's announcement last week that he would leave it to the next administration to decide whether and when to deploy such a system will certainly be welcomed by many leaders who have criticized the U.S. plans as a threat to 30 years of arms control treaties.
But analysts have predicted that Jiang will use the summit - and a one-on-one meeting with Clinton - to pressure the United States to cancel the missile defense proposal altogether. Beijing fears that the anti-missile shields will render useless its growing arsenal of missiles and force China into a costly arms race.
Jiang, however, will have his own controversies to deal with as members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement stage continuous demonstrations against the Chinese leader for Beijing's crackdown on the sect - part of the 91 demonstrations planned this week.
About 400 Falun Gong members, some of them wearing T-shirts that read "Stop persecuting Falun Gong" held their meditation exercises yesterday morning outside the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, where Jiang was hosting a breakfast meeting with American media executives.
"We're trying to rally Americans to try to do something to help us," protester Gail Rachlin said.
Other protests have been leveled against Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, including a demonstration yesterday outside Iran's U.N. mission by a coalition of Jewish groups protesting the prison sentences handed down to 10 Iranian Jews convicted of espionage.
Khatami, who has tried to reach out to the Iranian-Jewish community here, presided yesterday over a pre-summit roundtable discussion attended by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and other heads of state on forging a "dialogue among civilizations" to promote world peace.
Annan said the presence of Albright at Khatami's event was a good signal that a rapprochement between the United States and Iran was moving forward - "Let's say the ice is being broken," - but National Security Adviser Sandy Berger quickly said Clinton had no plans to meet with Khatami during the summit.
Clinton does, however, have meetings planned on the U.N. sidelines with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to try to relaunch Mideast peace talks. Berger, though, said yesterday he saw little chance for a peace agreement to emerge.
At a press conference to inaugurate the summit, Annan also tempered expectations that the summit would magically cure the world's ills. And he stressed that if leaders don't implement the pledges they make in a summit declaration expected to be adopted on Friday, nothing will change.
The declaration vows to halve the proportion of people who live on less than a dollar a day and to reverse the spread of AIDS while seeking a more just distribution of the benefits of globalization to the world's poor.
"We do have the capacity to tackle these issues, if we can only muster the will,' Annan said.
