G-8 Leaders Gathering in Canada's Rocky Mountain Retreat

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Wednesday, June 26, 2002

G-8 Leaders Gathering in Canada's Rocky Mountain Retreat

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The leaders of the Group of Eight (G-8) are arriving in Calgary one by one on Tuesday for a two- day annual summit meeting starting on Wednesday at a remote resort in Canada's Rocky Mountains amid unprecedented security.

After their special planes landed at the Calgary Airport, the leaders of Canada, France, Britain, Germany, the United States traveled on by military helicopters to Kananaskis, a village 90 kilometers west of Calgary.

At the airport, each leader was presented with a white cowboy hat as a special gift. But German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder put the hat on the head of the person who had handed it to him and then walked swiftly to his helicopter.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is due to arrive late Tuesday and Russian President Vladimir Putin will join the other leaders on Wednesday.

The G-8 leaders are expected to focus their discussion on strengthening global economic growth, building a new partnership for Africa's development and fighting terrorism, according to the agenda.

Putin, whose country became a full member of the group in 1997, will not take part in the economic session as usual.

Though Canadian Premier Jean Chretien has set the global economic growth, anti-terrorism and Africa's development as three priorities of the summit, the leaders still differ on which one they should focus on.

On the eve of his departure for the summit meeting, U.S. President George W. Bush proposed a controversial Middle East peace plan and hoped to shift the attention of other participants to counter-terrorism and his plan.

Bush has said his principal goal at Kananaskis will be "making sure this coalition of freedom-loving countries is strong."

However, his G-8 colleagues might be anxious to offer their thoughts on the damage that U.S. actions on steel, agriculture and softwood lumber are exerting on the coalition, not to mention Washington's refusal to join the Kyoto treaty on global warming.

At the same time, they are also concerned about Bush's emerging new doctrine of preemptive strikes against terrorists and countries that develop weapons of mass destruction.

Bush, in his commencement address at the U.S. Military Academy on June 1, said the U.S. will strike preemptively against suspected terrorists and the states that support them. The remarks have aroused new concerns about what many allies see as a troubling U.S. tendency toward unilateralism.

Observers said Bush's priorities in fighting terrorism, coping with the Middle East crisis and laying out Washington's plan to expand its war to Iraq may overshadow other G-8 agenda items.

This year, Chretien, who is hosting the G-8 summit for the second time, has made a special commitment to the development of an Africa Action Plan in order to help Africa address its social and economic marginalization.

The Canadian premier, who toured major African countries earlier this year, said he will not let other participants to shift the focus. "Not at all, because I am the chair," he said.

In Genoa last year, G-8 leaders decided to forge a concrete plan to respond to a unique proposal put forward by African leaders, which is known as the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD).

The G-8 leaders will be joined in their discussions by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the leaders of five African countries, including South African President Thabo Mbeki, who will urge their rich-nation counterparts to support the made-in-Africa plan to revitalize their stricken continent.

NEPAD aims to halve the number of Africans living in poverty by 2015 and meet several other development targets. Africa's 53 nations include the lowest 28 on the United Nations Human Development Index, a ranking of 162 countries. The continent has largely failed to benefit from economic globalization and has also been hit hard by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, famine and war.

Advocates for aid to Africa urged the G-8 to double their aid over the next three years. In a report released Monday, ActionAid, a global aid group, said the world is far behind meeting the United Nations' goal of cutting global poverty by half by 2015.

"Unless they radically change their approach, 2015 will come and go and 66 million children will have died needlessly because of poverty," said Matthew Lockwood, the report's author.

The summit is being held against the backdrop of increasing hopes for a stronger global economic recovery in 2002. The G-8 leaders are likely to signal renewed confidence in the world's economic prospect and express many of the sentiments evident at a recent meeting of the Group of Seven finance ministers in Canada.

The Canadian government has chosen Kananaskis as the summit site in an apparent bid to avoid a repeat of last year's violent street clashes in Genoa, Italy, during which one protester was killed and hundreds were injured.

Security is extraordinarily tight for the summit, the first since the September 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S., in which more than 3,000 people were killed.

Anti-aircraft missiles are deployed around the highway leading to the summit site and in other locations, ready to shoot down any aircraft that violates the 150-kilometer no-fly zone around the Kananaskis Village, accessible only by a two-lane road.

A brigade of Canadian infantry -- usually consisting of 4,500 soldiers -- is assisting police in patrolling the "exclusion zone" extending for 6.5 kilometers around the Delta Lodge at Kananaskis.

Thousands of anti-globalization activists gathered in the downtown financial district in Calgary on Sunday, staging their first protest against the 30-hour G-8 summit, promising that more mass mobilization is to come. Many marchers complained that the Canadian government tried to shut down dissenting voices by choosing the secluded mountain resort for the summit.

(Xinhua)

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