UNITED NATIONS, Sept 19: World leaders attending the UN summit stressed the leadership role of the United Nations in setting the international agenda, as they addressed the General Assembly on Sunday on its 60th anniversary session.

However, many leaders from Africa, Asia and Latin America lamented that there has been very little progress in meeting the pledges set five years ago to reduce poverty and disease.

A UN report said that about 40 per cent of the world’s people still struggle to survive on less than $2 a day.

The UN must create an equitable world order, urged President Alfred Palacio of Ecuador, the first to speak on Sunday.

He said the organization should also take a leading role in the preservation of bio-diversity, which was the ‘paramount goal of this third millennium’.

Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe, said the UN should not be diverted from its important role in re-establishing multilateralism by such distractions as, for example, the dragging of his country before the Security Council by the United Kingdom.

“It is my hope that the Council will reject this attempt at neo-colonialism,” he said.

He also protested that black residents of the United States Gulf Coasts were left unprotected, while his country was the focus of UN attention. “Where are the UN-Habitat and the Human Rights Commission?” he asked, answering that they should be in New Orleans rather than in his country, where they were not needed.

To purge human rights and development efforts of selectivity, he supported the creation of a new human rights body under the aegis of the General Assembly.

The President of Peru, Alejandro Toledo Marque, said that peace and security had a social and economic component.

“Social exclusion is a trigger of violence and instability. It renders democracy fragile,” he said. This is why the multilateral system as a whole, with the UN in the lead, must tackle development, he added.

While each country was responsible for its development, he said, each also encountered obstacles. The asymmetry among countries must be overcome, including unequal trade barriers, subsidies, the burden of debt, and most importantly ‘the absence of preferential trade conditions for developing countries’.