UNITED NATIONS – Remotely accumulated world leaders wednesday criticized a random global reaction to a microscopic virus that has unleashed economic devastation and killed nearly a million lives as it marches around the world. In the words of the President of Kazakhstan, this is a “critical collapse of global cooperation. “
“Our world has turned upside down,” said Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo. “We all fell in combination and looked in combination into the abyss.
The coronavirus pandemic and its aftermath crowned the list of considerations at the time of the day of pre-recorded speeches through world leaders at the first high-level virtual meeting of the General Assembly. Countries, large and small, spoke of the difficulty of dealing with its effect without external coordination.
Calls to the global to paint in combination to fight the scourge and other global disorders were at the heart of this week’s UN meeting, which in turn replaced with the virus.
“A pandemic is by definition a global challenge” and demands a global response, but COVID-19 “unfortunately has revealed how tempted we are to respond to immediate threats, nationally and internationally,” Finnish President Sauli Niinisto said.
Instead of joining multilateral efforts to combat coronavirus, he said, “we have noticed a number of national responses” that “raise considerations about how we will be able to meet other global challenges. “
Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev warned that the world “is reaching what some have already called a state of ‘dysfunction’ due to the pandemic, and that the formula is now” at the breaking point of dramatic disorders that can lead to irreversible consequences. “»
“Now is a turning point for humanity,” he warned.
Tokayev called for the improvement of national fitness institutions, the abolition of the policy of creating a coronavirus vaccine and the revision of World Health Organization regulations and allowing all countries to save and fight disease.
The Kazakh leader proposed the establishment of an International Biological Security Agency founded on the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, which would be accountable to the United Nations Security Council, and recommended the establishment of a network of regional disease and biosecurity centres under the auspices of the United Nations.
Many leaders also called for any COVID-19 vaccines developed to be shared equally, with Sefik Dzaferovic, president of bosnia’s three-member presidency, saying it will have to be available “to all mankind. “
Dzaferovic said that in recent years he had witnessed a “very strong crisis of multilateralism” within foreign organizations, adding that the United Nations has “an object of strong protests and even disputes. “
But the pandemic showed “its ordinary importance in today’s globalized world,” he said, and also showed that “today’s greatest disorders can no longer be solved through one, three, or five individual states. “
As the death toll from the virus approaches one million, many leaders have explained how lives in their countries have been dramatically replaced.
Akufo-Addo, from Ghana, said that around the world, other people around the world have learned not to shake hands or embrace those they enjoy, not to sing as a team because it has “a harmful activity” and to worry about protecting young people to school.
And “for many people, the hardest thing to deal with in those turbulent times has been the silence imposed on churches, mosques, temples and other places of worship,” he said.
The economic effect of COVID-19 has been felt around the world, including in the small Pacific island country of Palau, which has remained free of coronavirus. President Tommy Remengesau Jr. said the pandemic is affecting the archipelago’s economy and has put the country of about 18,000 more people “at a point of isolation that we haven’t experienced in many years. “
Palau is dealing with interrupted food and drug chains, obtaining life-saving remedies for patients who traveled to larger countries and keeping families, academics at school and people running together.
“Private sector unemployment is reaching 50%, and it will take years for what we lost in a few months,” Remengesau said.
The leader of Palau, who said he would soon return to fishing life, recalled attending the high-level assembly of the General Assembly in 2001, two months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and then called for the nuressing of unity and cooperation. Inspired.
“We don’t see human evil in this pandemic like we did in the perpetrators of 9/11,” he said. “But the challenge of our reaction is not so different . . . to unite in the face of a non-unusual crisis in some way that might have been unlikely a year or two ago.
The pandemic has also “thrown a soft crude about inequality in the world,” said Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, a coVID-19 survivor.
Swiss President Simonetta Sommaruga, one of the few female leaders to speak, said the pandemic “has caused incalculable suffering around the world,” and that the most vulnerable are the most affected.
“If each and every crisis is suffering, it’s also a time of replenishment that allows us to reinvent ourselves,” he said. “So let’s reinvent ourselves. “
Some countries, such as Iraq, have more help for countries that have less than others.
King Salman of Saudi Arabia, in the first speech to the UN by a Saudi monarch since his father’s in 1957, said that as president of the Group of 20 industrialized primary nations, the kingdom held a summit of its leaders in March and promised $ 500 million. . to fight this pandemic and its humanitarian and economic impacts. »
Reflecting the wishes of all leaders, Iraqi President Barham Saleh said: “We pray to the Almighty God that the next assembly can be held in a global pandemic. “
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a former actor who won the presidency in 2019, spoke about the final borders, the summer Olympics and the existing high-level online meeting.
“A year ago, we would have said this was the setting for the end-of-the-world blockbuster, not the truth of 2020,” Zelenskiy said.
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