Commonwealth Secretary-General Kamalesh Sharma’s CHOGM diary

The Commonwealth Games Federation Sports Breakfast has become something of a feature of CHOGMs – it showcases what is, after all (along with The Queen, and Commonwealth Scholarships, and, I believe, Commonwealth Values) one of the most distinctive elements of the Commonwealth brand. Everyone knows the Friendly Games, and most have a sense of why they get their name. It’s one of life’s certainties that sportspeople like to reflect on their business over breakfast – in silence if at all possible, with the back pages of a newspaper open, and a cup of tea. But this morning a procession of speakers discussed it out loud. There came a moment when one speaker clean forgot the name of the speaker to follow. I, too, have occasionally experienced such mental blanks: this morning the words came out in agonising slow motion: “our next speaker is …. er, you!” The next man up responded magnificently, and brought the house down: “not gone, but forgotten!“ India spoke of its preparations for the 2010 Games in Delhi, while PM Manning launched an impromptu bid for T&T to host the 2018 Games which, one senses, may have come as something of a surprise, not least to his own staff. I spoke of the power of sport to build individuals, communities, even nations. I quoted my one, unforgettable, example, of a project once presented to me, featuring teenage boys and girls playing mixed soccer in rural Kenya. For boys to respect girls as their equals on the football pitch, is for them to learn something very important, very young.

And so into the Heads of Government Meeting again. Yesterday’s debate was called a Special Session, and today’s an Executive Session. Quite how we are arrive at these titles, I don’t know – but I do know that the Session could never have been called a blend of the two: a ‘Speculative Session’. It was completely determined: we gave ourselves the morning to finalise a climate change statement. And when it came – four hours later – PM Manning seized the moment to refer the document to our Creator, with whose creation we have been so dismissive, and whose charge to be stewards of the earth we have so singularly ignored. Whether or not this was a first in a CHOGM Summit, I do not know, but we prayed. ‘Pray to your God’, he exhorted us, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, people of all faiths and none. He duly did so, even if he signed off with a fairly clear giveaway as to the identity of his own God. It was, however, a powerful and a bonding moment, and the least we could to mark our intent.

The press conference which followed immediately after made that intent crystal clear. Ban Ki Moon joined us, and enjoined both the Commonwealth and the international community to hold its nerve and ‘seal a deal’ at Copenhagen. Danish PM Rasmussen said ‘I will leave Trinidad fully convinced that it will be possible to reach an agreement in Copenhagen in just a few weeks’. Australian PM Rudd talked about the consensus, momentum and support which the Commonwealth had delivered, and the concrete nature of our Declaration too. A master of his brief, he knew it to the very paragraph numbers: 7 and 13 taking his fancy. They covered the impossibility of anything other than a legally binding agreement, and the fact that the $10 billion Copenhagen Launch Fund to help poorer countries use cleaner and greener technology originates largely in the Commonwealth, through the UK. Given the floor, it was my chance to tell the audience that not only had the Commonwealth been there at the start of the climate debate (its 1989 Holdgate Report is still regarded as seminal, and its Langkawi Statement was the blueprint for the Rio Declaration in 1992), but it is still very much in the vanguard. Our task now is not just to voice the concerns of the smallest and most vulnerable states, but to help them to access the help they need. We are their brokers. So I am delighted that in addition to my existing Secretary-General’s Good Offices for Peace, we will now have the Secretary-General’s Good Offices for the Environment. They start work immediately.

Lunch followed with representatives of the Commonwealth Youth Caucus, who were powerful and articulate advocates of the simple fact the future is theirs, not mine. Manmohan Singh sat on one side of me, and on the other side sat Sarika Katoch, just 26, a youth worker from Dharamsala. With young leaders like her, we are in good hands. Sammy Kuvuma from Uganda, our Africa Commonwealth Youth Caucus Chair, radiated sincere good purpose in pressing the role of youth as agents of peace-building. In general, young people know better than to fight. Sammy beams hope and goodness. I was heartened: on the strength of this, and nearly 40 years of ground-breaking Commonwealth youth work and a youth credit microfinance scheme which we want to see upgraded, we believe we can ask Heads to issue a strong statement to inform the Secretariat’s and their own actions over the years. This is the power of politics. Make a democratic case to your own society, and it will respond to you.

The afternoon session sped by. A proposal to establish a Commonwealth Network of National Election Management Bodies was accepted. This is significant, not just for the fact that we create a network which can share best practice, but also because we allow for peer review. Already, for instance, the Ghanaian election commission has assisted fellow Commonwealth election commissions in Guyana and Malawi. For every bad election – and there have certainly been some – the good ones often go unremarked. When the Ghanaian elections of last December went down to the wire in the second round, it was roundly acknowledged that the Commonwealth had been a voice of professionalism, objectivity, sanity and calm. Soon after, a new electronic database of 85 million voters was successfully used in elections in Bangladesh – and then, earlier this year, the largest electorate in the world delivered a significant democratic achievement, when 714 million people voted in India.

The story of the day, though, is that Rwanda is our newest member. I found myself preparing some cryptic mathematics, in case any theatricality were needed in the way we announced it. At 0 we were 8, at 30 we were 40, and at 60 we are now 54. Which may need some explanation... In 1949, in London we were 8 members. A new association was formed – ‘freely and equally associated’. In 1979, 30 years later, in Lusaka, we were up to 40 members. We stood firm, that year, as to the complete inadmissibility of any form of racism in national life. And in 2009, at 60 years old, here in Port of Spain, we now number 54 members.

What a moment for a country that went to the brink in 1994. A new way of assessing Commonwealth membership applications had led to a rigorous assessment of its candidature. Our own detailed research, and that of others like the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, had revealed causes for encouragement, and causes for concern. Rwanda is really no different to any other Commonwealth member: all have come so far; all have further to go. What won the day was the political will to affirm. So, late last night, I telephoned the Head of our newest member. It was 2 a.m. in Kigali for President Kagame, but he told me he had had no intention of going to bed before he heard the news. His government and peoples aspire to our values and principles, and I conveyed a warm welcome on behalf of us all. I said that we pledge to travel with him – as with all.

And so to dinner. While I supped and sipped and saw another spectacular dance routine to a steel band accompaniment, my officials tapped and tapped. Draft communiqués and declarations were belching from every printer. Stray paragraphs and handy sentences were transported from one document to another. Indispensable semi-colons were slipped in; verbs were argued over; trade mark obfuscations were removed. In the painful world of international summitry, the concept of running to the finishing line seems to involve a lot of stopping by the side of the track, and relacing shoes. The Summit will end tomorrow. Or ‘later today’, said the last of my officials to rest his weary head, at 3.30 a.m.