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Bill Clinton as World Saviour

09/15/2005 10:58 - (SA)

New York - Former United States president Bill Clinton, apparently not content with eight years as leader of the free world, is now out to save the planet.

With more than 170 heads of state and government gathered in New York for the United Nations summit, Clinton will open Thursday the inaugural meeting of his Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), aimed at wiping out poverty, ending conflict, rolling back climate change and promoting better governance worldwide.

"We have an opportunity we cannot afford to pass up - in just three days, we can begin to make a world of difference," says Clinton's mission statement on the CGI website.

If the CGI's stated aims seem somewhat grandiose, Clinton has the formidable personal contacts to mute the sceptics.

The three-day confab's participants include US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and media magnate Rupert Murdoch.

Few question his intentions.

Every year for the next decade, the CGI meeting will coincide with the opening of the UN General Assembly, but Clinton dismisses suggestions that he is setting up an alternative to the world body or, more realistically, the annual world economic forum in Davos.

"It is a meeting unlike a Davos or a UN meeting, but an activism forum from which each participant will come out with a list of tasks to be accomplished," Clinton told the British newspaper, The Independent.

"Those who do not fulfil their tasks will not come back the following year," he said.

The youngest pensioned-off president since Theodore Roosevelt, Clinton is still only 59 and a globally-recognised political figure in search of a constituency to match.

Since leaving the White House in 2001, he swiftly met the two traditional post-presidency requirements of building his presidential library and writing his memoirs.

My Life, which was published in June last year, became an immediate best-seller, despite less than glowing reviews that included a New York Times judgement of the book as "eye-crossingly dull."

Along the way, he set up a foundation to combat the global scourge of Aids, won a Grammy with Sophia Loren and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for a CD recording of "Peter and the Wolf," and underwent a quadruple heart bypass.

Now with CGI, Clinton is embarking on the independent, elder statesman path taken by another former president, Jimmy Carter, whose
Carter Centre with its similar slogan of "Waging Peace, Fighting Disease, Bringing Hope" was rewarded with a Nobel Peace Prize.

While few question Clinton's good intentions, there have been suggestions that his projects are chosen with one eye on building a platform from which to promote a widely expected presidential bid by his wife, New York Senator Hillary Clinton.