UNITED NATIONS. Sept 8 The UN Millennium Summit comes to its historic close today with the adoption of a wide-ranging wish list that promises to cut poverty, protect planet Earth and improve the ability of the United Nations to keep the peace, reports AP.

The summit declaration, negotiated for weeks but expected to be adopted by acclamation, also commits the 150 heads of state and government who gathered for the three-day meeting to promote democracy, strengthen respect for human rights and reverse the spread of AIDS.

Secretary-general Kofi Annan has warned that he would not be satisfied unless the leaders actually implement the pledges in the document. He told a news conference on the eve of the summit that he expected every one of them "to go back home and begin to do something about it."

The last day of the summit opened this morning with a speech by Gambian President Yahya Jammeh. at 35 the youngest African leader attending. The last scheduled speaker was Techeste Aliderom. who chaired a May sununit of grass-roots organisations who gave their own advice on how the United Nations could remake itself to better address the challenges of the 21" century.

On Thursday. It was the Security Council's turn to take up that task, pledging an overhaul of UN peacekeeping operations so troops can respond more quickly and robustly to world trouble spots.

The council's pronouncement, however, was not in the typical form of a Security Council resolution — an indication that the 15 — presidents and prime ministers weren't entirely comfortable with making such concrete. legally binding pledges to better finance

I teacekeeping operations.

But the document will nevertheless be one of the major outcomes of the summit, which featured a notable first — a chat and handshake between President Clinton and Cuban President Fidel Castro.

Another summit legacy will be the apparent failure to reach a Mideast, peace deal. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat on Thursday rejected Clintons proposal to split control of Muslim and Jewish holy sites In east Jerusalem.

But the three-day meeting, which clogged New York city, streets with motorcades and protests, will likely be hailed as a success merely for having occurred, drawing more leaders together than ever before to discuss the challenges confronting the globe in the third millennium.

“What's the point of stepping foot on Mars if there is still hunger in several regions of our planet?" asked Rene Preval, the president of Haiti, the Western Hemisphere's poorest country.

Such questtons were raised throughout the second day of speeches Thursday and continued Friday.

Clinton raised the issue of the disparities between rich and poor in his address to the council, saying it must address broader security issues related to disease, poverty, education and climate change if it wants to make a change in keeping the peace.

"Until was confront the iron link between deprivation, disease and war. we will never be able to create the peace that the founders of the United Nations dreamed of," he said.

The world body is currently engaged in 14 peacekeeping operations — most of them in the world s poorest countries — with more than 37,000 troops and civilian police deployed from East Timor to Cyprus and Sierra Leone at an annual cost

of about $2.2 billion.

Nearly 1,000 UN civilian stall are engaged in 14 other political and peace-building missions from Afghanistan to Burundi and Guatemala.

Council members met against a sobering backdrop: the killing of three UN relief workers assisting refugees from East Timor; the rebel seizure of 500 UN peacekeepers in Sierra Leone: highly critical reports of the UN role in the 1994 Rwanda genocide and the 1995 slaughter of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica.

At the end of the two-hour meeting, the council leaders — from Argentina. Bangladesh. Canada. China. France. Jamaica. Malaysia, Mali, Namibia. Netherlands’ Russia. Tunisia. Ukraine. Britain and the United States — vowed "to strengthen the central role of the United Nations in peacekeeping."

They underlined the importance of rapid deployment of UN peacekeepers and called for realistic mandates that the soldiers can fulfill, proper training and equipment for them, and an overhaul of the UN peacekeeping department.

But their proclamation wasn't in resolution form. A one-paragraph resolution was adopted, but it said only that the council "decides to adopt" the attached annex, which contained the text of the council pledge.

Diplomats were divided on whether the annex itself was legally binding. It was a compromise after more than a week of closed-door negotiation Council diplomats said several countries couldn't agree to make such specific pledges in a full-fledged resolution.

Rather than watering down the resolution to be palatable to all. they decided to adopt the declaration as an annex to a resolution, the diplomats said.