Don McKinnon's CHOGM: W. David McIntyre reports on the new format Commonwealth meetings held in Malta in November 2005.

• Author: McIntyre, W. David
• Position: Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting

The most significant pointers to the future of the Commonwealth that I took away from CHOGM 2005 in Valletta came, not from heads of government, but from the directors of the two premier inter-governmental organisations. Don McKinnon, the Secretary-General, suggests that a new name and acronym should replace 'CHOGM'. Mark Collins, the Director of the Commonwealth Foundation, wants to resolve the tri-sector dilemma by calling on the official, civil society, and private business sectors to focus on problems together. These are highly relevant responses to the new format CHOGM tried out in Malta in November 2005.

In recent years Commonwealth meetings have followed the pattern adopted in 1997 when Britain hosted them in Edinburgh. These coincided with the half-century of India's independence (and New Zealand's, though few remembered this). In the first flush of New Labour's 'Cool Britannia', 1997 had been designated the 'Year of the Commonwealth'. It was also the golden wedding of the Queen and she was invited, for the very first time, to address the opening ceremony as Head of the Commonwealth. This established a 'tradition' followed ever since. Other significant innovations at Edinburgh included a Commonwealth People's Centre in connection with the third NGO Forum, where over 80 civil society organisations mounted exhibits, seminars, and mini-conferences. There was also the first Commonwealth Youth Forum (CYF), and the first Commonwealth Business Forum (CBF), which gave birth to the Commonwealth Business Council (CBC). Several heads of government spoke at the Business Forum and later visited the People's Centre.

Tri-sector gatherings thenceforth became the norm. For Brisbane, in 2001, the Australian government planned to pull things together in an imaginative way. A splendid venue, where CHOGM, civil society meetings, and media centre were all to be housed in one complex, augured well for interaction. But it was not to be. The 9/11 crisis led to the cancellation, at the last minute, of a foreign ministers' meeting and the Business Forum. The CHOGM was postponed, but a People's Festival and Youth Forum went ahead. When, eventually, the CHOGM met in March 2002, it was at the remote Coolum Beach resort on the Queensland coast, the place originally planned for the Heads of Government Retreat. Here vast tents were erected for the opening ceremony, the sports lunch, and the media centre. A suggestion emerged at this time that CHOGMs might become simply heads of government retreats. Malta 2005 witnessed a further step in this direction.

New format

National leaders, caught up in an incessant summitry circuit, were reluctant to perpetuate the old week-long, or even five-day, CHOGMs. But they cherished their Retreats, where heads of government meet informally without officials to focus on a few key issues. Thus in Malta there was a completely new format. As well as the now well-established pre-CHOGM youth, civil society, and business forums, there were meetings of foreign ministers to dispatch all the detailed political business and receive submissions from the unofficial forums. This is one of Don McKinnon's most significant changes as Secretary-General. A former foreign minister himself, he noticed the 'big gap' in the sequence of Commonwealth ministerial meetings and inaugurated foreign ministers' meetings in-the-wings of the UN General Assembly. For the Malta CHOGM the heads of government meetings were the shortest yet--only two-and-a-half days. There was an opening ceremony, one agenda-setting executive session, and then an enlarged Retreat from Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon. This permitted attention to only the main issues and left all the nitty-gritty of the conference declarations and communique to pre-CHOGM foreign ministers' meetings. Some of the latter would have been attending anyway, either for the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group (C-Mag) on the Harare principles or for a Ministerial Meeting on Small States. Thus before the heads of government gathered on Friday 25 November 2005, there was a great deal of activity around Valletta.

Malta, with a population of about 400,000, is the smallest state so far to have hosted the meetings. CHOGM 2005 was the largest conference to be held on the island. It had nearly a full turn out: 52 out of the 53 member countries were represented. Only Nauru was absent. There were 23 prime ministers and three deputies, fourteen presidents and one vice-president, and a governor-general. Canada sent neither the Prime Minister nor the Foreign Minister because of their tenuous parliamentary situation. The head of the Canadian delegation was the Speaker of the Senate, leaving Tony Blair, Helen Clark, and John Howard to hold the fort for the old established democracies.

Delegations...