Topic: International Institutions and Human Rights

Afternoon Session, Oct. 16

El Hassan bin Talal
In the spirit of ecumenical pluralism and in the presence of so many of you of the Jewish and Christian faiths, at a time when extremism seems to be on the increase, when stereotyping blunts any hope of recognizing the humanity of the other, I wanted to remind us of another voice. His words also address our feelings about the tragedy that struck America. Somewhere in these shared feelings there has to be a way for us to meet, beyond the conflict that diminishes and corrupts us all, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Israelis, Palestinians alike. There are no simple answers to the political conflict. But there are possibilities of meeting each other at the level of religious understanding. Whenever we read the halal, that sound can also be a call to us to escape the narrowness of vision that lumps all people together and denies their uniqueness and humanity and reduces them to a label or a slogan: “the other, the enemy”. When I first met my friend Shimon Peres in the White House in 1993, I took courage in my hands and spoke in Hebrew and he will forgive me if I speak once again in Hebrew from the Old Testament, “To get out of this narrowness, I called on God and God answered me with a broader vision. Give thanks to the eternal who is good. God’s love is for the world, the whole world, is eternal. It lasts forever.”
The topic of today’s afternoon session is human rights and international institutions. My humble experience in working with numbers of international humanitarian issues was established in the late 1980s. My experience with the United Nations was rewarded in that the General Assembly of the United Nations renewed its commitment to a new international humanitarian order. We encompassed the ethics of human solidarity, looked at global issues, population, disarmament, poverty, and development. We considered the forces of change. We looked at the young, the uprooted, the neglected, at man-made disasters, famine, desertification, and deforestation. Let’s us remember the words of Mary Robinson that “if food does not arrive to the Afghan people within the next few weeks, a disaster on the proportions of Rwanda will be repeated before our very eyes.” I would like to suggest today that as we address the subject of working against terror, that we also address the subject of working for something beyond the imperatives of the moment. On Thursday next in London, I have been invited to address the Muslims of
Britain and representatives of Muslims from Europe on Islamic responses to terrorism. An organization, an NGO, the Al-Khoei Foundation in London has extended this invitation and I would like to say that to be able to work for something was the crux of my conversation with Walter Suzulu in Soweto not so long ago. For too long, we have worked against the apartheid, against xenophobia, against anti-Semitism, against Islamophobia today, and I would like to suggest that working for an international parliament of cultures is a part of the new value system that we wish to evolve to break away from the polarity of us and them. Most people, including intelligentsia and academia, define us very parochially most of the time and there is a desperate need for dialogue and the promotion of the noble art of conversation, which surely is not a martial art. The world today is increasingly interconnected and interdependent. I have no doubt that we as Muslims believe that we have partners in such a world. We want all cultures to play a part and contribute to the formulation of an agenda One World and 10,000 Cultures. If only one culture or tradition dictates the terms of reference vis-à-vis such an agenda, formulation of a value system according to that one culture will lead to the exclusion of others, to injustice and marginalization, to conflict and to further war. I had the privilege, as moderator of the World Conference on Religions and Peace, of speaking in Auschwitz last year. Why Auschwitz? I was invited, as moderator of the World Conference, and I didn’t want to be accused of being a hypocrite and not participating and triangulating a conversation between
Jews, Christians, and Muslims. I recall vividly traveling together to Bosnia, at a time when the international community was concerned over the fate of Muslim Bosnians, with Yossi Sarid, the then minister of the Israeli cabinet. We spoke of Jewish and Muslim aid to the Muslims of Bosnia. I would like to point out very clearly however, that the fighting continues in so many countries of the world. I don’t want to politicize this meeting by entering into the details of the images we have reported from London yesterday, the call for a viable Palestinian state, but I do want to say that with connections that I have in my family history, with Turkey on the one hand, with Pakistan, India and Bangladesh on the other, it is my hope that in this dawning millennium that the problems of Kashmir, Cyprus and Palestine are not there to stay. It is my hope that the parliament of cultures can be a clear break from the trend towards ethnic and sectarian break-up of nations, and the consolidation of hatred to a trend of understanding the importance of pluralism and respect for the other. When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted 1948, ethical and cultural relativity was firmly rejected. According to the relativistic approach, it is necessary to tolerate as equals even the most distorted notions about freedom and the dignity of man, even those involving degradation and slavery. This is not acceptable.
Ladies and gentlemen, an international symposium of the leaders of world’s religions will be meeting at Ground Zero in New York on the 23rd and 24th of October. I hope that the message will be clear–-the message of the respect for life, respect for justice, including the need for food and the respect for tolerance. The injunction is: The Almighty fed them from hunger and protected them from fear. As for suicide, once again, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, the terrorization of people, of innocent civilians is unacceptable and the position of suicide is also abhorrent and unacceptable. However, let me make it clear that those who call for the abolishing of martyrdom have to bear in mind that, regrettably, when societies were small, individual ethical obligations extended only to members of the clan or the tribe. What we see in the terms of martyrdom is more about tribalism than it is about religion. The media is also responsible for creating living martyrs, for creating anti-heroes, for developing the outreach of cult figures. I hope that this is an issue that, among others, can be also addressed in this afternoon’s session.
My natural allies, speaking of international institutions, in working against HIV in Africa, are Care International, UNICEF, and the American Save the Children Fund. Maybe a day will come when we will see a Muslim peace corps. Or an interdenominational peace corps. Which, as Shimon Peres has pointed out, is not composed of blue helmets but maybe of blue overalls, of altruism, of doing the work that is needed in so many difficult parts of the world. Once again, let me make it clear, that international institutions, not least of all the pension funds in Europe, were prepared to develop an infrastructure of poverty alleviation in our troubled arc of crisis, from the Moroccan Atlantic coast to the top of the Caspian, the energy ellipse, with seventy percent of the world’s oil and forty percent of the world’s gas, seventy percent of the world’s refugees are Muslims. I would like to point out very clearly that unless and until the question of human dignity is addressed, with the kind of extra-national thinking that a group like this can bring to the table, it is going to be very difficult to be talking of security in terms of guns with no butter. Once again, the question of security is that of human dignity and the question of culture is a question of human dignity, and if I may go back to the coal and steel community of money, what we need in our part of the world is a new community, possibly of water, of energy and of the human environment. A round table will be convened in Jordan this weekend as a continuation of the work, the inspiration of President Havel on the one hand and the support of the Sasakawa Foundation on the other, and I thank them for that.
I know we have a rich table of speakers in front of us, including, and I hope the technology will not fail me, I am sure it will not fail the technocrat, including a video conference with Jeffrey Sachs in Harvard. I hope that the product of all of this will be that we will talk to each other, and not at each other. Without further ado, I would like, and with no introduction, simply to refer to my friend on my left and I don’t know whether he is on my political left but he is certainly sitting on my left, Shimon Peres, to address this meeting. Shimon, you have the floor.

Shimon Peres
Thank you. I know that no matter in which language you speak, English, Arabic, French, German, it’s always correct. But when you speak in Hebrew, it sounds correct. Which makes it double important. Ladies and gentlemen, I know it is the custom of our time to criticize bureaucracies. But I’m trying to think what would happen to all our noble ideas if we wouldn’t have administrations. A world of ideas alone is an empty world. Ideas do require administration to implement them. Ideas without administration are quite impotent. On the other hand, administrations without ideas are even more dangerous. Just to give one example of ideas and institutions, as we are talking about human rights, the first human right is to remain alive. Because if you are not alive, what is the importance of the rest of human rights? So just to list the human rights without having an administration that people will remain alive doesn’t make any sense. And I believe that we find ourselves in a very strange situation, where both the ideas and the institutions are belonging to a world that no longer exists, and it comes to a new age. Neither our ideas nor our institutions are clear enough or relevant enough for being implemented. I think the world is going over profound changes.
In economy, basically, we are going over from an economy of the land, to an economy of science, of the intellect. The economy of the land forced us to have borders, to have divisions, to have sovereignties, to have armies to defend them or extend them. We went historically to war basically because of land and of natural resources. And then over the last years we have discovered there is something more important, powerful and meaningful than land, and that is science and technology. Science and technology first of all put an end to borders, to division, to prejudices, to time, to differences. We are no longer connected, not only dependent by land, or by seas, we are connected by air. No matter where you are, no matter who you are, you can get in touch with the latest developments in real time momentarily. We are now going over in our economy from the speed of the voice to the speed of the light and the real competition is for speed. For openness, for innovation, for new ideas. So I think that global economy, or the globalization of economy, is not an ideology. It is the result of a very profound change in the economy.
And actually, privatization follows suit. Privatization is neither an ideology, but a result of the globalization. Because governments remained national, economy became global, and the governments were forced to hand over the economy to private enterprises. And the results are quite demanding. Because what is privatization? Everything that makes money goes to private ends and every- thing that costs money remains in the hands of the governments. So governments are in deficit, in shortage of funds. Private companies are in surpluses, but they don’t have responsibilities, social or political or otherwise. And we are witnessing an economy that runs without an administration, without any control. Every morning, a trillion and a half dollars are changing hands, and they decide where to land. Nobody can control them.
There is no government which is as strong as the economy. And I do not foresee in the near future, an economy which will turn to become national as I do not foresee in the near future a government which will have global responsibilities and control. We are hanging in the middle. This creates many problems. The most important one is that nobody is really in charge of handling the division between the poor and the rich. It’s not a matter of the have and the have-nots, it’s a matter of the connected and disconnected. Where there is disconnection from the new age, remains very poor. We live in a world of six billion people, and two-and-a-half billion people live on two U.S. dollars per day. A billion and a half people live on one U.S. dollar a day, and only two billion people are having, what one may describe, an economy of well being. And this anomaly, will lead to protest, given maybe to violence, and nobody is trying to meet the storm at the early stages, instead of discovering that we are in the eye of the storm. We look as observers without any capacity to handle this situation.
So may I say that globalization and high technology are changing the nature of our societies. Many people think that high technology is a matter of technology alone. It’s not true. It’s not that you buy a computer or Internet and you are becoming high tech. You cannot have, for example, high technology or science, without deciding to remain totally and exclusively loyal to the truth. You cannot combine science and lies. You cannot lie scientifically. And there is no scientific lie. You have really to pursue the naked truth, as it is. You cannot really attract investment unless your bookkeeping is honest and transparent. Free money will never land in a location of doubts, or dark. You really cannot have science without having convinced your young generation of scientists that your land is free of pollution and free of corruption and free
of an arbitrary government. Otherwise they will buy a ticket to the Silicon Valley and you won’t see them. So you cannot think that this is a mechanical engagement. It must follow and include a set of values.
We have to change our educational system. From there, they age with understanding. There is no end to education. You have to learn, and learn all your life, because almost every seven years, you have new ideas, and new knowledge, and new offers. It’s a potential which is open and running and demanding and inviting. And the two billion people who are already engaged have changed already. Two of the largest populated countries, China and India, are entering this age. It’s a great promise, each of them in their own
way. The Chinese in an organized camp, from control from above. The Indians in a line, where you have people ahead, and people lagging behind, and in the middle we have the Indian tolerance, which is incomparable to any other tolerance in the world. I like the Indian liberty because the first rule in the Indian liberty is to liberate yourself from your own ego. To liberate yourself from yourself if you can, otherwise you cannot really understand what liberty is. It’s an ongoing situation, but it calls for a great deal of sacrifice, of bitterness and misunderstanding and lack of tolerance. Yet it has its potential and now we are discovering the other side of globalization.
If economically, globalization is a real potential, strategically, it’s a great danger. We don’t have war with organized armies. We are going over from a world of enemies and armies to a world of dangers and terror. Armies and enemies are basically national. Dangers and terror are again, global. You don’t know where they come from, you don’t know where they will land and hit, you don’t know their technology. But we know that as great as the potential of the global economy is, so great is the danger of the modern terrorism, so to speak. We find ourselves, like an economy, in the same situation. Dangers, without institutions. Because we have the very strange situation where we have armies that don’t have enemies, and where we have dangers that don’t have armies to face them. Look at NATO — and I know that Czech Republic became a member of NATO — I’m asking myself quietly, who is the enemy of the NATO organization? I can hardly decide. But terror can endanger every country in Europe, as every country, and the United States of America. And if we shall not confront this danger, if we shall not confront this nature in real towns in a global manner, again we shall discover that we live in a world where the two most important phenomena, the well-being of the people on one hand, and the being of the people on the other hand, are at random, without any control. And we know that we cannot go on like that.
I don’t believe that we have already the proper solutions, and I can hardly see the world will organize itself in a world parliament, in a world government. Maybe we have to construct volunteer administrations in those two domains, based on cooperation which is founded on interest of defense and security in the two domains, economically and strategically. Clearly, economically, we cannot let millions of people pass away. It is our responsibility, and I feel that we have the means to help, and right away. For example, to supply the proper medicine for many maladies. Because the dangers are not just a matter of physical violence, they are a matter of other sorts of challenges. I shall enumerate some of the dangers. It is terror. It is narcotics that kill many young people. It is pollution that doesn’t have borders. It is poverty and malady which create hate and misunderstanding and changes.
The inspiration of our time endangers the values upon which we live. I thought, for example, that when it comes to globalization and privatization, private enterprises have to organize themselves ahead of time and invest some of their profits in the development of continents, and nations which are in danger, humanly. And there are so many. Help in the way of education. Help in the way of health. Help in the way of social fabric and structure. Help to understand the danger of the lack of tolerance. Because democracy really is based on two principles, not on one. One principle is the right of every person to be equal, and the other principle is the equal right of every person to be different. I know many people do accuse us politicians of being compromisers. May I say that people that consider themselves holy men may occasionally become very dangerous, because in the name of justice they give themselves the permission to kill other people. If this is justice, who needs justice? Justice is death, like bin Laden, for example. Who appointed him? To whom is he responsible? What is the basis of his assumption of action? He became a killer disguised as a holy person. We politicians cannot afford holiness. Our task is to enable people of different origin, ethnicity, color, faith, and philosophies to coexist. We have to suggest a compromise which enables humanity to continue its life, and with great patience, and great compromise. Maybe the highest degree of justice is compromise. Compromise means to enable somebody else to remain alive, and not to kill it in the name of justice. And the same I believe, goes for the strategists who have to establish a volunteer organization and cooperation to meet danger. The danger of terrorism. Nobody can agree with it. If terrorism will prevail, no matter what the reason for it, religious or political or moral, we shall not be able to live in security and freedom. People will not be able to move, to fly, to commerce, to work, to build tall buildings, even to drink water, even to breathe fresh air. And the motivations are not serious. I know bin Laden, for example, says he wants to help the Palestinians to gain independence. The Palestinians don’t need bin Laden, even Chairman Arafat said it. We have offered the Palestinians most of the land, almost all of the land, and if there is a remaining difference of two or three percent, we don’t need that bin Laden will kill innocent women and men in New York to convince anybody. It’s a shame on the Islam world, and I know that many Muslims feel so, and one must be very careful not to identify violence with any religion, or any nation or any ideology.
But in order to secure our lives — and it concerns each of us and all of us — we have to come together, as a group of volunteers, just like the fire brigade in New York, only, not after the catastrophe, but before the catastrophe, to prevent it. I believe in the need to draw the conclusions both in the way of ideas and in the domain of administration. To introduce more justice in the domain of economy, and the sooner the better. We were never as rich in history, as we are today. We never have had such a surplus of money as we do today. And if it is to be distributed better, still there will remain a great deal of rich people. We have to defend our lives against nature, and against human nature to enable humanity, and to enable the globe, to move ahead. We are beginning to see the two faces of globalization. The promising face that should be handled with care and justice, and the menacing face that should be handled globally and immediately. And if we shall do so, we may promise our children a better world to live in. Thank you.

El Hassan bin Talal
Just a quick remark — first of all, terror knows no ethnicity and no religion. Secondly, I would like to refer you to a study produced by an Israeli researcher, an expert on anti-terror, Boaz Ganor, entitled, “Today’s Freedom Fighter is Tomorrow’s Terrorist.” I think it is important to bear in mind that in terms of the progression from international terrorist to international statesman, that the history books of the past few decades are full of examples from different continents. In fact when we received with the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1981, movements of freedom fighters, we
discovered with the Red Cross that as we tried to preach international humanitarian law, the basic understanding of humanitarian law had not been constructed, simply because, as I said before, concessions from the law of war, whether referring to refugees, to torture, to the treatment of prisoners, are not part of the parlance of these movements.
One thing that I am afraid of, in the Islamic context, is that opposition groups will find themselves very quickly on the terrorist lists, simply because they are in opposition. And I think that this is a point that should be borne in mind. If we say that the war on terrorism is not a war on Islam, then we should not also be encouraging the vicarious suppression of opposition groups simply because they are in opposition. I just wanted to make this point, and I agree fully with Shimon on the dangers of the gray economy, money laundering, drug smuggling, weapons, and so forth. Somebody once said the problem with the rat race is that the rats are winning. Forgive me for my levity. I would like to turn the floor to a very distinguished, dear friend, to Richard von Weizsäcker. Professor, you have the floor sir.

Richard von Weizsäcker
Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. Please allow me to start with a few sentences in my own language and then turn back to English a little later. The reason why I would like to say at least a few sentences in German is to express my gratitude for the role that this city, this country, its president and this entire region play in the effort to take steps toward achieving peace at least in our part of the world. During the Cold War, our continent was torn on both sides. But the growing together of Europe must occur from its center. There are no places that are more impressive and that represent the center of Europe with everything that that center is going through, what it went through and what it can contribute, than Prague, Krakow, Budapest, Vienna and many others. This is why I am very happy that we can present ourselves
in our common spirit as your guests, and we are grateful to you that you are willing to listen to us even in German.
I will turn to the topic of our panel, not only of this morning but also of this afternoon: International institutions and human rights. President de Klerk put responsibility on our shoulders this morning, really to start to speak about international institutions. I think we had a fascinating introductory speech by Ms. Summers, and she will permit me to say in view of international institutions I was missing another introduction by Ms. Kirkpatrick since the central institution which is on our agenda is the United Nations. But what can they really do? So far, some of the most powerful nations did not really cooperate, or participate. The NGOs have been, and still are, growing. Most impressively, without rules. What we need, is not the real power outside the United Nations, and the NGOs replacing those regions of global tasks for
which the structure of the United Nations so far is too weak. What we really need is to strengthen the United Nations exactly in those fields in which so far the NGOs are working, actively and impressively. We need a thorough and great effort to reform the United Nations. When they were founded in 1945, their main objective was to prevent the Third World War, which was very understandable. Therefore, in the foundation of the UN, only one powerful body was introduced, namely the Security Council. The agenda of the Security Council is power, and meeting crises, mostly with military means. But the real threat for the majority of the world population stems from dangers almost unknown in 1945, in the year of the foundation. They are quite well defined in the Millennium Declaration of last fall: need, hunger, population growth, migration, environment, and the like. I am very grateful that the Security Council did take very quickly and very clearly a resolution on terrorism after the 11th of September. But the tradition and actual experience of the Security Council does not have real answers as to the problems of terrorism. We have been working in a little global committee to propose reforms for the United Nations, for the structure of it. And all of us agreed that we need two more councils with comparable power: a social council and an economic council. Both councils where the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO should not only report but become dependent in this new United Nations reformed structure. We cannot do without rules, without growing legal rules and an increase of international law. We cannot do without institutions. There are some rules, for instance, the rule of sanctions inside the WTO. This is not much, but it is a step in the right direction, the step to socially and ecologically sustainable free trade, a step against protectionism, especially by the rich countries. We have the Rome Statute of International Criminal Code.
We are now heading for the study for an innovative best practice how civil societies, organizations, contribute best to the work of the United Nations. I am grateful that one of the reactions to September 11th was, if I am not mistaken, a somewhat changed attitude of the United States vis-à-vis the United Nations. What we have to do at the present time, of course, is to prove our solidarity. There is a large coalition, of course, far beyond NATO, which we need to fight terrorism. But it is of a paramount importance that this kind of change, namely, to include the real power into the structure of the United Nations, is making more progress. The Secretary General has put on the agenda of the General Assembly, hopefully in the beginning of December, “the Dialogue of Civilization.” But this is not enough, if we do not really achieve an inclusion of political power into the United Nations. I do recall when we had our little reform program to be presented not only to the General Assembly but also to the permanent members of the Security Council. So I was invited to present this thing to the Senate in Washington. And we had a long discussion. But the discussion was not very fruitful at the direction of the United Nations, so that the two members of our reform group at the end asked the senators whether they would finally make a decision, whether the United States now would like to join the United Nations. Yes or no. This time is now completely over, and I think the United States will, in the times to come, see that it is an indispensable and an enormous support for the causes, including the causes of human rights which are close to the heart and to the Constitution of the United States, to cooperate inside the UN.
I would like, Mr. Chairman, to come back to relations of separation of religion and politics. Our meeting yesterday morning was introduced by a very thorough speech by Professor Fukuyama. His ideas as to the enlightenment and the secularism in the Western world were, in my view, very important. Now, is our Western secularism leading to relativism in culture and religion? He himself asked that question. To which extent is terrorism––and I am now not referring particularly to the 11th of September — to which
extent is terrorism an explosion of the tension between secularized societies and religion? There is this increased suspicion of believers that the liberal secular society is a one-way road leaving religion behind. In my view, we should take this very seriously, that there are moral requirements which so far find their most adequate expressions in the language of religion. They should not be pushed aside, but adequately translated into the language of our liberal societies. This has not been fully achieved yet. There is an unfinished dialectic process on secularization in our Western societies. Science and tolerance are important but insufficient to give adequate answers as to what our moral obligations are. Let me mention, President Havel, an experience on the soil of this wonderful country which I had in 1968, in the Spring of 1968 in Mariánské Lázně. That was the famous Prague Spring. There were the best theologians, from Eastern and Western Europe, a few laymen, like myself, but the most impressive contributions
came from atheist philosophers from Prague. They explained their atheism as an answer to the habit of idolizing God by the churches. After the 11th of September, I would like to recommend a fairly sober approach, with mutual respect. The West, in my view, will have to learn again –and will, hopefully, learn –to be more careful not to intermix its own political and economic power and interests with a necessary further support and push of universal rights. When Professor Fukuyama yesterday said that in his view the Western human rights really were universal, he gave as a proof for his view two points, namely to say, democracy has been spreading all over the world and, there was a kind of “referendum by feet”, the movement into the countries where the Western human rights were governing but he did not add to which extent. Not only the honest belief in Western European human rights but also power and economic interest from the West were supporting this spread, both of democracy and human rights.
I do remember so well in 1989, or little later, when the Cold War came to an end, most African nations no longer received subsidies, neither from the West, nor from the East. But they needed subsidies. So they came up in our capitals and said with very warm and strong words to prove that now they have become democracies, that now they have introduced a pluralistic system of political parties in their democracies. For the purpose of getting subsidies after the end of the Cold War. I felt very badly whenever a head of state or government from Africa came to me and told me this kind of proof. It was a reproach, not at his address, that democracy was not working too well in his country. It was much rather a reproach to us, the way how we propagate our own values in that region. By this, of course, I do not want to prevent the democracy and human rights to penetrate Africa but what I simply want to say is that each country has its own way and if we propagate democracy and human rights in our Western style, we really must be very careful not to mix them up with our own interests, as we did during the Cold War. From both sides. So this, I hope, will be learned from the Western side. And the Islamic world will gain in progress, in coming to a more rational view of modernization as shaped by the West. I hope and I believe that there is a
move for an enlightenment as experienced in other parts and religions of the world, also inside the Islamic nations and peoples to disintegrate, step by step, religion and politics. That will, in the end, increase respect for both politics and religion. Thank you very much.

El Hassan bin Talal
And I thank Richard von Weizsäcker. I just wanted to say that with Elie Wiesel, we were on a panel last year in the Sorbonne. The conference was one week long and revolved around one word: imagination. Bronislaw Geremek, then Poland’s foreign minister, answering a question from the floor, said, that right off could not be achieved in Africa until civil society had been developed. And I came back with the example of twenty million HIV sufferers. I said, how can you come to these people and say, evolve
civil society and we will write off your debt? Now I recognize the achievement in Poland, in terms of development of civil society and his contribution. And being an author of several books on poverty alleviation, he agreed with me. So I just want to agree with your point, sir, that as far as horizontal inequalities are concerned, whether poverty, rich and poor, I think all of these horizontal inequalities explode at a time of crisis.
And as far as disaggregating religion from politics, as a member of the UN Commission on Culture and Civilization — which is to present its report on the 10th of December — I hope it will be understood by the international community that cultural, religious, ethnic, racial differences fan the destructive potential of Islamophobia. The fear and the hatred of Islam. If there is an intention of creating, in what Francis Fukuyama refers to, a great reconstruction after the great destruction, then I think we can talk to each other. But if there is the intent of creating a polarity after the fall of the Berlin Wall between the West and the rest, then I think it will be very difficult, for political reasons, to get through to understanding, not hydro-politics and petrol-politics, but anthro-politics. Politics for people. I hope that you can see the other in human terms. I don’t know whether we’re ready for the video hook-up with Jeffrey Sachs in Harvard, I haven’t had any indication of that yet.

Jeffrey Sachs
I have, I have been inspired by the wonderful remarks that you made, Mr. Chairman, Shimon Peres, and President von Weizsäcker. I’m extremely honored to join you at this wonderful forum. Unfortunately, I’ve been stuck in the United States, finishing a report in these very days, which I would like to speak to you about because it bears very much on the concerns of this meeting. We just finished it yesterday, a process that took two years under the direction of Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland of the World Health Organization to try to look concretely, specifically, operationally at what can be done to address the killer diseases that are causing such remarkable suffering on a scale as never before in modern history. But that had not been addressed for this generation.
We all understand, of course, and are all shaken by the tragedies of September 11th, but I think it is important to bear in mind, as we focus our attention on that, that we must not lose attention to the fact that every day eleven thousand people around the world, day in and day out, are dying of AIDS though it is a treatable disease. That every day, day in and day out, eight thousand people are dying of readily vaccine preventable diseases, diseases that don’t even exist in the rich countries anymore and yet are killing millions in the poor countries for lack of a measles immunization. We should understand that every day eight thousand people are dying of malaria in Africa. Though a pill can treat this killer disease, yet it doesn’t reach the vast majority of people. When our commission added up these facts, we found the most shocking realization: That the world stands by as sixteen million people die every year of preventable and treatable diseases for lack of the most minimal coverage of health services. This is in my mind perhaps the very greatest blight of all on our civilization and on our globalization process.
In the course of two years, engaging hundreds of scholars from around the world, leading public health officials, leading economists from all parts of the developing and the developed world, we learned a few things. We learned first of all that there is no way conceivable that these problems will solve themselves. Globalization can do some things but it cannot solve the problems of the poorest of the poor in the world, on its own terms. We learned that addressing these issues is a matter of simple pragmatism. One doesn’t need rocket science to solve the problems of giving measles immunization to a child. Or ensuring that an individual with malaria has a dose of curative treatment available. Or even that the thirty-five million individuals who are infected with HIV, the greatest pandemic disease in modern history — if not in all time, by the end of this pandemic — have access to the treatments for opportunistic infections and antiretroviral therapy that are keeping alive the much smaller numbers of individuals infested in the rich countries.
In other words, even with the knowledge and with the technologies that we have, we could save millions of lives every year if we care to do it. In my view, it is the greatest test of our globalization. Of whether our global community will stand by and watch this devastation, or whether we will finally take action. I
must say that I was shocked as learned in more and more detail in course of this work how great the neglect is right now. The rich countries do extraordinarily little beyond talk with regard to the major killer diseases in the poor countries. And as a macroeconomist, I can tell you with high confidence that Africa
and other impoverished places cannot grow, no matter what kind of trading system, if their children are dying by the millions, if their adults by the millions are infected with untreated killer diseases such as HIV, where only one in a thousand Africans right now receives even a minimal standard of care for that disease comparable to what is found in the rich countries.
But, ladies and gentlemen, the most amazing fact of all, in my view, is how the very richest country in the world, the United States, my own country, has failed to engage on this issue. As the United States calls on the world for help, for solidarity, for community, the simple fact of the matter is that the world’s richest, greatest, most technologically advanced, most powerful country does the least, as a share of its income, on behalf of the world’s poor. And what’s more, that share has been falling for the last two decades, not rising. The world long ago established a norm that the rich countries should give 0.7 of one percent of their Gross Domestic Products for help of the world’s poor countries. Since the rich countries have a combined annual income of over twenty-five trillion dollars, were we to do that, the annual amount of support would be one hundred and seventy-five billion dollars per year, easily enough to address the challenges of basic help, of universal education, of environmental degradation, of agricultural research and productivity, of promotion of a safe environment. But we do considerably less than a third of that amount and the United States reaches only one tenth of that international target. The US foreign assistance program has fallen so decisively that U.S. aid as a share of our GDP is now 0.07 of one percent of our national income, in other words, one tenth of the international norm. Were the United States to honor the international norm, we would have an additional sixty billion dollars per year to address the problems of the world’s poor, and to make the world a much safer and much more equitable home for all of us.
A study of the U.S. intelligence community in recent years called the “Task Force on State Failure” found that one of the three most important statistical predictors of state collapse is the rate of infant mortality. I, following up on that study, found sure enough, that in all of those instances of state collapse, those dozens of cases, where disease and the inhuman conditions of life played such a role, sure enough the U.S. was drawn into military involvement. We are foolhardy if we think that we can solve the problems of terrorism or any of the other conditions of our global society if millions of people are dying unnecessary deaths of terrible and yet treatable diseases which undermine society, undermine morale, and demonstrate the gross inequities of our world. What our commission tried to do was to move beyond these general observations, Mr. Chairman, and to suggest very concrete approaches. We identified several dozen high-priority interventions such as immunization, such as treatment of HIV-infected individuals, such as anti-malaria treatment. And we rather painstakingly, over the course of two years, with hundreds of researchers, put together the evidence of what the costs would be to address these issues and how to do it, with what kinds of approaches.
It is a war on disease, like other wars, where one needs logistics. One needs organization, one needs intervention strategies, we did that work. We found that the price is absolutely within our reach, though it is far beyond the reach of the poorest of the poor countries. We learned that all this rhetoric that the poor should get their own house in order is foolhardy and reckless. Because if you were at two hundred and fifty dollars per capita as so much of the poor world is today, there is no way, no matter how in order one’s house is, that one can cover the basic interventions that are needed to keep the people alive out of domestic income. So we took a hardheaded view of this and we found that the donor world should be contributing to the order of 0.1 percent of the combined Gross National Product of the rich countries. That is approximately twenty-five billion dollars per year. But think of it, ladies and gentlemen, 0.1 percent means that we would set aside one penny for every ten dollars of our income. One penny for every ten dollars, we have shown, could save eight million lives per year. Year in and year out, by the end of a decade of scaling up these interventions.
I would recommend and I hope that there can be follow-up, that if the rich countries will get serious about this, we could engage in the most uplifting and morally unifying campaign of all in the world. To put life where it belongs at the top of our values and that’s the life of all of the world’s children and peoples. So that we don’t find ourselves in this horrific situation of being passive observers while millions die. I hope, ladies and gentlemen, you can help me to discuss with my own government, with the United States, how there can be no peace if the world’s richest country will not lead in this venture. This is the great error of the United States, I’m afraid, in the last twenty years. The belief that globalization can take care of itself and that we can continue to accumulate and to hoard our wealth and that the world will somehow go along fine without us. That day must end if we have any chance of peace in the world. I fear the United States has not recognized this, even after September 11th. I’m not so optimistic because I do not yet hear the concerns for the rest of the world coming from this country, which since it is forty percent of the combined Gross National Product of the rich countries, is the indispensable part of any scaled global effort. I want to thank you very much for the chance to join you this morning I was inspired by the remarks that I heard and I know that this forum that President Havel has convened in recent years has been one of the most important, vital forces for injecting morality into our international affairs. We do have a chance to do great things. As Shimon Peres said, the world has never been richer,
never more capable, never more technologically able to address these ills as it is today. We stand with the possibility of saving millions and millions of lives per year, if we simply care to make the effort. I am sure that the wonderful people in Prague — and I would so much love to be with you, I assure you, in person — can do much to pursue this agenda as you have so brilliantly in recent years. And I thank you so much for the kind consideration today. Thanks.

El Hassan bin Talal
Thank you very much, Jeffrey. You can hear from the applause the weight of your remarks, and indeed, you have touched us all. I understand we have time for one question. But I would just like to suggest that the basic standards of humanity, the right to life, the right to justice, including the right to food and medicine, and the right to tolerance. The basic standards of humanity could be the subject of a round-table, possibly to be held in Washington, certainly many of us are involved with international organizations that I’m sure would be delighted to promote such a conversation on the fundamental standards of humanity and American cultural and humanitarian outreach in the world. How do we improve American humanitarian and cultural outreach. President Bush, the other day, said, “We are good people, but we need to improve our image.” And I would like to suggest that this take some substantive form on the basis of what we’ve just heard from you.
Ladies and gentlemen, I would like you to assist me in starting this session. May I take the opportunity of calling on Grigory Yavlinsky. I would just like to ask him a question, in the hope that we have a discussion session, if we have time for a discussion. We have three speakers. I hope that we have a maximum of ten minutes for each speaker so that we can move to discussion. But I would just like to ask, for purposes of the discussion session, if he would give us some of his views on what is happening in Chechnya today. Maybe that can come in later conversation. Grigory.

Grigory Yavlinsky
Thank you, Royal Highness. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I want to express my personal thanks to President Havel, who organized this forum, and for his giving us the opportunity to speak to the world from Prague. I think it’s really a very important event, especially it’s important because this forum happens at a moment which is extremely important for the mankind. If this conference would happen before 11th of September, in my opinion we should discuss a lot of real institutional problems, as we have it on our agenda for today. And we should discuss it in the relations, how the international institutions are operating with the situation of the human rights. I think that it would include some of the topics that the previous speakers touched a little bit, Mr. Weizsäcker, for example, the difficulties which the United Nations have inside the structure and the abilities of the United Nations to realize the policy, which
is based on human rights in the world. It would be also very important to discuss in this case, why the conference on racism failed and it was not possible even to find out any serious outcome from that conference, why the level of misunderstanding of the situation was so high. I would also think that it would be important to discuss why the institutions in Europe and politicians are trying to speak about human rights so much, but in fact we see a lot of the politics which one can call, realpolitik, which is perpendicular to what one can call human-rights politics. And we have it every day, almost in all European countries. And it would be very interesting also to discuss, and important as well, why the parliamentary assembly of Europe is so ineffective in such complicated and important cases like Chechen conflict in Russia and why its influence are diminishing from month to month. We also have to discuss, if to speak about the institutions, the main problem of the human rights institutional issue, is the relationship between human rights policies and the national states. The crisis in this relations is so obvious.
Especially, speaking from Russia, I want to say that one of the major problems is the problem when the states, national states, and bureaucracies are creating false democracies, quasi-democracies, a manageable democracies or as we like to say in Russia, Potemkin villages, and how to fight this. I think it’s extremely important, but now after 11th of September, we must a little bit change our approach to this institutional issue. I think that what happens, and the terrorism as a event, or as a substance is a challenge to the concept of human rights, is a challenge to that concept which is on the basis of almost all European countries and almost half of the world. War usually means that both sides are using almost the same methods and tools against each other and this is the pre-condition for the victory. From my point of view, the events which we are watching just now must be an absolutely different case and it is one of the major difficulties. I will try very briefly to explain what I mean. Terrorists have no limitations in their actions, except technical limitations, and we are extremely limited by our principles, by our values, by our views, by all the things which we are saying human rights concept. We should underline at this forum once again, that the war with terrorism is not an excuse to anybody to use this like an umbrella to start the things that would blow up the achievements of mankind in this way. It must not be allowed to anybody to use this for the purposes which is extremely far from the real fight with terrorism and would be action to suppress political opposition, on any other political, to reach any other political goals. What I am saying at the moment, to have real substance, and if we would be watching carefully, I’m afraid very soon we can see the signs of such things. So, the conclusion of this part I want to express in such a way: fighting
terrorism, not compromising basic values of human rights in our countries and societies, and in the world, this is at the moment, must be the main motto, or the main goal of international institutions. But certainly, having such a serious situation in the world, I think that it would be very important to have also a practical discussion about some important things here. Today I heard a discussion about the rich and poor states and the problems which are the consequences of that. I don’t want to offend anybody but I want to say that this is a right and a banal thought at the same time. I want simply to say that I think always it would happen this way, that we would have rich and poor people. One hundred years ago we had rich and poor people, but the poor people were very different from nowadays poor people. And in three hundred years from now, forward, I think, we would also have this situation. This is the nature of mankind. I think it is simply natural for us. It is not good and not bad, it is a fact of human life, some people are more capable, some people are less capable. Some people are two meters high, and the others are 1.60 meters high. So what can we do with this? These differences, differences which comes from the very beginning of the civilization. But, nevertheless, in connection with what we are discussing today, I want to say that the principle which must be accepted by everybody — there is no excuse, ideological, religious, political, logical, emotional or whatever reason, for killing innocent and disarmed people! That must be the starting
point for all kind of such discussions. It’s absolutely unproductive, and counter-productive, to start explaining that there are poor people in the world and rich people in the world, many things have justification. It is not. Yes many things have justifications, but not killing innocent and disarmed people, this is not possible at all! But what can we do at the moment – at this forum, just today – in order to have an impact. On one hand, to overcoming the terrorist situation of terrorism and attack from the one hand, and on the other hand to make an impact and to make some positive steps forward in the concept of human rights, which is all about our conference very much. First what I want to suggest, is I think that the Prague Declaration must have a point about the education. I think that the first thought which comes to the mind with the relations of human rights and anti-terrorism is educational programs. Not educational help. Being an economist, I want to say that I am absolutely sure with the figures at hand, that the world is able
just now to start immediately, the world has enough money to start immediately, the programs of education everywhere in the globe. Education is the shortest and the most effective and the most important way to stop the events which happened. It is possible to start thinking about that just today, and the money is ready for that. We must do it. It’s complicated, but I want to say that I think there are no easy solutions at all. And the argument that it is complicated is not an argument; there are no easy solutions. The second issue, which also I think must be in the declaration, or must be the part of the decisions of the forum, practical decisions in which forum can help, or take part in that, is the issue of starvation, the issue of hunger, the food problem. But also not simply like food aid, but a food program. It is a strange situation that humanitarian aid, food aid, is coming only after the war started. There are many places like Afghanistan in this point of view. Why should we wait when it would go the aid there, when the war would come together with this? One more issue, which I think is for today is very important. Even discussions on these two topics would help in the case of terrorism. But I want to touch on one more issue, the third one. The last but not least. I think that it is a very good news which I heard from our chairman, that there will be a meeting of religious leaders very soon in New York which will discuss some issues like this. First of all, I want to say that I like New York very much and I agree with Mr. Clinton very much that it is a model of living together, the people of different religions, races or whatever. But, I think that at the moment such a conference should be in Amman, not in New York. It’s the day of such type. I also think that one of the most important tools is the theological solutions, and theological conclusions and theological explanations, which must back up, as soon as possible, all the anti- terrorist activities in the world. On the very high level of all confessions and especially Islamic confessions, I want to hear the things which His Royal Highness explained today. I think that the people who have the highest position in Islamic belief, Islamic religion, one of the greatest religions in the world, should again and again on the highest level explain, together with others of the same level people in the other religions, that killing people have nothing in common with Islam and cannot be rewarded in any way, in any form, neither today nor a thousand years later. This is extremely, extremely important. We can’t close our eyes on these issues, if we really want to do something. I think it is something which is really related to what we are discussing today. In trying to make a conclusion of what I want to express today, I want to attract your attention that Afghanistan is a country which has almost all the borders with the nuclear powers, Pakistan, India, China, Russia. Two other nuclear powers, like the United States and Britain, is taking part in
the military action. That shows how recent events there and also recent events in United States, literally events of yesterday, with the anthrax, how serious is situation in the world. So I think that time, just now, is not only for discussion and not only for military action. And from this point of view I think our forum here in Prague can be most useful if we would have some kind of a practical agenda, which I was trying to explain just now. Thank you very much. And regarding the question I was asked, I am ready to explain certainly the views about the Chechen situation, and the situation in Northern Caucasus later in the discussion.

El Hassan bin Talal
Thank you Grigory very much, I just want to say that in Bonn University, only a few months ago, a conference was convened with the title, “Does Culture Matter in the Mediterranean?” And the conference led to the possible discussion of the establishment of a center for the study of humanities in the Mediterranean region. You may say, why is he talking about culture again? But I do feel that the absence of cultural affinity makes New York a very long way away from Amman. Unless there is a deliberate attempt to develop a conversation based on beginning with commonalities, revisiting our taxed heritage and history, absorbing the Erasmus program and the Socrates program, which have been so successful in changing mind-sets in post-War Europe. And I think this has to be not an event-oriented conversation. I mean, obviously in New York, we will invite them back to Amman and those who wish to come will come. But I think it has to be part of a process, which is why I would like to underline that in our round-table discussion on Middle East Peace—Strategy or Tactics, I have emphasized time and again, the
importance of what Yehudi Menuhin and I have discussed years ago, in the Balkans, the creation of a Parliament of Cultures. This is not track one or track two, or the Third Way, it is an essential maintenance of a desire to recognize the other on his or her own terms. So as I am on the dirty “P-word” list, Pluralist, I take pride in it, I just want to say, unless we recognize our differences it is going to be very difficult, as Shimon was saying earlier, the right to be different. To develop crisis avoidance. And crisis avoidance is what we need. There are too many tears after the event. Crisis avoidance means greater understanding before the event. May I take the opportunity of inviting Tomáš Pojar to address us? You have the floor, sir.

Tomáš Pojar
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. I will be short, that we can have some live discussion afterwards here. But I would like to repeat one sentence which Mr. Jeffrey Sachs used in connection with health problems but you can use that with the environmental, social problems, as well with the problems concerning different wars or war-zones around the world: a lot of talking, no action. I am not saying that these conferences such as Forum 2000 are not good and they should not be taking place but if we are just only talking on different conferences all around the world and nothing is happening on the ground, then we are not going to be talking in better situations and better times in the future. There are a couple of regions and countries around the world which fell over the edge of this planet. And you do not have to talk about human rights in these countries and regions because there are no human rights existing. There are wars, ethnic cleansing, complete anarchy, there is a lot of Mafia, and there is a breeding ground for all the extremism, fanaticism, and terrorism. Of course, because every war is a very good business and you can make a lot of money on every war and also you can spread your ideas, your fundamentalist, or extremist ideas to the impoverished population which is being bombed every day. I would like to suggest that we really very soon move and make some really serious efforts and activities on the ground. And it concerns all different kinds and types of international organizations, from NGOs to the inter-governmental organizations, to the UN. We have to go, we have to work with all the respect to the local population, we have to, through maybe some smaller projects, not huge declarations, to try to change the situation on the ground and also to report and to bring testimonies from these terrific and horrible places back to the audience, not only to the audience of the Western world but also to the audience in the other countries of this globalized world. These testimonies are very important, and I hope that there is going to be one time that Mr. Yousif will not be complaining, or will not need to be complaining, about slaughter of four thousand Hazaras in Afghanistan, with- out any mentioning, or basically any mentioning in the world media anywhere in the world. We have to be present on the ground but we have to be very careful that activities of the international community are not supporting the violation of human rights, that various activities are not supporting dictators, warlords, that they are not supporting one side of the conflict
and that they are really helping the people to change the situation and to have better future. The NGOs, humanitarian aid NGOs, should not be bringing aid which is only feeding the dictators and the warlords who are keeping their people in desperate situation. UN and OSCE observers should not be used like human shields because in the end they are not protecting anyone; they are just protecting the tyrants and warring parties. Of course, activities of such huge institutions like World Bank or World Trade Organization should always be questioned, and we should always scrutinize what programs they are funding and proposing, to ensure that they are not ending directly in violation of basic human rights. Also, we should scrutinize the investment of private companies, which some- times have the backing of the governments of the countries in which they have their headquarters, or which are part of the reconstruction or development aid that is directly funded by the governments; we should ensure that these activities are not supporting the dictators and the warring parties, and determine whether they are really solving the situation. I think that if we are working on the ground, and if we always ask these questions, and always question different organizations and components of international community, we can achieve
something on the ground. I agree with Grigory Yavlinsky that we should start before the conflicts erupt. And if we were present ten years ago in Afghanistan, if the world, Western world as well as Russia, maybe today we could have changed the situation, preventing it from erupting into such horrific times
that we are witnessing at the moment. My last comment is going to be again little bit controversial. I was very happy when I heard that Kofi Annan received the Nobel Peace Prize. I think that he is the person who deserves the Peace Prize and it is very good that he got that. But after Srebrenica and Rwanda, and after what is going on in Chechnya and some other places, I am not that happy that the UN deserves,
at the moment, Nobel Peace Prize. There is a lot of work to do before the UN, as well as other organizations, really deserves the prize. The lessons from the tragic events in New York, I hope, are ones the whole international community should really care about. We should try to prevent and solve conflicts
at the moment and on the spot, and we should be engaged in the situation and in what is happening all around the world. Of course, in Chechnya, negotiations must occur between the Chechens and the Russians, as well as in Israel between Israelis and the Palestinians. But the world should work on the ground and try to help the parties negotiate and compromise on some final status. The world should help try to stop the wars; sometimes the world needs to pressure both sides to really work on the ground and to work on some compromise and on negotiations, and not just leave both sides, or a lot of sides, to talk and talk and not to do anything on the ground, so that the situation is changed. Thank you very much.

El Hassan bin Talal
Thank you very much. I think that as we move from realpolitik to idealpolitik, and if we move, I cannot read into the minds of the Nobel Foundation, but I assume that the reference to the United Nations was to remind us of the fact that the absence of multilateralism means that bilateralism prospers and the poor become poorer. So I think that this is a point to be borne in mind. As for warlords, I remember the comment of a Western politician, “Well, he may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” And that’s what applies to warlords. But how we reconcile warlords with international norms I think is part of the enormous task of building a universal humanitarian order. Edith Awino from Kenya, you have the floor.

Edith Awino
Thank you very much. My name is Edith Awino, as you have heard, and I am the Students’ Forum delegate from Kenya. I will draw a lot from a lot of what my fellow panelists have said here today, and a lot from what President Havel and a lot of other participants of this forum have said. President Havel, in his opening statement, said that terrorism does not begin today. These are issues we have watched happen and we have allowed to happen. And this is where I come from. Perhaps I fall in that category which Bill Clinton described yesterday. Maybe I am just the designated worrier of my family or maybe I just come from a poor country, and that is why I view the issues the way I view them today. Before and after the September 11th events, I feel issues still need not revolve around the whole question of terrorism, but around more serious issues that have allowed the exacerbation of terrorism itself and that have allowed the bin Ladens of this world to exist. I come from a place where people are dying every day of HIV/AIDS and I have watched my very own relatives die of HIV/AIDS. If I go to a rural area of Kenya today and speak to a child who has been forced into parenthood because of the scourge of AIDS, will his war be on terror or will it be on the HIV/AIDS scourge? I ask you that question today. I come from an area where our own leaders and our own people and the leaders of the international community — and here I am not only talking about the UN, and international governments, but even African organizations — have sat and
watched as our own people have armed children, such as the child soldiers we hear about in Sierra Leone. If I ask that child today whether his war on terror was on bin Laden, would it be? I do not think so. Their realities are totally different. And perhaps I, like Dani Karavan, no longer have faith in international institutions. And while Jeffrey Sachs mentioned the foolhardy rhetoric that poor people should deal with their own problems. A lot of poor people and a lot of young people like myself who live in Kenya do not think that is foolhardy rhetoric, because a lot of times we have watched the world stand by and look at the constant violations, and the murder and massacre of people and no one has spoken about it. In an informal discussion with Professor Fukuyama today, he argued that perhaps one of the principal problems in areas like Liberia or Somalia is the lack of government. Now I ask you, there was an existing government in South Africa, there was rule of law, but did that stop the subjugation and oppression of Africans that live there? It did not. And how long did it take the world to respond to that? This is where I’m coming from. The Forum 2000 today and this grand forum is perhaps to be the last forum as I have heard and it is my belief and my hope that this last Forum 2000 will present a culmination of action. I totally agree with the last discussant who said that there is more need for work on the ground. But we have to avoid the unilateral approach that international institutions have continued to propagate. We have adopted a culture of dealing with issues by responding to it with one medicine, so to speak. You have malaria, I give you aspirin, you have diarrhea, I give you aspirin, you have AIDS, I give you aspirin. We have people dying of AIDS, we give you aid, we have corrupt government, we give you money, we have people killing our own people, we send in humanitarian aid, but on the other hand we are giving them guns. What message are we sending out to the world? That is the question I ask today. It is important; I do not want to act very pessimistic or perhaps shed a lot of blame, I don’t think that is my responsibility here today. But my suggestion is that, and it is a suggestion that I hope a lot of you will carry home, to wherever you are coming from and to your people that there is a need for more focus on the indigenous and local institutions that are doing so much work to improve the situations in their own country. A lot of times it is not the Amnesty Internationals, and please, let this not be taken as a direct attack on any organization, but it is not the big international organizations that we hear about that actually make any difference in the lives of people who are suffering. More often that not, it is the little people out there on the ground, it is the Somali indigenous women who have come together in local peace councils to try and initiate peace organizations and local community councils to discuss issues of peace among their clans that are making a
difference in changing their society. It is the Jewish and perhaps the Arabs, or Israelis and Palestinians, who are living within Jerusalem who come together to discuss these issues who actually make a difference. It is important that we begin to give visibility to these organizations. I have a lot of faith in track-two diplomacy as opposed to track-one diplomacy, because in my country, track-one has hardly ever worked. It is important that as we move away, perhaps, from our countries to look for better opportunities elsewhere, here I am talking about African people who choose to go elsewhere and look for proper opportunities, perhaps where they can earn better money and live a better life, it is important that we remember the people we have left back home. And it is important that we use that opportunity that has been availed to us, the opportunity that we have had to acquire education, the opportunity that I have to sit here today in front of very prestigious people, that we mobilize whatever recourses that we can. Here I am not only talking about financial resources. But human recourses, to go back and effectively support the grassroots organizations because it is those little people who suffer when our leaders or when corrupt governments steal public money, it is those little people who are killed in wars, it is those women who suffer and die and are raped constantly, it is those women who are mutilated every day and this is what a lot of times we forget to mention, or we forget to remember. Indeed, what happened in New York is sad. No one can dispute that. But let us not forget that for very many people around the world and for very many people in my part of the world, the war on terror, or the war against terror is not, for them, a war against bin Laden, but it is a war against the issues that they have to live with every day. The HIV/AIDS, the poverty, the lack of food, the lack of education, the lack of basic necessities. And the world has stood
and watched. That is all. Thank you.

El Hassan bin Talal
Thank you very much, Edith. You remind me of the fact that in Tehran, in the presence of forty-eight governments, and I have to read the title of the conference, the “World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance”. In the presence of forty-eight governments, with this long title about tolerance, the NGOs participating were given ten minutes in three days. And I go back to Richard von Weizsäcker’s remarks about the importance about the United Nations system. By all means. But I hope that the new global consensus can be a consensus that listens to people who are working on the ground. And I do feel that in terms of the experiences that we have had, for example, in the Sudan, working with leprosy, in Sierra Leone, in different parts of the African continent and else-
where, with relief work, it is crucially important to keep us focused. But listening to Jeffrey Sachs, I wonder sometimes, how do we move from the encyclopedic to the thematic. And there I think, going back to Gro Harlem Bruntland’s report on the trees of Amazonia. She presented a wonderful study, which resulted in a summit in Rio, on the trees, but she – or the study – made no reference to the forty million people living under the trees. And when Western ministers arrived at the summit, each one was looking for an indigenous person to be photographed next to, to show that he or she cared. And this is why I’m saying, rather than summits on moving mountains, what we need is a new universal approach with some clear focus. Otherwise, we’ll be in the war against terror one day, the war against drugs the next day, and the war against I don’t know what the third day. The important thing is to recognize the priorities of our shared humanities, and to listen to the people on the ground, and I thank you very much for that. The floor is open for discussants, and forgive me, my eyesight is failing, particularly at that distance, so would you please take the floor and introduce yourself.

Shunling Chen
Thank you Mr. Chairman, my name is Shunling Chen, I’m the Student delegate from Taiwan. I just wanted to make a quick follow-up to Edith and to Mr. Chairman, what you have said about the limitation of the international institutions. Since we all know that many existing international institutions today are based on the nation-state structure, and many important issues, many serious violations of human rights would just not be brought up in many important international arenas. Here I am just trying to give you a real example that I have heard in this July. After the Students’ Forum 2000, I went to Geneva and there were delegates of indigenous people participating in the nineteenth session of the working group of indigenous people who are under the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. I heard so many indigenous peoples, and volunteer groups for indigenous peoples from all over the world, who were trying to bring out there grievances, and were asking the special reporter of the working group — who is responsible for making the annual report on the human rights situation of indigenous people — “Miss Special Reporter, I would sincerely ask you to visit my country, to visit my place to see how people are suffering. And I believe it will help you to understand our situation.” And there — I will never forget what I heard, from the Special Reporter — she said, “I’m very sorry, but as the Special Reporter I need an official invitation from your government to be a Special Reporter to visit your country, although I would really love to visit you privately.” And I believe you will understand the story. Thank you.

Yousif al-Khoei
Thank you, Royal Highness. I just wanted to echo something Edith said about the role of local organizations and how they really got into the UN system. They sometimes get invited for major UN conferences, but since they have to be paid for their expenses, it’s a practical and financial difficulty trying to be anywhere. And then you have the lack of expertise, all this big jargon used at the UN, they don’t know how to use the system, they get really swamped by it. And I think we need to make it a little easier for people like that to come and sometimes maybe just come out with their feelings, with their anger, without being ridiculed in a big bureaucratic system. The second point I want to make is that one of the problems with NGOs is that people see it as a secular concept, with really no room for religious
organizations to participate. My organization is actually one of the very few Muslim NGOs of the United Nations, but I think we need to include more of local religious organizations. And I feel if they are included, and get to see how the world operates, they sometimes learn the art of argument and of accepting differences. I think by excluding them, they just see the whole UN system as an American, Western system where they have no voice. So I think we need to include them more. If you look at Latin America, for example, it was only when the churches got involved and started talking about human rights, environment, women’s rights, that a meaningful change happened. And I think, sincerely, in the Muslim world, if we get more and more Muslim NGOs — I mean, unfortunately, there are practical difficulties with Muslim NGOs in their own countries, but if we get the local mosques and churches with the UN mission, then I think we may be on our way to try to resolve some of the problems. Thank you.

John Shattuck
Thank you very much, your Royal Highness. John Shattuck from the United States. At the risk of defending the in some ways, indefensible in this conference, I want to defend the UN. But I want to defend the UN from the perspective of an American who is deeply disappointed with the way my own country has related to the UN. And I think in many ways that’s the heart of the problem that we’re talking about here today. I certainly agree, and I have in my own background, that nongovernmental organizations, particularly at the grassroots level, as our eloquent speaker from Kenya reminded us, those are the heart of real grassroots international action. But the UN today is not what is should be because countries like the United States, and other countries, have not allowed it to be what it should be. And I would certainly hope that the events of September 11th which certainly have been frequently referred to in this conference, haven’t hijacked the conference. In that sense, I agree with several of the speakers who have made the point that there are many long-term issues that need to be addressed in the conference, and I believe they are being addressed. But, I think that after September 11th I am hopeful that the United States will change some of its views with respect to the UN. Certainly the American people who again and again, through polling data, are shown to be supportive of the very basic principles of what the UN stands for which is an effort to ventilate crises in an international body. That is clear. The U.S. government has been more of a problem, we all know that. So I think the appeal to let the UN be what the UN should be, and certainly to have it engage much more effectively with the grassroots organizations is true. But I think there are some very practical questions here. The UN should be a major institution for international action and legitimacy of that action. It should be a way of bringing countries and private organizations with different capacities together to address a crisis in the world, particularly in the human rights area. It should be a way of overcoming the blockage of state sovereignty, which we’ll talk about tomorrow, in addressing human rights catastrophes. It should be a way of channeling international resources in a wide variety of areas – refugees, health, poverty, all the great issues that we’ve been talking about here today. It should be an instrument of partnership in nation-building with countries after they have gone through terrible catastrophes, such as what is unfolding today in Afghanistan. There are reforms that are needed in the UN, to be sure, and I think many of them are being seriously considered now, and I hope will be more considered in the current political, geo-political climate. Certainly the expansion of the Security Council, to allow more voices to speak in that very important body, as President von Weizsäcker was pointing out, the expansion, or creation of new institutions like a council for economic issues or a council for social
issues need to be very seriously considered. But my own favorite, and I think the most urgent, reform, and in many ways, the most controversial one that I would propose — certainly in the United States it is controversial — is that the UN needs a stand-by force of countries willing to participate when terrible catastrophes occur, such as unfolded in Central Africa, in Rwanda, in other situations in many parts of the world in recent years. When those catastrophes unfold, if the world can develop the will through a body that is perhaps regional in nature, the stand-by force can save hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives. The weakness of UN peacekeeping in situations like the Balkans, certainly in Rwanda — the story has been told again and again — is that it does not have rules of engagement that allow it to be a real peacekeeping force, rather than simply a set of human shields, or a way of engaging the world’s attention but not doing anything about a problem. If it doesn’t get that kind of rule of engagement, then such a stand-by force would certainly not be worth the paper that it was written on. But I am an optimist with respect to the UN, if it is truly reformed and countries like the United States throw themselves behind a truly international organization. We hopefully are leaving the era of pure bilateral or, more even more dangerously sometimes, purely unilateral action in the world. And nothing has demonstrated more dramatically, than the events of the last month, the urgency of countries and organizations and people on the ground in grassroots organizations working together to address common problems. And that, after all, should be what the UN stands for. Thank you very much.

El Hassan bin Talal
Thank you very much. I think I should give the panelists an opportunity to comment and round-up. President von Weizsäcker.

Richard von Weizsäcker
First of all, permit me to express my gratitude to Ambassador Shattuck. I wouldn’t say it’s the first time, but it’s the most refreshing voice coming from an experienced diplomat from the United States to really address the problem of the United Nations. And with all due respect to my friend, my side and the United Nations on the other side. The Peace Prize for the United Nations, together with the Nobel Prize for Kofi Annan, of course is an invitation, an encouragement to the members of the United Nations finally to take it more seriously than they have done hitherto. All those reproaches at the address of the United Nations always have been truly a reproach to the members, and not to the United Nations themselves. And I also fully agree with what Ambassador Shattuck said as to the stand-by forces. We have really, in my view, convincing examples of what could have been avoided during the 90s if the proposal for such a stand-by force would have been in practice much earlier. And that is proof that we must never forget that we have no replacement for the United Nations. And either we achieve a powerful United Nations, and power where, if I may repeat that, where the World Bank and the IMF and the WTO really are dependent on the United Nations structures, and not just reporting and doing whatever they like to do, even if it is reasonable sometimes. And that is why we need that reform. Ambassador, I have the feeling that we will finally come to a reform of the United Nations. It may last another fifty years, I’m not quite sure, but at the present time, I do share your hope that the events of the last four weeks will really open up the eyes of those powers who have not been participating sufficiently. It is no good if the real political power stays outside of the United Nations, and if what is to be expected from the United Nations is, in the end, not expected of the NGOs which are not within a United Nations rule system, which they need for themselves, and for their own aims. This is why I think this point of the institutions, Mr. Chairman, is so important if we really want to make progress with human rights.

Grigory Yavlinsky
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Once again, I want to repeat that I think that it’s a big challenge for international institutions and the role of such a forum as ours is to clarify what the goals are for these institutions in the near future. You see, the discussion was all around the same things. There are at least three things that were just here on the table. It’s medical aid, food, and education. Instead of discussing, from different sides of the problem, what to do with the United Nations, it’s much better to say that the United Nations can change the situations in these areas during the next year. If yes, it’s workable. If not, finish. It’s necessary to change something. But it’s the goal of the civil society of the world to put it in a very clear way. And then the organizations on the ground would have the opportunity to realize that. And this is part of the things I have said. I think also that the differences between places in the world certainly create a lot of tension and conflict and problems. But this is not a justification of killing innocent people anyhow. Whatever problems are in any country, that might be a starting point, otherwise it’s impossible to discuss anything. And the last point — I was asked about the situation in Chechnya. It is related to that. At the moment, the situation in Chechnya is very difficult. It is at a dead end. I don’t see any positive steps from any side there. There is torture there, there is tremendous violation of human rights, there are people suffering as refugees, and until today, there is no light at the end of the tunnel. The only thing that has happened is that, together with the anti- terrorism operation, the people don’t see, and politicians in the world don’t want to see these problems anymore. I hope we in Russia would deal with it anyhow, but I want simply to say that once again, the umbrella of the fight with the terrorism must not cover a lot of problems were mentioned today. This is not an excuse, and this is not any kind of justification for things like that. And not one leader in the world should have the right to violate basic human rights, using at the moment, the situation with the war on terrorism. That’s what I think is absolutely important to know here and to realize. Thank you.

Tomáš Pojar
I completely agree that the United Nations needs reform, and before this re- form is going to happen, we must now start changing things on the ground. And we should also start now to push for reform of the United Nations. I’m representing one of the few organizations around the world which has access inside Chechnya, and our people are among the few foreigners inside Chechnya, and I completely agree with the pessimism of Grigory Yavlinsky, that the situation is worse than a year ago, and it’s worse than it used to be before the start of this current war. But before Russia starts to negotiate with Maskhadov, nothing is going to happen. Maskhadov is very weak at the moment, but Russia has to negotiate with legitimately elected president, and try to get out from Chechnya and support moderate forces inside Chechnya. I hope it’s going to happen. It may be in ten years. Thank you.

El Hassan bin Talal
Well, I have been instructed to finish on time, for logistic reasons and I would like to thank you all for the good use of the time we have had available, and apologize for those who have not been able to participate. Many of you want to see deeds rather than words, and someone once said to me, “When all is said and done, more is said than done.” But I wonder whether Prague Forum 2000 was about the resolution and not only about the problem. I think that we have to move from regional to global, from parochial to global, and maybe that’s what the battle of globalization is about. Not only to talk in universal terms but also to talk in regional terms. You mentioned economic and social, Professor von Weizsäcker, and I wish that the prime ministers in each region would meet once in a blue moon, let alone, once a year in the context of the general assembly, in their regions to present their regional perspectives, rather than leave everything to the encyclopedic discussions of the General Assembly. As for churches and mosques working on the ground, I want to thank the world’s faiths, and the development dialogue initiative of Jim Wolfensohn, and
Archbishop Carey, and I wish more could be done. I feel this in terms of the outreach of religious institutions to do virtuous things in real time. And I want to thank John Shattuck for obviating the importance of the United Nations system of tomorrow. As I end, to thank one of the contributors to the report, Professor von Weizsäcker, I have to read an announcement, so you will forgive me if I move to the completely mundane, but essential. Those who want to go to the hotel before the Multireligious assembly in St. Vitus Cathedral should leave the conference hall now. I’m not being inhospitable, to be in time for the assembly which starts at 18:30. Of course all of you who received an invitation to the Forum 2000 conference are invited to join the Multireligious assembly. Please bring your badges with you, otherwise, your entrance will not be allowed. God bless you all.