October 31, 2001	Wednesday	Shaba’an 13, 1422

GHENT (Belgium), Oct 30: Former US President Bill Clinton urged an onslaught on everything from illiteracy to AIDS in poor nations on Tuesday to create fairer globalisation policies after the September 11 attacks on the United States.

“When it comes to globalisation, we can no longer claim for ourselves what we deny to others,” he told a one-day conference hosted by Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt on how to rein in unfettered capitalism. “We all have to change.”

Verhofstadt, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency, said that he favoured a new political world order to help counterbalance the effects of economic globalisation, which many poor nations say are mainly helping the rich get richer.

Clinton told an audience of 400 people at Ghent University that the world should work on policies for education, health care, the environment and education to ensure a fairer shareout of “burdens and benefits” of globalisation.

He said such policies would also help isolate militants like Saudi-born Osama bin Laden, blamed by the United States for masterminding the suicide hijacker attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in which 4,800 people died.

Clinton said, for instance, that the world should agree to a U.N. call to provide $10 billion a year to fight AIDS, saying it was a fraction of the cost if the killer virus keeps spreading.

Verhofstadt said earlier that: “The events of September 11 even made fervent globalists aware of the need for a worldwide political order...Economic globalisation needs a political counterpart.”

Verhofstadt said “There is a bit of Western hypocrisy in all the rhetoric about free trade, for we are not really opening our borders to trade...we are still very far from opening up the borders of richer countries to textiles and agricultural produce from the poorer countries of the world.” Verhoftstadt called Tuesday’s conference after writing a letter last month in which he called for ‘ethical globalisation’.—Reuters