NEW YORK, Feb 1: The US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, told the World Economic Forum on Friday that the United States was committed not only to fighting terrorists, but also to battling the poverty and hopelessness that helps breed their anger.
“We have to make sure that as we fight terrorism using military means and legal means and law enforcement and intelligence means ... we also have to put hope back in the hearts of people,” Powell said. “We have to show people who might move in the direction of terrorism that there is a better way.”
Other celebrities in their speeches made a case for the rich developed world to address the concerns of the poor and underdeveloped countries by forgiving their debts.
“I am a spoiled-rotten rock star,” Bono, the Irish singer of the rock band U-2, who has campaigned against AIDS and for debt relief for poor countries, told some 2,500 participants at the opening session of the five-day gathering of movers, shakers, deep-thinkers and dealmakers.
“I drink champagne, and I’ll eat the cake. But there is a sense that if this is just a talking shop, it’s a little close to Marie Antoinette.”
“This is a defining moment in history,” Bono said. “There is an emergency in the world, and I don’t think that’s hyperbole.”
Instead, Bono said in a hour-long panel discussion that also included former Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa and Queen Rania of Jordan, there was “a desire for the need to believe that the developed world is really interested in the developing world, and we have to prove that.”
The audience, listening on headsets in French, German, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Chinese and Arabic, exploded in the warmest applause of the session.
In fact, this elite retreat normally held in the Swiss ski-resort town of Davos opened its inaugural session in New York with much self-conscious discussion of two themes: the after-effects of devastating terrorist attacks, and the complaints of knots of sober protesters outside in the rain on Park Avenue that the newly global economy has left out millions of people.
Over and over, conference organizers and participants agreed that globalization could not be stopped, and that “whoever disengages themselves from it, loses,” as Kaspar Villiger, the president of the Swiss Confederation, put it in his opening remarks. But Mr Villiger also said that two-thirds of the world’s population had yet to reap the benefits, and that “in order to solve worldwide problems, we need to harness the growth potential of globalization.”
Queen Rania of Jordan told her panel’s moderator that “there is a special mood in the world right now, when there is a global moral consciousness” that can be a force for good. But she added: “There is a danger of a bipolar world, a subliminal segregation of us and them, and that is a very dangerous view.”
There may be things that have gone wrong in the world, the Queen said, but she added pointedly: “I can tell you that Islam is not one of them.” She said that the religion was completely consistent with modernity and social justice, and that the challenge for the world community was to find a way to do something “on the ground” to address root-causes of violence and tension, like poverty.
The meeting site at Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel was surrounded by 4,000 police to guard against the violent protests that have marred international economic meetings in recent years in Seattle, Canada and Italy.
There were no major disruptions on Thursday or early Friday, and police made a grand total of eight arrests.
Thursday’s largest protest, about 1,000 union workers and other protesters marched on a Gap store near the forum site to demonstrate against the globalization of industry. More protests were planned for later in the conference, including a teach-in and a video news conference on Friday.
Economists predicted that the US economy would bounce back by year’s end, with Europe expected to follow closely behind. But they said there was no end in sight for Japan’s 10-year-old slump.
Helping the weakest economies and creating strong middle-classes there are the best ways to fight terrorism in the long-term, panelists said at an afternoon discussion. “When you have that, it’s easier to have democratic values and practices,” said Alain Dieckhoff, the research director at France’s Center for International Studies and Research.
