THE United States of America evidently believes that if there was any justice in the world, it would find itself in the dock on a fairly regular basis. There can be no other reasonable explanation for the vehemence of its opposition to the International Criminal Court, which was born last week after an extended gestation period. Uncle Sam was not among the midwives, and his brazen attempt to strangle the institution in its infancy may have scarred the ICC for life.

The ostensible cause for Washington’s extreme displeasure is the suspicion that motivated prosecutors from Third World states may seek to indict US citizens on flimsy grounds. It must be aware, however, that the risk of such behaviour is, in practice, negligible. Built-in safeguards would act as a deterrent against frivolous prosecutions that would undermine the court.

The effectiveness of the ICC cannot, of course, be prejudged. Nothing of the sort has existed before. Nuremberg and the trials of Japanese officers in the aftermath of the Second World War were essentially examples of victors’ justice; a similar claim could also be made about the tribunals on Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. The new court can only proceed against suspected war criminals and human rights abusers if the legal systems in their own countries are unwilling or unable to take them to task. Its proponents hope that the existence of the ICC will make the would-be practitioners of such crimes think twice before they act.

This may be a vain hope, but there can be little question that the idea deserves a chance. Nor can there be any doubt that chances of the court’s success are directly proportional to the number of countries that throw their weight behind it. It has been ratified by nearly 80 nations, including most members of the European Union — American allies such as Britain and France apparently have few qualms about misuse of the ICC.

Russia, China, Israel and Turkey are among the states that have thus far withheld ratification, but the US is the only one to have thrown a spectacular tantrum. The United Nations peacekeeping operation in Bosnia could end within days, because the US intends to veto the United Nations Security Council resolution on its renewal — unless other powers agree that every case brought before the ICC will require Security Council approval. Not surprisingly, this is unacceptable to most other countries, because such an obstacle would defeat one of the court’s chief purposes.

As things stand, governments are able to prevent their citizens from being hauled before the ICC by putting them on trial in national courts. A right to veto prosecutions would guarantee that no American citizen, at least, could ever be proceeded against at The Hague.

In the absence of congressional ratification, no US citizen suspected of human rights abuses within the country can be indicted by the ICC. The problem, as far as Washington is concerned, is that this indemnity does not extend to US citizens held responsible for such abuses outside American borders.

In the six decades since the Second World War, American citizens’ invariably in an official capacity, have been complicit in genocide and a whole raft of crimes against humanity. Virtually none of them has ever had to answer for his excesses, either in the US or anywhere else.

Lieutenant William Calley was one of the few exceptions. He was in charge of the American troops who slaughtered hundreds of South Vietnamese villagers, many of them children, in cold blood in 1969. It was not the Pentagon by the American press that revealed the My Lai atrocity, and an international outcry necessitated a court-martial. Calley claimed to have been following orders, but none of his superiors was ever at risk of being answerable. The lieutenant was found guilty. An indisputable crime against humanity of My Lai proportions ought to have been rewarded with at least a life sentence. Calley spent about a year in prison.

It could be argued, of course, that the American war against Vietnam was in itself a massive and perhaps unprecedented crime against humanity, and it was the victorious Vietnamese who were penalized afterwards. The point, however, is that Americans involved in the abuse of human rights overseas have thus far run little risk of being brought to justice. And Washington is determined to keep it that way, particularly during the open-ended and ill-defined “war against terrorism”. If a wedding celebration in rural Afghanistan is reduced to a bloodbath, it’s best if no awkward questions are asked.

The Pentagon’s response in such instances is brazenly to “downsize” the incident and, once evidence to the contrary becomes overwhelming, to put it down to “collateral damage”. In international law, the validity of the latter defence would presumably depend on whether or not the US is at war against Afghanistan. That’s murky territory. And, with or without a spot of assistance from Al Qaeda, things are bound to get a good deal murkier in the months and years to come.

It is therefore vital for the rest of the world not to give in to American blackmail on the ICC as well as on other counts. The US needs to be disabused of the notion that international relations are a free-for-all in which it can always have its way. The preponderance of American military and economic power militates against a less inequitable world order, but of late there have been a few signs that significant allies of Washington are unwilling to always acquiesce in its wishes.

Britain and Australia have of late been the least critical of America’s friends, with prime ministers Tony Blair and John Howard keen to demonstrate their loyalty to the Bush administration at every conceivable opportunity. It is therefore notable that London and Canberra have both decided to throw their weight behind the ICC despite American objections.

More significantly, Blair and George W. Bush have disagreed in public over the US decision to write off Yasser Arafat. It could, of course, prove to be no more than a lovers’ tiff. But Blair hasn’t been alone in refusing to accept that the US has any right to decide whom Palestinians should or should not elect as their leader. At the recent G-8 summit in Canada, Bush was surprised to discover that none of the other leaders was willing to sign up to a Middle East policy dictated by Ariel Sharon.

One of the profoundest signs of lopsidedness in world affairs has been the flippant manner in which the UN has been sidelined. The US has for more than a decade been able to bully the international organization into falling into line with Washington’s wishes. This was demonstrated, for example, in 1990-91, when Iraqi forces were bombed out of Kuwait and Iraq was invaded by a predominantly Anglo-American force under UN aegis. However, no such pretence was deemed necessary before the assault against Afghanistan. And it is unlikely that the planned second war against Iraq — although the first one has never been called off, with US and British aircraft regularly carrying out attacks that generally go unreported — will involve any UN role.

The Security Council has been reduced to a handmaiden of the US State Department: on the increasingly rare occasions that the US wants UN cover for its actions, it virtually dictates its terms; more often, the council and Kofi Annan are simply ignored, despite the fact that Annan was Washington’s choice for secretary-general, after it found the decidedly un-radical Boutros Boutros-Ghali too hard to handle.

The UN General Assembly receded into irrelevance long ago: its resolutions, no matter how overwhelmingly they are passed, lack any binding force. The Security Council appears to be headed the same way; no other power has come close to using its veto power as frequently as the US, but evidently that stranglehold is no longer enough for the crew currently in charge of Washington. Last week a stern missive from Annan to Secretary of State Colin Powell won a brief reprieve for UN peacekeeping in Bosnia; it is highly unlikely that a similar letter to Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney could have elicited a courteous response. The UN could do with thoroughgoing reform, but not according to American specifications. (Much the same, incidentally, could be said about the Palestinian Authority.) The General Assembly needs to be empowered to a respectable degree, with binding force attached, for example, to resolutions passed by a two-thirds majority. The potency of permanent-member vetoes needs to be watered down, at the very least, accompanied by an expansion of the Security Council’s permanent membership: it should, for example, be possible for solitary vetoes to be overridden by unanimity among the council’s remaining members.

The US would not approve of any moves in this direction, but complete disengagement from the UN would only help confirm the pariah status Washington already deserves.

It needs to be made clear to the US that a global policeman who considers himself above the law is unacceptable to the rest of the world. That a rogue state par excellence can offer no remedy against terrorism or disorder. That unrestrained hypocrisy and unadulterated self-interest are an inadmissible way of spreading the free-market gospel.

A long-term collective effort by the rest of the world (or most of it anyway) will be required for such an endeavour to have any chance of success, and even then it is unlikely that the US can be tamed without a substantial movement from within. Although Congress has authorized Bush to attack The Hague in the event of any US citizen being produced before the ICC, it is hard to see it sanctioning the wholesale invasion of Western Europe. Not for the time being, at least. The time to act is now — else there may be no tomorrow.

This is the second and concluding part of Shahid Javed Burki’s article on corruption and the civil servant.

IN THE early nineties a relatively new branch of economics called institutional economics reached the conclusion that societies that tolerate corruption will find it difficult to promote development. Corruption adds to the cost of doing business and, consequently, reduces the return on invested capital.

This emphasis on looking at the “transaction costs” of doing business in the developing world was in part the result of globalization and the flow of an enormous amount of capital from the developed to the developing world. Much of this capital came from transnational corporations which were engaged in internationalizing the global production system. There was now a requirement that some measures should be developed to ascertain the prevalence of corruption in developing economies.

One such measure was introduced by a non-government organization called Transparency International. The TI, based in Berlin but with chapters in many countries across the globe, including one in Pakistan, began to publish a list every year, ranking countries according to the level of perceived corruption. “Perceived,” since the measure was based on what foreign investors thought about the extent of corruption in the countries in which they were doing business. As such, it is not a scientific indicator of corruption but is important since the perceptions on which it is based influence decisions by transnational corporations about the destination of foreign direct investment. According to the TI, in the mid-nineties Pakistan had the dubious distinction of having become the most corrupt country in the world. The TI’s judgment no doubt contributed to the precipitous decline in foreign direct investment in Pakistan in the late 1990s.

Interestingly, this conclusion was also reached by the government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif who was once fired by the president (in 1993) on charges of corruption and then removed by the military on the same charge (in 1999). In a report titled “Pakistan 2010 Vision Statement,” this is what the Sharif government’s Planning Commissions had to say: “Corruption pervades all three branches of government: the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary. The result is that none of the three branches acts as a check on the misfeasance of the other two. The powers to appoint or reward officials are used arbitrarily, public property is handled in a cavalier fashion, the system ignores (and often rewards) financial corruption and the misuse of powers, financial systems have been burdened with unserviceable loans, public lands have been doled out in return for political or financial favours, and publicly controlled institutions are badly managed and respond neither to citizen needs nor to financial imperatives.”

This was quite an indictment but the government did little to address the situation described by its Planning Commission. How did Pakistan land in such a situation? Why did the external and internal perceptions had become so negative about the quality of governance in the country? A bit of history will help answer this question.

We do not always recognize that Pakistan inherited a reasonably well functioning legal system from the British at the time of partition. The system had worked reasonably well during the colonial period. The basic needs of many segments of the population were fairly well provided by the government. There was an assurance that people’s lives and properties would be protected. There was an expectation that those who assaulted personal freedoms and property rights would be apprehended and punished. The courts worked with a reasonable amount of fairness and dispatch. That the citizens were satisfied with the civil service that helped the government perform these functions is suggested by the fact that the state was given the epithet of mai-bap, mother and father. However, over the years the system was allowed to weaken since the groups that held power were not prepared to be constrained by it.

Pakistan has struggled for a long time with the problem of corruption and a palpable lack of honesty among its public officials. One reason why the country has not been able to tackle this problem is that there is a remarkable amount of tolerance in society for corrupt behaviour.

Our culture permits it; in fact, at times, it encourages it. Why is the culture so accommodating of corrupt behaviour? I gave one answer to this question in a book on Pakistan published by me three years ago in the United States. In “Pakistan: Fifty Years of Nationhood,” I suggested that our culture expects a person to be a yaraan da yaar — to be a friend of the friend. Being a true friend — or a good relative — may, at times, mean, if not going against the law but then, at least, stepping a bit outside it. It is a riwaj — a well established tradition — to provide favours in the expectation of getting them back in return some time in the future.

This attitude may be alright in private dealings but they wreck havoc when they are transported to the public domain. And they have been transported with a vengeance during most of our history.

Although, we tolerate this behaviour our history also tells us that there is a threshold beyond which society becomes restive and demands corrective action. This threshold has been breached on several occasions in Pakistan and when that happened our leaders, under pressure from the people, promised a vigorous cleansing of the system.

But cleansing usually meant adopting a set of rules that applied to the group of people who were believed to be extraordinarily corrupt. It was this type of approach that led to the promulgation of such ordinances as the Public and Representatives Officers Disqualification Act of 1949 (PRODA) or the Elective Bodies Disqualification Order of 1959 (EBDO).

The same approach persuaded President Yahya Khan to fire a large number of civil servants — the famous 303 — for helping themselves to the fruits provided by rapid economic growth during the period of Ayub Khan. In a famous public address that came to be known as the “22 families’ speech,” Mahbubul Haq, Ayub Khan’s chief economist, blamed his own government for allowing a handful of industrial and commercial houses to capture the benefit of plentiful growth in the 1960s. The public heard Haq and demanded action and the axe fell on more than 300 civil servants.

Zulfikar ali Bhutto, Yahya Khan’s civilian successor, carried out his own bureaucratic bloodletting. He dispensed with hundreds of civil servants thus ridding the bureaucracy of some of the people with tarnished reputations. Bhutto’s wrath was also borne by a number of civil servants who had crossed his path during the years he spent as Ayub Khan’s high-profile minister, first of commerce and then of foreign affairs.

But Bhutto went further than just firing civil servants. The Constitution of 1973, of which he was the main author, removed the protections that were given to the civil servants by the two previous constitutions. The 1935 Government of India Act (Pakistan’s Constitution until 1956) contained detailed provisions regarding the terms and conditions of civil servants.

The Constitution of 1956 borrowed extensively from the Government of India Act. It was very friendly to the civil servants. It expressly prohibited variation of tenure and conditions of service to the employees’ disadvantage and provided “the right of appeal against alteration or adverse interpretation of a rule affecting the conditions of service.” The Constitution of 1962 was a bit less generous but continued to offer protection against a “disadvantageous alteration or interpretation of rules affecting terms and conditions of service.”

The Constitution of 1973 did away with these protections, exposing the civil servant to the protections available only within organic law.

Bhutto said that the decision to remove constitutional protection that had been available to the civil service for a quarter century in independent Pakistan was taken for good reasons. It was taken to allow merit to flourish within the bureaucracy while holding the civil servant to be fully accountable to the public at large. Neither objective was achieved. Instead, the civil servant became beholden to the politician which was probably the main purpose behind the approach adopted by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

Starting in 1990, the system’s wrath fell not on the civil servants as it did during the periods of Yahya Khan and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Now politicians were singled out for punishment. In that year President Ghulam Ishaq dismissed Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto on a number of charges that prominently included corruption. The same charges were levelled by President Khan against Nawaz Sharif in 1993 and by President Farooq Leghari against Benazir Bhutto in 1996.

All these draconian actions did little to keep corruption from corroding Pakistan’s social order and from seriously hurting the country’s economy. The reason why this did not happen is not difficult to find. The firing of corrupt civil servants or of corrupt politicians were sporadic events.

They did not change the cultural and legal environment in which public servants work and perform their duties. Culture is hard to change. To do so requires a great deal of patient labour, including educating people and inculcating in them a different set of values. Laws are somewhat easier to change, particularly when the public demands action which was the case throughout the 1990s.

The first serious attempt to systematically introduce accountability as a check on the working of public servants was made by the interim government that briefly held office in the winter of 1996-97. The Ehtesab Ordinance was promulgated in December 1996 which defined corruption as a culpable offence and created a new set of institutions, including the Ehtesab Commission, to process cases against public officials deemed corrupt. The process set in place, with some changes, was adopted by the government of Nawaz Sharif and was to become the basis of the effort launched by the government of General Musharraf. This effort began soon after the general took office and has continued to this day.

I am eagerly looking forward to the October general election and the subsequent induction of ministers, at the centre and in the provinces. It is not because of my love of democracy (for which I would gladly lay down my life if I were assured that it would help) but for other, selfish reasons. Ministers in elected governments, with their fads and foibles, have always provided me and others of my ilk interesting matter for column writing. Their counterparts in a military regime are a boring lot that way.

Although I am not obliged to explain, I feel I must tell my readers why the thought of the return to democracy does not excite me despite my claim to offer my life for it. You see, I am fairly advanced in years, and have been watching political developments since August 1947. I have been emotionally affected by many events — the frequent imposition of martial law, the political circumstances leading to the wars with India, the breaking away of Bangladesh, the hanging of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, among others — but I have observed that democratic governments and non-democratic regimes hardly made any difference to the people. So I have grown indifferent, cold, blase, a believer in the Urdu verse “Apni bala se boom base ya huma rahe.” Hence my rather bizarre reason for wanting elected ministers to enliven the scene.

A gem of a light essay was written by Sajjad Haider Yaldram way back in the thirties. Called (in translation) “Save me from my friends,” it acquired the status of a classic in Urdu literature and became almost a byword in everyday conversation. The news story from an African country that an elected minister had been beaten up by a group of people from his village for not solving their personal problems, made me think that some Urdu writer of humour could do an essay on a Pakistani minister exclaiming, “Protect me from my voters!”

Before the military jumped in and spoiled the fun, I used to look at the armed guard standing on duty at the gate of a minister’s residence whenever I passed by one. I often thought: where is the idiot who will go into the house and subject the minister to assault and battery, and what would the guard do in such a case? I was sure that if such a rarity did suddenly make his appearance and succeeded in effecting entry into the dignitary’s presence, he would himself realise his stupidity. for what can one gain by manhandling a minister? Unless of course the minister agrees with his bright PRO that a staged attack of this kind can be good for his publicity.

During the decade of democracy (1988-1999) there was not a single instance of a member of the long-suffering public trying to cause bodily harm to a minister, whether federal or minister. Admittedly, around 1990 a Balochistan minister was shot at and killed, but that is a different issue altogether and not within the purview of my topic. Shooting to kill has become a compulsive hobby in Pakistan and is the result of sheer trigger-happiness. But when a common man walks into a minister’s house with the intention of beating him up, it becomes a serious national problem, for even one incident of this kind would give ideas to enterprising people and make entire cabinets run for cover.

Actually there have been a few cases of ministers being manhandled, but thankfully they were confined to the sacred precincts of the National Assembly and the provincial legislatures where members, simply overloaded with privileges, may do what they like. In these august institutions, ministers are not more privileged than the members, and any member aggrieved by a word or deed of a minister is welcome to catch him by the throat. But of course with the permission of the Speaker. After all you can’t have regular fisticuffs in the House, with the Speaker pretending that he wasn’t looking.

That brings me to the necessity of issuing suitable instructions to the public. The done thing under the Westminster system in Britain is that a citizen with a grouse goes to his MP and asks him to take up the matter with the cabinet minister concerned. Since we have adopted that system in toto, any Pakistani voter wishing to twist the neck of a minister must ask his MNA or MPA to do the needful in the House instead of taking the law into his own hands. Instructions displayed at the gates of ministerial residences should clearly lay down that assaults on ministers must be made through proper channel.

The above detailed exposition of the matter should make it clear to the meanest intelligence that the armed policeman outside a minister’s house is there only to protect him from “friends, Romans — sorry, Pakistanis — and countrymen.” Otherwise he has nothing to fear by way of physical violence against his person. It is another matter that ministers never go out anywhere without the co-called gunman. But again, that is no protection against attack. The man adds a certain dignity to their personality if they are short of that commodity, and to collect for the waste paper basket applications from complainants and job-seekers. Normally this is the function of the PS or PA, but since those valuable flunkeys are almost always at the disposal of the begum minister, the poor gunman has to officiate.

Some time ago I read in the newspapers about the Inspector General of Police’s strict orders to his men that they must never fail to salute a flag car, even if it makes the johnny sitting in it believe that the salute was for him. I had intended this piece to be based on that subtle point, but look where I have got to. But never mind, the flag will always be there, God willing, and I can write about it any day. But I thought I must get into practice for the post-October days when I shall be devoting more and more of this column to ministers and their doings which somehow never lead to their undoing.

This is one thing that is wrong with this piece. The other is that most of it deals with physical assaults on ministers which never take place, and are only wishful thinking on my part. The third is that there are still three months to October, and ministers will not be in their seats before November. But to justify its writing let me say that if, in the coming days, it helps to prevent even one attack on a minister by any of his voters I shall feel happy that I have performed a national duty. Elected ministers are an entertaining breed and must be protected.

THE World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) to be held in Johannesburg, South Africa, this coming August-September is in trouble. These were troubling thoughts of Indonesia’s Emil Salim who chaired the final inter-ministerial preparatory meeting — Prepcom IV — at Bali in April-May 2002. “Bali”, declared Emil Salim at the recent Rio+10/Brasil organized on the personal initiative of President Fernando Cardozo of Brazil at Rio de Janeiro, “was a failure”. But Nitin Desai, the secretary-general of the WSSD does not share Emil Salim’s honest pessimism. The WSSD will be a major success, Desai predicted at the same meeting with President Cardoso.

Those of us who attended Prepcom IV and anxiously followed its work soon realized at Bali that all was not going well. In preparatory sessions for major international conferences and summits, the success or failure of the session is measured by the yardsticks of “clean texts” and “square brackets”. If there is agreement between the delegates on the text before them, the result is a clean text that is adopted at the following summit. Disagreement is recorded by “square brackets” around the controversial language or issue that is required to be further negotiated at he summit to an agreed clean text. Naturally, the lesser the square brackets at a preparatory meeting, the greater the chance of success of a summit.

Brazil had hosted the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) that was billed as the Rio Earth Summit because it attracted virtually every head of state or government into what was the largest assembly ever of the world’s leadership.. Rio 1992 had progressed from the earlier ground-breaking Stockholm Conference on Human Environment, 1972, which had, pioneeringly, internationalized natural resource management in almost the same fashion as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948, had internationalized the protection of human rights. The Stockholm Declaration on Human Environment, 1972, inspired, twenty years later, the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, 1992, and Agenda 21. The world had by then progressed to accommodate the interests of the developing countries in recognizing development as an equally important priority.

At Rio in 1992, we were all seduced by the vision of a new global partnership between the developed and the developing countries anchored on the agreed obligations of the developed countries to transfer financial resources and technology to the developing countries. Agenda 21 identified 0.7 per cent of the GDP of the developed countries to flow as Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) to the developing countries. Also, capacity building was another major obligation undertaken by the North to the South. Ten years later, we sadly find that the euphoria of 1992 was misplaced. The West has miserably failed to deliver the promise of Rio 1992.

It is against the backdrop of Stockholm (1972) and Rio (1992) that the international community has made another commitment to WSSD,Johannesburg (2002). The effort, of course, will be to draw the global leadership at the same level as at Rio in 1992.

Prepcom IV at Bali had demonstrated that some of the important developed countries, including the US., had clearly backed off from the “spirit of Rio”. They were not willing to acknowledge the commitments to the transfer of financial resources and technology on which the success of the global quest for sustainable development so crucially depends. They even want to renegotiate the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities that had been accepted in Rio in 1992 and which facilitates an international affirmative action in favour of the developing countries. The Doha Declaration (2002) had, in the meantime, thrown up the nexus between trade and environment and these issues — such as trade related intellectual property rights (TRIPS) — required sensitive negotiations. The developed countries are in no mood to meet the Rio expectations. Instead of increasing the ODA assistance to the level of 0.7 per cent of the GDP as held out at Rio in 1992, they have substantially reduced their aid flows to he developing countries in the ten years after Rio.

The developing countries, on the other hand, clearly want to factor the lessons of Rio (1992) in Johannesburg 2002. They not only want an unequivocal commitment to and reaffirmation of the Rio legacy, the Rio Declaration, Agenda 21, The Conventions on Biological Diversity, Climate Change and Desertification, but they want implementational commitments on action programmes with clear time lines.

The tensions and differences at Bali were the product of the above differences between the North and the South, And, while Bali produced a clean text of as much as 70 per cent of the principal document to be proclaimed in Johannesburg, the 30 per cent bracketed text represents the major core unresolved issues. In a lawyer’s language, such unresolved fundamental issues may become “deal breakers” that can doom Johannesburg.

In this delicate stage has entered the timely and personal initiative, Rio+10/Brasil, of President Fernando Cardoso of Brazil. Committed to keeping the spirit of 1992 Rio alive, he invited, in the last week of June, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and Prime Minister Goran Perrson of Sweden to a mini-summit in Rio.One declared objective was to pass the torch from Rio(1992) to Johannesburg(2002) in the presence of Stockholm(1972). What an inspiring sight to see this happen in a simple but elegant ceremony in Rio when the “troika summiteers” pledged to work for the success of Johannesburg and beyond. I was also privileged to be a part of the “passing of the torch” from the Swedish leadership to the Brazilian president for the 1992 Rio Earth Summit at a ceremony in Stockholm in 1991.

Also invited to Rio+10/Brasil were about one hundred influential leaders in sustainable development from all over the world. Although the charisma of President Cardoso pervaded the whole conference, his dynamic deputy, Fabio Feldmann, mobilized its intellectual energy. Deputy prime minister of the UK Prescott made an impassioned plea for multilateralism, defiantly criticizing the “isolationist” policies of certain world leaders, a clear pointer to the US and its dismal record on the Kyoto Protocol. Emil Salim and Nitin Desai were also there. And so was the legendary Maurice Strong who had shaped Stockholm in 1972 and was the secretary general of the 1992 Rio Summit. The heads of UNEP, IUCN, and WWF were all there. I had been invited to present a vision for the Asian and Pacific region. Mr. Mohammad Moosa, minister of environment, South Africa, had similarly reported on the African Initiative, NEPAD. We all heard Emil Salim’s disappointments at Bali and the challenge by Nitin Desai that sixty days before Johannesburg, there is more consensus and more hope than in the comparable period before the 1992 Rio Summit. Who has a better crystal ball, we will only know in September this year.