THE long awaited and much publicized WTO ministerial conference at Cancun, Mexico, has failed after five days of deliberations on matters relating to expansion of global trade. The failure of the conference was almost predictable as the gulf dividing the rich and the poor countries has already become very wide, and the hope that it can be bridged has not materialized.

The trade ministers from 146 countries who participated in the deliberations dispersed without knowing what to do next. As a result, the Doha round of negotiations for tariff reduction which began there in 2001 and which was to end by January 2005, has been left hanging in the air. When the negotiations began at Cancun, over 20 developing countries had formed a front to press for their rights and get the high farm subsidies of the rich countries reduced, particularly of the US and the European Union. This group was led by India, China, South Africa and Brazil. But eventually this bloc of the developing countries agitating for their rights swelled to 90 in a conference of 146 states.

Developed countries like the US and the European Union subsidize their farmers to the extent of almost a billion dollars a day which hurts the poor farmers of the developing countries. So the developing countries wanted the over 300 billion dollar annual subsidy to be reduced. But the rich countries do not want to make large cuts now. In fact, the US and the European Union which differ on the issue, joined hands at Cancun against the demands of the developing countries.

The subsidy given by the rich countries is nearly 6 times the outlay on international aid, says a report of the Oxfam which has been fighting against famine and hunger for a long time. And these subsidies generate large surpluses that are dumped in world markets at prices bearing no relation to production costs. As a result, millions of producers in the developing countries receive lower prices for their produce and get pushed out of markets because of agricultural dumping.

While the rich groups in the US were determined to fight any substantial lowering of the farm subsidies, it was the poorer nations that faced the biggest challenges in exporting their goods, particularly to the US. The shirts produced by Bangladeshi women enter the US market at a tax rate about 20 times higher than the one levied on goods imported from Britain. Vietnam pays more to US customs than the Netherlands despite the accounting for a far smaller share of imports. Reports suggest that up to 27 million jobs could be created in poor countries if import restrictions on textiles and garments alone were eliminated completely.

All this has made a large Indian group to demand withdrawal of their country from the WTO and form an alternate body. Even if that is done, the trade access for the developing countries which consume a great deal of what the world produces would remain a problem. So the solution does not lie in isolation or unilateralism, but in making the developed countries see reason and cooperate with the developing countries.

Experts have said that if there were no trade barriers, the world trade would increase by 400 to 500 billion dollars, and the trade of the developing countries would rise by 150 billion dollars. In that event, the number of the people living on less than a dollar a day would come down by 150 million. That may not be a great achievement when the total number of the very poor in the world is estimated at 1.2 billion, and their number is not expected to be halved before 2015.

But the political as well as economic conditions in the rich countries stand in the way. The US is recovering from a mild but prolonged recession which is not leading to an increase in the number of jobs. Japan, too is trying to emerge from a recessionary spell and in the European Union, Germany is facing recessionary prospects with France having similar problems.

The US is witnessing economic recovery without an increase in employment, while the unemployment rate stands at 6.1 per cent. Spain is having an unemployment rate of 11.4 per cent and Germany of 10.6 per cent followed by France 8.7 per cent. Belgium has an unemployment rate of 13.3 per cent.

Elections are due in some countries and the presidential election in the US is scheduled for next year. So their governments do not want to annoy their rich farmers or other producers who are pretty militant when it comes to cutting down their subsidies.

Not only the farm subsidies divide the rich and poor countries but also other issues, known as the Singapore issues as they were identified at a WTO ministerial meeting there earlier. The four issues are cross border investment, competition policies, trade facilitation and government procurement. The developing countries fear that the new international investment regime would benefit multilateral corporations at the expense of their own industries.

The ministers of the developing countries complained, the representatives of the advanced countries did not stick to the promises they had made at Doha, and in fact at Cancun they had tried to utilize the meeting to push their own issues. An Oxfam representative at Cancun said: “the meeting had failed, but the new power of the developing countries, backed by campaigners around the world, had made Cancun a turning point.” Anyway, the negotiating process many no come to an end by January 1, 2005, unlike set at Doha.

The developing countries have come to see more and more the inequity of the world trading order and the urgency for correcting it. But the West, while conceding the need for rectifying the defects in the system, is not in a hurry to do that. When the development aid from the rich countries targeted was reduced from one per cent of their GDP to 0.7 per cent and thereafter it fell steeply and was bridled with too many conditions, the developing countries said they preferred trade to aid.

But there were too many restrictions in the way of fair world trade and they sought to remove them. But the western countries have been fighting back to protect not only their nations‘ interests but also their group interest, and ultimately the US and Europe which differ on the extent of farm subsidies, joined hands at Cancun to resist the demands of the developing countries. The farm surplus of the developing countries is small and is reduced at a high real cost and yet they cannot export much to the West as the high tariff barriers stand in the way.

In this age of globalization if men cannot move freely at least goods should be able to move without excessive artificial barriers. But while the rich countries want their own goods to move by scaling down the tariff barriers of developing countries, they do not want to make it easy for the developing countries to export their farm products. Now when the WTO wants larger and freer flow of goods in the world, they have come up with labour issues, social issues and environmental issues which will eventually handicap the developing countries a great deal while they try to export more.

It is no use for the developing countries to keep counting the number of the poor in the world and lamenting that their number is increasing in many countries. What is important is the positive step they take to reduce poverty and help the poor in those countries stand on their own feet. If Bangladesh has to pay 20 times more duty on a shirt made by a poor woman in that country than by a factory in Netherlands, when it is imported into Britain, that is not the way poverty in the developing countries can be reduced. That is how the rich become richer.

What is certain is that the developing countries are now wide awake and are eager to join hands to fight for their common cause. While they welcome the assurances given by the developed countries, they want follow-up action in real terms, and they are bound to agitate for that ceaselessly.

IT IS almost ten years now (September 13, 1993) that Yasser Arafat stood on the White House lawn for that historic handshake with Yitzhak Rabin. The Oslo accords agreed then failed to deliver peace in the Middle East. In the intervening years Arafat’s popularity and political clout showed a similar decline.

Yet go to his Ramallah headquarters today and you will see thousands of Palestinians hailing him as their leader. The irony is that the credit for this latest revival in his political fortune goes not to Arafat, but to the Israeli government. After two suicide bombings in one night last week, the Israeli security cabinet agreed ‘in principle’ to oust Yasser Arafat. Holding him responsible for the current violence in the region, and characterizing him as the main obstacle to peace, the cabinet instructed the army to come up with proposals for his ‘removal’.

Subsequent statements by Israeli ministers clarified that by ‘removal’ they meant either his expulsion from the Occupied Territories or his assassination.

It is a measure of the lawlessness of the Sharon government that it can blithely announce such policy decisions. ‘Removal’ and ‘liquidation’ are terms more appropriate for a mafia don than for an elected head of state — a point noted by Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat. It is also a measure of the extent to which the Sharon government has already violated the norms of civilized governance (most notably through its policy of targeted assassinations) that this latest cabinet decision caused little surprise, either in Israel-Palestine or the international community.

Nonetheless, the decision to ‘remove’ Yasser Arafat represents a significant upping of the ante. It is one thing to assassinate Hamas leaders like Ismail Abu Shenab, or even to make an attempt on the life of its spiritual head, Sheikh Yasin. But it is quite another to target the democratically elected head of the Palestinian Authority. Nor should it be forgotten that Yasser Arafat’s name is virtually synonymous with Palestinian nationalism.

Yasin and Hamas might be challenging his domination in the Occupied Territories, but across the region and in the wider international community Arafat is still the undisputed ‘Mr Palestine’. Wiping out the political and symbolic head of the Palestinian national movement is no small undertaking. It is an undertaking whose futility is guaranteed. The justification given by the Israeli cabinet that Arafat is the biggest obstacle to peace has no basis in fact. [The real obstacle, of course, lies much closer to home.] As far as the Palestinian resistance movement is concerned, Arafat’s position at the helm has long been taken by Sheikh Ahmed Yasin and the militant ideologues of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

On the streets of the West Bank and Gaza it is these Islamist groups — not Arafat’s Fatah — that are spearheading the intifada against Israeli occupation. Arafat’s role is more akin to bystander than ringleader.

In focussing all its wrath on Yasser Arafat the Sharon government is thus completely off target. The international equivalent of this is George Bush attacking Iraq, run by the secular Saddam Hussain, in order to crush Islamist and non-Iraqi Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

Removing Arafat will not alter or erode the real factors fuelling Palestinian violence: injustice, occupation, anger, frustration and the inspirational leadership of Hamas. Hence it will not solve Israel’s Palestine problem. On the contrary as with the US invasion of Iraq and its catalytic effect on Islamic terrorism, it will make this problem much worse.

To begin with, Israel will have to deal with the consequences of Arafat’s political revival. Credit for this goes entirely to Tel Aviv. By threatening him it has restored his credibility and position in the eyes of the Palestinian people. The corruption, mismanagement and dictatorial nature of his previous stints in office have been forgotten. Israeli anger at Arafat has made him once again the beloved leader of the Palestinians. Little wonder that — for a man with a death threat hanging over him — he looks positively delighted.

Thousands of Palestinians have been flocking every evening to Arafat’s Ramallah headquarters (or what is left of it) to pledge their solidarity with him, and prevent any Israeli attempt to snatch or assassinate him. ‘We are all ready to be martyrs for Abu Ammar’ is the constant refrain from the crowds — in Ramallah, in Nablus, in refugee camps in South Lebanon. Everywhere the Palestinians are rallying around their leader.

Given this massive resurgence of support for Arafat, any conversion of the Israeli government’s agreement ‘in principle’ into practical action (by snatching and exiling Arafat or worse, killing him) will provoke a furious popular backlash. The anger caused by Sharon’s infamous visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000, will be nothing compared to that which will erupt if Arafat is removed by the Israelis.

And what would happen after Arafat’s removal? In exile, he would abandon the non-violence of the past decade and become a reinvigorated sponsor of anti-Israel violence, a fact appreciated by the Israelis, who favour the liquidation option.

In death, he would be a martyr to the Palestinian cause and the trigger for radicalization of the entire Palestinian people. The moderates like Saeb Erakat would overnight become redundant. No one on the Palestinian side would be talking of negotiations, compromise and peace: the talk would be purely of revenge and suicide bombings.

One could argue that the roadmap is already all but dead and buried, the chances of peace in the Middle East is remote in the extreme. Arafat’s removal would thus make little difference. This is a dangerous under-estimation of the extent to which things can get in the Middle East. There are many degrees of ‘non-peace’. Arafat’s ouster would shift the current ‘mid-level’ conflict into a much higher gear — perhaps even drawing in the wider Arab world. Lebanon’s Daily Star went so far as to predict that the ‘clash of civilizations’ would come ‘a lengthy step closer’.

Everyone but Ariel Sharon and the hardline Zionist camp can foresee the catastrophic consequences of Arafat’s removal at Israeli hands. Washington, while failing to denounce Tel Aviv for making such a Mafia-esque policy decision, has made clear it wants neither the expulsion nor liquidation of Yasser Arafat. The EU and UN have added their voices of condemnation. Perhaps most surprising, mainstream newspapers within Israel have strongly attacked the cabinet decision. Haaretz tore into the government, accusing it of ‘sheer stupidity’ and Sharon of heading ‘a failure of a government that insists on hunkering down in its own stupidity’ — a reference to the clarificatory statements by cabinet ministers that ‘removal’ meant ‘liquidation’.

Ariel Sharon has been accused of many things in the past: deceit, hypocrisy, cruelty, oppression — but rarely of stupidity. In putting a contract out on Arafat, is he really being stupid or does he have some hidden agenda? Peace and two-state coexistence with the Palestinians have, of course, never been on Sharon’s agenda. But he is managing to subvert all chances of these even without removing Arafat.

Why then push such a seemingly reckless strategy? Answer: to boost his domestic support within Israel. Hard-line Zionists have warmly applauded the cabinet’s decision. Among the general public, many Israelis have failed to make the connection between their government’s policy of targeted assassinations and the current deterioration in the security situation. By blaming Arafat and threatening to take him out, Sharon ensures they do not make that connection.

The other point to note is that Israelis have suffered the negative consequences of Sharon’s policies alongside — albeit on a much smaller scale — the Palestinians. Ariel Sharon has never let that Israeli blood deter him from his goal of a Jewish state that incorporates the Occupied Territories and all of Jerusalem, and that excludes as many Arabs as possible.

Removing Yasser Arafat will — at least in his mind — bring him another step closer to that goal. As in the past, he is blind to the price that the Israelis will have to pay.

The Jerusalem Post backed the prime minister’s decision on the grounds that: ‘Arafat does not just stand for terror, he stands for the refusal to make peace with Israel under any circumstances and within any borders’. Replacing ‘Arafat’ with ‘Sharon’, and ‘Israel’ with ‘the Palestinians’ would give a statement much closer to the truth.

“I KNOW not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” — Albert Einstein on war.

Regime change has become the hallmark of President Bush’s foreign policy under his top neo-conservative advisors. In just two years, he has dispatched two regimes namely; the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein’s in Iraq. He has tried to sideline Yasser Arafat and is hoping to do away with Kim Jong-II of North Korea and the clerics in Iran. This policy of regime change under the specific circumstances, may be new but ideas of a regime change and putting it in to effect are not.

Mr Bush, in seeking to change regimes not to America’s liking, is travelling a well trodden path. It started more than a century ago when, in the aftermath of the Spanish American War, the US found itself in charge of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. In 1903, Teddy Roosevelt engineered Panama’s rebellion against Colombia. The next year he asserted the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which led to the occupation of the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Nicaragua.

The US did go home after World War I, but not after World War II. Instead, it built a web of permanently entangling alliances that stretched along the globe. Once colonialism was discredited, the US adopted a different approach — covert regime change — with the CIA rather than the US military in the lead.

Today, we have another American administration that feels that diplomacy takes too much time, and is too uncertain. It is a neocon administration that sees regime change as a panacea. Mr Bush was visualized over a span of time to serve their preconceived plan. His Christian faith was used and abused for this purpose.

Of all the neo-cons in the Bush administration, Paul Wolfowitz, assistant secretary of defence, is regarded as the champion of regime change. He along with the other neo-conservatives developed this idea quite some time ago and has not ceased to promote it ever since. When, in 1980’s, Washington arrived at the conclusion that the Philippines’ President Ferdinand Marcos’ power was not legitimate and he must leave, it was Paul Wolfowitz, then the assistant secretary of state who put that departure into effect.

During his tenure as Indonesian ambassador in 1986-89, he made President Suharto his target and finally got rid of him with the help of International Monetary Fund in 1998.

It was in 1992, that Wolfowitz argued in a controversial draft ‘Defence Planning Guidance’ (DPG), for realigning US forces globally so as to ‘retain pre-eminent responsibility for addressing selectively those wrongs which threaten not only US interests, but those of the allies, or which could seriously unsettle international relations.’

Containment, the victorious strategy of the cold war, was to give way to an ambitious new strategy designed to “establish and protect a new order.”

President Bush was misled by a coterie of neo-conservatives led by the likes of Richard Perle and Wolfowitz into an unprovoked, unnecessary war in Iraq. Next, the White House gravely misread the strategic situation by swallowing neocon assurances that the ‘liberation’ of Iraq would be a cakewalk and oil bonanza. With the result that US army’s combat forces are now under siege, at a cost of $1 billion weekly. The very neocons who fathered this disaster are now calling for more American troops to be sent to Iraq.

Today, there is a sharp policy dispute over the Bush administration’s poor planning for post-war Iraq between the State department and the Pentagon. The Neocons regard Colin Powell, as the principal impediment to their Pax Americana. They believe the way to win the ‘War on Terror’ is to widen it into “World War IV” and overthrow all the undemocratic regimes of the Middle East.

The political confusion which exists today in Washington is part of a long established pattern in the making of American foreign policy. The standard US approach to international relations has been wooden headedly militaristic relying on massive force.

ISRAELI Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s recent visit to India should be seen in its historical perspective. The Indian leaders, irrespective of their political affiliations, had never been anti-Semitic. As a matter of fact, in the pre-independence period, they had supported the creation of Israel and after its establishment in 1948, stressed the need for closer political and economic ties with it.

As the recognition of Israel by India would have irked the Arabs, it refrained from doing so and chose to adopt a policy to make the Arabs believe that it was on their side in their conflict with Israel. India also adopted a pro-Arab stance to neutralize Pakistan’s influence in the Middle East. Israel fully understood India’s predicament and did not allow the absence of its diplomatic relations with it to be an impediment to the development of political and economic relations between the two countries. Israel’s consulate in Bombay was opened in 1950 to facilitate the immigration of the Jews who were stranded in India during the Second World War.

A retired Indian general, Ashok Mehta, sometime back, revealed one of the well-kept secrets that Israel helped India with intelligence and equipment in all its wars with its neighbours from 1962 onwards. Kargil was the most recent testimony of Israel’s military assistance to it. Israel also clandestinely helped India in the development of its nuclear capability.

Israel’s support to India was not, however, a one way affair. During the 1967 Arab-Israel war, when France clamped an embargo on the supply of arms to Israel, the then commander of the Israeli armoured division in Sinai, Brigadier Ariel Sharon, secretly visited New Delhi to purchase spare parts for Israel’s planes and tanks. Israel gratefully remembers India’s contribution to its victory over the Arabs in 1967 war with them.

The growing strategic relationship between New Delhi and Tel Aviv, with full support of the United States, can have the most complex and far-reaching consequences for Pakistan and may place it in a terrible predicament in course of time. The United States, wittingly or unwittingly, is hurting Pakistan’s security interests by overlooking an unbridled military collaboration between India and Israel whose aggressive designs against Pakistan are very well known.

The people of Pakistan are indeed baffled to see that the United States has allowed the sale of Israeli Phalcon radars to India which, sometime back, it had blocked in the case of China owing to its concern for Taiwan. However, it has completely disregarded Pakistan’s security concerns, with the prevailing security scenario in the region. It has manifestly remained oblivious to the fact that the possession of Phalcon radars by India will bring large parts of Pakistan under its surveillance.

It is believed that the United States cleared the sale of the Phalcon radars to India by citing the Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s offer of talks to Pakistan in April as a sign of lowering the tension between the two South Asian belligerent states. This was a lame excuse in view of the equivocal nature of Vajpayee’s offer of talks which remains in a quandary.

In any case, India’s massive procurement of the most advanced military hardware, worth billions of dollars from Tel Aviv and other sources, which has already wrecked the balance of power in the region, was aimed at establishing its military superiority in South Asia for fulfilling its long-cherished ambition to have regional hegemony and be a major world power. India has also acquired massive nuclear weapons and delivery system. There are reports that over the next decade India intends to acquire armaments, worth 90 to 100 billions dollars to enrich its war machinery.

The US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, in a statement, hinted that India would soon attain the status of a major player, both at the regional and global levels. The US Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, Christina Rocca, also stated in New Delhi recently that the United States considers India a growing world power with whom it shares strategic interests. In the light of these statements, one can safely deduce that the United States is propping up India to play a key role in the security and defence of South Asia, in the foreseeable future with the partnership of Israel.

Christina Rocca has denied the existence of any India-US- Israel axis. Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister, Yusef Laped, however, claimed that the proposed ‘tripartite axis’ has already been created. It seems that the idea of a ‘strategic triangle’, floated by Indian Prime Minister’s security adviser, Birjesh Misra, is being pursued, albeit discreetly, by the parties concerned and its formalization was only a matter of time.

Notwithstanding the growing co-operation between the two countries, the moderate elements in India had advised the BJP’s government against inviting Ariel Sharon to visit their country. They argued that Sharon was a ruthless dictator with a criminal record of genocide of the Palestinians. He was also involved in other war crimes and, even though the United States may have saved him from trial for these crimes by the International Criminal Court, he cannot be absolved of his guilt. The BJP’s government, however, paid no heed to this advice. It did not even bother to take into account the sensitivities of the Islamic world and indeed of its own Muslim population which was rightly outraged by the invitation to Sharon.

Sharon’s decision to get rid of Yasser Arafat, the legitimate leader of the Palestinians and an elected President of the Palestinian Authority, either by killing him or expelling him from his own territory, is his latest adventure which reinforces the arguments proffered by the opponents of his visit to India.

Regrettably, the ideological affiliations between the BJP and Sharon’s Likud Party, the commonality of their hegemonic designs and the coherence of other interests, weighed heavily against the adherence to the moral principles which India always claimed to be the hallmark of its foreign policy.

The writer is a former ambassador of Pakistan.