SINCE ending the fratricidal civil war in Lebanon through the Taif accord some 17 years ago, Saudi Arabia may have achieved the most important success of its diplomacy by promoting a comprehensive agreement between Hamas and Fatah in the holy city of Makkah on February 8.

It came about when the two largest factions of Palestinian politics were hurtling into an uncontrollable confrontation in Gaza with the West Bank beginning to get affected by its hot cinders. Up to a hundred Palestinians might have died in recent weeks that saw tensions generated by Hamas’s sweeping electoral victory a little more than a year ago exploding into a bloody struggle for power and influence.The Makkah accord was made possible by declarations by contending parties that they would not leave the holy city without an agreement. The religious implications of this vow should bring cheer to an otherwise deeply anguished Islamic world. Prior to the decision taken by the custodian of the holy mosques, King Abdullah, to commit himself completely to what the Arab media called the last final summit to avert disaster, Egypt had worked painstakingly to ease the internecine strife in Gaza but without success. Where the Saudi diplomacy succeeded better was in getting it across to the parties concerned that there were many strategic layers of the situation and that the outcome of the Makkah meeting would have substantive ramifications for the entire region.

King Abdullah had recently said that it was appropriate for the Arabs, and no one else, to resolve the problems in Palestine. But Arab diplomacy had lacked a robust quality for quite some time. In fact, there was an impression that President Bush’s sidelining of the Palestinian issue had created a crisis of indifference that Arab governments were simply not able to overcome.

While it was ritualistically observed that Palestine was the primal source of all upheavals in the region, the travails of its people had been eclipsed by the terrible tragedy of Iraq and its unfolding consequences. More recently, attention had shifted to the geo-strategic gains made by Iran because of the chaos in Iraq and by the Iranian assistance to Hezbollah. Riyadh had obviously contemplated the entire regional situation with concern and decided that it would have to resort to more proactive diplomacy. Averting the Fatah-Hamas conflict -- one of the three civil wars that the Jordanian monarch warned the Arabs against — would have to be an essential and a high priority objective.

As acrimony between Fatah and Hamas deepened, several concerned Palestinians -- many of them in Israeli prisons -- tried to pre-empt the crisis by advocating the formation of a government of national unity. Hamas had won the election but, on its own, it had no effective answer to the economic sanctions subject to preconditions attached by the international community, including the Quartet, to any cooperation with it. The main preconditions -- formal renunciation of armed struggle, acceptance of past agreements entered into by PLO-led Palestine and an explicit declaration recognising Israel -- challenged the ideological basis of Hamas and the very essence of its struggle against the 39-year old Israeli occupation. Israel was able to ensure that Hamas’s post-victory discreet progress towards a conditional acceptance of Israel within the borders existing on June 4, 1967, was dismissed by the international community as insufficient. Why the Palestinians were unable to implement their own decision to form a government of national unity to meet this grave situation remains a mystery.

The Makkah conference brought President Mahmoud Abbas, Prime Minister Ismail Haniya and the Damascus-based Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal together with active participation by the Saudi king. The final was a near miracle when considered in the light of the so-called non-negotiable demands of both the factions. The signing ceremony brought to our homes by Al-Jazeera shed some light on how the miracle was achieved. Each and every statement made during the ceremony invoked the Islamic obligation to end the feud; it took precedence over the expression of gratitude to the custodian of the holy mosques. Clearly, the concessions made by the two factions needed a higher value system than nationalism.

Mahmoud Abbas has made an important concession by agreeing that Ismail Haniya would be the prime minister of the coalition cabinet. Hamas gave up literal adherence to the majoritarian principle and accepted to be a minority in the cabinet which would have nominees of Fatah, other factions and “independent” technocrats. The new foreign minister, Ziyad Abu Amr is a respectable academic known for moderate views. The new finance minister, Salam Fayyad, rooted in the Third Way Party, is said to be fully acceptable to the United States. The post of the interior minister, which was a major source of disagreement, would now be filled by Mahmoud Abbas from a panel proposed by Hamas.

Saudi mediation found an ingenious solution for the endorsement of past agreements with Israel by Hamas. President Abbas did not insist on “adherence’ in the final text and settled for Hamas’s “respect” for them. The accord was hailed as a return to national unity that would facilitate the solution of immediate problems and energise the struggle against Israeli occupation from a common platform.

Much depends on Israel’s reaction and, more precisely, on its continued ability to shape the international response. Unfortunately, the accord has coincided with Israel’s renewed archaeological aggression against the Al Aqsa mosque. The pretext of digging up the space around the mosque to substantiate Israel’s eternal claim to Jerusalem is not new. The precinct of the mosque has already shrunk considerably since Israel came into existence. The so-called archaeological work plays straight into the hands of Zionist extremists who dream of pulling this third most sacred mosque of Islam down and replacing it with a new “temple”. Muslims fear that excavations would weaken the foundations of the mosque. The inflammatory situation will tax the Palestinian street once again.

An Israeli commentator says that “the new unity government creates a real problem for Israel” and the United States and Israel “will have trouble demanding that the international economic boycott of the Palestinian government remain in place”. This is to say that Israel still wants to evade meaningful negotiations with the Palestinians and would try to stall the peace process with its quibbling over some phrases in the Makkah agreement. The real intentions will be tested as early as February 19 when Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert is expected to meet President Mahmoud Abbas in the presence of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The European Union (EU) had all along been more supportive of the idea of a national unity government than the United States, which is often seen to be committed to the complete destruction of Hamas and Hezbollah. It would be instructive to watch if EU displays an independent capacity to ease the economic hardship of the Palestinian people. In any case, the Makkah accord should free all Arab-Islamic states from the burden of abiding by unfair sanctions; it has met the major concerns of the international community. Surely the rest needs a negotiated two-state solution.

The Saudi view that Arab problems should be solved by Arabs has generally been seen as directed against Iran. But that would be only half the story. The fact of the matter is that Egypt’s separate peace treaty with Israel and the long drawn out Oslo process turned the Middle East issues into items on the US agenda, their importance depending on the American global strategic policy needs and the personal predilection of the White House incumbent.

Privately acknowledged if publicly denied, it was a feeling of inadequacy and a perception of lack of leverage on the part of the Arab rulers. Diplomacy got reduced to efforts to secure American engagement. Iraq has been an eye opener; its intended and unintended consequences making it clear that Arabs were finally losing control of their lands. Hamas and Hezbollah could not be faulted for looking towards Iran if no Arab nation was in a position to save them from withering political and military attacks by Israel and the United States.

Riyadh is trying to change this situation. If the Makkah accord is successful, Saudi diplomacy would have opened an altogether new chapter in the region. Just as Arabs should solve their own problems, Muslims in general should have a greater voice in resolving their issues, including the present distrust between Iran and the moderate Arab states. In Makkah, the Saudis demonstrated that one could be a friend of the West without sacrificing core Arab interests. This is a way forward and almost certainly efforts would be made to create obstacles in it. Israel will still baulk at Ismail Haniya continuing as the prime minister. It would still argue that showing respect for earlier agreements was not sufficient and that Hamas has not signed on the dotted line on questions of an armed struggle and the right of return for the refugees.

The Arabs would doubtless be aware of the many dimensions of what they have decided at Makkah. It is time that they pool their resources and bring a robust regionalism back into the solution of their problems. It is, primarily, a question of shaking off the fear of 9/11 and Israel’s propensity to take precipitate action against Arabs. The Makkah summit has shown the way.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

Email: tanvir.a.khan@gmail.com

IF good fences make good neighbours, then the world is experiencing an unprecedented outbreak of neighbourliness. They used to wall cities. Now they wall whole countries.

The latest country to start building a wall -- sorry, a "security fence" -- is Thailand, which has just announced plans to build a physical barrier along the most inaccessible 75 km. of its frontier with Malaysia. The goal, says Bangkok, is to stop "terrorists" from crossing into Thailand's restive Muslim-majority southern provinces from northern Malaysia, whose people share the same language and religion. If experience elsewhere is any guide, the whole border will be walled sooner or later.

India is well on the way to being walled (except along the Himalayas, where the mountains do the job for free). The barrier along its 3,000-km. border with Pakistan is largely complete except in the parts of Kashmir where the steep and broken terrain precludes the construction of the usual two-row, three-metre-high (ten-foot-high) fence, with concertina wire and mines between the two fences. And India is now building an even longer barrier (3,300 km.) to halt illegal immigration from Bangladesh.

While India's walls keep unwelcome intruders out, the barriers around North Korea are meant to keep North Koreans in. The original fortifications along the Demilitarised Zone between North and South Korea, which have been continually improved since the 1950s, were built mainly to stop infiltration by North Korean troops or saboteurs. However, the fence that Beijing is now building along its own frontier with North Korea is a precautionary measure to stop an immense wave of refugees from entering China if the regime in Pyongyang collapses.

The majority of the new walls springing up around the world are there to stop either terrorist attacks or illegal immigration, but sometimes they also serve as a unilateral way of defining a country's desired borders. That is certainly true of the 2,700 km. of high sand or stone berms, backed by wire fences, mines, radar, troop bunkers and artillery bases that seal off Western Sahara, annexed by Morocco in 1975, from the camps in Algeria from which many of the former inhabitants waged a guerilla war until the 1991 ceasefire.

It is equally true of the wall that Israel is building through the occupied West Bank. The country has long had heavily mined and monitored barrier fences along its external frontiers with Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon and around the Gaza Strip, but the wall in the West Bank does not follow the ceasefire line of 1967. Instead it penetrates deep into the Palestinian territories at a number of points to leave Jewish settlement blocs on the Israeli side, and it cuts off (Arab) East Jerusalem from the West Bank entirely.

Pakistan is building a 1,500-mile fence with Afghanistan, Uzbekistan has built a fence along its border with Tajikistan, the United Arab Emirates is erecting a barrier along its frontier with Oman, and Kuwait is upgrading its existing 215-km wall along the Iraqi frontier. But the most impressive barriers are certainly around Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi kingdom has been quietly pursuing an $8.5 billion project to fence off the full length of its porous border with Yemen for some years, but the highest priority now is to get a high-tech barrier built along the 900-km border with Iraq. "If and when Iraq fragments, there's going to be a lot of people heading south," said Nawaf Obaid, head of the Saudi National Security Assessment Project, "and that is when we have to be prepared." The new wall will include buried movement sensors, ultraviolet night-vision cameras, face-recognition software and quite probably automated weapons in addition to the usual electrified fences, concertina wire, dry moats and mines.

By comparison, the apparently endless debate about building a relatively low-tech fence along the 3,360-km US border with Mexico to cut illegal immigration seems like an echo from an innocent past. The European Union's feeble gestures towards curbing illegal immigration from Africa (fences around the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the Moroccan coast, naval patrols off the Canary Islands) seem merely pathetic. But these are probably the last of the Good Old Days, at least in Europe.

The reason that the United States is incapable of controlling its Mexican border is political, not financial or technological: powerful domestic lobbies work to ensure a steady supply of "undocumented" Mexican workers who will accept very low wages because they are in the United States illegally. President Bush has now been authorised by Congress to build a fence along about 1,125 km of the Mexican border, but he will stall as long as he can while experimenting with a so-called "virtual fence."

No equivalent lobby operates in the European Union, and it is only a matter of time before really serious barriers appear on the EU's land frontiers, especially with Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Turkey. The walls are going up all over the world, and most of them will not come down for a long time, if ever. —Copyright

OVER the past three and a half decades, the World Economic Forum that meets in Davos, Switzerland, every year has gained increasing importance as a gathering that enables an exchange of views on global economic issues. It supplements the activity of the UN and its specialised agencies, notably those coordinated by the Social and Economic Council (Ecosoc) in which the member countries are represented at the official level.

As they take positions on the basis of the policies set by their governments they spend much of their time pursuing their own goals. A multilateral bureaucracy attempts to coordinate their diverse interests and requirements, which are also influenced by their regional and group affiliations.

The Davos forum provides a platform for the private sector, but as the role and activity of the multinational corporations has grown, major global financial institutions, even governments, like to be represented in order to project their views and interact with the private sector whose role affects theirs. In the early years, the influence of the Davos forum was limited, partly because the rivalry generated by the Cold War kept a large number of states out of its purview.

With the end of the Cold War, the role of the market economy system expanded as the efficacy of the command economy system was discredited. Indeed, the remaining socialist countries adopted the market economy system so that the role of the Economic Forum has come to embrace virtually the whole world.

The 2007 meeting took up themes that are in the global spotlight. State actors have reached a deadlock on global trade issues. Other subjects that are not strictly economic but exert a powerful influence on the economic outlook of countries have also assumed centrality among world concerns: These are terrorism and global warming.

This year, the forum saw the participation of 100 countries at the official level, with 30 represented by heads of state and government who helped raise the level of debate on these three areas of global concern that were causing unease in the entire world. Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz spent three busy days at the forum and made a comprehensive analysis of the challenge of terrorism, in particular focusing on the deeper roots of the phenomenon.

He drew attention to the key role being played by Pakistan in the war against terrorism. No other country has done more to apprehend terrorists who had sought refuge in Pakistan and in penetrating the Al Qaeda network. Several hundreds of its armed personnel died combating terrorist elements infiltrating its tribal territory from Afghanistan. However, the world had to deal with the root causes of terrorism including persisting injustices in the existing political and economic order.

Such disputes as those in Palestine and Kashmir are not being effectively addressed and the dominant West needs to do more for oppressed Muslim populations instead of patronising their oppressors. Equally serious is the issue of rising economic inequality.

Mr Aziz expressed the view that a major effort was needed to speed up reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which had suffered enormous destruction in the military operations against terrorism. He recalled the role played by the Marshall Plan in the rebuilding of Europe after the Second World War and stated that Pakistan was ready to host a regional conference to promote such an effort in Afghanistan. The long-term solution of the chronic unrest and violence in Afghanistan does not lie solely in increased military force but in a sustained effort to make life better for the ordinary people.

It is obvious that though the international community has made huge commitments for the rehabilitation of war-torn Afghanistan, very little has actually been accomplished. This factor has contributed to the rising insurgency in Afghanistan where returning refugees are not being provided with basic needs in a country shattered by Soviet occupation, internal instability and now the war on terror.

The other subjects addressed related to the persistent deadlock in the Doha round of WTO negotiations to address the grievances of the developing countries arising out of western subsidies to their farmers that were pauperising the economies of developing countries. At Davos, EU countries and the US agreed to speed up action to cut subsidies in order to provide a better level playing field to the poorer countries.

Perhaps the most dramatic result was achieved on the subject of global warming that established the need for urgent action by industrialised countries to cut down drastically on carbon emissions and reverse the process of climate change. The past few months have seen a growing realisation of the challenge that the entire globe faces vis-à-vis the environment.

Even President Bush, who had repudiated the Kyoto Protocol soon after moving into the White House, has shown awareness of the need for the US to join in worldwide measures to control emissions. In his State of the Union speech on January 23, he announced the launching of measures to reduce the use of fossil fuels by 20 per cent over the next five years.

The concluding address at Davos by British Prime Minister Tony Blair expressed gratification that the issues of poverty in Africa, world trade and global warming would receive urgent action in 2007.

Pakistan has been showing increasing awareness of the role of the forum that provides an annual opportunity to review trends and problems affecting the global economy. What began mainly as a gathering of leading executives of the private sector has become a multi-sectoral consultation, which the participation of representatives of governments and of multilateral organisations had turned into an effective forum to identify and resolve global issues. President Musharraf attended the 2006 forum while Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz has been a prominent participant this year.

The forum’s activities influence the investment policies of multinationals in various parts of the world, to the point that sessions devoted to different regions are being held. Pakistan is to play host to the economic forum for Asia and the Middle East later this year. Apart from focusing on challenges affecting the global and regional economy, it also enables the participation of a large number of NGOs concerned with disadvantaged groups and new problems.

With the UN system over-extended, and bureaucratised, the World Economic Forum is providing a partnership between state, regional and world planners and the growing private sector that has to finance and implement their plans.

The writer is a former ambassador

PUBLIC policy is all about trade-offs. Economists understand this better than politicians because voters want to have their cake and eat it too, and politicians think whatever is popular must also be true.

Economists understand that if we put a chicken in every pot, it might cost us an aircraft carrier or a hospital. We can build a hospital, but it might come at the expense of a little patch of forest. We can protect a wetland, but that will make a new school more expensive.

You get it already. But let me just add that in the great scheme of trade-offs in the history of humanity, never has there been a better one than trading a tiny amount of global warming for a massive amount of global prosperity. The Earth got about 0.7 degrees Celsius warmer in the 20th century while it increased its GDP by 1,800 per cent, by one estimate. How much of that 0.7 degrees can be laid at the feet of that 1,800 per cent is unknowable, but let's stipulate that all of the warming was the result of our prosperity and that this warming is in fact indisputably bad (which is hardly obvious). That's still an amazing bargain. Life spans in the United States nearly doubled (from 44 to 77 years). Literacy, medicine, leisure and even, in many respects, the environment have improved mightily over the course of the 20th century, at least in the prosperous West.

Given the option of getting another 1,800 per cent richer in exchange for another 0.7 degrees Celsius warmer, I'd take the heat in a heartbeat. Of course, warming might get more expensive for us. (And we might do a lot better than 1,800 per cent too.) There are tipping points in every sphere of life, and what cost us little in the 20th century could cost us enormously in the 21st — at least that's what we're told. And boy, are we told. Al Gore has a new incarnation as the host of an apocalyptic infomercial on the subject, complete with fancy renderings of New York City underwater.

Sceptics like me are heckled for calling attention to the fear-mongering that suffuses global warming activism. But the simple fact is that the activists need to hype the threat, and not just because that's what the media demand of them. Their proposed remedies cost so much money — bidding starts at one per cent of global GDP a year and rises quickly — they have to ratchet up the fear factor just to get the conversation started.

Even so, the costs are just too high for too little payoff. Even if the Kyoto Protocol were put into effect tomorrow — a total impossibility — we'd barely affect global warming. Jerry Mahlman of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research speculated in Science magazine that "it might take another 30 Kyotos over the next century" to beat back global warming.

Thirty Kyotos! That's going to be tough considering that China alone plans on building an additional 2,200 coal plants by 2030. Oh, but because China (like India) is exempt from Kyoto as a developing country, the West will just have to reduce its own emissions even more.

A more persuasive cost-benefit analysis hinges not on prophecies of environmental doom but on geopolitics. We buy too much oil from places we shouldn't, which makes us dependent on nasty regimes and makes those regimes nastier. Environmentalists like to claim the "energy independence" issue, but it's not a neat fit. We could be energy independent soon enough with coal and nuclear power. But coal contributes to global warming, and nuclear power is icky. So, instead, we're going to massively subsidize the government-brewed moonshine called ethanol. Here again, the benefits barely outweigh the costs. Ethanol requires almost as much energy to make as it provides, and the costs to the environment and the economy may be staggering.

Frankly, I don't think the trade-off is worth it — yet. The history of capitalism and technology tells us that what starts out expensive and arduous becomes cheap and easy over time.

— Dawn/Los Angeles Times Service