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Change Your Life! |
Cuba-Summit: World's have-nots complain about the haves |
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April 14, 2000
HAVANA, APR 13 (UNB/AP) - A procession of the world's poorest nations accused rich countries of imposing heartless or misguided policies that have kept their nations impoverished and technologically backward.
Cuban President Fidel Castro opened the three-day summit Wednesday with the fiercest attack, accusing the capitalist system of regularly causing deaths on the scale of World War II by ignoring the needs of the poor.
"The images we see of mothers and children in whole regions of Africa under the lash of drought and other catastrophes remind us of the concentration camps of Nazi Germany," he said.
Referring to war crimes trials after World War II, the Cuban leader said: "We lack a Nuremberg to judge the economic order imposed upon us, where every three years more men, women and children die of hunger and preventable diseases than died in the Second World War."
He called for abolishing the International Monetary Fund, which he said served the interests of the United States and other rich nations rather than those of poor nations forced to implement its free-market austerity policies in exchange for aid.
Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad defended some free trade, but denounced efforts to force it wholesale upon developing countries.
He said "rogue currency traders" plunged his country and East Asia into financial crisis by undermining their currencies.
"Millions were thrown out of work and made destitute," he added. "The international economic institutions moved in ostensibly to help with loans but in reality to facilitate the takeover of the country's economy and even politics."
He suggested that rich countries should permit flee flows of labor as well as capital.
"If money is capital for the rich, labor is the capital of the poor countries. They should be allowed to migrate to the rich countries to compete for the jobs there just as the powerful corporations of the rich must be allowed to compete with their tiny counterparts in the poor countries."
Other speakers were more conciliatory in tone as they called for debt relief, increased aid and sharing of the technology that has helped knit the world more closely together.
"Never has the world witnessed such massive disparities in international social and economic activities," said Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, whose country chairs the summit.
He warned that failure to reform international aid policies that have maintained the wealth gap "constitute a major threat to international peace and security."
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged the poor countries to coordinate for an upcoming U.N. Millennium Summit in September, but urged cooperation with developed states and others.
"I believe governments need to work together to make change possible but governments alone will not make change happen. We have to engage the power of private investment," he said.
In New York City, Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said Castro "lives in his own time warp, and so while I'm disappointed, I'm not surprised" at the Holocaust comparisons.
"But I am surprised by the other world leaders that were there. I would have hoped that they would have found an opportunity to distance themselves from those types of remarks," he said. "Poverty is serious, it's painful and maybe deadly, but it's not the Holocaust and it's not concentration camps."
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