inside the glass house

Bush policy under attack at Colombo meeting
COLOMBO - The Bush administration has been lambasted worldwide not only for asserting its raw military power in Iraq and Afghanistan but also for abandoning multilateralism in favour of unilateralism. As the international community watched with a sense of helplessness, the US went to war with Iraq last March in defiance of the United Nations and its sovereignty-conscious charter.

Additionally, the Bush administration rejected the global environmental treaty on climate change and also refused to accept the jurisdiction of the international criminal court (ICC) which was created specifically to punish war criminals. The rejection of multilateralism, however, did not end there. The US is continuing to peddle its much-maligned policy of pre-emptive military strikes on "rogue nations", including Iran, North Korea and Libya.

Addressing the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles last week, Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned Washington that its leadership should be best exercised within a multilateral framework based on dialogue and international consensus -- not on military bravado.

Touting a foreign policy which smacks of political and military arrogance, the White House has also brushed aside the economic and environmental sensitivities of developing nations struggling to survive in a world where the gap between the rich and poor is widening.

Last month, Friends of the Earth, publicly declared that George W. Bush was one of "the world's worst environmental presidents." The Europe-based non-governmental organisation, which advocates a pollution-free world, accused the US administration of working in cahoots with some of the world's worst polluters -- ranging from military industrialists to multinational corporations.

A more insidious campaign by the Bush administration is its attempt to renege on international commitments made at the 1994 Cairo conference on population and development. The president of the Washington-based Population Institute, Werner Fornos, who is a virulent critic of the Bush administration, believes that US population policies threaten to endanger the delicate balance between population and sustainable development.

"The world looks to the United States for guidance and compassion, but instead gets duplicity and double talk -- the classic prescription for dictatorship but hardly the leadership formula one expects from the world's most successful democracy, much less the world's only acknowledged superpower," he says.

Fornos, whose institute picked Sri Lanka as the venue for its annual Global Media awards ceremony last week, is critical of the Bush administration for cutting some $34 million in US funding for the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). The New York-based agency stands falsely accused of promoting abortions in China -- a charge it has vehemently denied.

The cut in UNFPA funds has been engineered by right-wing conservatives who refuse to make a distinction between "family planning" and "abortion". Fornos says the Bush administration's action reveals clearly and conclusively that the White House is using opposition to abortion to conceal its attack on family planning.

Despite slower population growth globally, world population is expected to be still on course rising within the next 47 years by an average of over 55 million people each year -- the combined populations of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

For the foreseeable future, warns Fornos, virtually all of the increase will be in the world's poorest countries, most of whom are hard-pressed to provide the basic infrastructure required to meet basic health, education and employment needs.
UNFPA estimates that $34 million could prevent two million unwanted pregnancies per year, nearly 800,000 abortions, and 4,700 maternal deaths.

But in an obvious slap to the Bush administration, an American grassroots campaign is currently under way to raise at least a part of the money that the US has cut from its contribution to UNFPA.

The global campaign was launched by two Americans, Jane Roberts, a retired 61-year-old teacher from California, and Lois Abraham, a 68-year-old lawyer from New Mexico.
The two volunteers, who did not know each other, had the same indignant reaction when the Bush administration rescinded the $34 million in UNFPA funds already approved by the US Congress.

They emailed friends urging them to send a dollar each and contact other friends "to help right this terrible wrong." "This little campaign has the possibility of changing the world a tiny bit," says Roberts. The campaign, titled "34 Million Friends of UNFPA", has already exceeded the one million dollar.

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