Foreign Reports

• India for Indians not for Italian - BJP
• Police step up search for London bombers
• NATO hits bus: 23 die
• Lanka's vital role on CTBT
• Set a thief to catch a thief

India for Indians not for Italian - BJP

By Vaijyanthi Prakash our New Delhi correspondent

It was Jayalalitha Jayaram who brought down the BJP government by withdrawing the support of her 18 MPs. And yet, the wrath of the BJP is directed not at the mercurial Tamil juggernaut, but the quieter Sonia Gandhi, President of the Congress.

Reason? The Congress is the BJP's most formidable challenger in the coming elections to India's parliament and not Jayalalitha's AIADMK, which has little presence outside Tamil Nadu.

Being a newcomer to politics and having held no office before, Sonia (52) cannot be subjected to a conventional attack. But her being a foreigner, an Italian at that, is seen as being the Congress party's Achilles' heel. And it is this aspect, which is engaging the attention of the Hindu fundamentalist BJP and its allies.

With the Sonia-led Congress making a bid for power on its own, the key isssue in the coming polls will be the foreign intruder and usurper vs. the bhoomiputra. The BJP is all set to launch a vicious attack.

The earliest sign of a paranoia about going under "foreign" rule again in just fifty years, was the BJP's rhetorical election time question a few years ago: "Do you want Ram Raj or Rome Raj?" Alas, the answer was not a resounding "Ram Raj" or native (Hindu) rule, but a fractured mandate.

The Congress, with the lady born into the Maino family in Orbassano near Torino in Italy as its presiding deity, got enough MPs to be a critical and unsettling element in parliament.

It was when Sonia finally plunged headlong into politics in 1998 and seemed within striking distance of becoming India's first non-Indian, Prime Minister, the vituperative Jayalalitha fired the first salvo. She demanded that there be a law to bar people of foreign origin from occupying the post of Prime Minister.

George Fernandes, overlooking his own foreign name, chimed in with a similar demand and the Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackerey threatened he would do anything to prevent a "foreigner" becoming prime minister.

Meanwhile, sensing trouble, Sonia and her daughter Priyanka went to the Tirupathi temple, virtually gatecrashing, to demonstrate her Indianness or Hinduness. She said that Hinduism was the most tolerant and secular religion, and quoted Swami Vivekananda to press home the point. But the chattering classes, who have the media in their hands, mocked her.

Nevertheless, Sonia campaigned hard, braving the sling and arrows from the ethnic swadeshis. Though she could not take the Congress to the victory stand, the party became the principal opposition, facing a shaky BJP coalition of 18 disparate groups. The mocking ceased but only for a while.

Come elections now, the tirade is in full blast. Here goes George Fernandes' clarion call: "Citizens of India awake! And save the self respect of our country! Sonia Gandhi go back to Italy!"

Commerce Minister Ramakrishna Hegde said that it was an "insult" to India if a foreigner became its premier. Chandrababu Naidu of the Telugu Desam Party said the people should think about changing the constitution. "It is a serious issue,'' he commented.

BJP's political analyst Kanchan Gupta pointed out that in the US, Finland, Germany, Thailand and Singapore, only "natural born" or citizen by birth could aspire for the top job and it was time, this was adopted by India too.

Commenting on Sonia's dramatic declaration that she would "remain an Indian till her last breath", Gupta asks why Sonia, who entered the Rajiv Gandhi household in 1968, took 16 years to take Indian citizenship, and whether she is still keeping Italian citizenship.

The last question becomes relevant according to him, in the light of the fact that she had taken refuge in the Italian Embassy after her mother-in-law Indira Gandhi's shock defeat in the 1977 election.

But Sonia's defenders, like Prof. Ashutosh Varshaney, point out that the masses of India, historically as well as now, have not accepted the BJP's narrow definition of 'Indian'. India is intrinsically plural and multi-ethnic and therefore, Sonia's "foreignness" cannot be an issue here.

Politically, Whites like Annie Besant, A.O. Hume, and Nellie Sengupta have been Congress Presidents. The Indian Left has also consistently held that race should have nothing to do holding o ffice.

In the most recent political jockeying for power prior to the dissolution of parliament, Sonia's supporters came from every region, caste and religious group.

She also heads the most composite and the most all-India of political parties in India, the Congress.

And the Andhra Pradesh High Court rejected a petition for declaring the Citizenship Act unconstitutional because it did not bar a foreign born citizen from becoming Prime Minister on grounds of national security.

The judges said: "Just because she (Sonia Gandhi) is Italian by birth, it cannot be said that the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India will be in danger if she is permitted to hold the post of Prime Minister."

Police step up search for London bombers

LONDON, Saturday (AFP) - Police stepped up search for suspected right-wing bombers today after a third nail bomb attack on the capital's minority groups killed two people and injured 70 others, provoking calls by anti-racist groups for a ban on extremist groups.

British Home Secretary Jack Straw appealed for calm and vigilance after the bomb on a popular gay pub in London's Soho late Friday, which followed similar attacks on the city's Afro-Caribbean and Asian communities in the past two weeks.

Straw told Sky television: "These attacks are an attack on us all and not just particular minorities. One of the things we need to hang on to is that, over the years, we have become a much stronger society, a multi-racial and much more tolerant society."

He said the bombers were "apparently racists, extremist people who hate Afro-Caribbean communities, Asian communities, Jewish communities amd now gay minorities as well."

Police chiefs said they were linking the "hate attack" on a pub in Soho, the bustling entertainment quarter of London, with similar blasts on the two previous weekends on April 17 and 24.

NATO hits bus: 23 die

LUZANE, Yugoslavia,Saturday (AFP) - At least 23 passengers in a bus were killed in a NATO air raid on a bridge in Kosovo today, an AFP reporter at the scene said.

The bridge at Luzane, 20 kilometers (12 miles) north of Pristina, was hit around 1:00 p.m. (1100 GMT), and the AFP reporter saw bodies of victims.

In Brussels, NATO military spokesman Colonel Konrad Freytag said the alliance had no immediate "evidence" regarding the incident.

Earlier NATO promised Yugoslav forces a hot May Day weekend as the weather cleared over the Balkans and the alliance unleashed a blitz on ground targets.

Spokesmen on Friday predicted noisy skies over Kosovo, with additional flying tankers refuelling warplanes in mid-air for tag-team ground attacks on any Yugoslav army or police units that risk coming out into the open.

As diplomatic efforts to secure a negotiated end to the war proliferated, there was not the faintest murmur at NATO headquarters in Brussels of any let-up in the military campaign.

NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said the allies launched over 600 sorties on the 37th day of operations, choosing strike aircraft from a fleet now twice the size it had a month ago.

Military briefer General Giuseppe Marani said Serb forces on the ground in Kosovo were "finding it increasingly difficult to avoid destruction".

NATO pilots this week destroyed multiple rocket launchers, tanks, artillery, portable rocket launchers, armoured personnel carriers, railroad fuel tankers and troops, he said.

As weather improved over the past 24 hours, they also scored successful attacks against important field command posts, anti-aircraft batteries and army vehicles.

"Attacks on fielded forces have intensified. As spring gives way to summer, their destruction becomes inescapable," Marani said.

Lanka's vital role on CTBT

By Ravindra Wijayawardanas

Vienna 28 April 1999 - Sri Lanka as the present Chair of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) can play a pivotal role in urging India and Pakistan to sign and ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) before its September 1999 deadline, a top disarmament diplomat said this week.

The current Chairperson of the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO PrepCom) Ambassador Ban Ki- Moon of the Republic of Korea said Sri Lanka was uniquely qualified to influence India and Pakistan on the CTBT.

"Since Sri Lanka enjoys excellent diplomatic relations with India and Pakistan and owing to the historical role she has played in the field of nuclear disarmament she is in a unique position to undertake this task especially in the aftermath of the nuclear test conducted by them in May 1998" he said.

However, Ambassador Ban Ki-Moon said that Sri Lanka's credibility would be further enhanced in this undertaking if she herself ratified the CTBT before September 1999. The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which was opened for signature on September 24, 1996, was signed by Sri Lanka on October 24, of the same year.

The Executive Secretary of the Provisional Technical Secretariat, Dr. Wolfgang Hoffmann pointed out that under the provisions of the Treaty, Sri Lanka will be hosting an auxiliary seismic station (AS 100) work on which is expected to begin later this year. This proposed station is part of the International Monitoring System (IMS) comprising 321 stations and 16 laboratories which are aimed at detecting nuclear tests worldwide.

"Last November two senior officials of the CTBTO PrepCom visited Sri Lanka and met with counterparts at the Foreign Ministry to discuss these and other related matters," Hoffmann revealed.

A three day conference which is aimed at accelerating the respective national ratification processes will be held in Vienna this October. This conference is expected to be attended by the Secretary General of the United Nations and by the foreign ministers of the member states of the CTBTO PrepCom including Sri Lanka. Those states that would not have ratified the CTBT by then, shall have to attend the conference as observers.

Dr. Wolfgang Hoffmann who was Germany's Ambassador to the Conference on Disarmament (CD) in Geneva where the Treaty was negotiated said the CTBT has so far been signed by 152 countries and ratified by 34 of which 17 belong to the group of 44 nuclear capable states whose ratification is necessary for the Treaty's entry into force. India, Pakistan and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) which also belong to this group have not yet signed the CTBT.

During the 53rd Session of the United Nations General Assembly in September 1998 the Prime Ministers of India and Pakistan stated that their countries would adhere to the CTBT by its September 1999 deadline.

So far of the seven SAARC countries, Bhutan, India and Pakistan have not yet signed the CTBT, while Bangladesh, Maldives, Nepal and Sri Lanka are yet to ratify it. Following the nuclear tests by India and Pakistan their Prime Ministers met for the first time in Sri Lanka during the SAARC summit in July 1998. However, little progress was made in making South Asia a nuclear weapon free zone.

Set a thief to catch a thief

The conviction of Benazir Bhutto and Asif Zandari for corruption in the SGS/Cotecna case isn't surprising in terms of its legality.

It is not true that Justice Abdul Qayyum was historically "biased" because "his brother is a Muslim League legislator and his father was on the bench which sentenced Mr. Z.A. Bhutto to death".

Ms. Bhutto made these allegations not when the Supreme Court established the bench, not when the trial began, not while it was conducted over many months, but at its fag end when cast iron proof of massive kickbacks, authenticated by the Swiss authorities who have already indicted husband and wife along with three Swiss nationals (two of whom are former employees of SGS/Cotecna), was presented by the prosecution.

For much the same reason, Ms. Bhutto is not the victim of a "witch-hunt". Since there are no such things as witches, a "witch-hunt" connotes a frame-up; it refers to an innocent person wrongly accused and unfairly adjudged.

But Ms. Bhutto and her husband were guilty as hell and they have been adjudged as such.

However, if the decision was anticipated for legal reasons, there were doubts, whether Senator Saifur Rehman would pursue the case to its political end.

Indeed, when delays set in, we wondered whether the senator merely intended to harass his leader's political opponents rather than to seek their conviction, much as Ms. Bhutto had done as prime minister when she used DG-FIA Rehman Malik to investigate and lodge fool-proof cases of corruption and misuse of power against Nawaz Sharif and his family members but studiously refrained from seeking their conviction.

Since there is an "honour among thieves", we reasoned, Mr. Sharif might also stop short of convicting his opponent because, once such a precedence is set, there is no guarantee that the noose might not be around his neck in time to come. That is why no one of any political substance has ever been convicted and sentenced for corruption in this country. In the end, however, one wise adage was finessed by another: it took a thief to catch a thief!

The facts are clear. Ms. Bhutto prolonged the case by shrieking "due process" even when "due process" was patently exhausted - the trial dragged on for over a year but should have concluded within three months as per the law. On the strength of the evidence, this was an open and shut case.

That said, it is absolutely true that this is no "accountability". Far from it. Accountability is supposed to be transparent and across the board.

That is why the accountability law framed by the much-vilified caretaker regime in 1996 has sprung to everyone's lips as the only true yardstick by which it should be measured.

But two critical amendments made in it by the Muslim League government have made it farcical.

In order to protect Nawaz Sharif and his cohorts, the cut-off date of the original law was changed from 1985 to 1991 and the writ of the Chief Accountability Commissioner was circumscribed by making it impossible for him to accept or investigate corruption cases without the approval and backing of senator Saif ur Rehman's notorious accountability Bureau.

This trial has led to three far-reaching and irrevocable conclusions. One, the verdict against Ms. Bhutto and Mr. Zardari, however well deserved, is not likely to be perceived as fair or just because it is one-sided; two, it is likely to create some unmerited sympathy for the couple, especially for the lady, and reinvent her as a martyr, which is most unfortunate because she is not one; and three, the verdict is likely to raise the even more critical, urgent and principled demand that Nawaz Sharif and Shahbaz Sharif should also be subjected to the same fate.

In this sense clearly and decisively, the two set of thieves are bound one day to be hoist by their own petards!

- Friday Times Karachi

In step with winds of change

It is 39 years since I joined the Foreign Office and I well remember my first day at work. When I went for some reason to my boss's room and knocked on the door and went in and said "good morning Sir, I'm Tatham Sir" and so on. He said "David, in this building we never knock on doors and we never call anyone Sir except the Permanent Secretary". It was a educative beginning - I had made two protocol blunders in 30 seconds.

But what I want to do is to look at the changes in the diplomatic career over those 39 years; obviously these are related to the changes in the world itself, the changes in Britain which is the country I represent and the changes in how we work as diplomats.

Changes in the world

The most obvious change is the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the collapse of communism, the triumph of liberal economic policy (even if that triumph looks a little threadbare since the recent events in South East Asia) and the explosion of new nationalisms, or rather old nationalisms revived across Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

My first post was in the United Nations in New York in 1962-3. And at that stage our foreign minister was Sir Alec Douglas Home and he made a speech referring to various dates in British imperial history. So he said that in 1815 the British Government annexed the Kingdom of Kandy and established a colony in Ceylon. In 1815 the Russian Government annexed one of the Central Asian States, Turkmenistan or Kazakhstan or wherever. In 1948 the British Government gave independence to Ceylon. Sir Alec wondered when the Soviet Government would give independence to whichever of the central Asian States it was. I must admit when he made this comparison none of us really imagined that the states of Soviet Central Asia would ever become independent again.

But in fact they did as a result of the break up of the Soviet Union, as a result of the loss of power in Moscow, and that has obviously been a major change. Not just the blooming of new states all over Europe and Asia but also in the collapse of the old bi-polar system, a system where power was divided between the United States and the Soviet Union, the two super powers.

Other changes in the world scene since then perhaps were already obvious in 1960. That was the year in which the French African colonies - almost all - became independent and there was this enormous arrival of new African states at the United Nations.

It was quite clear by then that the old colonial empires' day was over, that where there were problems these were problems caused by white expatriate minorities in particular states. Obviously from Britain one would think of Rhodesia, but there were also the Portuguese colonies and South Africa. These problems have been resolved more or less peacefully in the years since 1960. I think the great surprise was the peaceful coming to power of the majority in South Africa, something that we never expected. We assumed that there would be an enormously long bloody and drawn out civil war; though certainly there was a great deal of oppression, the end result was far more peaceable than most people expected.

For us in Britain, a major change has been our joining the European Community. This was a process that hadn't even begun in 1960 but we made an attempt in 1962/63 and failed and then 10 years later we succeeded - after General de Gaulle had departed - in joining the European Community.

Another change which affects the way we work as diplomats, is what I call "one world - the information revolution". I remember in New York a senior member of the American delegation saying to us "the trouble with you Brits, is that you think satellites are just a telegraph pole in the sky". To an extent that was true. In the British Government at that time, space policy, particularly satellite policy, was in the hands of the Post Office which at that time was not a particularly dynamic department of state. But then we simply saw satellites in terms of communications. Despite the vision of the British scientist Arthur C. Clarke, now Sir Arthur, I did not realise the enormous potential that satellites would have. We are now at the stage where satellites can actually measure the height of waves in the sea and forecast weather in all sorts of ways, most obviously by photographing cloud formations and so on.

And finally, a pleasant surprise: 39 years later we are all still here. When I was at Oxford in the late '50s the campaign for nuclear disarmament was just starting in England. There was a very real feeling that we might not survive at all, that the world might be destroyed in a Third World War and that only small pockets of civilisation, if one could indeed call it civilisation, would continue. We came very close to that mutual destruction in 1962 with the Cuban crisis, but I think we learnt from it. That crisis led to a series of confidence building measures and of course the danger now of an all out nuclear confrontation is very very much reduced. What is not reduced, is the danger of small-scale nuclear wars started by newly nuclear countries. Plus of course the ever-present and growing threat of biological and chemical weapons.

So those as I see it are the great changes in the world in very broad outlines. Forty years of world history in 10 minutes.

Change in Britain

The changes in Britain have also been very interesting. Britain is now a very different place from the country I joined the Diplomatic Service to serve in 1960. Society is much less deferential, it's much less chauvinist in the sense that it's much more equal between the sexes. My successor is a woman and there are now I suppose about a dozen female Ambassadors in the British Diplomatic Service. Still nothing like 50% but about 10%. When l joined there were none: the first took up her post in the 1970s, so that has been a change.

Britain is obviously a lot less Anglo-Saxon than it was. There has been a steady wave of immigration, firstly from the West Indies and then from the Asian sub-continent and this built up over the years and has now fallen away as successive governments have imposed restrictions.

But we are looking at a very different situation from 1960. There had been a couple of race riots in 1959 which had focused people's attention on the fact that we had a problem, that it was not possible simply to continue to absorb considerable numbers of foreign immigrants, usually of a different colour skin, and concentrated in particular parts of Britain, usually decaying old city centres. I think that the situation is much better now, although it differs very much from community to community. The British Asian communities, particularly the British Indian community, are by and large extremely successful, and we have large numbers of millionaires of Indian and particularly East African Indian origin.

One of the marked impacts of this immigration which I see very clearly as British High Commissioner in Sri Lanka, is the impact of diaspora politics on British foreign policy. This is particularly acute with the Indian sub-continent where we have three major groups of immigrant communities all active in the politics of their homeland: obviously the Tamils in Sri Lanka, but also the Kashmiris in Kashmir and the Sikhs in India. Now these campaigns do have an impact on foreign policy. They certainly have an impact on those British Members of Parliament who represent constituencies in which minorities have a large presence. The various MPs, particularly from South London where there is a large Tamil community, must be influenced. Because what an immigrant community of this sort possesses is the ability to switch votes in thousands at the drop of a hat. If the community's leaders decide to change votes from one party to another it can be done, and this sort of electoral power can be quite considerable.

The way we work

So that's looking really at the changes in the world and in Britain over the past 40 years. How have all these impacted on the way diplomats work? Well the big change obviously is communications: first is the cheapness and ease and speed of travel. When l went out to New York in 1962 I travelled by ship: I was going out for a long posting, so that wasn't surprising. But the British Minister, who came out for the General Assembly in September, he too travelled by sea with about 20 or 30 officials. They all got on the Queen Mary and got off about a week later. And nobody thought this was at all odd; that was how you went from place to place. If you were in a tremendous hurry, then you went on an airliner, but airliners were still a lot more expensive than sea travel and one had to get special permission.

So that is a change for us personally and for our conditions of work: but this also has an enormous impact on what we actually do, because it means that huge numbers of people are travelling abroad every year. The number of British people going abroad is enormous; we are looking at about 47 million people who go abroad on holidays. Sri Lanka is a long way from London but travel to Sri Lanka is still relatively cheap from Britain.

We now also have the Internet and the worldwide website. So far the Foreign Office is using the Internet really as a noticeboard. It's putting material onto web pages, partly publicity material but also - for example - forms. Nowadays if you wish to have a visa application form you just dial it up on the Foreign Office web site, download it onto your printer and there is your visa application form; you can fill it in and go along to the British High Commission and apply for your visa.

Human rights

These are what I would call technical problems but there are also qualitative changes in foreign policy, and the most remarkable of these I think is the change in the attitude towards human rights. In New York in the 1960s we certainly criticised the Soviet performance on human rights but it was accepted that this was almost shadow boxing, it was teasing more than a call for specific improvements.

But over the past 30 years we have seen a growing determination around the world that human rights are no longer internal national problems; they have international implications and that an intolerable human rights situation in any one country is the concern of that country's neighbours and indeed of the whole world. This concern for human rights has had considerable impact in this country and one sees occasional articles criticising foreign countries for sticking their nose into the Sri Lankan situation, criticising NGOs who are seen as agents of foreign powers intent on subverting the State and so on.

Terrorism

Another qualitative change I would mention is terrorism and the rise of the physical threat which particularly affects us as diplomats. British diplomats over the past 30 years have faced a threat particularly from Irish terrorism and we have lost several Ambassadors who have been blown up or shot by the IRA.

But this is a world-wide phenomenon: increasingly we find that minorities or groups who have been unable to obtain power through the ballot box, either because they are not particularly popular, or because they feel that the scales have been weighted against them in an unfair way or that frontiers have been drawn in a way which leaves them eternally dispossessed minorities, have resorted to terrorism.

This has become a major, world-wide problem and one which of course the Government of Sri Lanka has drawn particular attention to. It's one that I seem to have been faced with in several of my postings. I had a police escort for a year in Ireland because I had been unfortunate enough to serve in the NATO Defence College before I went there and some Irish groups thought that my arrival was part of an enormous plot to nudge Ireland into NATO.

That sort of threat is now much more common and of course it goes hand in hand with the media revolution because terrorism is usually extremely photogenic - bombs, hostages, kidnappings. These are human interest stories, they are dramatic stories, they make good television subjects and they are subjects on which the media focus.

The media

The influence of the media actually on foreign policy is, I think, another change. In the 1980s I was Ambassador to Yemen and when I went there my predecessor had been Ambassador to a little country across the Red Sea called Djibouti - the former French Somaliland. I asked whether I was to be appointed there as well and London said - well they didn't know; but it wasn't particularly urgent; and they weren't worried and they would think about it and so on. And then one weekend, I was down by the sea in Yemen and I suddenly got this message, come back, come back, very urgent, rush back to the capital. So I rushed back to the capital and I was told go to Djibouti, go to Djibouti at once. I said "but I'm not even accredited in Djibouti, I'm not even the Ambassador there, you told me to wait"

The reason for this haste was that a British television programme had discovered a famine in Ethiopia and presented a searing documentary about it which had provoked the British public to ask for something to be done at once. Ministers wanted to fly in food supplies and Djibouti was a possible base. It was an example of overwhelming and immediate political pressure aroused by a television programme.

But when it is power without responsibility: there is a problem.

As the British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin said about the newspaper tycoons of his age - and newspaper tycoons have certainly not lost any power in the intervening years - "they enjoy power without responsibility - the prerogative of the harlot through the ages". To take an example, the media may be quick to urge governments to intervene in situations of chaos, famine, massacre or human rights abuse. Bosnia and Somalia are two obvious examples. But if governments introduce peacekeeping forces and the operation goes wrong - as it is more likely than not to do - the media will be the first to turn against it. We shall be treated to pictures of peacekeepers who have been shot or humiliated or taken prisoner, with the message - "why do we leave our boys in this mess?"

So while the media has enormous potential to unmask abuses and draw attention to outrageous or unbearable situations, they do not usually have the staying power to keep with peacekeeping interventions which may be dangerous and long lasting.

The continuities

Having looked at all the aspects of my work which have changed during my lifetime, I think it is worth stressing two elements of continuity. The first is that there will always be more foreigners than there are of us: more foreigners than 18 million Sri Lankans; more foreigners than 57 million British people. But even the two giants of Asia - India and China, each about a billion in population, are outnumbered by the rest of the world. This means that we cannot stop the world and get off. We must deal with our neighbours and often with countries far distant who are still important to us for economic or strategic reasons.

The other conti nuity is that I believe it will always be best to have resident Embassies or High Commissions - as many as we can afford - in foreign countries. It is not possible to know what is going on in a particular country through newspapers, telephone calls or the internet.

One needs a local representative who can chart the state of opinion in the country where he serves, and act as a formal channel between its government and his own. To use the words of the English Statesman from the 17th Century, Sir Henry Wootton, there will always be a need for "an honest man sent to lie abroad for his country".

inside the glass house:

'Play by our rules and you'll get what you want'

by thalif deen at the united nations

Dr Gamani Corea, the former Secretary- General of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), is one of the harshest critics of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Addressing a luncheon at the UN delegates dining room, he once castigated the two Bretton Woods institutions for their obsession in laying down stringent conditions-- euphemistically called "structural adjustment policies" -- in return for concessional loans to the world's poorer nations.

The tragedy of it all, he said, is that virtually all of the crises-stricken Third World nations have a common finance minister: the IMF.

As if to reaffirm Corea's contention, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman recounts in his new book on globalisation an anecdote about a newly-appointed Indian finance minister being congratulated by a friend.

"Don't congratulate me," he tells the friend, "I am only half a minister. My other half is in Washington."

Last week, one-half of the equation met the other-half when the world's finance ministers arrived for the Spring Meeting of the World Bank and the IMF in Washington DC.

The IMF's demands from developing nations usually include the removal of state subsidies, privatization of government corporations, downsizing of bureaucracies, devaluation of national currencies, reduction of budgetary deficits, and sharp cuts in military spending and government salaries.

In effect what the IMF says to most developing nations is: If you don't play the game by our rules, you don't get anything from us.

Last week, the IMF's key policy-making "Interim Committee" concluded its meeting with no clear strategy to head off crises like those that have rocked Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, Russia and Brazil over the past 20 months - plunging one-third of the world into recession.

UNCTAD Secretary-General Rubens Ricupero of Brazil complained that "delay and denial have come to dominate the issue" of reforming the rules and institutions that make up the "global financial architecture".

"At our last meetings in September, the severity of the Asian crisis and its rapid spread to economies inside and outside the region with strong fundamentals seemed set to galvanise the international community into concerted actions,'' Ricupero said.

"For a few weeks it appeared that the need for a new financial architecture would translate into concrete proposals, that a looming catastrophe would finally conquer inertia," he added. "This was wishful thinking," he said.

Thailand - the first country to be hit by the 1997 Asian economic crisis - has accused Western nations of derailing an attempt to bring about radical changes in the international financial system.

"We have so far failed to overhaul the global financial system because developed nations were against it," says Ambassador Asda Jayanama of Thailand.

Jayanama said there were two proposals on the table now: one, for a new World Financial Organisation to oversee international capital, and two, the creation of a Asian Monetary Fund (AMF) to be structured on the lines of the Washington-based International Monetary Fund (IMF).

But both proposals, he said, were being opposed by the United States and other Western nations. Additionally, the proposal for an AMF, with a initial capital of about 100 billion dollars from Japan, has been shot down both by the US and the IMF.

Asked why they were opposed to it, Jayanama said there is a misconception that the ready availability of financial assistance for countries in crisis would encourage these recipient nations not to undertake reform of their own monetary systems.

Moreover, he said, the IMF does not want to lose the power and authority it exercises over Asian countries - as well as all other developing nations - which are currently subject to rigid conditionalities when they borrow money.

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