Leaders escalate crisis

Leaders escalate crisis

TOKYO (AP): Missteps by leaders in Indonesia, Malaysia and
Thailand destroyed market confidence in Southeast Asia and
worsened its economic crisis, Singaporean Senior Minister Lee
Kuan Yew was quoted as saying yesterday.

"Really it was a lack of understanding by the leaders that
this was a crisis of confidence," Lee was quoted by Kyodo News as
telling an international conference in Tokyo.

"The actions were not confidence-building, they were
confidence-destroying," said Lee, a former prime minister. "That
was the simple reason why it began tumbling down finally."

Lee told a Nihon Keizai newspaper-sponsored conference on the
future of Asia that a different reaction from the governments of
the region could have quelled the crisis and cut the damage in
half.

Lee criticized Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir for trying to
blame his country's problems on international currency traders,
and former Indonesian President Soeharto for delaying and half-
implementing painful reforms required by the IMF.

"So it was a generation of leaders that did not understand the
world around them had changed and they were not operating in the
1960s but in the 1990s," Lee said. "All this need never have
happened."