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."