North-South dialog tense: Mahathir

JAKARTA (JP): Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad yesterday poured cold water on the current Non-Aligned Movement's endeavor to promote dialog with the rich industrialized countries, saying that North-South relations are filled with antagonism.

"What are the prospects for North-South relations? The answer is not very good at the moment," Mahathir said addressing the international conference on Human Resources Development within the Framework of International Cooperation.

Mahathir criticized the developed countries for establishing what he saw as a perpetuation of the imperial powers of the West over their former colonies. "Oppressive pressures are now less direct and are applied in the name of democracy and human rights instead."

Over 200 delegates from 37 countries attended the three-day conference at the Jakarta Convention Center which was opened by President Soeharto, current chairman of the Non Aligned Movement, at the State Palace on Wednesday.

Such notable speakers such as Minister of Research and Technology B.J. Habibie and Professor Armand Mella head of Economic, Social and Human Sciences at the Ecole Centrale in Paris gave presentations at the conference.

Organized by the Center for Information and Development Studies (CIDES), the conference was designed to foster human resources development as set-out by the 1992 Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit in Jakarta.

However Mahathir's highly anticipated address yesterday portrayed a numbing prospect of cooperation between the two 'worlds'.

The charismatic Prime Minister, once dubbed the "little Sukarno" for his rousing rhetoric similar to the anti-Western sentiments of Indonesia's first president, did not disappoint a mostly Asian crowd who warmed to every remark critical of the developed nations.

According to Mahathir, the North was purposely stifling the growth of the developing South in order to retain some of its former colonial domination.

He said that the rise of Japan and other Newly Industrialized Countries, such as South Korea and Taiwan, have broken the North's economic domination and so western values of human rights, democracy and labor are purposely prescribed to deter these emerging economies.

"All these care and concerns for human rights and democracy are laudable except that the obvious results of applying Western standards would be to knock out the competitiveness of the manufactured products of these countries," he remarked.

Mahathir charged that these actions were done not to protect workers in the South but to protect jobs in the North.

Habibie

Minister Habibie contributed to the tone of yesterday's discussion by saying that the North should not force their own values in judging the developing countries.

"Democracy is a relative thing," he said, adding "I will not accept a standard given by others."

Despite the apparent support for "North bashing" yesterday, a number of the audience did speak out against the prevailing negative tone.

Dewi Fortuna Anwar, a respected international relations expert from the Indonesian Institute of Science, queried Mahathir's pessimism attributing it to possible aging.

The Prime Minister in reply said he had limited grounds for being optimistic. "There are not too many people in the North who are willing to listen," he said.

Though to the end Mahathir was persistent in his tone against the North, he acknowledged that the South was not without blame.

He attributed this fault to their inability to expedite stability and prosperity among its people.

Much of the South's weakness, he said, was due to "far too much time being spent on political struggles to gain control of governments." (mds)

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