Hürriyet, ANKARA
April 18 2009
A Bird’s Eye View: Summiteering for whom?
April has been quite a hectic month for you humans, particularly for
those of you who have been summiteering. You had the G20 summit in
London, the 60th anniversary summit of NATO in Strasbourg-Kehl and the
Second Forum of the Alliance of Civilizations here in Istanbul.
As usual, the G-20 Summit ended with the adoption of a long paper that
contains the usual platitudes, but for the first time there were
concrete measures for combating the global financial crisis. The
participants at the summit agreed in principle to raise $1.1 trillion
to help save humanity from the crisis. This included a $500 billion
fund for the IMF to lend to struggling economies, $250 billion to
boost world trade, $250 billion for a new IMF overdraft facility that
countries can use and $100 billion that international development
banks can lend to the poorest countries. Now how these poorest
countries will pay back their loans is another question since their
capabilities for development are limited. The positive thing is that
stock markets started going up globally after the decisions were
announced, which of course does not change in the short term the
plight of the millions of humans who are unemployed. Still these
measures are better than nothing and could have been adopted
earlier. We hope that they are implemented before the countries that
will give the money default.
Immediately afterward, NATO celebrated its 60th anniversary summit. A
declaration on alliance security was adopted with the usual wishful
thinking. The Summit did, however, elect a new secretary-general,
Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former prime minister of Denmark, in spite
of Turkey’s initial hesitations to agree to his candidacy. NATO also
accepted Albania and Croatia as new members. On Russia, the
declaration stated, "We stand ready to work with Russia to address the
common challenges we face." Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in
a speech in Brussels said: "NATO is not just threatening Russia. Its
new security agenda includes more and more scenarios where force could
be used, not necessarily with the sanction of the U.N. We just don’t
understand why NATO is expanding. We don’t understand why this
military infrastructure is being moved to our borders." Very good
questions that NATO refuses to address. As for the 60-year-old history
of NATO, nobody mentions NATO’s dismal human rights history during its
first 30 years. Portugal joined NATO as a dictatorship, NATO supported
the dictatorship in Greece, and the various military coups in
Turkey. So we still ponder why it was not dismantled after the Warsaw
Pact was.
Margins of the forum
So after that summit we had the Second Forum of the Alliance of
Civilizations that was held here in Istanbul. More things happened on
the margins of the forum rather than in the forum. Turkey got its
revenge by the fall of the new NATO secretary-general that resulted in
a dislocated shoulder. Obama popped in for a small reception and
consulted with the foreign ministers of Armenia and Turkey. The
president of Azerbaijan canceled his participation in the forum to
protest the rapprochement between Turkey and Armenia. The discussions
that took place within the forum were interesting, and ideas were
exchanged on how to bridge the gaps existing between humanity. How
many of these ideas will be implemented is another question. Anyhow,
more traveling opportunities are opening for the participants as the
third forum will take place next year in Brazil. Hopefully by then,
the gaps will have become smaller.
Ponder our thoughts, dear humans, for your benefit.