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World Economic Forum Urges Dual Attack on Terrorism
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protestor protesting lack of protestors. |
NEW YORK, Feb 1 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Some of the world's most powerful diplomats turned their attention at a global economic forum here Friday to a dual-pronged attack on terrorism, complementing military force with a campaign to root out despair, news agencies reported.
Behind a shield of more than 5,000 police, closed-off roads and lines of heavy concrete blocks, the 2,700 business, political and social leaders gathered in the World Economic Forum (WEF), Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
The gathering in New York, a show of solidarity with the shaken city after the terrorist attacks, is the forum's first venture outside of the Swiss ski resort of Davos in its 32-year history.
"What we have to do as we go forward is not lose sight of the fact that we are just beginning the campaign against terrorism," U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said during a panel discussion.
"From our perspective it was focused initially on Afghanistan and al-Qaeda, the Taliban. That work has not yet been done," he said.
In Washington, there have been calls from some quarters for action to be taken against Iraq, Iran and Somalia. U.S. President George W. Bush singled out Iran and Iraq, along with North Korea, for warnings of potential U.S. military action during his State of the Union address on Tuesday evening.
In the Philippines, U.S. forces have already deployed to train Filipino troops to hunt down the Abu Sayyaf group that allegedly has links to the al-Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden, believed by the United States to be have masterminded the September 11 attacks.
But addressing journalists at a breakfast meeting here, Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade said that while his country had been exchanging information with the United States and Europe, "I never got any information about Somalia."
Some U.S. media commentators have speculated that Somalia was not mentioned during Bush's Tuesday speech because officials with various Somali factions have been cooperating so far with U.S. authorities.
Wade added, "When I was asked about Iran [by a French television interviewer], my response was the same."
Powell insisted that, "we must go after terrorism wherever it threatens free men and women and as we move forward you will hear us re-emphasize this point over and over.
"We have to look not just at terrorists, we have to look at those states that provide them with aid, succor and support," he said.
"We have to look at those nations that proliferate weapons of mass destruction or other technologies," Powell said, also vowing to target countries that might lend or provide those weapons to terrorist organizations.
"We cannot just stop with a single terrorist or single terrorist organization, we have to go and root out the whole system."
But Powell, who appeared on the panel with the head of NATO, the senior European Union foreign affairs representative, the foreign ministers of France, South Korea and Turkey and the prime minister of Australia, softened his message with an appeal to complement the military campaign against terrorism with an attack on global poverty.
"We have to go after poverty, we have to go after despair, we have to go after hopelessness.
"We have to put hope back in the hearts of people. We have to show people who might move in the direction of terrorism that there is a better way."
It was a theme taken up by French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine, who stressed that the global anti-terror coalition forged in the aftermath of the attacks, must also work for justice.
"What I propose is that we build a coalition for a fairer world," he said. "We must make globalization fairer."
And in a panel discussion Thursday, Philippines President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo said that the "new kind of war" on terrorism should turn to a war on poverty as an attack on the root causes of terrorism.
Only a handful of anti-globalization protesters braved cold drizzle under grey skies outside the palatial Waldorf Astoria Hotel, where rich business leaders were hobnobbing with senior policymakers.
On the pavement opposite the Waldorf Astoria, eight Friends of the Earth activists held up protest signs with slogans such as: "WEF equals World-Eating Fat cats." Television camera crews outnumbered them, AFP reported.
But one protest organizer said that the reported turnouts may have been low because there were no major protests scheduled for certain areas or times, expressing doubts about the media's coverage of anti-WEF protests.
"We have our own event today inside a community church, an all-day teach-in," said Tony Moran, an organizer with the New York-based International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) coalition, on Friday. "And there are a couple of hundred people there."
"Some of those reports about the fact that there's nobody there, I don't know [about those]," he told IslamOnline, drawing attention to a demonstration of union workers outside a New York Gap clothing stores on Thursday that gathered about 5,000 people.
The biggest protests are planned for Saturday; ANSWER protestors will carry the message "Money for jobs, not war," to the WEF leaders, Moran said Thursday.
AFP said suspicions also arose that anti-globalization hackers had blocked the World Economic Forum's Internet site, weforum.org, which was inaccessible for a couple of hours.
"There is no way of knowing if it is heavy traffic or hackers. We cannot tell," said the forum's director for communications, Charles McLean.
With additional reporting by Ayesha Ahmad, IOL Correspondent
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