Iraq crisis could jeopardise global agendas, Clark warns

2:56PM

The Iraq crisis was now so serious it could endanger the international agenda to promote development and greater understanding between regions, Prime Minister Helen Clark said today.

"I believe that our security is now imperilled not because of any inevitable clash of civilisations...but rather because huge gaps have been allowed to develop between regions and nations, leading to bitterness, frustration, envy and hate," she said in a speech to the Women's Conference of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions in Melbourne.

"It is not helped that crises like that affecting Israel and Palestine have been left to fester for so long, and have created a climate of extremism in the Middle East, directed at the West which is held responsible for the stalemate."

Miss Clark said a series of international summits over the past 2/12 years had tried to address some fundamental problems.

She listed the Millennium Goals of the United Nations, the International Conference on Financing Development, the New Partnership for Africa's Development and the World Summit on Sustainable Development.

"There is a huge agenda to base international action on," she said.

"But the crisis over Iraq is now so serious and so polarising that it could jeopardise progress on that broadly based international agenda to promote development and greater understanding between peoples and regions."

Miss Clark said that to her mind, the 17 months since September 11 2001 had been the most destabilising period the world had known since World War 2.

"Nothing really prepared us for the shock of September 11, when low technology, suicidal hijackers launched unprecedented attacks on the world's only super power," she said.

"The international community is now transfixed by the problem of terrorism -- and rightly so.

"Terrorists have struck again since, with particularly deadly results in Bali and in Mombasa. Much military might has been devoted to tracking down the perpetrators but that can only be part of the answer."

Miss Clark went on to explain the Government's policy on Iraq and told the conference Iraq should not mistake the strong desire for a diplomatic outcome, held by New Zealand and other countries, for tolerance of their failure to answer questions about their weapons programmes.

"Should there be war in Iraq, my government fears for the widespread resentment that would provoke in the Middle East against Western nations, for the likely stimulus terrorist organisations would gain from that resentment, and for the high human costs a war would have," she said.

"All diplomatic means to contain Iraq have to be preferable to that."

The conference has brought together more than 500 delegates from about 90 countries, and Miss Clark's speech at the opening session ranged across New Zealand's history of trade unionism, its electoral system, social and economic policy, and labour laws.

- NZPA

Herald feature: Iraq