IPS Newsbriefs, Tuesday, 7 October 2008.
Indian Envoy Dismisses SG’s Annual Report as “Irrelevant”

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 6 (IPS) - India’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Nirupam Sen, never known to pull his punches, offered a critical appraisal of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s annual report on the work of the organisation. Abandoning diplomatic niceties, he dismissed the report as “inadequate, if not irrelevant.” The report, he pointed out, not only did not provide a vision for the future but also failed to discuss the current financial crisis, which he described as the most profound crisis since the Great Depression.

Addressing the General Assembly, Sen said while the universe had not ended, the world of Wall Street had certainly ended, and the Masters of the Universe had bitten the dust, “the same dust that is now in the mouths of the rest of us”. The free market, like free love, had come to an end, he said.

Sen said the debt crisis, the decline in commodity prices and the problems of liquidity would hurt the developing world the most. Only an international response could overcome the crisis, which was impacting the real economy. The problem with the Secretary-General’s report, he said, was that it ignored those issues and did not spell out how the United Nations could rebuild the global economic and political institutions.

Sen said the Secretary-General’s report was silent on that issue and others. It was also silent on what the United Nations could do to stimulate the stalled Doha Round of trade talks. The investment banking world had achieved the destruction of world liquidity, and had increased financial risks and bankruptcies. The impact on the developing world would be profound.