Developing nations outline priorities at U.N.

Leaders urge greater focus on roots of terror, combating poverty

? The battle against terrorists is being won but the “ultimate war” against terrorism will be lost if the roots of the problem aren’t addressed, Pakistan’s president told the U.N. General Assembly’s ministerial meeting Wednesday, echoing a theme raised by leaders of many developing countries.

The leaders stressed that the priorities of the developing world are receiving little more than self-serving lip service and that the United Nations, by virtue of having policies dictated by wealthy nations, has failed to substantively tackle key issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“Terrorism poses the most urgent threat to many countries, including the most powerful states. For many of us, the terrorist threat is very close and … very personal,” Gen. Pervez Musharraf said. Pakistan is a key U.S. ally in the war on terror.

Global cooperation has been “highly successful” and the international community is “winning the battle against terrorists,” he said. “However, what we are doing is insufficient to win the ultimate war against them.”

While many countries have called for a concerted effort against terrorism, leaders of developing nations argued for a closer look at terrorism’s roots.

They said the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, coupled with the events that followed, have left the international community myopically focused on terrorism at the expense of other issues that fuel tensions among the world’s most disenfranchised peoples.

“For the majority of the world’s people … the most immediate threats are those of poverty, hunger, unsafe drinking water, environmental degradation and endemic or infectious diseases, such as AIDS and malaria,” said Djibouti’s president, Ismail Omar Guelleh.

He said the “knee-jerk reaction of crushing (terrorism) militarily fails to address its many manifestations, or get at its roots and causes.”

“While acts of terrorism need certainly to be addressed, to do so with only cursory lip service to the possible underlying causes, can be fatal and in itself destructive,” Guelleh warned. “No one should excuse what is happening in many places today — the brutal and heinous crimes — but let us face it, those situations still require solutions.”

A key issue leaders said must be addressed is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Musharraf described it as “an open wound on the psyche of every Muslim,” a conflict that “generates anger and resentment across the Islamic world.”