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UNITED NATIONS: Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has accused the West of trying to impose its values on the world and said Asia faced a bleak future in the 21st century as a result.
The rhetoric was strong even for Mahathir, who last year charged Western financial traders with trying to destroy his South-East Asian nation of 21 million people.
Mahathir told the United Nations Tuesday that Western nations had granted themselves the right to interfere anywhere and were intent on crushing states that did not share their liberal democratic values. ``For the poor and the weak, for the aspiring tigers and dragons of Asia, the 21st century does not look very promising. Everything will continue to be cooked in the West,'' he said.
``And what is from the West is universal. Other values and cultures are superfluous and unnecessary,'' he continued. ``Thus the globalised world will be totally uniform.''
Mahathir later took a swipe at major powers for the way they had handled the East Timor crisis, saying Indonesia had been forced to hold a referendum on independence for the region against its will.
``Western liberals are always trying to stir up feelings against so-called authoritarian governments. The result is that the people suffer because of this. You can see this happening in many countries,'' he told a briefing. ``Now it is almost standard procedure that all such people opposing governments should be given Nobel Peace prizes and all that,'' he said. In 1996, the Nobel Peace Prize was jointly won by Timorese resistance activist Jose Ramos-Horta and Bishop Carlos Belo, also from East Timor.
Mahathir said capitalist countries had deliberately tried to destroy Russia and the East Bloc after the end of the Cold War in an episode which revealed the ``true ugliness'' of Western capitalism.
``They seem to have forgotten they took centuries to make their systems work. Their transition from feudal oppressive rule was bathed copiously in blood,'' he said. The smaller countries that wished to resist this process had little chance to make their voices heard because the Western media were determined to muzzle them, he said.
``For the small countries yearly (UN) speeches and various anniversary speeches will be allowed. Occasionally there will be (non-permanent) membership of the Security Council,'' he said. ``But despite at least three of the Permanent Five being vociferous advocates of democracy, there will be no democracy at the United Nations.''
Mahathir said the West-led intervention in the 1990-91 Gulf crisis had set a dangerous precedent. ``The claimed victory of the West in the Gulf War was regarded as a moral endorsement of the right of the powerful to interfere in any country's internal affairs,'' he said, blasting the West's ``touching concern'' over human rights.
``The definition of human rights seems limited to to an individual's right of dissent against the government,'' he said, implicitly criticising Western policy in Iraq and various parts of the former Yugoslavia.(Reuters)