By Agencies
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An alarming assessment, the Secretary of the United Nations warned world leaders Tuesday that nations are “gridlocked in colossal global dysfunction” and aren’t ready or willing to tackle the challenges that threaten humanity’s future — and the planet’s. “Our world is in peril — and paralyzed,” he said.
Speaking at the opening of the General Assembly’s annual high-level meeting, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres made sure to emphasize that hope remained. But his remarks reflected a tense and worried world. He cited the war in Ukraine and multiplying conflicts around the world, the climate emergency, the dire financial situation of developing countries and setbacks in U.N. goals for 2030 including an end to extreme poverty and quality education for all children.
He also warned of what he called “a forest of red flags” around new technologies despite promising advances to heal diseases and connect people. Guterres said social media platforms are based on a model “that monetizes outrage, anger and negativity” and buys and sells data “to influence our behavior.” Artificial intelligence he said, “is compromising the integrity of information systems, the media, and indeed democracy itself.”
The world lacks even the beginning of “a global architecture” to deal with the ripples caused by these new technologies because of “geopolitical tensions,” Guterres said.
His opening remarks came as leaders from around the planet reconvened at U.N. headquarters in New York after three years of pandemic interruptions, including an entirely virtual meeting in 2020 and a hybrid one last year. This week, the halls of the United Nations are filled once more with delegates reflecting the world’s cultures. Many faces were visible, though all delegates are required to wear masks except when speaking to ward off the coronavirus.
Guterres made sure to start out by sounding a note of hope. He showed a photo of the first U.N.-chartered ship carrying grain from Ukraine — part of the deal between Ukraine and Russia that the United Nations and Turkey helped broker — to the Horn of Africa, where millions of people are on the edge of famine It is, he said, an example of promise and hope “in a world teeming with turmoil.”
He stressed that cooperation and dialogue are the only path forward to maintain global peace — two fundamental U.N. principles since its founding after World War II. And he warned that “no power or group alone can call the shots.”
“Let’s work as one, as a coalition of the world, as united nations,” he urged leaders gathered in the vast General Assembly hall.
It’s rarely that easy. Geopolitical divisions are undermining the work of the U.N. Security Council, international law, people’s trust in democratic institutions and most forms of international cooperation, Guterres said.
“The divergence between developed and developing countries, between North and South, between the privileged and the rest, is becoming more dangerous by the day,” the secretary-general said. “It is at the root of the geopolitical tensions and lack of trust that poison every area of global cooperation, from vaccines to sanctions to trade.
Before the global meeting was gaveled open, leaders and ministers wearing masks to avoid a COVID-19 super-spreader event wandered the assembly hall, chatting individually and in groups. It was a sign that that despite the fragmented state of the planet, the United Nations remains the key gathering place for presidents, prime ministers, monarchs and ministers.
Nearly 150 heads of state and government are on the latest speakers’ list, a high number reflecting that the United Nations remains the only place not just to deliver their views but to meet privately to discuss the challenges on the global agenda — and hopefully make some progress.
The 77th General Assembly meeting of world leaders convenes under the shadow of Europe’s first major war since World War II — the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, which has unleashed a global food crisis and opened fissures among major powers in a way not seen since the Cold War.
At the top of that agenda for many: Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, which not only threatens the sovereignty of its smaller neighbor but has raised fears of a nuclear catastrophe at Europe’s largest nuclear plant in the country’s now Russia-occupied southeast.
Leaders in many countries are trying to prevent a wider war and restore peace in Europe. Diplomats, though, aren’t expecting any breakthroughs.
The loss of important grain and fertilizer exports from Ukraine and Russia has triggered a food crisis, especially in developing countries, and inflation and a rising cost of living in many others. Those issues are high on the agenda.
VENEZUELA
Venezuela has thrown back in prison the brother of the country’s former oil czar as part of an ongoing investigation into a multi-billion dollar embezzlement scheme at the state-run oil company.
Fidel Ramirez was arrested last Wednesday after failing to appear in court as required by the terms of his bail, Venezuela’s Attorney General Tarek William Saab said in a brief interview with the Associated Press.
Ramirez was originally arrested in early 2018 for his alleged involvement in a decade-old scheme to siphon to a bank account in the tiny European country of Andorra $2 billion from state-run oil giant PDVSA.
At the time of the alleged crimes, PDVSA was under the direction of his brother, former Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez, a harsh critic of the socialist government he once served.
Specifically, Fidel Ramirez, a medical doctor who once cared for the late Hugo Chavez, is accused of amassing about $300,000 dollars at an account at Banca Privada d’Andorra, or BPA, stemming from allegedly fraudulent medical services he billed PDVSA through two companies under other individuals’ names.
Banking authorities in Andorra, a mountainous country wedged between France and Spain, intervened BPA in 2015 amid allegations from the U.S. Treasury Department that it had become a central spoke for money laundering from government-connected elites in Venezuela, Russia and China.
Rafael Ramirez did not immediately respond to a request for comment and has been mostly silent in recent days on social media, where he takes frequent jabs at Nicolás Maduro’s government and its repeated efforts to link him to corruption at PDVSA.
The latest attempt came earlier this month when Saab, acting in response to complaints from the current oil chief, Tareck El Aissami, accused Ramirez of involvement in a $5 billion currency scheme involving fake loans to PDVSA from government insiders.
Ramirez was for years one of Chavez’s most trusted aides, charged with managing the world’s largest petroleum reserves at a time of soaring oil prices.
But when the late socialist icon fell ill, eventually dying of cancer, he saw his influence inside the Bolivarian revolution fade as his rival Maduro tightened his grip on power.
CHINA
Government helicopters have attacked a school and village in north-central Myanmar, killing at least 13 people including seven children, a school administrator and an aid worker said Monday.
Civilian casualties often occur in attacks by the military government on pro-democracy insurgents and their allies. However, the number of children killed in the air attack last Friday in Tabayin township in Sagaing region appeared to be the highest since the army seized power in February last year, ousting the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi.
The army’s takeover triggered mass nonviolent protests nationwide. The military and police responded with deadly force, resulting in the spread of armed resistance in the cities and countryside. Fighting has been especially fierce in Sagaing, where the military has launched several offensives, in some cases burning villages, which displaced more than half a million people, according to a report issued by UNICEF this month.
Friday’s attack occurred in Let Yet Kone village in Tabayin, also known as Depayin, about 110 kilometers (70 miles) northwest of Mandalay, the country’s second-largest city.
School administrator Mar Mar said she was trying to get students to safe hiding places in ground-floor classrooms when two of four Mi-35 helicopters hovering north of the village began attacking, firing machine guns and heavier weapons at the school, which is in the compound of the village’s Buddhist monastery.
Mar Mar works at the school with 20 volunteers who teach 240 students from kindergarten to eighth grade. She has been hiding in the village with her three children since fleeing for safety to avoid the government crackdown after participating last year in a civil disobedience movement against the military takeover. She uses the pseudonym Mar Mar to protect herself and relatives from the military.
She said she had not expected trouble since the aircraft had been over the village before without any incident.
“Since the students had done nothing wrong, I never thought that they would be brutally shot by machine guns,” Mar Mar told The Associated Press by phone on Monday.
By the time she and the students and teachers were able to take shelter in the classrooms, one teacher and a 7-year-old student had already been shot in the neck and head and Mar Mar had to use pieces of clothing to try to stanch the bleeding.
They kept shooting into the compound from the air for an hour,” Mar Mar said. ”They didn’t stop even for one minute. All we could do at that time was chant Buddhist mantras.”
When the air attack stopped, about 80 soldiers entered the monastery compound, firing their guns at the buildings.
The soldiers then ordered everyone in the compound to come out of the buildings. Mar Mar said she saw about 30 students with wounds on their backs, thighs, faces and other parts of the bodies. Some students had lost limbs.
“The children told me that their friends were dying,” she said. “I also heard a student yelling, ’It hurts so much. I can’t take it anymore. Kill me, please.′ This voice still echoes in my ears,” Mar Mar said.
