UN's 'gala' season

They forget these promises once they return to their capitals. And this cycle of global carnivals goes on every year. The venue keeps changing from New York to Geneva, London to Paris, Vienna to Brussels, the Hague to Rome, Bangkok to Tokyo, and where else not. Billions of dollars are spent on these multilateral junkets and diplomatic safaris in the guise of conferences, meetings, missions, dialogues and retreats. "They come, they speak and they leave" sums up the essence of these conferences and summits.

Meanwhile another posh carnival takes place every year at Davos in Switzerland in the garb of World Economic Forum (WEF), a Geneva-based foundation, established in 1971 by an enterprising Swiss "business-professor Klaus Schwab. The Forum brings together world's top business leaders, national political leaders (presidents, prime ministers and others), and selected intellectuals and journalists in the name of "good causes."

Our leaders, especially the outgoing president and his imported prime minister were very fond of the "Davos Circus." They never missed this event whether in Switzerland or anywhere else in the world. Motivated solely by commercial profit, this annual gala event is no more than a "business carnival" where the richest businesses are helped to negotiate deals with one another and lobby the world's most powerful politicians in their profit-making goals. It is only an elitist forum for circumventing democratic politics, and for encouraging non-transparent, secretive deals.

These gala events make no contribution to reducing poverty or eliminating despair and despondency. The more things change, the more they remain the same. Neither the world nor the UN has shown any change for the better. Both remain the same as they have been since after the Second World War. The Iron Curtain is no longer there, but the poverty curtain continues to cut across the face of this earth dividing humanity between two unequal halves - one embarrassingly rich and the other desperately poor.

Global peace remains as elusive as ever. Global development agenda has been shelved. The world remains afflicted with the same old problems, perhaps in their acutest form. There is no let-up in violence and the causes that breed despair and defiance. Armed conflict remains pervasive. Injustice and oppression continue unabated. Historical grievances and outstanding disputes remain unaddressed. Wars of aggression and attrition, invasions in the name of self-defence, military occupations, massacres and genocides, human tragedies and a culture of extremism and violence continue to define the "New World disorder."

The UN itself is doing no better with a dismal record of failures and a pathetic culture of poor governance. In the polarised world of the Cold war era, it was used as an arena of the realpolitk and an ideological power struggle between the two hostile blocs. Ever since it came into being as "mankind's last best hope", the UN was kept from fulfilling its promise of peace and prosperity. It has prevented no war and resolved no major dispute. Palestine and Kashmir, the world's two major outstanding issues, are the screaming example of this hopeless situation.