Well Worth Trip
PRIME MINISTER Girija Prasad Koirala returns
home today after an important trip abroad whose main purpose was to attend the United
Nations Millennium Summit at the UN-Headquarters in New York. On his way back from New
York, he also stopped by in Geneva to speak to Nepalese ambassadors based in Europe.
Seizing the opportunity to interact with world leaders at the Millennium Summit and the
Nepalese envoys in Geneva makes this trip productive. What comes to mind foremost
regarding this trip is his speech to the UN gathering of Heads of State or Government. Two
emphases stood out in his address: a) the need to help the have nots of this world and b)
the need to strengthen the world body. Addressing the gathering on September 8 morning, he
called for measures to be put in place to evenly distribute benefits of globalisation, to
bridge the digital divide, and to open markets in rich countries for products and labour
for poor countries. Premier Koirala was emphatic that the global financial architecture
and global trading regime must be more responsive to the needs of poor countries. Among
the poor countries, countries like Nepal—a Least Development Country and a
land-locked one at that—are confronted with even greater challenges. Such issues do
not always come to the fore in world gathering like this where the voices of the poorest
of this earth’s poor are drowned by the general developing vs. developed
countries’ tug-of-war. Hence, Mr. Koirala did well by drawing the leaders’
attention to the particular plight of countries like Nepal that were, as he put it, too
long in the shadow of the world attention.
How to help developing countries? Mr Koirala
had a prescription too: the developed countries, to start with, should provide duty-free
and quota-free access for the developing countries’ exports. Development partners had
an obligation to help them with adequate resources too. In all this, obviously, UN has to
play the role of a mediator in all this. And this was the second theme he particularly
laid emphasis on. He recommended comprehensive reforms for UN for it to rise to the
challenges of the 21st century, a suggestion he repeated later also in his interview to
Gorkhapatra’s correspondent in United States. The UN should be expanded and its area
of activity should be broadened indeed, for countries like Nepal the hopes for catalysing
the process of narrowing the gap between the rich and the poor countries rest with none
but the United Nations. It is imperative that a strengthened UN becomes the intermediary
in achieving this. Mr. Koirala’s call to Nepalese envoys based in Europe to promote
larger national interests in general and economic diplomacy in particular also has an
added resonance vis-à-vis the need to utilise what little resources we have to mobilise
greater resources. These missions, to maintain which Nepalese taxpayers are forking out a
huge sum, must, by being pro-active, do all they can to promote exports, tourism and
foreign employment opportunities. Mr. Koirala sought to impress this on the envoys. All in
all, Premier Koirala’s visit can be described as having been well worth it in that
he, apart from putting the problems and challenges faced by the least developed countries
like Nepal before the august gathering of world leaders attending the Millennium Summit,
also made known Nepal’s views as to how to make the United Nations more effective and
efficient so that this world organisation will be enabled to overcome the problems and
challenges of this new millennium.
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