By John Rice, Associated Press, 4/13/2000. Oston Globe
HAVANA - President Fidel Castro of Cuba launched a scathing attack on capitalism yesterday, telling a summit of the world's poor nations that the world economic order had caused suffering comparable to the Holocaust.
Castro denounced capitalism before at least 40 heads of state at the Group of 77 summit. He called for the elimination of the International Monetary Fund, accusing it of spreading world poverty.
''The images we see of mothers and children in whole regions of Africa under the lash of drought and other catastrophes remind us of the concentration camps of Nazi Germany,'' he said.
Referring to war-crimes trials after World War II, the Cuban leader said: ''We lack a Nuremberg to judge the economic order imposed upon us, where every three years more men, women, and children die of hunger and preventable diseases than died in the Second World War.''
His complaints of inequality were shared by other speakers at the opening of the summit. But the organization was expected to seek less radical solutions than the Cuban leader's. Draft resolutions called for developed countries to forgive the debts of poorer states, share technology, and give
poorer nations a greater say in the use of international development funds.
They also call for shifting more decisions from groups controlled by rich nations, such as the IMF and World Bank, to the United Nations. Since its 1964 founding, the number of developing nations in the UN has grown from 77 to 133, representing around 80 precent of the world's population.
''Never has the world witnessed such massive disparities in international social and economic activities,'' said the Nigerian president, Olusegun Obasanjo, whose country chairs the summit.
He warned that failure to reform international aid policies that have maintained the wealth gap ''constitute a major threat to international peace and security.''
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan also called for debt relief and greater investment in poor countries, and said developing countries should work together to increase their own trade and cooperation.
''I believe governments need to work together to make change possible, but governments alone will not make change happen. We have to engage the power of private investment'' as well as non-governmental and academic organizations, he said.
He said the summit would help the developing world forge a united front at the UN's Millennium Summit in September.
Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad of Malaysia took aim at a global system that he said allowed ''rogue currency traders'' to plunge his country and East Asia into financial crisis by undermining their currencies.
In New York City, Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, reacted to Castro's comparisons to the Holocaust, saying the Cuban leader ''lives in his own time warp, and so while I'm disappointed, I'm not surprised.
''But I am surprised by the other world leaders that were there. I would have hoped that they would have found an opportunity to distance themselves from those types of remarks,'' he said. ''Poverty is serious, it's painful, and may be deadly, but it's not the Holocaust and it's not
concentration camps.''
This story ran on page A18 of the Boston Globe on 4/13/2000.
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