At Talks, Much of It Ducks Behind Doors

Diplomacy trumped finance at the World Economic Forum on Friday, with foreign leaders and U.S. officials ducking into hotel suites for dozens of meetings while nonstop seminars focused on Africa, the Arab-Israeli conflict and international counter-terrorism strategies.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell spoke in the morning about fighting world poverty as well as terrorism, a persistent theme of the discussions here. Later in the day, he held private meetings with Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, as well as other world leaders.

Powell called the international campaign to raise humanitarian aid for Afghanistan an essential element of the battle against Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in that country.

“As we fight terrorism--using military means and legal means and law enforcement and intelligence means and going after the financial infrastructure of terrorist organizations--we also have to put hope back in the hearts of people,” Powell told the forum, an annual who’s who of the business, diplomatic, academic and media worlds.

There were no reported meetings between Peres and Palestinian officials, however, despite widespread hopes for such talks. Ahmed Korei, the speaker of the Palestinian parliament and a key peace negotiator, who plans to visit Washington next week, was expected to stop at the forum en route to attend some of its sessions.

But Powell said he was “very pleased” to hear news reports from Israel about meetings there earlier this week between Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Korei and two other top deputies of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.

“Dialogue is an important thing,” Powell said. But Sharon, who is scheduled to visit the White House next week, has said in interviews in Israel that he will urge President Bush to end all contacts with Arafat.

Powell also met privately with European diplomats who have been pressing for more active international engagement in the Mideast conflict, including French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine and Javier Solana, the chief foreign policy coordinator for the European Union.

After Powell spoke, panelists at a seminar titled “Understanding Global Anger” suggested that hostility toward the wealthy West shouldn’t be difficult to comprehend.

“Two-thirds of the world population is poor and hungry, so two-thirds of the world population is angry,” said Amr Moussa, the secretary-general of the Arab League. “We don’t have to ask why.”

The Philippines’ Arroyo, a ubiquitous and energetic presence at Friday’s meetings, also persistently linked political discontent to economic problems.

She told reporters shortly before her meeting with Powell that she hopes the coalition fighting terrorism--a fight that has now extended to the far edges of the Philippine archipelago--will unite behind a global campaign to boost economic development in areas where radical anti-Western forces have gained strength.

“These resources could have gone into the fight against poverty,” she said. “Where there is great poverty, you will also have the breeding ground for the recruits, for the evil ideologues who spread terror.”

Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien struck a similar note, appealing for a major increase in foreign aid to Africa.

“Poverty, Mahatma Gandhi once said, is the worst form of violence,” Chretien said.

Forum organizers say that 2,700 delegates from 106 countries are attending the meetings at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, including 30 heads of government and at least 100 Cabinet ministers. Many of them came as much to meet one another as to listen to the high-minded panel discussions.

“It is the bilateral meetings that make this worth it,” said Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, who met privately here Friday with half a dozen foreign ministers and heads of state.

Biden was a featured speaker in a long morning discussion on “new priorities for U.S. foreign policy.”

“It was interesting,” he said later, “but it didn’t yield much.”

Still, he added, the forum was a rare opportunity to hear a spectrum of non-American opinion about U.S. policy abroad. “There is concern whether the U.S. will use the war on terrorism as an opportunity for further consensus on other issues, or as an excuse of unilateralism,” he said. “It’s a legitimate question.”

On many panels, there was an undercurrent of unease about Bush’s State of the Union attack on Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an “axis of evil.” It is a concern generated both by the implied broad expansion of the U.S. counter-terrorism campaign and by fears among Europeans and others that the administration is reverting to unilateralism after a period of close consultation with foreign allies.

The most pointed critic, however, was a U.S. senator, Democrat Bob Graham of Florida, who called it “an unfortunate phrase” that falsely implied an alliance of the three in language reminiscent of the World War II Axis powers and President Reagan’s anti-Soviet “evil empire” remarks in the 1980s.

Iran and Iraq “are almost biblical enemies,” and neither has known close relations with the North Koreans, Graham said, adding that he has seen no convincing evidence of an Iraqi connection to the Al Qaeda terrorist network.

“It does not serve the objective of the war against terrorism to get diverted by other nations,” Graham said.