The United States is limiting the size of its team at next week's World Trade Organization meeting in Qatar for security reasons, US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick said here Tuesday, October 30.
"I am trying to keep my staff as small as possible for their safety," the US trade chief told a luncheon meeting here of the Council on Foreign Relations. "All of you are aware that the situation going into Doha is not exactly the happiest one in terms of overall security," Zoellick said.
"We are working closely with our own authorities and people overseas to try to make sure we have got full security but there are undoubtedly risks," he added. Trade ministers had considered moving the WTO meeting to Mexico City or Singapore, because of the risk of reprisals for the US bombing of Afghanistan. But WTO officials last week said they were determined to meet from November 9-13 in Doha, Qatar, as planned.
Zoellick praised staff from the US Trade Representative's (USTR) office for agreeing to go to Qatar. "It really is a stalwart statement of their commitment to their country and to the issue of trade." The September 11 disaster, in which 19 terrorists hijacked four passenger planes in suicide attacks that toppled the World Trade Center, killing thousands of people, had set the stage for the WTO meeting, he said.
The terrorists were masters of destruction but failures at construction, Zoellick said. "Their strategy is to terrorize and paralyze, not to debate and create," the trade chief said. "The international market economy -- of which trade and the WTO are vital parts -- offers an antidote to this violent rejectionism," he added.
"Trade is about more than economic efficiency. It reflects a system of values: openness, peaceful exchange, opportunity, inclusiveness and integration, mutual gains through interchange, freedom of choice, appreciation of differences, governance through agreed rules and a hope for betterment for all peoples and lands."
The US campaign against terrorism reflected a contest of values, he said. "By promoting the WTO's agenda, especially a new negotiation to liberalize global trade, these 142 nations can counter the revulsive destructionism of terrorism."
The WTO conference gathers some 4,500 people, including 2,000 government delegates, 700 journalists and representatives of 600 non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The small Gulf emirate has only a few thousand policemen and 12,000 troops, but says it will manage security with its own resources.
"Security will be 100 percent Qatari," organizing committee spokesman Sheikh Abdullah Bin Ahmed Al-Thani said in Doha on Monday, denying western reports that foreign security would be brought in to assist.
Since the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, an American and another foreigner died in a bomb in the Saudi city of Khobar, a Kuwaiti has been accused of shooting dead a Canadian, protestors tore up and stamped on the American flag in Bahrain and Omani students marched against the war on the Taliban Islamic militia in power in Kabul. But Qatar has remained calm, even though anti-American sentiment is heard on the streets and particularly in the mosques. — (AFP, Washington)
© Agence France Presse 2001
© 2001 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
