US urged to reshape international relations

The Most Reverend Francis Lodonu, Bishop of the Ho Diocese of the Catholic Church, on Tuesday urged the United States and the developed nations to try and change international economic relations to enable the poor live in dignity.

This, he said, would also remove the pretext for terrorism. "The poor nations of the world continue to be poorer whilst the richer ones are becoming richer. This creates a very dangerous situation in the world, which seem to underlie the suicidal terrorist attacks by a people whose belief in revenge is devilish and not divine".

Bishop Lodonu, who was speaking at a three-day workshop on Awareness Creation on Human Rights and Social Justice, organised by the Ho Diocesan Justice and Peace Commission of the Catholic Church, described the September 11 terrorist attack on the US as diabolical and the attackers as faceless criminals whose motives beat the human imagination.

"In striving to analyse the possible cause of these terrible events, one can safely say that there is a great segment of society that feels that their human rights, their justice and peace are being violated, whether rightly or wrongly. The USA and other world powers must sit down and think very seriously about these points."

Quoting a document on a United Nations Symposium held in New York in September 2000, Bishop Lodonu said one billion people were surviving on less than a dollar a day. Another 100 million children were living and working on the streets and 48 poorest countries in the world provided less than 0.4 per cent of the world's exports.

According to the report, someone dies from hunger every 3.6 seconds with 75 per cent of these being children. Bishop Lodonu said in the past decade more than 5 million people were killed and more than 6 million injured in wars.

He said in the 1990s about 50 million people were displaced by war forcing about 10 million of them to become refugees in the world today.

"The point I am driving at is to bring to ourselves the awareness of the world situation which affects human rights, justice and peace." He contended that these frightening statistics reflected the abject and inhuman poverty in which many were subsisting.

The workshop, which is being attended by 80 participants, is sponsored by the Konrad Adenaur Foundation (KAF) of Germany with the collaboration of the National Commission on Civic Education (NCCE) and the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ).

Kwasi Owusu-Yeboa, Volta Regional Minister, said human rights existed independently of formal documents and that laws in statute books were only to acknowledge the existence of such rights.

The government would entrench the rule of law by "building strong and sustained institutional structures that can buttress it", he said.