Tommy Koh among Earth Summit powerbrokers
By James Brooke
RIO DE JANEIRO — Trailing clouds of reporters through the corridors of the Earth Summit convention centre or forging coalitions behind closed doors, several faces emerged from the 7,000 delegates as international power-brokers.
They include a Singaporean lawyer who wields a fast parliamentary gavel, an Indian minister, a German minister who has assumed the mantle of Western leadership and a Malaysian minister whose tenacious defense of her nation’s right to exploit forests has won her notoriety as the Earth Summit’s "Dragon Lady".
• THE SINGAPOREAN
In treaty drafts, brackets are the red flags of diplomacy. Forty-eight went before signing ceremonies started on Friday, one 900-page document remained riddled on Wednesday evening with hundreds of brackets, marking for debate, language that ranged from entire paragraphs to, in one case, a single comma.
Enter Professor Tommy Koh, a seasoned international mediator who knows how to speed proceedings with a dose of humor, a dose of patience and a surprisingly fast gavel.
"He rammed the climate chapter right past Saudi Arabia,’ said an American, Mr Chip Barber, who watched Prof Koh slam his gavel down before a Saudi delegate could win the floor to object to an energy conservation clause in a document that was to serve as an environmental plan for the 21st century. "He cleared 100 financial provisions with one blow."
With cheers erupting occasionally from 400 lawyers and diplomats in attendance, he kept his parliamentary freight train going until 5.30 Thursday morning — without stopping for a cup of coffee.
A polished graduate of Harvard Law School, Prof Koh is now, at 54, a master of the system that produced him.
Currently an Ambassador-At-Large for Singapore, he served a total of 19 years in the United States, first as Ambassador to the United Nations, then to Washington.
He honed his fast gavel first as president of the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea from 1981 to 1982 and then, in 1990, as chairman of the preparatory committee for the Earth Summit.
• THE MALAYSIAN
When American negotiators arrived in Rio proposing an international convention on forests, they fell straight into the jaws of the "Dragon Lady".
"The almost obsessional anxiety to have a forest convention is driven by concerns which have nothing to do with forests or trees," Ms Ting Wen Lian, Malaysia’s chief negotiator on forests, lectured in a pre-summit briefing.
"Developed countries wish to appease their public opinion and thus get electoral mileage out of forests."
Environmental groups gave the Ambassador her "Dragon Lady" nickname after they lost several confrontations with her over Malaysia’s insistence that forestry practices are a matter of sovereignty.
"Forests are clearly a sovereign resource — not like atmosphere and oceans, which are global commons," Malaysia’s career diplomat said in the clipped tones of her alma mater, London University. "We cannot allow forests to be taken up in global forums."
Unrattled by her notoriety among environmentalists here, the Ambassador, who is currently assigned to Rome, said: "This is not just Malaysia alone. All the developing countries hold these views. The only difference is that we are more vocal about expressing our views."
And the Dragon Lady label? "I find it amusing," she said, without cracking a smile.
•THE INDIAN
In an inner office padded with carpets and cooled by an air-conditioner, India’s Minister of Environment, Mr Kamal Nath, sipped coffee with two ministers from Kenya.
But when conversation turned to the US, his voice bounced angrily off the prefabricated walls.
"At 6 o’clock this morning, the US told us they want to remove the phrase ‘right to social and economic development’, "he said as the visiting Kenyans whistled quietly their amazement.
"I’m not looking for good grammar — I’m looking for substance," the Indian said. "We must not budge from ‘the right to social and economic development’. I have talked to the Chinese, they are with us. The Swedes also. Finland seems to be on the fence."
A Congress Party politician little known in the West, in Rio Mr Nath has become a Third World spokesman who never ducks an outstretched microphone.
"We are seeking that the developed world plough a little of their prosperity back into the earth," he said. "We hope that by coming here Mr Bush will understand global environmental concerns."
To the delight of his English-speaking guests, he ended the meeting with his joke of the day.
White House infighting over an Earth Summit treaty on plants and animals shows, the Indian says, "that in the United States biodiversity is a question of bushes and quails."
• THE GERMAN
With the US revelling in a Lone Ranger role at the Earth Summit, leadership of the West fell to Mr Klaus Topfer, a low-key German who after five years in office is now the West’s dean of environmental ministers.
Little known in the US, the well-traveled German was described recently by Der Spiegel magazine as "EcoGenscher" — a reference to Germany’s ground-breaking former Foreign Minister, Mr Hans-Dietrich Censcher.
A veteran of foreign-aid missions to countries as diverse as Brazil, Yemen and Malawi, the German economist has found many friends in Rio.
Last Thursday, ministers of Kenya, India, Australia and Malaysia could be seen slipping discreetly out of a conference room maintained here by the German delegation, the Earth Summit’s third largest after Brazil’s and Japan’s.
Over dinner last week on a penthouse terrace overlooking Copacabana beach, the 53-year-old German warned that the collapse of East-West rivalries must not lead to North-South rivalries over environmental Issues.
"We cannot become caught in a new confrontation between North and South just as we have succeeded in overcoming the Cold War," said the minister, whose family fled eastern Germany when he was eight. "I am afraid that conservatives in the US are picking ‘ecologism’ as their new enemy." — NYT.
Source : The Straits Times, June 17, 1992
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