SUNS4514 Thursday 23 September 1999

United Nations: Organised crime thriving under globalisation

United Nations, Sep. 21 (IPS/Thalif Deen) -- The United Kingdom and France, in a warning to the UN members, say that globalisation - which promotes open markets and the removal of currency controls - needs to be regulated because it is in danger of being hijacked by organised crime.

"The more the world becomes global, the more it needs rules," French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin told the 188-member UN General Assembly in New York. Looking at the darker side of the new economic phenomenon, Jospin said globalisation, among other things, also was changing the nature of organised crime.

"This has positively exploded," he said, "In point of fact, the very great fluidity in movements permits criminal networks to exploit the contradictions among national laws, and the weaknesses of some of them, to find a haven against justice."

Pursuing a similar argument, the 1999 Human Development Report, released by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in July, said that globalisation had created "exciting opportunities" to enterprising and imaginative criminals all over the world. "Lowering the barriers to international trade and the transit of
goods across borders is generally seen as a good thing," the report said, "but it also helps the luxury car hijacked on a Johannesburg street to reappear for sale in Moscow."

As multinational corporations led a drive to globalise the world, the report said, so the "crime multinationals" had been quick to exploit it. The precipitous removal of currency controls, before a regulatory environment had been established, was the perfect condition for money laundering by drug traffickers.

Jospin told the General Assembly that, since international drug trafficking seemed to have benefited from globalisation, the United Nations should conclude as soon as possible the proposed UN convention against transnational organised crime.

"We have a choice in confronting globalisation," said Jospin. "We can either go along with the supposedly natural economic laws, and in so doing abdicate our political responsibilities. Or we can seek to order globalisation, and thereby achieve control of our collective future." The world, he said, needs rules of the
game. "It needs the United Nations."

Robin Cook, British Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, told delegates that globalisation was the term commonly used to describe how in today's world "we are interdependent with each other rather than independent of each other."

"We are bound together by our deepening links in trade and investment, in travel, communication...and the consequences of conflict," he added. Cook pointed out that, as a result of globalisation, what happens in one country now has a direct impact on the prosperity, security and even the climate of countries on the other side of the world. In Britain, he said, 90% of the heroin on the streets of the big cities was grown in Afghanistan "under cover of the generation-long conflict in that land."

In central Africa, the population upheavals sparked by the genocide in Rwanda had destabilised the region and half-a-dozen countries had been caught up in ensuing conflicts.

Across the countries of Europe, Cook said, there were several hundred thousand citizens of the former Yugoslavia who had fled from repeated conflicts there to seek sanctuary.
"Just as few nations can stand alone in the modern world, there are few major conflicts which remain only an internal matter with no impact on the rest of the world," he argued.

At a meeting of Third World trade ministers in Marrakech, Morocco last week, the chairman of the 133-member Group of 77 developing countries said globalisation continued to have a profound impact on most developing economies. Speaking on behalf of the Group, Clement Rohee, the Foreign Minister of Guyana, called for an "urgent" inter-governmental dialogue on globalisation.

"Although the consequences of globalisation are universal," he said, "the key decision-makers, in terms of global policy-making, are concentrated in a few major industrialised countries - often in the hands of a few major corporations and individuals.... National governments are known to feel increasingly marginalised
as economic sovereignty is redefined and market forces become ascendant," Rohee said.