ON THE SPOT

Why Bono won everybody’s heart at Davos this time

BY TAVLEEN SINGH

There is something about the annual meeting in Davos that attracts the rage of hacks. They flock here from all over the world, enjoy the hospitality of the World Economic Forum and the breathtaking beauty of this snow-covered ski resort and then return home to file bitter little stories about the rich and famous people they met.

So, in the London Sunday Times I read these comments under the headline 'An empty song from Bono and the Davos Dreamers.' 'Sharon Stone jumped on a podium, breaking up a discussion on disease, to pledge $10,000 and goad others to give more: she earned many times that uncrossing her legs in the most memorable moment of her career'.

And, later in the same column, 'Politicos were equally hilarious. Bill Clinton, strutting like an old rocker at a comeback gig, croaked with familiar charm. Which briefly made his fans forget he did sweet nothing for Africa when in power'.

Social activism
It is this sort of vicious, distorted reportage that inspires confused but compassionate social activists like Arundhati Roy to rant and rave against Davos every chance they get. A whole bunch of this genre of social activist used to come up to Davos, till a couple of years ago, and organise a gathering called Public Eye on Davos at which they claimed to speak for the poor and dispossessed of the world, they blamed globalisation for the world's poverty and destitution.

I attended one of their sessions and asked the ageing, sixties types who had gathered what they had against globalisation and to my astonishment was told that they believed the Narmada Dam was being built under 'globalisation' pressure. I told them this was untrue and that the dam was planned decades ago when India was a totally closed, Soviet Union style country and they looked puzzled.
I also told them that it was largely due to international pressures that the poor in India were getting a better deal now than in pre-globalisation times and they looked even more puzzled.

The anti-globalisation activists maybe confused but it does not stop them from continuing their attacks on the World Economic Forum because annually hacks come hither to give them more vitriol to feast off. It’s as if they come specifically to look for bad things to write.

As someone who was there when Sharon Stone stood up and pledged $10,000 and there when Clinton spent an hour giving us the most impressive roll call of recent history I have ever heard let me tell you what actually happened.

First, the Sharon Stone story. She was sitting in the audience during a discussion of poverty in Africa and on the stage was an African leader who made a convincing case that his country's biggest problem was debt. If its international debts to rich Western countries and financial institutions could be cancelled, he said, millions of dollars would become instantly available to him which could then be spent on fighting diseases like malaria.

Also in the audience was the economist, Jeffry Sachs, who in a recent report on poverty has pointed out that mosquito nets could save the lives of more than a million African children who die every year from malaria. He made this point more than once in the many sessions on poverty alleviation at the Davos meeting this year.

So, at the end of this particular session Sharon Stone stood up and said it was her first time in Davos and she had been very moved by the things she had heard and wanted to do her bit by pledging $10,000 for the purchase of mosquito nets for African children. Would anyone like to join her she asked and a gentleman sitting next to her stood up and announced a contribution of $50,000.

Bed net fund
By the time she sat down again more than $100,000 had been pledged and a Sharon Stone bed net fund is in the process of being set up to collect the money needed for a million mosquito nets. Will someone tell me why this should be something to sneer at?

Now, Bill Clinton. He has come to Davos several times in recent years and spoken at many sessions but never before have I seen a more impressive performance than he put on this year. He talked of American foreign policy and admitted its mistakes and analysed what could happen in the near future in Iraq and Iran and he did it brilliantly. As someone who has spent long years covering politics and politicians I have no hesitation in saying that in my lifetime I have seen no other politician who matches Clinton’s intelligence or charisma.

Of course in my time there has been Nelson Mandela but Mandela in my eyes is an icon and not just a politician and I treasure the memory of having spoken to him once at another annual meeting in Davos.

He was in the lobby of the Central Sport Hotel after some session he addressed and every member of the staff lined up and gazed at him with the awed expression of those who know they are in the presence of a higher being.

Davos is filled with moments like these and this year it was the Clinton session and Sharon Stone's pledge that counted among the best moments along with a session on poverty that was addressed by the rock star Bono. Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Thabo Mbeki, Tony Blair and President Obassanjo of Nigeria were the other speakers but it was Bono who won everybody's heart.

He has been raising funds to fight poverty and disease in Africa for many years and he said it bothered him that people thought of this as a 'cause'. If 10,000 children are dying every day from preventable diseases it is not a cause, in his view, but an emergency.

An emergency of such proportions that it was wrong for the rest of the world to simply sit back and watch. He was speaking, as it happens, on the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and he quoted a survivor of that death camp as having told him that so many years later what he remembered most were the faces of the people who had watched as Jews like him were being loaded onto the trains that took them to the concentration camps.

Bono said he wanted to be among those who would have stopped the trains by lying down in the tracks and that this is what he was trying to do for Africa.
By raising international consciousness about African children dying of poverty and disease he was urging the world not to simply stand and watch.

Having seen children in our own country die needlessly of preventable diseases, having been haunted by the suffering in the eyes of children dying of hunger even today in districts like Nandurbar, I am on the side of those who try to do anything, even the smallest thing, to rid the world of poverty.

What really happened at this year's annual meeting was that a thousand of the richest men and women in the world were shamed into admitting to themselves that they needed to do more to rid the world of poverty and disease. Is this something to be sneered at?