Corona Pandemic: World Leadership Refuses to Emerge!

Corona Pandemic:

World Leadership Refuses to Emerge!

By Shashi Malla

In spite of various possibilities and also some tentative initiatives, a robust and pro-active world leadership to combat the planetary Corona Pandemic has unfortunately not yet emerged.

TIME magazine has given some past and current leaders in various walks of life an opportunity to express their thoughts on how the world after the end of the pandemic – AC or After Corona – could look. However, before we come to that point, it is first essential to overcome the current dire straits. As the celebrated Canadian writer Margaret Atwood said paraphrasing from A Tale of Two Citiesand from the past to the present:

“It’s the Best of Times, It’s the Worst of Times.

Make the Most of it.”

At the same time, Charles Dickens protagonist’s last poignant thoughts could be evocative of the sacrifices being made bymedical doctors, public health workers and researchers all over the world:

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done…”

Gorbachev: “The World Must Come Together”

But as the greatest living statesman Mikhail Gorbachev wrote in the same TIME series, we have to discard our collective angst and realize the extreme fragility of our planet and the danger of sliding into chaos:

“The Covod-19 pandemic is facing all countries with a common threat, and no country can cope with it alone.”

Throughout his Soviet presidency, the visionary Gorbachev promoted peaceful diplomacy which led to the end of the Cold War. Now he calls on world leaders to convene an emergency special session of the UN General Assembly which should be about nothing less than revising the entire global agenda.

Ban Ki-Moon: “Coronavirus Crisis Can Bring the World Together”

The former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon (2007-2016) called upon world leaders to “urgently put aside narrow nationalism and short-term, selfish considerations to work together in the common interest of all humanity” in order to combat the current historic threat.

He urged global leaders, led by the UN, to consider how to develop a global governance system that can cope more effectively with any pandemic. They should re-commit to the values and aspirations of the lofty UN Charter, and use other multilateral bodies to pro-actively support the world’s most vulnerable populations in the developing world, including refugees, migrants and racial minorities.

Ban Ki-Moon stressed that respect for human rights, solidarity and justice need to be at the heart of the common response to Covid-19. And, therefore, only “if the world can show the necessary courage and leadership today” can it, in totality, “be better placed to tackle equally grave challenges tomorrow.”

Michelle Bachelet: “Our Health Depends on Each Other”

The first woman president of Chile(2006-10, 2014-18) and the current UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Veronica Michelle Bachelet is very matter of fact – our health depends on each other, that’s why we need to fight this threat together. As a former practicing physician-surgeon and health minister she is not only very outspoken but predestined to lay out the way forward.

She points out that the planetary pandemic has laid bare some of the most glaring vulnerabilities of our societiesand overlooked the needs of millions at greatest risk of contagion. There is, therefore, an urgent need to upgrade vital services for all people, including migrants.

It’s now or never to realize how much any one person’s health depends on everyone’s health and the essential need to coordinate national efforts to detect, test, isolate and treat people effectively:

“The pandemic demonstrates the importance and power of collective international action, and the multilateral institutions that can coordinate our capacity to control this pandemic. Avoiding the collapse of any country’s medical system is a matter of immediate interest to all of us. And countries will also need to support one another in facing the coming economic and social challenges, particularly in developing states,” [also in: TIME]

Bachelet’s message to would-be leaders is simple: the only effective way to fight this planetary pandemic is by winning the trust and participation of everyone – by serving the people’s interests, ensuring decent livelihoods and lives, listening to their concerns, and advancing their freedoms and rights.

She quotes the words of the great and prescient French writer Albert Camus: “The only way to fight the plague is with decency.”

Kevin Rudd: World Confronting Semi-Synchronic Public Health and Economic Crises

The former prime minister of Australia (2007-2010 and 2013) and current president of the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York, writing in The Economist of London, notes that those in leadership today, not since the Great FluEpidemic [also erringly known as the “Spanish Flu” although it started in Kansas, U.S. or southern China] or the Second World War has the world had to contend with semi-synchronous public-health and economic crises.

Rudd laments that national and global economic responses have been late, often tepid and disjointed. Both the G -7 and G -20 [virtual] summits failed to produce a co-ordinated, global economic-stimulus strategy. And despite the pandemic’s self-evident threat to international peace and security, the UN Security Council could not agree even to convene an emergency session until April.

Considering that we now have a “G – Zero” world situation, a new Cold War between the U.S. and China and the real and present impotence of the UN Security Council (UNSC), it is futile to go the path of the UNSC, but rather the UN General Assembly (UNGA) as also proposed by Mikhael Gorbachev [see above].

Rudd himself does not suggest any ready remedy for the current raging world situation, but suggests “A core group of constructive powers among the G – 20 should act to reform, fund, and politically defend the central institutions of global governance for the post-covid era.”

What is to be done, as the great Lenin said in another context.

No outstanding leader has as yet come forward to take the initiative. The spark to action has not yet taken place.

In an ideal world, our proposed leadership council – the crisis action committee – would look like: