KUALA LUMPUR -- A war in Iraq will deliver a "deadly blow" to billions of the world's poor and entrench a growing wealth divide, South Africa President Thabo Mbeki warned Monday. He urged the 116-nation Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which accounts for more than half of United Nations members, to "act to neutralize the deadly impact of the tide hungry for human blood."

"When and if it will break out we do not know. How many human casualties we also do not know," Mbeki, the outgoing NAM chairman, told the NAM summit here. "But what we know is that if war does impose itself on humanity, it will claim many lives. It will increase instability in the Middle East and the world. It will deliver a deadly blow to the poor of the world, who will have to bear the additional pain of growing impoverishment."

Mbeki pressed Iraq to cooperate fully with UN weapons inspectors and at the same time urged Western powers to respect the decisions of the UN Security Council to resolve the Persian Gulf crisis.

"We must together make the statement that we do not want war but we must also make the statement that neither do we want weapons of mass destruction," he said. At the same time, Mbeki said, globalization had created "two villages: one rich and getting richer, and the other poor and getting poorer."

Many NAM member states were hit by economic crises and millions in the world, especially Africa, survived on international food aid and grappled with wasting diseases including the AIDS epidemic, he said. Mbeki urged NAM members to unite to negotiate global agreements with developed countries and to act to ensure peaceful resolution of international conflicts "even in instances that affect our member states."

The movement must seek to reject unilateralism and "fight even harder for the democratization of the international system of governance," he said. Mbeki said NAM resolutions on Iraq and other international conflicts issued at the end of the summit Tuesday must have "greater meaning than the mere fact that we adopted them."

"The task we face is to take decisions that give hope to all humanity," he said. "Let it never be said of us that because of what we did not do when we met in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, we merely acted as indignant desert birds."

(AFP)