CONFERENCE DIARY
The year of the Commonwealth
MOLLY MORTIMER
Singapore Everyone has gone home from the caucus race conference with prizes and nobody is tactless enough to ask who won; consensus would be for the Chairman who steered Mr Heath faultlessly to shore. For the end of the conference was as uniquely Lee Kuan Yew's as the beginning. But there was an ethical Scylla and economic Charybdis to pass in the centre straits.
Air-conditioning, which had literally kept some delegates too cool, warmed up with tempers as the conference looked like mesh- ing into racial moralities and manoeuvres on the British arms sales to South Africa during its second half. After a weekend of rumour evenly shared between local fortune-tellers and frustrated journalists (though the fortune- tellers were more interested in Messrs Heath and Trudeau's marital status), Lee Kuan Yew set the pace with skilful impatience. A seemingly impromptu speech in essence told the delegates to quit hypocrisy: underde- veloped countries should not assume the world owes them a living and let those who dare throw the first stone on discrimination, racial or other. An impatience not entirely assumed. Sitting next to him at dinner one night I asked him his views on being the UN (or even Commonwealth) Secretary General. God forbid, he said, for a man of his tem- perament to wait about trying to do good. He preferred action like, in his own forth- right words, 'clobbering' the drug traffic and unofficial strikes. But one cannot clobber a conference, though, he showed signs of wanting to after Monday.
Previous page
