World leaders address crises afflicting globe
UNITED NATIONS — Vladimir Putin played it cool, Barack Obama was earnest but firm, and Iran’s president walked in smiling. World leaders convened for the opening day of a U.N. gathering that aims to wrestle with the globe’s biggest crises — a historic flood of refugees, the rise of threats like the Islamic State group and the conflict in Syria.
The U.N. secretary-general for the first time called for the civil war in Syria to be referred to the International Criminal Court, while Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Iran’s recent nuclear deal with world powers had a broader goal: “We want to suggest a new and constructive way to re-create the international order.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping made a $1 billion pledge for U.N. peace efforts.
And Jordan’s King Abdullah II made a heartfelt defense of the kinder side of the Muslim world in the face of “the outlaws of Islam that operate globally today.”
“When and how did fear and intimidation creep so insidiously into our conversation when there is so much more to be said about the love of God?” he asked, also quoting the Quran on mercy.
The king has called the rise of extremist groups like the Islamic State, and the crises they have caused, “a third world war, and I believe we must respond with equal intensity.” Jordan borders both Syria and Iraq, and Syrian refugees now make up 20 percent of Jordan’s population. Iraq and Turkey also groan under the strain of millions of refugees. In his state of the world address to leaders from the U.N.’s 193 member states, Ban KiMoon insisted on a political solution to the conflict in Syria, now well into its fifth year with more than a quarter of a million people killed.
Ban said five countries “hold the key” to a political solution to Syria: Russia, the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran.
Putin called for the creation of a broad international coalition against terror, after his country’s surprising moves in recent weeks to increase its military presence in Syria and to share intelligence on the Islamic State group with Iran, Iraq and Syria.
Rouhani appeared to align with Putin’s call for a U.N. Security Council resolution consolidating the fight against terror, saying “we propose that the fight against terrorism be incorporated into a binding international document and no country be allowed to use terrorism for the purpose of intervention in the affairs of other countries.”
Other issues at the center of this week’s discussions include the refugee and migrant crisis, the largest since the upheaval of World War II.