Global Policy Forum

By Steven Erlanger

President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic, the host of the annual meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund next month, said today that international development organizations "should listen more to the voices of the people" for whom they fashion programs, showing more respect for local cultural traditions.

Issues of poverty and housing "must be solved taking into account the human dimension, and not just the interests of investors," Mr. Havel said in an interview with a small group of reporters. The United Nations, too, he said, "should do everything to make people see it as their own organization, representing everyone, not as some sort of club of governments and diplomats."

Mr. Havel will travel to the United States to attend the millennial summit meeting of the United Nations early next month. As an institution, he said, "it should have more power and a smaller bureaucracy." Then he laughed. "Anyone with experience of power knows one of Parkinson's famous laws," he added, "and when two people on my staff say they need a third, soon there's a fourth and a fifth."

The fund and bank meetings in Prague, from Sept. 19 to Sept. 28, have become a target for groups opposed to globalization and multinational capital. Mr. Havel said he welcomes the debate, but hopes it can be a philosophical and substantive one, without violence in the streets.

Globalization by itself is "morally neutral," Mr. Havel said. "It can be good or bad, depending on the kind of content we give to it." He cited the spread of information about human rights as a good use of globalization. As a negative, he cited "the spread of silly sitcoms or even more stupid commercials," which give a false picture of human life. "These commercials say a lot," he said. "A handsome man with a great tan and strong muscles is running on a beautiful beach with blue sky in the background. A beautiful girl is running toward him and they are happy because they just ate some vitamin or drank some beverage. The stupidity of this world, which is offered to us as human happiness, should be analyzed."

Casually dressed in tan jeans and an open shirt, Mr. Havel, 63, looked fit after a vacation in Portugal, where he bought a summer residence to spend time after he leaves office in 2003. An hour before the interview, sirens went off throughout Prague in memory of the 72 people who died when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia 32 years ago on Monday.

Mr. Havel urged the news media to pay more attention to the substance of the debate than to security aspects , and he urged his countrymen to have a more worldly vision. "It is a great privilege for this country to have the meeting here," he said. People "often forget what it looked like here before the fall of Communism," he said. "How gray life was, how gray streets were, how the sign for a fruit shop was the same all over the country." But now, "every little shop has a different facade, and we are renewing a lot of local tradition." That, he said, was also a kind of answer to globalization and to "this unifying pressure of the dictatorship of consumption and commercials and those supermarkets that are destroying the city suburbs."

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