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The incoming chairman of the 114-nation Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, has taken a characteristically punchy line on the Iraq crisis as he assumes his last major role on the world stage.

Mahathir, a veteran Muslim leader bitterly opposed to Islamic extremism, believes the United States would fan the flames of international terrorism by leading an attack on Iraq.

He has made it clear that he will attempt to steer the NAM into declaring strong opposition to such a war at its summit in the Malaysian capital on Monday and Tuesday next week.

Asked what would be contained in the summit's final declaration, he replied: "Certainly it is about our anti-war stand."
In typical shoot-from-the-lip style, he has described US President George W. Bush's military threat against Iraq as a "primitive" response to the task of disarming President Saddam Hussein's regime.

"In the Stone Age the way of settling problems was to kill other people," he said.

Mahathir acknowledged that the major powers rarely listened to the voice of the NAM, but said he hoped the organisation's opinion would lend weight to the recent street protests of millions of people around the world.

Most member states are developing countries without international clout of their own, but many are also key players in the US's war on terrorism -- with NAM's roll-call stuffed with countries from the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America.

NAM was formed as an alternative to the Western and Eastern blocs in the 1950s, and has been seen as increasingly irrelevant since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But with Iraq itself a member state, the crisis over its alleged weapons of mass destruction is regarded as an opportunity to reverse the decline in the organisation's fortunes.

The movement also includes in its ranks 50 of the 57 members of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), and Mahathir has called a special "informal" OIC meeting on Iraq for the day after the summit.

Mahathir is seen by his supporters as a champion of the developing world, and his own success in transforming a sleepy backwater nation into one of Asia's most successful developing countries lends Malaysia's voice a weight it would otherwise lack.

He bucked the advice of the International Monetary Fund during the 1997 Asian economic crisis, pegging the ringgit to the US dollar and imposing capital controls, earning first scorn and then, last year, grudging acknowledgement from the IMF that he had been right.

When Mahathir became prime minister on July 16, 1981 Ronald Reagan was a rookie president of the United States and Margaret Thatcher was in her early years of power in Britain.

Since then, government here has been something of a one-man show, with Mahathir's stamp of approval vital to everything from the running of the economy to cleanliness in public toilets, and the nation was shocked by his announcement that he would retire this year.

When he made his unexpected resignation speech in June, the 77-year-old premier was mobbed by protesting cabinet ministers before he could finish, burst into tears, was hustled into a back room and took off the next day on a European holiday, leaving a stunned nation wondering what was going on.

Within days it was confirmed that he would quit, although not immediately as he had planned. He would stay on to host the NAM meeting and an OIC summit in October -Sapa-AFP

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