The United Nations Assembly should hold a special meeting to bring all world leaders to their senses and assert its authority to ensure world peace, Human Rights Commission vice-chairperson Harun Hashim today.

Harun said the tragic events of Sept 11 have suddenly changed the attitude and thinking of Americans that its honoured concept of due process has been abandoned in dealing with its Taliban and al-Qaeda captives, particularly those held in Cuba.

This is a clear violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of which the US was the principal author. So we have a situation where civilised people can act in a most uncivil manner, said the commissioner.

Harun was presenting a paper at a roundtable dialogue on Civilisation and Terrorism organised by Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM) in Shah Alam in collaboration with the Foreign Affairs Ministry and Malaysian Press Institute.

The one-day session brought together representatives from the Prime Ministers Department, Foreign Affairs Ministry, defence, Attorney-Generals Chambers, local media, police, military, academia, research and policy organisations.

Harun said in its declared war against world terrorism, the US has given notice that it is free to attack other countries.

However, Harun said, it was senseless for the US to invade other countries just because members of the al-Qaeda movement had sought refuge in those countries.

All they need to do is supply the information they have to the governments of the countries concerned. Let that government deal with the situation.

The question arises, who are the terrorists in the US vocabulary? Are they just the al-Qaeda? What about the Japanese Red Army, the Maoists of Nepal, the Irish Republican Army, and many other groups in different parts of the world? he queried.

The former Supreme Court judge said one cannot help but come to the conclusion that the so-called US-led war against world terrorism is retaliation out of anger and shame over the shattered US invincibility caused by the Sept 11 attacks.

Dialogue needed

Also presenting at the function, UiTM professor of law Dr Shad Saleem Faruqi concluded that a genuine inter-civilisational dialogue is needed to understand the concept of terrorism in all its manifestations.

Shad said no nation should be allowed to tailor-make this concept to suit its own grand design, and Third World and Islamic views must be heard.

Shad said the war on terror (selective though it is) must be addressed to causes that breed terrorism and not just the symptoms as desperation breeds violence.

The US and Israel must stop confusing cause and effect. America, more than other nations, has a duty to heal the wounds that have sparked off so much hatred.

A purely military approach will, understandably, be attractive to the defence establishment and to the arms merchants in America, Britain and France. But, for a lasting solution, attention must turn to winning over peoples hearts and minds, he added.

Shad said nobody can deny that the murder of thousands of civilians on Sept 11 was a moral outrage.

But at the same time, it must be said that just as innocent Americans should not have been sacrificed for their governments political follies, the innocent Afghani farmers who were in the grip of a three-year drought and on the verge of mass starvation and who had probably never heard of the World Trade Center or the Pentagon, should not have been killed for their leaders obstinacy, he added.

Besides Harun and Shad, New Straits Times Press group editor-in-chief Abdullah Ahmad also presented a paper at the dialogue.