By Ryohtaroh Satoh, Nikkei staff writer
Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said that countries of the so-called Global South will not throw their weight behind Russia or Ukraine in the ongoing war, despite the Group of Seven’s recent show of support for Kyiv.
Mahathir was speaking Friday at Nikkei’s Future of Asia forum. The Global South including “Brazil, India and Indonesia, these people do not want war,” he said. “They will not be supportive of the war between Russia and Ukraine.”
The 97-year-old veteran politician spoke of watching Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to the G-7 in Hiroshima last weekend. He said it felt as if the rich economies were “trying to persuade the Global South that they should support the war.”
While Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida chose Hiroshima as a symbolic venue amid Russia’s nuclear threats, the developing nations of the southern part of the globe may have taken a different message from the city once devastated by a U.S. atomic bomb in 1945.
“It makes the South feel that nuclear war is too damaging and we should not get involved in wars,” he said.
Mahathir warned of the danger of a “third world war.”
“I don’t think you can make Russia surrender. They will fight to the end and maybe in desperation, they may use nuclear weapons,” he said. “If you have a nuclear war, the whole world is going to suffer.”
Mahathir floated the idea of creating a “world government” to tackle international problems such as the COVID-19 pandemic or climate change, pointing out that vaccine supplies were concentrated in developed countries. The international community should “restructure the United Nations or set up a kind of world government which would look at certain international problems that are faced by the whole world,” he said.
He also stressed the need for Asia to “free ourselves from Western domination in the economic field as well as in the political field.”
Mahathir suggested creating an East Asian currency for trade, arguing that this would blunt the influence of the U.S. dollar. “We need to have more meetings of Eastern [Asian] countries in order to achieve some kind of consensus,” he added.
On his own health condition, he said he had no serious issues at the moment. “I did have heart problems. … I don’t have disease like cancer,” he said.
Mahathir shared his usual advice to the audience. “Being active is very important,” he said. “Active life, evolving both your mind and body, you will be able to survive a longer time.”
Additional reporting by Iyo Senga and Maya Shimizu.
Source: Nikkei Asia. 29 May 2023