Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [103]
I had lunch in the garden of the beautiful old house of the Governor at Peshawar. There, in the grounds of the house, I addressed a very large meeting of tribal leaders from the surrounding areas. Then I went by helicopter up to the Khyber Pass. I had been warned in advance that, as an honoured guest, I would be presented with the traditional sheep: I patted it appreciatively on the head and asked them to keep it for me. From there I went up to the frontier with Afghanistan itself, always busy despite its new status as a kind of dividing line between communism and freedom. I gazed across into the Soviet dominated lands beyond. A line of lorries was waiting to come through from Afghanistan to Pakistan. Relations with the Russian border guards on the Afghan side at this time were friendly enough. They were taking a very close interest in everything that was happening on our side. I reflected that Pakistan’s was an unsung story of heroism, taking in hundreds of thousands of refugees and bordering the world’s greatest military power. Though it was not a rich country, as I later remarked to President Zia, all the Pakistani people I saw looked healthy and well dressed. He said ‘no one is short of clothes or food, thank God.’ Britain was already providing aid for the refugees. But if Pakistan was to stand as a bulwark against communism it would need still more help from the West.
CANCÚN NORTH-SOUTH SUMMIT
I had successfully persuaded President Reagan in the course of our discussions in Washington of the importance of attending the Cancún summit which was held that October in Mexico. I felt that, whatever our misgivings about the occasion, we should be present, both to argue for our positions and to forestall criticism that we were uninterested in the developing world. The whole concept of ‘North-South’ dialogue, which the Brandt Commission had made the fashionable talk of the international community, was in my view wrong-headed. Not only was it false to suggest that that there was a homogeneous rich North which confronted a homogeneous poor South: underlying the rhetoric was the idea that redistibution of world resources rather than the creation of wealth was the way to tackle poverty and hunger. Moreover, what the developing countries needed more than aid was trade: so our first responsibility was — and still is — to give them the freest possible access to our markets. Of course, ‘North-South’ dialogue also appealed to those socialists who wanted to play down the fundamental contrast between the free capitalist West and the unfree communist East.
The conference’s joint chairmen were President López-Portillo, our Mexican host, and Pierre Trudeau who had stepped in for the Chancellor of Austria, prevented by illness from attending. Twenty-two countries were represented. We were staying in one of those almost overluxurious hotels which you so often seem to find in countries where large numbers of people are living in appalling poverty. Cancün was built in the 1970s, on a site (it is said) chosen by computer as likely to have maximum appeal to foreign tourists. The city was badly damaged by Hurricane Gilbert in 1988. So much for information technology.
There is no immodesty in saying that Mrs Gandhi and I were the two conference media ‘personalities’. India had just received the largest loan yet given by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) at less than the market rate of interest. She and others naturally wanted more cheap loans in the future. This was what lay behind the pressure, which I was determined to resist, to place the IMF and the World Bank directly under United Nations control. At one point in the proceedings I engaged in a vigorous discussion with a group of heads of government who could not see why I felt so strongly that the integrity of the IMF and the World Bank would inevitably be compromised by such a move, which would do harm rather than good to those who were advocating it. In the end I put the point more bluntly: I said that there was no way in which I was going to