India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka are commemorating 50 years of diplomatic relations with Japan. How their respective circumstances have changed in that time! Today Japan is the biggest aid donor to South Asia (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka), several of which are marked by despair at home and disquiet abroad.
The United Nations University, in collaboration with other U.N. agencies in Japan, is organizing an international conference on "The United Nations and South Asia" on Monday and Tuesday. What happens there could shape the contours of the global community in the decades ahead. The sheer scale of the problems and the numbers of people involved are so huge as to pose an intimidating challenge to the core competence of the U.N. as the arena for global problem-solving.
South Asia by itself accounts for one-fifth of "We the peoples of the United Nations." Developments there cut across the major faultlines of the U.N. system on economic development, environmental protection, food and water security, democratic governance and human rights, nuclear war and peace, internal conflicts, and new security issues like AIDS and international terrorism.