The Forum 2000: Bridging Global Gaps conference was held in
Prague in October of this year. The Myanmar Times' editor-in-
chief, Ross Dunkley attended and wrote the following article for
his paper:

WHAT is the use of bringing together a diverse group of people from
throughout the world to openly discuss global issues?

It sounds like too much of a 'big picture' idea. How can such a
gathering make a difference to what is happening in the world? That
was the question on my mind when I first walked through the doors
of Municipal House in central Prague, the venue for an
international event known as Forum 2000 to discuss such a
challenging theme.

A mere 48 hours later the answer was clear: It is important to
bring our collective consciousness together. We witness daily the
dangers hovering above contemporary civilisation and we can and
must all play a part in bridging the gaps in today's globalising
world or risk losing it all.

Of course I write this as a westerner, a rich one on the scale of
global wealth. For most of the world's people life is a struggle
for food and clean water, good health, and an education. That is
the reality in much of Africa and in many parts of Asia and South
America.

Fortunately there are people who care and have the public profile
that enables them to promote causes of international importance.
Humans like the Czech Republic's former president, Vaclav Havel, a
king among men; Yohei Sasakawa, the discreet Japanese
philanthropist; Nobel laureate F.W. de Klerk, and philosopher
Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan.

"The people that meet here are in a certain way trying to cross the
horizons of their professions, of their scientific fields, of the
locations they come from, of their religions, and they attempt to
jointly contemplate upon what is behind all that, what cannot be
grasped by all that, and to find a kind of common language, or
common minimum bases, something on which they can always agree,"
said Mr Havel, a playwright and former dissident, who played a
leading role in the 1989 Velvet Revolution that overthrew the
communist regime in the former Czechoslovakia. On January l, 1993,
Czechoslovakia became two independent states: the Czech Republic
and Slovakia.

"It seems to me that this is a very important activity as it is a
reflection, and a reflection always precedes and has to precede any
conceivable remedy. None of us knows how this world will end up,
but it seems to me we all should do everything that we are able and
have the power to do in order to prevent civilisation from
overwhelming us, to prevent this creation of ours from overpowering
us, so that we do not become victims of somewhat a strange
formation that we have put in motion by ourselves and that we are
not able to stop," Mr Havel said.

"And all this requires that we meet and discuss things openly."