The war on terrorism is being handled badly and the world is in a worse state now than it was immediately after the Sept 11 attacks on the United States, Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad said late yesterday.

The veteran leader told the World Economic Forum's East Asia Economic Summit that fear and reactions to that fear were making the already regressing world economy shrink further.

"In the handling of modern terrorism we are not doing well," Mahathir said at a dinner at the summit, which is attended by some 800 delegates from 33 countries.

"Today, a year after Sept 11, 2001, the situation is really worse than immediately after. Not only do people fear flying and travelling, but travelling is being made deliberately more difficult by security checks."

The cost was "draining even the richest treasuries", he said.

Mahathir, whose deputy Abdullah Ahmad Badawi had to remove his shoes for a security check when he arrived in the US last month to address the United Nations general assembly, had a wry recommendation for Washington:

"Stop examining the shoes of hundreds of millions for the hundred or so terrorists, but look instead for the causes which move people, normal family people, to blast themselves to smithereens and eliminate the causes."

Curbing avarice

Mahathir, 76, who has said he was also subject to "rough" treatment by security agents when he visited the US in May for talks with President George W Bush, has been hailed for his support for the US-led war on terrorism.

But he has recently criticised what he calls "anti-Muslim hysteria".

He pointed out that the world had prospered after the Second World War when the victorious allies had "set out to resuscitate the world's economy, including those of their late enemies".

In contrast, he said, at the end of the Cold War "some among the victorious capitalists saw little need to curb their avarice any more".

Turning to a recurring theme of his 21 years in power, Mahathir urged Asia to "gang up against the greedy who are already shaping the world's economy and finance through the World Trade Organisation".

"What is being cooked up is a recipe for the exploitation of the world by the few and the greedy. They will destroy the world for a few billion dollars in their pockets." AFP