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    WTO chief given cold-shoulder treatment at APEC
    October 19, 2003


    World Trade Organisation (WTO) director general Supachai Panichpakdi has been given the cold shoulder at the APEC meeting in his native Thailand, excluded from talks and failing even to meet the host, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

    WTO chiefs are usually invited to the meetings of foreign and trade ministers from the 21-nation Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) grouping, but this year he was left off the guest list.

    "APEC has nothing to do with the WTO, it's a different framework. APEC has its own secretary general," Thaksin told reporters recently.

    "We have never met with each other so I don't know how I can hold discussions with him."

    Commerce Minister Adisai Bodharamik was even more blunt, saying Supachai was not invited because he was not needed at the forum, which also includes a leaders' summit.

    "To me it's not quite productive if he is to be here, and people are only going to ask him why the multilateral trading negotiations in Cancun, Mexico, collapsed," he said.

    Supachai served as Thailand's commerce minister when the opposition Democrat party was in power in the 1990s, while Thaksin is the leader of the Thai Rak Thai party which defeated the Democrats in January 2001 elections.

    Supachai is seen as a possible future leader of the Democrats, which is currently languishing on the opposition benches, raising the prospect that he could one day try to turf Thaksin out of Thailand's top job.

    Thai media reports said that apart from the political gulf separating them, tensions between the two men erupted after an APEC trade ministers meeting in north-eastern Thailand in June.

    The Nation newspaper said Commerce Minister Adisai Bodharamik was pressured by other APEC members to elevate Supachai's remarks to the start of the meeting instead of the end as originally scheduled.

    Despite being excluded from the main APEC events, Supachai is lobbying hard from the sidelines to revive world trade negotiations which broke down spectacularly in Cancun.

    He will be holding meetings with the leaders of some of APEC's largest economies including US President George W Bush but face-to-face talks with Thaksin are not on the cards, his spokesman said.

    Asked how he felt about being left out of the ministerial talks, Supachai was diplomatic.

    "I really would rather not address that," he told AFP, despite being pressed for a response.

    "Let me not comment. I am trying to do my work. I am meeting with the ministers here. I think APEC has its own agenda and I'm trying to do my work, and I'm meeting the ministers and getting things done," he said.

    "I think we're making some useful discussions here in Bang:-)n the fringes of APEC."

    The Nation newspaper said the exclusion "has raised speculation among APEC members about whether Thai politics has taken precedence over this high-level meeting, or the government has little appetite for building a global economic multilateral system. Or both."

    -AFP


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