9 Lives

One grew up in a Harem, another in the poverty of the Andean highlands, another with an uncle because his parents were suspected of sedition. Some tripped into power; others had ideas that inexorably elevated them to the forefront. The common denominator is that each is a defining force at the end of the 20th century in his or her region--and often well beyond--and symbolizes a new approach or solution to a critical issue of the1990s. Each is, in a word, a leader. These nine wield disproportionate influence. They are providing ideas and energy for a world in transition and inspiring others to follow suit.

MARTIN LEE

Martin Lee, leader of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party, never intended to become a politician, but family history made it almost inevitable.

During the 1920s, Lee’s father studied in France with a Chinese student named Chou En-lai. Both politically active, they once spent 24 hours heatedly debating their nation’s future. The session ended at dawn with a handshake, but no agreement. “They respected each other but were never able to convert each other,” Lee recalls of a favorite family tale that would divert the course of his life a half century later.

Lee’s father went back to China and rose through the ranks of the Kuomintang’s Nationalist Army to become a general. Chou returned to found the Communist Party at the side of Mao Tse-tung. Lee was 12 when Mao’s Long March overran the Nationalists in 1949. His family was on the last flight out after Communist troops crossed the Yangtze River. The Lees settled in Hong Kong.

But Chou En-lai did not forget Lee’s father. Every year until Chou’s death an emissary arrived from Beijing to appeal to him to return to help rebuild and lead China. In the early 1980s, as discussions opened to transfer Britain’s last colony to Chinese control, Lee finally accepted the offer his father had refused. As chairman of the Hong Kong Bar Assn., he agreed to visit China. His host was Deng Xiaoping, one of Chou’s heirs.

Lee also agreed to help Beijing write a new constitution for Hong Kong. “My father told me that the Communists wanted to use me. I thought long and hard,” he says in his measured, whisper-soft voice. “But one reason Hong Kong was successful and China failed was because of rights enshrined in the rule of law. At least I had an opportunity to influence China for Hong Kong’s sake.”

Lee insisted on and then crafted Hong Kong’s new bill of rights. His relationship with Beijing ended, however, with the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising. Appalled by the crackdown, Lee shed his conservative lawyerly suit for a protest headband and T-shirt to lead hundreds of thousands of protesters through Hong Kong’s streets. China fired him from the constitutional committee. But the experience galvanized Lee, one of a growing number of figures who, through grit, daring and often their own resources, are fighting for democracy in Asia.

Lee launched Hong Kong’s first political party and led it to sweeping victories in the first democratic legislative elections in 1991 and 1995 despite China’s meddling and money. He quickly became Hong Kong’s most popular politician.

When China absorbs Hong Kong this Tuesday, both the legislature and the bill of rights will be scrapped. But Lee is not surrendering. He is stumping the globe, appealing to governments and anyone else who will listen to look at the principle of, not just the profit in, dealing with the world’s most populous state. “Governments all seem to be looking at one thing: the trade pie,” he charges. “They are willing to sacrifice the human rights of 6.5 million people in Hong Kong for the market rights to 1.2 billion in China.

“With the support of the outside world, we finally won basic human rights,” Lee adds with as much frustration as anger. “Now Hong Kong is going to be annulled. We will disappear, and with it will go our freedoms. Where is the outside world now? Where is its outrage?”

Although 118 of the world’s 191 countries are in varying stages of democratic rule, vast numbers have limited or no political rights in the 1990s. Asia--from Syria on the Mediterranean and Uzbekistan on the Aral Sea to Singapore on the South China Sea--is home to the most and the mightiest of the world’s undemocratic regimes. Twenty of 37 countries have yet to make the transition, according to Human Rights Watch reports.

Lee also challenges the new conventional wisdom of the post-Cold War world: that democracy can’t penetrate Confucian societies. “Democracy is not just a Western concept. Asians are no different from anyone else. We need and want as many freedoms as Americans or Europeans,” he says. “The fire of democracy has ignited people. It may take a long time and be more difficult than we ever thought, but there’s no going back.”

BORIS NEMTSOV

By the time he was 25, Boris Nemtsov was already heralded as one of the Soviet Union’s most promising physicists--so gifted that he wrote his doctoral thesis without taking course work, so respected that when he started a movement to block a nuclear power plant in Gorky, construction stopped.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the boyish scientist with a dark curly mane and perpetually loosened tie was appointed governor of Gorky. His mandate: Convert Russia’s third-largest city and the surrounding region, the hub of the Soviet military-industrial complex and closed to outsiders for 70 years, into a viable center for free market and international trade.

By then Nemtsov was all of 32.

He began by restoring Gorky’s pre-Soviet name of Nizhny Novgorod. Then, without a whit of economic experience, Nemtsov turned the region into Russia’s most daring and successful laboratory of reform.

He did so well that in March, when Nemtsov was just 37, Russian President Boris Yeltsin appointed him first deputy prime minister, a post charged with directing Russia’s transition to a market economy. Yeltsin was recognizing the accomplishments Nemtsov had already engineered in Nizhny Novgorod, where factories for nuclear submarines, MIG warplanes, armored vehicles and radar were sold off or converted into plants for vacuum cleaners, cars, appliances and televisions. To encourage the creation of small businesses, state-owned trucks were sold to individual entrepreneurs who had only well-conceived plans as their main collateral. To prevent hunger--and disillusionment--locally made televisions and cars were bartered for food from other regions, and 100,000 small plots were allocated for city dwellers to buy and cultivate. One of Nemtsov’s most original schemes was to sell certificates for as much as $450 for new phones with the promise of a connection within six months--down from a multi-year wait--or buyers would be paid a 1% per day penalty. Certificates were snapped up, creating funds to renovate a decrepit system.

“The most important result is making people believe they can themselves achieve results they want,” says Nemtsov, who has been mentioned as a possible presidential candidate, an idea that he dismisses. “We are proving that Russians are not some sort of lost people without hope. We are showing they are worthy of a better life and can have it.”

Nemtsov’s rise reflects the growing dependence of new democracies on economic innovation--and the way the very concept of democracy has expanded to include the right to prosperity.

In virtually all of Eastern Europe and the 15 former Soviet republics, the uneven growth of free markets produced rampant new poverty as well as a wealthy new elite. The gap between rich and poor in most countries actually widened. In Poland and Lithuania, economic factors led voters to return Communists to power in the mid-1990s.

The stakes may be the highest in Russia, where industrial production plummeted 60% and gross domestic product dropped 40% in the first five years of democracy. More than 30 million people fell below the poverty line. And men’s life expectancy dropped from the mid-60s to late 50s.

“Many places will get worse before they get better--if they get better,” Nemtsov warns. “This will be the real test of which democracies endure.”

Nizhny Novgorod, an area the size of South Carolina, is a model of prosperity. The rapid pace of reform--designed in part to prevent corruption and organized crime from cornering the market, a problem in other Russian regions--has converted more than 80% of state enterprises, including many strategic industries other countries still refuse to cede.

Nemtsov was willing to challenge the political status quo. Before the 1996 election, he organized a petition signed by millions of Nizhny Novgorod’s residents demanding that Yeltsin end the war with Chechnya--a move that would have been unheard of under Soviet rule. “For all the things we have achieved today,” Nemtsov declares, “history will say that the real success was changing the consciousness of the people.”

VICTOR HUGO CARDENAS

Victor Hugo Cardenas was born in a mud hut in Bolivia’s windy and breath-sapping Andean plateaus 14,000 feet above sea level. During the 1950s and 1960s, he grew up in the poverty still prevalent among many Aymara Indians--educated in a schoolhouse with one teacher for seven grades and living without electricity, running water or heat to ward off the bone-biting altitude chill even in summer.

Cardenas defied five centuries of institutional discrimination with the help of his father and a strategic name change.

“My father saw how indigenous people were unable to break through the automatic rejection that began with their Indian names,” he explains. “So he named me after his favorite writer and added a Spanish surname. My father,” he adds in a deep resonant voice, “wanted me to be able to get into college.”

He did. And with extra tutoring from his father, who was that lone schoolteacher for seven grades in the rural highlands, Cardenas became fluent in five languages and went on to teach linguistics, launch a human rights campaign and establish the first Indian political party in Bolivia. In a country with a 65% indigenous population, Cardenas quickly became so popular that Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, a leading presidential candidate, pulled him onto the ticket in 1993--and won.

Vice President Cardenas is the highest-ranking Indian to take office anywhere in the Americas. His rise to power reflects a global trend. Indigenous people are among the world’s most energetic new political and social forces. Cardenas’ election coincided with the U.N. Year of Indigenous People, highlighted by a summit the year before of more than 600 indigenous groups, from Australia’s aborigines to Zaire’s Pygmies. A year earlier, Rigoberta Menchu, a Quiche Maya activist fighting repression of indigenous people by Guatemala’s military, won the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize. In the 1990s, activism in Latin America, home to between 20 million and 40 million indigenous people, led the Organization of American States to draft a Declaration of Indigenous Rights and create a special fund for development. Colombia’s 1991 constitution enshrined guarantees for 82 Indian groups and opened the way for election of Indians to both the House and Senate. In Guatemalan elections last year, Indians won 10% of congressional seats and control of 40 urban areas. Chile legislated legal and economic benefits through its new National Corporation for Indigenous Development. And the presidents of Peru and Ecuador both courted the indigenous vote to win.

The shift is dramatic. Cardenas’ parents were not allowed to vote until the year he was born, 1952. Today, one in four elected local officials in Bolivia is Indian, in no small part because of Cardenas. He sponsored the most sweeping human-rights legislation on the continent, opening up Bolivia’s new democracy to the election of indigenous leaders, redistributing resources beyond Bolivia’s three main cities to farmers and peasants, stipulating that diverse cultures learn each other’s languages and making discrimination illegal.

But the battles are not over.

Last year, a ritzy La Paz hotel turned away an Aymara woman wearing traditional braids, bowler hat and full, multilayered skirt. Cardenas responded by escorting his wife, Lydia, who once had to quit teaching because she refused to give up traditional dress, to the hotel, forcing the staff and the nation to focus on ongoing petty discrimination.

“Discrimination against language and dress and color and customs is not something fated that can’t be gotten rid of,” says Cardenas, who himself wears a deep beige vicuna shawl across his business suit as a reminder of his roots. “But creating the conditions for a truly multi-ethnic society, where everyone has an equal chance at every job, takes longer.” That includes the likelihood of his winning the country’s top spot.

“My children’s children,” he adds with a wry grin, “will probably have a greater chance.”

ABDURRAHMAN WAHID

Abdurrahman Wahid’s life is a family tradition.

Both his grandfathers were prominent Muslim scholars with their own seminaries. Both were active in Indonesia’s anti-Dutch nationalist movement. His father, Wahid Hashim, was a noted Muslim scholar and avid nationalist who became minister of Religious Affairs.

Not surprisingly, Wahid is a prominent Muslim scholar and a powerful political influence in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim state. Yet when Wahid talks about his childhood, his memories are filled with Jules Verne, Snow White and Cinderella. Tales of student days with the great Islamic scholars of Cairo and Baghdad are dotted with quotes of Western fixtures from Kennedy to Khrushchev, Jewish philosopher Chaim Potok to Catholic Liberation theologian Leonardo Boff. And he loves Beethoven.

Wahid is the antithesis of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, who preached against “Westoxication” of any and all things Islamic. He prefers evolution to revolution and tolerance rather than confrontation with other cultures. And while the gaunt and often-haunting Khomeini exploited anger, Wahid, rotund and almost blind, gently prods, cajoles and entertains followers as he urges them to adapt.

The differences are critical. Wahid, who can fill sports stadiums when he appears in public, symbolizes one of the most profound ideological developments of the mid-1990s--an Islamic reformation that seeks to modernize the faith.

“It is time to refresh our religion. The ever-changing human situation requires Islam to undergo perpetual reinterpretation. Religious laws must be changed to be responsive to the values and human rights now accepted universally,” he says. “Otherwise, we risk religious wars in the next century. Islam could become an obstacle to world peace.”

From Tunis to Tehran, Wahid is part of a new breed of clerics and philosophers tackling fundamental issues the Christian reformation began grappling with 400 years ago, a turning point that paved the way for the modern era and the greatest period of change in the Western world. Islam, he says, should be liberating, not limiting. Pluralist, not authoritarian. Accepting of diversity, not just a singular truth.

“I am trying to humanize, liberalize and democratize the interpretation of Islam,” he explains. “Islam and democracy can be reconciled. For example, I have never tasted a drop of beer--by choice as a Muslim, not because of state laws. Democracy can help us develop awareness to be good Muslims by choice, not by force.” Wahid transmits his message through Nahdlathul Ulama, or Renaissance of Islamic Scholars, which, with 35 million members, may be the largest Muslim organization in the world.

Although he once pledged not to meddle in politics in exchange for freedom to engage in social activism, Wahid is increasingly shaping events in a country ruled ruthlessly for three decades by Gen. Suharto.

Wahid’s main constituents are the poor. He pioneered community projects that created about 8,000 schools, dozens of self-help outlets, credit facilities for small traders and farmers, women’s training programs, public health and child nutrition clinics--all providing alternatives to educate and empower.

As in the Christian reformation, his boldest position may be on the issue of secularism and the state. Islam is the only major monotheistic religion that offers rules by which to govern society as well as a set of spiritual beliefs. Again, unlike Khomeini, Wahid advocates separation of mosque and state.

“If Islam needs state power to shape people’s lives, then it is not a religion anymore,” he says. “It becomes an authority, and no religion can survive as an authority.”

WARGANI MAATHAI

Wargani Maathai has been beaten, detained more than a dozen times and teargassed by Kenyan police. She’s been charged with contempt of court and subversion of the state, for which she went to jail. She’s been publicly vilified by Kenya’s parliament and by President Daniel Arap Moi. And that doesn’t include losing her job and her husband.

All for the love of trees.

It started innocently enough. On Environment Day in 1977, Maathai transplanted seven seedlings from her backyard to a Nairobi park. The occasion marked the launch of Green Belt, an organization designed to provide poor women with a source of income while also reforesting the East African countryside.

The movement was small, the idea behind it almost an accident. The daughter of rural farmers and the first Kenyan woman with a doctoral degree, in biology, Maathai came up with the reforestation scheme after being roped onto the National Council of Women on a project addressing female poverty. She identified a link between it and a disrupted cycle of nature centered on the loss of indigenous trees.

“European settlers imported exotic species, such as eucalyptus and pines, that altered nature’s balance, our biodiversity,” says Maathai, with the enthusiasm of a convert. “The trees used for fuel and to build declined, as did the butterflies, birds, frogs, antelope, monkeys and other animals that lived among them. So much damage was done that we still don’t know how to cultivate some of the indigenous trees.”

The problem is widespread. As much as half of Africa’s forests have been felled in the 20th century, creating wastelands as well as droughts, famine and even wars. (The ongoing crises of Somalia and Sudan are but two recent examples.) Erosion is so chronic in many places that any prospect of self-sufficiency is a generation or more away. Regenerating the soil is a starting point for any turnaround. Meanwhile, women account for as much as two-thirds of all poverty worldwide, especially in rural areas.

The two problems often converge, as in Kenya, where 70% of farmers are women fighting to survive off the land. When Green Belt was launched, the country had less than 3% of the forest cover it had before it became a British territory in the 19th century. To begin reversing the cycle, Maathai badgered schools into letting her show children how to plant “green belts” of indigenous trees--leafy acacias, gnarly baobabs and symmetric cedars. As enticement she offered four cents of sponsors’ money for each tree that survived beyond three months--a pittance by itself but worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to 50,000 women who have now planted more than 15 million trees.

“The goal is to enrich women by showing them how to enrich the earth, by which they solve other problems like poverty and malnutrition,” Maathai says. “Everyone gains.”

Green Belt has made Maathai Africa’s foremost environmentalist--she’s often referred to as “Mother Earth.” Her work is a model of sustainable development, the doctrine that promotes regeneration of everything consumed. And that’s where the trouble started.

“Fighting for the environment inevitably means coming into conflict with politicians,” Maathai says with a rueful laugh. When the government unveiled plans for Africa’s tallest building, a 60-story glass skyscraper to be erected on Nairobi’s last park and most popular recreation site, Maathai challenged it. Parliamentarians demanded that Green Belt be banned. The president’s office blasted her. But the public pressure she mobilized led project financiers to pull out, and the park was saved.

“At a time [when] space is becoming so precious, we need to differentiate between what we are able to do and what we need to do,” she says.

Maathai decided to challenge the government on its own turf. She resigned from the University of Nairobi to run for parliament--a move that meant taking on her ex-husband, already a member of parliament. He left Maathai when she became “politically inexpedient,” she says. But the government disqualified her running on a technicality she still disputes. And the university refused to take her back.

“It may have been a blessing,” she says. Green Belt became her full-time profession and has since expanded into more than two dozen African countries.

But Maathai, who often wears Reeboks under batik dresses of bold African prints, refuses to concede politically. She continues to go after Moi, one of the continent’s longest-reigning dictators, whom she has publicly charged with ethnic cleansing, repression and electoral fraud.

“Green Belt is not just about preserving trees,” Maathai says. “It is about preserving the dignity of people.”

THABO MBEKI

As a radical, Thabo Mbeki has an impeccable pedigree. He was only 7 in the 1950s when he was dispatched to an uncle in Transkei, one of South Africa’s nine black homelands, because his firebrand mother was among the first to be banned for Communist ties and his father was on the verge of arrest for sedition.

By 14, Mbeki was mobilizing militant student protests. At 19, he fled the country to do the same abroad. In his 20s, he joined the Communist Party and trained at Moscow’s Lenin Institute. In his 30s, he was elected to the party’s Politburo and central committee.

Yet today, Mbeki, now in his 50s, is Mr. Capitalist, the primary advocate of privatization, fiscal responsibility and foreign investment. A dapper figure, he is well-known for his tailored flannel suits, white-collared shirts and designer ties. He now travels the world to sell the new South Africa to foreign investors. Among his duties is co-chairing the U.S. South Africa Binational Commission; the co-chair is Vice President Al Gore.

“Times change,” Mbeki muses with a chuckle, pulling on his trademark pipe. “None of us ever really thought we’d be in power.”

Mbeki, South Africa’s deputy president, last year officially became heir apparent to Nelson Mandela, the charismatic model of leadership for the entire Third World. Yet an even more daunting challenge is likely to make or break Mbeki’s reputation: He has to make South Africa work economically after decades of financial erosion.

The stakes supersede South Africa. The hope for much of Africa is that its southernmost state will become an engine that spurs and directs growth throughout the continent, the world’s poorest. “One of the biggest challenges for us is creating conditions for development and investment--meaning rules and regulations, political stability and democracy--so that we can say Africa is attractive not just because it is a good tourist attraction but because it offers the possibility of taking off in the modern way,” Mbeki says. “We want to remove the wall around the African ghetto and be part of the world. If we succeed, it will change the belief that it’s not worth putting money into this continent because Africa is destined to fail.”

Many of the odds are against it. As much as 40% of South Africa’s black labor force is without formal employment. The country produced 100,000 new jobs in 1995--but 400,000 entered the job market. Thirty-five of 43 sub-Saharan countries have experienced serious economic problems during the past decade, and capital investment in the region has plummeted by more than 50%. Nearly a third of about 500 million people face food shortages, while nearly 6 million are refugees.

Because of Africa’s instability, Mbeki warns that time is of the essence. “We can’t have 10 years down the road a society that looks in its main features quite unchanged,” he says. “If it does, then we are asking for a rebellion.”

FATIMA MERNISSI

Born to privilege in the medieval city of Fez, Fatima Mernissi grew up within the high walls of a Moroccan harem, where three generations of women--including cousins, divorced aunts, a widowed grandmother who was one of nine co-wives, and a maid abducted by slave-traders in Sudan--kept busy with beauty rituals, purloining a key to the forbidden radio and creating little plays of what they imagined the outside world to be.

As a child in the 1940s, Mernissi was told by her father that the sexes had rightly been segregated by God. Harmony exists only when each group respects the prescribed limits of the other, he warned her. Trespassing would lead only to sorrow.

Mernissi instead listened to her mother. Though illiterate, she agonized over their “absurd” life and tenderly admonished her daughter never to be one of those women who ally with or succumb to men and are “more dangerous than men.” Mernissi escaped the cloistered existence of purdah through education, eventually earning a Brandeis University doctorate, a transition recorded in her sixth book, “Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood.”

Today the Moroccan sociologist and professor at Mohammed V University in Rabat is the Arab world’s leading feminist and in the forefront of the one of region’s most tumultuous trends. Mernissi plays a leading role in an emerging network of Muslim women who are actively claiming their rights.

These women call on governments to change family law, which codifies gender discrimination. They pool their skills for vocational training. They hold mock tribunals showing women how to build cases against abusive husbands or employers. They set up alternative lines of information to circumvent the male-dominated media. And some are even reinterpreting Islamic law.

“Men have no monopoly on knowing what is right,” Mernissi declares.

And women are making serious headway.

They are parliamentarians for the first time in the 1990s in Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, the Palestinian Authority and unified Yemen, while female parliamentary representation has grown to significant numbers in Bangladesh (30), Egypt (10), Indonesia (63), Malaysia (15), Syria (24) and Tunisia (6). Even Iran’s Majlis has more women (13) than the United States has in its Senate (9). The only opposition Yasser Arafat faced for the Palestinian presidency was from a female political activist.

Some of the most aggressive campaigns to change the gender status quo in the 1990s are taking place in the developing world. Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Burkina Faso, India, Nepal, North Korea, the Philippines, Tanzania and Uganda now reserve seats or require that women make up a minimum percentage in parliament. India recently passed a similar law on the local level that brought a million women into power. In five of these countries, Islam is the largest or second-largest religion.

Looking back, Mernissi blames neither Allah nor Islam for repressing women. Current practices, she argues with crisp certainty, are the product of Koranic words misinterpreted and manipulated by despots, sheiks and husbands over the centuries. Indeed, Islam’s original egalitarian values are actually the best vehicle for change, she argues.

“Equality is not a foreign idea. It does not need to be imported from other cultures. It is at the heart of Islam, too,” she explains. “Remember, 20% of the hadith [traditions] of Islam come from Ayesha, wife of the prophet.”

Flamboyant in both words and appearance, her attire on a typical day mixing the deep ochers and aquas of North Africa, Mernissi dismisses the current Islamic revival as the product of a minority speaking with a disproportionately loud voice.

“Conservative Muslim politicians screaming that women’s equality is alien to Muslim tradition are like those who protested a century ago that banning colonial slavery was anti-Islamic,” she says.

The movement, however, is about more than equality.

“We are not just breaking down barriers between Muslim culture and a universal culture,” Mernissi adds. “We are breaking down the idea of barriers altogether.”

BERNARD KOUCHNER

As a young French gastroenterologist working with the Red Cross in 1968, Bernard Kouchner was so horrified by atrocities he saw in Nigeria’s grisly civil war that he broke the oath of neutrality and silence required of volunteers and called a press conference, where he lashed out at Nigeria’s genocide of its rebellious Ibo population. He has been on a tear ever since.

Condemning both Africa’s warlords and the outside world’s heartlessness, Kouchner carried sacks of rice ashore in Somalia for famine victims. To draw attention to Vietnamese boat people stranded in the South China Sea, he packed a ship full of doctors, celebrities and journalists and sailed out to treat them. To warn the world about the Kurdish crisis, he trekked into northern Iraq during the Gulf War. And to aid victims of civil strife, he led clandestine medical teams to Afghanistan, El Salvador and Lebanon in defiance of their governments.

“At some point, you can no longer stand back and wait for action or approval,” Kouchner says with impatient intensity. “The world too often operates on inertia. Sometimes you have to do things to get the process started.”

Or say things. Through a series of humanitarian groups he founded, Kouchner has also become deeply enmeshed in local politics, from demonstrating in Cambodia against Khmer atrocities to publicly lambasting Ethiopia’s Marxist regime for obstructing food aid.

Kouchner reflects the growing role of non-government organizations (NGOs). At a time when foreign aid is being slashed and governments are wary of getting stuck in quagmires, NGOs are leading efforts to heal, feed, clothe and shelter victims. As much as 40% of U.S. aid will be channeled through NGO projects by the end of the decade. (Half of World Bank loans already are--up from 8% in the 1970s and 1980s.)

Among the most prominent is Doctors Without Borders, which Kouchner founded in 1971 but left in 1979 because of internal disputes over his brash style. Still Hollywood-handsome in his 50s, Kouchner has also been criticized for showmanship. Yet Doctors Without Borders remains the world’s largest private medical relief organization, with 2,000 doctors of 45 nationalities active in almost 70 countries.

Now, Kouchner is calling on the world to recognize the “right of interference” to save helpless victims, even if the states in conflict reject it. He advocates an early warning system synergized with relief groups on the ground. And to create leverage over militias and outlaw regimes that increasingly create flash points in the post-Cold War era, he wants the world to mobilize a multinational rapid deployment force. Already, the U.N. General Assembly has adopted two of Kouchner’s proposals--establishing guidelines for aid in natural disasters and mandating warring parties to set up access corridors for relief aid. “At the end of the 20th century I think the world is ready to protect peace and human rights. We must add the right of humanitarian intervention to the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” he urges.

Former U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali once called Kouchner an “unguided missile,” but then espoused Kouchner’s concept of interference in dealing with the U.N. force in Somalia. The use of force as preventive diplomacy, however, remains controversial. “I don’t want to send in troops, but we need them available in order not to have to send them,” says Kouchner. “We need a force as a deterrent, to let the warring parties know we are serious.”

JAIME LERNER

In the 1960s, architecture student Jaime Lerner set out to save Curitiba. The budding Brazilian metropolis 400 miles south of So Paulo had given his parents, Polish Jews, refuge on the eve of World War II. He was born shortly thereafter. “I owed this city something and I wanted to save it--before it was too late,” Lerner says.

The adversary, in his eyes, was the automobile.

“Our city leaders were trying to modernize streets and tear down buildings to make way for the car. And I’ve always been suspicious about traffic engineers who care only about transport and urban growth. Traffic engineers can kill a city,” he says. “But a tendency does not have to be a destiny.”

So Lerner mobilized a group of maverick young architects and engineers who orchestrated a political takeover of Curitiba. By 1971, at age 33, he was mayor. Abolishing cars in key parts of town and converting thoroughfares into parks were among his first acts. Unable to afford the real thing, he built an ersatz subway above-ground that reorganized the city on seven axes linked to major services--and within a few years carried 85% of all Curitiba commuters, 1.8 million people daily. But Lerner’s urban revolution did not stop there. During the next 25 years, he tackled problems now faced by hundreds of cities worldwide.

Almost half the world’s people live in cities--up from 10% in 1900. Many are bursting at the seams. More than 100 cities boast more than 1 million residents; three dozen “megacities,” such as Los Angeles, have topped 5 million residents. And more than 17 “hypercities” claim populations of more than 10 million, larger than half the world’s countries. A third of city dwellers now live in substandard housing and 40% do not have safe water or sanitation. At least 600 million urbanites live in health- and life-threatening environments; half are children. But Lerner’s solutions may help save the modern city.

Curitiba’s recycling program, for example, trades food for garbage and handles 70% of the city’s trash; recycling in American cities averages 10%. At 200 day-care centers, children for their science projects grow many of the foods they eat at lunch and earn funds to pay for their care from handicrafts made in art classes. Old buses have been recycled into mobile classrooms for the poor and adults. The United Nations last year pronounced Curitiba the model city of the 1990s.

Lerner says these solutions come from the bottom, not the top.

“We are a society becoming used to quick answers. Credit cards give us money. Faxes give us messages. E-mail gives us answers. In this respect, central and state governments live in the Stone Age,” he says in an airy office crafted from used wooden telephone poles and glass. “The only place you can provide quick answers is at the local level.”

Ironically, Lerner has now taken on a bigger mandate. In 1995, he was elected governor of Parana state, with its 371 towns and cities (Curitiba is its capital). His latest idea is to send more than 7,000 teachers to retreats on culture, theater, music, philosophy and physics featuring the finest talent in Brazil. The goal is to stimulate knowledge and enthusiasm that will be conferred to students.

“Once again, people told me I was crazy,” Lerner says. “[But] you can’t change a country just by economic measures. To have the commitment of the population, you have to offer solutions that respect their needs and wants, but also that inspire.”