NEW YORK — Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Archbishop Desmond Tutu were having a diplomatic face-off during a panel discussion on, basically, how to save the world from itself, the meta-theme of the Clinton Global Initiative.
You go first, Tutu motioned to Karzai. No, motioned Karzai, you go first.
"Quit being deferential," Clinton snapped in faux frustration. "You're wasting time."
It's hard to imagine anybody but a former president speaking to dignitaries that way, but the exchange captured the urgency and the informality of the three-day conference, which ends today. (The impish Tutu had brought the house down when he described Myanmar's persecuted political activist Aung San Suu Kyi as his "only pin-up.")
Later, everyone else's pin-up, Angelina Jolie, brought many to tears as she recounted recently meeting an 8-year-old Iraqi refugee in Syria. The boy had befriended a badly burned beggar, cleaning his wounds and selling tissues on the street to feed them both. When she asked him if he'd like to become a doctor one day, he demurred. "I can't," Jolie said he told her. "I have to sell tissues."
There was a point: Jolie had just announced a major partnership worth close to $150 million aimed at providing education for children in conflict zones around the world. "We need to help them be doctors," she said as her eyes reddened.
Not to be outdone, the man she described to reporters as "my uh, my uh, Brad" had also announced that he and philanthropist-producer Stephen L. Bing were ponying up $5 million each in a matching fund to create 150 affordable, sustainable homes in New Orleans' Katrina-ravaged Lower 9th Ward.
The Clinton Global Initiative is a festival of philanthropic and socially responsible investment. Heads of state, CEOs, billionaires, mere millionaires and celebrities join up with nongovernmental organizations and underfunded activists looking to solve four generally intractable world problems: climate change, poverty, health and education. Guests this year included former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, Nobel Peace laureate and Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus, former Irish President Mary Robinson, Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch.
Members, who must be invited, pay $15,000 a year and undergo rigorous screening. They are expected to make substantial commitments to one of the four areas of focus during the conference. Those who do not follow through are not invited back.
