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Nothing gets Commonwealth chief Don McKinnon riled faster than saying the 53-nation group is a British colonial relic that is on its deathbed.
"People persist in writing Commonwealth obituaries but it has been around in one way, shape or form since 1887," the Commonwealth secretary-general told AFP in New Delhi on the first leg of a three-nation swing through South Asia.
"I don't think there's any international organisation that has been around that long and is still alive and kicking and working," said the New Zealander, a veteran politician, who has headed the organisation since 2000.
"We're constantly morphing to be relevant to our members," he said.
Right now, he said in an interview Wednesday, the Commonwealth is flexing for a big fight to ensure the Doha round of World Trade Organisation talks winds up being a "truly development round."
"We see a breakthrough in international trade for developing countries as the greatest means of fighting poverty - greater than anything else," the former New Zealand foreign minister said.
The Doha round, launched in the Qatari capital in 2001, is due to be completed by year end after missing its initial December 2004 deadline.
"Small countries, least developed countries, must really benefit from this round. If the barriers put up by the EU, US or Japan continue, you only create more poverty," he said.
And poor nations make up many of the Commonwealth's members.
The Commonwealth, made up of former British colonies and dependencies, is headed by Queen Elizabeth and embraces two billion of the world's population, including many of the least affluent.
Despite its geographic reach and wide membership, critics mock it as a "British-run club," a "talking shop" with no real influence in world affairs - an obsolete reminder of when Britain boasted the world's biggest empire.
But people who see it as a colonial throwback are off the mark, said McKinnon, now in his second four-year term as Commonwealth head.
In its low-key way, the Commonwealth exerts great influence because its membership is so "diverse and global," said McKinnon. "We're everywhere, in every part of the globe, we have every culture and ethnicity, we're non-threatening," said McKinnon, 66, who has a reputation as a genial consensus-builder and who travels constantly in his job.
One of the Commonwealth's biggest accomplishments, he said was in the mid-1990s when it inspired debt write-offs for highly indebted poor nations. "It was principally because Commonwealth finance ministers left a meeting and said, 'This is something we're going to push." "We have the ability to pick up a good idea and push it and get wider acceptance for it ... (partly) because we're also part of so many other organisations."
McKinnon, whose trip was due to take him to Bangladesh and Pakistan, said the group also has a big role to play in fostering good governance and democratic rule, noting to belong "you have to have won power through democracy."
On this journey, he was delivering the message that Pakistan General Pervez Musharraf must give up either the presidency or control over the armed forces by 2007, when his presidential term ends.
Commonwealth leaders have said Musharraf, who came to power in an army coup in 1999, must honour a pledge to relinquish his dual role by the end of 2007.
Far from being a "historical relic," he said, the Commonwealth continues to wield "moral authority." "We'll still be around in 50 years times - other organisations will have lived and died in that time," he predicted confidently.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2006

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