April 1997

LONDON– By the day the reports of the magnitude of the famine now overwhelming North Korea become both more vivid and more disturbing. Yet, as is so often the case, Mao Zedong’s dictum that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun” has enough truth in it to ask if the regime’s hold on power is in serious question. The regime could well survive whatever the cost in human suffering and devastating economic decline, always using as a stick to beat back the intrusions of the rest of the world the threat of abrogating its nuclear freeze agreement and adding nuclear weapons to its already sizeable arsenal of chemical and biological weapons. Yes or no. Is this how it will be, or will the regime just collapse one night as it did in East Germany? It is an unanswerable question and one can make a persuasive case either way. Thus...

“Vi slikker sårene og ligger lidt lavt. Vi har lært hvilke fredsbevarende operationer, vi ikke skal lade os skubbe ind i og hvilke mandater vi bør kunne kræve af medlemsstaterne. Reformer er på vej, der er en ny lederstil. Men jeg må minde Dem om at hvis USA fortsætter sin destruktive politik over for FN, så blir verden nødt til at finde på noget nyt inden fem år,” siger han og ser med et øjebliks forbitrelse ud over New York fra 37. etage som søgte han en vision dér på den anden side af smogen. Han er en af FNs vicegeneralsekretærer. Hvis FN havde den legitimitet, organisationen burde have, ville hans ord veje tungere end en stats- eller udenrigsministers. Som forbløffende mange FN-folk udstråler han kompetence, engagement og verbal præcision — forbløffende fordi der er sagt og skrevet så om “FNs inkompetence”. Cirkulerer man i det internationale opdager man snart...

“Vi repar oss, ligger lite lågt. Vi har lärt vilka typer av krig vi inte skall låta oss puffas in i. Vi vet nu vilka krav vi måste ställa på mandat och resurser från medlems-staterna, för att inte misslyckas. Reformer är på väg, det finns en ny ledarstil. Men jag måste påminna Er om att ifall USA fortsätter sin destruktiva politik gentemot FN, så kommer världen att tvingas hitta på något nytt inom fem år,” säger han och ser med ett ögonblicks förbittring ut över New York från 37 våningen som om han sökte en vision där bortom smogen. Han är en av FN:s vice generalsekreterare. Om FN hade den legitimitet organisationen borde ha, skulle hans ord väga tyngre än en stats- eller utrikesministers. Som förbluffande många FN-folk utstrålar han kompetens, engagemang och verbal precision &emdash; förbluffande därför att det har sagts och skrivits så mycket om “FN:s inkompetens”. Cirkulerar...

  Important international actors have considered the recent Croatian election free and fair — despite the fact that approximately 250,000 Serb-Croat citizens were unable to vote in their home country. These Serbs fled Croatia during its military operations in 1995 — the largest single case of ethnic cleansing during the wars. They are refugees in Bosnia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, sometimes referred to as “expellees,” but they remain legitimate citizens of Croatia. The United States, EU governments, the OSCE, the Council of Europe and various human rights organisations could have done politically in Croatia what they did in Bosnia: insist that refugees abroad be given an opportunity to influence the future of their homeland — to which many wish to return. The relatively young state of Croatia would hardly have brushed aside such advice from President Clinton (or the very active and human rights–concerned U.S. ambassador to Croatia,...

LONDON– “If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?” Shylock’s lament (in William Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice”) could be the epitaph for Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s beleaguered prime minister. Through the fog of Netanyahu’s war–a battle that appears to rage just as fiercely against liberal-minded Jews within israel as it does with the Palestinians outside–there is the unbending conviction of a man who believes absolutely that right is on the side of his deeply wronged people in the historic divide between Jew and Arab. To serve this cause he dispenses a bittersweet mixture of justice and revenge. As Golda Meir and Menacham Begin believed before him, not to seek compensation in blood and territory for three millenia of wrongs is in some profound way to forsake the...

LONDON– The rapid and dangerous way things are going suggest that Zaire could very easily, like its sideshow Angola, become the scene of an unending civil war between the two rival protagonists. In Zaire in the contest to succeed the dying president, Mobutu Sese Seko, we have in the capital Kinshasa, the ex-prime minister Etienne Tshisekedi, pulling out every stop to take over from his erstwhile boss. His charisma and organizational skills are formidable. Early this week he led a stunning strike which, for the breadth of a day, reduced the bustling, noisy, helter-skelter of life in the capital to an earie silence. In the west is his rival for power, Laurent Kabila, who by force of arms has captured the most populous half of the country, taken over the diamond and copper mines, the main source of the country’s wealth and is now advancing on Kinshasa. This is reminiscent of...

Idag den 13 april hålls ett ödesval i det Kroatien som förmodligen också står inför ett ledarskifte. Kommer valet att skapa förutsättningar för ett nytt Kroatien, utan nationalism och auktoritärt presidentstyre? Eller leder valet Kroatien landet än längre bort från “Europa” och från nödvändig nationella försoning efter kriget?De icke-kroatiska befolkningsgruppernas faktiska rättigheter i landet som helhet och i Östra Slavonien i synnerhet blir helt avgörande för Kroatiens möjligheter till demokratiska utveckling. Utan demokratiskt sinnelagKroatien har hittills saknat en demokratisk anda och en acceptabel politik för minoriteter och mänskliga rättigheter. Det civila samhället är svagt. Dock har Kroatien alltsedan krigsutbrottet 1991 haft Väst som beskyddare, särskilt Tyskland och USA.Många i väst har inte utan rasistiska undertoner betecknat folk på Balkan som primitiva och drivna politiska skurkar med ett “balkanskt” sinne för våld, lögn och dubbelmoral.Väst straffade den jugoslaviska och serbiska kampen mot Kroatiens självständighet &endash; men fördömde aldrig i handling den...

LONDON–It was Dag Hammarskjold, the greatest United Nations Secretary-General thus far, practitioner and contemplator all in one, who observed that the UN was not set up to take humanity to heaven, but to save it from hell With its new Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, the UN is once again feeling its way into a brave new world. It is not to be, however, the “new world order” of former U.S. president George Bush who, like his contempory, President Mikhail Gorbachev, saw at the end of the Cold War a chance to make the UN what it was meant to be when it was created out of the ashes of World War 2, a vigorous force in world peacekeeping. That prospect was dashed by civil war in Yugoslavia and Somalia, partly by the tenacity of the warring factions and partly by President Bill Clinton’s unprincipled undermining of the UN–in Somalia, after the...

By Nikolai S. Rozov Capitalism is now by no means a fashionable word. Its reality is more wide and complex than bourgeoisie-proletariat relations, wage-labour and surplus value (Marx), and evidently more hardy than Lenin’s ‘decaying imperialism’. To name our global world system capitalistic (instead of the neoliberal euphemism ‘free market economy’) is to emphasise the tremendous concentration of power and control over all kinds of world resources by ‘the Big Three’: modern transnational corporations (TNCs), main banking groups (with the New York – London – Tokyo axis), and governmental elites of the core states (G – 7). This global oligarchy uses institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Trade Organization (WTO), North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and other US-controlled military unions as instruments of its ‘Realpolitik’. The deplorable destiny of opponent countries, (such as the USSR, Cuba, Panama, Serbia, North Korea and Iraq) and the financial difficulties (collapse?!)...