July 1997

LONDON– There is a tide turning in the affairs of Iran, the land of megalomaniacal mullahs, passionate Islamic fundamentalism and secret nuclear bomb research where America’s proven role as the Great Satan is an inviolable text that until now has guided every move of the ruling elite. Item 1. An advertisement in Monday’s International Herald Tribune by the devoted sister of the late Shah of Iran, overthrown by a popular revolt led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, ending a monarchial system dating back 2,500 years. For years the Shah’s sister has taken advertising space to denounce the rulers of Iran. Now she commends on Iran’s recent presidential election thus, “Iranians have overwhelmingly voted for personal freedom, political democracy, separation of religion and government, economic development and peaceful foreign policy.” This is an endorsement of the new president, given its source, of rather stunning and unexpected proportions. She concludes ringingly, “This is...

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LONDON– How quickly the spotlight has turned from the expansion of NATO to the expansion of the European Union. But this is where it should have been concentrated all along. If the former Warsaw Pact eastern European members want security AND economic well-being this is the place to find it, all in one. President Boris Yeltsin says he sees that too; he wants Russia to win its own place within the European Union. The debate over NATO expansion has been a dangerous distraction from the main task. At the least a distraction, more likely something worse, a provocation, a running sore, that could in post-Yeltsin Russia lead to a new era of east-west confrontation. Left to their own devices, the West European leaders would never have thought up the expansion of NATO. It was foisted on them by the hubris of their friend, the American superpower which, in turn, had been...

Tredje klasses propaganda er gennemskuelig og får folk at tænke selv — “tror de jeg er helt idiot?” Den skaber sin modreaktion. Anden klasses propaganda er meget bedre, her opdager folk ikke at de er objekt for manipulation. Første klasses propganda er den mest effektive — hér er folk ikke blot uvidende om at de manipuleres, de finder situationen naturlig, nyder den, det er show og underholdning og “Guud hvår går det godt”. En sådan helt fed dag var det forleden da De forenede Staters præsident Bill Clinton kom til byen og holdt en flot tale som man siger. Dér stod de, 80.000 sommerglade danskere, dér sad de i millioner foran skærmen. Og det var en festlig dag. En stor mand var i byen, vores by, vores Danmark. Og han talte indiskutabelt elegant om venskab og kultur, om Kierkegård och Høeg, om den store lyse fremtid som hans land —...

LONDON– Those who sweated blood and tears to bring peace to Cambodia six years ago can be forgiven if they now say they see very little causal relationship between the magnitude of their efforts and the result now at hand–the coup d’etat by Hun Sen and the effective suspension of civil liberties. The Cambodian veterans and the rest of those who labor wearily in the vineyard of peacemaking are manifestly at a loss what to do next. It is somewhat of a cruel irony that the Secretary-General of the United Nations has deployed as his envoy to Cambodia Thomas Hammarberg who for years, as a brilliantly effective secretary-general of Amnesty International, did much to focus the spotlight of global attention on the gruesome details of the Cambodian genocide. Now it is if, in a perverse retribution for those days, he has to pay personal penance and go back and watch, perhaps,...

Att förlåta någon innebär att man accepterar den som handlat felaktigt och som ångrar det. Försoning är ett klarläggande och en accept av det som hänt, ett viljesmässigt beslut om att komma vidare och se framåt. Vi kan förlåta en annan människa hans eller hennes gärningar och därmed erbjuda en ny start. Vi försonas med fakta och med den skyldige och eventuellt också med att vi själva kan ha varit en medverkande orsak till att det gick som det gick. Förlåtelse och försoning handlar emellertid inte om att glömma. Ett par av mina kväkarvänner miste för några år sedan sin son och blivande svärdotter i en bilolycka, ett resultat av en annan bilists helt oansvariga manöver. Det var viktigt för dem att träffa den människa som förvållat dem så stor smärta. Straffet i sig var inte viktigt för dem utan de sade till honom: “vi kan förlåta Dig som människa,...

LONDON– Democracy has finally arrived in Mexico leaving only Cuba, among all the Latin American states, out on a distant limb. Yet the substance of the opposition’s victory is less tangible. Can the principal electoral victor, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solorzano, who now stands a good chance of winning the presidency itself in the year 2000, deliver to the poor and dispossessed of Mexico, whose numbers and plight have so dramatically worsened in recent years, what the demagoguery of electioneering has seemed to promise? Indeed this is the question for all of democratic, free-market, Latin America, bar the continent’s one success story, Chile. Unemployment and the deep poverty it sustains is every country’s bain. “How long will the people wait for trickle-down to trickle down?” as Newsweek’s David Schrieberg tellingly asked recently. Even in the best of times Latin America has never been good at dealing with its poor. It is the continent...

IntroductionOne of the great ironies of history is that nuclear weapons were used on Japanese cities on August 6 and August 9, 1945, while between these bombings — on August 8, 1945 — representatives of the United States, Russia, United Kingdom, and France met in London to sign the Charter of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) that would try Axis war criminals. Since the Axis powers had not developed nor used nuclear weapons, the issue of their legality was never placed before the IMT at Nuremberg. It would take almost 51 years from the first use of a nuclear weapon at Hiroshima for the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to issue an opinion on the legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons. The first resolution adopted by the newly established United Nations General Assembly, on January 24, 1946, called for the creation of an Atomic Energy Commission that...

STOCKHOLM, Sweden– Eight years on from the end of the Cold War we seem to be mired, even entrapped, in a seamless web of failures on the international scene. United Nations peacekeeping, once the flagship, has been holed below the waterline and is sinking fast–it doesn’t even try to put in a port call in bloody African conflicts these days. START 2 (the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) meant to cut the over-large U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, first held hostage by Senator Jesse Helms is now a prisoner of the equally chauvinist Russian Duma. The Clinton Administration’s energies have been deployed almost exclusively on the expansion of NATO–there are not many beads of sweat to be seen in Washington from the pushing for START 2, much less START 3. Elsewhere, Saddam Hussein is still trying to build weapons of mass destruction, the Middle East peace process is dead in the water…...