July 1998

LONDON–Does the U.S. have permanent interests even if perhaps it doesn’t believe it has permanent friends? Its performance the last two months over the negociations to create an International Criminal Court suggests that it doesn’t care a toss whether Canada, Japan, Germany, Britain, Denmark, Spain, or most of the world for that matter, think it’s important. Indeed, during the tense stand-off in Rome earlier in the month it went so far as to threaten its NATO allies with pulling its troops out of Europe if they didn’t kowtow to the American line and water down the court’s independence. Quite rightly, the allies called Washington’s bluff and pushed the issue to a vote. When 120 nations voted for the creation of the court and only 8 against, (the U.S., China, Israel, Libya, Quatar, India and Iraq what interesting bedfellows!) the chamber erupted into the kind of cheering more heard on the...

LONDON–When Mahbub ul Haq died in New York last week the traffic did not stop, nor did the United Nations, for which he had done so much, lower its flag. But all over the world, people who have been touched by the special wisdom of this astonishing man, felt their hearts miss a beat. He left behind one of the few great ideas of the twentieth century. When he died he was preparing to join Mikhail Gorbachev, the former president of the Soviet Union, in San Francisco in a private seminar with some of the world’s most influential minds. Simply put, Dr Haq was the greatest living expert on measuring human progress. Formerly Pakistan s minister of finance, for seven years he was the creator and continuing intellectual force behind The Human Development Report , published annually by the United Nations Development Program. In his years in ministerial office he...

LONDON–War is today sweeping Kosovo. The UN-brokered peace is breaking down in Angola. In Rwanda, Hutu militiamen killed 34 Tutsis watching the World Cup in an hotel. We hear about it all and ring our hands in despair at the ethnic hatred that now seems to be unhindered by the disciplines imposed by the exigencies of big power politics during the Cold War. What we don’t do much of is to look at it in, should I say, more positive terms. What use is conflict? In whose interest is it waged? We assume too blithely that these wars happen despite the intentions of rational people. In fact they happen often BECAUSE of the intentions of thinking people. War is often not simply a breakdown of the system but a way of creating an alternative system of profit, power and protection. To paraphrase Clausewitz, war has increaingly become the continuation of...

To be published in The Times of India Nuclearism is the ideology of nuclear weaponry and nuclear arms-based security. It is the most depraved, shameless, and costly pornography of our times. Such an ideology cannot be judged only by the canons of international relations, geopolitics, political sociology, or ethics. It is also a well known, identifiable, psychopathological syndrome. The following is a brief introduction to its clinical picture, epidemiology, and prognosis. Nuclearism does not reside in institutions, though it may set up, symbolise, or find expression in social and political institutions. It is an individual pathology and has clear identifiers. Many years ago, Brian Isley argued in his book, Fathering the Unthinkable, that nuclearism went with strong masculinity strivings. Isley was no psychologist, but the works of Carol Cohn’s and others have endorsed the broad contours of Isley’s analysis. They show that not only the language and ideology, but the...

The abridged version of the interview in Serbian was published by “Blic”on July 6, 1998 – http://www.decani.yunet.com/intervju1.pdf The peace and harmony. The sun shines while the monks are working in the fields of Decani Monastery. The church bell calls for communal meal in the refectory. This is a scene which someone could hardly expect only a mile from the town of Decani where serious clashes between the Serbian security forces and the KLA occurred just a month ago. The love and peace which shine on the faces of the abbot and his monks give an impression of an oasis of true peace and Christian blessing. “I would rather devote myself to monastic life, silence and prayer. But I simply cannot close my eyes in front of what is going on before us. Our brotherhood is helping all the people in need here as much as we can. I know that we...

LONDON–It would be fair to assume that while in China President Bill Clinton didn’t give much thought to Israel and the Palestinians. Even before he left Washington his whole body language seemed to suggest, “What more can I do? They’ve really got to work it out between them.” The steam has gone out of American diplomacy. Israel’s prime minister, the sand-blaster, Benjamin Netanyahu, has won the battle of attrition but lost the war for peace. In retrospect, it appears that the Clinton Administration saw this coming–only six weeks ago Secretary of State Madeleine Albright publically lectured Netanyahu saying, in so many words, that nothing had happened in the two years since he became prime minister and underlined the barb with praise for the cooperative attitude of Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader. The Clinton Administration feel they’ve lent their weight to what was essentially a pro-Netanyahu compromise on the next stage...