November 1999

By Michel Chossudovsky Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and author of The Globalization of Poverty, Impacts of IMF and World Bank Reforms, Third World Network, Penang and Zed Books, London, 1997. The author is also TFF adviser. In preparing the Seattle Millennium meetings, Washington in consultation with Brussels and the WTO in Geneva, is set on weakening and dividing social movements and citizens’ groups which have converged on Seattle from all over the World. Meanwhile, local organisers are busy –together with the FBI and the Seattle Police Department (SPD)– in carefully planning “security arrangements” for the official venue. An extensive police apparatus has been set motion. Special Forces from the FBI, the CIA and other federal agencies will be on the scene. “Trouble-makers” are to be held at bay, well equipped riot police are on hand including Gang Squads and SWAT teams of the Tactical Operations Divisions...

Nonviolence – forgiveness • We must learn from touching human stories about the will to abandon hate.The road to forgivenessIn South Africa’s Western Cape there is a rapidly growing bakery with the unusual brand name: “Amy’s bread – the bread of hope and peace.” The local communities know its significance. Amy Biehl was a Fulbright Scholar who was murdered in the Western Cape in the run-up to the 1994 elections. The bakery, run by the Amy Biehl Foundation, exists because her parents, Peter and Linda Biehl, from California, decided to walk the road of forgiveness. By Michael Henderson. • How actually did the old Cold War end – and what does it tell about the new emerging Cold War now?How We Ended the Cold WarJohn Tirman reflects in The Nation. “The dominant view of the right and center is that military intimidation was the root of victory, a dangerous axiom then and...

Tio frågor som borde ha ställts till president Clinton, när han i tisdags besökte Kosovo President Bill Clinton gjorde i tisdags en blixtvisit i Kosovo. I ett tal manade han albanerna att sluta hämnas på den krympande serbiska minoriteten. Han besökte också de amerikanska soldaterna på den nya Bondsteelbasen. Det finns viktiga frågor som borde ha ställts still honom om Balkan och Kosovo och om USA:s ledande roll i bombningarna av Jugoslavien. Det borde vara en självklarhet att oberoende medier i demokratiska länder låter politiska ledare svara på viktiga frågor. Men ställdes verkligen de viktiga frågorna? Här är några frågor som jag skulle ha ställt ˆ om jag vore journalist och hade fått tillfälle att göra en intervju i tisdags. (1) Mr President! Amerikanska plan bombade i våras Jugoslavien och Kosovo med er som överbefälhavare. Aktionen rättfärdigades av uppgifter om ett folkmord planerat av Belgrad. Dessa uppgifter har nu visat...

In failing to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the US Senate played partisan politics with an issue of utmost importance to the security of the US and the world. In observing the debates in the Senate on this issue, I was once again left with the impression that our Senators do not fully understand and do not particularly care that the rest of the world pays attention to what they say and do. Much of the world looks to the United States for leadership, but there is little to be found these days in the highest offices of our government. In 1995 I attended the Review and Extension Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). It was and remains clearly in the interests of the United States and all other countries in the world to prevent further proliferation of nuclear weapons. At that Treaty Conference...

LONDON- In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Hound of the Baskervilles”, the great detective Sherlock Holmes lectures his faithful assistant, Watson, on the unlikely subject of free trade. Says Holmes: ” Capital article this on free trade. Permit me to give you an extract from The Times, ‘You may be cajoled into imagining that your own special trade or your own industry will be encouraged by a protective tariff, but it stands to reason why such legislation must in the long run keep away wealth from the country, diminish the value of our imports and lower the general condition of life in this island.'” “What do you think of that, Watson?” cries Holmes in high glee, rubbing his hands together with satisfaction. “Don’t you think that is an admirable statement?” That was written in 1901. At century’s end the intellectual battle for this central point in economic life is being fought...

”With e-mail and Internet it has become so much more easy to generate and share ideas instantly. Below you find 53 different ideas about peace in Macedonia from people around the world who responded to our call in the preceding PressInfo. It’s a free gift to anyone who cares to listen and take inspiration – many could also be implemented in Kosovo,” says TFF director Jan Oberg. “Our respondents are not a representative sample but, among other things, this exciting experiment shows that: 1) there are so many ideas out there and an amazing willingness to contribute constructively; 2) people who have not been to Macedonia can share ideas and initiatives that have worked in other conflicts, a general body of knowledge and experiences are developing; 3) they focus much more on the human dimensions of conflict-resolution than governments do; 4) they by and large reject military means in peacebuilding,...

“Given that democratic countries have free and independent media, President Clinton’s visit to Kosovo on November 23 would be a golden opportunity to take stock of the US-led Western policies to bring peace to the region. Here is a selection of questions with some media advisory. In other words, if I imagine I had been granted an interview as a journalist, this is what I would focus on,” says TFF director Jan Oberg. (1) Mr. President, US warplanes bombed Yugoslavia and the Kosovo province with you as the Commander-in-Chief of US forces. Does it worry you that the whole campaign was justified and conducted on the basis of what has turned out to be grossly mistaken or falsified information about a genocide planned by Belgrade? [During the campaign, President Clinton, Secretary Cohen and Secretary Albright are on record with figures of between 10,000 and 100,000 missing and probably killed in...

”With e-mail and Internet it has become so much more easy to generate and share ideas instantly. Below you find 53 different ideas about peace in Macedonia from people around the world who responded to our call in the preceding PressInfo. It’s a free gift to anyone who cares to listen and take inspiration – many could also be implemented in Kosovo,” says TFF director Jan Oberg. “Our respondents are not a representative sample but, among other things, this exciting experiment shows that: 1) there are so many ideas out there and an amazing willingness to contribute constructively; 2) people who have not been to Macedonia can share ideas and initiatives that have worked in other conflicts, a general body of knowledge and experiences are developing; 3) they focus much more on the human dimensions of conflict-resolution than governments do; 4) they by and large reject military means in peacebuilding,...

Links to Facts & Views Beauty and nonviolence, and International Day for Tolerance Let’s begin this Transnational WIRE with a text on beauty and on how we could learn from appreciation of beauty that violence is a bad idea• Does beauty really equal truth?Philosopher Elaine Scarry defends beauty from politically correct critics. Here is one of her beautiful thoughts: “One of the reasons that violence has in our own era been so easily anesthetized is precisely because we’ve gotten unanchored from beauty.” November 16 was the UN-declared International Day for Tolerance. Here is how UNESCO’s new Director-General, Koichiro Matsuura, observed this important day:• Tolerance – a dynamic world valueAnd the UN Secretary-General promised to make tolerance a priority:• We can advance tolerance every day, says Kofi Annan. The old Cold War – and the New… On the occassion of the end of the Cold War:• CIA warned of Gorbachev’s fallWhat did CIA think it...

LONDON- The West has gone uncannily calm about last month’s military take-over in nuclear-armed Pakistan. Could it be embarrassment, that it hasn’t delivered on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty – an essential ingredient in the grand bargain of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that states that the old established nuclear powers will make significant progress in disarmament in return for the rest of the world – 95% of it in fact – abjuring manufacture of their own nuclear weapons? Or is it just carelessness that takes its cue from President Bill Clinton’s lack of conviction on the urgent necessity for nuclear disarmament? It is a quite extraordinary silence. Nowhere else in the world does the military – so blatantly at least – have its finger directly on the nuclear trigger. There has always been, right through the darkest days of the Cold War, the buffer of civilian authority. Even when the Soviet...

Links to Facts & Views, Kosovo and the Second Cold War Europe was extremely close to a major war. Did the allies know? Who would have made the decision? What would we, the citizens of NATO countries, have been told? Was Europe’s security and the existence of NATO put at risk because of the sufferings of Kosovo-Albanians? Because of a genocide that did not take place? Or because we are heading for a new Cold War?• NATO moved very close to invasion in KosovoThe United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, France, Finland and Yugoslavia — the United States came much closer to a ground war in Europe than is commonly understood. Read Steven Erlanger’s absolutely shocking analysis in New York Times. And what shall we do with the trophy? The American press is beginning to see that Kosovo was not all that simple and easy…• Kosovo in limboThis word picture is painted by the U.N....

So how many people were killed in Kosovo? Opponents of the NATO bombing campaign claim estimates were wildly exaggerated through cynical propaganda. But the totals for confirmed dead are mounting. By Ian Williamsin New York Holocaust revisionism – denial of the massacre of Jews during the war – is illegal in some countries. But the downward revision of the numbers murdered in Kosovo is proving very fashionable – even in the New York Times. In mid-October a Texas-based analytical group called Stratfor <www.stratfor.com> issued a report claiming that casualty figures among civilians in Kosovo were deliberately exaggerated to justify NATO’s attack on Serbia. “It really does matter how many were killed in Kosovo,” the report said. “The foreign policy and political implications are substantial. There is a line between oppression and mass murder. It is not a bright shining one, but the distinction between hundreds dead and tens of thousands...