December 1999

This is the founders’ end-of-the-year statement and a few highlights of our activities this year. It suggests that TFF will promote reconciliation and forgiveness in the year 2000 and beyond. We suggest this theme because it has been singularly missing in the century and the very decade we are now leaving behind. We agree with Desmond Tutu that there can be no future without forgiveness. Hope for change and reconciliation are now the lenses through which the future must be imagined. Why? Because if we let the present global system of violence — against other humans, other cultures and Nature — continue unabated, it is unlikely that there will be anybody around to celebrate New Year 2100. The wonderful thing about forgiveness, reconciliation and hope is that we have to take the initiative ourselves; they cannot be demanded of somebody else. You cannot force another human being to forgive you;...

MADRID- Americans are not good at giving away their territorial possessions, few though they’ve had. The renunciation of their ownership of the Panama Canal Zone has been handled with as much grace as a sack of potatoes. Refusing to attend if the ceremony were held at noon on December 31st as the treaty mandates, the celebratory party was advanced a couple of weeks to mid-December. Even then only ex-president Jimmy Carter, who in 1977 negotiated the treaty ending U.S. jurisdiction, made the relatively short journey. New situation, but the same reflexes. In the words of Ronald Reagan, who helped nearly cripple the young Carter presidency with a vitriolic anti-Canal Treaty campaign, “We built it, we paid for it, it’s ours”. But, despite all the second thoughts in Washington and the whispering campaign about a future Chinese grab for the canal via the Hong Kong company that has won the lease to...

LONDON- The Russian parliamentary election has well and truly knocked the pessimists off their perch. Few predicted that the Communist Party in these hard economic times would receive such a setback. The Russian voter, despite the total failure of capitalism to deliver the goods, has made it crystal clear that he is still in no mood to wind back the clock. Optimists can be forgiven for believing that democracy, like the stock market, appears to have entered an unprecedented benign era. There have been numerous setbacks, but it does seem true that this century has become, after all its failures of world war, extreme ideology and Cold War, the century of democracy. And now with Russia set to consolidate its young democracy, the 20th century is ending on an undoubted top C. Yesterday the New York-based Freedom House published its annual survey of democratic trends and concluded that “there were major...

By Walter A. McDougallVolume 7, Number 12Foreign Policy Research Institute WIREDecember 1999 Walter A. McDougall is the Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania, Editor of Orbis, and Co-Director of FPRI’s History Academy. His most recent book is Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776,Houghton Mifflin, 1997. This is his eynote address at FPRI 1999 Annual Dinner. “Several people, including our host Ron Naples, whose burden it was to introduce this lecture, have asked me what exactly I meant to discuss this evening inasmuch as my title was hopelessly vague. That, I confess, was by design, so as to leave me free to say pretty much whatever was on my mind, come November 10, about U.S. foreign relations at the turn of the century. And it seemed to me that I could take any of three approaches. I might, for instance, choose to...

“We are seeing it for the umpteenth time in international conflict-management: when intellectual analysis and politics fall apart, cover it up with military potency and give it all a human face! One would like to believe that the West’s moral, legal and political conflict ‘management’ disaster in the Balkans and in Kosovo 1989–1999 would be debated throughout the West — democracies with freedom of speech. The silence about that failure, however, is roaring. It’s just the locals who won’t understand how well-meaning we were and are! But something else is happening: the disaster is turning into a recipe. Read the statements from leading ministers, top generals, the EU and NATO during the last six months. They invariably state ‘that we have learnt in Kosovo’ that we need more military capacity, more force. NATO’s Secretary-General, Lord Robertson, tells the world that ‘the time for a peace dividend is over because there...

Dr. Georg Schoefbaenker’s collection http://www.nato.int/ Homepage of NATO http://www.eucom.mil/operations/af/index.htm US-Webinfos zur NATO – “Operation Allied Force” http://www.eucom.mil/europe/serbia_and_montenegro/kosovo/index.htm Web-Infos of the US-European Command http://www.afsouth.nato.int/ Website of NATO Command Allied Forces Southern Europe http://www.gov.yu/facts/facts.html Homepage of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia http://www.b92.net/ Homepage of the independent radio-station B92 in Belgrad (closed) http://www.alb-net.com/index.htm Website of the albanian Kosovo Crisis Center http://www.kosova.de/ Web-Newsservice für die Kosovo-Albaner (german language) http://www.kosova-info-line.de/ Web-Dienst der Kosova-Info-Line (german language) http://europe.cnn.com/SPECIALS/1998/10/kosovo/ Kosovo-Special Service of CNN http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/special_report/1998/kosovo/newsid_271 00/271265.stm Kosovo-Special of BBC http://www.gfbv.de/voelker/europa/kosovo.htm Die Albaner im Kosovo – Web-Special der Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker (german language) http://www.russiatoday.com/ Web-Site of the russian megazine “Russia Today” http://headlines.yahoo.com/Full_Coverage/World/Kosovo/ Crisis in Kosovo http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/1998/10/kosovo/ Conflict in Kosovo @ CNN http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/world/Kosovo/new_kosovo_index.html Coverage of Kosovo @ ABC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/special_report/1998/kosovo/ Kosovo Special Report @ BBC http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/balkans/balkans.ht Balkans @ Washington Post http://www.kohaditore.com/ARTA/index.htm ARTA Kohaditore Pristina daily http://www.crisisweb.org/projects/sbalkans/kosovo.htm Kosovo ICG South Balkans project http://www.balkaninstitute.org/internet.html Balkan Internet Resources Balkan Institute http://www.hrw.org/hrw/campaigns/kosovo98/index.htm Kosovo Crisis...

By Philip Hammond* From Transitions Online http://www.transitions-online.org Throughout Nato’s war against Yugoslavia, no opportunity was missed to contrast the propaganda emanating from Yugoslavia’s state-controlled media with the truthful, reliable free press of the West. The contrast was used by Nato as a reason to kill civilians, when it bombed the Belgrade RTS television building in April; and by journalists as a way to brush aside criticism of British media coverage and Nato news-management. As a demonstration of the vibrant diversity of Britain’s unshackled media, take the stories written as reporters entered Kosovo alongside British paratroopers on 12 June, carried in the following day’s Sunday editions. This is what James Dalrymple wrote in the Independent on Sunday, describing the town of Kacanik: ‘It looked peaceful and intact – except for the silence .There were no curtains, no ornaments, no door handles, no light fittings. Every item of value had been removed...

The Balkans Important documents This Is What the EU Wants From the Yugoslav OppositionOctober 17, 1999 Internal Documents from Germany’s Foreign Office Regarding Pre-Bombardment Genocide in KosovoWhat remains of NATO’s argument after this?Collected by International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms, IALANA (August 27, 1999) Joint Statement of Albanian and Serb Leaders of Kosovo Undertaking of Demilitarisation and Transformation by the UCKThis is the full text of the accord on the demilitarisation of the Kosovo Liberation Army. June 21, 1999 United Nations Resolution 1244 (1999) on KosovoAdopted by the Security Council at its 4011th meeting, on 10 June 1999 G8 Kosovo draft resolution Cologne June 8, 1999(Reuters) Includes all points and both annexes to draft resolution Belgrade Peace Agreement 4.6.99Full text of the peace document . Balkan Action Council, withThe Kosovo Interim Agreement of Feb 23, 1999 President Milosevic and Four Other IndictedThursday 27 May 1999, the International Criminal Tribunal...

By Dr. Erika Laubacher-Kubat* In this century alone 160 million people have been killed through wars, genocide and torture; since 1945 almost 200 wars have been fought. Laws on non-intervention, the blocking veto in the UN security council, and the immunity of government leaders have, in almost all cases, protected the perpetrators rather than the victims. The majority of today’s wars are intra-state conflicts between rivaling political groups within a state or conflicts arising between groups and the respective state. Key to identifying the conflict groups is the politicization of ethnic traits via their political leaders. Almost two-thirds of all wars have ethnopolitical roots and occur much more often than wars of an anti-regime nature or between countries. While inter-state wars tend to result in the strengthening of state power, intra-state wars often lead to the collapse of law and order and to the breakdown of military forces into armed...

Please Sign in Next 24 Hours From: FoE Sydney – Nuclear Campaign <nonukes@foesyd.org.au> Dear All, A copy of this letter is to be given to Russian foreign minister Ivanov in the next 24 hours. It is adressed to Ivanov and Sergeyev rather than Yeltsin himself, as those individuals are more likely to be in control and may be more reasonable. It is now open to organisations signatures. (Individuals, please send your own faxes direct to US defence Secy Cohen and Sergeyev and Clinton on +1-703-695-1149 (Cohen)+7-095-205-4330 (Sergeyev)+1-202-456-2461 (Clinton)) It’s been revised in accordance with comments from a number of people and the text is now frozen unless someone picks up some absolutely egregious error. Please do sign both this and if you have not already done so, the large ‘Bill and Boris’ sign on which now has 460+ organisations signed on to it. That letters text can be found on http://homepages.tig.com.au/~foesyd/nuclear/bbletter.html...

LONDON- U.S. and British policy towards Saddam Hussein’s Iraq has hit a wall. Whichever way the vote in the Security Council goes (had gone, the vote is scheduled for later this week) on the sanctions issue Britain and America have come out of their nine year old entanglement with Saddam the worse for wear. It is, in fact, a diplomatic smash-up of historic proportions. In brief, it can be summed up as the U.S. and Britain embracing anarchy and demonstrating they have little or no interest in the legal underpinnings of international order. The bombing of Iraq on almost a daily basis continues. The decision to try and modify the bite of sanctions affects the continuing air war not at all. But by what right have Washington and London arrogated the responsibility for deciding they can bomb for as long as they like? Only – as with sanctions – the UN...