February 2000

1. Democratic Control of a Military Alliance: Challenges and Problems The recent NATO military intervention in FR Yugoslavia (24 March – 11 June, 1999) underlined an urgent need for addressing some very significant theoretical and political issues the two most important ones being: 1) the issue of legal use of military force in international relations, or more precisely on legitimacy of humanitarian interventions; 2) the issue of democratic control of a military alliance in action. Obviously, the first question is relatively old, while the second one emerged as a rather new one. However, in the light of the Kosovo war they appeared to be deeply interrelated. The NATO intervention over Yugoslavia should not be considered as the main reason for theoretical deliberation of this relationship, but rather as an appropriate occasion for bringing the discussion up. From a theoretical and a political point of view, the relationship between NATO and...

Är det inte otroligt att de nya utrikespolitiska moralister, som anser sig förespråka mänskliga rättigheter, demokrati och fred, och som spenderade obegränsade summor på krigföring, idag inte bryr sig om att frambringa det minimum av finansiella medel som krävs för återskapandet av fred i Kosovo? Detta är vad FN:s “UN Wire” rapporterade den 3 februari, 2000 &endash; bara ett år efter “freds”-processens började i Rambouillet. Detta vittnar, ännu en gång, om hur detta inter-cyniska samfund verkligen fungerar. “UNMIK har inga pengar, säger Kouchner. FN har inte råd att betala sina tjänstemän i Kosovo, meddelar FN administratören Bernard Kouchner idag. I ett samtal i “Japan Press Club” i Tokyo med journalister hävdar Kouchner att FN-missionen i Kosovo (UNMIK) står inför en total krissituation, punkt. Vi måste betala tjänstemännen.” Somliga av arbetarna har inte fått lön i flera månader, och “det finns 0.00 D-mark i budgeten för Kosovo år 2000”, fortsatte Kouchner....

With Steve Marks (now the François-Xavier Bagnoud Professor of Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health) professor Burns Weston has recently published: “The Future of International Human Rights” (Ardsley, NY: Transnational Publishers, Inc., 1999). The book can be purchased directly from our publisher, Transnational Publishers, Inc., in Ardsley, New York either by phone (1-800-914-8186) or via their Web site (http://www.transnationalpubs.com) at the list price of $115. The book was conceived as a way to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the UDHR and seeks to envisage the future of international human rights through both an analysis of existing human rights norms, institutions, and procedures, and the projection of preferred future trends in these realms. It consists of 13 provocative essays plus a foreword by UNHCHR Mary Robinson and a poem by award-winning Iowa poet Marvin Bell (“The Dead Have Nothing to Lose by Telling the Truth”). The authors and...

NATO’s two main justifications for bombing Yugoslavia on humanitarian grounds have been refuted by the Western alliance’s own official figures and documentary evidence. These justifications rest on two central premises:1) the alleged indiscriminate mass killings of Albanian civilians (premise number one);2) the implementation of a deliberate policy of mass deportations or “ethnic cleansing” (premise number two). “Premise number one” has been invalidated by the FBI and European forensic teams working under the auspices of the Hague Tribunal (ICTY). The forensic and police investigators have uncovered several hundred bodies in grave sites in Kosovo as opposed to the 10,000 to 100,000 civilian massacres claimed by NATO and Western governments as a pretext for waging the War. British Prime Minister Tony Blair had announced that President Milosevic was “set on a Hitler style genocide equivalent to the extermination of the Jews during World war II”.1 “We’ve now seen about 100,000 military-aged men...

Soft conflict-resolution power is what distinguished columnist JONATHAN POWER writes about in his recentcolumn which you can find every week on TFF’s website http://www.transnational.org. So much has gone wrong when governments intervene the hard way – or do nothing – in conflicts around the world. Opinion leaders increasingly know we have to find alternatives – that the last ten years have not brought peace and that the remedy is not more militarisation as the US, NATO, Russia and many others will have us believe. Fortunately there ARE philosophies, concepts, methods and institutions which point in the direction of impartial conflict analysis, soft approaches, respect for local civil society peace-makers. There are nonviolent methods and there are experts who listen to what all parties to a conflict have to tell and respect everybody’s fears and suffering. Many begin to see that World Bank loans and authoritarian ‘missions’ or ‘protectorates’ full off soldiers...