August 2000

Pyongyang, August 2000 – PeaceBoat, a Japanese NGO of which Japan can be very proud, just concluded its voyage No. 3 to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), with more than 200 participants. I conducted workshops on reconciliation and had the occasion to have dialogues with a number of well placed DPRK officials. My focus was on how North Korea sees the damage/suffering caused by Japanese imperialism, what kind of compensation they seek, and what they mean by “real apology”. Some of the answers are well known, others are not; for completeness they are all included. They mention six forms of damage/suffering: one million killed/tortured (also hibakusha); six million forced into war service including 200,000 comfort women; economic looting; cultural treasures seized or destroyed; the zainichi situation in Japan; and Japanese responsibility for the division of Korea between the USA and the Soviet Union, as a Japanese colony. Compensation according...

COPENHAGEN- Who can get excited about a bridge? But if it were just a bridge it would have been built a long time ago. This bridge that links northern Europe with the Scandinavian land mass is a political statement, almost as powerful, if not quite, as the creation of the Euro, the single currency, to the south. Indeed, a Scandinavian decision to accede to membership of the Euro should by rights follow as a logical next step. That both Denmark, which votes on the issue next month and Sweden, the two mother countries of the bridge, have serious reservations about joining the Euro is, in modern dress, the debate they had about building the bridge, a debate that consumed over a century of argument and discussion. But the bridge is now there, opened last month, a graceful object crossing 17 kilometers of the sound that adjoins the Baltic sea. The Danish...

LONDON – Finally, the Swiss banks are off the hook on the Holocaust. Their offerof a $b1.25 settlement with Holocaust survivors and their heirs has been accepted by an American court. Yet, as the judge observed, the banks fought all the way. At the outset the banks said there were only 8,000 accounts with links to Holocaust victims. The truer figure turned out to be over 50,000. Fifty-five years after the liberation of the concentration camps Germany still stands out head and shoulders above the other countries that collaborated with Hitler as the one that made the earliest and swiftest attempt at restitution. And 55 years later it is still Austria, Hitler’s birthplace, that has done the least to square the past. It still half believes- or at least it gives the appearance that half the country believes- that Austria was Hitler’s victim rather than his willing ally. One case now...

The Peace Journalism Option 3 By Jake Lynch for Conflict and Peace Forums   PART 4 4. JOURNALISM AND MARKET FORCES The content of news is shaped by three main influences. One comes from the limits set down by the state, in the form of laws, censorship and access to information. The second is a ‘civic society’ element: journalists are exponents and guardians of values which belong both to everyone and to no-one. These have evolved in implicit dialogue with audiences and the public at large, and develop a little further whenever journalists meet to discuss the ethics and principles of their work – especially if they do so in consultation with professionals from other fields as in the conferences Conflict and Peace Forums have organised over the past few years. But the factor which has been the focus of most critical endeavour in Western societies is the influence of market...

The Peace Journalism Option 3 By Jake Lynch for Conflict and Peace Forums   PART 3 3. REPORTING OF ‘THE KOSOVO CRISIS’ ‘The Serbs’ – Aggregation and Dis-Aggregation Nowhere has the tendency to ‘aggregation’ been more evident than in coverage of the past decade’s upheavals in present and former Yugoslavia. The zero-sum analysis offered by most Western reporting is based on the proposition that ‘the Serbs’ were guilty of ‘starting it.’ A piece for the BBC’s Newsnight, screened as Yugoslav forces vacated the province in June 1999, proved an extraordinary example of this underlying narrative and an apt illustration of how ‘aggregation’ plays an important part in constructing it. The report was filed from Urosevac as local Serb civilians fled in fear of violence by the Kosovo Liberation Army. In the link read by the presenter, we learned that Russia had, that day, called for an urgent debate in the United...

The Peace Journalism Option 3 By Jake Lynch for Conflict and Peace Forums   PART 2 2. PRACTICAL EXAMPLES Explaining violence, framing conflicts Much reporting in and from Indonesia still bears the imprint of the ‘New Order’ orthodoxy of the Suharto years, part of which was the official ideology of ‘panca silah’, or unity-in-diversity. One consequence was for reports of violence to be suppressed. It meant that unpalatable facts about conflicts between Indonesia’s peoples were never faced. Typical are remarks by President Abdurrahman Wahid, shortly after taking office in 1999 and quoted in the Jakarta Post in one of its reports on the violence in Maluku province and its capital, Ambon. “Abdurrahman reiterated his belief that ordinary people in Maluku do not harbour hatred against each other despite their different faiths and ethnic backgrounds. He claimed they were merely victims of the work of irresponsible parties wishing to disrupt the country’s...

The Peace Journalism Option 3 By Jake Lynch for Conflict and Peace Forums   Conflict and Peace ForumsTaplow Court, Taplow, Bucks, SL6 0ER, United KingdomPhone +44.1628.591 233 / 239 Fax +44.1628.773 055www.conflictandpeace.org email info@conflictandpeace.org Table of Contents 1. Introduction Conflict Coverage A new approach Perspective: the fact and the truth 2. Practical Examples Explaining conflict, framing violence Conflict or meta-conflict? Media responsibility Practical reporting decisions Britain and Ireland From “apportioning blame” to conflict analysis in South Africa Worthy / unworthy victimhood Consequences Beyond ‘victim journalism’ and ‘how do you feel’? 3. Reporting of the ‘Kosovo Crisis’ ‘The Serbs’ – aggregation and dis-aggregation Disaggregation Assumotions revisited The KLA and the media 4. Journalism and market forces The rise of ethical purchasing and investment Two tentative conclusions 5. Appendix: Middle East The view in international media References About the author & publisher 1. INTRODUCTION Journalists have become accustomed to vying with estate agents and...

LONDON – Remember the summer of ’98? In the sweltering, torpid heat of a Roman august, charged with exhaust fumes, the international community gave its overwhelming approval to the establishment of an International Criminal Court that will enable those accused of “crimes against humanity” to be tried and, if convicted, sentenced. Only seven nations opposed or abstained from the motion, including Israel, China, India and the U.S.A. where the Pentagon had successfully waged bureaucratic guerrilla war to undermine the initially sympathetic stance of President Bill Clinton. Two years on we can now see what an epochal event that was. In a the stroke of 120 pens it changed the climate on political thuggery. After numerous half-starts and false starts ever since the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials that convicted the war criminals of the Second World War, the world at last had agreed en masse a common set of understandings and a...

Mission To mobilize and train an international nonviolent, standing peace force. The Peace Force will be sent to conflict areas to prevent death and destruction and protect human rights, thus creating the space for local groups to struggle nonviolently, enter into dialogue, and seek peaceful resolution. Endorsed by: His Holiness the Dalai Lama (Nobel Peace Prize Laureate)Oscar Arias (Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Former President of Costa Rica)Mairead Maguire (Nobel Peace Prize Laureate from Northern Ireland)Jose Ramos Horta (Nobel Peace Prize Laureate from East Timor)Ambassador Anwarul Karim Chowdhury (Ambassador to the UN from Bangladesh)International Fellowship of ReconciliationHague Appeal for PeaceRecommended by the Peoples Millennium Forum at the United Nations, May 2000 “There is an important need to pursue this ideal on a truly global basis, from our deep commitment to inter-dependence and universal responsibility. I wish your efforts every success.His Holiness the Dalai Lama “This is an idea that is...

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LONDON – George W. Bush and his Republican praetorian guard of hard-liners (many of whom, for no other reason than cowardice, ducked the call to duty in Vietnam) have put Al Gore needlessly on the defensive on the issue of national missile defense. Their intent, by hook or by crook, is to make Mr Gore look weak on defense, even if it means unilaterally abrogating a solemn international treaty with Russia and risking driving emerging Russia back into its Cold War bunker. Missile defence is predicated on the increasingly nonsensical notion that a “rogue state” (though these words are no longer politically correct, according to no less an authority than Madeleine Albright) will fire nuclear tipped missiles into Alaska and even northern California and seize a political advantage that its suitcase nuclear bomb deposited in a left-luggage locker in New York’s Grand Central Station could not. No wonder that even...