March 2001

LONDON – After ten years of Balkan sectarian madness the outside world thought it had caught its breath. The hard-line nationalist president of Croatia, Franjo Tudjman, died in 1999. Last year the ruthless Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic resigned due to old age. Most marvellous of all in October Slobodan Milosevic, who began the Balkan wars, was finally voted out of office. Yet as the new fighting in Macedonia abundantly makes clear the forces of disintegration in the region remain stronger than those of integration. It takes a quarter of a million Nato soldiers to hold the ring and still there is no peace. The issue posed by President Boris Trajkovski of Macedonia hangs in the air, imperfectly answered. “We cannot redraw borders and boundaries, making smaller units of ever purer ethnic states. We cannot survive as a region if ethnicity becomes the sole defining justification of statehood.” But why not?...

LONDON – It is hard to watch the most sensible foreign policy of the Clinton Administration being crumpled before our eyes. Particularly so when it is being done for the most malevolent of reasons- to resurrect an enemy that had decided to make its peace with America, so that the advocacy of missile defence for America could be seen to be based on a real rogue missile threat rather, than as hitherto, a make believe one. President George Bush is being given the benefit of the doubt with his new hard line policy towards North Korea, even as he overrides his more far-sighted Secretary of State, Colin Powell. General Powell had tried to get it on to the record, before the Gang of Two, Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, could bend the novice president’s ear back towards the dark ages, that the Bush Administration intended “to pick...

LONDON – Nothing could have been more revealing of the ambiguities at the heart of western policy towards China than when, in March 1997, the annual vote came up at the UN Human Rights Commission to condemn China’s record on the treatment of its dissidents and minorities. Denmark, with strong support from the Netherlands, had tabled a critical motion. The Chinese lobbyists went into overdrive. Denmark was told by Beijing that its criticism would be a “rock that smashed down on the Danish government’s head”. Several Danish contracts were cancelled and, as Chris Patten, now the European Union commissioner responsible for foreign affairs, wrote in his book, “East and West”, “And what did anyone do? Nothing. What in particular did members of the EU do? They looked the other way”. In 1998 Europe went one step further or, as Human Rights Watch described it, “a major step backwards”. Rewarding China for...

LONDON – The revolutionary past of Joschka Fischer, Germany’s foreign minister may be about to catch up with him if it turns out it is true that he lied about some aspects of it during the recent trial of an old friend/ terrorist from that turbulent period of 1968 to the mid 1970s. If it does it should not be just the end of an interesting period of German government but perhaps a time to ask what did all that turbulence do for the Western world? Is the only mark it left a black one? Has it bequeathed, as the great commentator on the era, Mel Lasky, asked many years ago in his journal de combat, Encounter, “powerful, moving, and possibly profound ideas”? It seems not. The only memorable and lasting hand-me-down of that era was not the “revolution” itself, but what was its trigger, the American black civil rights movement....

“Bra att Gandhi blev skjuten…” – om Hindutva Bussresan från Bombay till Ahmedabad, “Indiens Manchester” tar 17 timmar. Min granne på färden handlar med de berömda Hyderabad-pärlorna och med guld. Det vill säga, pärlorna kommer ursprungligen ifrån Basra i Irak, men med Saddam och allt det där kommer de nu från Kina, heter det. – Indiens senaste budget är riktigt bra för oss affärsfolk, men politikerna har annars förstört det här landet. Skit och korruption överallt. Titta på gatorna, den här bussen, skolorna. Denna unge, energiske kapitalisten fortsätter: – Nä, vi behöver en revolution! Man kan inte hålla ihop ett land där var enda en bara tänker på sig själv. Först när vi arbetar som en gemenskap kan vi bli självständiga. Vi är också på tok för många; Kina har kört om oss för länge sedan. När han hör att jag är intresserad av Gandhi säger han: – Han var...

In response to an urgent Appeal from all the living Nobel Peace Prize Laureates, the General Assembly of the United Nations, on November 1998, unanimously declared the first decade of the twenty-first century to be The Decade for a Culture of Peace and Nonviolence. While people are naturally concerned about the amount of violence in our world and how it threatens our future, the Nobel Laureates are right to remind us of the potential of nonviolence and our calling to build a culture of peace and nonviolence.  The twentieth century is instructive in the way that the philosophy and practice of nonviolence have begun to flourish and in the way that nonviolent movements have had an exponential growth across the world. Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. are the most famous nonviolent leaders but many have built upon the paths they charted as in country after country, tyrannies and...