May 2001

Penguin published Power’s history of Amnesty International on May 31st “Like Water on Stone”. (See below). LONDON – Amnesty International, founded forty years ago, was almost immediately dubbed “one of the larger lunacies of our time”. The then bizarre idea was to collect information on people incarcerated in prison solely for their political views and then, by means of an army of volunteer activists, bombard the offending governments with massive numbers of letters, postcards and telegrams, calling for the prisoner’s swift release. Other critics called it “subversive” and “an agent of Satan”. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomieni, Uganda’s Idi Amin, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and France’s President Jacques Chirac are all heavyweights who have gone into the ring to try and squash it. In the 1990s and the new century the criticism has been subtler. The attacks came not only from government leaders but from sceptics in the...

LONDON – Like its counterpart, the Northern Ireland conflict, the continuation of Basque nationalist terrorism seems too polarised, too fuelled by historical sentimentality and myth on one side and by narrow-minded authoritarianism on the other, for easy settlement. But Northern Ireland has found a peace of sorts and the lion is lying down with the lamb and even sitting side by side in the same cabinet room in Stormont castle in Belfast. Yet Basque militancy, in the form of the guerrilla army of ETA, continues its ferocious policy of assassination and intimidation, out of step not only with the rest of western Europe, not just with the majority mood of the rest of the country, but also with the majority mood of the Basque country itself. This is the clear reading of last week’s regional elections in the Basque country. The radical leftist party, Euskal Herritarrok, widely considered to be...

PressInfo 118 offers an independent analysis of 11 reasons why Macedonia is at the brink of war. Number 119 deals with the way the United Nations was forced out of Macedonia and not employed in Kosovo at the time when it could have made a difference. In short, there was a hidden agenda. PressInfo 120 deals with how Macedonia is also responsible, and not only a victim, in the process towards its fatal crisis now. This one deals with insufficient, or deceptive, media coverage, and with Western democracies. Where is the free press? We have explained that the 43,000 NATO/KFOR “peace”-keepers can not control or seal off the border around the territory it has occupied and is tasked with stabilising and controlling. Has it turned the blind eye to Albanian military activity all the time? This mission is much larger than the UN ever was in former Yugoslav territories and much more heavily armed. Very...

PressInfo 118 offers an independent analysis of 11 reasons why Macedonia is at the brink of war. Number 119 deals with the way the United Nations was forced out of Macedonia and not employed in Kosovo at the time when it could have made a difference. In short, there was a hidden agenda. This one deals mainly with the obvious question: Is Macedonia and its various groups totally innocent? Of course not! In some respects there is more repression of the Albanians in Macedonia than in Kosovo. Thus, for instance, Pristina University was the centre of learning for Albanians while for almost a decade the issue of higher education for Albanians have been controversial and, since 1997, the Tetovo University considered illegal by the majority. Albanians do not play a role commensurate to the proportion they make up of the population (25 – 40 pct depending on sources); whether this is a relevant...

LONDON – There was a time when it looked as if America and Libya were set on a dead-end course whose destructiveness was all but self-defeating. Its nadir was President Ronald Reagan’s decision in 1986 to bomb Libya, attempting to kill Colonel Mu’ammar Qaddafi, and in the end killing his adopted daughter. Libya’s withering response was to blow up in mid air a Pan American airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, for which crime a Libyan intelligence agent was found guilty in a special court four months ago Yet the two countries have managed, very slowly, to repair their antagonistic and fruitless relationship. Outsiders may consider that they have taken an unnecessarily tortuous road to get there but, nevertheless, where they are today is a different place than a decade ago. This is an achievement worthy of note. War, always a possibility, was avoided. Yet still the antagonism lingers, on both sides....

PressInfo 118 offers an independent analysis of 11 reasons why Macedonia is at the brink of war. You may summarise them: It’s the international community, stupid! Let’s add some more and look at the sad fate of the United Nations in Macedonia. WHY THE UNITED NATIONS WAS IN THE WAY UN warnings were ignored. UNPREDEP’s leadership repeatedly warned that if NATO bombed Yugoslavia, they could not guarantee the lives of UN personnel just at the other side of the Yugoslav-Macedonian border. Western politicians, Scandinavians from where the UN leadership came in particular, did not understand that if their NATO allies bombed Serbia it could provoke Serb retaliation against the Extraction Force which was partly co-located with their own nationals in the UN mission! The UN was impartial and fair. UN peacekeepers respected and listened to all sides as a matter of professionalism. They did not see the world in black-and-white terms....

For the umptieth time, the politico-military-media complex tells us that local conflicts are caused solely by locals. The international “community” has no part in it but the noble one of trying to persuade the parties to sit at a negotiation table instead. This time the stage is Macedonia and the complex has learnt nothing since Croatia. This PressInfo and PressInfo 119 tell you how this intellectual rubbish covers hidden political agendas instead of expressing the truth. They also reveal why the UN was forced out of Macedonia and that it was prevented from having a common mission in Kosovo and Macedonia which was the only thing that would have made sense in the late 1990s. It is based on my own investigations at the time and published here for the first time. THE INTERNATIONAL “COMMUNITY” : THE MAIN CAUSE OF WAR Since few seem to be burdened with a political memory stretching...

LONDON – Space being space can go in all sorts of directions- Tito’s pleasure trip to be followed by Richard Branson’s floating hotels. But it could, if the U.S. Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, has his way, be filled with anti-satellite weapons, as the Pentagon makes sure it is in total command of not just the land beneath but also the sky above. Rumsfeld chaired two important commissions whilst he was out of office. The first, now well known, came up with the argument that the threat of a ballistic missile attack on the U.S. was “evolving more rapidly” than had been previously thought. The second, which received much less publicity, warned that the U.S. may someday face a “Space Pearl Harbour” with a sneak attack on all America’s precious communication satellites orbiting the planet. Space warfare has become “a virtual certainty”, Rumsfeld argued. His conclusion, reiterated in his news...

På EU:s toppmöte i Göteborg ska en integration av EU och NATO klubbas igenom. Vi är djupt oroade. Med slutet på Kalla Kriget och Warsawapaktens upplösning blev det svårt att rättfärdiga NATO:s existens och Sveriges invasionsförsvar. Hur förklara deras uppgift, hotbild och resursförbrukning när fienden hade kollapsat? Det militäre försvarets berättigande var hotat eftersom människorna i Europa förstod att säkerhet handlar om väldfärd, jämlikhet, miljövård och förtroendeskapande. Kretsar som saknar fantasi till att föreställa sig en värld med mindre upprustning, våld och vapenhandel använde i det läget en gammal klassisk militär strategi: Angrepp är det bästa försvaret! Alltså: hitta nya fiender varje månad – Castro, Kim Il-Sung, Saddam Hussein, Milosevic, Khadaffi, narkotikatrafik. Och tala om för medborgarna att nya faror, t ex “etniska konflikter” lurar runt varje hörn. Den andra strategin var att accelerara västlig kontroll: utvidga NATO:s territorium österut, ge den USA-ledda militäralliansen större resurser, göra kärnvapnen än mer...

LONDON – As if his Star Wars initiative wasn’t enough President George Bush is already considering his next provocative move – the expansion of Nato right up to Russia’s borders. The world is now in real danger of spinning off its geopolitical axis. Even a defeated, militarily moribund, Russia will feel compelled to respond, at whatever cost of sweat, blood and treasure better spent on development at home, and the consequences of this will be felt the world over. It will confirm the leaders of China in what they are already suspecting, that the U.S is going through a new period of imperialistic expansion. And anything that Beijing decides to do reverberates into Japan, Taiwan and the Koreas and, further afield, into India and thence into Pakistan. The initial expansion of Nato in 1999 that took in the former Warsaw Pact members, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, was in fact...