July 2001

LONDON – The War Crimes Tribunal for ex-Yugoslavia that is preparing its case against former president Slobodan Milosevic is sitting on a time bomb, concocted by Milosevic himself. He has made it plain that he is going to conduct his defence on a political level – not by hiring a team of smart lawyers to challenge witnesses’ veracity over accounts that he ordered or sanctioned mass murder, rape and torture, but by mounting a solo political defence that will seek to turn the tables on his Western prosecutors. He will accuse them of bombing his country in defiance of the Charter of the United Nations. It is they, he will say, who need to defend themselves against legitimate charges of breaking international law. They bombed a sovereign foreign country without the approval of the Security Council, the supreme organ of the UN. It is going to be a difficult trial and...

Old school friends Sir Paul McCartney and respected international journalist Jonathan Power were reunited at their old school in Liverpool today to mark Amnesty International’s 40th anniversary. Jonathan Power’s highly-regarded book ‘Like Water On Stone – the Story of Amnesty International’ (Allen Lane) is his independent assessment of the history of the world’s largest voluntary human rights organisation. Paul and Jonathan were reunited at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, formerly the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys, where they cut a birthday cake for Amnesty International and made a toast to freedom with Portuguese wine. British lawyer Peter Benenson launched Amnesty International in 1961 after reading of two Portuguese students jailed simply for making a toast to freedom. Paul and Jonathan were in the same class in the middle to late 1950s. George Harrison was in the year below. “It was wonderful for Paul and I to meet up again at our old school and...

LONDON – Time moves on so rapidly that policy makers may forget that acronyms that were the common currency of a decade or two ago are now nothing to younger people today. Stop people in the street or even on the university campus and ask what MAD means and you’ll get a glassy stare. The leaders of the seven major Western countries themselves, meeting this weekend in Genoa, are not that well informed either. Most of them at the time of the Cold War were immersed more in the domestic nitty gritty of their countries; political advancement rarely came from knowing the nuts and bolts of foreign and defence policy. Thus it is the civilian experts – the Donald Rumsfelds of the world – who set the pace on these things and who win their political prowess by playing unashamedly on the deepest fears of an uninformed but easily worried public....

LONDON – Human rights and sports don’t mix. That refrain echoes back to the 1960s when conservatives opposed the breaking of sporting links with apartheid-ridden South Africa. But in the end sporting links were ruptured and nothing hurt the sport loving white South Africans more. It was the beginning of a wake-up call- that the rest of the world did not like the kind of society that its white people wanted to keep in place. Now this same defence is being trotted out by those who wish to see China being awarded the right to host the 2008 Olympic games, a decision that will be made at the end of the week at the meeting of the International Olympic Committee in Moscow. Those who wish to see China get the games argue, as a senior State Department official said to the Washington Post last week, that it could give China “a...

Thirty policemen, armed to the teeth, arrested Gandhi on the 4th of May 1930 when he extracted salt in the village of Karadhi, near Dandi. He was taken to Yeravda Prison in Poona. It was not the last time he was thrown into jail in this part of India. Between 1917 and 1932, Mumbai/Bombay and Poona (a 4 hours train journey inland) were important places in Gandhi’s long struggle for peace (including Ahmedabad). In Poona he was also imprisoned in the Aga Khan palace, since he had returned empty-handed from the negotiations in London and on New Year’s Eve 1931-32 initiated a non-violence action for Independence. At midnight, between the 3rd and 4th January, he was arrested on the roof (where he was sleeping) of his house in Mumbai, which is now a beautiful Gandhi museum – “Mani Bhavan” – at No. 19 Liburnum Road. Photo Jan Öberg, © TFF...

Here’s how it began… On the 2nd of March 1930, Gandhi sent a letter to Lord Irwin, the English viceroy, to warn him that an action of civilian insubordination was to start the 12th of July. In the letter, he assures the viceroy that no harm would be done to any Englishman. However, he also states that the whole British colonial empire is a form of exploitation and has destroyed Indian culture and enslaved the population. It is obvious that the British have no intention of making any changes that might have an impact on commercial interests. The purpose of the tax system is to cut out the country’s farmers. “Even the salt that the peasants need for their subsistence has had taxes imposed on it, so that they shall pay the most”, Gandhi wrote. “However, you personally have a salary amounting to 7000 dollars a month. That is 235...

Interview with Dr. Biljana Vankovska from the University of Skopje for the Belgrade newspapers “POLITIKA” Q: In spite of the condemnations that come from the international community and especially NATO, the Albanian terrorists have not ceased armed attacks in southern Serbia and northern Macedonia. The whole region is heavily destabilised. According to your opinion are we facing one more war in the Balkans or we can expect elimination of the tensions? A: First of all, something like “international community” does not exist. It is euphemism and the real question is who has legitimacy to represent the states and nations in the world. The role of this so-called international community in regard to the current crisis in the Balkans is just declaratory and symbolic. It is quite absurd that UN Security Council who once authorised the unique mission of UNPREDEP in Macedonia (i.e. deployed its forces BEFORE the outbreak of any violence), now...

Official transcripts of US State Department briefings reproduce “verbatim” the “questions” (Q) by journalists and the answers of the State Department spokesperson. Words are always transcribed phonetically, “Yes” is recorded as “yeah”, grammatical and speech errors are also recorded, non-verbal “noises” such as “laughs”, “chuckles”, “applause” as well as “mm-hmm”,  “wow” and “huh” are also transcribed.   “Laughs” and “chuckles” are usually associated with a Question (Q) from an individual journalist or an answer by the State Department official, whereas “laughter” is from the floor.  The “chuckles” and “laughs” often come after an embarrassing question, or when the State Department spokesperson says “Yeah, I  don’t know” or “I don’t want to get into that”.  “Chuckles” is often a way of skirting the question. It also means,  “You know the answer, why are you asking·” A few months before the onslaught of the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia, the State Department held a...

“From one point of view the modern militarist Western society furthers democratic control; it has become easier since there is more contact, co-operation, trust and more common values between those in uniform and those in three-piece suits. From another angle, war has – in contrast to what is often stated – become much more acceptable precisely because of the integration, the civilianisation-cum-militarisation of the two spheres of society. And it goes without saying that when democracies fight wars and make interventions they know how to legitimate it with reference to highly civilised norms such as peace, human rights, minority protection, democracy or freedom – and they do it as a sacrifice, not out of fear. In contrast, “the others” start wars for lower motives such as money, territory, power, drugs, personal gain, because they have less education, less civil society, less democracy and are intolerant, lack humanity or are downright...

LONDON – One senses someone who has started not to sleep so easily at night. Although a man of substance and powerful friends with might on his side, he now has begun to think that perhaps the unexpected may happen. And that would render him not only miserable and anguished- detained far away from family, friends and comforters -but would do much to undermine the reputation he thought he had secured in the annals of American foreign policy. The man is Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of State, whom his legion of critics charge with unnecessarily prolonging the war in Vietnam, precipitating neighbouring Cambodia into physical and political ruin, encouraging the overthrow of a democratically elected government in Chile and sundry other monstrous political offences which brought about the deaths of whole swathes of populations and the suffering, in particular torture, of many thousands. His defence, although oblique, is telling...

Originally published inAFB-Info 2/2000 – Newsletter of the Peace Research Information Unit BonnAFB, Beethovenalle 4, D – 53173 Bonn, Germanyafb@bonn.iz-soz.dehttp://bonn.iz-soz.de/afb 1. Origins From 1983 to 1989, I served as director of the Lund University Peace Research Institute (LUPRI), the origins of which went back to 1963. At that time, Håkan Wiberg and his colleagues had begun to develop the very first seminars and projects on peace research. Circumstances beyond our control led to the closure of the institute in 1989. ‘The Cold War is over. What use is peace research now?’ mused certain academics and bureaucrats of prophetic inclination. To justify their position, they cited ‘budgets’, ‘rationalization’, and the ‘necessity’ of preserving the university as a ‘discipline-based’ institution. And yet LUPRI’s activities, much appreciated by the university’s chancellor, had extended far beyond what might have been expected of this, the smallest of the university’s institutes: LUPRI had produced a steady stream...