May 2002

LONDON – That was a week and a half that was. The primary American transatlantic relationship has been moved eastward, away from London, Paris and Berlin to Moscow. Nuclear war between east and west has been consigned to the history books. And if on cue the new nuclear powers on the Indian subcontinent have rattled their rockets ready to unleash Armageddon on Asia, not on Europe as we had been brought up to fear. Meanwhile it has become clear that the Bush administration now considers its job all but done in Afghanistan. The bombing has given the American people their pound of flesh. Reconstruction and all the other idealistic goals of nation building can be left to the Europeans. If the U.S. sees a role for itself in this part of the world any longer it is only as an emergency interlocutor to try and talk the Indians and Pakistanis out...

MADRID – Before the latest carnage reported from Colombia is shunted down into the archives and certainly before the Bush administration decides it is going to re direct its military aid to Colombia, now concentrated on defeating drug trafficking, in the direction of fighting leftist guerrillas, we should all take time out to reconsider the last 100 years or more of Colombian history. As Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia’s Nobel Prize winning novelist, has reminded us, Cicero wrote two thousand years ago, “To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child”. In Colombia’s case the continuing political violence has cut across all levels of society on and off all through the last century and much of the century before. (The common Colombian term La Violencia is usually used for the particular intense period of civil war between 1946 and 1966, to distinguish it from the...

The president can no longer be considered simply a vacuous puppet brought to power by big business, a family name, and election fraud. He must now be viewed as a dangerous opponent of our constitutional form of government, international law and the international order that was born in the aftermath of World War II. The US withdrawal from the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court, announced by the Bush administration on May 6, 2002, has all the markings of a watershed event, an event that could make one weep for what it portends for the future of humanity and our country. The Bush administration is marching ahead in its assault on international law. Never before has a nation removed its sovereign signature from a treaty. Now it is done. In a one paragraph letter to the United Nations Secretary General, the US undersecretary of state for arms control, John Bolton...

Champaign, IL, fboyle@law.uiuc.edu LETTER FROM UNITED STATES CITIZENS TO FRIENDS IN EUROPE The central fallacy of the pro-war celebrants is the equation between “American values” as understood at home and the exercise of United States economic and especially military power abroad. Following the 11 September 2001 suicide attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, U.S. President George W. Bush has declared an open-ended “war on terrorism”. This war has no apparent limits, in place, time or the extent of destruction that may be inflicted. There is no telling which country may be suspected of hiding “terrorists” or declared to be part of an “axis of evil”. The eradication of “evil” could last much longer than the world can withstand the destructive force to be employed. The Pentagon is already launching bombs described as producing the effect of earthquakes and is officially considering the use...

LONDON – Of all the many ironies in President George Bush’s decision to remove America from membership of the treaty establishing an International Criminal Court – its own adherence to the supremacy of law, its enthusiastic initiating of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its primary role in setting up the ad hoc international court that is now trying Milosevic – none is more to the fore than the swapping of roles between an imperial Britain and an idealistic United States. In the short space of fifty-eight years there has been a total role reversal. Winston Churchill believed that there was only one fit punishment for the Nazi war leaders: to execute the top fifty the moment they were captured. Anthony Eden his foreign secretary observed that the “guilt of such individuals as Himmler is so black that they fall outside and go beyond the scope of any judicial process”....

We receive many positive proposals for peace from friends and readers of the Sunflower and our wagingpeace.org web site. I want to share some of them from time to time with a broader audience in the hope that they may spark your ideas and actions. Here is one from Janie, a mother in Philadelphia. She begins by observing that “the world seems to be falling apart” and notes that the format of international meetings hardly changes and the results are generally minimal. “What are we to do?” she asks. She answers her question this way: “When things don’t work out with a child, a new tactic is in order, and various tactics are attempted until the right one surfaces and the final breakthrough is accomplished.” Based on her experience, she makes the following proposal: “Why doesn’t someone initiate at the next world conference for anything (nuclear disarmament, environment, peace in...

Today, despite many significant achievements in science, technology, medicine, transportation and communications, and a vast increase in world trade, the globalised world economy is facing serious socio-economic, political, cultural and environmental problems, of potentially catastrophic proportions. Although many attempts have been made through neo-classical and neo-liberal policies of market economy, free trade, deregulation and privatisation to raise living standards, the dire poverty of billions of people and the widening gap between rich and poor, both within and between nations, point to the failure of these policies. Today, at the dawn of the third millennium, over three billion people have to survive on less than $2 a day. This is less than the daily subsidy provided for each cow in the European Union (EU). Moreover, every day 24,000 people worldwide die of starva-tion or malnutrition &endash; for want of food and water, the basics of life, in this supposedly globalised world...

A Buddhist Response to “The Clash of Civilizations” “The next world war, if there is one, will be a war between civilizations.” (Huntington 1993: 16) Has September 11th vindicated Huntington’s claim in “The Clash of Civilizations,” that the new battle lines today are the faults between the world’s civilizations? Or is his argument becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy &endash; because, for example, the U.S. response to 9-11 is deepening those fault-lines? The collapse of most communist states in 1989 and the end of the Cold War raised worldwide hopes that were short-lived. Francis Fukuyama claimed that we had reached “the end of history,” but history didn’t seem to notice. Although neither the United States nor the Soviet Union needed to support proxy wars anymore, violent conflicts continued, even in the backyard of a paralyzed Europe that could not figure out how to respond to Yugoslavia’s disintegration. Despite the pre-eminence of the...

DCAF WorkshopPromoting Civil Society in Good Governance: Lessons for the Security SectorPrague, 15-16 April 2002 At first glance it seems that the assessment of the Western democracy promotion programmes in the Balkans is a relatively easy task. The territory of former (or better, Second) Yugoslavia has been a focal point of various international interventions. Many of the lessons learned (and/or lessons that should have been learned) concern conflict management and post-conflict peacebuilding. One way or another, all these attempts have inevitably tackled the reform of the security sectors. The old and the emerging security structures have been de facto parts of the conflict structure(s). Thus the security sector reform (SSR) is usually associated with a painful debate on state building through conflict but also on traumatised, fragmented and frustrated civil societies and their recovery. Not surprisingly, what managed to stay immune from the ethno-nationalist zeal and/or emerged and matured during...

LONDON – After the publication this week of two important reports – one by the ambassadors of the European Union to India and the other by Human Rights Watch – confirming that what took place in the Indian state of Gujarat was nothing less than a state government-planned massacre, when Hindu mobs ran amok through Muslim neighbourhoods, we should start to worry less about a supposed Muslim/Christian clash of civilizations and worry more about the actual Muslim/Hindu divide of civilizations, especially so when the two sides have nuclear weapons pointing at each other. Why any Indian government should now expect to solve the Kashmir problem in its favour is beyond comprehension. If 180 million Muslims can no longer feel safe and secure inside India, despite the Herculean efforts of the country’s founding fathers to make the world’s largest secular democracy function without religious rancour, there is no chance that the Muslim...

Remember the innocent dead in Afghanistan too In many countries around the world, including NATO and the EU, governments and citizens observed three minutes of silence for the innocent victims killed in the terrorist attack upon the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on the 11th of September last year. In Denmark, for instance, a memorial service was also held in Copenhagen with representatives from the government, the Royal family and from The United States. Out of a similar humanitarian consideration, it is my opinion that the same countries should show the innocent victims killed in Afghanistan the same honour. On the grounds of principle and because there is an obvious connection between the two events. All religions maintain that each human life is sacred. Humanism is built, amongst other things, upon the premise that each and every human life is just as valuable as all others, no matter what...