August 2003

Till Klaras huvudsida  

Klara Anna Cecilia Sjödell, född 27 augusti 2003

Till Klaras huvudsida

Added responses to questions of the Turkish Daily News (VIII/6/2003) Question 16: What is your view of the current conditions of Greek/Turkish relations? Is the conflict likely to be resolved peacefully? My impression of the current Turkish/Greek conflict is based on visits to both countries over the years. I was particularly convinced after a visit to Greece a few weeks ago to give some talks at two conferences that a sea change in the Greek approach to its relationship with Turkey had occurred. Previously Turkey had been a preoccupation of Greeks and Greece. Only several years earlier the sense of Greek grievance with respect to Turkey was always present in serious discussions, during which the participants often exhibited an obsessive concern with the allegedly illegal Turkish occupation of Northern Cyprus, but also were quite ready to discuss the Greek their highly emotional understanding of the events after World War I...

Revised Responses by Richard Falk to questions posed by the Turkish Daily News (VIII/1/2003) l. Is there any basis in international law for recourse to “preemptive war”? Most interpretations of international law deny states the right to wage a preemptive war, although international practice is more ambiguous, especially in extenuating circumstances. There were few international objections raised when Israel initiated The Six Day War in 1967, convincingly claiming that it was confronted by an imminent attack by its Arab neighbors, and that its action was justified on the basis of defensive necessity to ensure its survival as a state. The invocation of an alleged right to wage preemptive war by the US Government is particularly troubling from the perspective of international law. First of all, the United States has expressed this right in highly abstract language rather than in a specific setting of the sort that led Israel to act...

I. “Globalization” under Stress In the 1990s it was evident that “globalization,” despite objections about the unsatisfactory nature of the term as misleading or vague, was widely accepted as usefully descriptive and explanatory: namely, that the world order sequel to the cold war needed to be interpreted largely from an economic perspective, and that the rise of global market forces was displacing the rivalry among sovereign states as the main preoccupation of world order. This perception was reinforced by the ascendancy of Western style capitalism, ideologized as “neo-liberalism” or as “the Washington consensus,” a circumstance reinforced by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the discrediting of a socialist alternative. It seemed more illuminating to think of the 1990s in this light by reference to globalization than to hold in abeyance any designation of world politics by continuing to refer to the historical period as “the post-cold war.” Others spoke...

International Symposium fo PeaceHiroshima, 3 August 2003 Lord Mayor, Hiroshima City, The Asahi Shimbun, Ladies, Gentlemen, We are 58 years away from 0815 in the morning of 0608 1945 when that B-29 dropped “Little Boy”, and USA committed nuclear genocide on Hiroshima, and then on Nagasaki. The call for the abolition of nuclear weaponry is as urgent as ever given the nuclear politics of USA, North Korea, Israel, Iran and others. To understand better the causes, we have to ask again why USA committed this atrocity. The decision was not made by any single person but by a group so we are talking of collective motivation. Some of the motivation was probably built around a desire to bring the war to a quicker end and to impress the No. 2 contender for world power, the Soviet Union. But much naivete is needed to assume that all motivation is conscious, passes...

News Poem 1 Fresh wave of sabotage and violence took its toll on Iraq on Sunday Baghdad (Reuters) A second blaze hit a crucial oil export pipeline,A water pipeline was blown up,Six Iraqis were killed in a mortar attack on a Baghdad prison,A Danish soldier was killed. A Reuters cameraman was shot dead while working near a U.S.-run prison,Iraq’s governor (Kissinger-associate and terror expert L. Paul Bremer)said on Sunday: the country was losing$7 million a day due to the attack on the pipeline, 59 wounded in a mortar bomb attack on a U.S.-guarded prison,500 Iraqi detainees,including common criminalsand suspected anti-American guerrillas,are being held at Abu Ghraib prison,which was one of Saddam Hussein’smost notorious jails. [President Bush cites progress in Iraq.] News Poem 2 Reuters cameraman Mazen Dana, 43 (Perhaps his camera was a rocket propelled grenade launcher) New York Times/Reuters Mazen Dana, a Palestinian working for Reutersfilming outside Abu Ghraib...