January 2004

LONDON – Europe doesn’t figure much in the Democratic primaries any more than it does in the White House. Perhaps it is understandable why France, Germany and Belgium, and to some extent, Britain, are pushing hard for Europe to have its own defense identity. NATO is too dominated by American decision making, so the argument runs, and Europe needs not only the freedom to deal with what it perceives as a crisis without having to win Washington’s support but if it is to be a mature political entity it needs its own military establishment and command and control. Only when it has its own significant military might will America treat Europe with the respect and attention it deserves. Besides without a sense of forward momentum in the European idea the U.S. will have increasing success in its apparent policy of divide and rule. But what exactly would Europe gain? And...

The Political Gandhi and the Whole Gandhi Our knowledge of the life of Mahatma Gandhi, when it does not come from Attenborough’s landmark film, is generally provided by popular biographies. The biographies, especially the most recent and best known ones, such as those by Fischer and Nanda, tend to be political biographies. Gandhi is the main player in India’s freedom struggle, the eventual “father of the nation.” His fight for the rights of Indians in South Africa and his struggle for India’s independence are generally the main focus of the story. The central narrative of the India phase of his life focuses on the three main political campaigns that he led: the 1921-22 Noncooperation Movement, the 1930-33 Civil Disobedience Movement and the 1942-43 Quit India Movement. The lengthy periods between these campaigns spent on self-discovery or anti-untouchability and other social work are glossed over, seen as lulls in Gandhi’s life....

January 28, 2004 Gandhi’s Call As early as 1931 Gandhi articulated his view that change, to be beneficial, needed to be achieved by nonviolent struggle: “I personally, would wait, if need be, for ages rather than to seek the freedom of my country through bloody means.” Gandhi added some optimistic words, declaring, “I feel in the innermost recesses of my heart that the world is sick unto death of blood-spilling. The world is seeking a way out, and I flatter myself with the belief that perhaps it will be the privilege of the ancient land of India to show the way out to the hungering world.” (1) Of course, from the perspective of 2003 this would seem to be a prime instance of false prophesy. This essay argues that although Gandhi’s literal coordinates of time and place were mistaken, we may yet be approaching a Gandhian Moment where there occurs...

On 14 December 2003, the Turkish Cypriots went to the polls to elect new deputies to the unicameral 50-seat legislature of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, TRNC. Political developments, elections and the comings and goings of governments in the non-recognised mini-state (est. population 200,000) tend to go largely unnoticed by the rest of the world, including its Greek Cypriot neighbours (est. 650,000) for whom the overriding concern remains the presence in the Turkish Cypriot-controlled north of a large contingent (est. 35,000) of Turkish troops. The December 2003 elections however took place under unprecedented international attention. The outcome was seen as having the potential to break the impasse of the intercommunal peace process and to enable the accession of a reunited Cyprus to the European Union on 1 May 2004. The pre-election agenda was dominated by disagreements between government and opposition parties pertaining to the merits of a November 2002...

1. Definitions and Hypotheses: An Overview Definition: An empire is a transborder Center-Periphery system, in macro-space and in macro-time, with a culture legitimizing a structure of unequal exchange between center and periphery: economically, between exploiters and exploited, as inequity; militarily, between killers and victims, as enforcement; politically, between dominators and dominated, as repression; culturally, between alienators and alienated, as conditioning. Empires have different profiles. The US Empire has a complete configuration, articulated in a statement by a Pentagon planner: “The de facto role of the United States Armed Forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing”. In other words, direct violence to protect structural violence legitimized by cultural violence. The Center is continental USA and the Periphery much of the world. Like any system it has a life-cycle reminiscent of...

Since its founding moments, the United States has been bedeviled by a morally self-congratulatory image of American exceptionalism, despite engaging in practices that violate the most fundamental precepts of human decency. This dualism, constituted by dynamics of denial and myth-making, has achieved a public posture of innocence throughout a national history that includes slavery, racism, dispossession and destruction of native peoples, continuous interventions in weaker countries, war-making and exploitative economic arrangements with autocratic Third World elites. A dramatic instance of this contradictory reality was the celebration of victory over fascism as a just war coupled with the mega-terrorist use of atomic bombs against the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. In some notable respects, the disappointments of the 1990s represented a parallel disconnect, due to US preeminence, between impressive achievements on the level of global justice and immobility, or worse, on the level of existential human suffering, when...

LONDON – Prime Minister Tony Blair is the type of man who will go to his grave insisting that he was right. Only a leader of his moral certitude could have revamped the riven Labor party into the disciplined vote winning machine it has become. Whatever happens in British politics this week- and his resignation is a distinct possibility- and however much he is criticized in the report of judge Lord James Hutton on the suicide of David Kelly, Britain’s top expert on Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons, Blair will insist that he was right to have backed President George Bush in his decision to go to war with Iraq. If Margaret Thatcher was, in her own words, a “lady not for turning”, Blair is a politician who says to himself “je ne regret rien” and, grey faced and exhausted though he looks according to intimates, believes he has done the...

De tre tidigare jugoslaviska delrepublikerna Serbien, Kroatien och Bosnien har samtliga haft val under 2003. I alla har nationellt sinnade partier stärkt sin röstandel. Men medierna har bara uppmärksammar detta när det gäller Serbien. Det serbiska valet ägde rum den 28 december 2003. I Kroatien var det val ungefär en månad tidigare. En mer genomträngande och sammanhängande analys av varför nationalistiska partier vunnit terräng i hela det forna Jugoslavien skulle vara på sin plats, inte minst för att ge ett framtida Europa en chans till fred. Men de stockholmsbaserade, dominerande svenska mediernas kommentarer kännetecknas av ytlighet och okunnighet, för att inte säga fördomsfullhet – inte minst mot det serbiska folket. Det gäller såväl de allmänna medierna SR och SVT som tidningarna. Vad som i Jugoslavienfrågan får sägas i Sverige – och framför allt inte får sägas – framgår av hemsidan www.manifest.se/balkan. “Det är de fattiga, de outbildade, de marginaliserade som...

LONDON – Europe doesn’t figure much in the Democratic primaries any more than it does in the White House. Perhaps it is understandable why France, Germany and Belgium, and to some extent, Britain, are pushing hard for Europe to have its own defense identity. NATO is too dominated by American decision making, so the argument runs, and Europe needs not only the freedom to deal with what it perceives as a crisis without having to win Washington’s support but if it is to be a mature political entity it needs its own military establishment and command and control. Only when it has its own significant military might will America treat Europe with the respect and attention it deserves. Besides without a sense of forward momentum in the European idea the U.S. will have increasing success in its apparent policy of divide and rule. But what exactly would Europe gain? And...

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LONDON – The occupying authorities in Iraq should get their legal skates on. Any delay in putting Saddam Hussein in the dock on war crimes charges is going to make the work of introducing democracy more difficult. It has become all too apparent that the long drawn out trial of former president Slobodan Milosevic at the war crimes court in The Hague has played into the hands of the extreme Serbian nationalists, who showed their strength in the recent election, not only forming the largest single party in parliament but also electing in absentia Milosevic himself. It is actually easier in many cases, where the institutions of a new regime are weak, to build peace after war or civil strife by declaring an amnesty, as was done fairly recently in Mozambique, Macedonia and South Africa, although in the latter’s case it was done in conjunction with a truth commission which allowed...

By Hannelie Booyens January 16, 2004 It’s difficult to imagine a more challenging journey than the one Ginn Fourie faces. She is a senior lecturer in Physiotherapy at the University of Cape Town. After Lyndi’s death she focused on a new direction of study: Reconciliation in SA for a doctoral thesis. For many of her white compatriots it’s a journey into the heart of darkest Africa – a place where the chant “kill the boer, kill the farmer” still inspires fear. How can you possibly travel alone to the seat of the military wing of the Pan Africanist Congress, to the place where the man who gave the order to kill your daughter, is to be honoured by his people? That’s the question Ginn’s been asked countless times. It’s like going into Dingaan’s kraal, a somewhat conservative relative warned her. All sorts of emotions surface as Ginn drives through Limpopo...