September 2005

Pressmeddelande Sveriges Fredsråds utmärkelse Lilla Fredspriset har för år 2005 tilldelats Erni och Ola Friholt för deras arbete för fred och internationell rättvisa som med enastående uthållighet pågått i mer än tre decennier och utmärkts av mångsidighet och stor kringsyn. De har under lång tid arbetat mot kärnvapen i både med- och motvind, aldrig försummat Tredje Världen perspektivet i sin analys av läget i världen, och haft en klar blick för samspelet mellan lokalt och globalt arbete. Den internationella kvinnoaspekten med tyngdpunkt på fattiga kvinnors perspektiv har också varit väl artikulerad. De har tagit initiativet till biståndsprojekt och verkat som informatörer genom böcker och artiklar och föredrag runtom i Sverige samtidigt som de på Orust drivit ett sommarkafé med både lokal och internationell prägel. Erni ingår också sedan länge i redaktionsgruppen för tidskriften Vi Mänskor. Erni och Ola har mer än de flesta bidragit till att internationalisera Sverige. Priset kommer att...

LONDON – Perhaps you need to be a long-range meteorologist to understand U.S.-North Korean diplomacy on nuclear weapons. The scene changes as swiftly as the sky over the ocean on a windy, autumnal day. Small white clouds chase big dark ones. The sea, ruffled by waves, changes from green to dark blue to almost black and soon the observer is lost in the shades of color, unable to discern whether the day will turn out good or bad. One thing we should all agree on: the weather is worse than a decade ago when President Bill Clinton, aided by the intervention of former President Jimmy Carter, manage to negotiate with the late President Kim Il Sung a nuclear freeze that has probably stopped the North building a good 30 nuclear weapons; and South Korea embarked on its so-called “sunshine” policy of political reconciliation. Early in its tenure, the Bush Administration...

A series of guides, directories and articles with many and quite different aspects.TFF produces Feature Collections on topical issues to to help anyone inform themselves and search for more information. TFF accepts no responsibility for the content of these articles.Newest stuff added at the bottom Guides, directories and link collections Wikipedia – The Free EncyclopediaIran – lots of relevant background materials US Library of CongressCountry study Iran IranMania.comProbably the largest Iranian Internet portalGeneral information on Iran here. Iran Online – link collection Iranian.ws & Persian JournalProgressive Iranian Community PetroleumIran.comIran – an extremely comprehensive list of links to all aspects of Iran EIA, WashingtonIran – economy and its oil The EconomistIran Factsheet MSNBC – The Secret Empire – The Iran Files Better World LinksIran – numerous resources for the understanding of Iran Wikipedia – the Free EncyclopediaIran’s nuclear programDisputed by some but full of useful links The Guardian – Special on IranNumerous links over...

True, the situation in Burundi is not without its risks and problems. But it has gone so well this summer in Burundi. As you’ll see below, Reuters, IRIN (the source of most Reuters stories), the UN and a few others do a fine job – but their stories are not picked up around the world. To put it crudely: Start a genocide – and you get attention. Start peace and development – and you get virtually none. As if peace and a better life for more than 7 million people wasn’t worthy to report…TFF is one of the few organisations that follow and support the peace process in Burundi – through 11 fine civil society organisations in the country. You can read much more here, at our Burundi Forum. Here are some of the recent stories out of Burundi: July-October 2005 – Oldest stories on top, most recent at botton ReutersChronology of key...

I. The Background of UN Reform As portrayed in the media, the issue of UN reform is often reduced in public discussion to the enlargement of the permanent membership of the Security Council to make it more representative of the power structure of states in the world as of 2005. There is no doubt that this issue has a significant substantive and symbolic importance in showing the capacity of the UN to adjust to changes in the relations among states, and especially to give states that were either defeated in World War II or situated in then colonized Third World regions a proper place at the head table of the United Nations. This persisting preoccupation also illustrates the disabling inability of the membership to agree upon a solution to the challenge of reform despite a major push in the period leading up to the millennium in 2000. These difficulties apply...

September 23, 2005 The World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI) held its final session betweenJune 24-27. This session was the last and most elaborate of sixteen condemnations of the Iraq War held all over the world in the last two years in Barcelona, Tokyo, Brussels, Seoul, New York, London, Mumbai and other cities. The Istanbul proceedings invoked the verdicts and relied on some of the testimony from the earlier sessions; this cumulative nature of the sessions built interest among peace activists around the world, resulting in this final session having by far the strongest international flavor with respect to scope and national identity of the participants. This cumulative process, described by organizers as “the tribunal movement,” is unique in history: Never before has a particular war produced this level of protest on a global scale – first to prevent it (the huge February 15, 2003 demonstrations, eleven million, 600 cities, eighty...

LONDON – This is the edge of tomorrow’s Europe, at least if Turkey gets its way. A desolate, mud-built, village, close up to the Syrian border, reduced to rubble by the Turkish army battling the terrorists of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), is slowly being repopulated by a brave few. The families are understandably nervous. The PKK has recently restarted its insurgency, breaking a five year truce, angry with the government’s slow delivery on its promises to allow Kurdish in the primary schools, full scale broadcasting in Kurdish and to invest in economic development. “This violence is what we don’t want”, says one man, living with his extended family under nothing more than a homemade canopy. Five minutes drive from the river Tigris that watered downstream the first of humankind’s civilizations, we engage in what seems to be almost surreal conversation. On the one hand, the grandfather, who has fathered...

The 2005 bombs in London shook the world. They reminded everybody of the Madrid bombings of 11th March 2004, or of what has become known as ‘Nine Eleven,’ to name only two of the tragedies that currently unsettle the world. Innocent civilians live in fear – not only is the West, also in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Middle East, in African countries and other world regions. In many cases, the West is the “addressee” and we have perpetrators acting as ultimate humiliators of the Western world. Taking down the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, proud symbols of Western power, was a cruel “message of humiliation.” Paralysing world hubs such as London and Madrid is another “message of humiliation.” Humiliation has to do with “putting down.” The word humiliation has at its core “humus,” which means “earth” in Latin. Indeed, the Twin Towers were taken down to the level of the ground,...

Sixty years ago on Aug. 6th the city of Hiroshima was destroyed by one single atomic bomb, a weapon produced by the most advanced and expensive scientific project of its time. Today there are terrorist groups who in the near future might have the capacity and the wish to explode a nuclear bomb with the same terrifying effect as the Hiroshima bomb. An expert group has for NATO described and in summary form published a study on the possibility and consequences of a terrorist nuclear explosion in a big city. The study was produced by members of Centre for Strategic and International studies in Washington and Nuclear Threat Initiative, led by the former senator Sam Nunn. As example they choose a detonation in the headquarters of NATO in Brussels, Belgium. The study, named Black Dawn, was recently presented for the NATO parliamentarians. I participated in the presentation as a medical...

The UN International Day of Peace One half of the population, here and in the Middle East, is barely being used when it comes either to causing terror or preventing it. Ninety seven percent of bombers and suicide bombers are male, as are over ninety percent of those conducting the so-called ‘war on terror’. Maybe it is time to consider what women would do. In fact, most governments have signed up to United Nations Resolution 1325, which is a worldwide agreement that we will include women in preventing and resolving violence. Why? Because all over the world women have shown that they’re good at it. Dekha Ibrahim Abdi is a Muslim woman from the borders of Kenya and Somalia. In 1992 she managed to stop a clan war that had cost 1,500 lives, by getting together with women from the opposing clan. This was not sewing circle stuff. She said...

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LONDON – A ‘no’ to Turkey starting negotiations to enter the European Union on October 3rd “will have centuries of implications”, as one influential academic, Husseyin Bagci, put it to me last week. It would push a wounded Turkey back into the arms of the nationalists, even perhaps the hard line fundamentalists, and be grist to the mill of those who argue that the Christian Western world will always consider itself superior and apart from the Muslim one. It would, as the provost of Istanbul’s Bahcesehir university, Eser Karakas, told me, make clear that Europe has no interest in becoming the great power that Turkey could help make it with its large population and army, able to play an influential role in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Caucasus, and not being subordinated always to the policies of the U.S.. Yet if there are no good reasons for a...