May 2006

LONDON – Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki the presumption has been that war can get no worse. The world has been spared a second nuclear war, so this presumption has a measure of truth. But the planning for major war has grown more alarming in all manner of ways – proliferation certainly but, not least, in the relatively recent statements of the U.S., Russia, the UK and France who, signalling a momentous shift in military doctrine, say that they are prepared to use their nuclear weapons for war fighting and not just for deterrence, as during the Cold War. When Hans Blix was the UN inspector charged with investigating whether Iraq still possessed weapons of mass destruction he once said that anyone can hang out a sign “beware of the dog”, but it doesn’t mean they have a dog. In Saddam Hussein’s case this turned out to be correct. These days...

LONDON – There was a time, not that long ago, when African leaders insisted that it was politically incorrect to discuss tribalism. Tribalism was the face of old Africa that the modernizers, inheriting their domains from the departing colonialists, refused to accept. Forty years later, the independence movement has more than come of age and today’s African leaders have learnt to be not so glib. Sudan is the latest turn of the screw that started with Katanga and Biafra and went on to Angola, Rwanda and Burundi with passing stops in Zimbabwe, Uganda and Senegal. One hundred years of colonialism (less in many countries) and the creation later of four dozen new national states, each insisting on the sanctity of colonial boundaries as a sensible way of avoiding future inter state conflicts, could not blot out 800 natural tribal boundaries. On Africa’s left it has been a common jibe that...

Peace Antenna interview with Dr. Evgenyi Shirokov, Head of Belarusian Division of the International Academy of Ecology, Head of Belarusian HABITAT Center.* The Belarusian Division of the International Academy of Ecology (IAE) is a non-governmental organization, which was founded in 1992 by Belarusian scientists concerned about environmental sustainability. The Belarusian Division of the IAE currently has 68 members. It aims to support sustainable development in Belarus through the implementation of various ecological, anti-nuclear and cultural projects. Dr. Evgenyi Shirokov is the head of the Belarusian Division of the International Academy of Ecology and also the head of the Belarusian HABITAT Centre. He has written about straw-bale houses here. The United Nations Human Settlements Programme, UN-HABITAT, is the United Nations agency for human settlements. It is mandated by the UN General Assembly to promote socially and environmentally sustainable towns and cities with the goal of providing adequate shelter for all (1). Urbanization:...

LONDON – The secret key to driving down the rates of poverty and population growth is female. To be absolutely precise, it is poor women living in the Third World’s rural backwaters, where 75% of the world’s hungry scrape a living. Everything else is a bit of a sideshow. The last few years the number of rural women living in poverty has gone up in both India and China, although during the latter half of the 1990s the figures were falling. In Africa, although the numbers haven’t gone up, the fall in numbers is very modest. Only in Latin America and the Caribbean has there been some marked improvement. Too rapid population growth is one part of the problem, but even where it is slowing – as in China- there has been a sharp jump in the number of female-headed households. Changes in traditional values, the emigration of men to...

LONDON – Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Libya. All (until the fall of Saddam Hussein) under pretty evil leadership. All the same, and yet very different. All have or had the urge to develop nuclear weapons. The three first were labelled early on in his presidency the “Axis of evil” by George W. Bush. Yet Libya was probably the worst and is now the best. Indeed, because the “axis of evil” speech appeared to demand “regime change” it is probable that omitting Libya from that speech was an important factor in the long effort to persuade Libya to drop its guard, to open up its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons factories for American and British inspectors to roam over and dismantle at will, and to give up its sponsorship of international terrorism, at which it far outshone all the others. For those who worry about Iran’s propensity for evil deeds today...

On 8th May the Iranian government’s spokesman revealed that the Iranian president had sent a letter [translation here] to President George Bush suggesting new ways of resolving the differences between the two countries. The 18-page long letter does not contain any new suggestions on Iran’s nuclear file, but has criticised some of the United States recent policies in the Middle East. US officials have summarily dismissed it as ‘rambling’ and not addressing the nuclear standoff. They have also indicated that they do not intend to respond to the letter. Ahmadinezhad’s letter is most significant However, the very fact that the hard-line Iranian president who had declared only a short time ago that there was no need to talk to the United States has decided to take this unusual step is of enormous significance, at least as a reflection of Iran’s internal politics. This is the first time in more than...

LONDON – During the difficult years that preceded the British handover of Hong Kong to China the Chinese government’s intense antipathy to opium and the still fresh memories of the evil that eighteenth century buccaneering Britain had inflicted on China and Hong Kong added an extra emotional charge to what, anyway, was a most complicated transition. Without opium there would have been no Hong Kong. The British only acquired it because of the Opium Wars, and the city’s early economic success was built on the opium trade. It was the British who fed the Chinese propensity for opium. Historians point out that the Chinese would have found it elsewhere, even grown some of it themselves. But the truth is the Indian-grown opium was the brand the Chinese smokers savoured and the British East India Company marketed it with commercial élan. Today the Chinese authorities regard opium as a singularly bad...