January 2007

Vicky Rossi: Having just spent a wonderful 2 weeks in India with you and an enlightened group of internationals on the Gandhi Legacy Tour (1), I was wondering when you first decided to lead such a trip and what your primary motivation was. Arun Gandhi: I have been involved with people from Europe and other parts of the world for quite some time now and I have always felt that people need to know each other better. We tend to live in our own isolated worlds without knowing much about one another. This means we form all kinds of stereotypes and misunderstandings, which lead to conflicts in the world. I have always thought that if we can somehow bring people together and let them get to know each other, then we will be able to break down the barriers that exist and build bridges instead. For a long time I...

January 26, 2007 Hans-Christoph von Sponeck In the early nineties, people hoped for the irrevocable end to fear and the great peace dividend. Those governing limit themselves to fighting symptoms. The causes of terror are not a theme for them.Freedom from fear and freedom from distress are the fundamentals of human security. The United Nations emphasized this when the Cold War allegedly ended. Freedom from distress should be gained with freedom from fear. The goal was to overcome malnutrition, sicknesses, poor education and inequality.Since then, globalization has advanced rapidly. However, only a minority of the world’s population has benefited. The far greater part of humanity must struggle at the lower end of the quadrant for sheer physical survival, often without success, with less than one Euro per day per person.The reality of life’s opportunities distributed crassly differently cannot be hidden any longer. The rice farmers in Bangladesh, the shepherds in...

Om Saddam, sannings- och försoningsarbete De senaste 20 åren har 24 sannings- och försoningkommissioner upprättats runtom i världen. Men vad spelar “sanningen” för roll om den inte används politiskt? Sören Sommelius har läst senaste numret av Glänta – väsentliga texter om vår tids grundläggande frågor. TidskriftenGlänta 4/2006Tema Sanning och försoning Saddam Hussein avrättades årets näst sista dag för brott begångna för mer än 20 år sedan. Diktatorns ansvar för det ohyggliga kriget mot Iran och hans brott mot det kurdiska folket kommer därmed aldrig att rannsakas i domstol. Förre försvarsministern (och krigsförbrytaren, menar jag) Donald Rumsfeld kan sannolikt sova bättre när USA slipper rättslig granskning av amerikanernas mångåriga uppbackning av tyrannen. Också sanningen knäcktes i bödelns snara. En mobilfilm publicerades dagen efter avrättningen och visar en totalt kaotisk avrättning. Folk skriker och knuffas och Saddam rabblar trosbekännelsen tills luckan öppnas. Den officiella film som TV-bolagen världen över visade av avrättningen var däremot...

An amazing and important commentary appeared in the January 4, 2007 issue of the Wall Street Journal, co-authored by four high-level architects of the Cold War: George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn. The article, entitled “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” was amazing not so much for what it proposed, but for who was making the proposal. The four prominent former US officials reviewed current nuclear dangers and called for US leadership to achieve the abolition of nuclear weapons. Their argument was as follows: 1. Reliance on nuclear weapons for deterrence is becoming increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective. 2. Terrorist groups are outside the bounds of deterrence strategy. 3. We are entering a new nuclear era that will be more precarious, disorienting and costly than was Cold War deterrence. 4. New nuclear weapons states lack the safeguarding and control experiences learned by the US and USSR during...

Three reports at the turn of the year

Jonathan Power LONDON – Osama bin Laden has made Al Qaeda’s position crystal clear in his latest tape released on May 16th. He said the fight for the Palestinian cause is the most important factor driving Al Qaeda’s war with the West and that was the primary reason for $9/11$. It sounds topical enough given the amount of attention that Washington is presently giving the Israel/Palestinian peace quest. But in truth bin Laden may well be behind the curve. A two state solution can no longer be a viable political goal, because: a) in terms of the demographics a Muslim majority in Israeli-controlled territory is less than a decade a way, b) the Israelis have effectively created a single state encompassing both Jews and Palestinians. To all intents and purposes it imitates the South Africa of apartheid days, a unitary state with a minority group attempting to rule by oppression...

Jonathan Power LONDON – President Dmitry Medvedev is too young to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, but if he’d talk to some of the oldies around like Georgi Arbatov, he’d learn how close a call it was. If President John F. Kennedy hadn’t surrounded himself with very cool and level headed people like his Defence Secretary, Robert McNamara, there could have been nuclear war. No wonder that Arbatov, a former foreign affairs advisor to Soviet leaders from Brezhnev to Gorbachev, calls for Russia to shame the U.S. into disarmament by unilaterally cutting its own rocket force. Presidential aspirant John McCain is old enough to remember. Presumably this had something to do with his call last week for the U.S. to start talking to the Russians again about reducing their massive inventories of nuclear weapons. Yet by the light of fellow conservatives, Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Paul Nitze and other prominent...