September 2008

to refer the conflict in the Sudan to the ICC, arguing that it was only the threat of a war crimes court that brought the protagonists of the Yugoslavia wars to the negotiating table and that the same stick is necessary over Sudan. The announced prosecution by the ICC of the Sudanese leader, Omar al-Bashir, has coincided with a major shift in American elite opinion about the usefulness of the ICC. Democrat foreign policy experts are talking as if the U.S. were already a signed up, ratified, member. But more interesting is the stance of the Bush Administration. In the first days of his presidency George W. Bush ‘unsigned’ the U.S. membership. Yet now it is pushing hard in the Security Council for the ICC to act faster over the Sudan prosecution. The turn round suggests it may not be too long before the U.S. formally endorses the Court. This...

Part I On the night of August 7, the Georgian artillery caused terrible suffering to Ossetians in the tiny province of South Ossetia.  Amongst the many deaths were those of Russian peacekeepers who had been placed there after the conflict there between Ossetians and Georgians in the beginning of the 1990’s with over a thousand deaths.  My wife, Roswitha, and I with community leaders from Northern Ireland met some of the Ossetians who had fled from there during our first visit to the North Caucasus in 1991. They showed us photos of atrocities. In 1990, John Lampen, a Quaker peace worker in Northern Ireland, and I  arranged for community leaders from the North Caucasus including an Ossetian to spend a morning at the headquarters of the British army in Derry (Londonderry).  The British commander there described how he and his soldiers exercised their role of peacekeeping with sensitivity to peoples...

LONDON – How far is downhill? Well, that’s like asking how long is a piece of string. But whatever the answer, the American/NATO military effort in Afghanistan, triggered by 9/11, seems to have all the marks of a quick descent. In Barack Obama’s phrase, American public opinion doesn’t get it. How could they when Obama himself, supposedly a fresh eye on the international scene, bangs the drum for more troops and yet more force? Does European and Canadian opinion get it? Apart from the Canadians, who have had the good sense and the foresight to give a date for the withdrawal of their troops, public opinion appears to be asleep at the switch. Their young men are dying for a method of attack that the older men have devised without ever being challenge d to think it through. The policy, made within hours of the atrocity of 9/11, seemed to be...

September 12, 2008 Jonathan Power LONDON – Does America know what a dangerous game its leaders are playing? Does it know its history? And do the leaders of Europe, who should be a brake on American determination, go along with Washington because they are almost equally ignorant? After all none of the present crop of European leaders have had time to study much history, and all of them made their way upwards in their party ranks because of their skill and knowledge of domestic affairs. They have had little or no preparation for the affairs of the world. On the Russian, Georgian and Ukrainian side one can make the same argument. Ignorance reigns so history can be repeated. World War I was the most important geopolitically of the last century. After forty three years of unbroken peace in Europe, the continent slipped into war with barely a diplomatic thought. The issues...

Seven years after the terrible terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and on the Pentagon the time has come to study those events dispassionately, to find out what really happened, and to see whether the response to that tragedy has been a correct one, or whether we could have followed a different path. What is certain is that those events have drawn attention to radical Islam as never before, and they have also given rise to a ‘war on terror’ that has continued non-stop for the past seven years and may continue for a long time to come. There are certain terms such as Shari’a, ayatollah, fatwa, jihad, madrassa, etc that have come into the English language, but with new and often menacing meanings, not to mention anything about insulting terms such as Islamism, Islamo-fascism, rogue states, etc. As the saying goes: ‘Beware of truth simplified!’ However, there is no...

at the time of the independence movement. It is true that Africa over the last decade and a half has been through a period of great turmoil. But, according to the just published annual report of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, that monitors world trends in violence, Africa along with Europe, is now the most peaceful continent in the world, with only one significant tribal or interstate conflict last year, and this. (That is with over 1000 battle-related deaths.) Are we still transfixed and extrapolating from the mad late 80’s and early 90’s when countries as diverse as Yugoslavia, Zaire, Somalia and Indonesia seemed to tearing themselves apart with ethnic strife? The then U.S. Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, was heard to say “Where will it end? Will it end with 5,000 countries?” It was a gross misjudgment. Two thirds of all the campaigns of ethnic protest and rebellion...