May 2011

Amnesty International, founded fifty years ago this week, was almost immediately dubbed “one of the larger lunacies of our time”. The then bizarre idea was to collect information on people incarcerated in prison solely for their political views and then, by means of an army of volunteer activists, bombard the offending governments with massive numbers of letters, postcards and telegrams, calling for the prisoner’s swift release. Other critics called it “subversive” and “an agent of Satan”. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomieni, Uganda’s Idi Amin, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and France’s President Jacques Chirac are all heavyweights who have gone into the ring to try and squash it. In the 1990s and the new century the criticism has been subtler. The attacks came not only from government leaders but from sceptics in the media as well. Some have argued that Amnesty has become respectable, a part of the...

By Jonathan PowerMay 17, 2011 Most reporters have been here for the election in which the communists – the longest ruling democratically elected communist party in the world – were trounced. It was a peaceful and civilized election and spoke well of West Bengal and its capital, Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). I’ve been here to sniff around the city and find out why it is one of the Third World’s most interesting and successfull places. Long a well educated part of India, West Bengal, and in particular Kolkata, has produced a disproportionate number of India’s intellectuals and artists. The other day one of its returning sons and one of its six Nobel Prize winners, the economist Amatya Sen, gave a speech at his alma mater, Presidency College, wondering if the reason for Kolkata’s low crime rate (the lowest of any big city in the world) is because of the depth of...

By Jonathan PowerMay 2, 2011 At the time of 9/11, nearly ten years ago, America was not only immensely distressed and angry but it was surprised too. It couldn’t- and still cannot- understand why anyone should be moved by such hatred against it. Inured from the rest of us by the isolationism of most of its political representatives and its media it had little idea of the currents swirling against it. An event of 9/ll’s magnitude was not only unimagined, it was unimaginable. Yet long before George W. Bush became president with his forceful in-your-face, take-it-or-leave-it attitude to the world outside on issues as diverse as global warming, the International Criminal Court and anti-missile defences, America had been turning in on itself, to the point of self-destructiveness. Thanks to President Barack Obama this has begun to change, though the Republicans in Congress, as with his urge to close Guantanamo, hamper...