Links to Facts & Views

You want to find interesting analyses, reports, articles and papers on peace and conflict issues from around the world?

Now we do the job for you. This page provides links to a selection of the best critical and constructive materials – the essential stuff we learn from ourselves and want to share.

Just click below at what you are interested in read, download or send on to a friend.

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 What is Operation Matrix? A strategy to undermine MilosevicThe program originated with a December 1998 White House meeting at which Robert S. Gelbard, the president and secretary of state’s special adviser for Kosovo, was put in charge of an umbrella strategy. That’s what CIA got money to do and – perhaps – it explains why NATO didn’t destroy Yugoslavia’s mobile phone net? Read William Arkin’s Washington Post column of October 11, 1999.

• What Makes Europe Look Increasingly Authoritarian?
Ralf Dahrendorf reflects on the future of the “Third Way” and liberty in the recent issue of Foreign Affairs.

• UN Secretary General Kofi Annnan visits Kosovo and expresses dissatisfaction with the treatment of minorities there. The S-G also turns down the Albanian request for observer status at the Security Council.

• TFF PressInfo 77 and 78 argued that the UN in Kosovo is not in line with Security Council resolution 1244. Did you know that Richard Holbrooke, the United States ambassador to the UN and has encouraged the UN in Kosovo not to worry to much about reactions in the UN?

• UNEP says NATO’s destruction in Yugoslavia had serious environmental consequences. Balkans Task Force Recommends Immediate Environmental Action as part of Humanitarian Aid Four environmental hotspots found in Serbia. This is the authoritative report from the Task Force of the United Nations Environment Program, UNEP – The The Kosovo Conflict: Consequences for the Environment & Human Settlements. The document is downloadable in Portable Document Format (PDF).

• Africa Has Refugees, Kosovo Gets MoneyMobilizing resources for any crisis in Africa is like climbing a mountain,” said Soren Jessen-Petersen, the assistant U.N. refugee commissioner. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), charged with caring for people displaced by conflict, has raised 90 percent of the money it needs for refugees from the Kosovo war. But it has raised just 60 percent of its budget for more than 6 million refugees in Africa. Jessen-Petersen said Africa programs, already pared from a year ago, will almost certainly be cut again to prevent the agency from going into the red. “At the end of the year we go back to our donors and say, ‘Please go back and look in your drawers one more time,’ ” he said. “And this year they’ll be telling us there is nothing in those drawers, because they gave it all to Kosovo” – writes Karl Vick in the Washington Post Foreign Service, on Friday, October 8, 1999.

And this next one tells you about the priorities of our world:

• Bill for Kosovo War Goes Over £ 30 Billion
This is the mind-boggling figure used by BBC and Jane’s Defence Weekly in the most comprehensive analysis so far of the military economic and human impact of the conflict: Bombing: £2.63bn; Humanitarian aid: £2.54bn; Peacekeeping: £6bn; Reconstructing Serbia/Kosovo: £20.5bn; Total: £31.67bn. The Guardian has the details.

• Kosovo Defence Chief – a Major Partner of the International Community – Accused of War Crimes?
Agim Ceku, the top commander of both the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, and the new Kosovo Protection Force, KPF, set up by the UN was also a leading commander in massacres in Croatia and when some 200.000 Serb citizens of Croatia were driven out in 1995. But it seems he can’t be indicted now – writes Tom Walker from Pristina in Sunday Times.

• Hate Speech in Pristina – Kosova’s Media War Has Started.
A KLA-linked news agency created a firestorm when it launched a vicious attack on a leading independent publisher and political personality, Veton Surroi – which TFF also featured. Political debate in Kosovo took a potentially dangerous turn this week with a ferocious denunciation of a leading independent publisher by the press agency linked to the unofficial Kosovo Albanian interim government and the Kosovo Liberation Army. Read the analysis by Anthony Borden, the executive director of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, IWPR.

• A Brief History of Indonesia under (neo)-Colonial Domination
“If there is a lesson in all of this it is that wrongs cannot be righted until the facts are known and understood. Peace and social justice cannot prevail until the rich and powerful set an example for the weak and impoverished,” writes Enver Masud, founder of the Wisdom Fund.

• How We Ended the Cold War
“Peace Activists’ Demand for an End to Nuclear Madness Played a Decisive RoleIt is now ten years since the Berlin wall crumbled, but the question of how and why the cold war was concluded still lingers. As the apparent winner, the West has tended to regard its triumph as a vindication of cold war policies or, more modestly, as a case of Soviet “exhaustion.” Neither of those views is satisfying because each discounts the role played by the peace and antinuclear movements. Evidence is mounting that their influence on events was more important than most historical accounts admit–perhaps even decisive.,” writes John Tirman in The Nation.

When you read the following report you may wonder what it is KFOR, the UN and the OSCE lack since this goes on week upon week. Perhaps the answer is: an idea about what they eventually want to do with Kosovo?

• The Ethnic Cleansing Attempts Goes On in Kosovo
Mitrovice again ignites in riots on a regular basis. An ethnic Albanian march billed as being for “peace and culture” in Mitrovice exploded into a full scale riot yesterday, showing what an ethnic powderkeg this divided town in northern Kosovo has become. Chris Bird of the Guardian reports.

World socio-economic trends compel us to ask whether it is not completely natural that there is militant security policies, far too many nuclear and other weapons, arms trade profiteers and military “humanitarian” interventions. Why should people not fight each other in direct violence when there is still so much structural violence? Find the facts here:

• The UNDP “State of the World Report” is Must Reading in an Age of Globalization…– in a summary comment by Stephen Shalom. And read the full text of the Human Development Report here.

– and not everybody suports the military-industrial complex – which is a sign of hope:

• American Business Men Want Military Cuts
Andrew Greenblatt lays out the craziest scenario he can come up with on short notice: All America’s ”enemies” – from North Korea, Libya and Iraq to China and Russia – gang up on it, while at the same time all its allies abandon it. Then: ”When it comes to military outlays, we’re spending twice as much as all these ‘enemies’ are spending combined.” Mr. Greenblatt, speaking for Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, a Manhattan-based group of about 500 business executives and former military officials, is trying to drive home the organization’s central point. American military spending is out of line with any imaginable threat, not only distorting the national budget but also actually weakening the nation. William Rasperry, The Washington Post, reports.

• Did NATO Bomb the Chinese Embassy Deliberately?Of course that would not be so easy to admit. So it remains a mistake. Says Robin Cook, according to a BBC report.

WIRE Editor

Jan Oberg with TFF Associates

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