February 1998

LONDON– On too many occasions the UN has been the big man’s whipping-boy. Bill Clinton for one has kicked it harder than his two immediate Republican predecessors ever did. Nikita Krushchev banged his shoe at it and Charles de Gaulle called it “ce machin”. Yet once again we see how in a crisis the big powers run to it to get themselves off the hook, this time for a bombing no one really had the argument or stomach for. Back in 1954 there was the charged incident over the capture of 17 U.S. airmen by China. American opinion became extremely agitated. There was even some wild talk about the use of nuclear weapons. The UN was asked to intervene and Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold went to Beijing to talk to Premier Chou Enlai. It took six months of negociating but finally the men were released. Dwight Eisenhower, the then U.S. president,...

“With the agreement signed in Baghdad, UNSecretary-General Kofi Annan has shown that there is aconstructive approach to conflict-mitigation: good planning,being principled, meeting face-to-face, listening actively,and showing respect. While we must hope that this will stop the plannedwarfare against Iraq and its people, we must also recognisethat the underlying conflict is far from resolved,” says TFFdirector Jan Oberg. “In situations like these it is essential to gather manyand varied facts and interprete the issues through otherlenses than those of the mainstream media. Internet permitsyou to combine many sources and perspectives, find the lesswell-known facts and construct your independent opinion. It’s not enough to criticise the violent approaches.Media people, experts and opinion-makers also need inputs ofconstructive alternative thinking, speaking and acting. Thisis essential for the emergence of a new paradigm of globalconflict-management, based on ever lower levels ofviolence,” Oberg continues. Thus, this service from TFF. We are happy to assist youin your...

LONDON– The war hero Antoine de St. Exupery, better known to most of us as the author of the children’s classic, Le Petit Prince, wrote in his autobiographical novel, “Flight to Arras”, about the rigours of air combat, some lines that President Bill Clinton could usefully reflect on: “Orders are given for the sacrifice of the air arm because war must be made to look like war. And nobody admits meanwhile that this war looks like nothing at all. That no part of it makes sense. That not a single blueprint fits the circumstances”. Mr. Clinton’s profound mistake is that he has acted all along as if he were back in 1990, in George Bush’s shoes at the time of the Gulf War, threatened by a military monster armed with weapons of mass destruction. And now that he’s raised the flag, the momentum of superpower ego is pushing him into a...

LONDON– India’s elections are like India’s trains–lumbering along at no great speed, taking days before the destination is reached but, despite the discomfort along the way, reliable, sturdy and arriving at the station more or less on time. The world’s largest democracy will soon be in action for the second time in two years in a desperate search to find a stable government, an extraordinarily difficult task now that the founding party of India’s independence, Congress, is a pale shadow of its original self and the strengths of local, regional, religious and caste parties, not to say the phenomenal rise of the Hindu nationalist, Bharatiya Janata Party, are now the deciding factors in Indian politics. Yet it is safe to predict it will be probably the fairest ever, without significant violence or vote-buying. Indian democracy is cleaner by the year. This is partly thanks to the former election commissioner T.N. Seshan...

In late November 1997 following the dramatic plunge of the Korean won on the foreign exchange market, an IMF team of economists led by Mr. Hubert Neiss was rushed to Seoul. Its mandate: negotiate the terms of a “Mexican-style bail-out” with a view to “restoring economic health and stability”. An important precedent had been set: the IMF’s standard “economic medicine” (routinely imposed on the Third World and Eastern Europe) had been launched for the first time in an advanced industrial economy… The details of the economic reform programme, however, had already been decided in advance in consultation with the US Treasury, Wall Street’s commercial and merchant banks as well as with major banking interests in Japan and the European Union. A Letter of Intent (“Memorandum on the Economic Program”) was put together in a hurry on behalf of the government with virtually no analysis of the broader causes of the...

LONDON– Fifty years on from the death of Mahatma Gandhi, lawyer, political activist, apostle of non-violence as a means of settling political disputes and vanquisher of the British Empire, the world is in crying need again for the philosophy he propagated and the debate he provoked. As Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of newly independent India, said on the day of his assassination, “the light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere”. If only India had listened to him more there would have been no division with Pakistan. If only the British had learnt more from him there would have been no colonial massacres in Kenya or Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland. Perhaps, if Bill Clinton could spare a thought for Gandhi today, he would find a way of keeping Saddam Hussein in check without risking the horrors of war, a war that New York Times...