July 2000

LONDON – Twenty years ago, not long after the current democratically elected president of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo, had voluntarily stepped down from his position as the military president, he gave a speech to a conference on disarmament attended by top political leaders from West, East and South. Of all the speakers – and some of them were great reformers like the late prime minister of Sweden Olof Palme, the former U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Georgi Arbatov, foreign affairs advisor to the Soviet president, Leonid Brezhnev – Obasanjo was the most outspoken and demanding on his prescriptions for limiting the international arms trade. “The industrialized countries”, he said,”should not assume too blithely that their policy of selling third World countries more or less whatever they want is universally accepted among developing countries.” For every Zia ul-Haq, Indira Ghandi or Middle East potentate who wanted to buy the latest military...

There are four Gandhis who have survived Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s (1861-1948) death. Fifty years after his assassination, it may be useful to establish their identities, as the British police might have done in the high noon of colonialism. All the four Gandhis are troublesome, but they trouble different people for different reasons and in different ways. They are also useable in contemporary public life four distinct ways.* I say this not in sorrow, but in admiration. For the ability to disturb people – or, for that matter, be useable – one hundred thirty years after one’s birth and fifty years after one’s death is no mean achievement. Frankly, I do not care who the real Gandhi was or is. Let academics debate that momentous issue. Contemporary politics is not about ‘truths’ of history; it is about remembered pasts and problems of fashioning a future based on collective memories. For good...

LONDON – Olusegun Obasanjo has now spent fifteen solid working months in office as Nigeria’s democratically elected president – and it shows from the moment the visitor arrives at the once chaotic, and dangerous, airport of Lagos. Gone are the pick up boys, pretending to be welcoming taxi drivers who rob you and dump your body by the road. Gone are the requests for bribes by custom officials. Gone is the air of disorder that made the simplest check-in a lengthy drama. In my first conversation with the president for just over a year I asked him at once how things are going. “I underestimated two things. First the degree of corruption. Of course, I knew it was bad. But I never guessed how deep and wide it went. The second is the chaos in the electricity supply system. As far as I can see it was set up in a...

Links to Facts & Views

Building a Peace Structure on the Korean Peninsula Dedication To All soldiers and civilians who were killed, wounded, traumatized, separated, and persecuted in the origins, conduct, and aftermath of the Korean War (1950-53) -victims of 20th century inability to create a powerful theory and practice of nonkilling global political science; and To Korean political leaders President Kim Dae Jung and Chairman Kim Jong Il who during June 13-15, 2000, took first steps toward potentially transforming nonkilling Korean leadership for the 21st century world. ___________________________________________________________________ Special Address, International Conference in Commemoration of the 50thAnniversary of the Korean War, “Fifty Years after the Korean War: From Cold-War Confrontation to Peaceful Coexistence,” co-organized by The Korean Association of International Studies (KAIS) and the Korea Research Institute for Strategy (KRIS); sponsored by the Ministry of Defense, Seoul, Korea, July 14-15, 2000. Is a Nonkilling Korea Possible? Is a nonkilling Korea possible? If not, why...

LONDON – We arrived at the king’s palace – not much more that a dilapidated corrugated iron-built structure- on the edge of the small town of Oyo, capital of the Yoruba kingdom that used to extend in pre-British days half way across the width of southern Nigeria and into Benin. Today, although it contains over 30 million people, it is a poor shadow of its former glory- power and wealth passed long ago to the bourgeoisie and- for a long period- to the army. There was a salute by toothless old men, dressed in black, firing home made muskets. A succession of elderly men and women came and prostrated themselves full length before the king. A child dressed as an African carved doll danced. Pierre Sane, Amnesty International’s Secretary-General, dressed in the russet red robes of an honoury chief, knelt before the king who called him “one of the illustrious...

 Links to Facts & Views

LONDON – One of the many imponderable issues of the forthcoming U.S. presidential election is the Saddam Hussein question, to bomb or not to bomb, to sanction or not to sanction, to try and overthrow him or to accept the status quo. Already advisers to George Bush are letting it be known that a toughening of the effort to depose him is high on the candidate’s agenda. Hanging like an albatross around Mr Bush’s neck is the widespread sentiment that when his father as president led the defeat of Iraq in the Gulf War he had a sword at the throat of Saddam Hussein and failed to use it. At the end of the war President George Bush Senior allowed Saddam to withdraw his forces from Kuwait and southern Iraq with half of his Republican Guard intact. Within days he was using these to savagely repress rebellions by Iraq’s Shiite Muslim...

A new formula and breaking with protocols The electoral triumph of Vicente Fox is perhaps the greatest sign of Mexico’s healthy transition towards democracy. It is also a breakthrough in the political tradition that has governed the modern era of the country after the Mexican Revolution. Vicente Fox started his political career with the PAN – Party of National Action – but he won the presidential election also representing a wing of opposition parties that joined efforts in the historical struggle to defeat the PRI – Institutional Revolutionary Party. Mexico not only has a new President, but a President born from new formulas. Breaking with protocols might be part of Vicente Fox’s political marketing strategy. The first unmarried President, divorced with four adopted children, wearing rancher boots and owner of a body language quite different from the “Chicago boy style” of technocrat political elites. As former president of Coca-Cola Company...

– “A burning passion coupled with absolute detachment is the key to all success.” Mahatma Gandhi 1. Peace Movements Come, Go and Change While peace movements come and go, people’s wish for peace is a steady undercurrent of civil society and civilised society. Whether there is peace and whether there are movements depends entirely on the definitions applied. Peace can be found in a situation, in a structure, in invisible values, and in a moment’s revelation. It does not always have to be constructed by some kind of entrepreneur or actor. Peace movement and peace work is global. However, in this essay I shall focus primarily on the movements in Europe. One can think of many reasons why the peace movement, or rather movements, of the 1970s and 1980s seem largely to have disappeared: • Individual and social exhaustion together with a belief that the movements would be less needed...