October 2005

LONDON – In mid 1999 only three weeks into his first term of office President Olusegun Obasanjo had to send the army into Warri, an important oil town, in the Niger delta. Around two hundred people were killed by intertribal fighting over confused land ownership. Obasanjo flew into Warri and started negotiations between the fighting groups. Six years later there is now peace between the three tribes who fought each other the most, the Ijaws, the Urhobo and the Itsekeri. He also promised to substantially increase the proportion of federal revenues going to the delta states. Nevertheless, sporadic violence has continued through the Obasanjo era, with the army and police sometimes responding viciously. Periodically, panicky articles appear in the local press quoting the oil companies – in particular Shell, by far the biggest – as fearing for the lives of their employees and threatening to shut down their oil wells....

The UN International Day of Peace One half of the population, here and in the Middle East, is barely being used when it comes either to causing terror or preventing it. Ninety seven percent of bombers and suicide bombers are male, as are over ninety percent of those conducting the so-called ‘war on terror’. Maybe it is time to consider what women would do. In fact, most governments have signed up to United Nations Resolution 1325, which is a worldwide agreement that we will include women in preventing and resolving violence. Why? Because all over the world women have shown that they’re good at it. Dekha Ibrahim Abdi is a Muslim woman from the borders of Kenya and Somalia. In 1992 she managed to stop a clan war that had cost 1,500 lives, by getting together with women from the opposing clan. This was not sewing circle stuff. She said...

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Dear friends at BBC I am the director of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, TFF. I have just returned from Burundi where I have worked on and off since 1999. I believe it is fair to say that, so far at least, the Burundian peace process is remarkably positive and promising – while it is also true that it can still go madly wrong. With the exception of the FNL that keeps on fighting, all other movements in the bush have, as I am sure you know, gone civilian and joined the political process – president Nkurunziza being the foremost example. If the present government should engage in a full war against the FNL, it would be catastrophic for the country. Elsewhere, warlords and other military actors have been successfully disarmed by tough UN peacekeepers – such as Eastern Slavonia, Croatia in the 1990s. May I add...

LONDON – Whoever wins the Liberian election, which now goes to a second round, will confront the question: how can Liberia avoid a resumption of politics-as-plunder? Charles Taylor, Liberia’s and Africa’s plunderer (and murderer)-in-chief, may be off the scene but the interim government that has presided over Liberia in the preparations for the recent elections has shown that raping raw material resources is deep in the sinews of Liberian politics. In March, a UN panel reported that Liberian officials had signed a secret contract with a European company that gave it a virtual monopoly to sell Liberian diamonds, even though Liberia has been banned from selling its diamonds by the UN until the UN certifies that transparent and accountable procedures are being followed. Although the two front-runners in Liberia’s presidential contest are known for their probity and integrity and doubtless will want to get on top of the problem, the...

LONDON – Even the worst of African situations can be turned around. In Liberia it has been done in two years. The descent during the 1980s and 90s was precipitous, fast and deadly. A quarter of a million people were killed by rival militias, hundreds of thousands driven across borders into refugee camps, one president tortured to death and the macabre event recorded on video, young adolescent boys dressed up in wigs and terrified the populace with random killings and, not least, the country was systematically looted almost clean by its warlord/president Charles Taylor, who became rich on the export of timber, iron ore and alluvial diamonds from neighbouring Sierra Leone. Two years ago I was here at the war’s end. Nigerian and Ghanaian peacekeeping troops lined the road from the airport, backs to the road, eyes scanning the jungle for movement. The roads were sandbagged with checkpoints, the telephone...

 En genlæsning af”BRIEFING FOR A DESCENT INTO HELL” Doris Kruckenberg har genlæst Doris Lessings 34 år gamle roman og ser mange forbindelsespunkter til verdens situation i dag. Kruckenberg mener at den frygt, Lessing dengang indirekte bearbejdede vedrørende menneskehedens fremtid, er blevet virkelighed. Titlen på Doris Lessings roman fra 1971 hedder på dansk: “Instruks om Nedstigning til Helvede”. Instruksen til nedstigning hentyder til et møde mellem planeterne, eller kald dem de græske/romerske guder, foranlediget af at Jupiters ældste datter Minerva – denne kloge og humanistiske måne – havde taget kontakt til Merkur/Hermes for at han, med sin autoritet som overguden Solens talerør og budbringer, skulle få gennemført, at nogle reddere blev sendt ned til jorden for at lempe den ind på et bedre spor. Denne “Briefing” i de olympiske sfærer foregår i hovedet på en professor (måske et sendebud fra oven?), der har mistet hukommelsen og på et mentalsygehus i London...

Trykt som kronik i Information i juni 2005 Vores oplevelse af tryghed rystes af voldsepisoder på gader og stræder. Og vi ønsker, at nogen handler, så vi selv og vore familier kan færdes frit og sikkert: De skyldige må findes og straffes. Retssystemet og staten sørger på ofrets vegne for, at retfærdigheden sker fyldest. Så langt så godt. Vores ærinde er ikke at nedbryde eller erstatte retssystemet. Men spørgsmålet er, om samfundet gør nok for at bryde de spiraler af hævn, gengældelse og vold, som risikerer at gøre livet endnu mere utrygt for almindelige borgere. Kan der gøres mere? Det danske forsøg med konfliktråd i straffesager blev indført for at give ofrene for kriminalitet mulighed for, gennem et møde med gerningsmanden, at få talt ud om episoden og dens konsekvenser. Vi ved, at det for mange har medført, at de igen turde færdes i det lokale miljø uden frygt for...

Oprindelig publiceret i Jyllands Posten 12. august 2005 Just hjemkommet efter en måneds ophold i udlandet har jeg haft anledning til at læse en debat i aviser og dagblade som følge af imam Abu Labans forslag om, at den drabssigtede dørmand fra café Rust på Nørrebro skal betale blodpenge til ofrets familie. Debatten synes at være gledet af sporet, og der er ingen tvivl om, at man skal holde tungen lige i munden, hvis debatten skal bringes tilbage på sporet igen. Jeg vover her forsøget. Først må nogle forudsætninger slås fast: I de fleste moderne retssamfund har staten 1. monopol på legitim voldsudøvelse, 2. uafhængige domstole tager stilling til skyld og straf og 3. politiet står for håndhævelse af lov og orden. Ordensmagten (dvs domstole og politi) varetager i straffesager forholdet mellem det offentlige og borgerne. Dvs. at ordensmagten har som sin opgave at sikre, at de love, der er...

LONDON – There are two ways of tracking down terrorists and war criminals. One we might dub the Simon Wiesenthal way, in honor of the Nazi hunter-in-chief who died on September 20th at the ripe old age of 96. The other we should dub the George W. Bush way. Wiesenthal was a stickler for legality. As The Economist obituary described him, Wiesenthal “was a clever detective with an elephantine memory”. It was this skill that enabled him to unearth war criminals wherever they were hiding, even though governments everywhere, including Western ones, were often content to let sleeping dogs lie. His greatest catch was Adolf Eichmann, the mastermind of the Holocaust. Another important catch was a former concentration camp guard notorious for shooting small children. She was living a respectable life in New York and neighbors thought her “the nicest woman on the street”. All those he uncovered were sent...

There is every reason to commemorate the massacre by Serb soldiers on innocent Muslim civilians in Srebrenica ten years ago today. But unless it is considered acceptable to quantify crimes and politically misuse human suffering, there is no plausible reason to forget or silence other cases of massacres, ethnic cleansing and terror bombings in which other innocent people lost their lives. Other crimes silenced In September 2003, mainstream media around the world forgot to commemorate the 10th Anniversary of the Croatian Army’s killing of civilian Serbs in the Medak Pocket in Croatia. In May 2005, they forgot to commemorate the 10th Anniversary of Operation Flash in Croatia and in August this year they are likely to remain silent about Operation Storm in Croatia. Here is what Amnesty International has to say about the fate of civilian Serbs in Croatia in the years 1991-95 during which 300.000 Croatian Serbs were forced to leave and/or actively driven out...

Der er al grund til at mindes massakren udført af serbiske soldater på uskyldige muslimske civile i Srebrenica for 10 år siden. Men med mindre det betragtes som acceptabelt at kvantificere forbrydelser og at misbruge menneskelig lidelse politisk, er der ingen gyldig begrundelse for at glemme eller fortie andre massakrer, etniske udrensninger og terrorbombninger, i hvilke andre uskyldige civile mistede livet. Andre forbrydelser fortiet I september 2003 glemte mainstreammedier verden rundt at mindes 10-års jubilæet for den kroatiske hærs mord på civile serbere i Medak-lommen i Kroatien. I maj 2005 glemte de at mindes 10-års jubilæet for Operation Flash i Kroatien og d. 5. august forblev de tavse om Operation Storm i Kroatien. Her er hvad Amnesty International har at sige om civile serberes skæbne i Kroatien i årene 1991-95, hvor 300.000 serbere blev tvunget til at forlade og/eller aktivt blev fordrevet med vold fra deres land. Nutidens kroatiske ledere er stolte af dette – og var selvfølgelig tilstede...