April 2009

LONDON – Of all the words said and written about torture in the current debate very few has bothered to look up the history of the birth in 1984 of the UN’s Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Much of the groundwork was done by Amnesty International. Among countries who put their shoulder to the wheel, the Scandinavians and the Dutch worked harder than anyone else. But not far behind them was the U.S., whose president at that time was the grand conservative, Ronald Reagan, who had no trouble in persuading Congress to ratify the Treaty. His fellow conservative, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain, also whisked it through the House of Commons in quick time. ‘Those were the days’, you might say. No one in the public debate, to my knowledge, has looked up the words of the Treaty itself. They are stronger...

By Jonathan PowerApril 15, 2009 LONDON – Last week Scotland Yard (alas, working without their chief sleuth, the late Sherlock Holmes and his deft touch) uncovered a major bomb plot. Those arrested were all Pakistanis. Londonstan? However, they chose to arrest the suspects, after months of carefully tracking their movements, not bomb them from 30,000 feet. Likewise, when four years ago bombers blew up the trains entering Madrid’s central station the Spanish police laboriously ran them down. This time they were mainly Algerians and Moroccans. Those arrested, later convicted and imprisoned, had no formal links with Al Qaeda. In fact their ties were non existent, a government-appointed commission later found. Doubtless, however, it was the example of Al Qaeda that prompted their dangeous views. The Spanish, on their manhunt, did not choose to bomb them, or even blast them out of their hideaways. It was careful police work, backed by...

Written before the April clashes After a dinner conversation in February 2010, with a colleague monitoring conflict in Nepal, the Czech Sinologist based in Hong Kong concurred with others that “the situation here is a big mess.”  Despite relative calm after the judgment day when the court verdict was delivered on February 26, many believe that the storm is brewing this week with the news about the impending red shirt’s determination to hold a large-scaled rally against the Abhisit government beginning on March 12, it would be another fateful moment testing the resilience of Thai society. Given the ways some media choose to report the protest and portray the protesters, I won’t be surprised if some diplomats would report back to their governments that the Thai government is quite nervous while contemplating the possibility of issuing a warning to their citizens against visiting Thailand at the moment. Some foreign companies...

LONDON – A fifty percent reduction in the nuclear weapons’ arsenal of Russia and the U.S. was proposed by President Barack Obama this past weekend. President Dmitry Medvedev seems to be receptive. What neither have mentioned is that we have been here before – with presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. But the plan was undermined by a key advisor on the American side and short sightedness on the Soviet side. Although Russia and the U.S. keep their missiles on hair trigger alert, there is almost nobody in the higher reaches of policy making on either side who thinks they would ever be used. Indeed, this has been so for years. Doubts about reason for the vast number of nuclear weapons in America’s stockpile go back a long way. President Dwight Eisenhower, the former Second World War commander in chief, observed that, “military statements of nuclear weapons requirements were grossly...