June 2009

Voltaire described Europe as “a kind of great republic, divided into several states, some monarchical, the others mixed but all corresponding with one another. They all have the same religious foundation, even if it is divided into several confessions. They all have the same principles of public law and politics unknown in other parts of the world”. In a way that Charlemagne, Voltaire, William Penn and Gladstone, the early advocates of European unity, could only dream, a united Europe has become a reality with half a billion members. War, time and time again, has interrupted the pursuit of that objective. Continued civil war across the continent, across the centuries, has pitted the French against Germans, British against French, Czechs against Poles, Spaniards against Spaniards, Gentiles against Jews, reaching its dreadful climax in the Second World War. Of all the continents, over the millennium, Europe has been the most warlike. As...

Recent developments in North Korea have been the subject of much speculation in Western media. In the West, we do not know a great deal about what goes on within the leadership of DPRK: the information we receive is unreliable and we hear little from the North Korean side. This article is based on information received from open sources from both North and South Korea, the USA, as well as experts with some direct access to the discussions in the DPRK leadership. In summary, the article makes the following points: The nuclear weapon During the Korean War, US General MacArthur threatened to use nuclear weapons against North Korea. Korean prisoners of war who had experienced the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came back telling of this terrifying weapon. These two factors are said by North Koreans to be the reason the Great Leader Kim II Sung decided to start a...

June 9, 2010 Jonathan Power The International Criminal Court is coming out of its first review conference with its head held high. Over a hundred nations attended its meeting, which will end on Friday, in Kampala, Uganda. No country – at least publically – wants to see the back of it, apart from Sudan, whose prime minister is under indictment. Those African countries – DR Congo, Uganda, the Central African Republic and Kenya – which have asked for the ICC to intervene, help arrest and try alleged war criminals from their countries (in Kenya the ICC is still at the investigation stage) have set an example to show how this new world judicial system can bite with teeth. We should not be surprised. Africa has been the scene of too many of the world’s recent wars and produced leaders whose cruelty has been in the same league as Hitler, Stalin...

On Wednesday 6th May President Barack Obama met with Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari and Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai to try to find a solution to the fast deteriorating situation in both Afghanistan and Pakistan and to develop his strategy towards those two countries. After the meetings, President Obama praised the two leaders and said that the three of them would work together on a long-term basis to defeat terrorism. This is despite the fact that a few days earlier, in a speech on the occasion of his 100th day in office, President Obama had poured scorn on the Pakistani president’s “very fragile” government, which lacked “the capacity to deliver basic services” and did not enjoy “the support and the loyalty of their people”. Nearly eight years after the start of the war in Afghanistan not only has that country not been turned into a functioning democracy, Afghanistan’s much larger...