January 2010

Why is the most densely populated state in India, which also suffered the greatest famine in India’s history in 1943, now the third largest economy in the country with a very rapid growth rate that is the third fastest among all the states, a power infrastructure that is the best in the country, soaring agricultural yields and a crime rate that is half the national average? It is mainly down to its governing communist-led front that is the world’s longest running democratically elected government – since 1977. Although in next year’s state elections it is likely to be ousted, partly out of the electorate’s boredom with it and partly because of its corruption (although its opposition, an offshoot of India’s ruling Congress Party, is also corrupt) No one epitomized communist rule more than its long time former leader, Jyoti Basu, who died last week at the age of 96. Television...

Is the state an opponent? I put this question to a top Gothenburg lawyer, Christina Ramberg, when interviewing her about Sweden and its top heavy welfare state. “No it’s a friend”, she replies, although she never votes for the Socialists.  Alexandra von Schwerin, an aristocratic businesswoman paying very high taxes, says “No, it’s a father.” Not even Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, leader of a right wing coalition that four years ago replaced the habitual governing party, the Social Democrats, is much against the state. He has dropped the old right wing mantra of calling for lowering taxes and wants to see only “a more efficient and less conformist state and society”. In an interview he told me that “we are not asking for a different system, just for better results.” The sense of equality goes deep down in the Swedish psyche, he explains. “The Swedish electorate don’t always look at their wallet....

Who knows? For all we do know Nigerian president Umaru Yar’Adua may be half dead. He has been ailing from a kidney illness for the last two months in a Saudi Arabian hospital. Now, at home, the chorus of those who believe he should step down has reached a crescendo. His vice president, Goodluck Jonathan, stands prepared in the wings. Meanwhile at home all major decisions are held up and his most crucial achievement – the winning of a truce with the Niger delta militants who have have knocked 25% off Nigeria’s oil income – hangs in the balance. The militants are becoming impatient for the truce to be firmed up and its promises delivered. The world cannot afford to ignore the happenings in the country that holds one third of the world’s black population. Nigeria gets a bad press. Despite its immense steps forward from the time of the...

By Jonathan PowerJanuary 19, 2010 The Obama Administration is going to leave behind 50,000 troops as they withdraw from Iraq called “Advise and Assist Brigades”. They will have warplanes, helicopters and Iraqi troops to command. Besides all this, the US State Department will deploy tens of thousands of mercenaries, provided by so-called contractors who seem to enjoy their Rambo style, careering around without much discipline. One wishes the more or less disciplined US military were not going if this is the substitute. What kind of withdrawal is this? Other questions remained unanswered too. Why did the President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair seek to topple Saddam Hussein when he was extraordinarily weak militarily, having lost most of his planes, tanks and warships in the first Gulf War twelve years before? Moreover, a good part of what was left of his armoury was destroyed by the UN and...

Last week the Indian minister for home affairs, P.Chidambaram, surprised many when he said that the year 2009 was remarkable for its lack of terror attacks. His statement came just over a year after Pakistani terrorists attacked Mumbai’s great hotel, the Taj Mahal, and killed more than 160 people. What he didn’t add was that this was the moment that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has said he was waiting for before he signed up for a peace deal with Pakistan over the disputed northern province of Kashmir. Kashmir has been torn in two ever since India and Pakistan won their independence from Britain in 1947. Independence provoked a mass exodus of Muslims to Pakistan and Hindus to India resulting in a massive carnage of both. At independence the ruler of Kashmir announced that the state would be part of India even though the large majority of its people were Muslims....

By Jonathan PowerJanuary 4th, 2010 It’s all coming along very nicely – the threat to arrest war criminals and those charged with crimes against humanity. Who would have thought in the days of the Vietnam and Cambodia wars, the civil war in ex-Yugoslavia, the pogrom in Rwanda and perhaps soon the architects of torture in the recent U.S. Administration of George W. Bush, that the hand of international justice would be reaching out to arrest the protagonists, try them and imprison them? After the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials in 1945 and 1946 of the wartime leaders of Germany and Japan there was a hiatus, finally broken when in 1975 most of the world signed the Convention against Torture. Then there was an even broader treaty when the Convention Against War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity was signed in Rome in June, 1998. In October, 1998, Scotland Yard arrested the ex...