Archive 1986 – 2017

This is a big week for the Palestinians and a big week for mankind. Whether it will end up being a big step forward remains to be seen. A BBC poll published yesterday reveals that there are large majorities in favour of admitting the state of Palestine to the United Nations – in Europe, in China and all the Muslim nations. Even in the US there is a significant majority in favour. The US seems adamant it will use its veto in the UN Security Council. It’s not that President Barack Obama disagrees with the Palestinian urge to be recognised it is because he fears the (unrepresentative) Jewish lobby and the loss of votes and money it can bring him. The Europeans are still equivocating although there are powerful European voices trying to push the European Union into the “yes” camp. Saudi Arabia, author of the best compromise yet tabled in the...

s and a third of what they were during the Cold War years. Terrible though 9/11 was, it barely registers compared with the siege of Leningrad, the battle of the Somme or Vietnam. One thing has certainly changed. We didn’t know much about either the Somme or Leningrad, merely the bare bones of events, until months afterwards. Now we get war reporting in real time- either from reporters on the ground with their satellite communications or, as in the case of Syria, from the mobile phones of locals. Thus we feel ourselves caught up in endless conflicts. But it is an illusion. There have been no interstate wars for some time and the number of civil and ethnic wars has fallen steadily almost every year of the last twenty. There are about a quarter fewer than in 1990 and the last sustained territorial war between two regular armies was between Ethiopia...

This week Mrs Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is back. Who, you might say? She is the person, in the early 2000s, who as finance minister under Nigeria’s democratically elected president, Olusegun Obasanjo, turned the Nigerian economy around 180 degrees. Before that, under the military dictatorship which had ruled Nigeria, Africa’s most populated country, for 18 years, economic growth, despite the huge oil wealth, had not risen above 3% a year. The economy was badly sick and billions of dollars were skimmed off by the dictator, Sani Abacha, and those around him. Inflation and bank indiscipline brought havoc and instability to the economy. The poor got poorer. With success under her belt she departed Nigeria to be a vice president of the World Bank. Now the new president, an Obasanjo protégé, Goodluck Jonathan, has brought her back, presumably to engineer another surge. On her last watch she killed inflation, paid off Nigeria’s huge...

There are questions that even today the historians don’t seem moved to investigate. Two important ones come to mind. Why was it that Pharonic Egypt never went to war for hundreds of years until Ramesses 11 became pharaoh in 1303 AD? Isn’t it a fact that Jews in Europe were unmolested for most of the first millennium after the death of Jesus? The Egyptian question is a bit of an idle curiosity since an answer probably won’t affect our behaviour today, although it should. Still, it is nice to know that we human beings aren’t constituted to make war and that we don’t have to live like we did over hundreds of years in Europe – going to war at the seeming drop of a hat and making the continent the most war-like place on earth. To learn more about the persecution of the Jews is highly relevant to today’s...

By Jonathan PowerJuly 12th, 2011 The big immigration debate is often the big obscurantism debate. The wool is pulled over our eyes and even for the best informed obtaining clarity is not so easily done. The vested interests in continued immigration are enormous – first and foremost the migrants themselves who are seeking an escape from poverty and lack of opportunity at home. But they are supported in their quest by governments at home who look at the remittances that bail out their balance of payments problems without looking at the other side of the balance sheet – the effect that emigrants and their money have on raising the desire of their populations for imported goods, the lost of the “bestest and brightest” from their own economies, the often sad and destructive impact on family life and migrants spending when they do come home on a house, consumer items, such...

, Washington approved the visit of a Taliban delegation to the Texas headquarters of Unical, the big oil company, to discuss the construction of a trans-Afghan gas pipeline. The Taliban emerged in the south of Afghanistan as recently as late 1994. It was in reaction to the chaos that followed the retreat of the invading Soviet army when for five years the mujahideen – who were made up of many separate elements – vied for supremacy, killing over a hundred thousand in the process. The Taliban had three main aims- the stop the violence, to stabilize the country, to restore the practice of Islamic law, albeit at the less tolerant end of the spectrum, and to wipe out the trade in opium. They had no trouble in welcoming both domestic and foreign NGOs. But the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Omar, made a dreadful mistake- he gave sanctuary to bin Laden when he fled Sudan....

In last Sunday’s general election Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Islamic, centrist, Justice and Development Party won a substantial victory at the polls, returning it to office for the third consecutive time, making his the strongest presidency since Attaturk. The Kurds who live mainly in the south east, although there are substantial numbers both in Istanbul and Ankara, voted in large numbers for the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party- giving them nearly 6% of the vote and 35 seats in parliament. This was also a substantial achievement, even though the urban Kurds, as always, voted in large numbers for the mainstream parties. The Kurds have had a chequered history in modern Turkey. First, they tried passive protests against their inferior position and the draconian rule of Ankara which didn’t allow them cultural freedoms- the right to have their own Kurdish language, media or to teach Kurdish in schools....

Amnesty International, founded fifty years ago this week, was almost immediately dubbed “one of the larger lunacies of our time”. The then bizarre idea was to collect information on people incarcerated in prison solely for their political views and then, by means of an army of volunteer activists, bombard the offending governments with massive numbers of letters, postcards and telegrams, calling for the prisoner’s swift release. Other critics called it “subversive” and “an agent of Satan”. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomieni, Uganda’s Idi Amin, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and France’s President Jacques Chirac are all heavyweights who have gone into the ring to try and squash it. In the 1990s and the new century the criticism has been subtler. The attacks came not only from government leaders but from sceptics in the media as well. Some have argued that Amnesty has become respectable, a part of the...

By Jonathan PowerMay 17, 2011 Most reporters have been here for the election in which the communists – the longest ruling democratically elected communist party in the world – were trounced. It was a peaceful and civilized election and spoke well of West Bengal and its capital, Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). I’ve been here to sniff around the city and find out why it is one of the Third World’s most interesting and successfull places. Long a well educated part of India, West Bengal, and in particular Kolkata, has produced a disproportionate number of India’s intellectuals and artists. The other day one of its returning sons and one of its six Nobel Prize winners, the economist Amatya Sen, gave a speech at his alma mater, Presidency College, wondering if the reason for Kolkata’s low crime rate (the lowest of any big city in the world) is because of the depth of...

By Jonathan PowerMay 2, 2011 At the time of 9/11, nearly ten years ago, America was not only immensely distressed and angry but it was surprised too. It couldn’t- and still cannot- understand why anyone should be moved by such hatred against it. Inured from the rest of us by the isolationism of most of its political representatives and its media it had little idea of the currents swirling against it. An event of 9/ll’s magnitude was not only unimagined, it was unimaginable. Yet long before George W. Bush became president with his forceful in-your-face, take-it-or-leave-it attitude to the world outside on issues as diverse as global warming, the International Criminal Court and anti-missile defences, America had been turning in on itself, to the point of self-destructiveness. Thanks to President Barack Obama this has begun to change, though the Republicans in Congress, as with his urge to close Guantanamo, hamper...

These days I pick up the paper or switch on the news and find that the UN is fighting- one battle here and another there. The UN never used to fight quite like this. It was the peace-keeper. UN soldiers and helicopters have been fighting in the Congo and now Libya and Ivory Coast. No one seems outraged. When journalists asked Alain Le Roy, the head of UN peace-keeping, why the UN was deployed in this non-traditional peace-keeping role in the Ivory Coast, he replied that the Security Council had adopted unanimously (as they did for Libya) a resolution that sanctioned “all necessary means…. to prevent the use of heavy weapons against the civilian population”. When diplomats at the Security Council quizzed Mr Le Roy, arguing that shelling the presidential palace could not be called protecting innocent civilians, Le Roy argued that the true target was heavy weapons in the...

March 29, 2011 Jonathan Power Now that the new nuclear arms reduction treaty between the US and Russia is safely tucked up in bed we have to ask “What next?” There are a number of imperatives: to agree to further sharp cuts in nuclear armouries and this time including the UK, France, China and Israel, a Test Ban Treaty,  a ban on the further stockpiling of fissile material, getting rid of short range missiles based in Europe, agreeing to joint NATO-Russian anti-missile defences in Europe and, not least, burying the doctrine of “No First Use”. An agreement on the “No First Use” (NFU) doctrine would make the protagonists agree that none of them would be the first to use nuclear weapons, that they would only use them in case of a nuclear attack. For years the Soviet Union had such a policy. But a few years ago its successor state, Russia, rescinded...