Archive 1986 – 2017

June 28, 2010 Gunnar Westberg In his famous speech in Prague in April 2009 President Barak Obama presented us with his vision of a world free of nuclear weapons. He emphasized that the U.S. would lead the world towards this goal. He foresaw, however, that this goal would maybe not be reached in his lifetime. Considering that the 48 years old President statistically has a 50% chance of living for 30 more year, adding a few years if he does not relapse into smoking, this was not an optimistic prediction. Can the world survive another three decades with nuclear weapons? Even more ominous was his statement that ”as long as these weapons exist, we will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and guarantee that defense to our allies”. Does that mean that the US will be the last to abolish nuclear weapons? During the year since this...

June 25, 2010 The World Cup, now being played out in South Africa, is not a mirage. It is succeeding beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Not only has the game thrilled its adherents all over the world, the new infrastructure has not failed to impress visitors – from the amazing stadiums, to the new roads and the high speed rail link to the airport. All was completed on schedule, testimony to the country’s growing expertise in management and sophisticated technology. The “crime wave” foreseen by many has not occurred. But for those who can take their eye off the ball, think not of football but of the African continent as a whole. It is beginning to roar. As the tigers have growled in South East Asia the last three decades, with an almost stratospheric rise in economic growth and living standards, the roaring African lions seem intent on emulating their Asian...

June 16, 2010 Jonathan Power Memories are short when it comes to realpolitik. President Barack Obama says he was only a boy when the Vietnam War was going on so it is not imprinted on his consciousness. I wonder if he, or indeed any of the current youngish Western leadership, recalls that the US helped the deposed dictator of Iran, Shah Mohammad-Reza Pahlavi, get Iran’s nuclear research underway, with no caveats about enriching uranium? Does Obama know that after the Shah’s overthrow and the mullahs took over that initially Iran was allowed to buy uranium fuel from the US but that soon after the US stopped the deal, but didn’t give Iran its money back? Does Obama know how it came to be that the US turned a blind eye to Israel’s creation of the atomic bomb? Has President Nicolas Sarkozy fully absorbed the implications of the French nuclear aid...

June 9, 2010 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 and Pol...

The unprovoked and murderous Israeli commando attack on the peace flotilla is the Selma of the Arab/Jewish struggle for the land of Palestine. Selma, a small town in Alabama, was where Martin Luther King based his campaign to win the voting rights for disenfranchised blacks. Attempting to march to the state capital, Montgomery, the marchers were set upon by baton-wielding police as they tried to cross Pettus Bridge. It provoked a nationwide outpouring of disgust and anger. The march continued, joined by tens of thousands of people from all over the United States, until it reached Montgomery. When King spoke it resonated around the world. Shortly after, President Lyndon Johnson rammed through Congress legislation ensuring there would be no longer impediments to blacks voting. The election of Barck Obama as president can be directly traced to that legislation. Will the creation of a two state solution to the Palestinian conflict...

. Nevertheless, true to Tennyson’s poem of the Crimean War, “Ours not to reason why, Ours but to do and die”, the top officers went along with obeying the orders they were given. The big question now is how to withdraw “with honour” from Iraq. That is important to the soldiers. President Barack Obama has promised to be out by next year. How he sees it today, given the post election infighting in Iraq, is unclear. When he was a senator he told a Congressional hearing that if the US wanted to totally eliminate Al Qaeda from Iraq and have a solid Iraqi state they would be there for decades but “if our criteria is a messy, sloppy status quo, but there’s not huge outbreaks of violence, there’s still corruption, but the country is struggling along but it’s not a threat to its neighbours and is not an Al Qaeda...

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, in the process of reaching out to the Palestinians, was murdered by an extreme Jewish militant. Although there was an outpouring of grief there were a good 30 to 40% who thought and even said “good riddance”. When Prime Minister Ehud Barak went to the Wye plantation outside Washington DC and negotiated face to face with Yasser Arafat and President Bill Clinton the media hailed an agreement as nearly done and then tore into Arafat for scuppering it. But the fact is Barak could not have won Knesset (the parliament of Israel) approval for what he conceded and, indeed, he raised the bar on Arafat so high that he must have known that Arafat would not make the great final leap. Maybe it was all just a masterful piece of public relations meant to get America off Israel’s back and to undermine Arafat’s standing. The latest...

May 13, 2010 Jonathan Power The stability of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous state, seems to defy the doomsayers. When the democratically elected president, Olusegun Obasanjo, ended his second term of office a quiet, self-effacing academic, Umaru Yar’Adua was elected. Last week he died, not yet 60. He is succeeded by his equally self-effacing, non dictatorial deputy, Goodluck Jonathan. Not everything Yar’Adua did was good – his most grievous sin was to fire Nuhu Ribadu, the path-breaking head of the country’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission that prosecuted successfully many of the country’s most egregiously corrupt governors. But he did achieve two very important things, as he battled his debilitating illness. With remarkable perseverance he did what his predecessor had tried and failed to do to bring to the point of success negotiations with the armed militants who were bent on destroying the foreign owned oil industry and the oil and...

say that if the nationalist drum roll reached a certain crescendo public opinion would welcome an Indian nuclear attack on Pakistan, totally careless of the consequences. Today also there is the insurgency of the Maoists in eastern India, fuelled by the deep poverty of India’s tribal peoples who rarely live beyond the age of forty. Yet there is a strong other side of India. There is the Gandhian tradition of non-violence and the value of the worth of the individual which suits the world’s largest democracy well. There is the continuing success of democracy, a functioning if very slow legal system and a free press that are much more than just a safety valve for anti-government anger. They are sophisticated instruments for the pacific settlement of disputes and resentments. There is the influence of the fast growing middle class which is educated enough to understand the futility of violence and...

The lies and misrepresentations by the British ex-prime minister Tony Blair led the nation into the long and destructive war with Iraq. Now we all know that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. The evidence that he had was bent almost out of recognition to the true facts. The cost in lives torn asunder in Iraq was immense, and only a handful of Iraqis thought they were better off with the war than without it. There may have been a dictatorship that was cruel to those that opposed it but most people, if fearful on occasion, had a peaceful life, law and order, food in the shops and functioning schools and a health service. That unnecessary carnage is on many people’s minds as Britain prepares to vote in its general election. Blair led the charge but his cabinet (with one major exception, Robin Cook, the leader of the...

One of the troubles with all the current emphasis on health care and nuclear weapons in American politics is that other issues are being given less attention. Human rights, supposedly one of President Barack Obama’s copper bottomed commitments, has taken if not a back seat at least one far from the front. And don’t ask the Europeans to take over the show. In the current general election campaign in Britain human rights abroad rarely gets a mention, even though the country is the birth place of Amnesty International. Quite a few European countries got badly compromised by the Bush Administration’s policy of rendition – sending a terrorist suspect off to a country which didn’t have scruples about harsh interrogation techniques. Even today, when you think they might be hanging their heads in shame for this outrage, there is not much effort to respond to Obama’s plea to take in released...

I have spent eight months now in the glorious city of Kolkata. You wouldn’t think it is glorious from those who still pedal the story of “The Black Hole” and quote Kipling. Paul Theroux, an exceptional novelist, in his new book, “A Dead Hand, A Crime in Calcutta”, continues the myth. The city “went on growing, yet it still looked rickety and ruinous, and in areas of faded elegance and dramatic misery a bad smell lingered, haunted and human”, he writes. But it is glorious in many ways. At its centre is a park larger than New York’s Central Park, full of boys and men playing cricket, and gardens with well tended flowers. In the midst of it sits the Victoria Monument, one of the finest buildings built in the nineteenth century that housed the central government of the British Asian empire. Right through the city are fine mansions. Some...