Archive 1986 – 2017

North Korea is again at the centre of the world stage. The regime has challenged the strong powers in the world and in the UN Security Council (UNSC). The strong reactions from international politicians and media serve the interest of the leader of the Democratic Peoples Republic of North Korea and give him an undeserved but highly desired important role in world politics. At the same time this reaction shows that the rules of international law as applied by the UNSC are unequal. Laws that restrict and condemn smaller countries are not applied to the nuclear weapon states themselves. This decreases the respect for international law and agreements. I wish to express as strongly as I can that the nuclear weapons test and the test of long distance missiles by North Korea increases the tension in the region and decreases chances of a lasting peace. It is most unfortunate that...

When a country tests a nuclear weapon, it is sending a message. It is not always clear, however, what that message is. In the case of the recent nuclear test by North Korea, some commentators have argued that the North Koreans are sending a “pay attention to me” message to the international community and particularly the United States. Other commentators have argued that the nuclear test was carried out for domestic purposes, to inspire the country with a display of technological prowess. A short statement from North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency suggests that both international and domestic audiences were relevant to the bomb testing message. The North Korean announcement indicated that the test had several purposes, including to “bolster up its nuclear deterrent for self-defense”; “settle the scientific and technological problems arising in further increasing the power of nuclear weapons”; “inspiring the army and people of the DPRK”; “contribute...

May 26, 2009 Jonathan Power LONDON – With the election behind it, it shouldn’t be back to square one for India in its quest to settle the bitterly divisive issue of Kashmir, one that has led to three wars and once brought the two countries to the brink of nuclear war. India missed its great opportunity to settle the burning dispute while the military president, Pervez Musharraf, who ruled Pakistan until his overthrow last year, was in power. According to diplomats I talked to eighteen months ago, both British and American, in New Delhi and Islamabad, a deal was tantalisingly close. One British ambassador told me that the main barrier to a deal was ‘psychological’ and that India had to make very few concessions to make a final deal. If Musharraf wasn’t prepared to give away the store, the Pakistani compromises came close to it. But India, despite the seemingly...

LONDON – I walk up Sonia Gandhi’s drive way, past  guards with Uzi machine guns, and can’t help thinking that when I came to interview Mrs. Indira Gandhi (Sonia’s mother-in-law) on the eve of her great comeback and massive electoral win, I walked up to her front door and knocked. There were no guards and only one servant to let me in. I am ushered into Sonia G’s office. She barely acknowledges my presence. “Buon giorno”, I say. There is no reply. I have been warned that she’s cold and she doesn’t offer me a hand. She walks over to me and asks me to sit down. I look her in the eye and ask my first question to the Italian widow of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was cruelly blown to smithereens by a female Tamil terrorist, a member of the now defeated Tamil independence struggle in neighbouring Sri...

May 13, 2009 Jonathan Power LONDON – Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine who lived 460-357BC, concluded that diseases were naturally caused and were cured by natural remedies. Opium, he wrote, was one of the latter. But he was also of the opinion that it should be used sparingly and under control. If only our governments today could take such a sanguine and informed view of the use of opiates in medicine today. No one needs a more enlightened attitude than the Western forces now operating in Afghanistan where they are committed to destroying the peasants’ main source of income. The tough, no nonsense, eradication programme has done as much as Western military action to push country people into the Taliban camp. The West has long been shooting itself in the foot. Both the former president of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf and the wise senior statesman and former finance minister Sartaj...

LONDON – Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine who lived 460-357BC, concluded that diseases were naturally caused and were cured by natural remedies. Opium, he wrote, was one of the latter. But he was also of the opinion that it should be used sparingly and under control.If only our governments today could take such a sanguine and informed view of the use of opiates in medicine today.No one needs a more enlightened attitude than the Western forces now operating in Afghanistan where they are committed to destroying the peasants’ main source of income. The tough, no nonsense, eradication programme has done as much as Western military action to push country people into the Taliban camp. The West has long been shooting itself in the foot. Both the former president of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf and the wise senior statesman and former finance minister Sartaj Aziz, who probably knows more about the economics...

LONDON – Igor Yurgens is probably as close to Dmitri Medvedev as one can get without interviewing the president himself. His influence is regarded by those who follow the inner workings of the Kremlin as immense. By disposition a liberal academic, committed to the rule of law, he runs his own think tank which gives him the research and intellectual firepower to influence his close friend. Yurgens had something to do with clearing the path for the president to give his first on the record interview to the remarkably brave and independent newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, whose star reporters, including Anna Politkovskaya, have been gunned down. I recently interviewed Yurgens and we talked about Georgia, where the Russian army last August defeated the Georgian forces which had precipitated an unnecessary war by invading its neighbour, the pro-Russian mini state of South Ossetia.I’ve long maintained that although Russia was acting within its...

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...

LONDON – “We must have an exit strategy”, said President Barack Obama on television yesterday. But what about an entry strategy, or should we say, after seven years of steadily losing the war in Afghanistan a re-entry strategy? In a month’s time Obama will descend on NATO at its Brussels HQ and demand that the Europeans help out. Well before then, Obama will have on his desk the interagency review of policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan that he has requested. We should be able to guess its bias, if not every details of its contents. It is being chaired by Bruce Riedel. He is a former CIA officer and a senior advisor to three U.S. presidents on Middle East and South Asian issues. We know his views (and they are easily accessible on the Brookings website). My first reaction on reading them is why on earth didn’t Obama give the job to his...