Archive 1986 – 2017

Framing an Inquiry President George W. Bush historically challenged the United Nation Security Council when he uttered some memorable words in the course of his September 12, 2002 speech to the General Assembly: “Will the UN serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?” (1) In the aftermath of the Iraq War there are at least two answers to this question. The answer of the US Government would be to suggest that the UN turned out to be irrelevant due to its failure to endorse recourse to war against the Iraq of Saddam Hussein. The answer of those who opposed the war is that the UNSC served the purpose of its founding by its refusal to endorse recourse to a war that could not be persuasively reconciled with the UN Charter and international law. This difference of assessment is not just factual, whether Iraq was a threat...

Book Review The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People. By Jonathan Schell. New York: Metropolitan Books (Henry Holt and Co.). 412 pp. $27.50. Ever since his earliest days as a writer, more than three decades ago, Jonathan Schell has had an uncanny ability to depict public preoccupations in an arresting manner. His superb journalistic coverage of the Vietnam War for The New Yorker later published as The Village of Ben Suc, remains to this day the best battlefield account of the war, and a classic in its genre. But Schell’s worldwide fame was established back in 1982 with the publication of The Fate of the Earth, an eloquent disquisition on the unsustainability of the nuclear arms standoff at the core of the cold war. As with all his work Schell has a special gift for articulating the most urgent concerns of the day in a prose that...

Frontline, Vol. 20 – Issue 8April 12-25, 2003 For over three decades, Richard Falk has shared, with fellow Americans Noam Chomsky and Edward Said, a reputation of fearless intellectual and political commitment to the building of a just and humane world. He recently retired as Professor of International Law and Practice, at Princeton University and is currently a Visiting Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has been a prolific writer, speaker and activist of world affairs and the author or co-author of more than 20 books. The following are excerpts from a discussion that Falk had with Zia Mian and Smitu Kothari about the US war on Iraq, the role and future of the United Nations and the need to rethink democratic institutions and practices. Kothari/ Mian: Before the war, there were unprecedented protests in the U.S and around the world. It was evident that a significant...

LONDON – “What is Europe?” Winston Churchill wrote in 1946, “A rubble heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground for pestilence and hate”- language that would not be out of place on one side of the vitriolic debate on the Euro, a new European constitution and indeed all things European that is now the everyday grist of Britain’s most populist press and which spills over not only into the Conservative party, as it has since the days of prime minister Margaret Thatcher, but into the ambivalence in the Labour party leadership that is unable to bite the bullet on taking Britain into full membership of the Euro currency. Yet Churchill, aware of Europe’s problems- a hundred times worse than today, if not a thousand- reached a different conclusion. On 19th September, 1946, speaking in Zurich a bare six months after his more famous Iron Curtain speech, Churchill appealed for a United...

The killing of Antioquia state Governor Guillermo Gaviria Correa on May 5, 2003, among ten hostages massacred by FARC guerrillas in reaction to a military rescue attempt, deprived Colombia and the world of a nonviolent political leader whose legacy is no less significant than those of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. He was born in Medellín in 1962, eldest son of a family prominent in politics, publishing and business. A mining management specialist by training at the Colorado School of Mines, after a decade of innovative public service including as Antioquian Secretary of Mines and General Director of the Colombian Roads Institute he campaigned for “A New Antioquia” in 2000 and was overwhelmingly elected Governor by 600,000 of six million people in Colombia’s most populous state. Gaviria’s brief but dynamic governorship was profoundly rooted in the principles and practices of nonviolence derived from his Christian faith and serious study...

Grundlovsdag – 5. juni, 2003 I sin tale den 9. maj på Woodrow Wilson Centret i USA Washington løftede statsministeren sløret for et initiativ for sikkerhed og samarbejde mellem Europa og Mellemøsten. Fogh Rasmussen ønsker en dialog mellem Europa og Mellemøsten inspireret af den OSCE-proces, der fra 1975 bidrog så stærkt til at nedbryde fjendskabet i vort fælles Europa. Sådan et initiativ har længe været savnet. Det er i grunden visionært i en tid hvor kortsigtede og hårdtslående midler ellers dyrkes. Og det er godt timet. Selvom der er grunde til at være pessimistisk om køreplanen for fred mellem Israel og Palæstina, er der dog nu kommet positive toner fra Tel Aviv; og uden en grundig dialog mellem netop Europa og Mellemøsten kan vi hverken få løst de gamle problemer eller reparere det fornyede fjendskab mod Vesten, som krigen mod og besættelsen af Irak har forårsaget. Fogh Rasmussens greb om...

LONDON – With unanimous approval in the Security Council the UN is authorizing a beefed up peacekeeping force into the Congo maelstrom. At least this time the UN, hitting trouble in the face of massacres and the deaths of its peacekeepers, is not going into reverse. In Rwanda eight years ago it was said that the UN force appeared to have four gears, one for forward and three for reverse. In Rwanda  800,000 million people were massacred. An independent investigation by Ingvar Carlsson, the former Swedish prime minister, laid the blame squarely on the shoulders of the U.S. and British governments which, when the small contingent of  Belgian peacekeepers were attacked and brutally castrated and killed, refused to allow the UN presence to be beefed up. The report also faulted Secretary-General Kofi Annan who was then head of peacekeeping and Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then Secretary-General, for not keeping the Security Council well...

LONDON – “It is a maddening circle of suspicion and fear,” editorializes the New York Times. But this is how it has always been since the days of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 when the British government gave the official nod to the Zionists who wanted to re-create a biblical homeland on what for 700 years, until the break-up of the Ottoman empire in the wake of Turkey’s defeat in World War 1, had been Muslim territory. In all the intervening years not once have the two parties been at a common point of compromise at the same time. The Balfour Declaration was a misguided attempt to meet the vision of what were then a relatively few Jewish idealists who wished to turn back the historical clock. If every ethnic group in the world asserted so vigorously ancient yearnings the world would become totally chaotic in a very short time, and...

Each year the future of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) Regime becomes more uncertain. In the past year alone: The NPT regime obligations are having less and less success in restraining the irresponsible behavior of nations, especially the treaty’s NWS, and the United States in particular. As NWS move further away from their obligations under the treaty, they are simultaneously weakening incentives for non-nuclear weapon state parties to the treaty to remain within the NPT regime. If such regressions continue, they will inevitably lead to an abandonment of disarmament goals and the gradual lack of interest by non-nuclear weapons states parties to remain within the regime’s boundaries. It is time for members of the NPT regime to issue a clear statement outlining how the treaty is being undermined and by whom.   The NPT 13 Practical Steps Towards Disarmament Ignored When the United States ambassador stated at the 2002 NPT Review...

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” These revolutionary words from the Declaration of Independence are worth reflecting upon in light of the current struggle for economic justice in America. The government of the United States, the richest and most powerful country in the world, is perpetuating...

LONDON – Why does the United Nations so often shoot itself in the foot? Just as the World Health Organization is basking in accolades at its annual assembly this week and next for its part in the battle to overcome the spread of SARS another story has begun to emerge – of  political ineptitude and moral cowardice that should bring shame not honour on its departing director-general, Gro Harlem Brundtland. It is the way the UN agency has dealt with Taiwan, now the country outside China with the fastest growing number of cases, despite it having a national health service, according to a year 2000 report of the Economist Intelligence Unit, only second in the world to Sweden’s. This suggests that if Taiwan doesn’t get on top of the disease no one will, for all the self-serving reports put out by the WHO this past weekend that it appeared that the...

Är irakier som bakterier som måste utrotas??Fredsforskaren Jan Öberg skäms för västmediernas hållning och utgår särskilt från rapporteringen från gripandet av Hoda Ammash, som presenterades som “Fru Mjältbrand”. Hoda Ammash arresterades i Bagdad på krigets 48:e dag, den 5 maj. Låt mig använda hennes mänskliga drama till att diskutera rasismen i medierna och politiken. CNN presenterade henne som “Dr Bakterie” och senare som “Fru Mjältbrand. Den enda bilden av henne, som använts om och om igen, visar henne i grön uniform. Hon kliver på en amerikansk och en israelisk flagga, medan hon med knuten näve hälsar på en stor skara av Baathungdomar. Hoda Ammash har inte befunnits skyldig till något brott. Ändå demoniserades hon också av våra medier, som sällan vågar motstå det amerikanska psykologiska kriget. Vidare nämndes att hon tagit sin doktorsexamen i USA och att hon kunde vara användbar då det gällde att finna de massförstörelsevapen man hävdat...