Archive 1986 – 2017

Washington’s covert war in Macedonia purports to consolidate America’s sphere of influence in southeastern Europe. At stake is the strategic Bulgaria-Macedonia-Albania transport, communications and oil pipeline “corridor” which links the Black Sea to the Adriatic coast. Macedonia stands at the strategic crossroads of the oil pipeline corridor. To protect these pipeline routes, Washington’s goal is to install a “patchwork of protectorates” along strategic corridors in the Balkans.  The promise of  “Greater Albania” used by Washington to foment Albanian nationalism is part of the military-intelligence ploy.  Amply documented, the latter consists in financing and equipping the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and its National Liberation Army (NLA) proxy to wage the terrorist assaults in Macedonia. The development of America’s sphere of influence in Southeastern Europe –in complicity with Britain– supports the interests of the oil giants including BP-Amoco-ARCO, Chevron and Texaco. Securing control and “protecting” the pipeline routes is paramount to the...

LONDON – You can blame part of it on Margaret Thatcher. It was she who brought some of the worst characteristics of the British temper to the surface and made them respectable: parochialism, petty nationalism, distrust of strangers (the Americans excepted), dog eat dog, and that long tradition of petty-bourgeois stoicism, tolerating the second rate in the government and the public sector – hospitals, trains, schools and so on. Her originality was to shake the moribund British economic tree until its leaves fell off, revealing a new hard working, thrifty, go-for-it populace – only 20-30% of the population, but that was enough – that would, by earning more, be able to buy privately what it did not really like in the public sector. All this still lives on after four years of Labour government and will be, doubtless, alive and healthy at the end of another five year term, unless...

Ifrån Surat mot havet Söder om Ahmedabad ligger Surat. Dit kommer jag med tåg och hyr där en bil med chauffören Max, som är svart som en afrikan. Med mig har jag Tom Webers bok om Saltmarschen, min lilla dator samt kameran. Allt måste registreras noggrant. Jag ska köra Marchens sista drygt 50 kilometer längs små vägar, från by till by och besöka de tempel, övernattningsplatser och torg som 78 marschdeltagare och Gandhi passerade för 71 år sedan. Vi lämnar “utvecklingen” och “civilisationen”. Byarna är Indien, inte städerna! Här är pastoralt och fridfullt, luften är ren; jag hör och ser fåglar. I lilla Dharam finns ett enkelt hus, nu bibliotek, med en byst av Gandhi framför. Här övernattade marschdeltagarna. Jag hälsar på i biblioteket. Max pratar med någon och återvänder: “De säger att det här i Dharam bor en vän till Gandhi, som var med på Marchen. Vill du träffa honom?”...

VÆRDIER Er konfliktløsning blot en samling metoder, som kan bruges for at få hvem som helst til at komme på talefod og enes, når problemerne brænder på? Altså en teknik, som er værdifri? Sådan er der nogle, der forstår begrebet. Men en sådan forståelse synes mig risikabel &endash; og uinteressant. Det er nyttigt at overveje, hvad hensigten med konfliktløsning er og at prøve at sætte den ind i en større sammenhæng. Og det er da også, hvad der gøres i de fleste af de centre for konfliktløsning, som i disse år vokser op over hele verden. En forståelse, som giver mening, kunne være: Konfliktløsning er en ikkevoldelig indsats for menneskelige rettigheder og behov i de civile samfund. Her ses konfliktløsning som en del af den filosofi og metode, som ikkevold er, med sine utallige udtryksformer . Konflikthåndteringens opgave er at erstatte fysisk og psykisk vold med klar og direkte kommunikation,...

Penguin published Power’s history of Amnesty International on May 31st “Like Water on Stone”. (See below). LONDON – Amnesty International, founded forty years ago, 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...

LONDON – Like its counterpart, the Northern Ireland conflict, the continuation of Basque nationalist terrorism seems too polarised, too fuelled by historical sentimentality and myth on one side and by narrow-minded authoritarianism on the other, for easy settlement. But Northern Ireland has found a peace of sorts and the lion is lying down with the lamb and even sitting side by side in the same cabinet room in Stormont castle in Belfast. Yet Basque militancy, in the form of the guerrilla army of ETA, continues its ferocious policy of assassination and intimidation, out of step not only with the rest of western Europe, not just with the majority mood of the rest of the country, but also with the majority mood of the Basque country itself. This is the clear reading of last week’s regional elections in the Basque country. The radical leftist party, Euskal Herritarrok, widely considered to be...

PressInfo 118 offers an independent analysis of 11 reasons why Macedonia is at the brink of war. Number 119 deals with the way the United Nations was forced out of Macedonia and not employed in Kosovo at the time when it could have made a difference. In short, there was a hidden agenda. This one deals mainly with the obvious question: Is Macedonia and its various groups totally innocent? Of course not! In some respects there is more repression of the Albanians in Macedonia than in Kosovo. Thus, for instance, Pristina University was the centre of learning for Albanians while for almost a decade the issue of higher education for Albanians have been controversial and, since 1997, the Tetovo University considered illegal by the majority. Albanians do not play a role commensurate to the proportion they make up of the population (25 – 40 pct depending on sources); whether this is a relevant...

LONDON – There was a time when it looked as if America and Libya were set on a dead-end course whose destructiveness was all but self-defeating. Its nadir was President Ronald Reagan’s decision in 1986 to bomb Libya, attempting to kill Colonel Mu’ammar Qaddafi, and in the end killing his adopted daughter. Libya’s withering response was to blow up in mid air a Pan American airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, for which crime a Libyan intelligence agent was found guilty in a special court four months ago Yet the two countries have managed, very slowly, to repair their antagonistic and fruitless relationship. Outsiders may consider that they have taken an unnecessarily tortuous road to get there but, nevertheless, where they are today is a different place than a decade ago. This is an achievement worthy of note. War, always a possibility, was avoided. Yet still the antagonism lingers, on both sides....

PressInfo 118 offers an independent analysis of 11 reasons why Macedonia is at the brink of war. You may summarise them: It’s the international community, stupid! Let’s add some more and look at the sad fate of the United Nations in Macedonia. WHY THE UNITED NATIONS WAS IN THE WAY UN warnings were ignored. UNPREDEP’s leadership repeatedly warned that if NATO bombed Yugoslavia, they could not guarantee the lives of UN personnel just at the other side of the Yugoslav-Macedonian border. Western politicians, Scandinavians from where the UN leadership came in particular, did not understand that if their NATO allies bombed Serbia it could provoke Serb retaliation against the Extraction Force which was partly co-located with their own nationals in the UN mission! The UN was impartial and fair. UN peacekeepers respected and listened to all sides as a matter of professionalism. They did not see the world in black-and-white terms....

For the umptieth time, the politico-military-media complex tells us that local conflicts are caused solely by locals. The international “community” has no part in it but the noble one of trying to persuade the parties to sit at a negotiation table instead. This time the stage is Macedonia and the complex has learnt nothing since Croatia. This PressInfo and PressInfo 119 tell you how this intellectual rubbish covers hidden political agendas instead of expressing the truth. They also reveal why the UN was forced out of Macedonia and that it was prevented from having a common mission in Kosovo and Macedonia which was the only thing that would have made sense in the late 1990s. It is based on my own investigations at the time and published here for the first time. THE INTERNATIONAL “COMMUNITY” : THE MAIN CAUSE OF WAR Since few seem to be burdened with a political memory stretching...

THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION NOW Only two things are worse than violence: to criticise it without presenting alternatives and to fight it with violent means. The turbo-militarisation of the European Union (EU) is the most important on the agenda of the EU Summit June 14-16 in Gothenburg, Sweden. Shall the EU commit itself to killing by weapons in the name of peace and intervene up to 6000 kilometres away from Brussels? If so, shall it be allowed to do so virtually without public debate and without referendums, irrespective of the fact that it will imply that young boys, one day, come home in body bags? Major EU countries have nuclear weapons; others are NATO members. EU bureaucrats and diplomats work intensely to integrate the ‘Peace’ Forces of the EU with NATO. Do you want the EU to support the existence and possible use of nuclear weapons, or to be a...

DEN VIKTIGASTE FRÅGAN JUST NU Det finns bara två saker som är värre än våld: den första är att kritisera våld utan att föreslå ickevåldsliga alternativ; den andra är att bemöta våld med våld. Den senaste tidens intensiva militarisering av den Europeiska Unionen (EU) är den i särklass viktigaste frågan på agendan för EU toppmötet som kommer hållas i Göteborg den 14-16 juni. Ska EU i första hand kunna döda för fredens skull och intervenera i konflikter som äger rum 6000 km ifrån Bryssel? Om ja, ska det då ske i nästan fullständig avsaknad av offentlig debatt och utan folkomröstning, och utan hänsyn till att det kommer att innebära att unga pojkar en dag kommer att transporteras hem i liksäckar? Stora EU-länder har kärnvapen, andra är NATO-medlemmar. EU:s byråkrater och diplomater arbetar frenetiskt med att integrera EU:s fredsstyrkor med NATO:s. Vill du att EU ska stödja existensen och ett möjligt...