Archive 1986 – 2017

London – It sometimes takes a lot of faith to believe it, but most of Africa is going slowly in the right direction. Once again the pessimists have been confounded. The run up to last weekend’s parliamentary election in Zimbabwe seemed to be African despotism at its worst with President Robert Mugabe blatantly calling on his supporters to “axe” opposition activists. But the heroism of the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, and his supporters paid off. Although they did not win, they secured a handsome vote that gives them a great deal of leverage in the new parliament to argue not just for political reform but for economic change too. Mr Tsvangirai is now well placed to topple Mr Mugabe in the presidential election in two year’s time. There may not be the political “renaissance” that presidents Bill Clinton and Thabo Mbeki once spoke of. There are too many wars tearing up...

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LONDON- Amnesty International’s blast last week against the legitimacy of the Nato bombing of Serbia in a report that the New York Times said “has infuriated Nato leaders”, perhaps produced an unintended result. It confirmed to the Pentagon that it was right to oppose U.S. participation in an International Criminal Court whose reach on the prosecution of war crimes could stretch right inside the American military. For a whole year the joint chiefs of staff campaigned against the wish of their commander-in-chief, Bill Clinton, who earlier had made it clear he favoured the establishment of such a court. They won the battle and the U.S. delegation at the UN conference in Rome two summers ago, when the Court’s statutes were written, was mandated to seek wrecking clauses that, in effect, would have drawn a cordon sanitaire around the U.S. military, making future prosecutions, however outrageous the alleged war crime, impossible. In...

Participants at a seminar in Ohrid, May 2000 Visit our website training section TFF is also a Peace Training Network. The foundation collaborates with a series of institutions, universities and other NGOs and exchange educators to serve the needs of our clients. Clients have been people in war-torn regions, journalists, NGOs, teachers, youth, former soldiers, human rights activists, UN staff and concerned citizens of all walks of life. The network of TFF trainers and those of the organisations we interact with covers some twenty themes relevant to peace, development, conflict, reconciliation and global conflict-management. Several of our trainers have 20-30 years of experience in public speaking combined with academia, journalism, conflict-resolution, psychology and other relevant themes. So – think of TFF when you think of education and practical skills training. Learn more about what we can do for and with you at our new training section at our website Tell us what...

LONDON – Endless confrontation can be endlessly counterproductive. There is no conclusive evidence that isolating or cornering a state succeeds in moderating its behaviour. Engagement is the only way, short of war, to produce results that move nations out of their entrenched positions. This may seem to many of my readers a controversial statement. Of course it is. But it is my political credo. And the best example I can give to sustain it is coming to the boil right now- on the Korean peninsula. On June 12th South Korea’s ex-political prisoner and human rights activist and now democratically elected president, Kim Dae Jung, will meet his opposite number Kim Jong Il, president of North Korea, who inherited his position from his notorious father Kim Il Sung, the communist warlord who initiated the Korean War 50 years ago. For this much of the credit must go to President Bill Clinton. There...

Bertrand Russell’s “Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare” was first published in 1959, in an effort “to prevent the catastrophe which would result from a large scale H-bomb war”. Nuclear confrontation had already stimulated a race towards ever deadlier weapons, and a new and more precarious balance of power. Public concern was growing. Russell’s views changed in the years following Hiroshima, and were to change again, as the arms race soared away into hitherto unimagined destructive capacities. Inevitably, Russell’s writing about the bomb was dominated by the fact of the Cold War. Fear of Communism ranged the United States and its European allies into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. A Eastern alliance, the Warsaw Treaty Organisation, emerged shortly afterwards. Fear of Communism did not only stimulate military co-ordination: for a time, it also promoted economic co-operation, and the ascendancy of what is now thought of as the Keynesian world order. These were...

at Moscow Summit LONDON – If President Bill Clinton had all his wits about him he would challenge the toughest hard-liners on the Republican right to posit a plausible scenario for modern day Russia wanting to go to war with the West. Can anyone really make a case that if the U.S. dropped its guard- and its nuclear allies Britain and France did too – that Russia would move into western Europe and bomb America’s industrial heart-lands? It is simply intellectually outrageous, which is why no one spells it out. Even Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft and Condoleezza Rice choose to speak in more general, vague, even elliptical terms, the content of which is more insinuation and prejudice than rational argument. As for General Colin Powell, the former chief of staff of the U.S. armed forces, the black man who could have been president instead of Clinton almost for the asking, and...

We are really moved by all the support letters we have received in response to PressInfo 94. To those who worry: we will not close down. TFF means too much to too many, we know that. The transition period will be tough. We will find ways to fly in the future… Most ask what they can do to help us now the Ministry of Foreign has withdrawn its support. We think the best you can do to help TFF is to: 1. MAKE A DONATION We serve people who want to practise non-violent conflict-resolution. We help people in conflicts and war. Our dream has always been to be as people-financed as possible. You can help us by making a donation. If 350 people each donate 100 US$ – or 1500 donate 25 US$ – you have replaced the ministry’s grant! Tell others! Go straight to: http://www.transnational.org/tff/friendfm.html or click the cash register on:...

Under nio år har TFF av UD tilldelats ett årligt organisationsstöd. I år fråntogs stiftelsen detta stöd med omedelbar verkan och utan förvarning eller motivering. Syftet tycks vara att tysta en oberoende, kritisk stämma inom internationell konflikthantering. TFF, Transnationella Stiftelsen för Freds- och Framtidsforskning i Lund, är Sveriges enda icke-statliga center för freds- och säkerhetsforskning. Stiftelsen är den enda inom sektorn forskning och upplysning, som helt berövats bidrag. Sedan 1991 har TFF byggt upp en internationellt ledande kompetens särskilt vad angår Balkans konflikter. I en tid när Sveriges engagemang på Balkan är större än någonsin, med en svensk bataljon i Kosovo/a och stora biståndsinsatser till främst Kosovo/a och Bosnien, borde ett oberoende forskningscenter som TFF snarare ges ökat grundstöd för att bidra till en fördjupad syn på möjligheter och problem då det gäller freds- och försoningsarbete. Organisationsbidrag ges för att skapa kontinuitet och bred debatt om internationella frågor. TFF:s är...

For the past nine years, TFF has received an annual organisational grant from the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This year, however, the Ministry has withdrawn this support with immediate effect and without prior consultation or explanation. The aim seems to be to silence an independent, critical voice in the field of international conflict management. TFF is the only non-governmental centre of peace and security research in Sweden. It is also the only one in the field of research and information whose funding has been cut to zero. Since 1991 TFF has built an internationally respected competence, with particular regard to the Balkans. In a period when Sweden’s engagement in the Balkans is larger than ever, with a Swedish battalion in Kosovo/a and considerable aid programs to that province as well as to Bosnia and the Stability Pact, one would believe that an organisation such as TFF would have its grant...

LONDON- When Kofi Annan, the UN’s Ghanaian Secretary-General, visited Rwanda in May, 1998 he ended up being pilloried in an aggressive press conference for presiding over the UN’s “hands off” policy during the genocide, of the Tutsis by the Hutus four years previously. Journalists were quoting from Philip Gourevitch’s shocking then just-published, book, “We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families”. In it he charged that the UN had ignored a cable from its local commander warning of the impending genocide. As William Shawcross tells it in his important new book on the UN, “Deliver Us From Evil”, “His voice almost cracking, Annan ended by saying that ‘too much was made of one cable and that if INFORMATION was indeed the only problem then peacekeeping would be much easier. We would not be having problems in Kosovo because everybody KNOWS. We would not have had...

MADRID- Two elections will shortly take place in Latin America that could, it is being said, make a trend or break a trend. This, of course, depends on what you think the trend is. If you believe that the trend is towards a firming of democracy then a truly open contest in the election scheduled in Mexico for July 2nd, which would be an historic first, together with the defeat of the autocratic quasi democrat, Alberto Fujimori, in Peru on May 28th would confirm your opinion. But if you believe that the trend has been on the ebb for some time with the attempted coups in Bolivia and Paraguay and the rise of elected autocrats in Venezuela and Peru, then a re-elected Fujimori and the victory of the governing party in Mexico will confirm your pessimistic leanings. The truth perhaps is somewhere in between. The post-Caudillo democratic movement, which started life...