Archive 1986 – 2017

LONDON- In the month which sees the return to China of Portuguese Macao , the last imperial enclave, the eyes and thoughts of strategists are turned to Beijing’s next quest. Will it be Taiwan, a hard nut to swallow? Or will it be the easily digestible small raisins of the Spratlys, the mass of supposedly oil-rich islands that lie scattered through the South China Sea? In the last couple of weeks there has been a flurry of diplomatic activity over the Spratlys as Chinese premier, Zhu Rongji, has worked his way round the Southeast Asian countries which also lay claim to the islands. The trip was only a partial success. Mr Zhu did his best with a tight brief to give the impression that China is more interested in conciliation that conflict. Nevertheless, his spokesman indicated that China is not prepared to modify its total and exclusive claim to “the historic...

The Peace Journalism Option 3 By Jake Lynch for Conflict and Peace Forums   PART 3 3. REPORTING OF ‘THE KOSOVO CRISIS’ ‘The Serbs’ – Aggregation and Dis-Aggregation Nowhere has the tendency to ‘aggregation’ been more evident than in coverage of the past decade’s upheavals in present and former Yugoslavia. The zero-sum analysis offered by most Western reporting is based on the proposition that ‘the Serbs’ were guilty of ‘starting it.’ A piece for the BBC’s Newsnight, screened as Yugoslav forces vacated the province in June 1999, proved an extraordinary example of this underlying narrative and an apt illustration of how ‘aggregation’ plays an important part in constructing it. The report was filed from Urosevac as local Serb civilians fled in fear of violence by the Kosovo Liberation Army. In the link read by the presenter, we learned that Russia had, that day, called for an urgent debate in the United...

Links to Facts & Views Nonviolence & forgiveness • Real peace builds on people, from the ground-up as well as by top-down peace agreements:Peace that starts in the heartsIn October, millions of Colombians – perhaps a third of the population – took to the streets in the country’s largest protest against a decades-long civil war and in support of fresh peace talks between the government and Marxist rebels. • Dr. Daisaku Ikeda, President of the Buddhist organisation, Soka Gakkai International, SGI, who is also a TFF adviser reflects on the necessary peace culture we must learn to develop:Towards a Culture of Peace. A Cosmic View“…I suggest that for the sake of overcoming the identity crises undermining the soul of modern humanity we must attempt to discover a new cosmology. Unless we raise our sights this high, hopes of nurturing true world citizens must inevitably prove illusory.” • A global inter-generational dialogue initiated by young people:The...

By Walter A. McDougallVolume 7, Number 12Foreign Policy Research Institute WIREDecember 1999 Walter A. McDougall is the Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania, Editor of Orbis, and Co-Director of FPRI’s History Academy. His most recent book is Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776,Houghton Mifflin, 1997. This is his eynote address at FPRI 1999 Annual Dinner. “Several people, including our host Ron Naples, whose burden it was to introduce this lecture, have asked me what exactly I meant to discuss this evening inasmuch as my title was hopelessly vague. That, I confess, was by design, so as to leave me free to say pretty much whatever was on my mind, come November 10, about U.S. foreign relations at the turn of the century. And it seemed to me that I could take any of three approaches. I might, for instance, choose to...

By Christian P. Scherrer What is the scope of reconciliation? Can we talk about a need of reconciliation as opposed to justice – especially in case of non-war violence? The discussion about the notion of reconciliation needs to be aware of some basic distinctions. The whole notion, which is a very important one, needs to be related to what we have to be reconciled with. There my first remark is that we should not mix warfare with slaughter. Compared to the tremendous increase of intra-state warfare and non-war types of mass violence such as genocide and mass murder the Clausewitzean type of inter-state conflicts was in recent decades a rather exceptional phenomenon. There are two important findings to be considered: Today more people die by slaughter than by war. And, in two third of all contemporary conflicts the ethnic factor (e.g. ethnic nationalism) is a dominant or influential component. The...

LONDON- Rarely, if at all in the post Cold War world, has there been such a stark case of high politics and doubtful economics. The oil company’s director of international affairs has been openly blunt about it: “The only way this is going to work is to make the pipeline as affordable as possible for shippers to put their oil down it. We are asking the U.S. government to attract as much oil as possible and to attract as much financing as possible”. Thus BP Amoco, the world’s third largest oil company, opens its begging bowl for a taxpayers’ handout with the fulsome backing of the U.S. government. All in the cause of giving Russia, now supposedly no longer our enemy, a black eye. Left to itself and the dictates of the competitive market, BP Amoco would not build a new pipeline to carry Caspian Sea oil across Turkey, avoiding the...

Nuclear weapons, which are instruments of genocide, incinerate human beings. The Peace Memorial Museums in Hiroshima and Nagasaki display gruesome evidence of the atomic bombings of those cities; one can see walls where human shadows remain after the humans who cast those shadows were incinerated into elemental particles. During World War II the Nazis put their victims into gas chambers and then incinerated them in ovens. While the Nazis took their victims to the incinerators, those who possess and threaten to use nuclear weapons plan to take these weapons, that are really portable incinerators, to the victims. Nuclear weapons eliminate the need for gas chambers. They provide a one-step incineration process — for those fortunate enough to die immediately. The behavior of the Nazis leading up to and during World War II is universally condemned. The German people are often criticized for failing to oppose the atrocities of the Nazi...

framfart och resenärer Introduktion Globalisering är ett ord som nämns allt oftare i tidningar, på TV och av gemene man. Trots detta är det inte många som vet vad termen globalisering egentligen innebär och vad den verkligen syftar till. Det är inte underligt då sökandet efter den rätta definitionen är i full gång och åsikterna går isär om hur en sådan ska se ut. Det finns heller ingen konsensus om vilka konsekvenser globaliseringen genererar. Vissa talar om homogenisering och andra om fragmentering. Några betonar ekonomiska faktorer som framväxten av transnationella företag och en världsmarknad, medan somliga fokuserar på teknologiska framsteg och ökad kommunikation. Det råder ovisshet och osäkerhet om vad som egentligen händer och i vilken riktning vi är på väg. Vad innebär dagens utveckling för individer, samhällen och nationalstater? Detta är enligt vår mening en viktig och spännande fråga till vilken det dock inte finns något enkelt och tillgängligt...

Nonviolence – forgiveness • We must learn from touching human stories about the will to abandon hate.The road to forgivenessIn South Africa’s Western Cape there is a rapidly growing bakery with the unusual brand name: “Amy’s bread – the bread of hope and peace.” The local communities know its significance. Amy Biehl was a Fulbright Scholar who was murdered in the Western Cape in the run-up to the 1994 elections. The bakery, run by the Amy Biehl Foundation, exists because her parents, Peter and Linda Biehl, from California, decided to walk the road of forgiveness. By Michael Henderson. • How actually did the old Cold War end – and what does it tell about the new emerging Cold War now?How We Ended the Cold WarJohn Tirman reflects in The Nation. “The dominant view of the right and center is that military intimidation was the root of victory, a dangerous axiom then and...

1. Nuclear weapons were needed to defeat Japan in World War II. It is widely believed, particularly in the United States, that the use of nuclear weapons against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary to defeat Japan in World War II. This is not, however, the opinion of the leading US military figures in the war, including General Dwight Eisenhower, General Omar Bradley, General Hap Arnold and Admiral William Leahy. General Eisenhower, for example, who was the Supreme Allied Commander Europe during World War II and later US president, wrote, „I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced [to Secretary of War Stimson] my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use...

ALBANSKA EXTREMISTER har nu avslutat en etnisk rensning av omkring 90 procent av Kosovos zigenare, serber och judar. Detta är den proportionellt sett hittills största etniska rensningen på Balkan. Belgrad varken planerade eller genomförde att fördriva 90 procent av albanerna.Nato hävdade att det var oacceptabelt att Belgrad hade 40.000 soldater i området för att bland annat skydda den serbiska minoriteten. Nu finns lika många NATO-soldater i Kosovo. Varför kunde inte dessa trupper med mycket mera avancerad teknik och underrättelsetjänst skydda serber och zigenare från denna förutsägbara humanitära katastrof? Den jugoslaviska militären fick tio dagar på sig att dra sig tillbaka. I strid med Säkerhetsrådets resolution 1244 har den jugoslaviska armén inte fått återvända med gränsvakter. Den albanska befrielsearmén UCK fick 90 dagar på sig för att lämna in sina vapen. Nu har UCK i direkt strid med resolutionen inte bara övertagit den lokala administrationen och polisväsendet utan också fått tillåtelse...