Archive 1986 – 2017

San Francisco, October 27-November 1 TFF is proud to have been invited to this year’s FORUM as the only institution from Scandinavia. It is tasked with making a special contribution to the Coexistence and Community Building Initiative chaired by Dr. Kumar Rupesinghe. Read more here! Join some of the world’s most thoughtful and innovative business, scientific, political, cultural and religious leaders to explore and shape the trends of the coming century. This year’s Forum is convened by the following co-chairs: Askar AkaevOscar AriasJean-Bertrand AristideJames A. Baker, IIITansu ÇillerMarian Wright EdelmanSonia GandhiJane GoodallMikhail GorbachevRuud LubbersFederico MayorThabo MbekiYasuhiro NakasoneLea RabinJose Ramos-HortaJehan SadatTed TurnerDesmond TutuElie WieselMuhammad Yunus The State of the World Forum is designed to inspire your life. You will interact with other leaders from around the world and a multiplicity of disciplines. You will be part of broad-ranging discussions covering the spectrum of human interests from spirituality to global security, science...

LONDON- The new war in Chechnya is becoming as pointless, self-defeating and counterproductive as the one before. Now that the peace agreement that was stitched together in time for the last presidential election is undone no one, not even General Alexander Lebed, President Boris Yeltsin’s last saviour, will be able to put Humpty Dumpty together again. Yet even if this war does rumble eternally on; even if, as reported, the Moslem fanatics from Afghanistan, the Taliban, are sending their young fighters to the anti-Russian cause, the threat it poses to Russia as a whole is minimal. The real danger to the integrity of Russia lies not in this super- obstreperous, but quite tiny region, but in its own massive size, that bridges eight time zones. Any system less centralised than that of the tsars or the communist dicatatorship poses enormous, complicated and unresolved problems of governance. As Martin Nicholson, a former...

Links to Facts & Views Are we ever told the truth about what is done in the name of security? This is what the United States did not tell us about its own proliferation of nuclear weapons around the world – since 1951! • Read “Where the Nukes Were” in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists“Soon complete weapon systems found their way to all sorts of places &emdash; Okinawa, Japan, South Korea and the Philippines in the Pacific for example, and Morocco, France, and then most of the NATO countries in the West. Sometimes U.S. allies knew they were hosting nuclear weapons; sometimes they didn’t. Then, too, the United States was occasionally a little too eager to share control with its NATO buddies…” This is the full listof where these nuclear weapons were.  – and here follow the news reports about this shocking report: • The United States scattered nuclear weapons around the...

Christian HårlemanFd överstelöjtnant, f.d chef utbildningsavd för fredsbevarande operationer i FN,rådgivare till Institute of World Affairs, Washington D.Ce-mail: ch.harleman@crido.pp.se Jan Øberg, fil.dr.Direktör, Transnationella Stiftelsen för Freds- och framtidsforskning, TFF, i Lunde-mail: tff@transnational.live Sverige håller på att installera ungefär 850 soldater i Kosovo som ska delta i KFOR, den militära styrka om 45.000 soldater med tung utrustning, som kom på plats i kölvattnet på NATO:s krig mot Jugoslavien under våren.Kostnaden uppges vara 900 miljoner kronor.Detta är den största enskilda satsning vår regering gör för att bidra till en lösning av de svåra problemen i och kring Kosovo. I jämförelse har Sverige avsatt 84 miljoner kronor år 1999 och år 2000 för civila insatser inom FN:s UNMIK-mission i Kosovo och 170 miljoner till humanitära insatser.Ett genomgående inslag i Sveriges och det såkallade internationella samfundets (fel)hantering av Balkans konflikter sedan 1980-talet har varit att fokusera på ett enda område åt gången och strunta...

LONDON- The legal pursuit of the Chilean ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet has reached a defining moment. His legal options have been whittled away, although theoretically he could still on appeal win the reversal of the London magistrate’s decision on October 8th. to allow his extradition to Spain for trial. It now seems clear that his legal team are advising him to change tactics and depend more on clemency than legal manoeuvres. Earlier this week, Chile appealed formally to Jack Straw, Home Secretary in the government of Tony Blair, to release him on the grounds of his deteriorating health. Yesterday the Spanish government, never happy with the action of magistrate Balthasar Garzon, who initiated the action against Pinochet, added its voice to Chile’s, saying it would have no objection if he were now released. It must not happen. The rulings so far- by Britain’s highest court, the House of Lords, and by the...

Links to Facts & Views You want to find interesting analyses, reports, articles and papers on peace and conflict issues from around the world? Now we do the job for you. This page provides links to a selection of the best critical and constructive materials – the essential stuff we learn from ourselves and want to share. Just click below at what you are interested in read, download or send on to a friend. •  What is Operation Matrix? A strategy to undermine MilosevicThe program originated with a December 1998 White House meeting at which Robert S. Gelbard, the president and secretary of state’s special adviser for Kosovo, was put in charge of an umbrella strategy. That’s what CIA got money to do and – perhaps – it explains why NATO didn’t destroy Yugoslavia’s mobile phone net? Read William Arkin’s Washington Post column of October 11, 1999. • What Makes Europe Look Increasingly...

By Philip Bowring International Herald Tribune. Paris, October 6, 1999 HONG KONG – Even assuming an optimistic evolution of the Timor crisis, fault lines have been opened up across East Asia and between it and the West which may take long to close. ASEAN and Australia are the most obvious losers so far. And if Indonesia sponsors a guerrilla campaign or defies the United Nations, the potential for disruption of international relationships is immense. The Association of South East Asian Nations has failed to keep outside intervention at bay by resolving its own conflicts. Its members failed either to give full backing to Indonesia to reject UN-sponsored armed intervention, or to persuade Indonesia to accept ASEAN-led mediation rather than risk an agenda written in New York. ASEAN’s paralysis may have been understandable; it was caught among alarm at what was happening in Timor, the political vacuum in Jakarta and distaste for...

“In voting down the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the US Senate acted with irresponsible disregard for the security of the American people and the people of the world. It is an act unbecoming of a great nation. The Senate sent a message to the more than 185 countries that have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that the United States is not prepared to lead the global effort for non-proliferation nor to keep its promises to the international community. I urge the American people to send a strong message of disapproval to the Senators who voted against this treaty, and demand that the United States resume a leadership role in supporting the CTBT and preventing further nuclear tests by any country at any time and at any place…The American people should take heart that the Treaty is not dead, and this setback should be viewed as temporary — until they...

European Council From the meeting in Luxembourg, 11 October 1999 14 Oct 1999 MEETING WITH DEMOCRATIC FORCES OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF YUGOSLAVIA In the margins of the Council, Ministers held a meeting with representatives of Democratic Forces of the FRY (representatives of political parties, NGOs, national minorities). The purpose of this meeting was to strengthen the Union’s relations with these forces and to encourage them to work towards peace, democratic change and economic prosperity in the FRY. The Union underlined also its preparedness to give substantial assistance to a future democratic Yugoslavia and to support the full integration of the FRY into the international community. At the end of the meeting, the EU issued the following statement: EU-FRY – a new beginning The EU, and representatives of the democratic forces of the FRY met in Luxembourg on 11 October 1999. The meeting was convened in the interests of the...

LONDON- President Bill Clinton’s inability to win enough Senate votes to win ratification of the American-sponsored Test Ban Treaty is one more milestone on the way to inevitable nuclear conflict. The fact that the decision to concede defeat was taken with the knowledge, following the coup in Pakistan, that a military regime, answerable to no civilian authority, is now in direct control of one country’s nuclear weapons is but one more indication that U.S. congressional opinion is dangerously out of touch with the pace of world events. It sends a clear signal to the world at large that the U.S. is not committed to nuclear arms control, even when it works in its favour. America, we all know, is capable of reacting after a disaster, but it appears dangerously bereft of an instinctive, prescient wisdom that might preclude it. The use of nuclear weapons remains unlikely between the U.S. and Russia,...

LONDON- Tanzania in East Africa has long been one of the 25 poorest countries in the world. But there was a time when it was described, in terms of its political influence, as one of the top 25. It punched far above its weight. That formidable achievement was the work of one man, now lying close to death in a London hospital. How it came to be so is one of the more interesting political histories of our age. A man born of peasants in a remote village climbed the educational ladder of the local Catholic missionaries, went to Edinburgh university, became a teacher and then blossomed into being the leader of Tanganyika’s (as it was then called before its union with Zanzibar in 1964) budding independence movement. His extraordinary intelligence, verbal and literary orginality (he later translated Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar into Swahili) and apparent commitment to non-violence made him not...

Christian HårlemanF.d. överstelöjtnant, f.d chef utbildningsavd. för fredsbevarande operationer i FN, rådgivare till Institute of World Affairs, Washington D.C e-mail: ch.harleman@crido.pp.se Jan ØbergFil.dr., Direktör för Transnationella Stiftelsen för Freds- och framtidsforskning, TFF, i Lunde-mail: tff@transnational.live Sverige håller på att installera ungefär 850 soldater i Kosovo som ska delta i KFOR, den militära styrka om 45.000 soldater med tung utrustning, som kom på plats i kölvattnet på NATO:s krig mot Jugoslavien under våren. Som väntat och efter långa och noggranna förberedelser är styrkan både välutbildad och välutrustad: toppmodern utrustning och ungefär 140 olika fordon – allt från stridsvagnssläp, arbetsfordon och lastbilar till pansarbandvagnar, pansarskyttefordon och pansrade ledningsfordon. Kostnaden uppges vara 900 miljoner kronor. Detta är den största enskilda satsning vår regering gör för att bidra till en lösning av de svåra problemen i och kring Kosovo. I jämförelse har Sverige avsatt 84 miljoner kronor år 1999 och 2000 för civila insatser...