Archive 1986 – 2017

Kejserne i international politik siger gerne at visse mennesker kun forstår voldens sprog. Situationen i Kosovo sender en boomerang tilbage. Ingen aktør har foretaget en analyse, lagt en strategi eller foretaget sig noget som helst hverken før eller efter Jugoslaviens sammanbrud, der kunne have hjulpet serbere og albanere til at undgå dét forudsigelige, der nu med fortvivlende styrke ruller over skærmen. De selvsamme kejsere gør altså først noget når en konflikt er gået i vold. Og vold var det eneste, der ikke må ske for en selvstændighedsbevægelse, der pragmatiskt-politisk bekender sig til ikkevold. Så meget om kærnen i modeord som voldsforebyggelse, preventiv diplomati, fredsbevarelse, OSCE’s konfliktforebyggelse, det ny NATO og europæisk sikkerhedsarkitektur og fælles udenrigs- og sikkerhedspolitik i EU. Så meget om den danske fejlslagne aktivistiske udenrigs- og forsvarspolitik i Irak og ligeså fejlslagne mangel på samme i Kosovo-spørgsmålet.Disse kejsere kan ekspandere NATO og bygge nye atomvåben til ingen verdens...

“Violence closes doors and minds. Goodconflict-resolution opens them. A principled, impartial andinnovative approach is now the only way to prevent a newtragedy in the Balkans. A limited United Nations presencecould be one element in violence prevention, says TFFdirector Jan Oberg. Below you find some examples, developedby us during our work with the Kosovo conflict since 1991.We’d be happy to have your comments and your suggestions.” “Many things can still be done – but only as long asthere is no, or limited, violence. When violence is steppedup, opportunities for genuine solutions diminish.Governments and citizen around the world can take impartialgoodwill initiatives, for instance: • A hearing in the United Nations GeneralAssembly. We need to get the facts on the table,presented by impartial experts as well as by the partiesthemselves; listen actively to them for they haveinteresting arguments and question their positions,activities and policies. • Meetings all over Europe with variousgroups of...

LONDON– “Human rights is a dirty business.” So said the late Martin Ennals, Amnesty International’s first secretary-general. And once again with Rupert Murdoch, press baron extraordinaire, we have yet another instance when wealth, power and narrow, self-serving, political interest outrank freedom of speech, democratic values and anti-totalitarianism. Murdoch has stopped his publishing house HarperCollins going ahead with the publication of “East and West”, a book authored by Chris Pattan, the last British governor of Hong Kong and a highly respected British Conservative politician. “Kill the book” an angry Murdoch banged the table as he shouted at Anthea Disney, the chief executive of Murdoch’s News American Publishing in New York. Murdoch’s underlings should not have been surprised. Indeed the only question is why they signed up Patten since their boss has a long record of cosying up to Beijing and Patten has an equally long record of fighting Beijing tooth and nail...

Where Is the International Peace ResearchAssociation, IPRA, Heading? IPRA holds its 17th General Conference, this time in Durban, South Africa from June 23 to June 26.On this occasion IPRA Newsletter has carried a debate about the development and priorities of the academic discipline and its relation to the world around it. Participating in it was Dr. Bjoern Moeller, Secretary-General of IPRA and Dr. Jan Oberg, director and co-founder of the Transnational Foundation. The debate started with Dr. Bjoern Moeller who in the September 1997 issue wrote a “letter from the Secretary General”: “IPRA as an organization, and indeed peace research as a discipline, may be at a juncture where the futures of both will be decided. Peace research had a very clear raison d’etre during the Cold War, in the sense that it was to be the only academic area of study that did not take war, conflict, and arms...

“The statements and threats by European Union commissioner VAN DEN BROEK and foreign secretary ROBIN COOK are imprudent: they focus on the actors, not on the problems. When BENJAMIN GILMAN, chairman of the US House International Relations Committee talks about sanctions, sending “NATO and UN troops” to the region and supports “independent Kosova,” there is even more reason for concern. They speak the language of power and violence, not of understanding and dialogue. And it is likely to harm the Kosovo-Albanians. “The tragic truth is that since 1990, neither the United States, the OSCE nor the EU and its members have developed any policies to help the Serbs and Albanians avoid the predictable showdown we now witness in Kosovo. There is much talk about conflict prevention, early warning, preventive diplomacy and non-military security. The second tragic truth is that there has been very little intellectual innovation since the so-called end...

LONDON– On too many occasions the UN has been the big man’s whipping-boy. Bill Clinton for one has kicked it harder than his two immediate Republican predecessors ever did. Nikita Krushchev banged his shoe at it and Charles de Gaulle called it “ce machin”. Yet once again we see how in a crisis the big powers run to it to get themselves off the hook, this time for a bombing no one really had the argument or stomach for. Back in 1954 there was the charged incident over the capture of 17 U.S. airmen by China. American opinion became extremely agitated. There was even some wild talk about the use of nuclear weapons. The UN was asked to intervene and Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold went to Beijing to talk to Premier Chou Enlai. It took six months of negociating but finally the men were released. Dwight Eisenhower, the then U.S. president,...

“With the agreement signed in Baghdad, UNSecretary-General Kofi Annan has shown that there is aconstructive approach to conflict-mitigation: good planning,being principled, meeting face-to-face, listening actively,and showing respect. While we must hope that this will stop the plannedwarfare against Iraq and its people, we must also recognisethat the underlying conflict is far from resolved,” says TFFdirector Jan Oberg. “In situations like these it is essential to gather manyand varied facts and interprete the issues through otherlenses than those of the mainstream media. Internet permitsyou to combine many sources and perspectives, find the lesswell-known facts and construct your independent opinion. It’s not enough to criticise the violent approaches.Media people, experts and opinion-makers also need inputs ofconstructive alternative thinking, speaking and acting. Thisis essential for the emergence of a new paradigm of globalconflict-management, based on ever lower levels ofviolence,” Oberg continues. Thus, this service from TFF. We are happy to assist youin your...

LONDON– The war hero Antoine de St. Exupery, better known to most of us as the author of the children’s classic, Le Petit Prince, wrote in his autobiographical novel, “Flight to Arras”, about the rigours of air combat, some lines that President Bill Clinton could usefully reflect on: “Orders are given for the sacrifice of the air arm because war must be made to look like war. And nobody admits meanwhile that this war looks like nothing at all. That no part of it makes sense. That not a single blueprint fits the circumstances”. Mr. Clinton’s profound mistake is that he has acted all along as if he were back in 1990, in George Bush’s shoes at the time of the Gulf War, threatened by a military monster armed with weapons of mass destruction. And now that he’s raised the flag, the momentum of superpower ego is pushing him into a...

LONDON– India’s elections are like India’s trains–lumbering along at no great speed, taking days before the destination is reached but, despite the discomfort along the way, reliable, sturdy and arriving at the station more or less on time. The world’s largest democracy will soon be in action for the second time in two years in a desperate search to find a stable government, an extraordinarily difficult task now that the founding party of India’s independence, Congress, is a pale shadow of its original self and the strengths of local, regional, religious and caste parties, not to say the phenomenal rise of the Hindu nationalist, Bharatiya Janata Party, are now the deciding factors in Indian politics. Yet it is safe to predict it will be probably the fairest ever, without significant violence or vote-buying. Indian democracy is cleaner by the year. This is partly thanks to the former election commissioner T.N. Seshan...

In late November 1997 following the dramatic plunge of the Korean won on the foreign exchange market, an IMF team of economists led by Mr. Hubert Neiss was rushed to Seoul. Its mandate: negotiate the terms of a “Mexican-style bail-out” with a view to “restoring economic health and stability”. An important precedent had been set: the IMF’s standard “economic medicine” (routinely imposed on the Third World and Eastern Europe) had been launched for the first time in an advanced industrial economy… The details of the economic reform programme, however, had already been decided in advance in consultation with the US Treasury, Wall Street’s commercial and merchant banks as well as with major banking interests in Japan and the European Union. A Letter of Intent (“Memorandum on the Economic Program”) was put together in a hurry on behalf of the government with virtually no analysis of the broader causes of the...

LONDON– Fifty years on from the death of Mahatma Gandhi, lawyer, political activist, apostle of non-violence as a means of settling political disputes and vanquisher of the British Empire, the world is in crying need again for the philosophy he propagated and the debate he provoked. As Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of newly independent India, said on the day of his assassination, “the light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere”. If only India had listened to him more there would have been no division with Pakistan. If only the British had learnt more from him there would have been no colonial massacres in Kenya or Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland. Perhaps, if Bill Clinton could spare a thought for Gandhi today, he would find a way of keeping Saddam Hussein in check without risking the horrors of war, a war that New York Times...

“Plikten är rättigheternas sanna källa.Handlingen är plikten, frukten är rättigheten”Mohandas K. Gandhi, som dog för 50 år sedan Försvaret för de mänskliga rättigheterna (MR) utvecklas snabbt. Nationella centra, folkliga rörelser, kulturpersonligheter, tribunaler och domstolar, media och solidaritetsgrupper, FN och andra mellanstatliga organ konkurrerar om att etablera fakta, övervaka, rapportera och behandla kränkningar och kräva handling och straff samt genomföra projekt, som skall förebygga övergrepp och hjälpa offren för dem. Detta är odiskutabelt bra. Det behövs ständigt ett vakande öga överallt för att befästa de normer, som har skrivits in i nationella och internationella fördrag och skiljer civilisation ifrån barbari. Det är tillika okontroversiellt i och med att man inte kan vara för kränkningar av MR. MR-politik bör dock kunna diskuteras. Det är fortfarande problematiskt att universalisera de i huvudsak västliga MR-normerna tvärs över kulturella skiljelinjer. Kan verkligen en enda kulturkrets normer spridas globalt eller ska det finnas en kärna, en...