Archive 1986 – 2017

LONDON– The rapid and dangerous way things are going suggest that Zaire could very easily, like its sideshow Angola, become the scene of an unending civil war between the two rival protagonists. In Zaire in the contest to succeed the dying president, Mobutu Sese Seko, we have in the capital Kinshasa, the ex-prime minister Etienne Tshisekedi, pulling out every stop to take over from his erstwhile boss. His charisma and organizational skills are formidable. Early this week he led a stunning strike which, for the breadth of a day, reduced the bustling, noisy, helter-skelter of life in the capital to an earie silence. In the west is his rival for power, Laurent Kabila, who by force of arms has captured the most populous half of the country, taken over the diamond and copper mines, the main source of the country’s wealth and is now advancing on Kinshasa. This is reminiscent of...

Idag den 13 april hålls ett ödesval i det Kroatien som förmodligen också står inför ett ledarskifte. Kommer valet att skapa förutsättningar för ett nytt Kroatien, utan nationalism och auktoritärt presidentstyre? Eller leder valet Kroatien landet än längre bort från “Europa” och från nödvändig nationella försoning efter kriget?De icke-kroatiska befolkningsgruppernas faktiska rättigheter i landet som helhet och i Östra Slavonien i synnerhet blir helt avgörande för Kroatiens möjligheter till demokratiska utveckling. Utan demokratiskt sinnelagKroatien har hittills saknat en demokratisk anda och en acceptabel politik för minoriteter och mänskliga rättigheter. Det civila samhället är svagt. Dock har Kroatien alltsedan krigsutbrottet 1991 haft Väst som beskyddare, särskilt Tyskland och USA.Många i väst har inte utan rasistiska undertoner betecknat folk på Balkan som primitiva och drivna politiska skurkar med ett “balkanskt” sinne för våld, lögn och dubbelmoral.Väst straffade den jugoslaviska och serbiska kampen mot Kroatiens självständighet &endash; men fördömde aldrig i handling den...

LONDON–It was Dag Hammarskjold, the greatest United Nations Secretary-General thus far, practitioner and contemplator all in one, who observed that the UN was not set up to take humanity to heaven, but to save it from hell With its new Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, the UN is once again feeling its way into a brave new world. It is not to be, however, the “new world order” of former U.S. president George Bush who, like his contempory, President Mikhail Gorbachev, saw at the end of the Cold War a chance to make the UN what it was meant to be when it was created out of the ashes of World War 2, a vigorous force in world peacekeeping. That prospect was dashed by civil war in Yugoslavia and Somalia, partly by the tenacity of the warring factions and partly by President Bill Clinton’s unprincipled undermining of the UN–in Somalia, after the...

By Nikolai S. Rozov Capitalism is now by no means a fashionable word. Its reality is more wide and complex than bourgeoisie-proletariat relations, wage-labour and surplus value (Marx), and evidently more hardy than Lenin’s ‘decaying imperialism’. To name our global world system capitalistic (instead of the neoliberal euphemism ‘free market economy’) is to emphasise the tremendous concentration of power and control over all kinds of world resources by ‘the Big Three’: modern transnational corporations (TNCs), main banking groups (with the New York – London – Tokyo axis), and governmental elites of the core states (G – 7). This global oligarchy uses institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Trade Organization (WTO), North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and other US-controlled military unions as instruments of its ‘Realpolitik’. The deplorable destiny of opponent countries, (such as the USSR, Cuba, Panama, Serbia, North Korea and Iraq) and the financial difficulties (collapse?!)...

LONDON– The western world, in particular Washington and London, is too often besieged by inner hobgoblins who warn it of the threat of militant Islam, rogue nations intent on the development of nuclear and chemical weapons, redoubts of unreformed communism in Cuba and North Korea. Most of it is overstated, an unpersuasive zero sum, often counterproductive. But nobody can exaggerate the danger of Saddam Hussein. He is indeed a “cretin, a monster”–the words of a distinguished French journalist, Jean Daniel, unbelievably now being sued by none other than Saddam Hussein in a French court for “insult and defamation.” “The damned don’t cry,” wrote Eugene O’Neil, “but in this case they never stop trying to make everyone else weep and gnash their teeth. The sheer arrogance of the world’s premier bully is chilling almost beyond belief. Early next month there will be another reminder of Saddam Hussein’s formidable staying power, just when...

LONDON– Most of the world will cheer when the grand dictator of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko, dies. “The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones,” said Mark Anthony as he buried Caesar. We too will doubtless happily forget that it was strongman Mobutu that bound the factionist, disintegrating, post- colonial Congo back together, changed its name and made its destiny so important to Cold War-ridden Africa that the Soviet Union, France and the U.S. competed for his favors. Instead we will remember that it was Mobutu who robbed his country blind, who pilfered and wasted away the enormous potential wealth of this country, a country that if it had been properly managed would be as prosperous as perhaps Malaysia or Thailand or, at least, the Philippines today. For every dictator in the world who did his country economic good, Pinochet in Chile, Park...

LONDON– After a difficult and slow start the United Nations war crimes tribunals are hitting their stride. The new UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, has purged the incompetents at the Arusha, Tanzania, tribunal and we can expect it now to move more rapidly in bringing to trial the suspects it has in detention, accused mass-murderers from Rwanda. In The Hague this week the trial of three Muslims and a Croat began, accused of war crimes against Serbs at a prison camp in 1992. 74 men have been indicted so far, most of them Serbian. This is all progress, the first faltering steps of a new responsibility for the international community–the extension of the rule of law to the battlefield and its aftermath. Unlike Nuremberg and the Tokyo trials following World War 2 that were wrapped up as soon as their business was complete, there is now a very tangible sense that these...

“The current rhetoric about NATO expansion — exemplified by US Foreign Secretary Madeleine Albright’s recent article in The Economist — is pathetic, and the discourse about it lacks intellectual quality as well as creativity. If advocates of this historic step are unable to find better arguments, the idea itself is probably flawed or, perhaps, indicative of less noble motives. In addition, it is clearly divisive within NATO itself,” states TFF director Jan Oberg. “We now have a tame debate about NATO’s expansion where we ought first to clarify humankind’s post-Cold War needs for conflict-resolution, security, and development and then NATO’s contribution, if any, to new thinking and policies. NATO members failed abysmally as conflict-managers in ex-Yugoslavia 1991-95 and made UN peacekeeping “mission impossible”. Then they deployed NATO — much in need of a raison d’etre and lacking peacekeeping experience — and equated peace with what NATO/SFOR could deliver. NATO expansion...

LONDON– That President Bill Clinton, commander-in-chief of the world’s one remaining superpower, might dare to risk his country’s self- interest in financial and political prudence by personally wooing monetary support for his re-election bid from Chinese, Thai and Indonesian businessmen and women, all with close ties to their governments, is by the yardstick of common probity boggling to the imagination. This is the age of what Moises Naim has called “corruption eruption” that has shaken “every region regardless of cultural background or Gross National Product.” The last eighteen months have seen the fall of the Secretary-General of NATO over corruption allegations, indictments for corruption of one-third of India’s cabinet, graft charges against Italy’s most prominent post-war prime ministers and two former South Korean presidents; parliamentary investigations into financial abuses by the heads of government of Colombia, Pakistan and Turkey, graft at high levels of government in Japan, not to mention the...

the working title of a research programthat started in February 1997 We have been witnessing the creation of new ethnic boundaries or maybe reactivating of existing ethnic boundaries in former Yugoslavia. But we do not know when and why some people started to treat their former friends and neighbours as enemies and why that led to atrocities, totally destroyed societies and genocide. In order to find out why, we have to trace the process and the people involved in it. It seems to be a good way to choose one geographically defined place and try to find out what has happened to the people living there, also in their minds. Our assumption is that an understanding of what happened in Pakrac in Western Slavonia, Croatia, will offer useful insights into what happened elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia, and, for that matter, into other parts of the world where ethnic hostilities...

LONDON– The world has much to be thankful for that Deng Xiaoping died when he did, just four and a half months before the Union Jack is run down in Hong Kong. Britain and China, until last week, were set on what seemed an unavoidable collision course. If Beijing was holding the whip hand of divine power to do as it pleases, commencing July 1st., London, or in effect its audacious governor, Chris Patten, held the trumps of the electorate’s will. Against every brutish blandishment–“a serpent, a whore and a sinner for all millenia” Beijing’s foreign ministry called him at one time–he has over the last five years engineered Hong Kong’s entry into the democratic community. If Hong Kong’s citizens could fill the streets for days after the Tiananmen Square massacre then one can reasonably surmise that any move to take away their own new-found liberties after July 1st.will meet with...

STOCKHOLM, Sweden–The rage and the storm have passed–thus diminishing the hope that the world’s governments, in their collective unease, have decided at last to throw their combined weight against the growing cancer of paedophilia, ravaging and spoiling societies all over. Last August, in a veritable blaze of publicity, the Congress Against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children was held in Stockholm. 122 countries participated. The press, more than sensitized by gruesome revelations of sexual abuse and child murder in Belgium earlier in the month, turned up the heat. The governments said they WOULD do something. A week later the U.S. was bombing Iraq once again. It didn’t, as usual, do much to damage Saddam Hussein but it did bury the paedophilia story and allowed governments to return to doing what they had pledged to do in Stockholm as a matter of urgency more at their usual pace. But to quote Julius...