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The Disco Bay

The Ice Fjord Midnight Sun (3)

In the streets of Bujumbura 3 – bank building with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on top floors

Esther Hammeken and Poul Krarup Esther Hammeken and Poul Krarup @ Jan Oberg, TFF 2005 Esther’s and Poul’s hand @ Jan Oberg, TFF 2005 Esther holding child’s boot @ Jan Oberg, TFF 2005

In the streets of Bujumbura 4

Carrying flour

Migrated from the TFF legacy site archive. TFF Home Forums Iraq Forum Features by others Oberg’s photos Paul McCartney About us Associates’ articles Burundi Forum Reconciliation project Øbergs Kalejdoskop Annual Reports New stuff Jonathan Power Macedonia Forum TFF News Navigator Publications on-line Support TFF on-line Nyt på nordisk Nonviolence EU conflict-handling Teaching & training Links to all issues Support TFF off-line Activities right now Gandhi & India PressInfos – Analyses Lærestof på dansk The 100 best books Contact Kosovo analyses by TFF from 2004 & 2005 The Kosovo Solution Series By Aleksandar Mitic & Jan Oberg On March 24, 2005 it was six years since NATO bombs to create peace began to fall. What peace is there today? What will there be tomorrow? PressInfo 209-218, April 8, 2005 The Kosovo Solution Series – all in one place 10 analyses of the future of Kosovo. Referred to by Reuters as the...

The Real Story Behind Srebrenica Reproduced from The Globe and Mail, Thursday, July 14, 2005 – Comment This week marked the 10th anniversary of the United Nations’ second greatest failure since its creation in 1945 — the genocide in Rwanda being the undisputed No. 1. With much fanfare, the ceremonies focused on the massacre of "up to" 8,000 Bosnian men and boys by General Ratko Mladic’s Bosnian Serb army in Srebrenica in July of 1995. In the vast majority of recent media reports, the background and responsibilities for the disaster in Srebrenica were absent. Preferred was the simple explanation: a black and white event in which the Serbs were solely to blame. As someone who played a modest role in some of the events preceding the massacre, perhaps a little background will provide some context. In early 1993, after my release from the Canadian Forces, I was asked to appear...

Nations and states, sovereignty and self-determination Relevant background links for this series here. May we recommend that you get hold of a copy of the UNDP’s, Human Development Report of 2004 with the title, Cultural Liberty in Today’s Diverse World? It’s a rich source on the problems we seek to deal with here. It informs us that the world’s nearly 200 countries include some 5,000 ethnic groups. Two-thirds of all countries have more than one ethnic or religious minority group that make up at least 10 per cent of the people. Thus, one way or another every country is a multicultural society. No less than 44 per cent of the people living in Toronto, Canada was born outside Canada. There are some 300 million indigenous people in 70 countries representing 4,000 of the world’s 6,000 languages. The Minorities at Risk project at the University of Maryland estimates that 129 groups,...

Summary: From "Only one solution" towards democracy and peace Kosovo is moving up again on the international agenda. The time to think about the framework, the alternatives and the consequences of the talks on the future status of Kosovo is now. Despite the highly unlikely possibility that Kosovo will be able to achieve in the next few months the key standards necessary to initiate the final status talks, it would be gullible to believe that these criteria will not be once again downsized, shrunk to fit the path to the status talks. Pro-Albanian lobbyists such as the International Crisis Group, Richard Holbrooke and various US members of Congress argue that "independence is the only option." However, this option can also be seen as unjust, dangerous, archaic and anti-European. The option of an "independent Kosova" implies that one of the sides (the Kosovo Albanians) would achieve its maximalist goal and that...

Nations and states, sovereignty and self-determination Relevant background links for this series here. May we recommend that you get hold of a copy of the UNDP’s, Human Development Report of 2004 with the title, Cultural Liberty in Today’s Diverse World? It’s a rich source on the problems we seek to deal with here. It informs us that the world’s nearly 200 countries include some 5,000 ethnic groups. Two-thirds of all countries have more than one ethnic or religious minority group that make up at least 10 per cent of the people. Thus, one way or another every country is a multicultural society. No less than 44 per cent of the people living in Toronto, Canada was born outside Canada. There are some 300 million indigenous people in 70 countries representing 4,000 of the world’s 6,000 languages. The Minorities at Risk project at the University of Maryland estimates that 129 groups,...

Many models for a future Kosovo Four ways of making peace By way of starting, some words of caution. What’s the egg and what’s the hen in the question about the future status of Kosovo? What is form and what content, the means and the goals? People who strongly want independence tend to see that as both a means and the goal: "if only we become an independent state, everything will be fine." There have been enough post-independence and post-colonial conflicts and wars in the world for anyone to see that this is not necessarily so. With the decision-making on the future status – form – moving to the top of the international agenda, it is likely to tilt the general attention away from issues of substance, i.e. what kind of Kosovo – internally and as a unit in the region – will be granted a certain status? In substantive...