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December 19, 2009 Jonathan Power LONDON – What India wants India will get. As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told me a couple of years ago, India wants to overtake China whilst putting its own runaway capitalism under tighter social control. At the time he seemed downbeat about realizing these goals. But as India has emerged faster than China, from the great recession, and as its huge anti poverty programmes begin to bite his pessimism seems unwarranted. Maybe it was just caution about the revolution he has wrought. I first came to Kolkata 35 years ago. It was then literally a “black hole”. I walked out of my hotel in the evening. Everywhere was dark. The city could only afford minimal street lighting. The bodies of families eating, defecating and sleeping were scattered along every pavement. The next morning I walked along the back lanes near the hotel. How could I...

LONDON – A reader of a column of mine on the social consequences of abandoned street children wrote to point out that my prognosis that these little Lords of the Flies would grow up as the new bin Ladens, primed to wreck vengeance on established societies, was mistaken. “Osama bin Laden’s anger did not develop out of poverty,” she argued, “but out of a middle class malaise”. Of course. And so did Che Guevara’s and Stokely Carmichael’s and that of Marx and Lenin. But this does not exclude the undisputable, well-researched, fact that poverty, particularly when it exists in a society of gross inequalities, breeds violence, crime and the urge to deal out deadly punishment on conventional society. The leaders may be educated; the shock troops often come from the underclass. Besides, humanity has never confronted before 100 million youngsters growing up on the street, without parents. Their anger, one...

LONDON – Sweden, which holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, has launched a drive to speed up liberalization of the EU’s trade with the Third World. And there are increasing indications that the Obama Administration in Washington is likely soon to join with Europe and Japan and indicate its willingness to attempt to complete the Doha trade round, meant to lower tariffs across the board. The trade ship, which seemed to have hit the rocks just over a year and a half ago, has been prized free and is once again sailing on the high seas with the wind behind it. And so it should. Eighteen months on it appears even more nonsensical than it did at the time that the seasoned diplomats and politicians gathered together for earnest negotiations on freer trade should have allowed their plans to be scuttled. Moreover, the journalistic reporting was shoddy in...

LONDON – The serious newspapers I read used to take me an hour to get through. These days it is fifteen minutes. Nothing much is happening, at least in foreign affairs. Iraq has all but disappeared from the front page. Afghanistan and Pakistan remain there (but even so investors are still steadily upping their investments in Pakistan, presumably judging that the conflict is being over hyped). The argument with Iran over whether it is building nuclear weapons drags on, despite the forgotten report of the CIA two years ago that found that Iran was probably not, not to mention that the West and Russia look a bit silly when they turn a blind eye to Brazil for doing exactly the same as Iran. More recently is Iran’s suggestion that it might ship some of its used uranium to Russia to be converted into fuel to provide medical isotopes, or else...

Good news: All Africa a Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone! With the ratification of the Pelindapa treaty on July 15, 2009 by Burundi that treaty on an African Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone, NWFZ, has entered into force. In a NWFZ nuclear weapons may not be used, developed, deployed or transported. The status of a NWFZ shall be recognized by the United Nations and the Nuclear Weapon States shall ratify certain conditions in any NWFZ treaty. France, China and Great Britain have done so for the Pelindaba treaty. Russia has not ratified because the island of Diego Garcia, controlled by Britain and used by the USA as a military base, has a disputed status in the treaty. USA has not ratified. The Pelindaba Treaty covers all of Africa. There are now a NWFZ zone that covers Latin America and the Caribbean – the Tlatelolco Treaty. In the South Pacific, we have the Rarotonga treaty. In South-East...

15 september, 2009 Håkan Wiberg Recension av Fredrik S. HeffermehlNobels viljeVidarforlagetOslo 2008 På 1890-talet var Alfred Nobel en av de rikaste svenskarna och hade skapat ett industriimperium över hela Europa baserat på flera hundra patent. Han var också en ensam, sjuk och periodvis deprimerad man. Hans överväganden om vad hans förmögenhet skulle användas till resulterade i hans testamente 1895, vilket blev offentligt känt efter hans död följande år vid 63 års ålder. Testamentet har varit omgivet av drama från första början. Heffermehl beskriver hur den unge testamentsexekutorn Ragnar Sohlman lyckades rädda förmögenheten från otaliga angrepp. Franska skattemyndigheter hoppades på väldiga arvsskatter. Ett koppel advokater med ambitioner om oändliga processer kom snabbt i gång. Oscar II försökte manipulera brorsonen Emanuel att få Nobel-familjen att sätta stopp för planerna på Nobelpriserna, vartill Alfred Nobel enligt honom förletts ”av fantaster och särskilt fruntimmer”. Allt gick dock väl, såtillvida att den därtill testamenterade delen...

LONDON – Six days after the attack on the World Trade Centre, President George W. Bush declared that the capture of Osama bin Laden was his prime objective. “I want justice”, he said, “There’s an old poster out west that I recall that said “wanted dead or alive”. He also said that the purpose of going to war was to “smoke him out”. The U.S. and the U.K. then unleashed their bombs all over Afghanistan, killing far more innocent Afghans than were killed on 9/11. It did no good at all, and it certainly didn’t touch bin Laden and his team who were safely hidden in caves in the impenetrable mountains of Pakistan. Not long after Bush turned his attention to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Less and less was spoken of the need to hunt down bin Laden. None of this made sense. Afghanistan is now in a mess. The U.S....

. And it adds that there will be a significant increase in the number of malnourished children. It also says that there will be between 30,000 and 50,000 more infant deaths each year until 2015. But does this mean that over the last 20 years we have not made progress and that it will now get worse? First the one billion figure for the hungry is an invention of the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation and the G8. It appears to be based on nothing more than a back of an envelope calculation. There is no hard evidence to support it. Indeed, the number of hungry may have already peaked and is on its way down again. It is true that in 2007 and in early 2008 there was a fast rise in food prices and a fall off in food stocks. It was this that panicked the rich country...

that McNamara “bled inside for what he’d done in Vietnam”. Ward was cross with me for using this quote, understandably so as this was the first time that an intimate friend had gone on the record with McNamara’s inner feelings. She went on to say that over time people would judge him more by what he was initiating in his relatively new job as president of the World Bank. Judging from last week’s obituaries she was wrong about that. Vietnam, the Cuban missile crisis and his changing attitude to nuclear weapons dominate present day memories. Yet it is true that what he did at the World Bank is worth remembering, especially his efforts to turn aid in the direction of small farmers. Under his tenure the World Bank spent 30% of its budget on helping small Third World farmers be more productive. Today, as before McNamara, it spends about 10%....

Voltaire described Europe as “a kind of great republic, divided into several states, some monarchical, the others mixed but all corresponding with one another. They all have the same religious foundation, even if it is divided into several confessions. They all have the same principles of public law and politics unknown in other parts of the world”. In a way that Charlemagne, Voltaire, William Penn and Gladstone, the early advocates of European unity, could only dream, a united Europe has become a reality with half a billion members. War, time and time again, has interrupted the pursuit of that objective. Continued civil war across the continent, across the centuries, has pitted the French against Germans, British against French, Czechs against Poles, Spaniards against Spaniards, Gentiles against Jews, reaching its dreadful climax in the Second World War. Of all the continents, over the millennium, Europe has been the most warlike. As...

May 26, 2009 Jonathan Power LONDON – With the election behind it, it shouldn’t be back to square one for India in its quest to settle the bitterly divisive issue of Kashmir, one that has led to three wars and once brought the two countries to the brink of nuclear war. India missed its great opportunity to settle the burning dispute while the military president, Pervez Musharraf, who ruled Pakistan until his overthrow last year, was in power. According to diplomats I talked to eighteen months ago, both British and American, in New Delhi and Islamabad, a deal was tantalisingly close. One British ambassador told me that the main barrier to a deal was ‘psychological’ and that India had to make very few concessions to make a final deal. If Musharraf wasn’t prepared to give away the store, the Pakistani compromises came close to it. But India, despite the seemingly...

LONDON – I walk up Sonia Gandhi’s drive way, past  guards with Uzi machine guns, and can’t help thinking that when I came to interview Mrs. Indira Gandhi (Sonia’s mother-in-law) on the eve of her great comeback and massive electoral win, I walked up to her front door and knocked. There were no guards and only one servant to let me in. I am ushered into Sonia G’s office. She barely acknowledges my presence. “Buon giorno”, I say. There is no reply. I have been warned that she’s cold and she doesn’t offer me a hand. She walks over to me and asks me to sit down. I look her in the eye and ask my first question to the Italian widow of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was cruelly blown to smithereens by a female Tamil terrorist, a member of the now defeated Tamil independence struggle in neighbouring Sri...