Features

The Appeal of the Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Peace! If the Third Millennium could begin under the sign of non-violence… It’s the dream of the Nobel Peace Prize Laureates. They invite you to join them to influnece all governments of the planet. The Appeal of the Nobel Peace Prize Laureates “FOR THE CHILDREN OF THE WORLD”To Heads of States of all member statesof the General Assembly of theUnited Nations. Today, in every country throughout the world, there are many children silently suffering the effects and consequences of violence. This violence takes many different forms: between children on the streets, at school, in family life and in the community. There is physical violence, psychological violence, socio-economic violence, environmental violence and political violence. Many children – too many children – live in a “culture of violence”. We wish to contribute to reduce their suffering. We believe that each child can discover, by himself,...

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?!)...

Abolition 2000 Statement April 25, 1995 Statement of the Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) Abolition Caucus at the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review and Extension Conference A secure and livable world for our children and grandchildren and all future generations requires that we achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and redress the environmental degradation and human suffering that is the legacy of fifty years of nuclear weapons testing and production. Further, the inextricable link between the “peaceful” and warlike uses of nuclear technologies and the threat to future generations inherent in creation and use of long-lived radioactive materials must be recognized. We must move toward reliance on clean, safe, renewable forms of energy production that do not provide the materials for weapons of mass destruction and do not poison the environment for thousands of centuries. The true “inalienable” right is not to nuclear energy, but to life, liberty and security of...

TFF’s Report from 1992Executive Summary This is an interim report by a conflict-mitigation mission from the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, TFF, in Lund, Sweden visiting Kosovo* &endash; Prishtina and Mitrovica &endash; for the third time this year, from May 29 to 31, 1992. We conducted a series of interviews with representatives of the Serbian and Albanian communities there and in Belgrade. The report is sent to a number of Nordic and international organizations and individuals, particularly at the UN, as a service to those working with conflict-resolution and humanitarian aid planning. It starts head on with the conflict assesses the risk that it will turn into large-scale warfare and addresses &endash; in an exploratory manner &endash; possible solutions. Furthermore, it describes our impressions from talks with the Kosovan leadership on ways of defining a new type of independent state. The Appendices offer a background to the conflict....

THE GLOBALIZATION OF POVERTYThe late 20th Century will go down in World history as a period of global impoverishment marked by the collapse of productive systems in the developing World, the demise of national institutions and the disintegration of health and educational programs. This “globalization of poverty” –which has largely reversed the achievements of post-war decolonization–, was initiated in the Third World coinciding with the onslaught of the debt crisis. Since the 1990s, it has extended its grip to all major regions of the World including North America, Western Europe, the countries of the former Soviet block and the Newly Industrialised Countries (NICs) of South East Asia and the Far East. In the 1990s, local level famines have erupted in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and parts of Latin America; health clinics and schools have been closed down, hundreds of millions of children have been denied the right to primary education....

“The restructuring of global financial markets and institutions has enabled the accumulation of vast amounts of private wealth, a large portion of which has been amassed as a result of strictly speculative transactions. The number of billionaires in the US alone increased from 13 in 1982 to 149 in 1996. The “Global Billionaires Club” (with some 450 members) has a total Worldwide wealth well in excess of the combined GDP of the group of low income countries with 56 percent of the World’s population (Forbes Magazine, International Billionaires, the World’s Richest People, 1997. The data is based on recorded wealth. It tends to grossly underestimate the concentration of global wealth). Family fortunes are in some case in excess of the GDP of countries (for instance, the private wealth of the Walton Family owners of Walmart (27 billion), is of the same order of magnitude as the GDP of Bangladesh with...

IntroductionOne of the great ironies of history is that nuclear weapons were used on Japanese cities on August 6 and August 9, 1945, while between these bombings — on August 8, 1945 — representatives of the United States, Russia, United Kingdom, and France met in London to sign the Charter of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) that would try Axis war criminals. Since the Axis powers had not developed nor used nuclear weapons, the issue of their legality was never placed before the IMT at Nuremberg. It would take almost 51 years from the first use of a nuclear weapon at Hiroshima for the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to issue an opinion on the legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons. The first resolution adopted by the newly established United Nations General Assembly, on January 24, 1946, called for the creation of an Atomic Energy Commission that...