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Features collected by TFF • Updated regularly, April 28, 2005 News out of Africa are mostly bad news – AIDS, poverty, humanitarian catastrophes, war. Burundi today is a story about a hard struggle for peace and reasons for hope. It is about rebels laying down their weapons and demobilisation and a new post-war defence force. It is about elections, power sharing, and a truth and reconciliation committee. And it is about an absolutely essential UN mission – and a world community that still does not reward those who move to peace enough. The story about the struggle for peace in Burundi has hardly been written and certainly not reached beyond the tiny circle of specialists. Of course, there are not only good news. But hugely complex and risky, the peace process is still a story of hope. It deserves to be told worldwide. If Burundi got more media attention, it...

– “Click on the above link and see what fascinating path Gudrun has created in her life. With remarkable creativity, energy and devotion she has now spearheaded a new mass movement in Sweden, Feminist Initiative – FI – that has, in less than four weeks, put the feminist issues on the Sweden’s political and media agenda in an entirely new way and put the skids under all other parties from right to left. It’s 13 years since Gudrun joined TFF as adviser and she serves today as a board member who helps us – with other strong women Associates – to integrate the feminist perspective with our work for peace. Gudrun sees TFF as another platform for global impact – her own as well as that of Feminist Initiative. We are very happy to have such a visionary fiery spirit and like-minded sister on board,” says TFF director Jan Oberg....

LONDON – Kibera, on the outskirts of Nairobi, supposedly the world’s largest slum, home to 800,000 souls, is known for its “flying toilets”. With no sewerage system the inhabitants defecate into plastic bags, which are then thrown onto nearby wasteland. How can it be, after billions of dollars of aid to Kenya, hundreds of reports on upgrading squatters’ settlements and the headquartering in Nairobi of the UN agency, Habitat, charged with urban improvement, that no one has built Kibera a sewerage system? Most of the people I approached refused to accompany me to Kibera, known as a den of dirt and iniquity. Habitat didn’t respond to my e-mails. Finally a young man, a teacher of the Koran, agreed to show me the inside track. And so I made my first visit for 25 years. It was always bad. Now despite the signs outside a couple of shops advertising “second hand...

We want to share with you the happy news that Jan Oberg, TFF co-founder and director has been awarded the “2005 Small Peace Prize” of the Swedish Peace Council. The Prize is instituted as “complimentary to the ‘big’ Nobel Peace Prize.” The Council is an umbrella organisation for the following members: Artists for Peace, the Iraqi Democratic Association, Association of Christian Humanism and Social Perspective, Women for Peace, Psychologists Against Nuclear Weapons, the Swedish Peace Committee, Swedish Women’s Left Association, and the Society of Friends (Quakers) plus 5 other associated NGOs. The Prize – which comes with 25.000 Swedish kronor – rewards an individual’s “courage and idealism in promoting reconciliation among groups in conflicts outside Sweden.” In its motivation, the Council emphasises the energy and creativity by which TFF’s international work is carried out; its integrated approach to research and activism based on about 100 highly competent people, all voluntarily...

LONDON – Tanzania has re-invented itself twice – the first time in 1964 after a bloody revolution had overthrown the Omani-descended Sultan who ruled the neighboring spice island of Zanzibar. Tanganyika, as it was then, persuaded the successful African-led rebels to join their island with the mainland, and Tanzania came into being. This union remains precarious because of latent Zanzibari nationalism after too many years of misrule. The second time was when Julius Nyerere, the founding father of independence, stepped down in 1985 and two successive presidents over the last twenty years have ushered in free market reforms, fundamentally altering the direction of a once moribund socialist economy. But the legacy of the Zanzibari revolution of 1964 and of Nyerere still hang over the country. Nyerere, who died four years ago, had been a teacher and he became what was in fact Tanzania’s headmaster. He was incorruptible, unpretentious but totally...

LONDON – I used to jog down the back roads of Jinja, the old cotton center laid bare by 15 years of murderous civil war. There was a dirt-covered sign pointing to a rutted road: “To the source of the Nile.” I would cut through the long grass and the sweet smell of jacaranda and frangipani, past the long abandoned Mango Café, and arrive at a sharp cleft in the hill. There, nestling below, the headwaters of the Nile burst into view. No wonder, I would think, that Winston Churchill called Uganda “the pearl of Africa, a fairy tale land”. But in mind’s eye I could see the future and now it has arrived. Two hotels have grabbed the spot. And there is a plan, well advanced, to build a dam to provide electricity for Uganda’s rushing economic development. The country’s untamed beauty, preserved by misrule and war, is being...

For første gang i verdenshistorien har en president blitt valgt på et program om bruk av aktiv ikkevold. Abu Mazen benyttet hver eneste mulighet under valgkampanjen sin til å argumentere mot bruk av vold i kampen for et fritt Palestina. At han fikk 62 prosent av stemmene på et valgmanifest dominert av Ikkevold er en historisk hendelse, ikke bare i Palestina. Dette er unikt uansett hvilket land man studerer. Ifølge Abu Mazen har den andre intifadaen bare skapt palestinerne en dårligere situasjon for det palestinske folk. Bruken av selvmordsbombere, bilbomber, raketter og andre væpna angrep har ikke ført fram mot den overlegne krigsmaskinen til Israel. Nå er spørsmålene om han får fremganger i sin forhandlingslinje med Israel og om han på alvor vil benytte ikkevoldelige motstand i kampen mot okkupasjonen. Problemene er mange og det er vanskelig å være optimist selv om det er en åpning for flere møter på...

A review of Soros’ book, The Bubble of American Supremacy George Soros must be a disappointed man. In the book, “The Bubble of American Supremacy”, that he published last year he admits that he has usually been rather indifferent between different presidential candidates, but sees the 2004 election in a very different light: “I have made it my primary objective to persuade the American public to reject President Bush in the forthcoming elections” (p. viii). He probably even succeeded in his avowed purpose. The exit polls in Ohio and elsewhere showed Kerry as a clear winner, whereas the official election results proclaimed George W. Bush as the winner. The more detailed figures were analysed by a group of very respected mathematicians and statisticians, and show beyond reasonable doubt that there was gross and systematic electronic election fraud, even if they of course cannot tell exactly who were involved in what ways. If...

Flera författare har frammanat bilder av Jesu återvändande till vår jord och brukar då berätta hur illa han råkade ut, och ett antal goda vitsar föreställer sig kända politiker i samma predikament. Hur skulle det då gå för en filosof? “Platons tilbakekomst” är ett försök av journalisten och författaren Zeljko Vukovic att ge oss en bild av det. Vukovic är väl kvalificerad: som journalist ställde han så många opassande frågor att samtliga grupper i Bosnien blev arga på honom och han tvangs fly till Norge. Flera av hans böcker sedan “Mordet på Sarajevo” (1993) har översatts från serbiska till norska och andra språk. Boken låter Platon dyka upp på ett antal olika platser för att komma i samtal med folk: hos Vita Husets säkerhetsvakt och en saxofonspelande president, i en park med en tysk gymnasial punktjej, i en berömd fransk vänsterfilosofs parisvåning, hemma hos en arabisk arbetare i Marseilles och i en tysk...

LONDON – It’s the working class who bear most of the cost of absorbing new immigrants, whether it be in France, the U.S. or Malaysia, but it is the middle class who dominate the debate, forging an alliance in its favor across the political spectrum- liberals who want to be multicultural, and conservatives, as Ronald Reagan used to, who argue for the free market and open borders. Two new academic reports challenge the conventional wisdom that immigration is an unalloyed good for the economies of developed societies. George Borjas, a Harvard professor of economics, has published a study for the Center of Immigration Studies in which he argues that when immigration increases the supply of workers the earnings of native-born workers fall significantly. A parallel study by two professors of economics at Colombia, Donald Davis and David Weinstein, shows that the net loss for native-born Americans is $70 billion each...

Emina Babovic från människorättsorganisationen Medborgarforum i bosniska Tuzla, är uppgiven. “Alla vill ge sig av från Bosnien. Ingen ser någon framtid där.” Kriget i Bosnien upphörde med Daytonavtalet 1995. Tio år senare råder en bräcklig fred. Krigsekonomin har inte ersatts av en fredsekonomi. Folk med bakgrund i paramilitära banditband och krigsprofitörer behärskar en maffiaekonomi, med förgreningar in i den politiska makten. “Vem vann krigen på Balkan? Dayton och konsekvenserna för världsordningen” var titeln för en tvådagarskonferens i dagarna med ett 30-tal deltagare, arrangerad av Göteborgs universitet.* * * Dayton gjorde lite eller inget för att läka och lindra de interna konflikter som låg till grund för kriget. Bosniens uppdelning i två eller rentav tre enheter har inte lett till en gynnsam fredsprocess och det stärkande av ekonomin som skulle kunna ha varit motorn i fredsbyggandet. Den bosniska civilbefolkningen far illa. Maffian i Bosnien omsätter lika mycket som statsbudgeten. Landets styrs...

LONDON – When in 1964 China first tested a nuclear weapon the West had every reason to be worried. Here was a country that had recently fought the U.S. in Korea, had threatened countries as far afield as India and Indonesia and which supported revolutionary movements all over the Third World. But today China’s policies of would-be military domination worry us very little. Its nuclear arsenal is rather small – a mere 24 intercontinental nuclear missiles that are able to reach the U.S.; no aircraft carrier battle groups for projecting its power; very few destroyers; it is constructing no long-range bombers; and has no military bases abroad. Its seventy submarines rarely venture outside Chinese territorial waters. Even vis a vis Taiwan, against which it has deployed 600 short-range missiles, it does not have the makings of an invasion force that could overwhelm Taiwan’s defenses. Nevertheless, both the White House and...