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The Kosovo Solution Series By Aleksandar Mitic & Jan ObergOn March 24, 2005 it was six years since NATO bombsto create peace began to fall.What peace is there today? What will there be tomorrow? PressInfo # 209, March 16, 2005Kosovo Solution Series # 1Why the solution in Kosovo matters to the worldExecutive summary of a series of PressInfos on Kosovo. Twelve reasons why it is important and a mini-analysis of the role of the international community in conflict-management. With a few words about the approach TFF has taken since it got on the ground in Kosovo as early as in 1992. PressInfo # 210, March 18, 2005Kosovo Solution Series # 2The media – strategic considerationsAn unbalance between Belgrade and the Kosovo Albanians in the means put into PR advocacy campaigns and lobbying efforts has led to a one-sided media war in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Serbs still lack a...

LONDON – A deep and disturbing malaise has descended on Britain’s European debate and one powerful reason for that is that the agenda and the discourse are set by journalists and not by historians. The politicians too often seem to be fearful of challenging the journalistic agenda and spelling out more than a day-to-day, nuts and bolts vision of Europe Although Prime Minister Tony Blair promises to use the same formidable energy he deployed to win support around the world for the invasion of Iraq to ensure a hostile British public votes ‘yes’ on the European constitution, once the May election is safely won, many wonder if it is already too late. Blair has conspicuously failed to fight the European corner and has run scared before the tabloid press and its anti European crusade. The recently published diary of Piers Morgan, the former editor of the Daily Mirror, records that...

LONDON – A path being beaten to The Hague war crimes’ tribunal? It has almost become a road, such is the traffic. Since October, 12 alleged war criminals have made their own way to Holland to hand themselves over. They are mostly Serbs, but last week it was the turn of Ramush Haradinaj, the former prime minister of Kosovo, accused of crimes against his territory’s Serb minority. This week the Croatian government will probably be told that it has lost its chance of being considered for European Union membership since it hasn’t persuaded General Ante Gotovina to turn himself in. The penny is beginning to drop that you can’t do such dastardly deeds and strut your stuff in your hometown forever more. Something has profoundly changed in international relations which augurs well for the future of international justice and the diminishing of future conflicts. One lesson is being learnt, but...

Dr. Eisler spoke in Germany at the invitation of Prof. Rita Suessmuth, President of the Bundestag (the German Parliament) and Daniel Goeudevert (Chair of Volkswagen International, who wrote the Foreword to the German Edition of Eisler’s international bestseller The Chalice and The Blade). She was invited to Greece by another TFF Associate Margarita Papandreou (the First Lady). She spoke in Colombia, invited by the Mayor of Bogota, and in the Czech Republic, invited by Vaclav Havel (President of the Czech Republic). She addressed the NGO Forum of the End of the First U.N. Decade for Women Conference in Nairobi, Kenya and was a plenary speaker at the 2004 Barcelona Women’s Forum. She keynoted the Seventh Annual Conference of State Governors’ Spouses. She made a major presentation at the Second Centennial Parliament of World Religions in Chicago, and has addressed a wide range of audiences. In 1999, she spoke at the Club of...

The Kosovo Solution SeriesBy Aleksandar Mitic & Jan ObergOn 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, 2005The Kosovo Solution Series – all in one place10 analyses of the future of Kosovo.Referred to by Reuters as the place you can learn more. And on top of Transitions Online, TOL. PressInfo 209-218, April 27, 2005 The Kosovo Solution SeriesAll the 10 articles, 58 pages, 340 KB in pdf formatNow widely featured in Balkan media, posted or mentioned on leading European sites, Reuters, Transitions Online, EUActive, EuropeanVoice, etc. It circulates European embassies and international organisations. The pdf edition is free but please make an honour payment here when you download and print it out. Feature Collection, March 2005 and ongoing The Accumulating Crisis in KosovoMany links to evidence of the crisis, to...

LONDON – Fifteen white Zimbabwean farmers, their land taken from them in one of the most badly conceived land reform programs ever enacted, announced recently that they have been invited to start farming in Nigeria where land is both plentiful and, by tradition, reasonably fairly distributed. Land reform has been given a bad name in Zimbabwe where the most modern and productive farmers have been summarily stripped of their titles for no other reason than the color of their skin. In Venezuela, likewise, a typical Latin American country still mired in its feudal division of land, its mercurial president, Hugo Chávez, is stirring the issue of land seizures, a policy that is more beholden to his short term electoral needs than to any long term thought-out policy for diminishing rural poverty and inequality. Yet careful land reform is an absolute must in many countries – in Nepal where a dangerous...

LONDON – How is the ordinary mortal able to make up his mind on whether Iran is developing nuclear weapons or not, and if so whether this poses a serious threat to Israel or other neighbors? After all, as Hans Blix, the UN’s former chief nuclear weapons’ inspector, famously said about Iraq’s supposed nuclear armory, there was nothing to stop Saddam Hussein hanging up a sign “Beware of the dog”, even if there was no dog. Moreover, even if Iran does have or almost have the capability to build a few nuclear weapons who would they use them against in a real life situation, as opposed to the make believe scenarios that game playing strategists love to create? Against Israel, Europe or the U.S.? But these putative antagonists all have enough submarines, hardened silos and nuclear missiles to ensure a second strike ability that would wipe Iran off the face...

LONDON – “Better to light a candle than curse the darkness” said Peter Benenson, the founder of Amnesty International who has just died. To which I would add, quoting Nehru on hearing of Gandhi’s assassination, “A light has gone out of our lives”. When Peter Benenson was born there was no Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Today we have nearly a hundred international agreements on all aspects of human rights- from the abolishing of torture to the outlawing of the trafficking of women and children. Human Rights are now part of the world’s common culture. Yet to take issue with one of the two most important documents in the human rights’ canon, the American Declaration of Independence, there is nothing “self-evident” about it. Jefferson himself was a contented slave owner. Professor Kenneth Minogue of the London School of Economics, has written that the idea of human rights is “as modern...

LONDON – Credit should always be given where credit is due: Bush/Blair have come to terms with the Shiite ascendancy in Iraq. This was never on their agenda. At the outset of their war they naively believed that the secular émigrés would grab the reins. Gracefully, they are bowing before the results of democracy. The Shiites of Iraq too are now facing the consequences of democracy. Unlike in Shiite Iran where democracy plays second fiddle to the religious authorities, the Shiite religious leaders of Iraq, in particular Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, seem ready to take a back seat. Like Bush and Blair the Shiites are being compelled by the Iraqi voters to come to conclusions they may not at first have contemplated. They have won at the polls, but they have to deal with their rivals if it is to mean anything for the long run. Islamic democracy gets a...

Öppet brev till Statsrådsberedningen ifrånTFF-rådgivare om EU:s säkerhets- og fredspolitik Mottagare av Sveriges Fredsråds “Lilla Fredspriset” 2005  Denna artikel finns också på engelska TillStadsrådsberedningenoch särskilt till Göran Persson,Bosse Ringholm och Leni Björklund Hej! Er arbetsbörda är stor, och ni missar säkert det mesta av allt som rör sig i folkdjupet. Hatet mot manipulationerna i EU-frågor är enormt. Men få människor finner det meningsfullt att fördjupa sig i konstitutionen när de inte får en chans att yttra sin mening i en folkomröstning. Men det gäller trots allt en konstitution vi ska leva med resten av våra liv. Vi har gjort ett försök att granska ett enda avsnitt: det säkerhets- och försvarspolitiska. Resultatet av detta och av det vi uppsnappat på vägen överlämnar vi nu till er. Vi hoppas personligen slippa leva med en konstitution för nittonhundratalet, med allt dess eländiga makt- och våldstänkande. Något land måste ta itu med detta. Det...

LONDON – In seeking to lift its arms embargo of China the European Union has picked on the worst kind of issue at the worst possible time. The roles of Europe – the good guy over Iraq – and the U.S. – the bad guy – have been reversed. And to what point? To earn a few more euros for the arms’ export industry which, although it earns a high marginal rate of return, employs relatively few people. (130,000 in the UK for example.) Is this worth passing up the opportunity of mending some fences with Washington? And there is no evidence that this change in policy is one that the European electorate- the one that with its protests fashioned its own common European foreign policy during the run up to the war with Iraq- is actually desirous of. Over the decades, since President Richard Nixon engineered a grand rapprochement...

The first time I met Zurab Zhvania was at a Conference for Green Parliamentarians in Stockholm in 1990. He came from a distant and unknown country and told us that he had formed a successful Green Party – in the Soviet Union. We thought that was impossible – but Zurab did it! To overcome the impossible became his personal brand. However, at last, if available information is correct, he fell victim to one of the most mundane everyday aspects of the crisis of Georgia – the energy shortage. Nothing works as planned; everyone has to “make it for oneself”, amateurish, with what is at hand. So it seems that Zurab Zhvania tragically died by a leaking gas fuelled heating device. Thereby becoming a symbol for the paradoxes of his country in life as well as in death. Relations with Shevardnadze Next time I saw him was in 1993. Georgia was...