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LONDON – Could it be that the Pinochet affair is now moving inexorably towards its denouement? Even more a cause celebre among human rights activists than the case of the Serbian, Slobovan Milosevic, it remains unresolved since the arrested former dictator was allowed to walk free four years ago from his detention in Britain. General Augusto Pinochet’s crimes were no ordinary crimes of the maintenance of political authority in a time of turbulence. They continued until 1990, long after Pinochet announced in 1978 that the “communist threat”, with which he had justified his coup against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, had ended. “The rituals of torture were intended to send horrific whispers through the populace”, wrote Geoffrey Robertson in his book, Crimes Against Humanity. Pinochet, it is alleged, personally supervised the torture operations with the boss of the torture unit, Manuel Contreras, reporting daily to him. He is...

Rabat, Morocco – September 25, 2004 – Published by Kyodo News, Japan The question posed in the title implicitly admits that the Arab world is not presently master of its own destiny. This is quite true and has been so for several decades. The Arab world is composed of 22 countries, including Palestine, a total population of 300 million 40% of whom are under 15 years of age. The region represents an area of 13 million square kilometres (35 times the area of Japan). It is hard to understand what is happening in this region today without recalling elements of a past which is still affecting the present and conditioning the future. Atomization has been and remains one of the basic obstacles facing the region. Eighty percent of the total Arab population is concentrated in 7 countries whereas 7 other countries barely reach 2 percent of that total. This geo-political...

By LONDON – The two big wings of Islam -Turkey in the West and Indonesia in the East – are reforming and changing at a lightening pace, confounding those who only measure Islam by its seemingly stagnant middle ground. Next week Indonesia goes to the polls for its final round in a presidential election that so far has been largely free, courteous and non-violent. Turkey continues with reforms that began in Ataturk’s day in the 1920s but which have recently accelerated under its relatively new Islamist government that is determined to meet all the criteria for entry demanded by the European Union. In fact the countries that contain the largest numbers of Muslims- Turkey (70 million), Indonesia (240m), Bangladesh (114m) and India (121m)- are all liberal minded and democratic. All have populations that overwhelmingly reject the terrorist jihad. All prefer their women uncovered. All find the rigidity of Islamic belief...

‘We showed weakness and weak people are beaten,’ said President Vladimir Putin after surveying the wreckage of the battle scarred school in Beslan. Now we know what President George W. Bush meant when he said after his first meeting with Putin that he had looked into his eyes and had seen his soul. He had indeed found a soul mate. The meek, they both believe, shall not inherit the earth. Who fights with Dragons, said Nietzsche, shall himself become a dragon. But the other horn of the dilemma is he who does not fight with dragons may be devoured by them. War is sometimes perhaps necessary. But in too many cases it degrades the fighter and his cause. The resort to force is too often crudely instinctive, as in Iraq despite the thinness of the arguments for war. In this latest case the lack of sophistication of the Russian troops,...

LONDON – “The moral arm of the universe is long”, Martin Luther King once said in one of his memorable speeches. “It bends towards justice”. But it is doubtful if the people of Cambodia, the site of the original “Killing Fields”, feel that this is likely. Yet their understandable cynicism may about to be confounded. Cambodia‚” National Assembly is poised to approve a government decision to ratify a treaty, over a decade in the making, that will empower a special court to try surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge, the communist movement that was seized with a mission to refashion the social and economic structure of their country by the sword and the bullet. Cambodia incarnates the worst horrors of being caught in the crossfires of war. It was heavily bombed in secret by the Nixon administration. Then when the Vietnamese invaded in 1979 Washington had the audacity to line up...

We know that medical personnel have failed to report to higher authorities wounds that were clearly caused by torture and that they have neglected to take steps to interrupt this torture. In addition, they have turned over prisoners’ medical records to interrogators who could use them to exploit the prisoners’ weaknesses or vulnerabilities. We have not yet learned the extent of medical involvement in delaying and possibly falsifying the death certificates of prisoners who have been killed by torturers. A May 22 article on Abu Ghraib in the New York Times states that “much of the evidence of abuse at the prison came from medical documents” and that records and statements “showed doctors and medics reporting to the area of the prison where the abuse occurred several times to stitch wounds, tend to collapsed prisoners or see patients with bruised or reddened genitals.” http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/080604J.shtml#16 According to the article, two doctors who...

Nuclear weapons occupy the highest rung on the ladder of military cowardice. They are long-distance devices of mass annihilation. They destroy indiscriminately &endash; men, women and children. They draw no lines between soldiers and civilians. Those who make the weapons, who deploy them, who order their use and who press the buttons to send the missiles on their way have virtually no connection with the victims. They are simply human instruments in a chain of activities leading to massive devastation. The only arguably sane use of nuclear weapons is deterrence, and deterrence is largely an unproven theory. General George Lee Butler, a former commander-in-chief of the United States Strategic Command, who was in charge of all US nuclear weapons, has expressed his deep concerns about deterrence. “Nuclear deterrence,” he wrote, “was and remains a slippery intellectual construct that translates very poorly into the real world of spontaneous crises, inexplicable motivations,...

LONDON – If all the world were like Sweden there would be no news to report. The last time that Sweden hit the front page was when its foreign minister, Anna Lindh, was knifed to death by a madman last year on the eve of a referendum on Swedish entry into the Euro zone. The time before that was in the distant past. But news and truth, as Walter Lippmann observed, should never be confused. The truth is, as a recent report by the United Nations showed, that Sweden is probably the most successful country in the world – that is if you factor in not just national income, but the longevity of its people, low infant mortality and high levels of education. Moreover, a new study by Professor Richard Florida of Carnegie Mellon university which measures the kind of creativity most useful to business – talent, technology and tolerance...

By LONDON – In his forthcoming memoir on his involvement in the Indian/Pakistani nuclear relationship Strobe Talbott, the former U.S. deputy Secretary of State, recounts the surprise and alarm that swept through the eighth floor of the State Department when, on May 11th 1998, the first reports came in over CNN that India had tested a nuclear weapon. Yet one presumes his diplomats were reading the Indian press carefully. For example, I have in front of me two articles dated April 8th and 15th, 1998, in the influential Indian daily, The Statesman, that argued that now the Indian nationalists of the Bharatiya Janata party had come to power India going nuclear was going to happen very quickly. The information was around for those who had eyes and ears. It was as if Washington didn’t want to know until it had to. Rather similarly the reports emerging today suggesting that Saudi...

Riane Eisler’s speech at the World’s Women Forum July 29, 2004 in Barcelona, Spain. It is a pleasure and an honor being here with you today – with so many women and men dedicated to creating a better future by empowering women worldwide – a cause I have been passionately committed to for over three decades, as a scholar, author, and activist. We are all aware that women must become economically empowered. We need equal access to education, well-paying jobs, credit; we need to change laws and customs that discriminate against us simply because we were born female. But – and this is what I want to focus on in the short time we have together today – we need more than that. If we are to change the shameful fact that worldwide the mass of the poor and the poorest of the poor are women and their children, we...

LONDON – I know how to tell you to keep healthy: don’t smoke, exercise every day but, if you ignore my advice, I have no idea how to do surgery on your arteries. I think I knew how to avoid war in Iraq and how to keep Saddam Hussein boxed in and weak militarily without hurting the innocents too much. But now that George W. Bush and Tony Blair have turned Iraq upside down with their single-minded pursuit of the chimera of weapons of mass destruction I have very few ideas on how to put Humpty Dumpty together again. Does this make me a useless political voyeur? I refuse to apologize. It is Bush and Blair who have lost their credibility in the Middle East, and for the world’s next big crisis, not my side. When, like Matilda, they next shout “fire, fire”, many of us will say, “be quiet,...

Here is a short critique of Javier Solana’s paper on European security of 20 June 2003, which Johan Galtung gave two weeks ago at a meeting with EU officials in Luxembourg.Another longer paper with constructive proposals will follow later. Comments are welcome to galtung@transcend.org By Reading Javier Solana’s “A Secure Europe in a Better World” calls to mind the famous prison director Herr Obermeyer in Germany with a fabulous record of low recidivism. His prisoners became law-abiding citizens upon release. Of course there was a study commission to uncover his method. And the conclusion: “Die Methode des Herrn Obermeyer ist Herr Obermeyer selbst” – Mr Obermeyer, meaning his personality, is his own method “Das Problem des Herrn Solana ist Herr Solana selbst”? Mr Solana is his own problem? Partly, yes. Long time ago he was against Spanish membership in NATO to win Spanish elections, then worked for that membership, and finally became NATO’s...