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“En livräddares försvarstal”Av: Borislav PekicÖversättning från serbokroatiska av Djordje ZarkovicGavrilo förlag Den ex-jugoslaviske författaren Borislav Pekics roman “En livräddares försvarstal” är både en uppsluppen skröna och en politisk satir över det Jugoslavien som inte längre finns. Romanen, publicerad 1977, skildrar livräddaren Andrija Gavrilovic, som år ut och år in med stor nit fullgör det arbete vilket han betraktar som ett kall. Men han har otur. Den enda gång han behöver gripa in är för att rädda en hund, annars inte en enda incident. Men vem kan vara domare om det inte finns några skyldiga, vem kan vara läkare utan patienter? Efter femton år utspelar sig dramatiska förändringar i landet. Stora starka karlar kommer till hans strand för att bada, goda simmare. Tyskarna har ockuperat landet. Nu ockuperar de också Andrijas strand. “En livräddares försvarstal”är skriven som ett förklarande brev”att öppnas efter min död”. Brevet/berättelsen har inspirerats av “Sokrates försvarstal”, av...

LONDON – If Europe and the rest of the world want to save the UN as an institution that counts and Iraq from the disintegration that confronts it they must let the U.S. back into the UN – and into the driver’s seat. As Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN’s most revered ex secretary general, once said, the UN was created not to get us to heaven but to save us from hell. It is tempting – and I have been very tempted – to let the U.S. and Britain stew in their own mess in Iraq. They created this pickle and for a few months it has seemed right to let them soak in it, so that next time they might more openly listen to those many critics who warned them that war would probably end up, as it has, creating a worse situation that the one that existed before. But the...

ABUJA, NIGERIA – If you want to find opposition to the elected administration of President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria open any newspaper any day. Last week, for instance, almost the entire press was up in arms against his vice president, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, who too calmly turned away as his bodyguards beat into unconsciousness a photographer whose crime was to get too close at a ceremony to crown the new Oba of Lagos, or so the reporters present unanimously say. The state governor shouted himself hoarse begging them to stop but to no avail. Cruelty and cold feelings remain part of Nigerian political and social culture 5 years after the fall of the ruthless military regime of General Sani Abacha who purged and pillaged until there was practically nothing left in the treasury, and those that prospered were the most corrupt. It became a dark satanic society more in the mould...

MONROVIA, LIBERIA – African peacekeeping has perhaps at last found the right turning on the dangerous road of ethnic strife, tribal war and warlordism that besieges too many countries in Africa. When President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, engineered, or rather enticed, the removal of the Liberian despot, Charles Taylor, to exile in Nigeria last month it turned the page on a new chapter in African peacekeeping efforts. It has been nine years since the U.S. /UN debacle in Somalia when the U.S. command of the UN peacekeeping force decided to cut and run after the gruesome death of 18 American soldiers. This was followed by a period during the Clinton Administration when the U. S. stood back from Africa’s wars. The administration effectively vetoed a major peacekeeping operation that might have stood a chance of forestalling the Rwandan genocide. The combination of a rebirth of political confidence in now democratic Ghana,...

LONDON – Too many observers look at Iraq as if it were a boxing match. Invasion – one up for the “West”, well at least America and Britain. Sabotage of electric pylons – one down for the West. Blowing up the UN headquarters in Iraq – one down for humanity. And so it will go on, doubtless for a long, long time. Only one thing is sure and clear: in the cold searching light of history each of these incidents that absorb us will not even rank as footnotes. Whatever one thinks of the exaggerations of Samuel Huntington’s book, “The Clash of Civilizations”, nevertheless a competition of civilizations it is and has long been. And we need to know that history if only to absorb its greatest lesson- military success on either side has never determined the direction of the civilization in question for more than a century or two at...

I tre artiklar kommer Sören Sommelius att skildra intryck från vårt grannland Litauen. Litauen 1Hitlers balkong 1. Atvykimas Klaipeda Förundrad ser jag ut genom hyttfönstret när färjan Kaunas når den litauiska kusten. Vad är detta? Jag gnuggar ögonen. Kvällen innan hade hamnen i Karlshamn haft en besynnerlig öststatsprägel. Klaipeda verkar mera som New York. Färjan far en timme längs oändliga kajer med stora lyftkranar. Allt har sin förklaring. För Karlshamn är International Ferry Port ännu ganska nytt. Men Klaipeda – i dag Litauens tredje stad med dryga 200.000 invånare – var under den sovjetiska ockupationens år Sovjets fjärde största hamn, med 32 km kajer och 55 jättelyftkranar. Tio år har gått sedan de sista sovjetiska soldaterna lämnade Litauen 1993. Redan 1987 kunde västerlänningar besöka Klaipeda som dittills varit en “förbjuden stad” av militära skäl. De flesta ombord är balter eller ryssar. Alltför få skandinaver tycks ha upptäckt resvägen, att Östersjön...

What a difference a few months can make. At the end of April 2003, just four months ago, Donald Rumsfeld was in the Qatar headquarters of General Tommy Franks, effusively comparing the US victory in Iraq to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the liberation of Paris.  The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Cold War and a reuniting of East and West, and the people of Paris actually welcomed the Allied forces as liberators from the Nazis in World War II. In neither case was it necessary for American forces to remain as an occupying force; in neither case did the US government have its eyes on the oil.  As Rumsfeld savored US military dominance over the far inferior Iraqi forces, he triumphantly crowed, “Never have so many been so wrong about so much.” He was presumably referring to the “many” who doubted American...

USA vill fortsätta att påverka Europas inre angelägenheter genom att ytterligare splittra Balkan, samtidigt som Balkan-staterna nu inviterats att bli medlemmar i EU. USA pressar nu de länder i Europa, som är tillräckligt svaga, varav flera finns på Balkan, att skriva avtal med USA, om att om att amerikanska medborgare ska undantagas från att ställas inför den nya internationella krigsförbrytardomstolen i Haag. USA har helt och hållet dominerat ICTY, den särskilda krigsförbrytartribunalen för Jugoslavien, och har handlagt alla ärenden på ett sätt, som inte haft något med ett normalt domstolsförfarande att göra. USA vill därför undvika att den nya FN-domstolen skulle kunna behandla amerikanska medborgare på samma sätt. USA ställer nu genom utpressning, dessa länder inför motstridiga krav och önskningar. Naturligtvis vill de, som europeiska länder, vara med i EU, men på grund av hot om uteblivet ekonomiskt och militärt bistånd från USA, kan de se sig tvungna att avstå...

As we approach the second anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, it is important to take a hard look at the direction our country has taken since these tragic events occurred. The United States has attacked Afghanistan and driven the Taliban regime from power. In the process, we killed some 3,000 to 5,000 civilians, more than died at the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The US has not been able to locate and capture Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Reports from Afghanistan are that the US-backed regime there controls little more than the city of Kabul, and warlords are in control of the rest of the country. The United States has also attacked Iraq, but with neither evidence of a link between Iraq and the 9/1l terrorists, nor with the sanction of the United Nations. The US preventive war against Iraq killed some 6,000...

Added responses to questions of the Turkish Daily News (VIII/6/2003) Question 16: What is your view of the current conditions of Greek/Turkish relations? Is the conflict likely to be resolved peacefully? My impression of the current Turkish/Greek conflict is based on visits to both countries over the years. I was particularly convinced after a visit to Greece a few weeks ago to give some talks at two conferences that a sea change in the Greek approach to its relationship with Turkey had occurred. Previously Turkey had been a preoccupation of Greeks and Greece. Only several years earlier the sense of Greek grievance with respect to Turkey was always present in serious discussions, during which the participants often exhibited an obsessive concern with the allegedly illegal Turkish occupation of Northern Cyprus, but also were quite ready to discuss the Greek their highly emotional understanding of the events after World War I...

Revised Responses by Richard Falk to questions posed by the Turkish Daily News (VIII/1/2003) l. Is there any basis in international law for recourse to “preemptive war”? Most interpretations of international law deny states the right to wage a preemptive war, although international practice is more ambiguous, especially in extenuating circumstances. There were few international objections raised when Israel initiated The Six Day War in 1967, convincingly claiming that it was confronted by an imminent attack by its Arab neighbors, and that its action was justified on the basis of defensive necessity to ensure its survival as a state. The invocation of an alleged right to wage preemptive war by the US Government is particularly troubling from the perspective of international law. First of all, the United States has expressed this right in highly abstract language rather than in a specific setting of the sort that led Israel to act...

I. “Globalization” under Stress In the 1990s it was evident that “globalization,” despite objections about the unsatisfactory nature of the term as misleading or vague, was widely accepted as usefully descriptive and explanatory: namely, that the world order sequel to the cold war needed to be interpreted largely from an economic perspective, and that the rise of global market forces was displacing the rivalry among sovereign states as the main preoccupation of world order. This perception was reinforced by the ascendancy of Western style capitalism, ideologized as “neo-liberalism” or as “the Washington consensus,” a circumstance reinforced by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the discrediting of a socialist alternative. It seemed more illuminating to think of the 1990s in this light by reference to globalization than to hold in abeyance any designation of world politics by continuing to refer to the historical period as “the post-cold war.” Others spoke...