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I det mörkaste Peru 3Reflexioner från en resa “När du besöker en hantverksmarknad för att köpa en souvenir från mitt land och upptäcker att du saknar pass, kamera och dina kära dollar, gråt inte, kasta inte upp armarna i fasa, därför att det du just har upplevt är en sann artists arbete, en konstnär som under många år uppövat sina fingrars känslighet för att utföra konstverk. Lägg därtill att också han är en samlare.” Så skriver den peruanske författaren Mario Guevara Paredes, född i Cuzco 1956, i sin novellsamling “Gringa Hunter & Other short stories”. Cuzco är ett av Latinamerikas största turistmål, också därför att staden är startpunkten för resan till Machu Picchu. Mängder av turistdollar strömmar hit. Samtidigt är Cuzco en av Perus fattigaste städer, där 75 procent av befolkningen är fattig och 50 procent extremt fattig, enligt färsk statistik. Turism kan skapa utveckling och välstånd. Men inte här....

LONDON – Statistics of the 2000 census recently released in Beijing report that there is now an extraordinary imbalance in the birth-rate – 117 boys are being born for every 100 girls. In southern Hainan province the gap widens to an astonishing 135/100 ratio. In China today about 97% of all unmarried persons aged between 28 and 49 are male. China is probably the world leader in using cheap scans to enable parents to know the sex of their child in the womb and, despite breaking the law, to find a doctor who will abort a foetus for no more reason than it happens to be female. However, this practice is also widely practised in many other Asian countries. India is not far behind. Adding the two countries together, according to Valerie Hudson and Andrea Den Boer, writing in the spring issue of Harvard University’s quarterly, International Security, there are now...

Abstract. Often regional conflicts are treated as if they are placed in a vacuum, independent of their environment. This paper attempts to put regional conflict regions into the perspective of a globalising world. It is suggested that feelings of humiliation play a central role in this process. Human rights ideals extend dignity to all humankind and prohibit humiliating people as lesser beings. Human rights ideals thus define high goals and consequently create intense feelings of humiliation when violated. Every local conflict is inscribed into the global debate as to how the global village will look like in the future: will human rights reign, or will elites keep underlings in a humiliating position? Expressions that are central to this discourse are discussed in this paper, such as ‘protecting my people’, ‘freedom’, ‘peace’, ‘stability’, as well as ‘war’, ‘enemies’, ‘friends’, ‘terrorists’, ‘soldiers’, and ‘police’. Keywords: egalisation, globalisation, human rights, humiliation, reactive devaluation, regional conflict....

The USA has argued that a military attack on Iraq is justified because the Saddam Hussein regime has assisted, even hosted, Al Qaeda and that there is a clear and present danger of Iraq attacking Israel or others with weapons of mass destruction. But it has not been able to convince either world public opinion nor the UN and the Security Council (except for the UK). This raises the question whether the US military build-up around Iraq and the plans for a regime change under US military occupation (as in Japan) has other motives: Saudi Arabia, up to now one of the United States’ key allies in the Gulf region, looks increasingly unreliable, given that 15 of the 19 suspected hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi nationals, and Saudi money is believed to be a major source of financing for Al Qaeda, with which it shares a common ideology, Wahhabism. So...

I det mörkaste Peru 1Reflexioner från en resa Sören Sommelius har under en månad rest i Peru. I en serie artiklar kommer han att göra nedslag i peruansk samtid och historia under vinjetten “I det mörkaste Peru, Reflexioner från en resa”. När jag landar på flygplatsen i Lima tänker jag på björnen Paddington, som upphittades på tunnelbanestationen i London med samma namn. “Och var kommer du ifrån?”, frågade fru Brown. Björnen såg sig omkring innan den svarade. – Mörkaste Peru. Jag borde egentligen inte alls vara här. Jag är fripassagerare.“ (Ur “Kalla mig Paddington”, av Michael Bond, i översättning av Louise Moëll). Det mörkaste Peru, landet Långt borta, nämns sällan i medierna. Vad vet jag om Peru? Presidenten, ja hur var det nu, och gerillan? Hur är det med gerillan, “Sendero Luminoso“, “Den lysande stigen”? Finns den fortfarande? Vad stod den för? Var det frihetskämpar eller terrorister? “Det mörkaste Peru” är...

LONDON – In the week before the International Criminal Court comes into formal existence, the United States has decided to pick a fight with it – and potentially a damaging one. In the UN Security Council the U.S. has said that it is not going to vote for the renewal of the mandate of the Nato peacekeeping force in Bosnia unless the Security Council rules that American soldiers be given a solemn assurance that U.S. peacekeeping forces could never be prosecuted for war crimes. This American hostility will hang like a heavy cloud over the ceremonies that will mark the opening of the Court’s doors on July 1st. To their immense credit the two other Western Security Council members, Britain and France, are adamant in refusing to countenance the American request. All the member states of the European Union regard the Court as an historic breakthrough in the building up of...

31 Members of Congress Thirty-one courageous members of Congress, led by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), are challenging the president’s unilateral withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. These representatives deserve our appreciation for taking action to prevent Mr. Bush from trampling on the Constitution in his continuing effort to undermine international law and expand US military domination. This is a critical challenge to the abuse of presidential authority. A lot is riding on it. If the president can unilaterally voids our laws, which ones will be the next to go? Perhaps the first and fourth amendments? If your congressional representative is not one of the 31 parties to this lawsuit, he or she should be asked why not and urged to join the lawsuit and support it in the Congress. Not a single US Senator has had the courage to join this lawsuit. Sen. Russell Feingold (D-WI) initially indicated his...

And its Aftermath: Three Discourses USA, the West and the Rest after September 11/October 7, 2001: a Midterm Report (1) 1. Three Discourses: Terrorism, State Terrorism and Retaliation There seem to be three discourses, competing for attention, to come to grips with September 11 (terrorism in New York/Washington, killing about 3,000) and October 7 2001+ (state terrorism in Afghanistan, killing about 5,000) (2), summarized in the Table. The first is the terrorist discourse. Inspired by fundamentalist Islam, the shahadah (“I testify that there is no God but Allah, and I testify that Muhammad is his prophet”) and the sword; the flag of Saudi Arabia is a perfect symbol. To bring Allah’s justice to America is one element. Another, articulated by bin Laden, is revenge for humiliation: “What America is tasting now is something insignificant compared to what we have tasted for scores of years. Our nation has been tasting this humiliation and...

Without a vote of the United States Congress and over the objections of Russia and most US allies, George W. Bush has unilaterally withdrawn the US from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, rendering it void. His withdrawal from this solemn treaty obligation became effective today, June 13, 2002. Bush’s action is being challenged in US federal court by 32 members of Congress, led by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) and Senator Russell Feingold (D-WI). We should be thankful that there are still members of Congress with the courage and belief in democracy to challenge such abuse of presidential power. Since becoming president, Bush has waged a campaign against international law. Withdrawal from the ABM Treaty is but one of a series of assaults he has made, including pulling out of the Kyoto Accords on Climate Change, withdrawal of the US from the treaty creating an International Criminal Court, opposing a Protocol...

LONDON – Why is Washington so worried about Iran building a nuclear bomb, if it is? It never worried that much about India and Pakistan. Indeed in this case it was perhaps rather too insouciant, never contemplating that Al-Qaeda’s friends in Pakistan’s military and intelligence services might attempt to gain control of it. The reason is simple: most if not all the powers-that-be in Washington have long ago convinced themselves that nuclear deterrence is a good thing, cooling war passions rather than aggravating them. And, secondly, they believe that the security of the U.S. would not be affected by a nuclear war between India and Pakistan or even between India and China. Millions would die, of course, but the damage would be localised. Doesn’t the same go for an Iranian nuclear bomb? Moreover, Iran in more than two hundred years has never started a war with anyone and, despite the history...

LONDON – President George Bush has bequeathed the world a great sense of insecurity. Since he delivered his dose of inflated hyperbole at his State of the Union address we are left to wonder if the rest of his presidency is going to be a constant reminder of that state when “every road towards a better society is blocked, sooner or later, by war, threats of war, preparations for war,” as Aldous Huxley warned us it would be 70 years ago. “If you want peace, prepare for war” advised Clausewitz, and today’s inhabitants of the White House, convinced self righteously that the mailed fist will cow the infidel and the wicked, take Clausewitz all too literally, convinced that their bombs will persuade those underneath to bow to superior force. It can happen. Nazi Germany was blitzed into oblivion. Japan was nuclear bombed into capitulation. More recently, Iraq was dissuaded from...

LONDON – Quite some time before Adolph Hitler had decided to exterminate the Jews the British political establishment had sadly concluded, twenty years after the Balfour Declaration of 1917, that they had made a mistake in allowing the Zionist movement to drag them into the enterprise of re-making a Jewish homeland in what for 700 years, until the break up of the Ottoman empire in the wake of Turkey’s defeat in World War 1, had been Muslim territory. One certainly doesn’t have to be anti-Semitic to wonder, in retrospect, whether the founding of Israel on Palestinian soil was such a good idea. The Jews had begun to settle in Palestine in the late nineteenth century at a time when “life proceeded slowly at a pace set by the stride of the camel”, to quote Tom Segev’s marvellous book, “One Palestine, Complete”. But it was only after the British foreign secretary Stanley...