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LONDON – If nuclear war does break out between India and Pakistan they will only have themselves to blame. Since the early 1970s they have been walking along the unmarked path that leads to nuclear holocaust and enough people both within and without have told them how to turn back. Even today if President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee were as serious as they say they are about avoiding nuclear war they could sit down for two hours and sort the whole thing out. It is not that complicated. The late Mahbub ul Haq, at one time Pakistan’s minister of finance and one of the most creative minds to have come out of a land that has produced more than its fair share of brilliant heads, suggested six years ago the creation of a UN trusteeship to last 10 or 15 years over both Indian-held and Pakistani-held Kashmir....

THE CONFLICT WORKERS’ MISSION When tense international crises occur, we tend to react due to impulsive feelings and mainstream attitudes. Prejudice, enemy images and ideas of retaliation and revenge may thus form public opinions, and these may again become part of the escalation of violent hostilities. The conflict worker2 however has the possibility of using the methods of conflict resolution in order to stay more balanced, think more deeply and come up with sober arguments and alternatives to the use of violence. As conflict resolution is part of the nonviolent mindset, our perspective is how to promote genuine and sustainable security in this crisis.3 Security is the key word. It links to the most important and global of all Human Rights of the UN charter, namely the right to life. As conflict workers we try to rise above war propaganda, rumours, animosity and shortsighted clinging to military escalation as the only means to obtain...

The SunflowerOnline monthly newsletter of theNuclear Age Peace FoundationJune 2002 (No. 61) The Sunflower is a monthly e-newsletter providing educational information on nuclear weapons abolition and other issues relating to global security. Back issues are available at http://www.wagingpeace.org/sf/backissues.html I N T H I S I S S U E PERSPECTIVE NUCLEAR SOUTH ASIA NUCLEAR MATTERS MISSILES & MISSILE DEFENSE NUCLEAR WASTE NUCLEAR INSANITY NUCLEAR ENERGY NAPF HAPPENINGS ACTION RESOURCES ************ PERSPECTIVE ************ Stopping a Nuclear War in South Asia Two nuclear-armed countries stand on the brink of war and the world seems paralyzed as it watches events unfolding in what seems like slow motion. It is a war that could easily escalate into a nuclear holocaust taking millions or tens of millions of lives, and virtually nothing is being done to end the standoff. The US and the UK have advised their citizens to leave the region and the UN is...

LONDON – That was a week and a half that was. The primary American transatlantic relationship has been moved eastward, away from London, Paris and Berlin to Moscow. Nuclear war between east and west has been consigned to the history books. And if on cue the new nuclear powers on the Indian subcontinent have rattled their rockets ready to unleash Armageddon on Asia, not on Europe as we had been brought up to fear. Meanwhile it has become clear that the Bush administration now considers its job all but done in Afghanistan. The bombing has given the American people their pound of flesh. Reconstruction and all the other idealistic goals of nation building can be left to the Europeans. If the U.S. sees a role for itself in this part of the world any longer it is only as an emergency interlocutor to try and talk the Indians and Pakistanis out...

LONDON – Of all the many ironies in President George Bush’s decision to remove America from membership of the treaty establishing an International Criminal Court – its own adherence to the supremacy of law, its enthusiastic initiating of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its primary role in setting up the ad hoc international court that is now trying Milosevic – none is more to the fore than the swapping of roles between an imperial Britain and an idealistic United States. In the short space of fifty-eight years there has been a total role reversal. Winston Churchill believed that there was only one fit punishment for the Nazi war leaders: to execute the top fifty the moment they were captured. Anthony Eden his foreign secretary observed that the “guilt of such individuals as Himmler is so black that they fall outside and go beyond the scope of any judicial process”....

MADRID – Before the latest carnage reported from Colombia is shunted down into the archives and certainly before the Bush administration decides it is going to re direct its military aid to Colombia, now concentrated on defeating drug trafficking, in the direction of fighting leftist guerrillas, we should all take time out to reconsider the last 100 years or more of Colombian history. As Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia’s Nobel Prize winning novelist, has reminded us, Cicero wrote two thousand years ago, “To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child”. In Colombia’s case the continuing political violence has cut across all levels of society on and off all through the last century and much of the century before. (The common Colombian term La Violencia is usually used for the particular intense period of civil war between 1946 and 1966, to distinguish it from the...

The president can no longer be considered simply a vacuous puppet brought to power by big business, a family name, and election fraud. He must now be viewed as a dangerous opponent of our constitutional form of government, international law and the international order that was born in the aftermath of World War II. The US withdrawal from the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court, announced by the Bush administration on May 6, 2002, has all the markings of a watershed event, an event that could make one weep for what it portends for the future of humanity and our country. The Bush administration is marching ahead in its assault on international law. Never before has a nation removed its sovereign signature from a treaty. Now it is done. In a one paragraph letter to the United Nations Secretary General, the US undersecretary of state for arms control, John Bolton...

We receive many positive proposals for peace from friends and readers of the Sunflower and our wagingpeace.org web site. I want to share some of them from time to time with a broader audience in the hope that they may spark your ideas and actions. Here is one from Janie, a mother in Philadelphia. She begins by observing that “the world seems to be falling apart” and notes that the format of international meetings hardly changes and the results are generally minimal. “What are we to do?” she asks. She answers her question this way: “When things don’t work out with a child, a new tactic is in order, and various tactics are attempted until the right one surfaces and the final breakthrough is accomplished.” Based on her experience, she makes the following proposal: “Why doesn’t someone initiate at the next world conference for anything (nuclear disarmament, environment, peace in...

DCAF WorkshopPromoting Civil Society in Good Governance: Lessons for the Security SectorPrague, 15-16 April 2002 At first glance it seems that the assessment of the Western democracy promotion programmes in the Balkans is a relatively easy task. The territory of former (or better, Second) Yugoslavia has been a focal point of various international interventions. Many of the lessons learned (and/or lessons that should have been learned) concern conflict management and post-conflict peacebuilding. One way or another, all these attempts have inevitably tackled the reform of the security sectors. The old and the emerging security structures have been de facto parts of the conflict structure(s). Thus the security sector reform (SSR) is usually associated with a painful debate on state building through conflict but also on traumatised, fragmented and frustrated civil societies and their recovery. Not surprisingly, what managed to stay immune from the ethno-nationalist zeal and/or emerged and matured during...

LONDON – After the publication this week of two important reports – one by the ambassadors of the European Union to India and the other by Human Rights Watch – confirming that what took place in the Indian state of Gujarat was nothing less than a state government-planned massacre, when Hindu mobs ran amok through Muslim neighbourhoods, we should start to worry less about a supposed Muslim/Christian clash of civilizations and worry more about the actual Muslim/Hindu divide of civilizations, especially so when the two sides have nuclear weapons pointing at each other. Why any Indian government should now expect to solve the Kashmir problem in its favour is beyond comprehension. If 180 million Muslims can no longer feel safe and secure inside India, despite the Herculean efforts of the country’s founding fathers to make the world’s largest secular democracy function without religious rancour, there is no chance that the Muslim...

Since the devastating carnage of World War II, a war that left some 50 million people dead, far-sighted individuals have worked for a world in which the force of law will prevail over the law of force. The first step toward realizing this vision was the establishment of the Nuremberg Tribunals to hold leaders of the Axis powers to account for crimes committed under international law. This unprecedented step on the part of the Allied powers was led by the United States. The American Supreme Court Justice, Robert Jackson, who became the US chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, argued in his opening statement: “We must summon such detachment and intellectual integrity to our task that this trial will commend itself to posterity as fulfilling humanity’s aspirations to do justice.” Following the trials, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Principles of Nuremberg, principles of individual accountability that were meant to serve...

LONDON – It is all too easy both to understate and to overstate the results of the first round of the French general election. To overstate is to forget that Jean-Marie Le Pen achieved back in 1995 14% of the vote as against his present 16.86%, hardly a mammoth increase. He is still far behind the electoral pull of his Austrian counterpart Jorg Haider and the peripheral position of his National Front party gives it no chance of being a critical element in supporting a government, as does its Danish counterpart the Peoples Party. Yet again is all too easy to understate the significance of his victory over Lionel Jospin. Le Pen is part of a marked trend in European politics. Admittedly Haider seems to be losing support but in many countries rightist candidates with an anti-immigrant tone and policies that underline tough law and order themes are still gaining ground....