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Min Indienresa går mot sitt slut. Jag har träffat buddhistiska ungdomar från Tibet och uppsökt historiska platser och ashrams förknippade med Gandhi. Jag har besökt hinduernas heligaste stad, Varanasi eller Benares, och sett hur människor söker frälsning i Ganges kolibakteriefyllda vatten och hur gamla väntar på att dö och få sina kroppar uppeldade på stora brasor innan askan förs bort med floden. Jag har tillika besökt platser centrala för buddhismen – Bodghaya där unga Gautama nådde upplysning under pipal-trädet och Sarnath, där han först talade till sina lärjungar. Jag for till Rajgai där Buddha levde under 12 år och såg den egendomliga klippformation, Gridhakuta, där det sägs att han höll sina viktigaste föreläsningar. Där upplevde jag också den enorma, magnifika Fredspagoden, byggd av den japanska Nichiren-buddhistiska munken Nichidatsu Sufujii Gurujin i Rajgiri Hills. I samband med honom stöter jag åter på Gandhi. Gurujin föddes 1885, kom till Indien 1931 och...

LONDON – Perhaps the single most striking thing about the attack of September 11th and its aftermath is the significant number of Muslims who have argued the ludicrous proposition that the hand of Israel was behind it. But what such voices are in effect saying in their roundabout way is that such a dastardly deed could not possibly be the work of a God-fearing Muslim. The second most telling fact about this horrendous epoch is how quiescent has been the majority of the Muslim world in the face the American bombing of Afghanistan. To get this in perspective the present should be compared with the universal Muslim (and indeed Third World) outrage that met the Russian invasion of Afghanistan twelve years ago. From presidents to peasants the anger was deep and heartfelt and it was this moment that made it clear that the reflexive support that much of the Third...

1. Vapenvilasöndag i Makedonien Det är söndag och mycket varmt. Huvudstaden Skopje är tyst. De flesta sover, sitter i skuggan på balkonger eller vilar under träd. Tiden och rummet är ett vilset ingenmansland mellan fred och krig. Man sover, pratar, väntar, fördriver tiden, gör det man alltid gjort, håller fast vid det normala – väl vetande att det dag för dag blir ständigt mer onormalt. Ovissheten skapar en tyst närvarande oro. Allt har blivit värre, men måste det bli krig? Ska det bli samma helvete som i Bosnien? Var tar jag vägen? Blir jag inkallad? Ska jag skicka barnen till Kosovo? Till Belgrad, eller bara söderut, ifall? För kriget kan man förbereda sig eller just inte förbereda sig. Man kan inte förbereda sig för det obegripliga, det absurda, det helt onormala. Man kan egentligen bara vänta och hoppas på att det trots allt inte blir av. När jag skriver är...

LONDON – There are no points awarded for having seen this truck coming down the road. I first wrote about the likelihood of a group with no address getting its hands on a nuclear weapon in my column in the International Herald Tribune in 1975. Likewise, those liberals who worried out loud for years about Afghanistan first being armed and then left to rot by the West or pointed out the dangers of letting the structures of the Soviet Union collapse without sufficient economic aid to ease the transition in a sensible and organised way, have gained precious little kudos with public opinion at large. We are compelled to stand aside whilst the hardliners call the shots. If they go wrong and provoke a coup d’etat in Saudi Arabia or cause Pakistan’s nuclear weapons to fall into the wrong hands or leave a residue of Arab hatred far deeper than...

LONDON – Gung-ho about the fall of Kabul, but wary about the political morass that now confronts it, the U.S. has thrown the ball to the United Nations, an organisation not normally held in high regard in Washington but, as on past occasions, a useful refuge in times of grave crisis. Yet if history is any guide, a wave of amnesia about the value of the UN will fall over Washington as soon as the matter in hand has been dealt with. It has long been so. In 1954 there was the incident of the capture of seventeen U.S. airmen over China. Just as in the later Iranian hostage taking-taking, American opinion became extremely agitated. There was even some wild talk about the use of nuclear weapons. The UN was asked to intervene and Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold went to Beijing to talk to Premier Chou En-lai. It took six months...

London – Can the spirit of the successful achievement of the Putin-Bush meeting now be carried over into Russia’s relationship with Europe? In many ways it is easier for the U.S. to make a big peace with Russia than it is for Europe. There has never been any territorial issue between the two, apart from the quiet selling of Alaska to the U.S. in 1867. Despite all the tension of the Cold War it remains true that neither Russia nor the U.S. lost a soldier to the other side in combat. Yet for Europe the memories of war with Russia and Russian occupation run deep. Is it at last possible, ten years after the fall of communism, for contemporary Europe to finally respond to Mikhail Gorbachev’s plea to build a “common European house”? This is Europe’s call. America will want to be privy to the content of the discussions, but...

LONDON – Primitive man, like other animals, followed his instincts and killed his enemy as swiftly as the job could be done. Archaeologists who have dug up prehistoric skeletons have found no evidence of torture. Even human sacrifices were made without prolonged suffering. Torture, the systematized use of violence to inflict the maximum amount of pain in order to extract information, to break resistance or simply to intimidate, is a product of civilization. But to reintroduce it now would be one of the greatest setbacks for civilisation imaginable. Before the American authorities rush into it with the righteousness that comes from a conviction that they might be extracting information that could forestall a terrorist nuclear attack on Manhattan they would do well to ponder the course the debate on torture has taken over the three and a half millennia of Western civilization. It has been abolished for good reason. Both...

LONDON – At least ex-president Ronald Reagan is too ill to feel the pain. If Daniel Ortega Saavedra and his colleagues from the revolutionary Sandinista movement are swept back into power in the coming general election it won’t be Reagan’s feathers he ruffles. Still there are enough old Central American warriors in the top echelons of the Bush government- Elliott Abrams in the White House, for example- who perhaps will not be able to stop their pain reflexes working and once again there will be pressure for America to send in the CIA to head off an apparently unfriendly government. How will they put it? “If we will ignore the malignancy of Nicaragua it will spread and become a mortal threat to the entire New World” to quote President Reagan. Or again, “The Sandinistas are just two days drive from Harlingen, Texas”. Or, as his Secretary of Defence, Caspar Weinberger...

AS IF PEOPLES MATTEREDBy Zelim SkurbatyPublished by Kluwer Law InternationalMartinus Nijhoff PublishersThe Hague/Boston/London, 2000, xxvii + 498pp.The Raoul Wallenberg Institute Human Rights Library Vol. 4 Dr Skurbaty has written a very important book, probably destined to become something of a classic. He draws upon an enormous amount of philosophy, humanities and social science and footnotes everything, including his frequent use of Latin. He is a learned, not only educated, man, up to a level I have only experienced in academies in the old Soviet Union, leaning on the older Russian tradition now disappearing rapidly, yielding to business administration and computer science there as elsewhere. As a learned man Skurbaty belongs to an endangered species; his is not the kind of knowledge picked up by a voracious reader but knowledge with purpose. He mobilizes his intellectual apparatus to explore well-mined territory occupied by international law. Then there are the many philosophical...

Printed in SGI Quarterly in an edited a slightly shortened version.The Soka Gakkai International Magazine, Number 26, October 2001 Conflict-management and -prevention are international buzz-words of the post-Cold War era. Several hundred new so-called non-governmental organisations, NGOs, have emerged while older ones have re-oriented themselves toward conflict-“management.” Governments and inter-governmental organisations have been busy setting up units for conflict-prevention. Universities and other organisations have flooded the market with books and reports on how to handle what is often, with gross simplification, called domestic and ethnic conflicts. But: what have we learned about conflict these last ten years? Has all this lead to a more peaceful world? If not, what are the challenges ahead? In 1991 when TFF teams started doing fieldwork in all parts of former Yugoslavia, there were only a handful of similar independent, small groups around and only a tiny fraction of them with a scholarly basis. We were devoted...

LONDON – As the bombing progresses the crater America has dug for itself gets ever bigger. It is not so much that the bombing has stirred up a hornets’ nest in neighbouring Pakistan where militant fundamentalist allies of the Taliban and Qaida itch to get control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, it is that it has destabilised America’s carefully nurtured tight relationship with the main pillars of the Islamic world – Saudi Arabia with its massive oil wealth and holy sites, and Egypt, with its large population and inbred sense of historical destiny. If these long-lasting, diplomatically and militarily tight relationships become undone, then the whole script of the Middle East story will have to be re-written. There will be no reliable fixer of the world oil price; there will be no trustworthy Arab interlocutor with the Palestinians; Israel will be totally surrounded by enemies who have lost all patience with...

LONDON – When George Bush senior went to war over Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait he secured a mandate from the UN Security Council. Bill Clinton didn’t bother with such a resolution when he decided to bomb Belgrade, and now America, although easily winning a vote at the Security Council condemning the attacks on New York and Washington, has decided not to ask for a resolution authorising its bombing of Afghanistan. It suggests that America has not changed its spots. Commentators the world over have been hailing the end of American isolationism. But peel off the outer skin and the same old America of the last decade is there – doing what it thinks is right, the way it wants, interpreting the laws of the world community as it sees fit and then having the gall to say, which at least it didn’t before this crisis, “if you are not with...