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Since the beginning of the violence in Republic of Macedonia there has been an imposed “peace process” by the President of Republic of Macedonia and the “international community”. Now, when the framework Agreement for Solution of the Political and Security Crises is in its final draft, it is likely that the violence will not stop. The reasons are not solely the Agreement or the “players” who reached it. It has become obvious that the “President’s peace plan” and all the actions in the “peace process,” no matter if by the Government, the President or others, had been set on the wrong foot from the beginning. The aim of this article is to highlight some of the facts that speak about the premises and proposed solutions in the “peace process” rather than perpetuates the popular “picture” and the international image-making. That is why the concrete proposals of the peace plan are...

LONDON – Three years ago this August the Russian economy blew up, sank and seemed as unsalvagable as the Kursk submarine. Economists and money-men told us it would be the best part of a decade before Russia would find its feet, yet here we are with a vital, pruned down, but effervescent economy. This week the cautious Lex column of the Financial Times recommends it as a place to start to invest again: “Its twin surpluses (current account and budget) and lack of need to issue debt bolster resistance to Argentinean flu”. The fall was overrated. It was not quite so dramatic as the statistics then suggested. “Almost by 50%”, as was said at the time, was a wild overstatement reflecting the padding in the old Soviet economy, which three years ago was still producing what nobody wanted to buy. The subsequent decline in the production of what had become...

In 1907, King Nikola of Montenegro told the Danish journalist Franz von Jessen: “The Balkans is the small change that the great powers use in their transaction”. It has not become less true since then, with Macedonia as a good example. Macedonia – a victim of Western actions For almost ten years, Macedonia was the main unintended victim of a long series of Western actions. The (counterproductive) sanctions against Yugoslavia impoverished not only FRY but also its neighbours, Macedonia suffering worst. When Germany cheated Greece on their recognition deal from 1991, it was Macedonia rather than Germany who suffered. When NATO attacked FRY, Macedonia suffered in many ways. The destruction of the civilian infrastructure of FRY reduced that market even further. It also cut Macedonia off from the most economic export routes to Western Europe for years. Macedonia was squeezed to take in more than 300,000 refugees – while all...

At Diakonhjemmet International Centre, Oslo, Norway Peacebuilding, Conflict Transformation and Global Development, PCTGD 2001, is a five-days intensive training programme for advanced practitioners, aid and development workers, international diplomats, journalists and academics, held at DiS, in Oslo, Norway, from September 3rd – 7th, 2001. Peacebuilding, Conflict Transformation and Global Development (PCTGD 2001) is aimed to help participants strengthen their knowledge and understanding of the fields of peacebuilding, conflict transformation, and people-centred, participatory development, building concrete skills and conceptual resources vital to both the practitioner and to scholars. The programme is a joint initiative between TRANSCEND, A Peace and Development Network for Conflict Transformation by Peaceful Means; the Nordic Institute for Peace Research (NIFF); the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research (TFF); and Diakonhjemmet International Centre (DiS). The PCTGD 2001 training programme offers participants an intensive, five-days programme designed both to challenge and to stimulate, and is the first of...

LONDON – Proportional to its population more people were killed and tortured for their beliefs during the 1970s and 1980s in Guatemala than any other country in the world. Over the last decade it had seemed to many that the situation was slowly, but cumulatively improving. But the last twelve months or so it has started in some respects to worsen again. While the country still remains democratic if imperfectly so, while some judges are slowly gaining a measure of independence and confidence (but a few live in fear of their lives), while the army – the main perpetrator of human rights abuses – has been shrunk in size, and while the press, always prepared to criticize the government and the political order, becomes even stronger and more independent, it is clear that all is not well in Guatemala. Some would put it stronger than that and say that powerful...

Macedonia was the last miracle on the territory of former Yugoslavia. Paradoxically, today only a miracle can save Macedonia. Citizens of this country need a reminder, something that will help them keep sane and understand the current developments. The three conflict miracles A wise peace researcher has noted that there were three miracles throughout the decade of Yugoslav conflicts. The first one was the delayed outbreak of the conflict in Bosnia. In spite of all bad prognoses, the existence of the explosive ethnic mix and the spillover effect from the conflicts in Slovenia and Croatia as well as the catastrophic meddling by the “international community,” Bosnia slid into war only in spring 1992. The second miracle seemed to be the peaceful resistance led by Ibrahim Rugova in Kosovo. In spite of all preconditions for outbreak of hostilities (i.e. the repressive Milosevic regime and belligerent culture of his ethnic kin) Rugova...

From Surat towards the Sea Surat is located to the south of Ahmedabad. I arrive there by train and hire a car with a driver called Max, who is as black as an African. I have brought along Tom Weber’s book on the Salt Marsch, my little computer and my camera. This trip must be registered thoroughly. I shall drive the final 50 kilometres of Gandhi’s Salt March along small roads from one village to the next, and visit the temples, overnight accommodations and other places the 78 marchers passed 71 years ago. We soon leave “development” and “civilisation” behind us. India is its villages, not its cities! Here it is pastoral and peaceful; the air is fresh. I can both see and hear the birds. In the small village of Dharam, I find a simple house, now a library, which has a statue of Gandhi erected in front of it....

LONDON – This is not the last tango in Belfast, whatever the hype of Sinn Fein. Sinn Fein and the IRA have a marked ability to suggest, even promise, a course of action but then the actual delivery becomes a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t process. Still, the IRA proposal made earlier this week looks like the firmest and clearest promise yet to destroy their arm caches. And common sense suggests that in the end they will act to begin real disarmament before next week’s deadline, despite today’s qualms by the Unionists. Not only do the nationalists have the better part of the bargain in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, everyone knows that the arms cache question is more symbolism than substance. As was shown with the bomb that wounded eleven people in west London last week dissident factions of the IRA have no trouble in making deadly bombs out of fertiliser and...

The evidence amply confirms that the US and Britain –in complicity with their NATO partners– have been arming and equipping the terrorists, while paying lip service to constitutional reform in Macedonia. The “framework  document”, to be ratified by the leaders of Macedonia’s political parties has nothing to do with “peace”. It is an act of surrender by a sovereign country to the enemy, paving the way for the military occupation of Macedonia by NATO troops. The Western press points to the “mediation” of the US and the EU in what is largely portrayed as an “internal conflict”. Public opinion is led to believe that the Macedonian crisis pertains solely to the social, political and language rights of the ethnic Albanian minority and that the “international community” is committed to ending the violence “between government forces and ethnic Albanian insurgents” while assisting opposing sides to reach a solution. The truth is...

LONDON – It was a well-kept secret during the Clinton Administration that his one great foreign policy success was when he chose to engage rather than confront. It was the agreement negotiated with North Korea that led to this “rogue” country putting on ice its nuclear weapons programme in return for an American pledge to help it build a civilian nuclear power industry and, in the interim, to give it a reasonable supply of crude oil. The alternative, war, had been counselled against by the brass at the Pentagon because 1) of the uncertainty that the U.S. air force could locate and destroy the North’s nuclear weapons, if indeed it had them.2) if North Korea did have a nuclear weapon it could attack back with it and 3) of the high cost in dead American and South Korean soldiers if the North’s army did cross the border. In nearly every...

LONDON – The War Crimes Tribunal for ex-Yugoslavia that is preparing its case against former president Slobodan Milosevic is sitting on a time bomb, concocted by Milosevic himself. He has made it plain that he is going to conduct his defence on a political level – not by hiring a team of smart lawyers to challenge witnesses’ veracity over accounts that he ordered or sanctioned mass murder, rape and torture, but by mounting a solo political defence that will seek to turn the tables on his Western prosecutors. He will accuse them of bombing his country in defiance of the Charter of the United Nations. It is they, he will say, who need to defend themselves against legitimate charges of breaking international law. They bombed a sovereign foreign country without the approval of the Security Council, the supreme organ of the UN. It is going to be a difficult trial and...

Old school friends Sir Paul McCartney and respected international journalist Jonathan Power were reunited at their old school in Liverpool today to mark Amnesty International’s 40th anniversary. Jonathan Power’s highly-regarded book ‘Like Water On Stone – the Story of Amnesty International’ (Allen Lane) is his independent assessment of the history of the world’s largest voluntary human rights organisation. Paul and Jonathan were reunited at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, formerly the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys, where they cut a birthday cake for Amnesty International and made a toast to freedom with Portuguese wine. British lawyer Peter Benenson launched Amnesty International in 1961 after reading of two Portuguese students jailed simply for making a toast to freedom. Paul and Jonathan were in the same class in the middle to late 1950s. George Harrison was in the year below. “It was wonderful for Paul and I to meet up again at our old school and...