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LONDON – In Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Hound of the Baskervilles”, Sherlock Holmes lectures Watson on the unlikely subject of free trade. Says Holmes: “Capital article this on free trade. Permit me to give you an extract from The Times. ‘You may be cajoled into imagining that your own special trade or your own industry will be encouraged by a protective tariff, but it stands to reason that such legislation must in the long run keep wealth away from the country and lower the general conditions of life in this island.'” “What do you think of that, Watson?” cries Holmes in high glee, rubbing his hands together with satisfaction. That was written in 1901. And in 2006 we are still arguing the toss. And at the heart of the argument is how to deal with the fast growth of imports from the low cost, developing world. This week is showdown...

BRUSSELS – An old saying in Montenegro used to say “Crna Gora i Srbija – to je jedna familija” (“Montenegro and Serbia – one family”). Today, pro-independence graffiti in Montenegro read “Crna i Gora i Baskija – to je jedna familija” (“Montenegro and the Basque Country – one family”). With Montenegro independent, the process of the Europe’s balkanization of the Balkans will have scored one more point. Some say it also paved a chance for many independence-hopefuls around Europe, be it in Catalonia, the Basque Country or Scotland, which have sent their observer missions to Podgorica to monitor the mechanics of intra-state divorce. It might be contrary to the logic of European integration and the equation mark between the European Union and “borderless Europe”, but it is real and it is happening in 2006, just a few weeks before the June summit on “the future of Europe”. As far as...

* This article has been shortened and edited by the editor of this hompage  SKOPJE, MACEDONIA – You may well have heard the old children’s shaggy dog story about Tomboy, a nickname given to a girl because she behaves like a boy. It came to my mind when I returned from what was supposed to be an important conference organized by the Finish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in collaboration with the prestigious London School of Economics, LSE. Mars, Venus and chameleons I also came to think of that inspirational analysis of Robert Kagan about Mars (USA) and Venus (EU) published in 2002. It seems, however, that the equation between Venus and EU becomes more and more problematic due to the rapidly ageing EU Lady. One might expect her to be armed with the charm and wisdom of her age, but if you want my opinion about what can we expect...

LONDON – Whenever I introduced Munir Khan to a friend I would say light-heartedly “and this is the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb” just to enjoy the pleasure of watching the reaction. Kahn himself would give a self-depreciatory smile. As Hans Blix, the former director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the world’s nuclear policeman, put it to me, Khan was “a cheerful soul”. The world has been told over and over again that the father of the Pakistani bomb was A.Q. Khan, the metallurgist, who in fact ran only one part of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission whose chairman was Munir Khan. More correctly we have recently been told that Qadeer Khan secretly set up an international network to supply the likes of North Korea, Libya and Iran with blueprints and materials for the manufacture of their own nuclear weapons. This was done for his private profit. Kahn and...

1. Diagnosis There are obvious similarities to USA/UK vs Iraq, but possibly less obvious that UK will follow suit or even play a major role (“The Downing Street Memorandum”) this time. The goals of the USA seem to be diverse, like these nine: – regime change, like in 1953, possibly also to reinstate the Shah family, again assuming Iranians will be receptive; – Middle East political control, fearing that control is slipping from USA-Israel to Iran-Hamas and shia/radical Islam; – revenge for the 52 hostages-444 days humiliation; – eliminating any Iranian threat to the US/UK Iraq construction; – eliminating any Iranian threat to Israel, nuclear or not, given the statements by president Ahmadinejad; – securing Iranian oil flow at affordable prices; – protecting the use of dollars against euros for oil trade; – expanding further the military bases encircling Russia-China; – eliminating any Iranian nuclear weapon capability. The last goal...

LONDON – On September 17th 2002, six days after the planes destroyed the World Trade Center, George W. Bush declared he was going to hunt down Osama bin Laden. “There’s an old poster out West, I recall, that said, ‘Wanted, Dead or Alive’.” Now we learn, nearly four years’ later, that Bush’s wife Laura, had privately admonished him for talking like a gun-slinger – not very sophisticated and presidential seems to have been the gist of her remarks. Yet, as you can tell a tiger by its stripes, you can tell a person by the way they talk, especially when they are charged up. This is a president who acts on the baser instincts that dominate his personality. Means and ends do not cohere in Bush, as Martin Luther King might have said. There are no regrets about suspending perhaps the oldest of all codified human rights – habeas corpus....

LONDON – One hundred black men crammed together in a small boat crossing a patch of the wild Atlantic. The Spanish know how many arrive, but have no idea how many are lost at sea. No one mentions, either African or Spaniard, that this island is where Thor Heyerdahl of Kon Tiki fame made his home until he died two years ago. The panicky feeling now dominating the airwaves and newsprint leaves no time for either irony or imagination. In the local press here it’s a front-page story every day. The president of the local Tenerife government has written to all the media asking them “to tone down” their coverage as it is undermining the tourist industry, the driving force in the local economy. Yet, as Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero told parliament last week, the number of illegal immigrants arriving in Spain has been less over the last...

LONDON – Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki the presumption has been that war can get no worse. The world has been spared a second nuclear war, so this presumption has a measure of truth. But the planning for major war has grown more alarming in all manner of ways – proliferation certainly but, not least, in the relatively recent statements of the U.S., Russia, the UK and France who, signalling a momentous shift in military doctrine, say that they are prepared to use their nuclear weapons for war fighting and not just for deterrence, as during the Cold War. When Hans Blix was the UN inspector charged with investigating whether Iraq still possessed weapons of mass destruction he once said that anyone can hang out a sign “beware of the dog”, but it doesn’t mean they have a dog. In Saddam Hussein’s case this turned out to be correct. These days...

LONDON – There was a time, not that long ago, when African leaders insisted that it was politically incorrect to discuss tribalism. Tribalism was the face of old Africa that the modernizers, inheriting their domains from the departing colonialists, refused to accept. Forty years later, the independence movement has more than come of age and today’s African leaders have learnt to be not so glib. Sudan is the latest turn of the screw that started with Katanga and Biafra and went on to Angola, Rwanda and Burundi with passing stops in Zimbabwe, Uganda and Senegal. One hundred years of colonialism (less in many countries) and the creation later of four dozen new national states, each insisting on the sanctity of colonial boundaries as a sensible way of avoiding future inter state conflicts, could not blot out 800 natural tribal boundaries. On Africa’s left it has been a common jibe that...

Peace Antenna interview with Dr. Evgenyi Shirokov, Head of Belarusian Division of the International Academy of Ecology, Head of Belarusian HABITAT Center.* The Belarusian Division of the International Academy of Ecology (IAE) is a non-governmental organization, which was founded in 1992 by Belarusian scientists concerned about environmental sustainability. The Belarusian Division of the IAE currently has 68 members. It aims to support sustainable development in Belarus through the implementation of various ecological, anti-nuclear and cultural projects. Dr. Evgenyi Shirokov is the head of the Belarusian Division of the International Academy of Ecology and also the head of the Belarusian HABITAT Centre. He has written about straw-bale houses here. The United Nations Human Settlements Programme, UN-HABITAT, is the United Nations agency for human settlements. It is mandated by the UN General Assembly to promote socially and environmentally sustainable towns and cities with the goal of providing adequate shelter for all (1). Urbanization:...

LONDON – The secret key to driving down the rates of poverty and population growth is female. To be absolutely precise, it is poor women living in the Third World’s rural backwaters, where 75% of the world’s hungry scrape a living. Everything else is a bit of a sideshow. The last few years the number of rural women living in poverty has gone up in both India and China, although during the latter half of the 1990s the figures were falling. In Africa, although the numbers haven’t gone up, the fall in numbers is very modest. Only in Latin America and the Caribbean has there been some marked improvement. Too rapid population growth is one part of the problem, but even where it is slowing – as in China- there has been a sharp jump in the number of female-headed households. Changes in traditional values, the emigration of men to...

LONDON – Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Libya. All (until the fall of Saddam Hussein) under pretty evil leadership. All the same, and yet very different. All have or had the urge to develop nuclear weapons. The three first were labelled early on in his presidency the “Axis of evil” by George W. Bush. Yet Libya was probably the worst and is now the best. Indeed, because the “axis of evil” speech appeared to demand “regime change” it is probable that omitting Libya from that speech was an important factor in the long effort to persuade Libya to drop its guard, to open up its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons factories for American and British inspectors to roam over and dismantle at will, and to give up its sponsorship of international terrorism, at which it far outshone all the others. For those who worry about Iran’s propensity for evil deeds today...