Forum

LONDON – Presumably President Vladimir Putin had prepared the disarmament statement he issued on Monday for delivery to the next president of the United States. In the event, he decided not to put it on ice but seized the moment, perhaps aware that for the first time in almost a decade the debate about nuclear disarmament in the American foreign policy community was beginning to open up after the Clinton-induced freeze ( or was it simply torpor?). It was Jonathan Schell’s long article two month’s ago in the establishment’s favourite foreign policy magazine, Foreign Affairs, that has brought a simmering debate to the boil. Schell did this once twenty years ago with an article in the New Yorker that was quoted the world over but, alas, to no lasting effect. On this occasion the magazine of publication is a better platform. Moreover the timing is perfect. For not only, as Putin...

worse or better after this election? LONDON – Will it be worse or better? Or is U.S. foreign policy so firmly set on a course that even with a new a president it can’t be changed significantly? Some foreign policy analysts are saying that under President Bill Clinton’s stewardship the U.S. became a “rogue state”, a term cooked up by the State Department to describe the likes of Iraq, Libya and North Korea. This sort of language is not just being deployed against America by those using it for effect, like those who described the impact of Western sanctions on innocent Iraqi children in a landmark article last year in Foreign Affairs magazine. It is being used by serious commentators such as Michael M. May who is quoted in a recent issue of Survival, the quarterly journal of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, as listing half a dozen damning developments...

Introduction Political acceptance is based on a successful struggle concerning the understanding of reality. In a conflict the issue is how the parties and the conflict are portrayed to the international public opinion. Eye witnesses on the spot, who are a danger to the credibility of the propagated image, represent a threat to an acceptance of the performed policy as justifiable. A strategic response is then, primarily, to prevent their presence and, secondarily, to limit it. Thirdly, their credibility ought to be undermined, if possible. The intention of this paper is to argue: – that Israel over the years has followed this strategy successfully in the Israeli – Palestinian conflict;– that this strategy is now in danger and may even be counterproductive, as the undertaken measures are meeting increasing criticism and resistance;– that this critique is formulated by the international community and particularly enacted by the civil society, consisting of...

AbstractIn this article, conflict resolution procedures focussing on reconciliation and forgiveness are analyzed in contrast to traditional court hearings. Forgivesness is seen as a process in the individual, which can either be facilitated or complicated but never demanded by the institution offering the framework. Especially three elements are identified as necessary in order to bring forgiveness about. These elements are knowledge of what happened, a willingness to forgive and restitution of dignity obtained by, among other things, the victim receiving some kind of reparation from the perpetrator. Examples are given from the author’s work in South Africa and former Yugoslavia. 1. Indledning. De senere år har studier af forsoning fået begyndende anerkendelse som akademisk disciplin. Flere steder i udlandet er etableret institutter til formålet, f.x International Forgiveness Institute ved Wisconsin University, USA og Department of Peace Studies, ved Bradford University, England. De teoretiske studier har nær sammenhæng med en voksende...

Democratic processes and conflict management Project outline November 2000 to May 2002 HISTORY OF THE PROJECT It was initiated in 1996 in connection with H.H. the Dalai Lama’s visit in Copenhagen. As a result Danish Centre for Conflict Resolution set up a study group to work for two years with Tibetan issues under the supervision of Lakha Rinpoche. After two facts finding missions to Dharamsala and interviews with a number of key persons from the Tibetan community in exile the purpose was stated. The project is a partnership project between the Tibetan community in exile and Danish Centre for Conflict Resolution. It is funded by Danish Centre for Conflict Resolution and DANIDA under the Danish Foreign Ministry. THE PURPOSE OF THE PROJECT The purpose was created in close collaboration between the partners: To sharpen the tools of democratic processes, co-operation and conflict management, in order to strengthen the Tibetan exile...

Washington’s new world order weapons have the ability to trigger climate change The important debate on global warming under UN auspices provides but a partial picture of climate change; in addition to the devastating impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on the ozone layer, the World’s climate can now be modified as part of a new generation of sophisticated “non-lethal weapons.” Both the Americans and the Russians have developed capabilities to manipulate the World’s climate. In the US, the technology is being perfected under the High-frequency Active Aural Research Program (HAARP) as part of the (“Star Wars”) Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI). Recent scientific evidence suggests that HAARP is fully operational and has the ability of potentially triggering floods, droughts, hurricanes and earthquakes. HAARP is a mass destructive weapons – not part of any negotiations From a military standpoint, HAARP is a weapon of mass destruction. Potentially, it constitutes an instrument of...

U.S. presidential election LONDON – When a Mexican man was executed in Texas in 1997 there was a bit of a row because not only had he signed his “confession” in English, a language he didn’t understand, he was denied access to the Mexican consul. After his execution Governor George W. Bush issued a statement that since Texas had not signed the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations it was not bound by it. But the United States of America had and it was legally binding on all states. Is this a forewarning of how a President Bush would treat the rest of the world- with, putting it at its mildest, nothing less than arrogant contempt? As for a President Al Gore he shows every sign of walking in Bill Clinton’s footsteps, with perhaps an even heavier tread. He seems, too often, to regard the Pentagon as the arm of government that...

LONDON – Richard Nixon, contending to be president in 1968, wrote a sensational article in the magazine Foreign Affairs in which he anticipiated a more conciliatory U.S. policy towards China. Soon after Nixon’s election, the U.S. moved to recognise communist China, which it had refused to do for twenty two years , and ejected Taiwan from the Chinese seat at the UN. During his election campaign Jimmy Carter promised he wouldn’t “ass-kiss” the Chinese, but like Nixon he ended up turning his back on China’s human rights dissidents, intent on concluding the formal normalization of relations with China. When Bill Clinton campaigned for the presidency against George Bush Senior he charged that Bush was soft on China- Bush had been quick after the Tiananmen Square masacre to send to Beijing his National Security Advisor to reassure the Chinese leadership of Washington’s solid, enduring relationship. Clinton promised if elected that the age...

The need for a just peace Anger and frustration should be no surprise Discussions and analysis of recent events in Israel/Palestine by peace workers, journalists, human rights activists, and others have been cause for both encouragement, and a great deal of concern. The situation in Israel-Palestine and throughout the entire Middle East today is very alarming, but it is in no way surprising. Anger and frustration at one of the most oppressive and exploitative structures of violence in the world is exploding. A system which Nelson Mandela once referred to as “worse than apartheid” is itself being met with counter-violence in the form of stone-throwing and protest. The cycle of violence, recriminations, fear and anger on all sides is growing, and, given the complete absence of any real attempts at peace on the parts of the leadership on both sides, can be expected to continue. Any ‘peace’ which would be...

1. The “Normalization” of Northern Ireland Politics There is (without doubt) a peace process going on in Northern Ireland. One of the most recent surveys has shown how these events are off-set by “persistent insecurities” about the return to violence./1/ However, a basic aspect of this on-going “peace process” is that the key issue underlying the conflict, the advocacy of “republic” or “union”, will become less and less salient as time passes on. But of the ten parties currently represented at the Belfast Assembly (based in the old Parliament buildings of Stormont) at least seven are clearly linked to that issue, at least in the name, and the name will always be indicative of some of the discourse. One might hope that, in time, party leaders might respond with imagination to new political discourses, perhaps even so as to develop a new variety of politics in Northern Ireland where the...

LONDON – It would be perhaps expecting too much for the world to learn one thing from the Yugoslavian imbroglio – that its ethnic wars were a figment of the political imagination. The Balkans is not, as Robert Kaplan famously put it, ” a region of pure memory” where “each individual sensation and memory affects the grand movement of clashing peoples” and where the processes of history were “kept on hold” by communism for forty-five years, “thereby creating a multiplier effect for violence.” If ethnic war is when “ancient hatreds” lead one ethnic group to become the ardent, murderous and dedicated opponent of everyone in another group this was not it. It was,as professor John Mueller of Ohio State University has written in the current issue of “International Security”, a situation in which “a mass of essentially mild, ordinary people unwillingly and in considerable bewilderment came under the vicious and arbitary...

LONDON – Poets as diverse as William Blake and Yehuda Amichai have sung the praises of the heavenly Jerusalem, a land without strife or rancour, war or bitterness, envy, acquisitiveness or hatred. Mankind now has the historic opportunity to take a giant step towards making the present day Jerusalem acquire, at least in some of its aspects, the earthly prototype of the heavenly Jerusalem. For once we can see whether the work of imams, rabbis and priests has born fruit. The secular politicians may be the ones doing the negotiations and ordering the compromises but it is the teachers of the three great deistic religions who have been exerting their mandate to teach compassion, goodness, tolerance and brotherhood. These traits of virtue, as common to them all as is their God, now will be tested in the hottest of fires. Have their peoples imbibed the true message of their faiths? Or...