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Bertrand Russell’s “Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare” was first published in 1959, in an effort “to prevent the catastrophe which would result from a large scale H-bomb war”. Nuclear confrontation had already stimulated a race towards ever deadlier weapons, and a new and more precarious balance of power. Public concern was growing. Russell’s views changed in the years following Hiroshima, and were to change again, as the arms race soared away into hitherto unimagined destructive capacities. Inevitably, Russell’s writing about the bomb was dominated by the fact of the Cold War. Fear of Communism ranged the United States and its European allies into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. A Eastern alliance, the Warsaw Treaty Organisation, emerged shortly afterwards. Fear of Communism did not only stimulate military co-ordination: for a time, it also promoted economic co-operation, and the ascendancy of what is now thought of as the Keynesian world order. These were...

at Moscow Summit LONDON – If President Bill Clinton had all his wits about him he would challenge the toughest hard-liners on the Republican right to posit a plausible scenario for modern day Russia wanting to go to war with the West. Can anyone really make a case that if the U.S. dropped its guard- and its nuclear allies Britain and France did too – that Russia would move into western Europe and bomb America’s industrial heart-lands? It is simply intellectually outrageous, which is why no one spells it out. Even Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft and Condoleezza Rice choose to speak in more general, vague, even elliptical terms, the content of which is more insinuation and prejudice than rational argument. As for General Colin Powell, the former chief of staff of the U.S. armed forces, the black man who could have been president instead of Clinton almost for the asking, and...

LONDON- When Kofi Annan, the UN’s Ghanaian Secretary-General, visited Rwanda in May, 1998 he ended up being pilloried in an aggressive press conference for presiding over the UN’s “hands off” policy during the genocide, of the Tutsis by the Hutus four years previously. Journalists were quoting from Philip Gourevitch’s shocking then just-published, book, “We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families”. In it he charged that the UN had ignored a cable from its local commander warning of the impending genocide. As William Shawcross tells it in his important new book on the UN, “Deliver Us From Evil”, “His voice almost cracking, Annan ended by saying that ‘too much was made of one cable and that if INFORMATION was indeed the only problem then peacekeeping would be much easier. We would not be having problems in Kosovo because everybody KNOWS. We would not have had...

MADRID- Two elections will shortly take place in Latin America that could, it is being said, make a trend or break a trend. This, of course, depends on what you think the trend is. If you believe that the trend is towards a firming of democracy then a truly open contest in the election scheduled in Mexico for July 2nd, which would be an historic first, together with the defeat of the autocratic quasi democrat, Alberto Fujimori, in Peru on May 28th would confirm your opinion. But if you believe that the trend has been on the ebb for some time with the attempted coups in Bolivia and Paraguay and the rise of elected autocrats in Venezuela and Peru, then a re-elected Fujimori and the victory of the governing party in Mexico will confirm your pessimistic leanings. The truth perhaps is somewhere in between. The post-Caudillo democratic movement, which started life...

The moral cost of the Nato war on Yugoslavia is only beginning to become plain. The material costs were far from negligible, and have revealed considerable weaknesses in the military preparedness of most Alliance members. More than one thousand aircraft flew more than 38,000 sorties, and cost dozens of billions of dollars. Twenty-eight countries have subsequently deployed 38,000 peace keepers, many of who will be needed to stay in place indefinitely in conditions which are highly insecure. Endemic ethnic violence rages through Kosovo, and even the most robust optimism blenches in the face of such ungovernable turbulence. Murders are commonplace. Former guerrillas, once subject at least to token disarmament, are now commonly armed again. Nato forces suffer continual attacks, sometimes from minority Serbs and at other times by majority Albanians. The real Government of Kosovo is frequently said to be in the hands of the Kosovo Liberation Army, but its...

At a meeting in the European Parliament on 11/12 May 2000 to consider the proposal for a European Conference on Peace and Human Rights, the following appeal was agreed. After the war in Yugoslavia, and the sidelining of the United Nations, there has been a marked deterioration in international relations. This adverse development has not been offset by gains in human rights, either in the Balkans or further afield. To the contrary, ethnic divisions have been intensified, crime and lawless behaviour have increased, and people have fewer rights, and less control over the course of their lives, than ever before. At the same time, new threats have widened. In particular, the threat to peace is now fearfully increased by nuclear doctrines of first use. This long-held and dangerous commitment in the USA and Nato has been matched by the Putin Doctrine in Russia, ratified on 21st April 2000. Henceforward, the...

LONDON – The private schools of Britain, the Etons, Harrows, Winchesters et al produce the Tutsis of my land. I grew up as a rank and file Hutu, part of the majority, graduating from the city high school of Liverpool- along with my classmate, Paul McCartney- and then on to the red brick university of Manchester. The Tutus in large numbers colonized Oxford and Cambridge- and still do despite a generation of educational reforms- taking a good half of the places. All my journalistic life I’ve struggled against the Tutsi. They take most of the top jobs in the BBC and the classier papers. If it hadn’t been for the American paper in Europe, the International Herald Tribune, I might never have made it. Yet not for one moment did I consider rallying my putative majority to fight the Tutsis. Years of conditioning bred me to accept the virtues of a...

It is inevitable not to react to Pressinfo # 90 “Lift the Sanctions and Bring More Aid to Yugoslavia”. To convey images with the facts and descriptions offered by TFFs conflict-mitigation team members Soren Sommelius and Jan Oberg should be the duty of responsible journalism, but it is good not to wait for that to happen and take responsible initiative. The demolition of the middle-class seems to be the priority of the global neoliberal policies that have been adopted by most developing countries and make rich elites richer and poor masses poorer. The examples are manifold. I can think of Mexico for instance, where according to Carlos Fuentes 40 million live in poverty, and 17 million in extreme poverty. Another Mexican, Carlos Slim, is one of the richest men in the world who among many businesses owns Mexico’s telephone company, Telmex. He has benefited from the privatization policies of a...

An investigation of the role of poverty as a causal factor in war requires re-examination of three generally accepted propositions. The first speaks directly to the issue at hand; the others do so only indirectly, but are also pertinent. 1. Poverty alone, or even in conjunction with other alienating factors (ie ethnic or religious discrimination), is insufficient to spark revolt. 2. The late 1990s explosion of intra-state violent conflicts was due to the end of the Cold War (which removed the pressure cooker lid), and/or the implosion of the Soviet Union. 3. Democracies do not go to war against each other. Challenging conventional propositions There were, in fact, historic exceptions to all these ‘rules’. Now, there is an argument to be made that the exception, at least to the core, first proposition, is becoming the norm. And that this phenomenon, in turn, may be ascribed to the communications/ information revolution...

Världspolitikens Dagsfrågor 12/1999, Utrikespolitiska Institutet, Stockholm Efter nära två år av förhandlingar kunde på långfredagen 1998 sk Belfast-avtalet undertecknas. Avtalet lade grunden för en återgång till självstyre för Nordirland. För första gången någonsin skulle katoliker och protestanter gemensamt dela det politiska ansvaret för provinsen och dess relationer till grannen i söder, Republiken Irland. Det skulle dock dröja ända till november 1999 innan de institutioner som enligt avtalet skulle etableras var på plats; en provinsregering i Belfast, ett ministerråd för samarbete mellan Belfast och Dublin (North/South Ministerial Council) och ett gemensamt forum för de brittiska öarna (British-Irish Council). I februari 2000 beslutade den brittiska Nordirlands-ministern att efter endast nio veckor suspendera självstyret som fram tills dess fungerat över förväntan. Det största protestantiska partiet väntades fatta beslut om att dra sig ur provinsregeringen som därmed skulle falla. Orsaken var att de paramilitära grupper som under ett kvartsekel hållit Nordirlands befolkning i ett...

LONDON – Can it go on? Why should it go on? And, anyway, what real long run benefits does it bring? These are the still unanswered questions that fifty years of massive immigration into Europe pose. The last ten years the questioning has been relatively muted. The European economies under-performed and European governments finally, if belatedly, put into place common immigration policies that weakened a flow that was diminished anyway by the slackening of demand. But the big questions from the 1960s and 70s are back with a vengeance. Economic activity is picking up fast and some governments, such as the Spanish, are letting it be known they are more in favour of renewed immigration. The whole 60’s belief system is being dusted off: that immigration oils the cogs and wheels of the economy, especially the bit down below decks where the heavy lifting is done. Moreover, it was said, as...

LONDON – We live in a time of one of the world’s most profoundest paradoxes- whilst warfare for eight consecutive years has been on a steady downward decrease, individual violence is soaring. Of course, one dramatic event, say nuclear war between India and Pakistan, would make nonsense of the paradox in an instance. Still, for the moment it holds and, given the factors at play, is quite likely to sharpen. I was provoked into this observation by reading an essay in the current issue of Foreign Policy by two researchers at the Inter-American Development bank, Mayra Buvinic and Andrew Morrison. They show that homicide rates around the world (the most reliable measure of individual violence) increased by more than 50% between 1980-84 and 1990-94. In the industrialized world the increase was 15%. It was up by 80% in Latin America and 112% in the Arab world. However both Asia and the...