Forum

LONDON– If there had been no president Suharto there would have been no invasion and annexation of East Timor. Now he’s deposed, one of the world’s dwindling number of territorial injustices can be remedied in a week-end’s negociations–the leadership of East Timor is ready and waiting. If President B.J. Habibie, Suharto’s step-in, won’t do it then a newly elected president in the elections now being pushed for early next year will have to, if a new war is to be avoided. Indonesia invaded East Timor, a Portuguese colony in the Indonesian archipelago in December, 1975. It was a massive assault, involving bombers, paratroopers and marines. The army wrecked havoc; there were indiscriminate killings and rape. Later, the Indonesian vice-governor admitted that 60,000 Timorese had been killed–more than a tenth of the population. For too long the sounds of protest have been next to inaudible. But, gradually, the penny has dropped as...

LONDON– The only surprise is why Bill Clinton was surprised. People, even non-expert journalists like myself have seen the Indo/Pakistani bombs coming for a long time. (see columns of April 8th and April 15th). John Kennedy would not be surprised. He foresaw 20 to 30 nuclear bomb powers by the year 2000. Nevertheless, it will go down as one of the great shocks of the twentieth century. It is going to consume the minds and the political energies of the best and the brightest of the twentyfirst century how to avoid a cataclysmic nuclear war between these two antagonistic neighbours who rub elbow to elbow 365 days a year in one of the most densely populated parts of the world and how to avoid a struggle for power and hegemony between the two giants that are going to dominate the world in the future, India and China. Clinton, to my knowledge,...

MADRID–The American columnist and political philosopher Walter Lippmann once remarked that, in politics, there can be no concluding chapter because there is always more future out in front than recorded history behind. At no point is there a pause when all problems, upheavals and conflicts are solved and every good idea finds its proper place. In Asia, with the overthrow of Suharto and the detonation of the Indian H-bomb we have just had another jolting reminder of the truth of this observation. At the same time, barely noticed, in Latin America there is another event afoot that reaffirms the other side of political life, the often successful quest for a more ordered, self-disciplined and farsighted world, that certainly India and Pakistan could benefit from in their own fraught relationship over Kashmir and Indonesia likewise with its continued occupation of East Timor. Very soon one of the world’s last remaining inter-state...

LONDON–Almost a year after the British left Hong Kong this self-contained part of China– the Special Administrative Region to be precise–goes to the polls. Against the din of India’s nuclear explosion, the slow, but probably sure, toppling of Sukarno in Indonesia and the economic crisis in east Asia (which is now spilling over into Hong Kong) the question of how much democracy is going to be allowed to be practised in Hong Kong seems to be on everyone’s back-burner. Even the people of Hong Kong, who not that long ago came out on the streets en masse (one million out of a population of six million) to protest the killings in Tiananman Square, seem subdued- -or resigned. Perhaps this is a good sign. The transition from British to Chinese rule has gone not with a bang but a whimper in large measure because Beijing has been extraordinarily sensitive about not...

LONDON–The centre cannot hold–that has been the received wisdom since in 1921 the protestant bulwark of Northern Ireland was detached from the rest of this catholic- dominated, Irish island and incorporated into the United Kingdom. Now the historic peace agreement between the mainstream protestant unionists and Sinn Fein, the political front of the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, will be put to the test in next week s referendum. It is not a simple choice between the ballot or the bullet, for Sinn Fein has long had a dual Armalite and ballot box strategy. Even now the decommissioning of the IRA’s formidable arsenal has been allowed a two year grace period, enough for the IRA to see if it gets anything out of this deal. But the accord has put the ballot box on a higher pedestal than the bullet and reverses a long-standing, almost sacred, position of Sinn Fein/IRA...

LONDON–“Some frontiers are only in the imagination” wrote Jan Morris in her “Fifty Years of Europe”. Prince Metternich used to say the frontier of Asia was at the Landstrasse, the street which ran towards Hungary away from Vienna’s city walls. It is also said that Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of West Germany after World War 2, held similar feelings about Prussia. He was a Rhinelander, and whenever his train crossed the Elbe, on its way eastward to Berlin, he too would groan, “Hier beginnt Asia”, and pull the blinds down. After last week-end’s momentous event, the launching of the single currency, the Europeans now have to consider where they go next. Do they in fact need frontiers within Europe any more? If they can come this far, shouldn’t they let their imaginations work further and complete the journey to a United States of Europe? By any measure of history...

LONDON–If Saddam Hussein bothered to read Paul McCartney’s hand-written eulogy after the death of his wife, Linda, we can be sure that he laughed/simply didn’t understand the sentiment/uttered an expletive–or all three. The partnership of Paul and Linda symbolised not just the rewards of marital harmony but a change deep in the soul of western culture. William Rees-Mogg, a former editor of the conservative London Times, described it approvingly in his recent column as a “reaction against the world of masculine discipline, of khaki and rifles, the world culture in the first half of the century, in the direction of peace and love.” Hence, it is no surprise that when today’s West, with leaders at its helm who matured in the sixties and seventies, come up against the machismo of Saddam Hussein there is an enormous gulf of understanding that diplomacy finds hard to bridge and that, perversely, creates a...

LONDON– Not much in the dark arts of international relations is purposely kept more opaque than the Missile Technology Control Regime. Although a western creation, founded by the U.S., Canada, France, Britain and Germany in 1987, one might conclude from its byzantine penchant for secrecy it was designed by Russia which signed up only in 1995 or even by Turkey which signed last year. Its purpose is to limit the diffusion of the know-how for building rockets that can deliver nuclear weapons. Anyone these days can build a nuclear weapon, but delivering it by long-range missile remains an art mastered by a restricted inner circle. Thanks to a small group of American and Russian scholars working under the auspices of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, but sheltering under the dispensation granted by the comradeship of the Russian-American space cooperation effort, we have been given a dispassionate, but quite frightening,...

LONDON– The unanswered question for the new government in India: is the country now going to come out of the closet and declare itself an armed nuclear power, ready and prepared if necessary to strike a mortal blow at its adversaries? Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee said shortly after the election that the government has resolved to “re-evaluate the country’s nuclear policy and exercise the option to induct nuclear weapons”. Yet the delicate balancing act of his coalition government is clearly a brake on what his Hindu-nationalist Bharitiya Janata Party would do if left to its own devices. But how much of a brake remains unclear. If the government does go ahead then the world before very long should expect to see a series of nuclear tests and within a year the commissioning of around a 100 aircraft to carry nuclear weapons and a step up in the pace of an...

LONDON–When Martin Luther King died 30 years ago this weekend the outlook for America’s race relations looked on the surface unredeemable: a future of more urban riots, further polarisation of the races, white reaction feeding black reaction in ever ascending spirals of bitterness and hate. There seemed to be little on the horizon to give ground for hope. The south was fighting what appeared at the time to be a successful rearguard action against the 1954 Supreme Court decision to desegregate schools and the 1964 Civil Rights Act that outlawed discrimination in public places. The north was becoming increasingly segregated. The electoral drift was towards the right, soon to bring to power Richard Nixon and the end to any thought of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society”. Black revolutionary militancy was becoming more bold and confident. Yet within only three years the picture had changed dramatically. Polarisation didn’t worsen. Blacks en masse...

LONDON– Two and a half years ago France’s minister for overseas development, Jacques Godfrain, startled an international conference suggesting that “Africa is on the way to becoming the tiger of the twentyfirst century–following the pattern of the tiger economies of east Asia 30 years ago”. Few people predicted their fabulous growth rates, he observed, “Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were at war. Malaysia and Cambodia were battling communist insurrection. South Korea was still emerging from a debilitating war…but look what they achieved and now it is going to be the same story with Africa.” At the time Mr Godfrain was widely disparaged. Today, it seems, half the world is jumping on the African bandwagon. What was yesterday’s disaster continent is tomorrow’s tropical repository of unrealized, latent possibilities. President Bill Clinton may have his own reasons for taking such a long trip to Africa but his troubles at home rebound to Africa’s advantage....

LONDON–All the dons sitting around the tea table with China’s most famous dissident, Wei Jingsheng, seemed decidedly nervous and unusually quiet by the everyday standards of Britain’s most revered university. It took me a few minutes to figure out why and then I guessed if your brain is telling you that this may be the Nelson Mandela of China, future ruler of one third of the world, then a little awe and a roomful of silence are to be expected.After the tea there was the speech to students. Direct, eloquent, his 18 years in jail on a wind-swept, bitterly cold, 10,000 feet high plateau, behind him, he tore into the Chinese communist regime and to the western governments who give it so much comfort and assistance. With almost serene self-confidence he appeared to predict that his cause will triumph sooner rather than later–“every ordinary Chinese now recognises the need for...