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VIENNA, Austria–Perhaps the day will dawn when an American president gets his lines wrong and says, “We have no quarrel with the government of x, only with the people.” Of course, a big part of the trouble with ex-Yugoslavia is its unscrupulous leadership. But at least an equal part is due to the ethnic immaturity of its people. Ethnic conflict does not, it seems, require great difference or great leaders; small will do in both cases. The conflict began with a clash between Serbia and Croatia, nations with only the smallest difference in geneology, with practically a common language and with much intermarriage. Nevertheless, guilty as the rank and file citizens of ex-Yugoslavia are, without the leaders they have the wars would never have been so well organized or so brutally focussed, nor of such genocidal proportions. Mass killings on this scale, whether it be in ex-Yugoslavia or Rwanda or,...

NEW YORK–With righteous Italian anger of the radical variety, Emma Bonino, the European Union’s commissioner for humanitarian aid, has turned on the institution she has long been a passionate supporter of. The UN, she said last week, faces “being tarnished for ever by shame” for its role in the Congo. “The saga of the commission of inquiry into the massacres has surpassed the degree of ridicule it has already earned.” Mrs. Bonino, who directs the world’s biggest budget for humanitarian aid, had better be listened to, for knowing Mrs. Bonino, I can say this, “there’s no fury like this woman scorned.” More to the point, she is right. We need to know what is going through the minds of the (relatively) new UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan and the (brand) new High Commissioner for Human Rights, the former president of Ireland, Mary Robinson. How could the UN just decide to buckle...

VIENNA, Austria–The fuss over Iran–the major investment by the French oil company, Total, and the alleged indirect support of Russia for Iran’s nuclear bomb program–is taking our eyes off the real ball. It was the same three years ago when CIA leaks about North Korea’s bomb ambitions were part of an effort to steamroller President Bill Clinton into ordering the bombing of North Korea’s nuclear installations. The real issue in terms of imminent danger both then and now is the Russian mafia. “The director of the FBI, Louis Freeh, has warned that Russian organized crime networks pose a menace to U.S. national security and has asserted that there is now greater danger of a nuclear attack by some outlaw group than there was by the Soviet Union during the Cold War,” reported the Washington Post last week. In conversation, Munir Ahmed Khan, the former chairman of the world’s nuclear watchdog...

By JONATHAN POWER Washington – DC — Rarely has the U.S.-when out in the countryside – so lost sight of the wood for the trees. Its decision to go into bat the World Trade Organization to deprive the small Caribbean banana producers of their protected European market is one it will come to rue. In the exaggerated name of free trade, but choosing the easiest and most vulnerable of targets, it is setting itself up for social and economic decline and thus chaos in its own back yard. Or, if that is to be averted, the development of cocoa as a substitute crop rather nearer home than Peru’s Rio Huallica valley. Officials in the European Union, conceding defeat last week in the so-called banana war, have been scratching their heads as to why Washington has decided to use a blunderbuss to kill a fly. Surely it cannot be so crude as...

GENEVA Switzerland–The U.S. president, Bill Clinton and British prime minister, Tony Blair are a source of danger for similar reasons. They are riding high. They look good. They smile a lot and they owe much of their success to the remarkably prolonged era of economic expansion and renewed sense of prosperity they preside over. And, since they dominate the ubiquitous anglo-saxon press, they are spreading their globalizationmessage with enormous effect. But they mislead us into a state-of-unaware-being. A new United Nations report, published by its Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), makes plain the real situation. The world economy is growing slowly. World output growth has averaged only 2% this decade of liberalization, compared to the near 3% of the turbulent years of the 1980s. If the razzmatazz about globalization is put to one side and the underlying trends more soberly analyzed we will observe that there is also another...

GENEVA, Switzerland–In Shakespeare’s time–and even later–the blood feud now proclaimed by Princess Diana’s brother, Charles, would have been settled on the battlefield, a resounding re-match of Plantagenet versus York. It was Erasmus, writing in the early sixteenth century, who said that wars occurred because they were a way of life among a militarized, aristocratic, ruling class. Humanity has moved on since then and today the alleged dishonoring of the house of Spencer by the house of Windsor will be fought in the newspapers and on television, above all in the court of mass public opinion. The British, one of the most warlike of nations, as Margaret Thatcher showed not so long ago with her war against Argentina over the inconsequential Falklands Islands–two bald men fighting over a comb, as one wag at the time put it–are now undergoing a discernable sea-change in their attitudes. Martial virtues are being sublimated. Even...

LONDON– Stripping off all the layers–the drunkenness of the driver, the tortured ambiguity towards the press of the victim–the death of Diana still deeply challenges those in the media courageous enough to face up to the moral and philosophical dilemma with the same scrupulousness and sanity that Einstein applied to the invitation to participate in the Manhattan project. You can say “no.” The human conscience is the most supreme and sublime element in creation. It embraces and embodies the impulses of both the animal and the divine. This is the switching mechanism that determines whether the individual will advance towards civilization or regress towards barbarism. It is the spring, the tension, that everyone lives with every day, in small things and in big. Ideology that allows the individual conscience to be subsumed into a greater collective cause simplifies the individual’s choices, hence its attractiveness, particularly in a time of turmoil, ultra...

LONDON– Short two and a half years ago, the then foreign minister of Israel, Shimon Peres, observed, “I don’t think we have in the Middle East a process of peace. We have a war for peace, because it calls unfortunately for victims and casualties.” Probably, not even in the most pessimistic moments of this melancholic man, did he himself forsee that soon after he spoke he’d witness the triple whammy of the murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the subsequent victory at the polls of Likud’s party Binyamin Netanyshu and the effective pacing of negotiations under the Oslo accords by terrorist elements on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides. While Mr. Netanyshu may not have wanted the tide of events to move in his direction by such a route he and his Likud philosophy is the clear beneficiary. The political cul de sac that Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians now find...

LONDON– Using aid as a political weapon goes in phases and fashions, fits and starts, lulls and storms. The only consistent factor is that invariably it is the U.S. that sets the tone. Other Western and Middle Eastern aid givers follow in a straggle. Sometimes they do, more often they don’t, as Japan has just made plain over Cambodia, much to Washington’s chagrin. With Jimmy Carter as president it was a sword to be wielded in every direction and certainly in Latin America, combined with a high decibel rhetoric on human rights, did help in the battle to vanquish tyranny and restore democracy. Since Carter’s days there has been the occasional spate of activity but of a less spirited kind. But now the Carteresque fervor is back in vogue. Madeleine Albright’s State Department is charging at every windmill. Although it is far too early to say whether she will have any...

LONDON– By what yardstick does India wish to be measured as it celebrates this week (along with Pakistan) the 50th anniversary of independence as a sovereign country? As the world’s largest functioning democracy it has clearly achieved renown and every day by example it lays low the lie that China is too big to be ruled any other way than by dictatorship. As a military power it has an unshakable superiority over all its neighbors, save China. And if India’s rulers remain wise, as they have been since prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s tragic mistake, not long after independence, to go to war with China over an unimportant peace of Himalayan real estate, that power equation need never again be put to the test. Moreover, with Pakistan, its estranged twin, at long last under civilian rule that is both democratic and sensible, now is the time to solve the Kashmir dispute and...

LONDON– Do we so quickly have to repeat history, the first time as a near tragedy, the second as what would be farce, if it didn’t emanate from such a serious source? Last week, the Malaysian prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, speaking at the annual forum of the Association of South-East Asian Nations, called for a review and possible re-write of the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights. The Declaration, he declared, “was formulated by superpowers which did not understand the needs of poor countries.” But he’s had his attempt at a re-write. It was a tragedy in the making, only averted by the relentless efforts of the human rights lobby, not least from the Asian non-governmental groups. It’s only a mere four years since the World Conference on Human Rights held in Vienna fought off an attempt by Malaysia, Singapore, China, Syria, Iran and Iraq to drastically water down the Universal...

LONDON– There is a tide turning in the affairs of Iran, the land of megalomaniacal mullahs, passionate Islamic fundamentalism and secret nuclear bomb research where America’s proven role as the Great Satan is an inviolable text that until now has guided every move of the ruling elite. Item 1. An advertisement in Monday’s International Herald Tribune by the devoted sister of the late Shah of Iran, overthrown by a popular revolt led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, ending a monarchial system dating back 2,500 years. For years the Shah’s sister has taken advertising space to denounce the rulers of Iran. Now she commends on Iran’s recent presidential election thus, “Iranians have overwhelmingly voted for personal freedom, political democracy, separation of religion and government, economic development and peaceful foreign policy.” This is an endorsement of the new president, given its source, of rather stunning and unexpected proportions. She concludes ringingly, “This is...