Forum

LONDON– “If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?” Shylock’s lament (in William Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice”) could be the epitaph for Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s beleaguered prime minister. Through the fog of Netanyahu’s war–a battle that appears to rage just as fiercely against liberal-minded Jews within israel as it does with the Palestinians outside–there is the unbending conviction of a man who believes absolutely that right is on the side of his deeply wronged people in the historic divide between Jew and Arab. To serve this cause he dispenses a bittersweet mixture of justice and revenge. As Golda Meir and Menacham Begin believed before him, not to seek compensation in blood and territory for three millenia of wrongs is in some profound way to forsake the...

LONDON– The rapid and dangerous way things are going suggest that Zaire could very easily, like its sideshow Angola, become the scene of an unending civil war between the two rival protagonists. In Zaire in the contest to succeed the dying president, Mobutu Sese Seko, we have in the capital Kinshasa, the ex-prime minister Etienne Tshisekedi, pulling out every stop to take over from his erstwhile boss. His charisma and organizational skills are formidable. Early this week he led a stunning strike which, for the breadth of a day, reduced the bustling, noisy, helter-skelter of life in the capital to an earie silence. In the west is his rival for power, Laurent Kabila, who by force of arms has captured the most populous half of the country, taken over the diamond and copper mines, the main source of the country’s wealth and is now advancing on Kinshasa. This is reminiscent of...

LONDON–It was Dag Hammarskjold, the greatest United Nations Secretary-General thus far, practitioner and contemplator all in one, who observed that the UN was not set up to take humanity to heaven, but to save it from hell With its new Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, the UN is once again feeling its way into a brave new world. It is not to be, however, the “new world order” of former U.S. president George Bush who, like his contempory, President Mikhail Gorbachev, saw at the end of the Cold War a chance to make the UN what it was meant to be when it was created out of the ashes of World War 2, a vigorous force in world peacekeeping. That prospect was dashed by civil war in Yugoslavia and Somalia, partly by the tenacity of the warring factions and partly by President Bill Clinton’s unprincipled undermining of the UN–in Somalia, after the...

LONDON– The western world, in particular Washington and London, is too often besieged by inner hobgoblins who warn it of the threat of militant Islam, rogue nations intent on the development of nuclear and chemical weapons, redoubts of unreformed communism in Cuba and North Korea. Most of it is overstated, an unpersuasive zero sum, often counterproductive. But nobody can exaggerate the danger of Saddam Hussein. He is indeed a “cretin, a monster”–the words of a distinguished French journalist, Jean Daniel, unbelievably now being sued by none other than Saddam Hussein in a French court for “insult and defamation.” “The damned don’t cry,” wrote Eugene O’Neil, “but in this case they never stop trying to make everyone else weep and gnash their teeth. The sheer arrogance of the world’s premier bully is chilling almost beyond belief. Early next month there will be another reminder of Saddam Hussein’s formidable staying power, just when...

LONDON– Most of the world will cheer when the grand dictator of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko, dies. “The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones,” said Mark Anthony as he buried Caesar. We too will doubtless happily forget that it was strongman Mobutu that bound the factionist, disintegrating, post- colonial Congo back together, changed its name and made its destiny so important to Cold War-ridden Africa that the Soviet Union, France and the U.S. competed for his favors. Instead we will remember that it was Mobutu who robbed his country blind, who pilfered and wasted away the enormous potential wealth of this country, a country that if it had been properly managed would be as prosperous as perhaps Malaysia or Thailand or, at least, the Philippines today. For every dictator in the world who did his country economic good, Pinochet in Chile, Park...

LONDON– After a difficult and slow start the United Nations war crimes tribunals are hitting their stride. The new UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, has purged the incompetents at the Arusha, Tanzania, tribunal and we can expect it now to move more rapidly in bringing to trial the suspects it has in detention, accused mass-murderers from Rwanda. In The Hague this week the trial of three Muslims and a Croat began, accused of war crimes against Serbs at a prison camp in 1992. 74 men have been indicted so far, most of them Serbian. This is all progress, the first faltering steps of a new responsibility for the international community–the extension of the rule of law to the battlefield and its aftermath. Unlike Nuremberg and the Tokyo trials following World War 2 that were wrapped up as soon as their business was complete, there is now a very tangible sense that these...

LONDON– That President Bill Clinton, commander-in-chief of the world’s one remaining superpower, might dare to risk his country’s self- interest in financial and political prudence by personally wooing monetary support for his re-election bid from Chinese, Thai and Indonesian businessmen and women, all with close ties to their governments, is by the yardstick of common probity boggling to the imagination. This is the age of what Moises Naim has called “corruption eruption” that has shaken “every region regardless of cultural background or Gross National Product.” The last eighteen months have seen the fall of the Secretary-General of NATO over corruption allegations, indictments for corruption of one-third of India’s cabinet, graft charges against Italy’s most prominent post-war prime ministers and two former South Korean presidents; parliamentary investigations into financial abuses by the heads of government of Colombia, Pakistan and Turkey, graft at high levels of government in Japan, not to mention the...

the working title of a research programthat started in February 1997 We have been witnessing the creation of new ethnic boundaries or maybe reactivating of existing ethnic boundaries in former Yugoslavia. But we do not know when and why some people started to treat their former friends and neighbours as enemies and why that led to atrocities, totally destroyed societies and genocide. In order to find out why, we have to trace the process and the people involved in it. It seems to be a good way to choose one geographically defined place and try to find out what has happened to the people living there, also in their minds. Our assumption is that an understanding of what happened in Pakrac in Western Slavonia, Croatia, will offer useful insights into what happened elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia, and, for that matter, into other parts of the world where ethnic hostilities...

LONDON– The world has much to be thankful for that Deng Xiaoping died when he did, just four and a half months before the Union Jack is run down in Hong Kong. Britain and China, until last week, were set on what seemed an unavoidable collision course. If Beijing was holding the whip hand of divine power to do as it pleases, commencing July 1st., London, or in effect its audacious governor, Chris Patten, held the trumps of the electorate’s will. Against every brutish blandishment–“a serpent, a whore and a sinner for all millenia” Beijing’s foreign ministry called him at one time–he has over the last five years engineered Hong Kong’s entry into the democratic community. If Hong Kong’s citizens could fill the streets for days after the Tiananmen Square massacre then one can reasonably surmise that any move to take away their own new-found liberties after July 1st.will meet with...

STOCKHOLM, Sweden–The rage and the storm have passed–thus diminishing the hope that the world’s governments, in their collective unease, have decided at last to throw their combined weight against the growing cancer of paedophilia, ravaging and spoiling societies all over. Last August, in a veritable blaze of publicity, the Congress Against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children was held in Stockholm. 122 countries participated. The press, more than sensitized by gruesome revelations of sexual abuse and child murder in Belgium earlier in the month, turned up the heat. The governments said they WOULD do something. A week later the U.S. was bombing Iraq once again. It didn’t, as usual, do much to damage Saddam Hussein but it did bury the paedophilia story and allowed governments to return to doing what they had pledged to do in Stockholm as a matter of urgency more at their usual pace. But to quote Julius...

October 1998 Introduction According to the Secretariat of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), there are 88 individual, regional trade agreements currently in force.1 Not less than 77 new preferential trade agreements on the regional level have been registered from 1992 to 1996.2 Virtually all 132 members of the WTO now participate in at least one agreement to advance regional trade liberalisation in goods and services.3 Twenty-five per cent of global output is being exported.4 World trade growth doubled from 4 per cent per annum between 1980 and 1993 to 8 per cent in 1994-1996, outpacing world output growth by a widening margin.5 “Recent trends in intra-regional and extra-regional trade allow for some tentative conclusions,” according to ‘Intereconomies’, “on whether regional trade rather than global networking was the dominant feature in the world economy during the 1980s and early 1990s.” 6 The phenomenon of regionalisation needs to be analysed not only...

LONDON– Apathy was the only voice left to Pakistan’s voters in Monday’s general election. By staying away from the polls in record numbers they turned their back on the choices they were given, two alternative anciens regimes, both discredited, both corrupt, both unwilling or too beholden to military and feudal interests to turn Pakistan’s many consecutive years of satisfactory economic growth even modestly in the direction of the have-nots, the overwhelming majority of this potentially bountiful country. This is always the country that might have been–might have been Taiwan, Malaysia, South Korea, Indonesia or, these days, the Philippines, if its corruption wasn’t so endemic, its successive administrations so incompetent, its feudal structure so deeply entrenched and, above all, its military spending so high. Benazir Bhutto, the now totally rejected two time prime minister, should realize that the demons she rails against are within not without. They are certainly not President Farooq...