Migration and refugees

. We think that it’s 30th Anniversary is a fitting occasion to reflect on what has happened in the big world and in our lives with the foundation. It is also a piece of Lund’s research history in general and of peace research and education in particular. Part 2 Weak aspects of TFF • Being outside many networks and institutions – it has become more and more difficult to influence the world if you are small, independent and don’t accept governmental and corporate funds. • A perception that the interest/commitment of TFF is out of sync with the sentiments of times, of the Zeitgeist. In spite of that we maintain the fundamental belief that peace is essential and that we can forget about the rest if major wars or nuclear exchanges take place. • Too ‘academic’/theoretical to forge deeper, permanent links with public opinion and movements. • Too ‘radical’ or...

. We think that it’s 30th Anniversary is a fitting occasion to reflect on what has happened in the big world and in our lives with the foundation. It is also a piece of Lund’s research history in general and of peace research and education in particular. Motivation The 1980s was a decade of gross changes in Europe, the struggle against nuclear weapons in particular. Lund University was predominantly about education and single research projects – while TFF could be more of an experimental playground. We wanted to do truly free research and not negotiate with higher levels at, say, the university what to do where, in which countries to work and what to say to the media. Peace has always been controversial and there were – and remain – enough examples of places that become ‘mainstream’ and routine – rather than experimental and radically ’alternative.’ What we did not...

Norway, on top of the UN indicator of good life for years, is now hit by two different crises; one for the less developed aspect and one for the more developed. Yet the citizens are protected by a massive oil slick, the biggest sovereign fund in the world, the Government Pension Fund for an aging population when oil dries out. For only 5 million inhabitants, $178,000/capita, and growing. First crisis: Third World monoculture—oil/gas–hit by the world markets; from over $ 100 per barrel to under 50 recently. A crisis of over-supply and also of under-demand, less than expected: toxic fossil fuels do the same to the lungs of Planet Earth as smoking to the lungs of humans. Green alternatives strong in Germany, China, coming in USA. A generation was needed for the smoking truth to penetrate, but smoking survived in the Third World – for some time. We will get...

Editor’s note This is a grand essay on the dimensions, history, structures of the Middle East/Palestine-Israeli-Western conflict over about 100 years. It is extraordinarily rich – but doesn’t cause the reader to drown in too many details. I highly recommend it to any student – young or old, journalist and politician – whose understanding of the issues may be based on the woefully biased, general account in Western mainstream media. – Jan Oberg Preliminary Observations In this period when the centenary of the genocidal victimization of the Armenian people in 1915 is being so widely observed and discussed, it seems especially appropriate to call attention to the comparable victimization of the Palestinian people. This second story of prolonged collective victimization also received its jump start almost a century ago with the issuance by the British Foreign Office of the Balfour Declaration supporting the Zionist movement project of establishing a Jewish...

/10/janoberg.jpg”>[/caption] /05/tff-pressinfo-320-what-hopes-for-burundi-now/”>See also TFF PressInfo 320. The world’s leading countries are busy with ongoing conflicts and wars in areas of strategic importance to them. Organisations that work with humanitarian issues and post-war healing have exhausted their capacities long ago. It’s repair work but it must be done. So there is hardly any capacity in the world to do what would be much more productive: Prevention of violence (yes, not of conflict but of violence). For decades there has been talk of early warning – but if it works at all, there is little or no early listening and even less early action. If it all worked as it ought to, the world would have a violence-prevention machinery in place and it would, these very days, plan what to do before a catastrophe descends upon a small, beautiful African country – poor, mal-developed and of no strategic significance to bigger powers....

The West – North America and Europe to somewhere in Mexico and Ukraine – declines, outcompeted economically, defeated militarily, confronted politically, contested culturally. But still strong on all four, with much to offer in a more egalitarian world. There should be no need to fall further by working against itself. Take the 70th anniversary demarcation of the victory over nazism, take thousands of Africans drowning in the waters around Lampedusa, Italy, take the Islamic State, take Ukraine – and a country up there in the high North of Europe, Norway. Elections have moved the country from “red-green” to “blue-blue” coloring of the same color blind foreign policy: follow Washington, Our Father, lest Satan should come. Yes, the Red Army came and liberated Kirkenes 25 October 1944, the northernmost city. Everybody knows Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s three-pronged attack toward Leningrad (the siege), Moscow (to beat–Napoleon?) and Caucasus (oil); but not the war...

/10/janoberg.jpg”>[/caption] The refugees in the Mediterranean The European Union members states are trying to look as if they are doing something serious to care for the poor, catastrophe-stricken people who flee from war zones to Europe under the most risky and inhuman conditions. Apart from the lack of genuine humanism and compassion and the cynical intention to uphold the ”deterrence” factor – other features surround these tragic events. In various media reports and political statements the word ”refugee” is increasingly being replaced by ”migrant” – hardly just a coincidence given the fact that the number of refugees, internally displaced persons and asylum-seekers passed 50 million fellow human beings worldwide last year. Migrants and refugees A migrant, according to the UN, is a person who is engaged in (seeking) a remunerative activity in a state of which he or she is not a national. A refugee is an entirely different person...

Double standards A coalition led by Saudi-Arabia and supported by Western leaders has been bombing Yemen for about a month; it’s a clearcut international aggression and an extremely a-symmetric conflict. But we’ve heard no calls for a ‘humanitarian intervention’ by NATO or a no-fly zone to prevent the now more than 1500 bombing raids from contining and hitting also civilian targets. It’s not that international law is blatantly violated; sadly that has been seen before. It is the roaring absence of a clear condemnation by the UN, EU/NATO countries – usually calling themselves ‘the international community’ – and by the Western mainstream media. Substance plays a minor role. What is right or wrong depends on who is doing what. This war is OK because the Saudi dictatorship and its coalition members are Western allies and armed by NATO countries. The convenient but wrong narrative Furthermore, the narrative has twisted this...

By Farhang Jahanpour After four weeks of savage bombing of their impoverished neighbor, Yemen, the Saudis declared “Mission Accomplished”, and promised to halt their aerial bombardment at midnight on 22 April 2015. Yet only three hours later, they resumed their attacks with greater intensity from the sea and the air. Although the conflict in Yemen has been going on for four years, it was the new 79-year old Saudi King Salman and his young son Muhammad bin Salman (believed to be between 27 and 33 years old) who has been appointed defense minister as well as running the royal court and the newly formed Economic and Development Affairs Council, in addition to being a member of the Political and Security Affairs Council, another key decision-making body, who decided to start the aerial bombing of Yemen. The Saudis turning Yemen into another Libya or Syria After having helped the attacks on Libya that...

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/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> January 20th 2015 In his book “Faith and Power” Edward Mortimer, the former foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times, when writing about Rishid Rida, the great Islamic intellectual of the first half of the twentieth century, asked himself if Rida was “fundamentalist” since he was an admirer of the militant Wahhabi puritans of Saudi Arabia. “I do not think so”, concluded Mortimer, “although I must admit that the precise meaning of this word when used in the context of Islam eludes me.” At a time when the West is again aroused – because of the attack on Charlie Hebdo – by the actions of extreme Islamic fundamentalists we should note that it is astonishingly difficult to define fundamentalism either in Islam or Christianity. If it means “an effort to define the fundamentals of one’s religion and a refusal to budge from them once defined then surely anybody with...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> Over 15,000 foreign jihadists from 80 countries are believed to be fighting alongside militants in Syria, the CIA says. The Syrian war is estimated to have mobilized more European Islamists than all the foreign wars of the last 20 years combined. What to do when the jihadists try to return home? Many of them might be trained to wage jihad against their home countries. The danger is, as Daniel Byman and Jeremy Shapiro write in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, “the returned fighter seasoned by battle acquires a new authority among his old friends and followers on social media – a street cred that allows him to recruit and radicalize others and send them into the fray.” On the other hand because of the use of social media where the returnee sometimes brags about his exploits and adventures it becomes easy for the intelligence services both to track...