Treasures – TFF Associates

At a large manifestation with thousands of participants on the national day, May 26, the opposition parties of the South Caucasus republic of Georgia escalated their accusations against the Saakasvili regime for ruling the country on the basis of electoral fraud and suppression of alternative opinions. Levan Gachechiladze, who came second at the presidential election in January this year, threatened that the opposition will refuse to take the few seats they won according to the official result of the parliamentary elections some days earlier – May 21st – and prevent the new parliament from convening ”if necessary by force”. If this really comes true it would be an ironical repetition of the method the present regime used to take power through the ”Rose Revolution” in November 2003. Then angry representatives of the opposition of that time, considering their loss at the parliamentary elections a couple of week earlier to be...

May 31, 2010 Chaiwat Satha-Anand [Published in The Bangkok Post as “The effect of violence on the future of reconciliation”, May 28, 2010: op-ed.] That the military would succeed in defeating the UDD, also known as the “red shirts”, and in securing the city space occupied by many who came from rural Thailand was never in doubt.  In fact, some from within the security community might regard this operation as a success given the resulted “low” number of casualties. What certainly is , however, is how the military solution chosen by the government and violent methods incorporated by some UDD leadership will shape the form of continuing political conflict in this society. This article is an attempt to understand the violence effect of the “May 19 incident” on Thai society, especially on future reconciliation efforts.  I would argue that any future reconciliation effort with some hope of success would have to begin...

May 8, 2009 Farhang Jahanpour During their first meeting on the margins of the G-20 conference in London on 1st April 2009, President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced the start of negotiations on a new strategic arms-control treaty that would cut each nation’s long-range nuclear arsenal further than previous agreements. In his first major foreign policy speech in Prague, the president went further and introduced an ambitious vision of getting rid of all nuclear weapons, although he said that this might not happen in his lifetime. He rightly stressed the danger of the existence and ultimate use of nuclear weapons. He also set a four-year target for ‘locking down’ all loose nuclear material scattered around the world to prevent them from falling into the hands of terrorists. While the president referred to North Korea’s satellite launch and Iran’s nuclear programme, he significantly failed to mention Israel’s nuclear...

and the international law.’ Strangely, EU’s President has to defend his Union against critics who maintain that its mission called LEX – meaning law! – is not established according to international law. Unfortunately for Barosso, they are right and have read and understood Resolution 1244 of 1999 (after NATO’s bombing) in which the members were: – “Reaffirming the commitment of all Member States to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the other States of the region, as set out in the Helsinki Final Act and annex 2,” and – “Reaffirming the call in previous resolutions for substantial autonomy and meaningful self-administration for Kosovo.”  Indeed, what is there to discuss? If 1244 were respected by Western law-breaking governments, EULEX could only have been established in agreement with Serbia/Belgrade as were all other international missions in Kosovo since 1999 – and by the local authorities and...

Short text in English below Per Gahrton ger ut engelskspråkig bok om Georgien, Rosenrevolutionen och Ossetienkriget – stödjer EU:s Tagliavinirapport och kritiserar Bildts oreserverade Saakashvili-stöd Per Gahrton, ordförande i den gröna tankesmedjan Cogito ger i dagarna ut en engelskspråkig bok om Georgien, Rosenrevolutionen och Ossetienkriget hos det brittiska förlaget Pluto Press. Gahrton har följt utvecklingen i Georgien under de senaste tjugo åren och var personlig vän med landets premiärminister efter Rosenrevolutionen 2003, Zurab Zhvania, som omkom under mystiska omständigheter 2005. Under sin tid som EU-parlamentariker var han s k rapportör för Sydkaukasien. Han har flera gånger varit valobservatör i Georgien. Han har också sedan länge följt utvecklingen i Sovjetunionen och Ryssland och har “working knowledge” i ryska. Gahrton intar överlag samma hållning som EU:s s k Tagliavini-rapport om Ossetienkriget, d v s att det startades av Georgies president Saakashvili som därmed brott mot folkrätten, men att Ryssland genom att inte...

Lecture given at the New Zealand Parliament  15/11 2010 Ladies and gentlemen. As a former college it gives me a special pleasure to visit your parliament again. It was long ago in the 1980s and much has happened in between. Last time I was not only a parliamentarian but also as ambassador responsible for Swedish peace and disarmament policy. In order to answer the question if a small country can have impact on peace and disarmament  I have to go back to 1930s  before the Second World War. The Europe women´s movement was deeply involved against war.  In 1935 a conference on “Women´s unarmed rebellion against war” was organized. Alva Myrdal was elected to take part and demanded stop for all weapon´s trade and proposed peace education at schools. Inga Thorson, the second women as chair of the Swedish disarmament delegation after Alva, brought then up conversion to civil production. ...

September 14, 2010 Chaiwat Satha-Anand In the corner of a Sunday comic strip titled “Pastor Jones goes to New York”, there is a small character saying “ Your fifteen minutes are up reverend.” (Bangkok Post, September 12, 2010) That may be true about Terry Jones’ personal fame since a month ago no one this side of the globe has heard about him or his tiny Protestant church in Gainesville, Florida, nor his 2010 book: Islam is of the Devil. But when he announced the “International Burn a Koran Day” from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. to be held on September 11, world attention descended upon him. Outcry against his proposed act from religious leaders around the world notwithstanding, world leaders from President Obama, to UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon to David Howell Petraeus, a former professor of international relations, he received his Ph.D. from Princeton, and now the commander of...

Seven years after the terrible terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and on the Pentagon the time has come to study those events dispassionately, to find out what really happened, and to see whether the response to that tragedy has been a correct one, or whether we could have followed a different path. What is certain is that those events have drawn attention to radical Islam as never before, and they have also given rise to a ‘war on terror’ that has continued non-stop for the past seven years and may continue for a long time to come. There are certain terms such as Shari’a, ayatollah, fatwa, jihad, madrassa, etc that have come into the English language, but with new and often menacing meanings, not to mention anything about insulting terms such as Islamism, Islamo-fascism, rogue states, etc. As the saying goes: ‘Beware of truth simplified!’ However, there is no...

November 28, 2007 Jan Oberg Written for and © by IPS We seem to live in an age in which spin and deliberately distorted information threaten to replace knowledge. Politicians, journalists and many people, including left-wingers and peace activists, talk about the Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) as if it were mainly about defence. It is not. BMD is based on the perverse wish that the United States shall be able to start, conduct and win a nuclear war – a Nuclear Use Theory (NUT). BMD is a fundamental break with the logic of nuclear deterrence, or Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) that the world has lived with since 1945. Undoubtedly a provocative statement, here is the philosophy of MAD and NUT. Imagine two nuclear parties, A and B, pitted against each other. They have their arsenal of nuclear weapons in silos on the ground, under the wings of planes and on submarines...

Introduktion Två faktorer är mycket tydliga vad det gäller användningen av militära medel sedan flygplanen störtades in i World Trade Center och Pentagon. Den första är att militära medel i högre grad har använts där polisiära medel tidigare var helt dominerande. Den andra är den amerikanska imperialismens ökade militarisering av vårt jordklot. Båda dessa faktorer får skrämmande konsekvenser som inte är omedelbart synliga i det korta perspektivet. Det kalla krigets slutMed tio års mellanrum har två stora ändringar skett i såväl synen på, som användningen av, militära medel. Fram till kalla krigets slut var rättfärdigandet av stora försvarsbudgetar grundat i behovet av ett nationellt försvar. Men vi har samtidigt sett en praxis där militära medel använts för att försvara politiska intressen långt utanför det egna territoriet. När endast en stormakt återstår och många av de traditionella fiendebilderna försvann upplevde vi några år då politiker och militärer sökte sig nya hotbilder...

If a visitor from space were to read history books of human behaviour, they would certainly conclude that the answer is yes.  This is because history has largely been written as if it were the history of man, tending to move from battle to battle, because that’s what interested the authors. If, however, our visitors were to read the acclaimed Quaker sociologist and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Elise Boulding, they would gain an entirely different picture.  In The Underside of History Boulding tells the other half of the story, as she traces the evolution of woman’s role from the Paleolithic to modern times. She demonstrates how very recent it is that women have begun to move from the ‘inner’ or domestic world to the ‘outer’ or political world. She considers that empowering women – to dismantle their history of being devalued and to reconstruct true equality between the sexes – will lay the...

Martin Smedjeback, TFF Associate, August 13, 2006. Lyssna på Smedjebacks föredrag om Jesus, Martin Luther King och ickevåldet (mp3 fil). Listen to Smedjeback’s lecture on Jesus, Martin Luther King, and nonviolence — MP3 audio. This recording was listed on the TFF oldsite Nonviolence resource index. The lecture explores Christian nonviolence, the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., and practical approaches to peace work. The audio was originally hosted at rilacademy.org. Download / listen: Vadå vända andra kinden till? (MP3) Note: The original rilacademy.org host may no longer be online; the link is preserved for archival reference.