WIRE

Links to Facts & Views Nonviolence & forgiveness • Real peace builds on people, from the ground-up as well as by top-down peace agreements:Peace that starts in the heartsIn October, millions of Colombians – perhaps a third of the population – took to the streets in the country’s largest protest against a decades-long civil war and in support of fresh peace talks between the government and Marxist rebels. • Dr. Daisaku Ikeda, President of the Buddhist organisation, Soka Gakkai International, SGI, who is also a TFF adviser reflects on the necessary peace culture we must learn to develop:Towards a Culture of Peace. A Cosmic View“…I suggest that for the sake of overcoming the identity crises undermining the soul of modern humanity we must attempt to discover a new cosmology. Unless we raise our sights this high, hopes of nurturing true world citizens must inevitably prove illusory.” • A global inter-generational dialogue initiated by young people:The...

Nonviolence – forgiveness • We must learn from touching human stories about the will to abandon hate.The road to forgivenessIn South Africa’s Western Cape there is a rapidly growing bakery with the unusual brand name: “Amy’s bread – the bread of hope and peace.” The local communities know its significance. Amy Biehl was a Fulbright Scholar who was murdered in the Western Cape in the run-up to the 1994 elections. The bakery, run by the Amy Biehl Foundation, exists because her parents, Peter and Linda Biehl, from California, decided to walk the road of forgiveness. By Michael Henderson. • How actually did the old Cold War end – and what does it tell about the new emerging Cold War now?How We Ended the Cold WarJohn Tirman reflects in The Nation. “The dominant view of the right and center is that military intimidation was the root of victory, a dangerous axiom then and...

Links to Facts & Views Beauty and nonviolence, and International Day for Tolerance Let’s begin this Transnational WIRE with a text on beauty and on how we could learn from appreciation of beauty that violence is a bad idea• Does beauty really equal truth?Philosopher Elaine Scarry defends beauty from politically correct critics. Here is one of her beautiful thoughts: “One of the reasons that violence has in our own era been so easily anesthetized is precisely because we’ve gotten unanchored from beauty.” November 16 was the UN-declared International Day for Tolerance. Here is how UNESCO’s new Director-General, Koichiro Matsuura, observed this important day:• Tolerance – a dynamic world valueAnd the UN Secretary-General promised to make tolerance a priority:• We can advance tolerance every day, says Kofi Annan. The old Cold War – and the New… On the occassion of the end of the Cold War:• CIA warned of Gorbachev’s fallWhat did CIA think it...

Links to Facts & Views, Kosovo and the Second Cold War Europe was extremely close to a major war. Did the allies know? Who would have made the decision? What would we, the citizens of NATO countries, have been told? Was Europe’s security and the existence of NATO put at risk because of the sufferings of Kosovo-Albanians? Because of a genocide that did not take place? Or because we are heading for a new Cold War?• NATO moved very close to invasion in KosovoThe United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, France, Finland and Yugoslavia — the United States came much closer to a ground war in Europe than is commonly understood. Read Steven Erlanger’s absolutely shocking analysis in New York Times. And what shall we do with the trophy? The American press is beginning to see that Kosovo was not all that simple and easy…• Kosovo in limboThis word picture is painted by the U.N....

Links to Facts & Views A NEW COLD WAR ?  Are nuclear policies shaping a new Cold War era?• New U.S. policies anatagonize Russia and ChinaThe Clinton administration appears to be heading for a confrontation with Russia and China on its plans to develop an antiballistic missile (ABM) system capable of warding off blows from rogue states like North Korea and Iran. High-level Chinese diplomat sees the United States developing into a rogue state.• The U.S. is drunk with its own powerWashington seems to be developing a stubbornness against abiding by weapons’ control pacts and a greater penchant to use armed force against its real or perceived enemies. This is not the era of peace it could have been, says the director-general of the Arms Control and Disarmament Department of the Chinese foreign ministry. Russia’s warfare in Chechenya, just an immitation of NATO’s in Yugoslavia?• On Winning Battles And Losing WarsRussians who want to...

Links to Facts & Views There are many great initiatives – also in the field of norm-setting – to further a truly global democracy. Here is one of them:• A Charter for Global DemocracyOur call for international accountability, justice, sustainable development and democracy. In September 2000 the United Nations will hold a special Millennium Assembly and Summit on the future of the world. This Charter will be published as an open letter on worldwide and other presented to UN Representatives. Please join us. NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia was also an experiment in information or cyber warfare…• The Cyber Bomb in YugoslaviaFor specialists in this burgeoning field of information warfare, Yugoslavia merely stands as another demonstration that computer network attack will eventually become an integral part of the way warfare is waged, writes Bill Arkin in Washington Post. Bit by bit, the truth about the consequences of NATO’s irresponsible bombing comes out:•Environmental effects of...

Links to Facts & Views Are we ever told the truth about what is done in the name of security? This is what the United States did not tell us about its own proliferation of nuclear weapons around the world – since 1951! • Read “Where the Nukes Were” in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists“Soon complete weapon systems found their way to all sorts of places &emdash; Okinawa, Japan, South Korea and the Philippines in the Pacific for example, and Morocco, France, and then most of the NATO countries in the West. Sometimes U.S. allies knew they were hosting nuclear weapons; sometimes they didn’t. Then, too, the United States was occasionally a little too eager to share control with its NATO buddies…” This is the full listof where these nuclear weapons were.  – and here follow the news reports about this shocking report: • The United States scattered nuclear weapons around the...

Links to Facts & Views You want to find interesting analyses, reports, articles and papers on peace and conflict issues from around the world? Now we do the job for you. This page provides links to a selection of the best critical and constructive materials – the essential stuff we learn from ourselves and want to share. Just click below at what you are interested in read, download or send on to a friend. •  What is Operation Matrix? A strategy to undermine MilosevicThe program originated with a December 1998 White House meeting at which Robert S. Gelbard, the president and secretary of state’s special adviser for Kosovo, was put in charge of an umbrella strategy. That’s what CIA got money to do and – perhaps – it explains why NATO didn’t destroy Yugoslavia’s mobile phone net? Read William Arkin’s Washington Post column of October 11, 1999. • What Makes Europe Look Increasingly...