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 benefit from ourselves and want to share.
Just click below at what catches your interest – read, download or send on to a friend.
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 value
And 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 knew between 1988 and 1991? If George Bush and other Western leaders knew that Gorbachev’s chances of survival were THAT slim – why didn’t they do more to support him?
Chechenya splits Russia and the West at OSCE’s summit in Istanbul. But there is a much more important dimension:• American-sponsored oil projects in Central Asia provokes Russia – and others
The US sponsorship of two pipelines has an overt geostrategic objective: to pull the countries of the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea into the western orbit and the world economy and keep Russia and iran out – writes the Financial Times in an analysis.So, why did the relations between the US and Russia sour to the extent they did in Istanbul?
• America’s Russia policy backfires
Jonathan Steele of the Guardian analyses the last 10 years. It’s not a great result for the West…Nuclearism
NATO split because of US plans for a nuclear missile defence system• European allies fear the US is jilting them for missile
US plans for a national shield against nuclear missiles are threatening to plunge the Nato alliance into its most serious crisis since the end of the cold war, writes the Guardian.Kosovo – and Western self-censorship
Ethnic cleansing goes on in Kosovo – or is it now so clean that more and more troops can leave?• 1.200 British troops more are withdrawn
British troops have now been reduced from over 10.000 to below 4.000 in Kosovo. Michael Jackson earlier told the world that it was impossible to prevent ethnic cleansing.Here is an interesting – and certainly different – personal account of what it means to be working in a war-torn society• Rekindling Kosovo (Look for “Opinion”)
Great and simple truths of humanitarian work: numbing exhumations, stolen staplers, no phones, and lots of hope.This is an excerpt of an Oct. 16 letter sent to family and friends by Carolyn McCool, a Canadian lawyer working in Mitrovica, Kosovo.Kosovo makes SLOW news. Slow news is a form of censorship used in democracies• Western media didn’t do reporting, they did propaganda
There is as yet no evidence that genocide took place in Kosovo. But that fact is nigh impossible to find in the press, writes John Pilger in the New Statesman.Globalization
The World Trade Organisation, WTO, is meeting in Seattle from November 29. Here is an overview piece about this organisation and why the meeting may be the “Protest of the century”• Last Stop for corporate globalization
How did something as arid and seemingly removed from people’s lives as “the Third Ministerial Meeting of the World Trade Organization” manage to attract this kind of opposition?And if Western democracies were also promoting economic democracy and economic human rights, there might be less protesting and criticism around the world. Study why there is mounting opposition to globalization at:• Z Net’s Global Economic Crisis website• The Nation
The World Trade Organisation and China – a historic change of the world economy• China is joining – and what does that mean?The move will spell the end of Communist control over large sectors of the economy and speed up the economic and cultural globalization of a land that only 30 years ago was almost completely sealed off from the rest of the world.
The United States violates everybody’s human right
It is hard to believe that the National Security Agency of the United States, the champion of moralism, human rights and freedom is planning to do THIS:• Listen to million of telephone conversations…
To date, it has been widely believed that while the NSA has the capability to conduct fully automated, mass electronic eavesdropping on e-mail, faxes and other written communication, it is now also attmepting to do so with the human voice, over the phones, writes the Independent.
How quickly will the international human rights community mobilize against this?EU’s turbo militarization in the wake of Kosovo
The EU is on turbo defence policy integration and co-operation with NATO
• Common EU-NATO exercizes and Solana wants EU at UN Security Council
Solana calls for voice to match EU might The European Union flexed its muscles on the international stage yesterday with a demand for it to be given a voice at the heart of the United Nations and the announcement that the embryonic European defence corps will be conducting military exercises with Nato early in the New Year.A common sense Russian peace proposal for Chechenya
Here is a proposal on how to end the war in Chechenya• Only Chechens can end the war
– says a leading business newspaper, The Russia Journal editorial.
