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.
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 globeHere is an official Pentagon report on the places where bombs or bomb components minus their nuclear charges were located between 1951 and 1977. The names of 18 other locations were blacked out by government censors before the document was released to Robert S. Norris, a private specialist on nuclear weapons and author of numerous books on the topic. Using other documents, Norris and his co-authors said they could identify 17 of those other locations, ringing the globe from Canada to Iceland to South Korea and Japan, writes Robert Burns for Nando Times and Associated Press on October 18, 1999. And this is what Reuters wrote about this shocking report.
So, people get nuclear bombs – but that is not exactly what they want. If this is so, how much democracy is there in the nuclear age?
• So Everyone Wants Peace, So What?
“Recently I invited friends around the world to ask their friends and neighbors a simple question: “What would the world be like if it were what you REALLY WANT, not what you’ve learned to settle for or what you think is possible? What do you REALLY WANT the world to be like for your children and grandchildren?…
There were no differences. Nearly all of us highly varied people want the same kind of world, though our ways of describing that world can be different and colorful — and, I discovered, wonderful,” writes Donella Meadows in her column in The Global Citizen. She is director of the Sustainability Institute and an adjunct professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College.Well, some people don’t want peace, they want a new Star Wars project:
•The Ballistic Missile Defence – BMDWatch out, Reagan’s old idea is back – to try to protect the United States against incoming missile and thus become able to launch an attack without being hit back – is again being seriously considered. The Centre for Defence Information and the Council for a Liveable World has the relevant links and articles.And no wonder that wars continue around the world at the turn of the century. Some profit from somebody’s elses death:
• Nothing Can Stop U.S. Arms Sales
“One thing never changes in America’s post-Cold War foreign policy, and that is the awesome power of the U.S. arms-exporting industries.
Over the past five years, no other nation comes close to the United States as an arms exporter.
American sales from 1994 to 1998 added up to $53.9 billion, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which collects the statistics. In second place was Russia with $12.3 billion in sales over the five-year period, followed by France with $10.6 billion,” writes Jim Mann in the San Jose Mercury News.This will make you think twice about globalization – Zambia as a case:
• IMF and the World Bank – Africa’s Hidden Killers?
“What if the IMF was to pack its bags and leave Zambia? Do they imagine the situation would get worse for us?” asks Emily Sikazwe. “What would they say if we took them to the World Court in the Hague and accused them of genocide?” Mark Lynas, editor of the fantastic supersite OneWorld, offer the hard evidence in his empathetic report.There are ever more signs that the honeymoon between the West/KFOR and the Kosovo-Albanians is over. Here is an example – but this article, like many others, does not raise the question why KFOR, the UN and all the police seem helpless in keeping law and order four months after they arrived. Is it the presence of some 70.000 internationals with high salaries that attract maffia groups?
• Increasing Crime in Kosovo
Pristina has turned into an Eldorado for different criminal activities. Muscling people from their homes is a lucrative activity in a city where a huge influx of refugees has nearly doubled the original population of 280,000. And then there is the other crime – intimidation, occupation of flats, harassment of minorities, plus thefts, car thefts. And two to four people a week dead in Pristina. Confidential records for October show more than 200 crimes a week, including murder, kidnapping, arson and burglaries, registered with U.N. police &emdash; most unsolved. Many hundreds more are unreported. Some of the violence remains ethnically based. Much of it is committed by Albanians targeting the dwindling Serb minority in revenge. Increasingly, however, crimes &emdash; capital or otherwise &emdash; are driven by the profit motive. In a city where few people have jobs, crime is a way of survival – writes Associated Press from Pristina on October 18.• BBC’s Special Report on Rebuilding the Balkans
This site contains many links and articles on various aspects of this tremendously complex and resource-demanding task. Among them is Dr. Jonathan Eyal’s comment on what money can – and cannot – bring to the region.But what do we do if the UN and NATO missions are already failures?
• Annan warns U.N. Mission in Kosovo risks being seen as ‘occupation’The UN SG, Kofi Annan, said the United States and its European allies, while eager to finance the war against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, had been less generous with money for reconstruction. So far, he said, they have provided only $35 million of a projected $125 million budget. And the S-G is afraid the UN could look like an occupier in Kosovo. He has good reasons.
Have you wondered what happened to the genocide in Kosovo that justified NATO’s bombing campaign? Here follows a critical analysis from Stratfor.com:
• Evidence of Genocide Has Not Come Out of Kosovo Yet.
“During its four-month war against Yugoslavia, NATO argued that Kosovo was a land wracked by mass murder; official estimates indicated that some 10,000 ethnic Albanians were killed in a Serb rampage of ethnic cleansing. Yet four months into an international investigation bodies numbering only in the hundreds have been exhumed. The FBI has found fewer than 200. Piecing together the evidence, it appears that the number of civilian ethnic Albanians killed is far less than was claimed. While new findings could invalidate this view, evidence of mass murder has not yet materialized on the scale used to justify the war. This could have serious foreign policy and political implications for NATO and alliance governments,” writes Stratfor – which also has a nice collection of Western statements concerning genocide.And where is Montenegro heading?
• “Montenegrins See Split with Serbia”
“With its economy spinning toward disaster, tiny Montenegro is close to taking one more formal step toward independence from Slobodan Milosevic’s Yugoslavia: the establishment of its own currency,” writes Steven Erlanger in New York Times of October 18.There are signs that a new Cold War-like conflict formation is developing. Here is one of them:
• New Types of Non-Military Weapons in the Chinese Arsenal?
Senior members of the People’s Liberation Army are openly urging the Beijing government to abandon conventional defence strategies and prepare a “dirty war”. They advocate terrorism, biochemical warfare, environmental damage and computer viruses as a means to pitch the West into political and economic crisis. Daily Telegraph’s David Harrison and Damien McElroy have read some Chinese studies and speculate.
