Category: OPINION

By Amina Mohammed

The author is Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations. This article first appeared on UNCTAD website on July 21 with the caption: ‘Can trade deliver the UN’s 2030 agenda?’ – The Editor

UNITED NATIONS (IDN-INPS) – Trade can be a source of prosperity, new ideas and shared values and ambitions. Today, the world strives to harness globalization in realizing the social, economic and environmental goals embodied in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Making sure that trade plays its part is a must, which means both sustaining it and ensuring its consistency with sustainable development.

Trade can create jobs, promote investment, spread technological progress and speed up communications and connectivity.

By Dr Patrick I. Gomes, ACP Secretary-General

BRUSSELS (IDN) – Our Ocean, Our Future: Call for Action is the outcome document agreed by Heads of State and Government and High Level Representatives of the 193 member-states of the United Nations that met in New York from June 5 to 9 2017 at the first-ever Oceans and Seas Conference.

With the Republic of Fiji and the Kingdom of Sweden, as co-conveners, the Conference was a widely participatory event aimed at giving concrete support to the implementation of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14 of the 2030 Agenda that seeks to Conserve and sustainably Use the Oceans, Seas and Marine Resources.

The participation of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group at the conference was very fitting and timely to shore up support and stand in solidarity with a hosting member state in its endeavour to rally unwavering commitment to accelerate the collective actions of the international community to deliver for the attainment of SDG 14.

Viewpoint by Jonathan Power*

LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) – The most peaceful countries in the world are Iceland, Portugal, Austria, New Zealand and Denmark, according to the new Global Peace Index, in a new 136-page report, published by the Institute for Economics and Peace in Sydney, Australia. The most violent are Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and South Sudan.

Seen from a spaceship the most violent ones appear more or less clustered in a corner of the earth. It’s not that the rest of the globe is at peace but even where there is fighting there is not the wholesale destruction of cities that we see every day on TV, as, for example, when the cameras follow the multi-sided civil war in Syria. Indeed, violence away from these five countries is localised. Nowhere else does it consume whole societies. The fickle eye of television needs to show more peace and less conflict if it is to project a balanced picture.

Viewpoint by the Venerable Dr Omalpe Sobhitha Mahathera*

This article is the 16th in a series of joint productions of Lotus News Features and IDN-InDepthNews, flagship of the International Press Syndicate.

ENBILIPITIYA, Sri Lanka (IDN) – There will be many answers to the question: which is the country where the happiest people live? In response many famous, developed nations will come to mind, but you will be surprised that the name of a little-known country could be the right answer to this question. It is Bhutan, the wonderful and amazing country that beats all others on the happiness index.

Bhutan has been so identified following a worldwide survey on Gross National Happiness (GNH) – not Gross National Product (GDP). Its capital is Thimpu, which reminds us of the peace talks held there between the Sri Lanka Government and Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) separatists in 1985.

Viewpoint by Jonathan Power*

LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) – China, since the days in 1793 and the mission of Earl Macartney, emissary of King George 11, has kept its distance from the West, preferring to be “as self-contained as a billiard ball”, to quote the great historian Alain Peyrefitte.

It was Peyrefitte who argued in “The Collision of Civilizations” that Macartney’s decision not to kowtow to the emperor gave the Chinese the impression that their civilization was denied. They withdrew into their bunker and have remained for the last two centuries prickly, ultra-sensitive, quick to take offence and too ready to assume the worst of West’s motives.

Viewpoinrt by Esad Duraković

Professor Esad Duraković is a well-known academic and a member of three Arab Academies of Art and Science.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina (IDN) – In late June 2017, four Arab countries (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain) adopted a decision to isolate the “brotherly” Qatar for several reasons, the main being “Qatar’s support for terrorism”.

In the subsequent ultimatum, they demanded of Qatar to close down Al-Jazeera, which, without doubt, embodies the greatest value of the Arab world in general today, and as such poses a threat to totalitarian regimes that want to rule in media darkness.

Viewpoint by Sugeeswara Senadhira*

COLOMBO (IDN-INPS) – While there is much written about China’s jittery relations with many of its neighbours these days, there is hardly anything written about equally jittery relations between India and its smaller neighbours in South Asia.

The scorching summer of 1987 saw the relations between Sri Lanka and India plummeting to a lowest ever ebb. New Delhi’s decision to airdrop supplies over Jaffna had opened up a diplomatic Pandora’s Box. New Delhi tried to justify this blatant violation of Sri Lanka’s sovereignty as an act of humanitarian necessity. But the world knew it as a hegemonic political action entangled directly in the ethnic crisis in Sri Lanka.

Viewpoint by Jonathan Power*

MOSCOW (IDN-INPS) – Here I am in Moscow standing in front of a statue of Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev to celebrate the unveiling of a statue crafted by the master sculptor, Alexander Bourganov.

I’m the only journalist invited to speak – and after I go with the others to drink Russian champagne. I talk to a group of students and a younger member of the Russian media contingent. I’ve also invited along a journalism student I met late at night on an almost empty street when I stopped to ask the way. She insisted on walking me to my hotel. To my surprise she accepted my offer of a drink and we spent an hour talking about her course and the Russian press. At the airport in the Aeroflot lounge I talked to one of the hostesses. It turned out she was a journalism graduate. On the plane I sat next to a Russian student studying in America.

Analysis by Pier Francesco Zarcone*

ROME (IDN) – We know that international legality goes no further than pious aspirations, so all that counts is force and tactical-strategic capacity of its use.

The Syrian crisis

Well, the United States edged its way into Syria on its own account – that is, without the Damascus government having called on it – in order to achieve two interrelated goals.

First, to save the self-styled anti-Assad Syrian Democratic Forces which had suffered blows from both ISIS and the Syrian Arab Army – to the extent that it was necessary to link it up with the Kurdish militia of Syria to give a semblance of existence.

Second, to break the potential territorial continuity between Syria, Iraq and Iran – that is, the so-called “Shiite corridor”.