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IDN-InDepthNews

 

EURASIA Focus

   

 

Acronym of the Year

    

UN INSIDER

Individual Journalists

Photo: Anti-war protest in London, 2002. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Viewpoint by Jonathan Power

LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) - The crime of aggression ("planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression”) was described by the Nuremberg Tribunal that tried Nazi leaders as "the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole".

President George W. Bush and British prime minister, Tony Blair, have been accused by many as war criminals for starting the war against Iraq and, second, for not watching carefully enough to make sure that war crimes carried out by individual soldiers were not covered up, and for the torture that Bush initiated and Blair appeared to tolerate.

OPINION

Photo: Student Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people on Virginia Tech's campus in 2007. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Viewpoint by Jonathan Power

LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) - After Hitler’s Final Solution – the elimination of the Jews – came Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge and the murder of two million of the country’s people. After that came Rwanda when at least a million of the Tutsi people were slaughtered en masse by the Hutus. More recently we have seen large-scale killing in Sudan and now in Syria. The latter two can’t be called “genocide” – the attempt to totally eliminate a people – but the first three certainly were.

However bad that sounds the evidence is, whether it be genocide or mass slaughter, there has been significantly less of it during the last 50 years, despite the fact that most of us recall the horrors – thanks to the TV news producers’ mantra “if it bleeds it leads” – not the steady lessening of its frequency.

SUSTAINABILITY
Peace & Justice

Photo: President of the European Council, Donald Tusk and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. Credit: NATO

Viewpoint by Jonathan Power

LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) - NATO has just announced a plan to send troops to the Alliance’s eastern flank, close to the Russian border. NATO says it is attempting to deter potential Russian aggression.

The UK, the U.S., Canada and Germany will lead four battle groups to be based in Poland and the Baltic states. Diplomats say the troops will be a deterrent to Russian aggression by acting as a “tripwire” that would trigger a full response from the alliance if necessary

On June 26, 2016 the foreign minister of Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, condemned Western “sabre-rattling and war cries”. He said, “Anyone who believes the symbolic tank parades on the Alliance’s eastern border will increase security is wrong”.

OPINION

Photo: 2016 Elections in Argentina Credit: posadiststoday

Viewpoint by Jonathan Power

LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) - Is there a democratic recession? No, not an economic one. Rather one of the voting kind. In other words: Is democracy going backwards? It is not. Democracy remains resilient. Authoritarianism is being held at bay, despite recession in Russia, Turkey and China.

“Democracy may be receding somewhat in practice, but it is still globally ascendant in people’s values and aspirations,” writes Larry Diamond in a new book, “Democracy in Decline”. In fact, Diamond’s positive conclusion is less positive than I believe the facts say. By and large democracy is not receding.

SYNDICATION
Individual Journalists

Photo courtesy: UNFPA

Viewpoint by Jonathan Power

LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) - Over 200 years we have watched with a mixture of fascination and horror the explosion of population in most parts of the world. In the 1960s and 70’s many people were convinced that it was the single most important issue of our times.

Government aid agencies, especially in the Western world, gave overriding priority to distributing condoms wherever and whenever they had the chance.  Some people like the bishops of the Catholic Church and the mullahs of Iran got very hot under the collar. Indeed, these two groups would unite together to vote the “no” in UN population conferences.

In the Third World militants argued that this was one more perfidy carried out by the West – to rid the world of dark skinned people.

SUSTAINABILITY
Gender Equality

Photo: ‘Coalition’ airstrike on ISIL position in Turkey/ Kobane, Syrian border on 22 October 2014. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Viewpoint by Jonathan Power

LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) - “ISIS is not an existential threat to the United States,” President Barack Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg of Atlantic magazine recently.

What becomes clear in this long article, much of it Obama’s own words, is that Obama shies away from the idea that war can make bad things good. The unquenchable wars that he inherited – Iraq and Afghanistan – were set alight by his predecessor, George W. Bush, and no amount of Obama fire engines have been able to douse them with enough water to put them out.

As for the rest of the waterfront of foreign affairs, he argues that after a period of uncertainty he decided that the U.S. should not militarily involve itself in the civil war in Syria. He decided that Ukraine is not a core American interest, although it is a Russian one, and he was convinced that Iran would agree through peaceful negotiation to renounce the dangerous parts of its nuclear program.

SYNDICATION
Individual Journalists

Photo: On 31 July 1991, the US President, George Bush (left), and General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev (right), sign the START I Agreement for the mutual elimination of the two countries’ strategic nuclear weapons.

Viewpoint by Jonathan Power

LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) - During the Cold War barely a week went by without some reportage or debate on nuclear weapons. Not today. Yet most of the nuclear weapons around then are still around.

It would be alright if they were left to quietly rust in their silos. But they are not. When in 2010 President Barack Obama made a deal with Russian President Dimitri Medvedev to cut their respective arsenals of strategic missiles by one-third the Republican-dominated U.S. Congress, as the price for its ratification of the deal, decreed that Obama and future presidents be made to spend a trillion dollars on updating and modernizing America’s massive arsenal.

Now that chicken is coming home to roost – and a few other chickens too.

President Barack Obama’s unexpected legacy is that he has presided over an America that has been at war longer than any previous president. Moreover, of recent presidents, apart from Bill Clinton, he has cut the U.S. nuclear weapon stockpile at the slowest rate.

ARMAMENTS

Photo: Secretary of State John Kerry laid a wreath at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Museum on April 11, 2016. Credit: U.S. State Department

Viewpoint by Jonathan Power

LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) - We were standing in Hiroshima looking at a stone wall. All there was to see was a shadow of a man. It had been etched into the wall at the moment of his obliteration by the blinding light of the first atomic bomb.

Olof Palme, prime minister of Sweden, stared hard at it. An hour later he gave a speech as head of the Independent Commission on Disarmament of which I was a member. “My fear”, he remarked, “is that mankind itself will end up as nothing more than a shadow on a wall.”

President Charles de Gaulle of France once observed, “After a nuclear war the two sides would have neither powers, nor laws, nor cities, nor cultures, nor cradles, nor tombs.”

What if, contrary to the received wisdom, it was shown that nuclear weapons played no role in the surrender of Japan at the end of World War 2, as has been their justification? Perhaps the terrible acts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are no worse, despite their two hundred thousand deaths, than many other scathing memories of war waged against mainly civilian populations. Then we would have to start a big rethink of the value of nuclear arsenals.

OPINION

Photo: The photograph is part of the collection known as the Auschwitz Album. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Viewpoint by Jonathan Power

LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) - May 4 is Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Holocaust was committed by a nation whose church attendance was then high and whose creation of the most sublime sacred music ever written was etched deep into the minds of most people. Yet only the rare Catholic bishop and Protestant pastor spoke out against Hitler.

Today Germans admit the guilt of their nation. School children are taught every detail of the Holcaust’s evil- not least about Adolf Eichmann, the personification of Nazi extermination policy.

At the end of World War II, Adolf Eichmann, the chief organiser of the eradication of the Jews in the concentration camps went into hiding. Later he got himself, with the aid of sympathetic clergy, to Argentina.

For the next 10 years he worked in several odd jobs in the Buenos Aires area – from factory foreman, to junior water engineer and professional rabbit farmer.

OPINION

Photo: Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (R) meets with Indian Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar in Beijing on April 19, 2016. Photo: BRICS Info | Xinhua

Analysis by Shastri Ramachandaran*

BEIJING (IDN) - If New Delhi's intention is to keep Beijing and Washington guessing as to who it favours, then the mixed signals during recent high-level exchanges with both are right on point. Neither Washington nor Beijing can, at a given stage or on a specific issue, say with any certainty which way New Delhi may swing.

The matter of mixed signals is best illustrated by developments surrounding the second visit of U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter to New Delhi; the three-high-level official exchanges between India and China – two in Beijing and one in Moscow; and, the wholly avoidable flip-flop in first granting and then revoking the visa to Dolkun Isa, whom Beijing says is a terrorist leader.

Earlier in April, India's Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar was in China on a five-day visit. Parrikar's visit was not only a high-level one, but the first by a defence minister in the National Democratic Alliance government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He was received at a high level and had meetings with his Chinese counterpart General Chang Wanquan of the People's Liberation Army and top defence officials.

THE WORLD
Asia-Pacific

  1. How Lies Were Concocted Before the Iraq War
  2. Brazil’s Great Achievement Must Survive
  3. Why Brazil Must Not Fire its President
  4. When the Pope Turned His Back
  5. Turkey Winding the Clock Back Before the EU Lowers the Drawbridge

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