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.

Obama’s Nuclear-Free World Vision Has Come to Naught

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.

: Jonathan Power; ARMAMENTS; 17 May 2016

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

Obama Must Say a Profound Sorry for Hiroshima

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.

: Jonathan Power; OPINION; 10 May 2016

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

The Little-Known Dimension to the Holocaust

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.

: Jonathan Power; OPINION; 03 May 2016

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

India Sends Mixed Messages to Beijing and Washington

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.

: Shastri Ramachandran; THE WORLD; Asia-Pacific; 30 April 2016

Photo: U.S. Marines from 1st Battalion 7th Marines enter a palace during the Fall of Baghdad. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

How Lies Were Concocted Before the Iraq War

Viewpoint by Jonathan Power

LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) - President Barack Obama has observed, “ISIL [Islamic State] is a direct outgrowth of Al Qaeda in Iraq that grew out of our invasion – which is an example of unintended consequences- which is why we should generally aim before we shoot”.

Many of us, looking at the horror of the Iraq war, waged by the U.S. and the UK against the regime of Saddam Hussein when 200,000 civilians died and a total of 800 billion U.S. dollars was spent on the campaign, need little to be persuaded that there was a Machiavellian plot to find an excuse to make war. Yet there are many in the circles of power in Washington who believe the U.S. should shoot on sight and to kill whenever danger is thought to have appeared- in Iraq, Syria, Libya and, before that, in Vietnam.

: Jonathan Power; OPINION; 19 April 2016

Photo: President Lula giving a speech to recipients of Bolsa Família and other federal assistance programs in Diadema in June 2005. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Brazil’s Great Achievement Must Survive

Viewpoint by Jonathan Power

LUND, Sweden (IDN | INPS) - If worst comes to worst and Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff is deposed and her widely beloved predecessor, Luiz “Lula” da Silva, is discredited they will long be remembered for the “Bolsa Familia”.

This is a government program that has cut Brazil’s once appalling poverty rate by half and reduced the number of poor very sharply to 3% of the population. It reaches 55 million people and 36 million have been lifted out of poverty. It has been such a winner that around sixty countries have sent their experts to study it.

Indeed, it has been so successful politically that we shouldn’t be surprised that if Rousseff is felled by the shenanigans of Congress masses will go out on the street and riot.

: Jonathan Power; SYNDICATION; Individual Journalists; 12 April 2016

Photo: Dilma Rousseff with Lula during the 2010 presidential campaign. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Why Brazil Must Not Fire its President

Viewpoint by Jonathan Power

LUND, Sweden (IDN | INPS) - The Brazilians have an elected president. They must keep her. If Dilma Rosseff is pushed to resign democracy has failed.

Two years ago she won re-election handsomely. That is the source of her mandate. From that she derives her legitimacy. The only thing that could topple her is if hard evidence emerges that she is crook- in her case supposedly stole millions of dollars from the Brazilian oil giant, Petrobras, of which she was once head of the board. Then Congress would be within its rights to discuss her impeachment.

But there is no evidence of her personal corruption – although there is evidence aplenty that her party, The Workers’ Party, has received a lot of black money, not just from Petrobras.

: Jonathan Power; SYNDICATION; Individual Journalists; 06 April 2016

Photo: 2014 Pastoral Visit of Pope Francis to Korea Closing Mass for Asian Youth Day August 17, 2014 Haemi Castle, Seosan-si, Chungcheongnam-do | Credit: Korean Culture and Information Service

When the Pope Turned His Back

Analysis by Jonathan Power

With his focus on economic justice, Pope Francis is still riding a wave of adulation three years into his job. And perhaps it’s deserved, but as leader of the Jesuits and then as bishop and archbishop in Argentina, he failed to publicly denounce the abuses of the military junta. Jonathan Power compares the pope’s silence to the courage of Brazil’s church hierarchy, which stood up to dictatorship. Power urges the pope to explain exactly what went on and how the Argentine church erred. The pope’s admission, Powers argues, would inspire his followers to think more profoundly about moral dilemmas and, perhaps, even help them be braver in the face of evil.

LUND, Sweden (World Policy Journal) - It’s no wonder Pope Francis is still riding a wave of adulation nearly three years into his job: He speaks out against child abuse within the Catholic Church and against homophobia at large; he renounces the panoply, regalia, and bureaucracy that repels so many; he condemns “the idolatry of money” and says “working for a just distribution” of wealth is a “moral obligation.” And sometimes, at midnight, he visits the homeless on the streets of Rome, wearing only a black cassock.

: Jonathan Power; SYNDICATION; Individual Journalists; 03 April 2016

An anti-Erdoğan poster during 2013 Gezi Park protests in Cologne, Germany

Turkey Winding the Clock Back Before the EU Lowers the Drawbridge

Analysis by Jonathan Power

LUND, Sweden (IDN) - In the 1970s there was a cult film, “Midnight Express”, directed by the young Oliver Stone. It was based on the story of an American who was sentenced to 30 years in a Turkish prison for smuggling drugs. It showed in stark reality the total lack of any semblance of human rights or normal human behaviour by the Turkish authorities. It was that impression of Turkey that many of us carried forward, even as Turkey in fact was profoundly changing.

Even today some hold on to what is now a discredited viewpoint, particularly in France, a country that has long made it clear it will obstruct any move to bring Turkey into the European Union. Anti-Turkey feeling exists elsewhere, particularly in Germany which has far more Turkish immigrant workers than any other nation. However, the truth is the Turkey of today is unrecognizable from that of the 1970s. Not least it has become a democracy, albeit a not perfect one.

: Jonathan Power; SYNDICATION; Individual Journalists; 29 March 2016

Listening to Obasanjo on Boko Haram in Nigeria

News Insight by Jonathan Power

LUND, Sweden (IDN) - If there is one man in Africa who combines kindness, authoritarianism of right and rationed proportions with nevertheless a deep commitment to democracy, business proficiency learnt on his now large-scale farms, political nous that outsmarts all competitors, a demanding Christian belief, honed while he was in prison for 3 years under the military dictatorship and a not overdone portion of charisma, it is Olusegun Obasanjo, the man who returned Nigeria, Africa’s most populated country and largest economy, to democracy twice and was himself the elected president for 8 years from 1999 to 2007. No wonder a majority of Nigerians consider the Obasanjo years as the best in Nigeria’s history.

I have to say in my 40 years of being a writer on foreign affairs and interviewing over 60 heads of government he is the one who has impressed me the most, for sheer brainpower, idealism and wisdom.