Category: AA ARTICLES BY ASSOCIATES

Beyond language: Reflections on the Arakan tragedy

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By Richard Falk

Yesterday I listened to the wife of the Prime Minister, Emine Erdogan, speak about her recent harrowing visit to the Rohingya people in the the federal state of Arakan (mainly known in the West as Rakhine) who are located in northwestern Myanmar (aka Burma).
The Rohingya are a Muslim minority numbering over one million, long victimized locally and nationally in Burma and on several occasions over the years their people have been brutally massacred and their villages burned. She spoke in a deeply moving way about this witnessing of acute human suffering shortly after the most recent bloody episode of communal violence in June of this year. She lamented that such an orgy of violence directed at an ethnic and religious minority by the Buddhist majority is almost totally ignored by most of the world, and is quietly consigned by media outlets to their outermost zones of indifference and irrelevance. Read More »

They did it again…

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By Gunnar Westberg

The Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union

The Norwegian Nobel Prize committee has again decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize award to a recipient with the intention to encourage the awardee to work for peace, rather than to reward an accomplishment. 

The founders of the European Union saw it as a peace organization, but since then very little has been done to promote peace or to achieve disarmament. Most important, the EU has not at all worked to diminish the greatest threat to mankind, nuclear war. Two of the dominant members of the EU are nuclear weapon states, and have shown no intention to work to prevent a nuclear Armageddon. The EU has rather discouraged work by its member states against nuclear weapons. The two European countries who have been most active for nuclear abolition, Switzerland and Norway, are not members of the EU.

The Nobel Peace Prize committee members are appointed by the Norwegian Parliament. The Parliament has chosen to appoint mostly politicians. Perhaps that is the reason the members keep rewarding politicians and political organizations? There should be members from peace research institutes and from peace organizations and respected non-political members of the community.

It is simply impossible to see that the European Union meets the requirements in the testament of Alfred Nobel, to give the award to “the one who has worked most or best to promote the brotherhood of men and the decrease or abolition of standing armies or promote peace congresses”.

Turkey: Cyprus, Kurds, Armenia and Syria

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By Johan Galtung

There was a time, a century or so ago, when Turkey was the “sick man of Europe”. Times are a-changing. Today Turkey is quite healthy, and much of Europe is sick, suffering from gross institutional and economic problems, including a flagrant inequality within and between countries, between a creditor and a periphery of debtors in bondage.

This in no way means that Turkey is problem-free; no country is. The focus here is on four problems involving other nations: the Greeks, the Kurds, the Armenians and the many nations in Syria. With an explicit foreign policy of zero problems with neighbors great progress has been made, but much remains to be done.Read More »

The scandal called the Nobel Peace Committee

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By Jan Oberg

Why? The EU is credited with making making peace in the Balkans while it made war in Bosnia unavoidable by prematurely recognizing Slovenia and Croatia out of old Yugoslavia. After that Bosnia could neither sit in Rest-Yugoslavia nor become independent without war.
EU countries are constantly involved in wars and interventions (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria). Two are nuclear weapons powers. The EU Treaty advocates Read More »

Was it wrong to support the Iranian Revolution in 1978 – because it turned out badly?

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By Richard Falk

I have often reflected upon my own experience of the Iranian Revolution. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War I believed that the United States would face its next major geopolitical challenge in Iran: partly because of its role via CIA in overthrowing the Mohammad Mosaddegh elected constitutional government so as to restore the repressive Shah (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi) to power in 1953, partly because there were 45,000 American troops deployed in Iran along with a network of strategic assets associated with Cold War anti-Soviet priorities, partly because there was a generation of young Iranians, many of whom studied abroad, who had experienced torture and abuse at the hands of the SAVAK, Tehran’s feared intelligence service, partly by the intense anti-regime opposition of an alienated middle class in Iran that was angered by the Shah’s reliance on international capital in implementing the ‘White Revolution,’ and partly because the Shah pursued a regionally unpopular pro-Israel and pro-South Africa (during apartheid) policy.

Against this background, and on the basis of my decade long involvement in opposing the American role in Vietnam, I helped form and chaired a small, unfunded committee devoted to promoting human rights and opposing non-intervention in Iran. I was greatly encouraged to do this by several students who were either Iranian or political activists focused on Iran.Read More »

The Balkan wars at 100: Four ways to good neighborhood

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By Johan Galtung

*Keynote Speech, Istanbul, Hacettepe University, 4 October 2012

Empires come and go. The Ottoman-Muslim Empire was among the better whereas the Iberian-Catholic and the European-Protestant were among the worst.

The religions of the kitab were respected and Turkish language was not imposed. Religious-linguistic entities in the Balkans survived, as opposed to those in Latin-Caribbean America. National independence movements succeeded: Greece in 1829, Serbia and Romania in 1878, Bulgaria in 1908, Albania in 1912.

But the nation-states were incomplete. And on October 8, 1912 – a century ago – the Balkan League–Serbia-Bulgaria-Greece-Montenegro–declared war on the Ottoman Empire; and won. Then came the Second Balkan war in 1913, among the victors, Serbia-Greece-Romania against Bulgaria over Macedonia. Bulgaria lost.

Today this all sounds disturbingly familiar; but it is very far from Kant’s “eternal peace”. The wars may be over right now but recent ones have claimed many more lives than the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, estimated at 122,000 killed in action, 20,000 from wounds and 82,000 from disease. Positive peace seems far away; there is only some unstable negative peace.

This keynote will use a four factor formula for positive peace…Read More »

Obama is a great success

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By Jonathan Power

Bar Martin Luther King, Barack Obama is the finest political orator in America’s living memory. His supporters are dumbstruck that in his debate with his challenger for the November 6th vote for the presidency his performance was so weak. He didn’t even mention Mitt Romney’s absurd statement that he has written off 47% of Americans because they depend on some sort of government handouts.

Hopefully Obama can recover this lost ground in the next two debates, one on domestic policy, the other on foreign affairs.Read More »

Sociocide, Palestine and Israel

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By Johan Galtung

Testimony for Russell Tribunal on Palestine – New York City, 7 Oct 2012

Honorable Members of the Jury!

Sociocide is a new concept that has not found its place in positive international law. But Genocide, the unspeakable crime of massive killing of members of a genus, a nation, for no other reason than membership, has. And Ecocide, the unspeakable crime of killing Mother Earth who nourishes us all, is finding its place via the constitutions of some countries in Latin America.

Sociocide, the killing of a society’s capacity to survive and to reproduce itself, should become equally and prominently a crime against humanity.Read More »