By Jonathan Power
There can be no question that if President Bashar al-Assad of Syria falls the International Criminal Court will want to put him on trial for war crimes. The long arm of international law will reach him wherever he flees to. The ICC has an unblemished record in bringing to The Hague, the Court’s headquarters, the people they want. As the great heavyweight boxer, Joe Louis, once said, “You can run but you can’t hide”.
This week a new term begins for the justices. Read More »
By Jonathan Power
The vigour of the recent elections in Mexico suggests that despite the massive number of drug related killings Mexico is not yet a “mafia-state”. The government remains the primary source of both political power and economic patronage. The mafia king-pins can dominate a town here or there, intimidate a regional government and assassinate policemen and journalists. But this doesn’t make it a mafia state, as some commentators suggest. It is a state which is still in control of its own destiny and one which with some bold decisions can probably get on top of what is an intolerable surge of criminality. Read More »
By Jonathan Power
The current belief of the government of Barack Obama is that there are two major fault lines in the world – one in the Middle East and one in the so-called “failing states”. “From Africa to Central Asia to the Pacific rim nearly 60 countries stand on the brink of conflict or collapse. These failed states are the perfect incubators for extremism and terror”, President Obama has said.
But is this true? The evidence suggests it manifestly is not as a general case although obviously Al Qaeda’s operations in deeply troubled Afghanistan and Pakistan (which some say is heading towards becoming a failed state) suggest that there has been some truth in the assertion.Read More »
By Jonathan Power
Last week as we watched Mitt Romney win the right to challenge Barack Obama in November’s general election the last thing that most people were thinking about were sea and oceans. Yet the last Republican president, George W. Bush, at this point in the electoral cycle announced that, if elected, he would move to ratify the UN’s Law of the Sea. He never did. But also last week Secretary of State Hillary Clinton flanked by the senior brass from the military announced that this Administration was immediately going to push Congress to vote for the long delayed ratification of the treaty.
All the road blocks of the last thirty years since President Reagan decided to torpedo the treaty have been removed and Congress is poised to give the White House the green light on ratification. Read More »
By Richard Falk
The Houla Massacre of a week ago in several small Muslim villages near the Syrian city of Homs underscores the tragic circumstances of civilian vulnerability to the brutal violence of a criminal government. Reliable reports confirm that most of the 108 civilians who died in Houla were executed at close range in cold blood, over 50 of whom were children under the age of 10.
It is no wonder that the Houla Massacre is being called ‘a tipping point’ in the global response to this latest horrifying outbreak of Syrian violence, a process that started over 15 months ago. The chilling nature of this vicious attack that refused to spare the most innocent among us, young children, does seem like a point of no return. Read More »
By Richard Falk
Can anyone doubt that if there were more than 1300 hunger strikers in any country in the world other than Palestine, the media in the West would be obsessed with the story? It would be featured day after day, and reported on from all angles, including the severe medical risks associated with such a lengthy refusal to take food.
At this time two Palestinians who were the first to start this current wave of resistance, Thaer Halaheh and Bilal Diab, entering their 64th day without food, are reported by the prisoner protection association, Addameer, and the NGO, Physician for Human Rights-Israel, to be in critical condition with their lives hanging in the balance. Despite this dramatic state of affairs there is scant attention in Europe, and literally none in North America.Read More »
By Richard Falk
From all that we know Charles Taylor deserves to be held criminally accountable for his role in the atrocities committed in Sierra Leone during the period 1998-2002. Taylor was then President of Liberia, and did his best to encourage violent uprisings against the governments in neighboring countries so as to finance his own bloody schemes and extend his regional influence.
It was in Sierra Leone that ‘blood diamonds,’ later more judiciously called ‘conflict diamonds’ were to be found in such abundance as to enter into the lucrative world trade, with many of these diamonds finding their way onto the shelves of such signature jewelry stores as Cartier, Bulgari, and Harry Winston, and thereby circumventing some rather weak international initiatives designed to prevent this outcome.Read More »
By Johan Galtung
Washington, DC
One wonders what the US political leaders want. The incumbent lives in this world, playing an ultra-realist game: extra-judicial executions in maybe 70 countries, drone attacks; minimizing US losses, maximizing direct hits at what he sees as the problem, concrete identified individuals, not concrete unidentified conflicts. He has neither the moral nor the intellectual courage to do that.
The challengers, with one exception, are focusing on one issue: down with the welfare state. Ron Paul, the libertarian, adds: down with the warfare state. He has registered Vietnam-Afghanistan-Iraq and the next in line, Iran-Syria, as unwinnable and unaffordable for a bankrupt economy. Young Republicans and others flock to him, but his discourse is too unusual. Warfare, not welfare makes sense. This has to do with the relation to conflict, a three-headed problem: attitude, behavior, contradiction. The USA wants an attitude of love for the USA, military response to evil people who do not and act on that, and contradiction, incompatibility are outside the thinkable. The deep culture of good vs evil and Armageddon for the latter take over.
Well, does it? The reader is invited to look at the scheme below.Read More »
By Stephen Zunes
Gareth Evans, a former attorney-general and foreign minister in Australia, threatened me because I raised the issue of his support for the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia.
I have rarely ever come face to face – only inches in fact – with such anger. Certainly not at an academic conference. And certainly not from such a prominent figure: chancellor of Australian National University, former attorney-general and foreign minister, former head of the International Crisis Group, and one of the world’s most prominent global thinkers.
Yet here I was with Gareth Evans, cursing at me, ripping my badge off, and threatening to punch me in the face.Read More »
By Richard Falk
As with Khader Adnan, Israel supposedly compromised with Hana Shalabi on the 43rd day of her hunger strike in protest against administrative detention and her abysmal treatment. But Israel’s concept of ‘compromise’ if considered becomes indistinguishable from the imposition of a further ‘vindictive punishment.’
How else to interpret Israel’s unlawful order to coercively exile (not technically deportation because she is being sent to a location within occupied Palestine) Hana Shalabi for three years to the Gaza Strip, far from her home village of Burqin in the northern part of the West Bank, and more significantly, far from her grief-struck family? Read More »
TFF Associates Blog 2011-2017 