Category: Reconciliation & forgiveness

ISIS – Negotiations, not bombing

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By Johan Galtung

Johan Galtung

More senseless bombing of Muslims, more defeats for USA-West, more ISIS-type movements, more West-Islam polarization. Any way out?

“ISIS, Islamic State in Iraq-Syria, appeals to a Longing for the Caliphate” writes TFF Associate Farhang Jahanpour in an IPS column. For the Ottoman Caliphate with the Sultan as Caliph – the Shadow of God on Earth – after the 1516-17 victories all over till the collapse of both Empire and Caliphate in 1922, at the hands of the allies England-France-Russia.

Imagine the collapse of the Vatican, not Catholic Christianity, at the hands of somebody, Protestant or Orthodox Christians, meaning Anglo-Americans or Russians, or Muslims. A center in this world for the transition to the next, headed by a Pope, the apostolic successor to The Holy Spirit, an emanation of God in Heaven. Imagine it gone.

And imagine that they who had brought about the collapse had a tendency to bomb, invade, conquer, dominate Catholic countries, one after the other, like after 2 Bush wars in Afghanistan-Iraq, 5 Obama wars in Pakistan-Yemen-Somalia-Libya-Syria, and “special operations”.

Would we not predict [1] a longing for the Vatican, and [2] an extreme hatred of the perpetrators? Fortunately, it did not happen.

But it happened in the Middle East: leaving a trauma fueled by killing hundreds of thousands.

The Sykes-Picot England-France agreement of 16 May 1916 led to Read More »

Hong Kong and beyond

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By Johan Galtung

Johan Galtung

Beijing should listen to its own excellent mantra: “One Country, Two Systems”. A part of that other system is democracy. England never practiced that during 150 years of conquest and colonialism – also fearing Hong Kong might vote themselves into independence from UK – but that low standard is no excuse.

And democracy today rides on an expanding agenda, much more than periodic fair and free multi-party national elections which China does not practice, for its own reasons.

China experiments with local democracy and Hong Kong is local. Democracy today moves in favor of direct election of the Chief Executive; in the Hong Kong case governor, in 2017. That means having a choice among candidates with different visions, not a governor appointed, be that by Beijing or by the governing council of Hong Kong.Read More »

TFF PressInfo 282: Instead of bombing ISIS – Concrete proposals (Part B)

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By Jan Oberg, TFF

Jan Oberg

Lund, Sweden October 7, 2014

Part A – Some principles (yesterday) here

This two-part PressInfo offers a pro-peace perspective on the present war on ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

First some principles to stimulate another discourse, another way of thinking that is not militarist – and then the concrete proposals below – 27 in all for your deliberation, discussion with friends and perhaps to share through your social and other media.

The proposals are not numbered – there is no linearity, some of it can be done simultaneously.

How to make the bombing and wars irrelevant

Stop the financing of ISIS – sadly it is non-democratic allies of the West – Saudi-Arabia, Qatar, UAE etc – that seem to pay its bills. Joe Biden apologised – for being truthful.

Allegedly, ISIS has an income of US$ 3 million per day from oil resources they now control. Oil fields should have been protected at an early stage. Fire your intelligence service leaders if they did not see this coming.

Instead of starting out with war, declare yourself willing to talk with some representatives of ISIS and other conflict parties. Some of them have been trained by the U.S. so they are obviously possible to talk with. And if not, you take it from there.

Recognise – even apologise – for wrong deeds and mistakes and brutalities you have yourself committed. In the case of Iraq this is particularly relevant because the invasion, occupation and 13 years of world history’s most brutal sanctions have killed about 1 million innocent Iraqis and made 4 millions to flee their homes.

Danish poet and philosopher Piet Hein has said it beautifully: ”The nobel art of losing face may one day save the human race and turn into eternal merit what weaker minds would call a disgrace.” Don’t be that weaker mind – because, if so, you will over time become a mirror image of those terrorists you are fighting – a disgrace.

Deploy a robust, impartial, globally composed UN-led force Read More »

TFF PressInfo 281: Instead of bombing IS (Part A)

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By Jan Oberg

Jan Oberg

PressInfo 281 – Part A here.

This two-part article offers a pro-peace perspective on the present war on ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

First some principles to stimulate another discourse, another way of thinking that is not militarist – and then some concrete proposals – 27 in all for your deliberation, discussion with friends and perhaps to share through your social and other media.

Neither war nor doing nothing

The principle of ”An eye for an eye will one day make the whole world blind” – said Mohandas K. Gandhi who was born on October 2 145 years ago. Since then, human civilisation has not advanced much when it comes to handling conflict.

Let’s recognise that it is a difficult situation – the Middle East is in a mess and the West is deeply co-responsible if you look at the last roughly 100 years – Sykes-Picot, Balfour, coup d’etats, occupations, bombings, bases, oil greed etc.

So, there are no easy solutions.

However, three simple principles will help us all:
A) Be aware of the West’s co-responsibility,
B) Don’t make everything even worse – and
C) Remember that violence begets hate, wish for revenge and more violence – blowbacks.

Unfortunately, A to C is totally ignored by the bombing nations – the US, France, Britain, Belgium and my native Denmark together with some small Arab states which paradoxically have financed ISIS – Al-Qaeda in Iraq – for years.

It is easy to be for war. Read More »

TFF PressInfo: Support Richard Branson’s Ukraine dialogue initiative

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TFF PressInfo 273

By Jan Oberg, TFF co-founder

Jan Oberg

Lund, Sweden August 22, 2014

We are drifting towards a new Cold War. The reason isn’t substance because there is no reason we should not be able to live in peace in Europe – if we want and educated ourselves in handling problems.

No, the reason is the woefully incompetent way in which politicians and media focus on violence and ignore the underlying conflict and civil means – yes yes, of course there are exceptions.

Escalation doesn’t create peace

Here is just one example – NATO S-G Anders Fogh Rasmussen and NATO’s supreme commander General Breedlove (funny name given his anything but loving views coming rather from a Strangelove …) in the Wall Street Journal.

They tell you about all the escalation they have already done Read More »

TFF PressInfo: Leadership change needed in Israel

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By Johan Galtung

Johan Galtung

Lund, Sweden August 15, 2014

Like so many, like millions, this author’s heart is bleeding for the killed and bereaved in Gaza – so disturbingly similar to the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 and Warsaw 1944. With Arab and Western governments doing nothing; like the Red Army in 1944.

But the latter was heading for Berlin. And the West uses Ukraine as a distraction, trying to hit Moscow.

Like Rabbi Michael Lerner, my non-Jewish heart is also bleeding for Judaism and the Israel that could have been.

The present regime is a traitor to both, driving into the abyss.

Yet they have parliamentary and democratic, voter, support? Except that parliaments are not infallible, democracies can be wrong; even more so if the people think they have a divine mandate.

England, the mother of parliaments, once thought it had; colonized 25% of the world and is now hanging on to the “united kingdom”.

The USA still feels covenanted to the Lord but is lording over less and less; Japan suffers from similar Sun Goddess delusions.

So does the present Israeli regime, but there is enough sanity left.

By “pathology” it is meant not only the megalomaniac-paranoid component but the deficient sense of reality. Particularly:

Pathology 1: The delusion of victory being feasible.Read More »

TFF PressInfo: Use Malaysia’s MH17 to make peace instead

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By Jan Oberg, TFF director

Jan Oberg

Tragic misuse of a tragedy

The government of Ukraine as well as the separatists, NATO/U.S. and very many leading Western mainstream media seem all to know who has caused the tragedy. Putin believes it was caused indirectly by the West.

Given the fact that very few, if any, people or institutions can know who did it with enough details, data and precision to accuse anyone, the MH17 tragedy has been misused to an extent that can itself only be termed tragic.

The misuse is tragic because it is a catastrophe for close to 300 people, their relatives and friends. Silence – of both verbal and military weapons – and empathy would have been appropriate.

Anyone pointing fingers and calling it a terrorist act at this point is irresponsibly or should present convincing evidence.

Secondly, the blame game makes the necessary road to peace and security even more difficult.

An All Party Peace Process should come out of MH17 and the civil war

It would have been so much more civilised to use the MH 17 tragedy to say:Read More »

Three elections, three reactions: Ukraine, Egypt and Syria

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By Farhang Jahanpour

On Friday 27 June, Ukraine’s new president Petro Poroshenko signed a trade and economic pact with the European Union. It was the same deal that his predecessor, Viktor Yanukovych, was prepared to sign in November 2013 provided that he could also maintain economic links with Russia, but he eventually backed out from signing it due to US and EU insistence that he had to choose between the two.

That event led to violent street demonstrations that forced Yanukovych to flee, pushing his troubled country towards upheaval and a virtual civil war.

On Thursday 26 June, President Obama requested $500 million from Congress to train and arm what the White House called “appropriately vetted” members of the Syrian opposition to fight against President Bashar Assad.

This is despite the fact that the insurgents fighting in Syria have morphed into Al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra and even into ISIS, the Islamic State in Syria and Sham or greater Syria that has overrun parts of both Syria and Iraq and has been even disowned by Al-Qaeda for being too violent!

A week earlier, during a tour of the Middle East, US Secretary of State John Kerry met with the new Egyptian President, the former Army Chief, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, pledging American help and support for his government. Officials accompanying Kerry on the trip told reporters that Washington had quietly restored all but about 78 million dollars of the 650 million dollars of US aid to Egypt earlier this month.

Kerry told reporters in Cairo after meeting Sisi that he was “absolutely confident” that all of the aid would soon be restored. (1) Washington has provided Cairo with an average of about 1.3 million dollars in military aid annually over the past three decades as part of the Camp David Accord signed by the late President Muhammad Anwar Sadat and the late Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at Camp David under President Jimmy Carter.

As it happens, there have been elections in all the three countries in June, and it is useful to study the circumstances surrounding those elections and the West’s reactions to those elections.Read More »

Aage Bertelsen (1901 – 1980) – Danish educator for peace

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By Jan Oberg & Johan Galtung*

Lund and Kuala Lumpur, July 2014

Introduction

He was a tall man and a great man, a visionary, pacifist, civil resister, educator and philosopher. He took life more seriously than most and he could be playful and fun like a child. His life’s guiding principle was ”Engage in your time!” and while he wrote and talked a lot he also did it. His name was Aage Bertelsen, he was born in Denmark in 1901 and died on August 15, 1980.

Bertelsen’s imprint on history is two-fold. First, with his wife Gerda he was a prime mover of one of the groups, the Lyngby Group, which organised the rescue of altogether 7.220 Danish Jews into safety in Sweden in October 1943 during the German occupation of Denmark – more here. The Lyngby Group – Lyngby is north of Copenhagen – got about 1.000 of these in safety by organising their nightly transport onboard small fisher boats over the Sound between Denmark and Sweden.

In this he deserves a place in international contemporary history for its humanity, civil courage and as an example of non-violent struggle against occupation.

Secondly, Bertelsen was an educator of and for peace. His life work educational efforts included his family and friends, his pupils over 22 years at the Aarhus Cathedral School in Aarhus, Denmark, the general public as well as national and international leaders.

He lived in pre-Internet times and very little is publicly available today about this renaissance man. From two rather different, but compatible, perspectives we’ve taken it upon us to remind the world about him – friends and colleagues of his as we happen to be.

Headmaster Aage Bertelsen in 1961 Photo: Elfeldt, Copenhagen

 

Why now, over 30 years after his death? Read More »

Seven Roads to Happiness

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By Johan Galtung

… Would be the title in English of a book this author just published in Norwegian, Syv veier til lykke (Oslo: Kolofon 2014); with excellent photos by Aase Marie Faldalen. And, very befitting for a book with that title: the book quickly made it to the Top 10 on a best-seller list, of course as No. 7. There will be translations but have a peek here and now.

Why does a peace researcher, concerned with peace theory and practice, write a “how-to” book about happiness, well-being? Read More »