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August/September 1999
NATO’s fiftieth anniversary summit in Washington last April had been intended to be a full-scale celebration of a half century of security success in Europe. Instead, as the alliance became deeply mired in the Kosovo War, the entire event was scaled down to a much more political occasion, focussing almost exclusively on the need to maintain alliance solidarity. Faced with potentially damaging splits within its political and military elite, and strong public opposition in several member states, especially Italy and Spain, NATO sought to maintain unity as it escalated the air war against Serbia.
Paul Rogers is Professor of Peace Studies at Bradford University, where he works mainly on the changing causes of international insecurity.
A week is a long time in politics. At present, in East Timor, a day can be an eternity. Having been frozen on the international agenda for almost a quarter of a century, events are now moving very quickly.
On 5 May this year, an agreement was signed at the United Nations in New York between the UN, Portugal and Indonesia, paving the way for a vote in August by East Timorese aged seventeen and over on whether to accept a special autonomy arrangement for their territory within the Republic of Indonesia. A rejection of that proposal clears the way for East Timorese independence.
Keith Suter is Director of Studies of the International Law Association (Australian Branch) and author of East Timor, West Papua/ Irian and Indonesia (London: Minority Rights Group, 1997).
While attention has been focussed on the Indo-Pakistan confrontation over Kashmir and efforts to prevent a wider conflict between the world’s newest nuclear powers, the battle within Pakistan has largely gone unnoticed. This ‘other war’ is the result of a widening crackdown on dissent by an increasingly authoritarian government led by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. His administration has used its presumed electoral mandate to enhance and deploy coercive power to muzzle criticism on a scale that has left democracy impoverished.
By mixing religion with politics, the Sharif administration has reignited the clash between liberals who seek to strike a balance between Islamic and modern values, and religious conservatives who want to push the country towards a theocracy.
This echoes past debates and conflict, whose nature and intensity have varied. But the present clash has acquired a new and unpredictable edge with the fallout from the Taliban phenomenon in neighbouring Afghanistan.
Dr Maleeha Lodhi, Editor of The News, Pakistan’s leading English daily paper, was Ambassador to the US from 1994 to 1997 under the government of Benazir Bhutto and the caretaker administration of President Leghari.
Do workers have the right to expect international companies, or their subsidiaries, to apply the best health and safety standards in all their world-wide activities? If enterprises cause injury or environmental damage, should the parent company be responsible? And can legal action against those parent companies protect workers abroad?
A series of cases in the English courts over the last few years has raised the profile of issues of transnational responsibility, generating intense debate within government, the legal community and non-governmental organisations.
Halina Ward, who is Senior Research Fellow in the Energy and Environmental Programme at Chatham House, is beginning a research project into the issues raised in this article.
Like a host of other micro-states which are predominantly tax havens and offshore finance centres, the Channel Islands have been identified by a variety of agencies, including the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention, the European Union and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, as global problems. In the estimation of the OECD, they are sufficiently threatening to merit inclusion on a hit list of islands in the sun. What has happened to bring these obscure statelets under international scrutiny?
The tourism campaign for jersey, largest of the British Channel Islands, proclaims this tiny island as ‘A World Apart’. Photographs of craggy inlets and empty beaches reinforce the image of a place disconnected in time and space from neighbouring mainland European states. Seen from the metropolitan viewpoint, however, the notion of ‘A World Apart’ has acquired an altogether less attractive image.
John Christensen is Director of Economics of Menas Associates. He was previously Economic Adviser to the States of Jersey.
Dr Mark Hampton is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics, University of Portsmouth, and co-editor of Offshore Finance Centres and Tax Havens: the Rise of Global Capital (London: Macmillan. 1999).
The new Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Barac, searching for a ‘Peace of the Brave’, promises to withdraw his forces from southern Lebanon within a year. But the issue is linked to the dispute with Syria over the Golan Heights. Lebanon, by insisting on an unconditional withdrawal, is determined that it should not be part of the wider peace process.
The latest cycle of violence culminating in Israeli air raids over Lebanon, targeting bridges and electrical infrastructure, highlights the irony of Israel’s demands for security guarantees before it withdraws from the territory it illegally occupies in the south of the country. Given Israeli aggression against Lebanon over the past twenty years, it is obvious that Lebanon and not Israel is in urgent need of that kind of guarantee.
Nadim Shehadi is Director of the Centre for Lebanese Studies at Oxford. He is co-editor of Lebanon on Hold: Implications for Middle East Peace, published by RIIA in 1996.
Since the end of the Cold War there’s been an epidemic of elections. But has the sudden profusion of choice produced greater democracy, and what effect has it had on the people and states that have opted for the ballot box?
The collapse of the soviet union signalled that authoritarian governments were a thing of the past. The end of the Cold War swept away the certainties that had produced the mentality of a generation. There were no new real or imagined truths that could easily replace them. Freedom, democracy and human rights became the fundamental reference points for the former UN Secretary-General and for many in the West, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The democratic idea—at least in the sense that people had the right to choose their own rulers—had won.
Dr Anita Inder Singh is a fellow in the Centre for International Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research and a forthcoming book are funded by the Suntory-Toyota International Centre for Economics and Related Disciplines and the Leverhulme Trust.
Fifty years ago, a new set of Geneva Conventions extended international protection to civilians in occupied territories and widened the scope of intervention of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Now, in some parts of the world, a warrior culture is making that protection difficult to deliver.
Since the collapse of the soviet union and the end of superpower rivalry, the notion of spheres of influence has been weakened and transformed. Even if powerful countries still pay attention to what happens in Africa, for example, they are less inclined to see regional conflicts as opportunities to extend their power. More important still, perhaps, the nuisance value of such disputes has greatly diminished. Conflicts in far-off countries have certainly lost the potential they had during the Cold War for triggering major international crises involving countries of the northern hemisphere.
Urs Boegli is Head of ICRC Media Services in Geneva.
This August is the fiftieth anniversary of the four 1949 Geneva Conventions, concluded just after the end of World War Two. They established the international criminal liability of people committing certain acts, defined as grave breaches of the Convention, and otherwise known as war crimes.
Following the horrors of the war, and the unsatisfactory criminal processes of the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals—‘arguably instances of victor’s justice’ according to Lawrence Weschler in this book—states agreed to actively seek and exercise universal jurisdiction over such people. If, to cite Weschler again, the Conventions have proven ‘at best of only middling effectiveness’ in regulating warfare, the commitment to use the law to punish and deter war crimes committed wherever and by whomever, fell into abeyance almost as soon as it was articulated.
Dr Lynn Welchman is Director of the Centre of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law at the School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London.