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February 2000
At the start of the twenty-first century, children in north Korea continue to face death from severe malnutrition. Women do not have rice to feed their babies because the world would rather donate surplus American wheat. US assistance has helped tens of thousands who would otherwise have starved. But food aid now needs to be fine-tuned, more targeted and directed less by the Department of Agriculture whose priority is the interests of American farmers and more by USAID.
Dr Hazel Smith is Reader in International Relations at the University of Warwick. She most recently visited north Korea at the end of last year, and is a consultant on the country to UNICEF and the UN World Food Programme.
On the last day of the millennium, Boris Yeltsin surprised the world by resigning as president of Russia. His action automatically elevated his protégé, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, to the post of acting president. Putin, boosted by the parliamentary elections of 19 December, now looks certain to win the presidential elections, brought forward from June to 26 March. Yeltsinıs move was designed to serve his own interests. It may also serve Russiaıs by shortening the period of uncertainty between the two sets of elections and hastening the time when the conflict in Chechnya can be taken out of the electoral context.
The economic and political crisis of August 1998 severely weakened Boris Yeltsinıs presidency. His main concern thereafter was to leave office with dignity. He looked for a successor who would be both loyal enough to guarantee his own and his familyıs security and popular enough to be electable. This was a difficult equation given the collapse of Yeltsinıs own popularity.
On appointing Vladimir Putin prime minister, Yeltsin announced that this was the man he wished to succeed him as president. Yeltsin had previously avoided this sort of commitment, apart from the occasional jocular hint in the direction of one or another aspiring politician. It seemed a very long shot at the time, and possibly the kiss of death for Putin.
Martin Nicholson is an Associate Fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House. He was previously a Russia specialist in the British diplomatic service.
In one of the paradoxes of Russian politics, Boris Yeltsin had to end his war in hechnya to return as President in 1996. This time, Vladimir Putin has vigorously pursued conflict with the same enemy, apparently enhancing his chance of presidential office. In Yeltsinıs case, media coverage of the battles influenced public opinion, while the current conflict has become part of a worrying information war that has enveloped Russian political life.
Diametrically opposite judgements have been made about the December elections to the State Duma, Russiaıs lower house of parliament. International monitors declared the vote free and fair. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), for example, called them an important step in the countryıs democratic developmentı. Long-term specialists were far more negative. Michael McFaul of the Carnegie Foundation, who has studied every Russian election since 1989, termed this campaign the worst from the point of view of obvious violations of the rulesı. Nowhere were the violations more obvious than in the media. Monitors were appalled at how freedom of speech was used and abused.
Professor Margot Light of the London School of Economics and Political Science, was a member of the European Institute for the Mediaıs monitoring team for the December 1999 parliamentary election.
The hijacking at the turn of the year of an Indian Airlines jet by opponents of Indiaıs administration of Kashmir, has focussed attention again on an increasingly dangerous fault line. As the crisis ended in Kandahar, Afghanistan, the five hijackers disappeared, with three militants whose release from Indian custody they had secured, into an area that some regard as a zone of chaos.
In their recent book, Anticipating the Future, Barry Buzan and Gerald Segal visualised the area west of India Pakistan, Afghanistan and parts of Central Asia becoming a zone of chaosı by 2030. The signs of this are already visible. The Afghanistan-Pakistan area is now the main centre of Islamism, drug trafficking, the illicit trade in small arms and international terrorism.
The last decade has seen the growth there of religious and fundamentalist organisations and terror outfits masquerading as holy warriorsı and freedom fightersı, causing death and destruction.
Dr Mohan Malik is Director of the Defence Studies Programme at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia.
Expectations are high that this year will see the conclusion of a series of deals between Israel and the Arabs which will finally produce a comprehensive peace. This could be the make or break moment for several reasons, mostly to do with the urgency felt by key personalities.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak came to power last year promising to reinvigorate a process which had languished under his predecessor Binyamin Netanyahu. He pledged in particular to achieve an Israeli troop withdrawal from southern Lebanon by the middle of this year. His desire to restart negotiations with Syria, considered a pre-requisite for peace on the Lebanese front, met with a positive response in Damascus.
There, Syrian President Hafez al Assad is purportedly keen to do a deal, which will retrieve the Golan Heights, lost to Israel in the 1967 war, to clear the way for Syria and possibly his son, as his own successor, to embrace a new era.
Dr Rosemary Hollis is Head of the Middle East Programme at Chatham House.
Are wars becoming so precise that force can be delivered with almost surgical accuracy? Or are we likely to continue to witness unspeakable carnage in dirty urban conflicts and from rogue states? The two articles that follow explore the future of war and the moral and ethical basis on which it will be fought.
The Kosovo campaign began a new chapter in the history of war. It was the first war to be real for one side only and remain virtual for the other. For Serb civilians and military forces killed in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) strikes and the thousands of Kosovar Albanians murdered by Serbian paramilitary units, the Kosovo conflict was as real and as horrific as war has always been.
For the citizens of NATO countries and for the pilots who hit targets, the war was virtual: a spectacle witnessed on television or through a gun camera. It was also a virtual war in a legal sense: initiated with neither formal parliamentary declaration nor Security Council approval.
Undertaken in a twilight zone of legality, it achieved an ambiguous end a military technical agreement, guaranteeing the entry of NATO troops and the departure of Serb forces, but leaving the final status of Kosovo entirely undecided. Virtual wars, it seems to follow, can only achieve virtual victories.
Michael Ignatieff is a journalist and broadcaster. His new book, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond is published in London by Chatto and Windus on 17 February. The BBC 2 series Future War begins in Britain on Sunday 12 March at 7:30pm.
Military ethics have become a central issue for policy-makers. The ethical dimensions of military interventions have recently moved further into the political spotlight with the conflicts in Kosovo and Chechnya. But what are military ethicsı? When, if at all, are ethnic cleansing or genocide legitimate military options? Can external military intervention intensify a crisis? Did the apparent success of Operation Allied Force in Kosovo encourage Russia to seek to re-establish total control of the Chechen republic?
The moral and humanitarian dilemmas for the peacekeeping soldier on the ground are immense. The pressure is intensified by scrutiny, quite properly by the chain of command, sometimes by legal representatives and always by the media. Moral as much as legal accountability haunts the military.
Military ethics can be defined as the spirit in which force is used to achieve political ends. In practice, the impact on military operations, planning and rules of engagement often falls short of the theoretical policy goal. The link between ethics and military realities, both strategic and tactical, is not always clear or easy to maintain.
Patrick Mileham,a former army officer, is Lecturer and Governor, University of Paisley.
Dr Lee Willett is Leverhulme Research Fellow at the Centre for Security Studies, University of Hull.
As it took over the presidency of the United Nations Security Council, the United States declared January the month of Africa. The Council prepared to hear about the problems of Burundi from a large gathering of African presidents. Itıs not the first time that new initiatives have been announced for a continent that some describe as forgotten. But will it make a difference, or increase understanding?
Commentators examining the response of Western governments to conflicts in Africa in the 1990s have noted the death of outside engagement. The embarrassing departure of US troops from Somalia, the failure of the United Nations Security Council to respond decisively to the Rwandan genocide, accusations that France continued to support the Hutu génocidaries in Rwanda, claims that the British government privately sanctioned the use of the military company, Sandline International, in Sierra Leone and the humiliating withdrawal of UN peacekeepers from Angola, all pointed to the declining importance of African affairs in the foreign ministries of Western states. Yet Sierra Leone, a small country of just over five million on the West African coast, has been receiving international support since its civil war ended with the signing of the Lomé peace agreement in July 1999.
Comfort Ero is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Defence Studies at Kings College, London.