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The World Today
March, 1998
Amidst the bluster and brouhaha surrounding United Nations arms inspectors in Iraq, the equally pressing but less visible United Nations humanitarian oil-for-food programme has been virtually ignored by a war-mongering western media. Disproportionate press attention has focused on the mental health of the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, and not enough on the physical health of the Iraqi population who have borne the brunt of a debilitating embargo that has just entered its eighth year. UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, recently recommended a two-and-a-half fold increase in the amount of oil Iraq can sell to purchase vital food and medicines.
Adekeye Adebajo recently served on the UN mission in Iraq. He is a Hamburg research fellow at Stanford University's Centre for International Security and Arms Control and a doctoral student at St. Antony's College, Oxford.
It is not clear what the outcome of the Monica Lewinsky flap will be. At one point, President Clinton's presidency seemed to be in danger. Even impeachment was considered a serious possibility. But after the President's (moderately) successful State of the Union speech and Mrs Clinton's brilliant performance on NBC's 'Today' show, Bill Clinton's popularity was at its highest level. So the President may have put the scandal behind him, especially as the Special Prosecutor, Judge Starr, has been unsuccessful in some of his moves. On the other hand, luck may turn against the President again. This therefore is a good moment to put aside the details, and look at the developments in American political culture that have made such an extraordinary episode possible, and make future episodes of more or less the same kind almost inevitable.
Godfrey Hodgson is Director of the Reuter Foundation Programme at Green College, Oxford.
The first victims of Asia's economic crisis are the millions of migrant workers whose labour is no longer required by the region's erstwhile 'tigers'. Their repatriation raises serious political, economic and social issues for citizens and states in both home and host countries. The migrant's plight reveals the human dimensions of the crisis masked by other economic indicators.
Shanti Nair is a Visiting Fellow at the Asia Research Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science.
East Asia's economic turmoil was set in train in July 1997 by the decision to float the Thai Baht. That currency sank like a stone, taking a number of other regional currencies with it and producing acute economic adversity highlighted by cases of chronic indebtedness. Such a dire condition prompts the question whether corresponding turbulent political outcomes may follow, especially as East Asia's economic success has been based on political stability.
Michael Leifer is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science and directs its newly established Asia Research Centre. He is also on the Council of Chatham House.
Sudan's civil war is being fought on a 'fault line' between Arabic and Islamic states to the north and black Africa -- with greater Christian influence -- to the south. Now that superpower rivalries are out of the way, regional influences are reasserting themselves. African solutions are being promoted as the best alternatives to more destruction and disintegration of the state.
Francis M. Deng is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington, and was Foreign Minister of Sudan from 1976-1980.
Does Europe have a foreign policy? The British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, equipped with a new ethical approach, clearly hopes it does. As president of the European Union, he's tussling with the carnage in Algeria, which continues to claim innocent lives. Mr Cook may have chosen an issue which allows him to use a powerful tool of Union policy: inter-regional cooperation.
Hazel Smith is Director of the University of Kent's London Centre of International Relations. The author of European Union Foreign Policy and Central America (Macmillan, 1995), she is completing The Foreign Policy of the European Union for Macmillan.
The stream of cooperative and disarmament initiatives launched by President Boris Yeltsin in Stockholm towards the end of last year was more than one of his habitual public relations exercises. It was an attempted departure from Russia's previous politicalcourse in the Baltic region. For at least five years Moscow has been so defensive and inflexible that most analysts had given up hope of positive development.
Pavel K. Baev is a Senior Researcher at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO) and the Editor of Security Dialogue.
The Caspian Sea has some of the world's biggest unexploited reserves of oil, but to whom does it belong? Conflicts in the region have claimed many lives; an oil war would be much worse. A new proposal offers a neat division of the disputed waters and clears the lines for export pumping to increase.
Richard R. Dion is Director of Economic Research at the Centre for American-Eurasian Studies and Relations in Washington, DC. He is currently based in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
Book Reviews
Professor Michael Cox (University of Aberystwyth) reviews Defining the National Interest by Peter Trubowitz.