'Since
I was born, I've never seen such hunger'.
Andrew Meldrum in Nkayi, south-western
Zimbabwe, reports on the famine and US
intervention
sackings
threaten boycott of Israeli universities
Israeli
boycott divides academics Suzanne
Goldenberg and Will Woodward: The
decision of Mona Baker, a professor at
Manchester Institute of Technology, to
removed two academics from their roles on
journals she edits, simply because they
are Israelis, brings the wider boycott of
Israeli universities into question.
Ethics
and academic boycotts Hilary Rose,
co-drafter of the boycott petition,
acknowledges the difficulties.
Sussex's racist professor:
a debate on academic freedom
'There's
nothing wrong with racism' condemned
by University and faculty
Gurminder
Bhambra: 'This last week I have had to think in terms of
the colour of my skin and I can tell you that it’s not pleasant to do
so. Academic freedom is about the healthy exchange
of ideas but it can not be separated from the practices that are
legitimated and justified through their promulgation. Therefore any move
to protect academic freedom simultaneously protects the practices that are
associated with those ideas. As members of a community we have a
responsibility for how that community is constructed and develops – we
need to move away from idea that if something is academic it is irrelevant
– academic debate has consequences and academic freedom entails
responsibilities.' See full speech
Martin
Shaw: 'The
problem here is that we can't always
make a clear distinction between
'matters related to our research' and
others. The basic principle is that
knowledge is indivisible. A 'university'
assumes the universality of knowledge.
Rather than a sharp division there is a
gradation from subjects we have directly
researched, through subjects on which we
keep up with the research
literature, through cognate subjects
with which we have a nodding
acquaintance, to subjects which we have
no real claim to have studied, but may
follow more or less as intelligent
laypeople. However an academic has a
duty to apply a scholarly attitude to
all of these, and should keep this
in mind in expressing views
involving any or all of them. The
problem with Sampson is not that he
expresses views on subjects remote from
his direct research interests but that
he has embraced some of the more dubious
scholarship on race and has used it
sloppily on his website. I likewise
am not a scholar of racial
issues in a direct
way although I have studied some of
the abuses of race (in genocide, for
example) more systematically. But I
have a passing acquaintanceship with
academic debates on race and
intelligence and have come to opposite
conclusions from Sampson. As a scholar
as well as a citizen I feel able to
express my views on race with some
authority, and want to claim the
protection of academic freedom in so
doing. I would want to be able
to do so even if other people
thought I was wrong, as we think that
Sampson is wrong. I would want my
critics to point out why I was sloppy or
wrong, as John Maynard Smith, John
Drury and others did [of Sampson]
at the meeting, rather than to demand
that I be sacked for propagating
erroneous views.' See
full debate with Gurminder Bhambra
Nigeria
eyewitness
account of the armory massacre in Lagos Tony
Eneh: 'The morning after, the banks of the
canal were like scenes from the Holocaust.
Bodies, bodies and more bodies! Some mangled
beyond recognition, others with terror
affixed on their faces in morbid stares. ...
So many lives have been lost, others
traumatized from a few hours of a
"bombing accident". How much more
negative the effect of war?'
|
in
the Tribunal,
a key figure in Serbian Krajina regime
details the command structures of
Milosevic's Greater Serbia project.
Petritsch
Sheds Light on Rambouillet Mirko Klarin:
How, contrary to left-wing myth, it was the
Serbian dictator who blocked agreement on
Kosovo at the Rambouillet conference
The
case of the missing witnesses 'Why are key US officials involved
in the international bid to solve the
Kosovo
crisis absent from the witness list in the
Milosevic trial?'
Colombia
Priorities
for peace Mariano Aguirre argues that
Colombia's newly elected president needs to
put top priority on promoting peace talks,
and that a path of increased force could
lead to failure and even greater violence.
India's
Hindu fascism
'Democracy:
Who's she when she's at home?' Arundhati
Roy's blistering attack; SEE ALSO comment
on India-Pakistan at justpeace
Venezuala
after the coup Edgardo
Lander:
un diálogo por la inclusión social y la
profundización de la democracia
Milosevic
trial follow it with Tribunal
Update text
service or via streaming
audio - available
(with half hour delay) via Domovina
Net, FreeSerbia
and at the UN's
Tribunal website. The UN webpages which
are presently available in the English and
Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian languages, but will
be extended with Albanian- and
French-language pages - and audio. Read the International
Tribunal's indictment and IWPR's The
Case Against Milosevic
Milosevic
challenged by Racak survivors
Slobodan
Milosevic accuses the West of fabricating a
massacre at Racak as a pretext for NATO
intervention. One reporter at the scene
recalls the survivors' testimony. By Gordana
Igric
'ethnic
cleansing'+mass executions=genocide Mirko
Klarin of IWPR analysed the implications of
the historic first conviction for genocide,
of Serbian general Krstic for his role at
Srebrenica
prosecuting
for humanity Ed Vulliamy's full Guardian Unlimited interview
with former Hague Prosecutor Nancy Paterson,
who helped compile the Milosevic indictment
TV
station bombing
On October 24,
2001,
five families and one survivor brought a landmark case before
the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, seeking
redress for office workers, employees of Radio Television
Serbia, who were killed or injured when NATO bombed their
building at the height of the 1999 Kosovo campaign.
Coming before the court when the NATO allies have bombed
civilian targets in Afghanistan, another non-member state of
the Council of Europe, the case could resonate well beyond
Europe. Details at www.iwpr.net
a criminal entity?
Dr. Kasim Trnka,
professor of constitutional law at the University of Sarajevo,
writes at iwpr.net:
'The indictment against Slobodan
Milosevic for war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina brings charges
not just against Milosevic but against Republika Srpska itself. If
the accusations are upheld, they could provide a legal basis for
challenging the Dayton Peace Agreement which established the Serbian
entity - the argument being that it is a political unit specifically
created with criminal purpose and through criminal means.The
evidence testifies that the plans of the former Belgrade regime to
preserve Yugoslavia as a "Greater Serbia" included
preparing, planning, organising and implementing genocide over the
non-Serb population on the territories expected to join such a
state.'
Pinochet
Pinochet:only the beginning
Juan
E Garces,
Geoffrey Bindman,
Isabel Hilton on the background to the
pathbreaking Pinochet indictment, from Open
Democracy
Cambodia
Rwanda: genocide
and America
Samantha Power:
Bystanders
to Genocide and responses
from Michael Barnett, Alan J Kuperman
comment
on
world events and the views you read on this
site - email
us your response
justpeace
our special
area on the global spread of war after 911 covers
current events in India-Pakistan, Israel-Palestine
and the US 'war on terrorism'
|
The
killing of Pim Fortuyn, the leader of the
eponymous political party (List PF), has sent
shock waves across Europe and certainly has left
Holland in a state of stunned amazement and deep
political crisis. Fortuyn was an unusual leader of
a more commonplace right-wing, anti-immigrant
groundswell that is mounting in Europe. He was no
neo-nazi but should be seen as an extremely self-centred
opportunist, who in the 1970s was as easily part
of the left, Marxist academic scene as he was to
be, in the year before he was assassinated, a
sudden star on the political firmament from the
opposite angle. In the meantime, he had been a
public speaker, a maverick newsweekly columnist
and briefly before his emergence at the head of a
populist revolt against established
politics-as-usual, even tried to have the
Christian Democratic party solve its leadership
crisis by turning to… Pim Fortuyn. His personal
idiosyncrasies also soon ended his brief stint as
a candidate for Leefbaar Nederland, ‘liveable
Holland’, launched a few years ago by a rowdy
café singer. This populist party had had local
success but was not willing to subscribe to
Fortuyn’s public statements on Islam.
Fortuyn
may have been an odd character, a bit out of
character even as a right-winger, for instance by
his advocacy of civil liberties; appalled as he
was over the fact that homosexual friends of his
were being harassed by young immigrant schoolboys.
But there is no need to be uncertain about his
backers and followers. His backers included shady
real estate developers and disgraced former
politicians and journalists; his followers, who
turned out to give him 35 per cent in the
Rotterdam municipal elections and were expected to
have given him some 20 per cent of the national
vote in the elections of the 15th of
May, were fed up with the general climate of
insecurity and lack of a firm response to mounting
petty crime by the current government. So whilst
Fortuyn was certainly not a member of the neonazi
strand in European politics, the voters who
embraced him were part of the broader European
trend that also backed Le Pen and the even more
successful Philip DeWinter in Belgium. And let us
not forget that in Italy or Austria, there is no
need to fear a neonazi movement destabilising the
government because they are in it already, with
one leg or both.
What
should be said about this phenomenal rise of a new
political star and his dramatic disappearance from
the scene that has not been said yet?
First
of all, the fear of rising extremism. We too often
forget that people are already exposed to an
extremism that creates the very insecurity that
other, less respectable and less legitimate
extremisms capitalise on. This is the extremism of
the market. If insecurity is the issue, we might
remind ourselves of the fact that due to decades
of neoliberal economic policies involving a
decline in stable employment as well as
privatisation and subsequent downscaling of public
services, daily life for the greater mass of the
population in the West has become profoundly
insecure. Loss of secure jobs, loss of secondary
benefits including protection against illness or
joblessness or old age or inflation, replaced by
flexibilisation of the labour market and unhinging
the social security system. In general there has
occurred a corrosion of the public
sphere—whether in public transport, health or
education. Step by step the sense of being
protected from adversity on which a civilised
society is built, continues to be removed. In the
space abandoned by the state, private interests
have selectively moved in to take over paying
concerns and leave others to further decay.
Whether we talk about pensions, transport, health
care, or schools, we can see that these empty
spaces are being filled by a new type of
‘entrepreneur’ who is after a quick buck, and,
at the low end (or just the back of the tram), by
unruly youths of foreign origin. After all,
closure of community youth centres, disappearance
of accessible sports facilities, etc., have raised
schoolyards, rail stations and public transport
facilities to meeting places and playgrounds for
showing off and testing the limits of tolerance.
Now
it would have been much less of a problem if this
economic policy and the social devastation it
entails, would have been championed only by the
Thatchers of this world, so that other political
forces of the mainstream could clarify why all
this was happening, and resist it. But politics
unfortunately has declined to a market sector
itself, where candidates rise and fall just as
washing powders do, and the ‘product’ is
invariably aimed at identical target groups in the
middle. Fortuyn (like Berlusconi, or any other
newcomer) was an excellent example of a celebrity
politician, an image with a few text lines
circulated in the media, to embrace or
reject—just as some like the Simpsons, others
don’t. The historic parties of the left have not
escaped this trend, and some like the British
Labour Party even have actively remodeled
themselves to fit the trend. As a result,
neoliberal attacks on a secure existence have been
led or continued as often by the ‘Left’ as
they were by the right. In some cases, socialists,
Greens, and communists even supported punitive
wars like the one against rump-Yugoslavia. Again
we should see this as a space abandoned—the
space where people are defended against
injustices, where war is replaced by international
mediation.
Therefore
Blair’s warning to Le Pen and his expression of
shock about Fortuyn’s killing, are to say the
least, deeply naïve—because Britain today is
the engine which continues to push for neoliberal
‘reform’ and the removal of the vestiges of
social security all across Europe. It is this
stifled political arena, where the ‘left’
pushes for more privatisation, flexibilisation,
and market reform (Jospin has privatised more than
any prior French government of the right), while
established conservatives look on, that opens the
space for right-wing populism and political
adventurers like Fortuyn. There is no point in
warning people not to vote for populists who seek
to pin down feelings of profound insecurity on the
immigrant problem, the lack of integration of
immigrants, petty crime (which very often is
accounted for by immigrant youths), and big crime,
which as often is home-grown as it is in foreign
hands. These are real problems, but in the end
aspects of a more fundamental insecurity created
by the abandoning of the public sphere by
neoliberal states—incidentally, also by
neoliberal states acting in collusion as when they
decided to lift border controls and
‘Europeanise’ neoliberalism through EMU (the
‘Euro’ and what it entails).
Finally,
the killing itself was an act worthy of reality
TV. In an age of ‘Big Brother’, but no longer
one that is ‘watching you’, on the contrary,
people increasingly fancy the moment of their
greatness in an act of public display that will
lend them a brief and fleeting moment of celebrity
status. An Italian pilot no longer able to pay his
debts, acquires his stint of fame by flying into
the Pirelli building; a German schoolboy kicked
out of school, comes back and kills 17 teachers. A
vegan anti-fur campaigner decides that his
historic role will be to stop the demon that he
and his small, isolated circle of animal rights
campaigners have made out of Fortuyn. And out pour
the millions, as when Princess Di was killed, to
express their grief, as demonstratively as
possible. This is not to say there is no real
grief, on the contrary. But the spectacle of
powerless politics allowing free rein to economic
piracy, got a fitting climax in this cruel and
theatrical killing in which a loner faced a loner,
but with millions looking on. |