"The South Commission is convinced that the developed countries cannot play the role of the engine of Southern growth. The new locomotive forces have to be found within the South itself. South-South co-operation is therefore crucial." Manmohan Singh, then secretary general of the South Commission, said this to a symposium on development at Espoo, Finland, in May 1989.Dr Singh's statement came at a time when the Atlantic powers, under the leadership of the Group of Seven (G7), were using the debt crisis of the 1980s to remake the global economic order in their favour. The "Third World project" was already in retreat. What was on offer was the structural adjustment programme of the Washington Consensus. "…Intellectuals like Manmohan Singh," writes Vijay Prashad in his latest book, The Poorer Nations, "began to trumpet a new siren: Neoliberalism with Southern Characteristics for domestic policy and South-South Cooperation for international policy. It was not a capitulation to the North, but the creation of a new approach." http://www.business-standard.com/article/beyond-business/heading-due-south-113061600611_1.html
The George Bush administration's inflexibility on Iran was "bombastic diplomacy" that "wasted energy and hardened the lines". Under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran had "a right to peaceful nuclear power and to enrichment in the purpose". If you thought these words came from some left-leaning critics of the Bush foreign policy, think again. Senator John Kerry, now US secretary of state, expressed these views in 2009 when he was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. If these views were to become the US policy propounded by Secretary of State Kerry in 2013, write Peter Oborne and David Morrison in their book, A Dangerous Delusion: Why the West is Wrong About Nuclear Iran, "the prospects for a settlement with Iran on the nuclear issue would be excellent". If not, which is most likely, the authors have no doubt that "the outlook for the world is grim". http://www.business-standard.com/article/beyond-business/the-west-s-sanction-for-global-war-113071001007_1.html
In Minority Report, the 2002 Steven Spielberg movie, the job of PreCrime, a specialised police department, is not to hunt down current criminals but to track down future criminals. The movie is set in the year 2054, apparently because the Spielberg crew might have thought such police operations were a distant reality. Perhaps the Academy Award-winning director could read journalist Jeremy Scahill's latest book,Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, which says the pre-crime hunt is already here, though in the name of the war on terror. http://www.business-standard.com/article/beyond-business/on-a-wing-and-a-predator-113072501169_1.html
Karu was a grocery shopkeeper in Puthukkudiyiruppu whenSri Lanka’s 26-year-long civil war was nearing its end. Like tens of thousands of Tamil civilians in the island nation’s north and northeast, Karu and his pregnant wife, Gowri, were caught up in the war in 2009. He was attacked and dumped in a hospital, where he was brutally tortured; his wife gave birth to a baby girl in a bunker in the heyday of the war. They finally managed to leave Sri Lanka for Tamil Nadu and then set out on a deadly 27-day-long boat journey to Australia. http://www.business-standard.com/article/beyond-business/sri-lanka-s-unfinished-war-113021900867_1.html
“I guess you killed 7,000 people there,” a Lebanese businessman once said to Rifaat al-Assad, the younger brother of former Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, referring to the Hama massacre of 1982. Rifaat was the commanding general of the Hama operation in which Syrian troops, under order from President Hafez, massacred scores of people to quell a Sunni rebellion against the Baathist regime. Normally a politician will play down such a ghastly incident. But Rifaat’s response was rather surprising. “What are you talking about, 7000?” He said to the businessman. “No, no. We killed 38,000.” This conversation, cited in Thomas Friedman’s award-winning book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, offers a complete picture of how President Hafez put down the rebellion in Hama. http://www.idsa.in/idsacomments/TheSyrianConundrum_sjohny_140212
If anybody thought that a change of talk in the Bush administration’s Iran policy would be enough to induce the “isolated” Tehran to give up its intransigence and toe the western line, the July 19 meeting proved him or her wrong. Before the Geneva meeting between Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili and European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana, the US sent feelers to Tehran. In a clear indication that Washington was prepared to change its belligerent stand towards Tehran, the Bush administration announced that William Burns, undersecretary of state for political affairs, would attend the meet. In addition, unconfirmed reports said the US was planning to open a diplomatic post in Tehran for the first time since relations were severed during the 444-day occupation of the American embassy in Tehran nearly three decades ago. http://www.idsa.in/idsastrategiccomments/TheUnendingIranianNuclearCrisis_SJohny_250708
In international politics, decades are important tools that help us understand and interpret history better. The major developments in the past often come to our mind with tags of decades – the economic crisis of 1920’s, the wars of 1930’s, the reconstruction of 1950’s, the Lost Decade, and so on. Now, standing at the starting point of a new decade, how do we analyse the bygone one (2000-10)? According to British historian Andrew Roberts, the first ten years of the new century, or the Noughties, were full of troubles. It witnessed two major wars, one of the gravest financial crises in decades, a number of natural disasters including Tsunami, and changes in global power dynamics. At the beginning of the century, not many might have forecast such a troublesome first decade. http://www.globalresearch.ca/a-decade-of-wars-crises-and-rises/16868
