On 10 June, the fifth anniversary of UN Resolution 1244 establishing the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), protesters in Prishtina raised their red cards to tell UNMIK it was time to leave. Throughout the city their posters proclaimed six principles of nonviolence stated by Martin Luther King.
The demonstration was not very big: it had been pretty much kept out of the news in advance, and afterwards was to be downplayed by the powers-that-be--both local and…
After the NATO bombings, the world's most powerful intergovernmental organisations involved themselves in the administration of post-war Kosovo--not just UN and its subsidiaries or NATO, but the OSCE (for “democratisation”) and the EU and World Bank (for “economic regeneration”).Most of the major international humanitarians NGOs were also keen to be seen in post-war Kosovo. Per capita more money has been spent in Kosovothan in any other peace or humanitarian operation, and far more soldiers…
It is hard to believe that, just ten years after the genocide in Rwanda, new reports of massacres against Tutsis by Hutus have started coming in.
As PN went to press more than 150 Tutsi refugees were reported to have been macheted and shot by a Hutu during a raid on a nearby Burundian military base.
Red cards all roundAs Peace News went to press the 2004 Olympics had just kicked off.
Like music, sport is often said to be a great bridger of divides. It can bring…
This article is being written as another war comes to an end, the war in Iraq. It is clear by now that the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein vanished under the heavy bombing of the American and British forces. Many rejoiced at the day when a government that persecuted and discriminated against its own people disappeared. The big question is what comes next.
To us as women's rights activists, the big concern is what will happen to women in a post-war Iraq. And, as women's groups that…
In this book, Danilo Zolo offers “an interpretation of the `humanitarian war' waged by nineteen NATO countries against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999”. In so doing, he paints a depressing (but perhaps unsurprising) picture of political manoeuvrings, hypocrisy and double-dealings that are enough to get the word “humanitarian” a bad name. The fact that it takes place against the background of the genuine suffering of the people of Kosova serves only to make it all…
In writing this book, former PN editor Howard Clark has drawn on his close involvement with Kosov@ for over a decade, and with nonviolent theory and action for several decades. Fascinated by a remarkable movement, he hoped to assist in the prevention of war (“Why was the war most warned about not prevented?” p213).
Clark provides a minutely detailed account of these unique developments throughout the decade up to the eruption of extreme violence of 1998-9. Using a wide…
