MIDDLE EAST: SELF-DEFENSE OR WAR?

Bombs are falling again on innocent civilians in Lebanon, Gaza, and northern Israel. Why? It is necessary to go back in history to understand what is happening today, write Johan Galtung, a Professor of Peace Studies and Founder and Co-Director of TRANSCEND: A Peace and Development Network (www.transcend.org), and Dietrich Fischer, Director of the European University Centre for Peace Studies (www.epu.ac.at) and Co-Director of TRANSCEND. The problem is the vicious cycle of repeated mutual retaliation characteristic of wars, and underlying it the unresolved conflict between Jews and Arabs. This problem cannot be solved by de-escalation in the choice of targets and level of destruction. A ceasefire is urgent to end the immediate suffering, but it will remain only temporary as long as the underlying conflict is not solved. Israel should consider how to make peace rather than war. One way out might be a Middle East Community modeled after the European Community of 1958, with Palestine fully recognised. It would be in Israel\'s and its Arab neighbor\'s interest to learn from that success story. People of good will should come together in the midst of the present crisis to elaborate what a peaceful Middle East could look like.

THE WORLD NEEDS A MORE DEMOCRATIC UNITED NATIONS

In its present form the United Nations is ill-equipped to advance humanity\'s best interests, writes Kumi Naidoo, Secretary-General of Civicus: World Alliance For Citizen Participation. In this article the author writes that the democratisation of the UN cannot be limited to the current efforts at reform. Calls by the Secretary General for full, systemic, and meaningful civil society participation must be urgently implemented in order to make the UN system more transparent, accountable, and democratic. What is most urgently needed is a changed consciousness at the international level. This is an essential prerequisite for the UN to achieve a profound democratic transformation that will allow humanity to deal effectively with the new challenges of the 21st century. Civil society traditionally has helped bring about great societal changes. It shall continue to do so in the years ahead.

WORLD SOCIAL FORUM: THE CRADLE OF GLOBAL CIVIL SOCIETY

What can we expect from the future of the World Social Forum? asks Roberto Savio, president emeritus of IPS and member of the International Council of the World Social Forum. In this analysis, Savio writes that the refusal of the participants to allow themselves to be absorbed by political parties and to establish relations with political institutions has reduced the WSF to a circuit of self-referentiality. Is it possible to increase the WSF\'s capacity for action? Savio thinks not: it has not been possible to move past the idea of an \'\'open space\'\', which allows for the exchange of ideas and the creation of alliances but prevents the formulation of proposals for concrete action by the forum. It is thought that such options should be carried out by the organisations participating in the WSF during their normal operations. There is a minority that holds that the WSF should not limit itself to being a kind of spiritual exercise from which participants emerge stronger and better. They believe that the forum should decide on a series of actions that provide an alternative to neoliberal globalisation and should pressure institutions to adopt them. But for now this debate is going nowhere. In all likelihood the WSF will not make significant progress into the political realm and will remain a major exceptional occasion for civil society to meet.

WORLD SOCIAL FORUM: THE CRADLE OF GLOBAL CIVIL SOCIETY

What can we expect from the future of the World Social Forum? asks Roberto Savio, president emeritus of IPS and member of the International Council of the World Social Forum. In this analysis, Savio writes that the refusal of the participants to allow themselves to be absorbed by political parties and to establish relations with political institutions has reduced the WSF to a circuit of self-referentiality. Is it possible to increase the WSF\'s capacity for action? Savio thinks not: it has not been possible to move past the idea of an \'\'open space\'\', which allows for the exchange of ideas and the creation of alliances but prevents the formulation of proposals for concrete action by the forum. It is thought that such options should be carried out by the organisations participating in the WSF during their normal operations. There is a minority that holds that the WSF should not limit itself to being a kind of spiritual exercise from which participants emerge stronger and better. They believe that the forum should decide on a series of actions that provide an alternative to neoliberal globalisation and should pressure institutions to adopt them. But for now this debate is going nowhere. In all likelihood the WSF will not make significant progress into the political realm and will remain a major exceptional occasion for civil society to meet.

AN ASIAN CANDIDATE FOR UN SECRETARY-GENERAL

India\'s choice for UN Secretary-General of senior most Indian in the UN secretariat and renowned thinker and writer Shashi Tharoor, passing over many senior politicians, is testimony to its traditional approach to the organisation, writes T.P. Sreenivasan, former ambassador of India to the United Nations (Vienna) and former governor for India at the International Atomic Energy Agency. In this article, the author writes that India has not sought to use the UN as an instrument of its policy nor sought sinecures in it for its politicians. The next Secretary-General has to be a good manager and a strong reformer. For the US, this will be the real issue. Of all the candidates, only Tharoor has worked at various levels in the UN and knows the organisation inside out. He has proven managerial skills and has a vision for reform, which he has already written on. Indeed, he would do well to present a blueprint for change even before his election. None of the other candidates would be able to do so convincingly.

CENTRAL AMERICA BENEFITS FROM SHAKE-UPS TO THE SOUTH

A few months ago no one was betting on the progress of Central American integration, much less the region\'s hopes for a free-trade agreement with the EU, writes Joaquin Roy, Jean Monnet Professor and Director of the Centre for the European Union at the University of Miami. However, Roy writes in this article, the one-two punch administered by Venezuela\'s surprising decision to enter MERCOSUR and pull out of the Andean Community, and by the bout of nationalisation in Bolivia, set off alarms in Europe. The Andean Community, with which Brussels hoped to work out a moderate agreement, is now definitively out of commission, while the viability of MERCOSUR is in doubt. Consequently, Brussels is now setting its sights on Central America, willing, it would seem, to temporarily overlook its shortcomings. In this new opportunity for integration opened by the possibility of a Central American Free-Trade Agreement (CAFTA), or mini-FTAAs with the US, those problems presented by crucial elements that still lack a common free-trade zone must be resolved. While 94 percent of products are already covered, 53 percent of that remaining six percent are agricultural products. Despite the fact that there are agreements for the exchange of services and transport, there are also major asymmetries and not all countries apply them.

RESOURCE WARS: THE HEAVY ECOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL FOOTPRINT OF ECONOMIC GLOBALISATION

Oil wars, water wars, land wars, atmospheric wars : this is the real face of economic globalisation, whose appetite for resources is exceeding the limits of sustainability and justice, writes Vandana Shiva, an author and international campaigner for women and the environment. Like oil, water is becoming a source of wars as it is commodified and privatised, dammed and transferred long distances. Every river in India has become a site of major, irresolvable conflicts over water ownership and distribution. The waters of the Tigris and Euphrates, which have sustained agriculture for thousands of years in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, have been the cause of several major clashes among the three countries. Trade liberalisation is allowing corporations to encroach on the ecological space of local communities, thus unleashing conflicts. The problem is not a shortage of natural resources but free trade and globalisation, corporate greed and partnerships between corporations and states to usurp people\'s resources and violate their fundamental rights. If globalisation is pushed relentlessly, these resource wars will grow and globalisation will be slowed to a halt by ecological catastrophes and conflicts over resources -- or, the movements for ecological sustainability and social justice will succeed in resisting globalisation\'s ecological overreaching by laying the foundations for an Earth Democracy in which we live lightly on the earth, and share her vital resources equitably.

NO NEW IDEAS FROM DAVOS, NO ACTION FROM PORTO ALEGRE

Despite its current openness to new issues, no one today expects ideas and proposals from the World Economic Forum or anything more than the great opportunity for socialising it offers its participants, writes Roberto Savio, president emeritus of IPS news agency and a member of the International Council of the World Social Forum. In this article, the author writes that only corporations with income of over one billion dollars are invited to the WEF, which means that businesses from the developing world are sharply under-represented. And despite its name, the WEF is dominated by Europeans, Americans, and Japanese: in 2002, 75 percent of attendees were from Europe and the US. Just 7.7 percent of the forum were from Asia, home to 60 percent of the global population. While participation in the World Social Forum has reached unprecedented levels, topping 100,000 participants, it has entered a crisis of growth and identity and perhaps a transition to new forms. Davos and Porto Alegre are both separate actors and at the same time symptoms of their respective worlds. The WEF has the power but faces a crisis of legitimacy. The WSF represents the eruption of a new phase of idealism and commitment in the world.

HELSINKI PROCESS TARGETS CORRUPTION

At the Helsinki Conference last September, the need to promote global cooperation in the fight against corruption emerged as a central issue, write Leena Luhtanen, Finland\'s Minister of Justice, and Erkki Tuomioja, Minister for Foreign Affairs. In this article the authors write that in recent years, the globalisation of corruption has spurred the international community to acknowledge the problem and demand action that is not restricted to mere recommendations but aims at creating binding international legislation. Perhaps the best example of this is the UN Convention against Corruption, which has been signed by 140 states and ratified by 52, and which went into force in December 2005. Indeed, implementation and effective oversight are the Achilles\' heel of the UN Convention against Corruption as well. Recognising that corruption must be met with cross-border cooperation, Finland has developed a Road Map for action which is being realised together with Friends of the Helsinki Process governments -- Algeria, Brazil, Canada, Egypt, Hungary, Malaysia, Mexico, South Africa, Spain, Thailand, and the United Kingdom -- and in cooperation with other active governments as well as representatives of the private sector and civil society.

THE POLITICS OF MONEY

The word is out that economics, never a science, has always been politics in disguise, writes Hazel Henderson, author of Creating Alternative Futures and numerous other books and co-creator of the Calvert Group, the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators. In this article, Henderson writes that civic action with local currencies, barter, community credit, and the more dubious rash of digital cybermoney all reveal the politics of money. Economics is now widely seen as the faulty sourcecode deep in societies\' hard drives, replicating unsustainability: booms, busts, bubbles, recessions, energy crises, resource depletion, poverty, trade wars, pollution, disruption of communities, and the loss of cultural and biodiversity. Citizens all over the world are rejecting this malfunctioning code and its operating systems: the World Bank, the IMF, WTO, and central banks. As local groups and communities created their own local scrip currencies and exchange systems, they learned about economists\' deepest secret: money and information are equivalent -- and neither is scarce! Barter, dismissed in economic textbooks as a primitive relic, went hi-tech. The deconstructing of money systems, and the growth of all the healthy local, real world alternatives is propagating widely.

DEVELOPMENT MUST REMAIN AT TOP OF GLOBAL AGENDA

These are difficult times -- both for the United Nations, and for the world. It is thus all the more imperative to ensure that development remains at the top of the global agenda, writes Supachai Panitchpakdi, Secretary General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). There are increasing pressures on developing countries to open their markets, with the promise that this is the key to making the biggest gains. Such promises should not be allowed to disguise the fact that there are still serious trade barriers to the key exports of developing countries as a whole --both tariff and non-tariff barriers-- that need to be addressed. Indeed, a worrying trend is the resort to new forms of protection as tariffs and quantitative restrictions have come down.

WORLD RESPONSE TO IRAN A MAJOR FACTOR IN INTERNAL POLITICS

Given the fragmentation of Iran\'s conservative ruling elite, the response of the major powers to Iran\'s nuclear ambitions will greatly affect the outcome of the current power struggle inside the country -- and by implication, the fate of Iran's nuclear program, write Dariush Zahedi, who teaches International Political Economy and Peace & Conflict Studies at University of California, Berkeley, and Ali Assareh, a student instructor and analyst specialising in the political economy of the Middle East at UC Berkeley.

BIOMASS: A WIN-WIN ENERGY SOURCE

Fully developed, biomass could reduce reliance on hydrocarbons of all kinds, foreign and domestic, not only as fuel for light-duty vehicles but as a raw material for biodegradable manufactured plastics. At the same time, rightly utilised, biomass could be harvested not from food crops but from the stalks and stover of grains that would otherwise go to waste. In the process, it could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and fuel a rebirth of long languishing rural regions worldwide. Unlike oil, coal, uranium and other conventional fuels, the processes that produce biofuels are not intensely toxic to humans or the natural environment. Moreover, unlike fossil fuel and nuclear plants, biorefineries are most efficiently run when they are small-scale, decentralised, and locally-managed, with raw materials drawn from as little as a thirty-mile radius of the plant. One of the benefits of biofuels is that they offer the possibility of returning the sources of energy, income and political power to each locale. In an era when centralised power is revealing itself to be ever more inefficient and untrustworthy, an energy system of distributed power driven by biology rather than mineralogy might provide not only heat and light but, as a beneficial byproduct, a greater measure of democracy.

AN AFRICAN PRAYER FOR PEACE

May 5 seemed to be yet another day of good news for our continent, signalling that we were indeed advancing towards the realisation of the goal of Africa\'s renaissance: Sudan took a step forward towards the restoration of peace in Darfur, as the government of Sudan and one faction of the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) signed a peace agreement in Abuja, Nigeria, after a protracted process of negotiations, writes Thabo Mbeki, President of South Africa. In this article, Mbeki writes that it is most unfortunate that another faction of the SLM/A, led by Abdel Wahed Mohammed al-Nur, as well as the second Darfur rebel movement, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), decided not to sign the peace agreement. The negative impact of the Darfur conflict on inter-state relations, as between Sudan and Chad, as well as Eritrea to the east, which Sudan accuses of supporting the Darfur rebels, must communicate the strong message to the Sudanese negotiators in Abuja that, truly, the resolution of the Darfur crisis and the overall challenges of Sudan, would make an important contribution to the resolution of Africa\'s problems. A just resolution of the conflict in Darfur must indeed be based on the repudiation of any winner-takes-all approach, which makes it impossible to build the inclusive societies that are the only condition for the achievement of peace, stability and national unity and reconciliation in all African countries.

INTERVIEW WITH ALAN GARCIA :’I WILL RENEGOTIATE CONTRACTS WITH FOREIGN COMPANIES.”

lan Garcia, who polls show is the favourite in Peru\'s presidential elections, scheduled for June 4, says that his government will not expropriate foreign companies doing business in Peru but rather will negotiate with them --as well as others that have no presence there yet-- so that they will process copper, gold, fish, and food locally. \'\'In short, this is so they will invest more, but in order to spur our development, not so they can extract our raw materials and process them in another country.\'\'

DEVASTATION AND MISERY IN BURMA

A recent visit by ASEAN parliamentarians to a refugee camp on the Thai-Burmese border provided a searing glimpse of a country devastated by violence and repression, writes Son Chhay, a member of the Parliament of Cambodia and an active member of the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Inter-Parliamentary Myanmar Caucus and other pro-democracy networks in Asia. In this article, Chhay writes that military offensives, forced labour, forced relocation, extra-judicial killing, and torture by Burma\'s military government have driven many hundreds of thousands of Burmese into neighbouring countries as well as into the myriad refugee camps that line the country\'s borders. Forced labour and forced relocation have been perpetrated to allow military control over economic activity. Systematic sexual violence by military personnel targeting ethnic nationality women is rife and has been widely documented. Moreover, children as young as eleven are often forcibly taken from their homes for military duty in the Tatmadaw, the Burmese army.

A MORE MODERN, AND MORE PRO-FAMILY ITALY

The House of Liberty alliance has led Italy through one of the most difficult periods of its history, writes Pierferdinando Casini, President of the House of Deputies and leader of the Union of the Democratic Centre, which is a member of the House of Liberty alliance. In this article, Casini writes that the Italy of today is not the same we inherited in 2001 from the centre-left. No one can pretend not to see the roots of a country that is more modern and advanced and that the House of Liberty planted in this legislature. Only by making the markets truly competitive can we provide a sufficient stimulus to business to improve efficiency and open industry to internationalism. But completing the process of liberalising the markets means above all cutting the cost of services: this is the goal we must measure ourselves by, and which has the greatest impact on the quality of life of the citizens. The core of our strategy for the country is family, first and foremost. The birthrate of Italy is the lowest in the European Union except for Germany. This figure reflects a profound discontent. Our goal is to introduce a system whereby the more children you have, the less taxes you pay.

ROYAL ROLLBACK IN NEPAL

After three weeks of a growing people power movement, Nepal\'s King Gyanendra finally yielded on Monday and restored parliament, which he dissolved four years ago. That met the key demand of an alliance of seven opposition parties, who will now sit in the reconvened parliament on Friday, writes Kunda Dixit, Editor and Publisher of the Kathmandu-based weekly newspaper, Nepali Times. But it doesn\'t go all the way to addressing the demand of the Maoists for elections to a constituent assembly. The Maoists have been fighting a guerrilla war for the past ten years to overthrow the monarchy. On Friday, parliament will immediately deliberate on the Maoist demand, which would pave the way for them to renounce violence and join the political mainstream. This compromise deal was brokered by the Indians and gave the king, the parties, and the Maoists a face-saving way out of the impasse. In the end it took three weeks of nationwide non-violent people power to achieve what the Maoists couldn\'t get with years of armed struggle.

SPAIN: EQUALITY IS NOT A UTOPIA

A fundamental commitment to the recognition of social rights and the equality of all citizens is at the core of the initiatives undertaken by the government of Spanish president Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, writes Jesus Caldera, Minister of Labour and Social Issues of Spain. In this article, Caldera writes that the first law that this administration presented and which received the unanimous support of all groups in parliament was the Comprehensive Law Against Violence Against Women. The draft bill of the Organic Law that was approved by the Council of Ministers on March 3 has the objective of effectively implementing the principle of equality and eliminating all discrimination against women in all areas of private and public life. Its goal is to modify all laws that are affected by the introduction of the principle of real equality and devise effective instruments to apply it to, among other areas, government offices, health and education policy, labour policy, access to new technology, and the information society. Our intent is to make the formal equality consecrated in the Spanish constitution a concrete reality in all areas of life, public and private. With this law, the Spanish government wants to issue naturalisation papers to a cultural change that a large part of Spanish society is already calling for and that needs legal codification.

UNITED STATES: AN ADMINISTRATION ADRIFT

Behind the recent personnel changes at the White House lies a single objective: protecting Bush from further investigation and scrutiny from Congress. In the end he is guilty of all the disasters that his successor will inherit, republican or democrat, writes Joaquin Roy, \'\'Jean Monnet\'\' Professor and Director of the European Union Centre of Miami University. In this article, Roy writes that Defence Secretary Rumsfeld is doing a magnificent job as lightning rod. Behind the recent criticism of him by a dozen retired generals lies the feeling that the war in Iraq is not being shouldered by the American people as a whole but rather by a poor minority, isolated and made to carry out dubious orders and play the role of occupier, torturer, and executioner. While it is unthinkable that the generals would rebel against civilian authorities in the middle of a war (it wouldn\'t occur to them), their outburst could nonetheless harm the country. Their indirect intervention in politics, cloaked in military expertise, is a risk that the US can hardly afford to take.

WORLD TRADE: THE MOMENT OF TRUTH APPROACHES

The end of this year marks the deadline for negotiations of the Doha Round of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), writes Pascal Lamy, WTO Director-General. The date was not picked out of the air: it is the day the US Trade Promotion Authority Act expires, the author writes in this analysis. The Act gives the US president \'\'fast-track\'\' authority to enter into trade agreements which the US Congress must then submit to an up-or-down vote without amendment. If this deadline is missed, trade liberalisation on the scale envisaged by the Doha Round would become impossible to achieve in the near future. The main loser would be the developing world. The main aim of Doha is \"development\", in other words, redressing the existing imbalances in multilateral trade relations. We are now faced with a difficult situation. The Hong Kong Ministerial Declaration called on countries to complete the \"modalities\" for the agricultural and industrial goods negotiations by 30 April. In the services areas, the Declaration called for revised offers to be submitted by 31 July. For these deadlines to be met, all actors will need to move.