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"Peace and Security"
It is devilishly difficult to accurately track and describe the international trade in narcotics. Trafficking routes emerge with startling rapidity, states alternately demonize and then decriminalize different drugs, while fickle consumers spur the development of markets for new types of narcotics overnight. The illicit organizations conducting the trade have every reason to camouflage their activities, [...]
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Several people sent in questions to Alex de Waal in response to his article, “African Roles in the Libyan Conflict of 2011″ available in the March 2013 edition of International Affairs. Below are de Waal’s responses.
1) There seems to be a theme in this article about the notion of the [...]
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The extraction of the Falasha from Ethiopia remains a dark chapter in our history which we should not forget. As a nation we are poorer, deprived of their cultural and historical legacy. As a nation we are shamed by the cynical way in which our leaders exploited them for money and weapons. Most importantly, the Ethiopian Jews have become victims of this relocation, at best unwitting, at worst coerced. It is not surprising that people who have undergone such an uprooting are traumatized and prone to become social casualties. The revelation that the Israeli state has systematically violated their rights in the most sinister manner, betraying the trust that the Beta Israel put in that government as their protector, is a signal that this historic wrong needs to be righted.
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This time, the dominant Western advocacy no longer deems the promotion of human rights, beyond the rhetoric of Western and Burmese officials, as something affordable. But the ugly realities of human insecurity as lived by the great majority of Burmese Buddhist farmers, Rohingya Muslims, and Burmese Christians are difficult, if not impossible to address. So, Western advocacy is experiencing a Buddhist turn for the first time in the past twenty-five years: it’s all in the state of mind. If you can’t change the reality, change your perception, and the way you frame it, especially when doing so advances your national interest, however defined – hence, President Obama and his showcasing Burma as ‘a success story’ of his foreign policy.
Continue Reading →The World Peace Foundation invites you to submit questions in response to this article for Alex de Waal to answer. You can submit a question as a comment to this article, through our facebook page, or via twitter (follow us @WorldPeaceaFdtn) at#AfricanrolesinLibya. We will be accepting questions from today until next Wednesday, March 20, [...]
Continue Reading →In the February 8, 2013 edition of the Times Literary Supplement, Alex de Waal reviews Chinua Achebe’s There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra. You will need a subscription to access it.
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