Mission & Justice

Noah Barkin; 26/9/08

Germany blamed the United States yesterday for spawning the global financial crisis with a blind drive for higher profits and said it would now have to accept greater market regulation and a loss of its financial superpower status. In some of the toughest language since the crisis threw Wall Street banks into financial disarray earlier this month, German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck told parliament the turmoil would leave “deep marks” on both sides of the Atlantic, but called it primarily an American problem. “The world will never be as it was before the crisis,” Steinbrueck, a deputy leader of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), told the Bundestag lower house. “The United States will lose its superpower status in the world financial system. The world financial system will become more multi-polar,” he said.

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25/9/08

The European Commission said Wednesday that it will send a mission to the Middle East in early November to evaluate the problems faced by refugees from the conflict in Iraq. “This mission will take place in the first week of November,” said Michele Cercone, the commission’s justice affairs spokeswoman. The fact-finding mission - which will travel to Jordan and Syria - will include representatives from the EU’s executive branch and those of EU member states wanting to take part, as well as UN refugee officials. It will aim to assess the conditions of the most vulnerable refugees from Iraq, and consider how, or whether, some of them could be resettled in EU countries prepared to host them. The plight of Iraq refugees will be discussed by EU interior ministers at a meeting in Brussels on Thursday. In June, Germany urged its European Union partners to accept more refugees from conflict-torn Iraq and to step up their aid efforts.

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Alice Sternhell; 20/9/08;

At nine I was a diehard atheist, having acquired my parents’ agnostic-atheistic convictions. It was September 1942 and I was about to be liquidated with the rest of my family in an Aktion (deportation) of which most people in Poland’s Czestochowa Ghetto had an inkling. My mother was a dentist, and the heroic and saintly wife of one of her colleagues saved my life.

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18/9/08

Anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish feelings are rising in several major European countries, according to a worldwide survey released on Wednesday. The Washington-based Pew Research Center’s global attitude survey found that most Muslims in countries where they are in the majority worry about the rise of Islamic extremism at home and abroad. Majorities held that view in Indonesia, Pakistan, Tanzania, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and Nigeria. Large numbers of respondents in several Muslim countries also identified struggles within their countries between people who want to modernize the society and those dedicated to maintaining fundamentalist practices of Islam.

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Jonathan Power; 12/9/08

Does America know what a dangerous game its leaders are playing? Does it know its history? And do the leaders of Europe, who should be a brake on American determination, go along with Washington because they are almost equally ignorant? After all, none of the present crop of European leaders has had time to study much history, and all of them made their way upwards in their party ranks because of their skill and knowledge of domestic affairs. They have had little or no preparation for the affairs of the world. On the Russian, Georgian and Ukrainian side, one can make the same argument. Ignorance reigns so history can be repeated.

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Shenaz Kermalli;10/9/08

Shukaina, says she feels ‘prouder than ever’ to wear the headscarf. An Irish family at the centre of a nationwide dispute over the wearing of the Islamic headscarf in schools has accused Ireland’s government of repressing minority rights while “flaunting itself as the bastion of democracy”. Liam Egam,whose daughter’s desire to wear the headscarf to school last year sparked the debate, said: “It is time the world witnessed the true face of Ireland. “The issue of the hijab [Islamic headscarf] is a reflection of how Ireland treats its minorities. “It has silently repressed Muslim rights while flaunting itself as the bastion of democracy for far too long.”

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Uri Avnery; 4/9/08

If he steals my cow, that is bad. If I steal his cow, that is good” — this moral rule was attributed by European racists to the Hottentots, an ancient tribe in southern Africa. It’s hard not to be reminded of this when the United States and the European countries cry out against Russia’s recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two provinces which seceded from the Republic of Sakartvelo, known in the West as Georgia. Not so long ago, the Western countries recognized the Republic of Kosovo, which seceded from Serbia. The West argued that the population of Kosovo is not Serbian, its culture and language is not Serbian, and that therefore it has a right to independence from Serbia. Especially after Serbia had conducted a grievous campaign of oppression against them. I supported this view with all my heart. Unlike many of my friends, I even supported the military operation that helped the Kosovars to free themselves.

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Adam Sage; 27/8/08

Teenagers are to be banned from buying alcohol in France, as health advisers dismiss the cherished Gallic belief that children should be initiated in the art of wine drinking at an early age. With British-style binge drinking gaining ground among French youth, officials say they want to send a clear message against adolescent consumption. Health Minister Roselyne Bachelot said she was planning to make it illegal to sell alcohol to the under-18s, with legislation likely to be introduced next year.

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26/8/08; Tony Kevin served as an Australian diplomat in Moscow (1969-71), UN New York (1973-76), and as Australian Ambassador in Poland (1991-1994).

Triggered by events in Georgia, the US and Polish governments have agreed that Poland will host an American base for ten interceptor missiles designed to shoot down a limited number of ballistic missiles that, the US claims, might one day be launched against NATO Europe by a future ‘rogue state’ adversary such as Iran. The system, on Poland’s Baltic coast (and Russia’s doorstep), to be manned by 100 US military personnel, is expected to operate by 2012. The Czech government had previously agreed to host a complementary tracking radar system. Separately, the US will provide Poland with advanced air defence systems, unrelated to the shooting down of ballistic missiles. The US proposed giving Poland such a modest anti-missile system two years ago, but Poland hesitated in the face of strong opposition and retaliatory threats from Moscow, which from the beginning believed that it was the true target of the proposed system. Such prototype systems — already being installed in some NATO countries — are politically and technically controversial. Democrat critics in the US Congress last year condemned such ‘high-risk, immature programs’.

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Geoffrey Robertson; 6/8/08

The appearance of Radovan Karadzic in The Hague dock has provided some satisfaction for victims of his Bosnian Serb regime - not only families who grieve for those it massacred but for all of us forced impotently to read of the atrocities at Sarajevo and Srebrenica, a form of wickedness never experienced in Europe since the Nazis. The big question is whether justice will be seen to be done better than in the convoluted and inconclusive trial of Slobodan Milosevic. Can the Karadzic trial be fair, expeditious and effective - and cost-effective as well? The trial will surely benefit from lessons learnt in the course of the Milosevic proceedings, when prosecutors “threw the book” at the defendant and the judges insisted that all charges against him over the three wars he waged - in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo - should be heard together.

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