JAPAN


JAPAN

Asahi Shimbun, Tokyo, July 21: Alarm bells are beginning to ring around the world over global warming and security — two seemingly unrelated issues.

In June, the National Intelligence Council (NIC), a U.S. government organization that analyzes foreign policy issues based on data provided by the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence bodies, published its assessment of the security threats posed by climate change.

Global warming is projected to have disastrous consequences — a rise in sea levels and more frequent droughts and flooding. That means the natural conditions that have made the development of modern civilization possible will change.

Global conflicts

If the fallout brought on by global warming causes conflicts to break out all over the world at the same time, even the overwhelming military power of the United States or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the world’s largest military alliance, will be powerless to handle this intractable situation.

Reducing carbon dioxide emissions to mitigate global warming would be an effective approach in terms of national security. Policymakers should keep that in mind.

Fierce competition among countries for oil and coal to fuel economic growth can only heighten international tension. The massive CO2 emissions from the burning of these fossil fuels just adds to the problem of global warming.

Solid, effective cooperation

The world must be better prepared to tackle the effects of global warming and help nations in need. The only way to achieve this is to establish solid and effective cooperation among all members of the international community.

In doing so, perhaps Earth can be rescued from falling into the environmental abyss.

AUSTRALIA

Sydney Morning Herald, July 23: The arrest of Radovan Karadzic, the fugitive Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect, is a welcome breakthrough for those trying to strengthen the international justice system to handle wartime atrocities.

A former psychiatrist who liked to write plays and children’s poetry, Karadzic is no ordinary ethnic thug. He faces charges of genocide and crimes against humanity relating to Europe’s worst atrocities since Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. ... He is accused of orchestrating the expulsion of a million Muslims and Croats from their ancestral homes, by a systemic pattern of killings and rapes. His indictment covers the 10,000 civilian deaths incurred in the 43-month siege of Sarajevo by his forces, and the massacre of more than 7000 Muslim men and boys captured in the town of Srebrenica in July 1995.

European enlightment

If he is successfully extradited, Karadzic will be the 44th Serb sent to The Hague. But his former military chief, Ratko Mladic, remains at large, so the ad hoc Balkans tribunal must remain in being until he is caught. Meanwhile, the tribunal’s work will inform the permanent International Criminal Court, which has jurisdiction over war crimes committed since July 2002 (when the court was formed) that national courts will not address. By the arrest, Serbia embraces more tightly the European enlightenment, and rejects the dark ethnic attraction of the pan-Slavism emanating from Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

BRITAIN

The Observer, London, July 20: It would be hard to deny the evidence that Afghanistan is at a crossroads as Democratic nominee Barack Obama yesterday met the country’s President Hamid Karzai. Despite the claims by some British officers that the Taliban is being tactically routed, no one seems to have told the Islamist insurgents. ... Despite $15 billion in aid that has been disbursed, Afghanistan remains mired in pervasive poverty with unemployment standing at more than 40 per cent.

Multiple failures

Confronted with these multiple failures, the temptation, voiced yesterday by Barack Obama, and by his Republican opponent John McCain already, is to throw more military forces at the problem in a replication of the Iraq “surge.” A parallel attraction, encouraged by Karzai, is to insist that the international community provide ever more money in the hope that some of the billions will stick. But in a country beset by rapidly increasing pessimism ... what is needed is a large-scale rethinking of what we are doing in Afghanistan, not more violence and more largesse.

More widely, there needs to be acceptance that this is not a local conflict but a regional one. Pakistan’s failure to tackle the Taliban’s safe havens in the tribally administered areas is stoking Afghanistan’s woes. Finally, there needs to be an end to the cozy client relationship with Karzai, who has yet to show himself a capable leader, and a retreat from the West’s view that he is the country’s only possible savior.

KENYA

Daily Nation, Nairobi, July 17: The agreement reached on Monday between Dr. Robert Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai should hopefully deliver the people of Zimbabwe from misery. But there should be no illusions about the complexity of the problem. ... The document they signed before South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki was merely an agreement to start talking.

The negotiated settlement in Kenya that brought the country back from the brink of disaster following a disputed presidential election has been hailed as a model for Zimbabwe and other countries facing similar political problems.

Such a settlement may well be necessary to head off a complete national breakdown, but it should only be as a last resort.

Abortive election

Citizens of any nation who exercise their right to vote for leaders of their choice do not troop to the polling stations in expectation of an abortive election followed by some arrangement between the contenders. If such deals become the norm then democracy as we know it is not worth the ballot paper.

The trend could also encourage incumbents to defy the will of the people and hang on despite the electoral outcome, confident in the knowledge that they will retain power, or partial power, by other means.

So if the Zimbabwean leaders get to actual negotiations, they must seek to go beyond the Kenyan model and look for a formula that actually tries to address the will of the people.

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