Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 29. August 2004 / Timeline August 29, 2004
Version 3.528. August 2004, 30. August 2004
08/29/2004
GAO Report and 60 Minutes to rerun Halliburton story
This Sunday, 60 Minutes is scheduled to update the story about Halliburton doing business in Iran through an offshore (Cayman Islands) subsidiary.
Note that Treasury (OFAC) reopened the investigation after the story ran. As a result, a grand jury has been empaneled in Houston to investigate the situation. For more see:
http://www.halliburtonwatch.org/news/dresser_terror_sales.html
This issue was first raised by NYCity's fire and police pension funds -- who have questioned Halliburton's management about this as shareholders.
Also, it's interesting that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) today released the following report:
International Taxation: Tax Haven Companies Were More Likely to Have a
Tax Cost Advantage in Federal Contracting. GAO-04-856, June 30.
http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-04-856
Highlights - http://www.gao.gov/highlights/d04856high.pdf
08/29/2004
War Making Headlines, but Peace Breaks Out
By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent
The chilling sights and sounds of war fill newspapers and television screens
worldwide, but war itself is in decline, peace researchers report.
In fact, the number killed in battle has fallen to its lowest point in the post-World
War II period, dipping below 20,000 a year by one measure. Peacemaking missions,
meantime, are growing in number.
"International engagement is blossoming," said American scholar Monty G. Marshall.
"There's been an enormous amount of activity to try to end these conflicts."
For months the battle reports and casualty tolls from Iraq (news - web sites) and
Afghanistan have put war in the headlines, but Swedish and
Canadian non-governmental groups tracking armed conflict globally find a general
decline in numbers from peaks in the 1990s.
The authoritative Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in a 2004
Yearbook report obtained by The Associated Press in advance of publication, says 19
major armed conflicts were under way worldwide in 2003, a sharp drop from 33 wars
counted in 1991.
The Canadian organization Project Ploughshares, using broader criteria to define
armed conflict, says in its new annual report that the number of conflicts declined
to 36 in 2003, from a peak of 44 in 1995.
The Stockholm institute counts continuing wars that have produced 1,000 or more
battle-related deaths in any single year. Project Ploughshares counts any armed
conflict that produces 1,000 such deaths cumulatively.
The Stockholm report, to be released in September, notes three wars ended as of 2003
- in Angola, Rwanda and Somalia - and a fourth, the separatist war in India's Assam
state, was dropped from the "major" category after casualties were recalculated.
It lists three new wars in 2003 - in Liberia and in Sudan's
western region of Darfur, along with the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq. These joined
such long-running conflicts as the Kashmiri insurgency in India, the leftist
guerrilla war in Colombia, and the separatist war in Russia's Chechnya (news - web
sites) region.
Other major armed conflicts listed by the Stockholm researchers were in Algeria,
Burundi, Peru, Indonesia's Aceh province, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Israel, and
Turkey. Their list also includes the U.S.-al-Qaida war, mainly in Afghanistan, the
unresolved India-Pakistan conflict, and two insurgencies in the Philippines.
"Not only are the numbers declining, but the intensity" - the bloodshed in each
conflict - "is declining," said Marshall, founder of a University of Maryland program
studying political violence.
The continuing wars in Algeria, Chechnya and Turkey are among those that have
subsided into low-intensity conflicts. At Canada's University of British Columbia,
scholars at the Human Security Center are quantifying this by tackling the difficult
task of calculating war casualties worldwide for their Human Security Report, to be
released late in 2004.
A collaboration with Sweden's Uppsala University, that report will conservatively
estimate battle-related deaths worldwide at 15,000 in 2002 and, because of the Iraq
war, rising to 20,000 in 2003. Those estimates are sharply down from annual tolls
ranging from 40,000 to 100,000 in the 1990s, a time of major costly conflicts in such
places as the former Zaire and southern Sudan, and from a post-World War II peak of
700,000 in 1951.
The Canadian center's director, Andrew Mack, said the figures don't include deaths
from war-induced starvation and disease, deaths from ethnic conflicts not involving
states, or unopposed massacres, such as in Rwanda in 1994.
08/29/2004
The World says No to the Bush Agenda!
http://www.unitedforpeace.org
Massive march past Madison Square Garden
Gather 10:00AM, Seventh Avenue 14th Street, New York.
08/29/2004
TRANSCEND Peace University (TPU) will begin a new semester!
TRANSCEND Peace University is the world's first global peace
university for policy makers, practitioners, scholars, students, UN
staff and others working in peacebuilding, conflict transformation,
post-war reconstruction, rehabilitation and reconciliation,
development, human rights, and other related fields. Please forward
this announcement to individuals, organisations, UN agencies and
governments which you believe may be interested in participating in
the TPU's September Semester 2004. For more information or to apply
on-line, please visit
Johan Galtung, the Rector of TPU and one of the founders of peace
studies, invites you to join practitioners and students from around
the world online.
Since 1996, 300+ on-site workshops have been offered for 6,000+
participants around the world, using the TRANSCEND manual "Conflict
Transformation By Peaceful Means," published by the United Nations.
There will be certificates; for single courses, diplomas for
clusters of courses and eventually BA, MA; and PhD degrees.
Participants may combine online and onsite courses.
In the Sept. 2004 Semester TPU will offer the following 13 courses:
1. Peaceful Conflict Transformation, Johan Galtung
2. Nonviolence as Political Tool and Philosophy, Jorgen Johansen
3. Peace Journalism, Jake Lynch and Annabel McGoldrick
4. Peace, Music, Literature and the Arts, Olivier Urbain
5. Deep Culture in Conflict, Johan Galtung and Wilfried Graf
6. Democratization and Development, Paul D. Scott
7. Conflict Prevention, Intervention, Reconciliation and Reconstruction, S.P. Udayakumar
8. Dialogue, Peace and Development, Katrin Kaeufer and Claus Otto Scharmer
9. Peace and Tourism, Lynda-Ann Blanchard and Freya Higgins-Desbiolles
10. Peace Business, Jack Santa Barbara and Sara Horowitz
11. Peace and Macro-history, Sohail Inayatullah
12. Peace Museums, Christophe Bouillet
13. Peace Zones, Christophe Barbey
Starting Date: September 27, 2004
Ending Date: December 17, 2004
Deadline for Registration: September 17, 2004
Cost per one Course: For European Union, North American and East
Asian/Australian participants 300 Euros. For all others 150 Euros.
For more information or to register, please contact the TRANSCEND
Peace University Global Center in Cluj, Romania with a staff to
handle information, applications, payments, course related
questions, and computer problems: tpu@transcend.org
Fax +40-264-420298,
Tel +40-724-380551;
web-site www.transcend.org/tpu
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