Det danske Fredsakademi

Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 18 Oktober 2005 / Time Line October 18, 2005

17. Oktober 2005, 19. Oktober 2005

10/18/2005
Following Cindy's Example, Brits to Camp Out at Blair's Place
Downing Street Peace Camp
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/3645
Rose Gentle's son Gordon died in a roadside bombing in Basra on 28th June 2004 - Susan Smith's son Philip was killed in a roadside bombing in Al Amarah on 16th July this year.
Next Tuesday both mothers will camp outside Downing Street to protest at the political decision to deny the families legal aid in their campaign to bring the Prime Minister to book for the Iraq war. The families believe the war to have been fought on the basis of lies and deceit and moreover consider that there was no legal basis for the conflict.
Both Rose and Susan have been inspired by the example of Cindy Sheehan, mother of Casey Sheehan - a US soldier also killed in Iraq. Cindy took her protest to George Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. Families on each side of the Atlantic will not rest until both George Bush and Tony Blair face them and take responsibility for their actions.
The US President and the British Prime Minister have both refused to meet the bereaved families. Rose and Susan welcome any support.

10/18/2005
Wars 'less frequent, less deadly'
The Human Security Report 2005
http://www.humansecurityreport.info/
Wars around the world are both less frequent and less deadly since the end of the Cold War, according to the new report.
Comprehensive three-year study shows surprising evidence of major declines in armed conflicts, genocides, human rights abuse, military coups and international crises, worldwide
The Number of Armed Conflicts Has Dropped 40% since 1992.
This Unheralded Decline Is Linked to a Dramatic Increase in UN Conflict Prevention and Peace Building Efforts.
NEW YORK, October 17, 2005—Confounding conventional wisdom, a major new report reveals that all forms of political violence, except international terrorism, have declined worldwide since the early 1990s.
Supported by five governments, published by Oxford University Press and released today, the Human Security Report is the most comprehensive annual survey of trends in warfare, genocide, and human rights abuses. The Report, which was produced by the Human Security Centre at the University of British Columbia, shows how, after nearly five decades of inexorable increase, the number of genocides and violent conflicts dropped rapidly in the wake of the Cold War. It also reveals that wars are not only far less frequent today, but are also far less deadly.
In tracking and analyzing these trends the Report draws on specially commissioned studies and confirms the little-publicized findings of earlier research to explode a number of widely believed myths about contemporary political violence. The latter include claims that terrorism is currently the gravest threat to international security, that 90% of those killed in today’s wars are civilians and that women are disproportionately victimized by armed conflict. Analyzing the causes of the improvement in global security since the early 1990s, the Report argues that the UN played a critically important role in spearheading a huge upsurge of international conflict prevention, peacekeeping and peace building activities.
Although marred by much–publicized failures, these efforts have been the major driver of the reduction in war numbers around the world. The Report examines alternative explanations for the decline and finds them wanting.
Professor Andrew Mack, who directed the Report project, says that these extraordinary changes have attracted little discussion because so few realize that they have taken place. ‘No international agency collects data on wars, genocides, terrorist acts, or core human rights abuses,’ he said. ‘The issues are just too politically sensitive. And ignorance is compounded by the fact that the global media give far more coverage to wars that start than those that quietly end.’
KEY FINDINGS
Patterns of Political Violence Have Changed

1. The number of armed conflicts has declined by more than 40% since 1992. The deadliest conflicts (those with 1000 or more battle-deaths) dropped even more dramatically––by 80%.
2. The number of international crises, often harbingers of war, fell by more than 70% between 1981 and 2001.
3. Wars between countries are more rare than in previous eras and now constitute less than 5% of all armed conflicts.
4. The number of military coups and attempted coups has declined by some 60% since 1963. In 1963, there were 25 coups or attempted coups; in 2004, there were 10. All failed.
5. Most armed conflicts now take place in the poorest countries in the world, but as incomes rise the risk of war declines.
6. The period since the end of World War II is the longest interval without wars between the major powers in hundreds of years.
7. The UK and France, followed by the US and Russia/USSR have fought most international wars since 1946.
8. Burma and India have suffered the greatest number of ‘conflict-years’ since 1946. (If a country fights two separate wars in one calendar year this counts as two ‘conflict-years’.) In 2003, India suffered more ‘conflict-years’ than any other country in the world.
9. Most of the world’s conflicts are now concentrated in Africa. But even here there are signs of hope. A new dataset compiled for the Human Security Report finds that between 2002 and 2003 (the last year for which there is data) the number of armed conflicts in Africa dropped from 41 to 35.
10. The drop in armed conflicts in the 1990s was associated with a worldwide decline in arms transfers, military spending and troop numbers.
11. Wars have become dramatically less deadly over the past five decades. The average number of people reported killed per conflict per year in 1950 was 38,000; in 2002 it was just 600––a decline of 98%.
12. In the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s by far the highest battle––death tolls in the world were in the wars in East and Southeast Asia. In the 1970s and 1980s, most of the killing took place in the Middle East, Central and South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. By the end of the 1990s, more people were being killed in sub-Saharan Africa’s wars than the rest of the world put together.
13. The new dataset created for the Report finds that between 2002 and 2003 the number of reported deaths from all forms of political violence fell by 62% in the Americas, 32% in Europe, 35% in Asia and 24 % in Africa.
14. The biggest death tolls do not come from the actual fighting, however, but from war-exacerbated disease and malnutrition. These ‘indirect’ deaths can account for as much as 90% of the total war-related death toll. Currently there are insufficient data to make even rough estimations of global or regional ‘indirect’ death toll trends.
15. Not withstanding the horrors of Rwanda and Srebrenica, Bosnia, the number of genocides and other mass killings plummeted by 80% between the 1989 high point and 2001.
16. International terrorism is the only form of political violence that appears to be getting worse. Some datasets have shown an overall decline in international terrorist incidents of all types since the early 1980s, but the most recent statistics suggest a dramatic increase in the number of high–casualty attacks since the September 11 attacks on the US in 2001. The annual death toll from international terrorist attacks is, however, only a tiny fraction of annual war death toll.

Why We Have Fewer Wars
The Human Security Report identifies three major political changes over the past 30 years that, Andrew Mack says, “have radically altered the global security landscape.”
First, was the end of colonialism. From the early 1950s to the early 1980s, colonial wars made up 60–100% of all international conflicts depending on the year. Today there are no such wars.
Second, was the end of the Cold War, which had driven approximately one-third of all conflicts in the post–World War II. This removed any residual threat of war between the major powers, and Washington and Moscow stopped fueling “proxy wars” in the developing world.
Third, was the unprecedented upsurge of international activities designed to stop ongoing wars and prevent new ones starting that took place in the wake of the Cold War. Spearheaded by the UN these activities included:

1. A six-fold increase in UN preventive diplomacy missions (to stop wars starting).
2. A four-fold increase in UN peacemaking missions (to end ongoing conflicts).
3. A four-fold increase in UN peace operations (to reduce the risk of wars restarting).
4. An eleven-fold increase in the number of states subject to UN sanctions (which can help pressure warring parties into peace negotiations).

The UN did not act alone, of course. The World Bank, donor states, regional organizations and thousands of NGOs worked closely with UN agencies––and often played independent roles of their own. But the UN, the only international organization with a global security mandate, has been the leading player.
As this upsurge of international activism grew in scope and intensity through the 1990s, the number of crises, wars and genocides declined, despite the much–publicized failures.
The evidence that these initiatives worked is not just circumstantial. A recent RAND corporation study, for example, found that two thirds of the UN’s peace building missions had succeeded. In addition, the sharp increase in peacemaking efforts led to a significant increase in the number of conflicts that ended in negotiated settlements. Approximately half of all the peace agreements negotiated between 1946 and 2003 have been signed since the end of the Cold War.
The annual cost of these changes to the international community has been modest––well under 1% of world military spending. In fact, the cost of running all of the UN’s 17 peace operations around the world for an entire year is less than the United States spends in Iraq in a single month. The Report argues that, in the long run, equitable economic development, increased state capacity and the spread of inclusive democracy play a vital role in reducing the risk of political violence. But it also argues that these factors cannot explain the dramatic post-Cold War reduction in armed conflicts. Why Today’s Wars Kill Fewer People
The explosion of international activism after the Cold War helps explain the subsequent decline in the number of armed conflicts, but it doesn’t tell us why they became so much less deadly. Here the explanation is related to changes in the nature of warfare and (possibly) in the international refugee regime:

• The major wars of the Cold War era typically involved huge armies, heavy conventional weapons, and massive external intervention. They killed hundreds of thousands––sometimes millions.
• The overwhelming majority of today’s wars are low-intensity conflicts fought with small arms and light weapons. They typically pit weak government forces against ill-trained rebels and rarely involve major engagements. Although often brutal, they kill relatively few people compared with the major wars of the Cold War era––typically hundreds rather than tens or hundreds of thousands.
• The decline in the battle-death toll is probably also related to the huge increase in the number of refugees and Internally Displaced Persons in the 1980s. By 1992, the peak year, the worldwide total of displaced people exceeded 40 million––up from little over 10 million at the end of the 1970s. Displacement is a humanitarian tragedy, but had these millions not fled their homes, hundreds of thousands––possibly far more––could have been killed. So the increase in displacement is likely one of the reasons for the decline in battle-deaths.

Finally, we know that countries ruled by authoritarian regimes have higher levels of violent internal repression and gross human rights abuses than do democratic regimes. At the end of the 1970s some 90 countries around the world were governed by authoritarian regimes; by 2003 there were just 30. The decline was steepest in the post–Cold War years when the numbers of genocides and other mass killings started to drop rapidly. In addition, the Report, finds that human rights abuses declined in 5 out of 6 regions in the developing world after the mid-1990s. No Grounds for Complacency
Despite the positive changes it documents, the Report makes clear that there are no grounds for complacency. Although wars and war-deaths are down, there are still some 60 armed conflicts raging around the globe. There are still gross abuses of human rights, widespread war crimes, and ever-deadlier acts of terrorism. And because the underlying causes of conflict are too rarely addressed, the risk of new wars breaking out, and old ones starting up again remains very real.
And, as the many failures of the past––and numerous recent reports––have made clear, the UN remains in urgent need of reform if it is truly to fulfill its mandate to ‘save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’.
That the world is getting more peaceful is no consolation to people suffering in Darfur, Iraq, Colombia, Congo or Nepal. To help them, policymakers need a better understanding of human insecurity. That is the central goal of the Human Security Report.
The Human Security Report provides the data and analysis that can help the international community evaluate the effects of conflict prevention and resolution policies. ‘Without trend data neither international agencies nor governments can tell whether or not their efforts are succeeding’, Mack said. The Report can be downloaded from www.humansecurityreport.info It will be published by Oxford University Press in November 2005.
The Human Security Report 2005 was funded by the governments of Canada, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. It should not be taken to represent the views of these or any other government, or of the UN or any other agency.
Professor Andrew Mack is Director of the Human Security Centre, at the Liu Institute for Global Issues, University of British Columbia. He was Director of the Strategic Planning Unit in the Executive Office of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan 1998-2001. He has held research and teaching posts at Harvard, the London School of Economics, and the University of California, and in Australia, Denmark, Hawaii and Japan. His career has included periods as a pilot in the UK’s Royal Air Force, as a meteorologist in Antarctica, as a diamond prospector in Sierra Leone and as a journalist with the BBC.
Contact
Andrew Mack +1 604 803 3548; andrewmack@attglobal.net
Zoe Nielsen +1 778 239 5787; zoe.nielsen@ubc.ca

10/18/2005
SADDAM'S IRON GRIP
Intelligence Reports on Saddam Hussein's Reign
http://www.nsarchive.org
Washington D.C. October 18, 2005 - The National Security Archive today posted a series of declassified U.S. intelligence documents and other U.S. agency reports on Saddam Hussein's human rights abuses, one of which is the subject of the first trial of Saddam which begins tomorrow in Iraq. The first set of charges concerns Saddam's responsibility, along with seven co-defendants, for the 1982 massacre of 143 Shiites in Dujail, a town 35 miles north of Baghdad, after an unsuccessful assassination attempt against Saddam. Procedures for the trial are the subject of significant controversy, as reported by the New York Times' John Burns today. The Archive's posting gives a preview of the evidence that the U.S. government may be providing to the trial process.
Saddam may face up to a dozen trials for crimes alleged to have been committed by his regime - among them the gassing of Kurds in Halabja and the suppression of a Shiite uprising in the south. However, in September it was reported that the Iraqi government may waive further proceedings if Saddam is convicted in the first trial, a conviction which could bring the death penalty.
During his years in power, the U.S. Intelligence Community produced estimates and studies of Iraq's foreign and defense policies, its military capabilities and activities, and analyses of the regime's domestic policies and actions. Other U.S. agencies, both before and after the termination of Saddam's rule, also produced reports on the the regime's internal activities.
The collection below contains a number of documents produced by U.S. agencies over the last thirty years concerning the Iraqi regime's policies and activities directed at maintaining itself in power and eliminating or neutralizing opposition to the regime.

10/18/2005
Auditors For Iraq War Withdrawn In 2004
By Seth Borenstein
Miami Herald,
WASHINGTON - The chief Pentagon agency in charge of investigating and reporting fraud and waste in Defense Department spending in Iraq quietly pulled out of the war zone a year ago -- leaving what experts say are gaps in the oversight of how more than $140 billion is being spent.
The Defense Department's Office of Inspector General sent auditors into Iraq when the war started more than two years ago to ensure taxpayers were getting their money's worth for bullets, meals-ready-to-eat and other items.
The auditors were withdrawn in the fall of 2004 because other agencies were watching spending, too. But experts say those other agencies don't have the expertise, access and broad mandate that the inspector general has -- and don't make their reports public.
That means the bulk of money being spent in Iraq doesn't get public scrutiny, leaving the door open for possible waste, fraud, and abuse, experts say.
U.S. spending in Iraq falls into two big categories -- fighting the war and rebuilding the country. A Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction has a 45-person staff in Baghdad to monitor $18.4 billion in contracts.
In contrast, the Defense Department's Office of Inspector General, whose responsibility includes reviewing the $142 billion earmarked for the military, doesn't have a single auditor or accountant in Iraq tracking spending, Knight Ridder has found.
Spokeswoman Lt. Col. Rose-Ann Lynch, of the Defense Department IG's office, acknowledged Monday that the agency has no auditors in Iraq and that its criminal investigative arm ''ceased operations in Iraq in October 2004.''
Lynch said taxpayers' interests are served instead by other watchdog agencies, including the Defense Contract Audit Agency and the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.
Since the war in Iraq began, government spending has been tainted by charges of inflated pricing, double billing, bogus shipments of goods and kickbacks.
The inspector general's relocation makes finding cases of abuse more difficult, government officials and other contracting experts say.
Between October 2004 and this month, only one of the 107 audits listed on the Defense Department's Office of Inspector General's website is about Iraq.
By contrast, the reconstruction inspector general has completed 25 audits and has 60 investigations under way...

10/18/2005
MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media
MEDIA ALERT: KILLING WITH IMPUNITY
Nine-Second Coverage For Dozens of Dead Iraqi Women and Children
Last night's BBC Newsnight programme reported the deaths of 70 "Iraqi militants" in US air raids on the western Iraqi city of Ramadi. The item lasted just nine seconds. This included three seconds of scepticism from an Iraqi doctor who reported that in fact civilians were amongst the dead. Viewers' attention was then rapidly diverted elsewhere; a familiar pattern of mainstream news coverage.
A BBC news online report titled "US strikes kill '70 Iraq rebels'", also led with the US military version of events. Perhaps by way of a nod to increasing levels of public frustration with 'embedded' journalism, the phrase "Iraq rebels" at least appeared in quotes. The report also added a cursory note of caution in the second paragraph: "eyewitnesses are quoted saying that many [of the dead] were civilians". (BBC news online, October 17, 2005;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4349032.stm)
A Media Lens reader wrote to Pete Clifton, the BBC's news online editor:
"Regarding the BBC article 'US strikes kill "70 Iraq rebels"', isn't it biased to include the US quote in the headline?
"I'm sure you'd agree an alternative such as 'Iraqis: many civilians die in US attack' is biased and would be avoided.
"Why not choose a neutral headline to avoid contentious claims, such as 'Dozens killed in US strikes'?" (Darren Smith, message board,
www.medialens.org, October 17, 2005)
Compare the emphasis and extent of the Newsnight and BBC online reports with today's press release from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs - Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN):
"Two days of US air attacks against insurgents in the western Iraqi city of Ramadi have caused heavy casualties among the city's civilian population, a doctor and a senior Iraqi government official in Ramadi said."
IRIN go on to quote Ahmed al-Kubaissy, a senior doctor at Ramadi hospital:
"We have received the bodies of 38 people in our hospital and among them were four children and five women. The relatives said they had been killed by air attacks in their homes and in the street."
IRIN also quote a senior Iraqi government official in the city, who reported: "three houses had been totally destroyed in the air attacks on Sunday and Monday and 14 dead civilians had been found inside them. A further 12 civilians had been critically injured in the same air strikes."
The official described the US attack as "a cowardly action... [adding] that if any insurgents have been killed, many more civilians have been buried with them over the past two days". (IRIN, 'Iraq: Women and children killed in US air strikes on Ramadi, doctor says,' October 18, 2005;
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/LSGZ-6HAC7A?OpenDocument&rc=3&cc=irq )
The independent reporter, Dahr Jamail, paints an even more appalling picture of events in Ramadi:
"Residents claimed that several people, including children, were congregating around the site where a US military vehicle was destroyed and five soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb on election day.
"US warplanes conducted a strike on the crowd of two dozen people which had gathered to look at the wreckage and strip it for scrap metal. The military claimed that they were setting another roadside bomb in the same location.
"Dr. Bassem al-Dulaimi at the main hospital reported that he received 25 dead bodies which were the result of US aerial bombings. Other doctors and Iraqi police officers reported that the dead were all civilians, including children. At least 14 other Iraqis were killed in US air strikes on a nearby village." (Jamail, '"Elections" and other Deceptions in Iraq,' October 18, 2005,
http://dahrjamailiraq.com)
Another story from Iraq that is embarrassing US-UK government politicians, and their supporters in the media, has received similarly scant attention in recent days. On October 15 the Independent reported that Jean Ziegler, a senior UN official, had condemned the 'coalition' practice of cutting off food and water to force Iraqi civilians to flee before attacks on insurgent 'strongholds' as a "flagrant violation" of international law. (Bradley S. Klapper, 'Iraq referendum: US practice of starving out Iraqi civilians is inhumane, says UN,' The Independent, October 15, 2005)
This single article represents the sum-total of coverage in the mainstream press - 298 words. The story was ignored by every other national British newspaper. A 302-word article on the BBC website will doubtless allow 'Auntie Beeb' to claim it has 'covered' the issue. ('US troops "starve Iraqi citizens"', October 15, 2005;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4344136.stm)
American dissident David Peterson reports close to zero coverage of Ziegler's comments in the US media.
( http://blog.zmag.org/index.php/weblog/entry/iraq9/)
The US forces have, in their usual robotic fashion, issued a blanket denial of Ziegler's horrific charges. But mainstream news outlets have done little, if anything, to challenge US and UK government ministers and officials about what Ziegler has called the "starvation of civilians as a method of warfare." (http://news.bbc.co.uk/; op., cit)
When the mass killing of Iraqi civilians is couched in propaganda terms imported wholesale from the military, and reported in nine seconds or 300 words, it means the media have given the military a green light to kill with impunity. It means we are a couple of hundred words away from the kind of performance we would expect from a totalitarian media system.
What is it about Iraqis that makes us believe we have a right to go on killing them year after year? Why do their deaths mean so little to us? How can the deep moral degradation of our corporate press, and of our corporate political system, remain invisible to so many of us? How long must innocent people continue to pay the price for our indifference and complacency?

10/18/2005
Military Recruiting Ads Zero In On Mom, Dad : Parents, many of whom never served, are told of benefits
By Joe Garofoli, Chronicle Staff Writer
San Francisco Chronicle, October 18, 2005
With public support for the Iraq war dropping and military recruits becoming harder to attract, the Pentagon started an ad campaign Monday that skips patriotic images and focuses on the difficult conversations that young people have with their parents about joining up.
The $10 million campaign by the military's marketing arm urges parents to "make it a two-way conversation" with children looking to join the military. In four 30-second spots on cable networks and in print ads in publications ranging from O, The Oprah Magazine to Field and Stream, the appeals urge parents -- many of whom, the Pentagon realizes, have never served in the military -- to learn more about the services...

10/18/2005
CONTRACTS from the United States Department of Defense
Bechtel Plant Machinery Inc., Pittsburgh, Pa., is being awarded a $279,237,437 cost-plus-fixed-fee contract for Naval nuclear propulsion components. Work will be performed in Schenectady, N.Y. (50 percent) and Pittsburgh, Pa. (50 percent). Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. The contract was not competitively procured. Work completion date or additional information is not provided on Naval nuclear propulsion program contracts. The Naval Sea Systems Command, Washington, D.C., is the contracting activity (N00024-06-C-2106).
Campbell-Ewald, Warren, Mich., is being awarded firm fixed price contract in the amount of $91,926,443 to provide services in support of the Navy Recruiting Command's Navy Recruitment Advertising program. The contract contains four option periods, which if exercised, would bring the total estimated value of the contract to $468,558,820. Work will be performed in Warren, Mich., and is expected to be completed by November 2006. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This contract was awarded through full and open competition, with two offers received. The Fleet and Industrial Supply Center Norfolk, Philadelphia Division is the contracting activity (N00140-06-D-0005).

10/18/2005

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