Feb 13, 2008

Our responsibility to protect

WATERLOO, Canada — Then Secretary General Kofi Annan’s famous “challenge of humanitarian intervention” in September 1999 provoked a furious backlash from many countries. Yet a mere six years later, the norm, reformulated as the “responsibility to protect” (R2P), was endorsed by the world leaders ...

Dec 31, 2007

Killing cycle claimed Bhutto

WATERLOO, Canada — Born amid the mass killings of partition in 1947, Pakistan has never escaped the cycle of violence, volatility and bloodshed. Benazir Bhutto (1953-2007) is the latest casualty of that murderous cycle. Many features of her life and death are common to ...

Dec 12, 2007

Protection and punishment

WATERLOO, Ontario — Dec. 9 and 10 marked the anniversaries of the Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Both were an acknowledgment of the dark side of European history and embodied the determination to ban vices that had been let ...

Nov 28, 2007

Labor wins by a Rudd-slide

WATERLOO, Ontario — Poor John Howard. Reckless on climate change, clueless in Iraq, fickle on civil liberties, mean to migrants and minorities, ruthless toward the workers — and now jobless. He also was set to lose the Parliament seat he has represented since 1974, ...

Nov 7, 2007

Time for Musharraf to go

Waterloo, ONTARIO — For outsiders as for Pakistanis, the choice is between worse and worst: a militantly Islamic, 160 million strong, nuclear-armed failed state at the strategic crossroads of South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. Pakistan’s fate has rested historically on the ...

Sep 26, 2007

Keep the Arctic free of nuclear weapons

WATERLOO, Ontario — As a nonnative speaker of English, I have always been intrigued by the phrase “polar opposites.” Fact is, nothing so resembles the North Pole as the South Pole. Based on this polar symmetry, there exist the opportunity and an increasingly urgent ...

Sep 15, 2007

Taiwan's sad quest for U.N. membership

WATERLOO, Ontario — As the United Nations General Assembly begins its annual session later this month, it will refuse once again to confront an issue where the denial of reality intersects with a negation of the world body’s core values. Article 4(2) of the ...

Jan 12, 2007

Crisis in multilateral trade

“Globalization” remains controversial. It has produced increasing economic interdependence through the growing volume and variety of cross-border flows of finance, investment, goods and services, and the rapid and widespread diffusion of technology. The scale, benefits and vilification of globalization can all be exaggerated. Since ...