Nieuws van de afdeling

4 April 2008

NATO does the splits

NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer is doing the splits. US President George W.Bush wants to use the NATO Summit in Bucharest to bring the future membership of Ukraine and Georgia a step nearer. Russian President Vladimir Putin wants, on the other hand, to make it clear that he sees nothing to attract him to a more complete encircling of his country by the Atlantic alliance. Revival of the American-Russian conflict is particularly bad for De Hoop Scheffer, now that NATO is, in his view, in urgent pursuit of a new Atlantic Charter, a new strategic concept and a better relationship with Russia.

3 April 2008

Harry van Bommel: Get rid of nuclear weapons!

NATO is meeting this week to discuss Afghanistan, but the debate will focus for the most part on the organisation's own future. The alliance is faced with a conundrum. The old opposition between East and West has gone and new enemies have not as yet presented themselves. The traditional defence of its own territory is therefore no longer necessary and for this reason NATO has for more than ten years been active outside its area, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. Success, however, has been evasive. NATO, with its large standing armies, has no idea how to win a guerrilla war against a rebel uprising.

1 April 2008

SP: EU rules for dismantling ships must be stricter

The European Parliament will tomorrow discuss the regulations governing the breaking up of ships at the end of their useful lives. Many of these end up on the foreshore of countries such as India where, under appalling conditions, they are broken up by hand, often by child workers. “I intend to present tomorrow a number of proposals which would tighten up the rules,” says SP Euro-MP Kartika Liotard, “because the inhuman conditions which surround the dismantling of ships are as things stand completely unacceptable.”

1 April 2008

Secret Memos

Harry van Bommel

1 April 2008

The ethics of medical experiments

Agnes Kant

31 March 2008

Film Mania

For months now our country has been ravaged by film mania. Much speculation, many media releases and hundreds of commentaries later, the film which provoked this is at last here – Fitna. Geert Wilders has succeeded these last few months in dominating the news [1]. Friend and foe must give him his due for this achievement, which demonstrates what is, for a politician, a skill of some importance.

International