Below are some quotes on self-determination from a speech by Mahmood Mamdani, professor and director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) on the independence of South Sudan. The full speech can be found here. 

“Let me ask one question to begin with: who is the self in what we know as self‐determination? In 1956, when Sudan became independent, that self was the people of Sudan. Today, in 2011, when South Sudan will become independent, that self is the people of South Sudan.

 

“That self, in both cases, is a political self. It is a historical self, not a metaphysical self as nationalists are prone to think. When nationalists write a history, they give the past a present. In doing so, they tend to make the present eternal. As the present changes, so does the past. This is why we are always rewriting the past.

“We need to rethink the relation between sovereignty and self-determination. Sovereignty is the relation of the state to other states, to external powers, whereas self-determination is an internal relation of the state to the people. In a democratic context, self-determination should be seen as the prerequisite to sovereignty.”

The United States has launched a high-level initiative to make its military more ready and able to respond to potential mass killings in future, the Wall Street Journal reports.

A senior Department of Defense official told the WSJ that the project, which is at an early stage, would help develop "a complete set of options that the leadership can consider in the preventive area before it comes to sending in the military, or not sending in the military."

The emerging doctrine is a blueprint for an interventionist foreign policy that places such ideas as "responsibility to protect" on a par with the principles of realpolitik, the paper says.

A tight-knit group of academics, policy makers and military officers have been lobbying the Pentagon to embrace a new 160-page handbook that details, step by step, how the US military can respond to mass atrocities, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

In the context of US’s role in the UN-sanctioned intervention in Libya, their efforts are paying off, with top US commanders turning to their work, the WSJ says.

And the idea is already finding its way into US military strategy: the Army Operating Concept, a document that envisions how the US army will fight in the next decade and a half, says that the service "must be prepared to conduct mass-atrocity response operations" as one of its core tasks.

See the WSJ’s report here

An Iraqi tribunal has ruled that a 1983 attack on the Barzani tribe in the Kurdish provinces of Iraq was an act of genocide, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) said.

The KRG said as many as 8,000 members of the Barzani tribe, most of them men and boys, were rounded up and killed by the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein in 1983.

The reprisal came five years before the 1988 chemical attacks on Halabja in which 5,000 more Kurds were killed by Saddam’s forces.

The Kurds have been waging a decades long struggle, including a campaign of armed resistance, for self-rule from Arab-dominated Iraq.

Following the toppling of the Saddam regime, the KRG was set up as part of the new Iraq - despite the bitter opposition of the country's Arab majority.

KRG President Masoud Barzani said this week's ruling was a testament of the strength of Iraq's new judicial system.

"This ruling strengthens our confidence in the justice of our cause, and illustrates the scale of the injustices committed against our people," he said.

"What strengthens our faith is that the future is always an ally of the oppressed and brings shame and disgrace on the perpetrators."

See UPI’s report here

A party advocating Scotland’s independence from Britain has won a surprising majority in the Scottish Parliament in last Thursday’s elections.

It is the first time the Scottish National Party (SNP) has taken a majority in the devolved national assembly which was established in 1999.

The head of the SNP, Alex Salmond, who will serve another term as Scotland's first minister, pledged to introduce a plebiscite on Scottish independence within the next five years.

"The SNP can finally claim that we have lived up to that accolade as the national party of Scotland," he said.

"That is why, in this term of the Parliament, we shall bring forward a referendum and trust the people with Scotland's own constitutional future."

According to the SNP, the Scottish Parliament has a say of spending on less than 20% of the government revenue generated from the region.

Notably, although Britain’s three main parties are opposed to Scotland’s independence, the government has firmly declared it would not block a referendum.

See reports by the BBC here and here

Photo Wattle Cheung

President Obama announced Sunday night that US forces had killed Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden at a location in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and taken possession of his remains.

He said a small team of US Special Forces had successfully attacked Bin Laden's compound in the town, which is close to Islamabad.

Referring to the Al-Qaeda attacks on the United States in September 11, 2001, President Obama said justice had been served, and vowed to continue the fight against the group and its affiliates.

See the official transcript of President Obama's speech here.

Also, see CNN's report here and BBC’s obituary here

A UN team is due to arrive in Tripoli to investigate allegations of human rights violations in Libya since the start of the conflict in February, the BBC reported Wednesday.

The team was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council following the Libyan government's crackdown on protesters.

The government has said it will co-operate with the inquiry.

The three investigators say they will look at all alleged abuses, including those the government says have been committed by rebels or Nato forces.

Separately, the UN Security Council has asked the International Criminal Court to investigate Libya on possible charges of war crimes.

Fatah, the Palestinian political organisation, has reached a comprehensive agreement with its rival Hamas on forming an interim government and fixing a date for a general election.

The deal was announced by Egyptian intelligence in a statement, Al-Jazeera reports.

"The consultations resulted in full understandings over all points of discussions, including setting up an interim agreement with specific tasks and to set a date for election," Egyptian intelligence said in a statement on Wednesday.

The deal, which took many officials by surprise, was thrashed out in Egypt and followed a series of secret meetings, Al-Jazeera said.

"The two sides signed initial letters on an agreement. All points of differences have been overcome," Taher Al-Nono, a Hamas government spokesman in Gaza, told Reuters.

Rageh said the deal was expected to be signed next week by Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority and Fatah member, and Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, who is based in Damascus.

Sathya Sai Baba, one of India’s most famous spiritual gurus passed away on Sunday, triggering a global outpouring of grief and tributes from devotees across all walks of life, including politics, sport and entertainment.

He was 85 and finally succumbed to multiple organ failure after being in a critical condition for more than three weeks, AFP quoted his doctors as saying.

“Sai Baba is no more with us physically. He breathed his last at 7:40 am and died due to cardio-respiratory failure," a statement from the hospital in Puttaparthi, in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, said.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said the nation would deeply mourn the death of Sai Baba, who "was an inspiration to people of all faiths."

"He was a spiritual leader who inspired millions to lead a moral and meaningful life," Singh said, adding that the softly-spoken guru taught "the universal ideals of truth, right conduct, peace, love and non-violence."

Over decades, millions of devotees across the world, and from many faiths, have supported through the Sri Sathya Sai Central Trust’s numerous charitable projects in some of India’s most impoverished areas.

Today the trust runs the Sathya Sai University complex, the 220-bed Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Medical Sciences, where Baba breathed his last; a world religion museum; a planetarium; a railway station; a hill-view stadium; a music college; an administrative building; an airport and an indoor sports stadium in Puttaparthi.

It also runs a specialty hospital in Bangalore, several other hospitals and dispensaries in the backward district of Anantapur. It also funded several drinking water projects, including one for 731 villages in Anantapur district, and Krishna water supply to Chennai.

See reports by AFP, Hindustan Times and Economic Times.

See also commentary:

The Hindu: ‘The secular spiritual leader’ (see also this)

Deccan Herald: ‘A man of miracles and divine sagacity'

“I was, and am, today firmly convinced that we need The Hague tribunal.

“Why? Well, because in Croatia there was no political will to process war crimes that doubtlessly happened on our side.”

- Stejpan Mesic, former president of Croatia (2000-2010)

See DPA’s report here.

See also: ‘Stiff war crimes sentences for Croatian generals’

In an unusual move, a group of Canadian lawyers and legal academics are urging voters not to support the Conservative Party in the May 2 election, the Toronto Star reports.

“The Conservative Party has been telling visible minority immigrant communities, which it calls the ‘ethnic vote,’ that it is improving the immigration system,” said the group in a statement released Wednesday. “A review of their record shows the contrary.”

The group’s statement sets out several startling differences between the Conservative government’s rhetoric on immigration issues, and its practice.

For example,

• Instead of getting tough on smugglers, new legislation introduced by the party target the victims of smuggling - the refugees - by mandatory detention, denying permanent residency and making it more difficult for refugees to reunite with their families.

• Whilst claiming to be sympathetic to genuine refugees who do not flee their countries illegally, the government has just announced plans to cancel the only program allowing Canada to protect refugees applying from within their own country.

• New laws said to target marriage fraud actually serve to make reunification more difficult. (Meanwhile, the conditional two-year permanent residency will trap spouses in abusive relationships).

• The annual visa quotas for sponsoring parents and grandparents are down — not up — by 44 per cent (from 20,005 in 2005 to 11,200 in 2011). It also now takes nine to 30 months longer to process these sponsorships, depending on the visa post.

See our recent comment on Canada's asylum practices: 'Extraordinarily Perverse'

Croatians - and their government - have reacted with shock and outrage over the sentencing in the Hague last week of two former generals for crimes against humanity committed over fifteen years ago by troops they commanded.

Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markac were sentenced last week to 24 and 18 years respectively, after being found guilty of orchestrating a campaign of murder and looting that led to the expulsion of some 200,000 Serbs from the Krajina region of Croatia in August 1995.

Operation Storm, conducted by Croatian troops, was heavily supported by the United States. It lasted just four days and is seen as a turning point in Croatia’s war of independence.

Along with the mass expulsions, the operation resulted in the deaths of three hundred Serb civilians by artillery fire and extra-judicial killings.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) said the "the Croatian military committed acts of murder, cruel treatment, inhumane acts, plunder, persecution and deportation."

See UN news service report here.

It added the Croatian leadership had engaged, along with late president of Croatia, Franjo Tudjman, in “a joint criminal enterprise” whose aim - during and after the operation - was to forcefully and permanently remove the Serb population from Croatia.

Tudjman died in 1999 as prosecutors at The Hague were planning his indictment.

The judges said the generals abused their power by failing to prevent further crimes against vulnerable victims.

Judge Alphons Orie, who presided over the trial, said that the case was not about the legality of resorting to and conducting war.

"This case was about whether Serb civilians in the Krajina were the targets of crimes and whether the accused should be held criminally liable for these crimes," he stressed.

The Croation government, which has funded the generals’ defence, slammed the sentences as “unacceptable” and vowed to support their appeals.

Tens of thousands of Croats demonstrated against the verdict in the capitol Zagreb Sunday, chanting slogans against the EU. There were also protests by Croatian expatriates, with 4,000 marching in Australia.

According to the New York Times, US military advisors helped plan the offensive against Serb forces and trained Croatian forces, and US drones over flew the region providing intelligence.