“It is convenient for the world to think that the ongoing Ivory Coast civil war and genocide is about election and election results, and removing recalcitrant Gbagbo from an office which he lost in the polls.

“In reality, this is hypocrisy. The UN and the stakeholder-countries involved in Ivory Coast [know] that the problem is not Gbagbo and Ouattara, or elections. The primary issue in Ivory Coast is that of “North vs. South” which is now translating into perhaps Muslim North vs. Christian South.

“The result of sweeping this fact under the rug and pretending that it is not there is what we have now: civil war, civilian casualties and genocide. Yet, the charade continues.”

- Braimah Dupe Marian. See his comment in Niger’s Weekend Observer here

“During the decade-long rule of Laurent Gbagbo … his favorite theme was national pride, the belief that Ivorians stood out among their West African neighbors and controlled their own destiny.

“But behind the positive rhetoric was a dark and sometimes threatening brand of patriotism that raised an unspoken question: Who truly belongs in Ivory Coast?

“The last decade has been marked by boiling nationalism and xenophobic violence, with killings and harassment of northerners and Ivorians of foreign descent.”

- Robyn Dixon. See his comment in the Los Angeles Times here

Alarmed over the recent nuclear catastrophe in Japan, India and Russia have decided to jointly review the safety of nuclear reactors installed in India, but have also agreed not to impose brakes on ongoing projects.

"We will do this exercise together. But nothing stops and it does not replace anything that we have already agreed in the long-term,” National Security Advisor Shiv Shankar Menon says.

See ANI’s report here.

Nuclear energy constitutes just 3 per cent of India's power generation. Delhi would like this share to go up to nearly 25 per cent by 2050.

Over the next few decades, India proposes to spend an estimated $175 billion importing new generation nuclear power plants from the United States, France and Russia.

See India Today’s extensive report here

India has 22 nuclear reactors. Of these, eight are in Tamil Nadu, and by 2015 three more will be built in the southern state.

“For decades, international and regional organisations have resisted the partition of states. Despite the principle of self-determination enshrined in the UN Charter, this emphasis on non-interference and territorial integrity has preserved artificially created state entities, defined by colonial boundaries that disregard traditional homelands.

“Now, the international community is starting to change its posture. The process that leads to the formal secession of South Sudan from Khartoum … was sponsored, not just accepted, by the international community.

“For too long the international community has given precedence to preserving the grip of narrow elites on subject populations. Rulers in Morocco, Yemen, Sudan, Iran and elsewhere, now facing a new wave of regional secessionism, have good reason to wonder about the future integrity of their states.”

- Michael Crawford and Nader Mousavizadeh, a senior global adviser and chief executive of Oxford Analytica respectively. See the full text of their article in the Financial Times here.

This is what Tamil Guardian argued in our editorial of Feb 4, 2011 (see full text here):

“The next few years and decades will undoubtedly bring further changes in the international system. Whatever is emphatically asserted today will not necessarily be so in future - as the cases of Sudan and Kosovo demonstrate. But, one principle will be ceaselessly pursued in an increasingly interconnected world: stability.

“Indeed, the independence of Kosovo and South Sudan, once resisted on the basis of preserving stability, came to be supported precisely as the means to ensure it.

“In a world where states do not wage wars of conquest, the principle of territorial integrity has less relevance as a cornerstone of world peace when powerful internal demands have to be violently denied in its defence.”

See also our earlier posts:

‘What about those on ‘wrong’ side of a new border?’ (Mar 2011)

‘Breaking up is good to do’ (Jan 2011)

‘Self-determination in the 21st century’ (Jan 2011)

‘Obama: the will of South Sudan has to be respected’ (Jan 2011)

Critics argue that we are inconsistent, even hypocritical, in our military interventions. After all, we intervened promptly this time in a country with oil, while we have largely ignored Ivory Coast and Darfur — not to mention Yemen, Syria and Bahrain.

We may as well plead guilty. We are inconsistent. There’s no doubt that we cherry-pick our humanitarian interventions.

But just because we allowed Rwandans or Darfuris to be massacred, does it really follow that to be consistent we should allow Libyans to be massacred as well? Isn’t it better to inconsistently save some lives than to consistently save none?

- Nicholas D Kristoff defends the Libyan intervention in his New York Times opinion column. Read the full piece here.

Many of you will remember how effective the sports boycott of the 1970s and 1980s was in conveying to sport-crazy South Africans that our society had placed itself beyond the pale by continuing to organise its life on the basis of racial discrimination.

Your refusal to kow-tow to racism was the sanction that hurt the supporters of apartheid the most, and for those of us who suffered the effects of discrimination nothing could have shown us more vividly the principal value enshrined in the preamble to the Spirit of Cricket, which Lord Cowdrey and Ted Dexter later helped to introduce to the laws of the game, the value of which is all the more powerful for the simplicity of its statement, and that of course is fair play.

For 20 years, as the sports boycott tightened and apartheid stopped generations of South African sportsmen and women, both white and black, realising their full potential, you and others like you drummed into us what the world saw as fair play and what it saw as unfair play.

I have not the slightest doubt that what you did played a major role in persuading the supporters of apartheid to change their ways and, in the negotiations that followed F.W. de Klerk’s courageous decision to release Nelson Mandela in 1990, to agree on a constitution based on the principle, also enshrined in the Spirit of Cricket, of respect for others.

There have been those who have loved the dichotomies that try to divide life into watertight compartments – religion, politics, sport – imagining fondly that they were watertight and impervious to one another. But we know differently: politics impinges on sport as much as on any other aspect of life.

We know that politics and sport have an important relationship. We indicated that the sports boycott played a crucial part in our liberation, and now sport is playing a pivotal part in helping to build South Africa up to be the rainbow nation.

From a speech given by the Most Reverend Dr. Desmond Tutu at Lord's Cricket Ground in June 2008. See the full text here.

In September 2009, a delegation of three senior Libyan military officers visited the US military’s Africa Command headquarters as part of an orientation program.

See Africom’s report here.

The Libyan officers held meetings with senior US staff members to discuss Africom's programs and activities, met General William E. ward and his two deputies, and traveled to Ramstein Air Base to meet Major General Ron Ladnier, the US Air Force Africa commander, and his staff.

Interestingly, Gen. Ward had earlier visited Libya twice in 2009, and also met the Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi, in May.

"It was explained to him that we were there not to threaten the sovereignty of any nation; that we were there to work in close cooperation, but only among those things that the nations wanted us to do," Ward said of his meeting with Gaddafi.

" ... it was about trying to enhance the stability and the security of the nations that we work with. We also discussed issues that concern security matters in Africa and how we look forward to working together in ways that help us achieve those common objectives for peace and stability."

Perhaps this is one reason Gaddafi expected international inaction when he launched his onslaught to crush the rebellion against his rule.

In an interview with CNN, President Obama makes clear that the US supports the removal of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and his replacement with a government formed by the rebels.

He pointedly refused to rule out military assistance for the rebels, but said the international air campaign was focused on “ensuring that the people of Libya are not assaulted by their own military.”

“Keep in mind we don’t just have military tools at our disposal in terms of accomplishing Gaddafi’s leaving. We’ve put in place strong international sanctions, we’ve frozen his assets, [and] we will continue to apply a whole range of pressures on him.”

“Our hope is that the first thing that happens once we’ve cleared the space is the rebels are able to start discussing how they organise themselves, how they articulate their aspirations for the Libyan people, and create a legitimate government.”

See the interview here:

The permanent members of the Security Council have no problem with a second term for UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, Reuters quotes UN diplomats as saying.

Once criticised by Human Rights Watch for being "notably reluctant to put pressure on abusive governments," Ban has grown tougher and more self-confident in recent months, they say.

In 2008 Russia had threatened to block Ban’s second term for supporting Kosovo’s seccesion from Serbia, but Moscow “got over it,” Reuters quoted diplomats as saying.

"It's not as if he's lightning in a bottle, but we can live with him," a senior Western diplomat said.

See Reuters report here.

Some observations on the UN-backed intervention in Libya from Bloomberg’s report (see it here):

“This is 21st century intervention, an extraordinary step that pushes the envelope for the UN.” Intervening in an internal conflict such as Libya “goes beyond previous non-aggression measures such the steps taken against Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990.”

- Jeff Laurenti, UN analyst at the New York-based Century Foundation research group.

“The Security Council has defied expectations and risen to the occasion by making clear that all options are on the table to prevent mass atrocities.” It now needs to deal as decisively with other crises, such as halting mass atrocities in Ivory Coast, Myanmar and Sri Lanka.

- Kenneth Roth, executive director of the Human Rights Watch.

“Since that controversial principle [of R2P] was introduced, it has been endorsed in general and hesitant terms … Libya was the first time it’s been forcefully invoked in respect of a specific crisis.”

- Bruce Jones, senior fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution.
 

“There is no contradiction in the White House position that the UN-sanctioned military mission is restricted to protecting civilians but that the longer-term, broader political aim is to remove Col Muammar Gaddafi. What is left unsaid is that presumably the man giving the orders to kill civilians is Col Gaddafi. Getting rid of him would protect civilians. QED.”

- Mark Mardell, BBC's North America editor. See his blog here.