ISLAMABAD:
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) should be dissolved or reconsidered, Ingeborg Breines said in a public lecture organised by the Pakistan-Norway Association (PANA) and Council of Social Sciences (COSS) in Islamabad on Friday, said a press release.
She said this was particularly important after the end of the cold war and since Nato was now also operating outside its own territories in areas such as Afghanistan and Libya. Thus, Nato has gone beyond its mandate as a defence organisation for America, Canada and Europe.
Norwegian native Breines is the Co-Chair of the International Peace Bureau, the world’s oldest peace organisation, and was recently a visiting scholar at the University of Gujrat and Unesco director in Pakistan prior to that.
Responding to a question, Breines said that since Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah did not live long after Pakistan’s birth, he did not have time to refine his ideas on peace and development.
She also justified the reverence Mahatma Gandhi receives, noting that his achievements include leading the India’s struggle for independence and developing concepts and practices on peaceful resistance to force that we still learn from today.
Breines underlined that peace and development go hand in hand, without one the other cannot grow roots, she said. She also said that we should study experiences from other countries and draw lessons.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 29th, 2012.
COMMENTS (2)
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Good point by Breines as NATO has become the aggressive arm of the oil/energy cartels, rather than following its original purporse. Those still supporting its existence with great verbosity can only be considered as the propaganda arms of the cartels, paid to defend these cartels' interests at all forums, as can be seen here where a small report in a second-tier Pakistan newspaper is immediately blasted with such agression.
For shame. Any person sincerely concerned with peace, not just with belonging to the "camp" of peace-speech, would be courageously supporting NATO.
The International Peace Bureau originally promoted a United States of Europe. Which has finally begun to be built since 1946, with the Marshall Plan, OEEC-0ECD and NATO as its cornerstones, and the EU as its highest superstructure.
NATO remains the foundation structure that ensures that Europe remains at peace with itself, internally not just from external attack. And meanwhile has helped greatly in ending murderous tyrannies such as recently in Libya; also in protecting Afghans from the Taliban, tho regrettably not fully successfully.
If the IPB is now against NATO, it is to its shame. It is betraying its heritage.
Calling for dropping it as a Cold War relic is a telling slip. It is line ever repeated by people who have a visceral dislike of NATO for having held up the Western side of the Cold War -- something always deprecated as evil or in bad taste by people on, or under the influence of, the left end of our culture -- and have always been ready to seize on any argument for getting rid of it.
It is also questionable for an IPB person to be praising Gandhi and Jinnah, two politicians who each sought separatist independence for their different but overlapping identity-groups, and so divided the Indian subcontinent, plunging it into communal wars, with millions of dead victims of their nationalist ambitions. Leaving an ongoing simmering conflict that has brought recurrent further wars, and is now made more dangerous by nuclear arsenals.