Crossing the Great Divide: Worker Risk and Opportunity in the New Economy by Vicki Smith Cornell University/ILR Press, 2001, 240 pp., $29.95 Recession’s harsh light having awakened us from our dreams of a new economy, we’re now looking bleary-eyed at …
The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001 can appear within two different frames of interpretation. The first sees them as attacks on the United States as a state and its people. The second views …
Since September 11, no question has been more urgent for America and the West than how to combat terrorism. The danger of this dramatic and necessary change is, however, that it threatens to obscure the problem of humanitarian intervention—the need …
A week or so after the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers and the attack on the Pentagon, I had this conversation with a friend who shall remain unnamed. “They could not have been Arabs,” he said. “Of course …
A New Generation Draws the Line: Kosovo, East Timor and the Standards of the West by Noam Chomsky Verso, 2000, 145 pp., $23.00 Powerless By Design: The Age of the International Community by Michel Feher Duke University Press, 2000, 167 …
August 30, 1999, should have been a day of celebration for the people of East Timor. In a referendum in which more than 98 percent of the eligible voters cast their ballots, 78 percent voted for independence from Indonesia, throwing …
It was around the 15th of April 1994 that we started to spend the night in sorghum fields and in the woods. People were being pursued during the day, killed or tortured. When I saw this, I put my little …
On the afternoon of September 13, 1999, I joined one of the last United Nations patrols to venture out into Dili, the capital of East Timor. Clad in flak jackets, but unarmed, we toured the city in three vehicles. In …
There is nothing new about human disasters caused by human beings. We have always been, if not our own, certainly each other’s worst enemies. From the Assyrians in ancient Israel and the Romans in Carthage to the Belgians in the …
The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans by Simon Winchester HarperCollins, 1999, 272 pp., $13 The Road to Kosovo: A Balkan Diary by Greg Campbell Westview, 1999, 228 pp., $15 Only the Nails Remain: Scenes From the Balkan Wars …
A glass wall covered by blinds separated the courtroom participants from the spectators in the public gallery, but a hush enveloped both sides when the witness known as FWS-50 began to speak. Although a voice modulator screened her identity from …
I was almost fourteen years old when things became a mess. My school was half Serbian, half Muslim, but no one recognized the difference, and we were all together. My best friend was a Serbian girl named Boriana. One day, …
It’s never a good idea to refight the last big war. But perhaps one can learn a lesson from it. The atmosphere of American politics since September 11 bears an uncomfortable resemblance to that of the cold war, particularly during …
All around town houses were burning. We heard gunfire all the time. On the 5th of September [1999] the police came to us and said that if we wanted to stay alive, we had to come to the police station. …
In the midst of his speech at the 1993 dedication of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel shocked President Bill Clinton and the audience by departing from his prepared remarks to observe, …
