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Author: Binoy Kampmark

  • AUSTRALIA

    Humiliating Gbagbo

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 14 April 2011

    Journalistic accounts of the defeat of Ivory Coast's Laurent Koudou Gbagbo seem to contain an unhealthy note of gloating. The Ghana Business News shows a more modest creature who posted his impressions on Twitter even as the crisis was unfolding. 

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  • MEDIA

    Polanski's art not greater than his crime

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 16 July 2010
    6 Comments

    The decision by a Swiss judge not to extradite film director Roman Polanski to the US has again triggered the debate about how artists are treated by the law. The case has been running simultaneously to that of Russian musician. The parallels are striking.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    True memories of Bloody Sunday

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 17 June 2010
    5 Comments

    Lord Saville's report this week into a seminal moment of 'The Troubles' in Northern Ireland included the admission that the killing of 14 demonstrators by the British Army was 'unjustified and unjustifiable'. True reconciliation can only ever take place with a true recounting of memory.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Freedom Flotilla and Israeli 'pirates'

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 02 June 2010
    31 Comments

    Turkey has condemned the attacks on a flotilla carrying humanitarian supplies to Gaza as piracy. Branding activists as terrorists and denying the human situation in Gaza will not help an Israeli cause that is proving increasingly alienating.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    How to apologise for genocide

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 06 April 2010
    3 Comments

    From Rudd's 'sorry' to the Stolen Generations, to last year's US Senate resolution apologising for slavery, the political apology has assumed freight and relevance. An apology issued in the Serbian Parliament last week is exceptional for its attempt to allow the perpetrator into the moral circle.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Tasmanian Greens and the terror of coalitions

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 23 March 2010
    6 Comments

    The Greens are arguably the true winners of Saturday's inconclusive Tasmanian state election. The Rudd Government should be worried. An arrangement with the Greens may be unavoidable should Labor wish to retain power.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Bosnian war criminal's strategic repentance

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 30 October 2009
    1 Comment

    The only woman convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has returned to Serbia. Her guilty plea formed part of a bargain, another sign that guilt and punishments are often matters of tactics and basic arithmetic. The victims of that savage war will not be so gracious.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    How to take the UN Indigenous report card

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 03 September 2009
    4 Comments

    The Rudd Government would be wise to ignore calls to 'bin' UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Human Rights' James Anaya's statement on the Intervention. Sometimes it takes an international body to condemn an obnoxious law or practice.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Grandeur and banality as Obama ascends

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 21 January 2009
    4 Comments

    One reporter described the crowd gathered for the inauguration as a 'mass of humanity' with 'children living their history'. How Obama's leadership takes shape will be a point of curiosity and perhaps a dread. But in searching for consensus, Obama has started well.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Pol Pot and the repentant Swede

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 24 November 2008
    1 Comment

    Gunnar Bergstrom returned to Cambodia last week hoping to atone for his one-time approval of the Khmer Rouge's Year Zero. In 1978 he and his comrades from the Sweden-Kampuchea Friendship Association were hosted by a gracious and grateful Pol Pot.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    'Bumbling' Karadzic faces political justice

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 24 July 2008

    One of the vices of nationalism is the symptom of long memory. Punishing accused war criminal Radovan Karadzic will do little to convince those who are set in their positions — Bosnia's Muslims will feel vindicated, but Bosnian Serbs are simply weary.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Why Rudd commission won't stop the bomb

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 19 June 2008
    2 Comments

    Continuing the work of the defunct Canberra Commission, Kevin Rudd's Nuclear Non-Proliferations and Disarmament Commission is re-inventing a wheel that never worked. Preventing freelance scientists from following their career wanderlust is the real challenge in any post-nuclear framework.

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