The world has had its share of global tragedy in the past two years. First, was the unexpected appearance of COVID-19 which has now killed more than six million people and left many more with chronic health challenges. Despite the incredible job of creating multiple effective vaccines and treatment drugs by the biomedical experts, the virus seems to have gone into a hide and seek mode by mutating into new variants every time we think we have gotten it under control.

Historian Susan Williams grew up in Zambia. Like other scholars of her generation raised in former settler societies of southern Africa, she empathizes with the continent’s people.

Williams’ widely acknowledged new book, White Malice–The CIA and Neocolonialization of Africa, adds to her track record, testifying to this engagement. Almost a forensic account, its more than 500 pages (supported by close to 150 pages of sources, references, and index) are as readable as a John le Carré novel.

The United Nations Convention on International Mediation Settlement Agreements, also known as “The Singapore Convention on Mediation” is a convention that applies to international settlement agreements resulting from mediation. It sets out a legal framework for the right to invoke the mediation settlement agreements as well as for their enforcement among the member states. The Convention facilitates international trade by using mediation as an alternative and effective method of resolving commercial disputes. The Singapore Convention on Mediation (the Convention) was adopted in December 2018 in Singapore and Uganda was among the first countries to became signatories to the convention on 7^th August 2019. 

As always, I appreciate Jonathan Power for sharing his weekly columns on foreign affairs. While I acknowledge that he has the right to have an opinion as he once told me, I, too, have the right to have one. This time, I found his column titled, “IT IS NOT ETHNIC SLAUGHTER IN YUGOSLAVIA AND RWUANDA” jarring to say the least.

The divisions and tensions in some parts of ex-Yugoslavia appear to be boiling up again. The leadership of the Serbian mini-state, Srpska, which comprises 49% of Bosnia’s territory, appears to be challenging the governing entity of Bosnia, founded at the end of the civil wars that raged in ex-Yugoslavia, 1991-2001. In a peculiar compromise, this sliver of Serbian territory was confirmed as part of Bosnia, but with its own self-government at the local level. Twenty-seven years later its hardline leaders are set on joining up with Serbia proper. 

Our February Edition features two polar views on whether ethnic slaughter occurred in both former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s. We welcome readers who might have been in similar situations to share their views on the two horrific events. They are the ones who can best narrate their experiences.

The woman was strikingly pretty and in a tight-fitting denim skirt. Some of the passengers gawked at her when she was boarding the bus at the Bus Park. She was thirty something, about five and a half feet tall, and about fifty-five kilograms or one hundred twenty pounds. She was in an aisle seat, on the left-hand side of the bus, four rows in front of me on the opposite side from where I was sitting.

Perhaps the biggest single misthink in Western history is best understood by standing in the town square of Bethlehem, allowing one’s gaze to pass over the roof top of the Church that covers the stable where Jesus was supposedly born, and let one’s eye drift into the blue sky beyond and thinking: how on earth could it be that the Christians, whose belief in the divine center around Jesus’ crucifixion carried out by Roman soldiers