The "Global Elders"

Nelson Mandela has setup a group of "12 wise men and women" to address global problems by offering expertise and guidance. Let's have a look at the members and the baggage that they will bring to the problem of conflict resolution, the "comments" are taken mostly from their Wikipedia entries, not the usual depth of research but less controversial than others:

Present at the launch:
Nelson Mandela - the former President of South Africa (and living totem) - Outspoken opponent of the United States involvement in Iraq ""What I am condemning is that one power, with a president who has no foresight, who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust." and "If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don't care." Nelson Mandela has also kept quiet about the atrocious activities of Robert Mugabwe's government in Zimbabwe.

Graca Machel - Nelson Mandela's wife - widow of Samora Machel, the former Mozambican president and ANC ally of Nelson Mandela.

Desmond Tutu - Archbishop of South Africa - Tutu has criticised human rights abuses in Zimbabwe, calling Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe a "caricature of an African dictator", and criticising the South African government's policy of quiet diplomacy towards Zimbabwe. He also warned of corruption shortly after the election of the African National Congress government of South Africa, saying that they "stopped the gravy train just long enough to get on themselves." Tutu is, nonetheless, an active and prominent proponent of the campaign for divestment from Israel, and has likened Israel's treatment of Palestinians to the treatment of Black South Africans under apartheid. Tutu has made some controversial statements involving Israel. In 1988, he was quoted as saying that Zionism has "very many parallels with racism", Speaking in a Connecticut church in 1984, Tutu said that "the Jews thought they had a monopoly on God; Jesus was angry that they could shut out other human beings." In the same speech, he compared the features of the Temple in Jerusalem, Judaism's holiest site, to the features of the apartheid system. In conversations during the 1980s with the Israeli ambassador to South Africa, Eliahu Lankin, Tutu "refused to call Israel by its name, he kept referring to it as Palestine," Lankin recalled. During a 1989 trip to Israel's Yad Vashem museum, Tutu said, "We pray for those who made it happen, help us to forgive them and help us so that we in our turn will not make others suffer." The Simon Wiesenthal Center called the statement “a gratuitous insult to Jews and victims of Nazism everywhere.” In another instance, Tutu said "You might even say that the gas chambers made for a neater death" than South Africa's resettlement policies. Some Jews objected the remark, arguing that the evils of apartheid had never extended to systematic annihilation of the blacks and pointing out that no rabbi in Nazi Germany was extended the freedom to criticize the regime as Archbishop Tutu had. Tutu's response was to describe this "as a kind of Jewish arrogance." "Jews seem to think that they have cornered the market on suffering," he said to interviewers

Jimmy Carter - Former President of the USA - Carter visited Cuba in May 2002 and met with Fidel Castro. He was allowed to address the Cuban public on national television with a speech that he wrote and presented in Spanish. This made Carter the first President of the United States, in or out of office, to visit the island since the Cuban revolution of 1959.

A popular petition resulted in Venezuela holding a recall election on August 15, 2004, and Carter was there to observe it. European Union observers had declined to participate, saying too many restrictions were put on them by the Chávez administration. A record number of voters turned out to defeat the recall attempt with a 59% "no" vote. The Carter Center "concluded the results were accurate." On the afternoon of August 16, 2004, the day after the vote, Carter and Organization of American States (OAS) Secretary General César Gaviria gave a joint press conference in which they endorsed the preliminary results announced by the National Electoral Council. The monitors' findings "coincided with the partial returns announced today by the National Elections Council" said Carter, while Gaviria added that the OAS electoral observation mission's members had "found no element of fraud in the process". Directing his remarks at opposition figures who made claims of "widespread fraud" in the voting, Carter called on all Venezuelans to "accept the results and work together for the future". However, a Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates (PSB) exit poll had predicted that Chávez would lose by 20%, and when the election results showed him to have won by 20% Schoen commented, "I think it was a massive fraud". US News and World Report offered an analysis of the polls, indicating "very good reason to believe that the (Penn, Schoen & Berland) exit poll had the result right, and that Chávez's election officials — and Carter and the American media — got it wrong". The Schoen exit poll and the government's programming of election machines became the basis of claims of election fraud. In March 2004, Carter condemned George W. Bush and Tony Blair for waging an unnecessary war "based upon lies and misinterpretations" in order to oust Saddam Hussein. He claimed that Blair had allowed his better judgment to be swayed by Bush's desire to finish a war that George H. W. Bush (his father) had started.In his book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, published in November 2006, Carter states that "Israel's continued control and colonization of Palestinian land have been the primary obstacles to a comprehensive peace agreement in the Holy Land." While he recognizes that Arab citizens in Israel proper have equal rights, he declares that Israel's current policies in the Palestinian territories constitute "a system of apartheid, with two peoples occupying the same land, but completely separated from each other, with Israelis totally dominant and suppressing violence by depriving Palestinians of their basic human rights." While some have praised Carter for speaking honestly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, others have accused him of anti-Israeli bias and of making significant factual errors and misstatements in the book.

Kofi Annan - former Secretary General of the United Nations - Oil-for-Food Program
and Conflict between the United States and the United Nations, I need say no more.

Muhammad Yunus - Nobel laureate economist and founder of the Bangladeshi Grameen Bank - Someone who has actually achieved something in the world outside of politics

Mary Robinson - former President of Ireland - Concerned with Human Rights since her fall from power. shortly before the September 11 attacks, as the UN’s High Commissioner on Human Rights, she presided over the infamous antisemitic conference in Durban, South Africa, with the Orwellian title “World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance.” "The hate literature distributed during the NGO conference included caricatures of Jews with hooked noses, Palestinian blood on their hands, surrounded by money, and Israelis wearing Nazi emblems. At the Government Conference, there was daily distribution by NGO participants of literature reading “Nazi-Israeli apartheid,” while inside the drafting committees, states such as Syria and Iran objected to the inclusion of antisemitism or the Holocaust on the grounds that antisemitism was a “complicated,” “curious,” and “bizarre” concept, and reference to the Holocaust would be imbalanced or “favoritism.”

Meanwhile, outside the conference hall, as one delegate reported in the Los Angeles Times, he and other representatives of Jewish groups were subjected to taunts and physical intimidation. At one point, thousands of South African Muslim demonstrators marched bearing banners proclaiming “Hitler should have finished the job.”

Thus, success on the political battlefield was to be accomplished by utilizing the language of human rights to demonize, and then dismember, the opponent. In this way, the Durban Conference provided rampant antisemitism with a global platform under UN auspices, in a conference allegedly against racism and xenophobia. It also revealed the malevolent antisemitism underlying the campaign to delegitimize the state of Israel." From http://www.jcpa.org/jl/vp468.htm



Invited to join but not present or yet confirmed:
Li Zhaoxing - former Foreign Minister of China - Let's just say Falun Gong, supression of human rights and Tibet

Ela Bhatt - Indian activist - founder of India's Self-Employed Women's Association and a respected leader of the international labour, cooperative, women, and micro-finance movements. A great fighter against poverty and the oppression of women.

Gro Harlen Bruntland - former Prime Minister of Norway and director of the World Health Organisation - now very concerned with sustainable development

An empty chair will be at all meetings, reserved for Aung San Suu Kyi - the elected leader of Burma/Myanmar who has been under house arrest almost continuously since her 1990 victory.


So that's a collection of almost completely left of centre people with received opinion views of the USA, Israel and most other matters, Tibet might be a sore point so that will be brushed under the carpet whilst they concentrate on the really major issue in the world - Palestine and I think we can see how unbiased they will be on that issue.


Here's an image that Theo Spark has brought to my attention regarding this matter -