Bureaucratic façade and political realities of disarmament and demobilisation in Afghanistan

Internationally sponsored disarmament and demobilisation in Afghanistan was characterised by a marked divergence between the bureaucratic process designed by the UN and the political reality of disarmament. The bureaucratic process had several flaws of its own, which were particularly obvious in the case of DIAG, but the main reason for the substantial failure of disarmament was the absence of political will among key Afghan partners. International players in the process choose to compromise on ratherunfavourable terms, saving the façade of demobilisation thanks to the formal disbandment of the militias incorporated under the Ministry of Defence, but in fact allowing thousands of militias to continue operating throughout the country. The article shows how the very limited impact of DDR and even more so DIAG was already obvious in the early stages of the process and was deliberately ignored. The article concludes that the compromise could at least have achieved some limited aims, such as delegitimising the militias, had not many of their leaders been allowed to compete successfully for parliamentary seats shortly afterwards.     

Reflections on International Criminal Justice

Judge Cassese presents arguments in favour of the use of international courts in order to punish war crimes. He argues that the application of justice through a court is better in certain circumstances than amnesties. He examines the merits of international courts rather than national courts, but acknowledges that at present there are several major stumbling blocks to an effective international criminal justice system.     

A decision model for the study of public bureaucracies

In this paper the concept series of decisions is introduced and defined as the total number of decisions made in the attainment of a goal. The series are analytically divided into two types of decisions, programming and implementation—the first ones are those made during the process of converting policy goals into programs, and the second, those made during the implementation of the programs. The distinction is important because different actors and institutions are involved in the two phases. It is hypothesized that the relation between the time of programming decisions and the time of implementation of decisions tends to be zero the less effective and the less numerous the organizations participating in the programming phase. A list of factors which could be useful in the process of testing and modifying the hypothesis is presented. The division of health environment of the health ministry of Colombia is used to exemplify the concept of series of decisions, and to show the utility of the analytical distinction between programming and implementation decisions.The field work for this study was done in 1970 under the sponsorship of the Division of Research in Epidemiology and Communications Sciences (RECS) of the World Health Organization. The research was conducted at the Ministry of Public Health of Colombia. I am very grateful to Dr. Antonio Ordonez Plaja, Minister of Public Health at the time of the research. Without his continuous help, encouragement and understanding, this work would not have been possible.     

Allele frequencies of nine STR loci--D16S539, D7S820, D13S317, CSF1PO,TPOX, TH01, F13A01, FESFPS and vWA--in the population from Alagoas,northeastern Brazil

The polymorphism of nine STR loci has been studied in a sample of 598 individuals from the population of Alagoas, Northeastern Brazil. Determination of the allele frequencies as well as of several commonly used statistics in forensic and paternity testing were defined. The most polymorphic loci were TH01 and D7S317. The exact test demonstrated that the nine loci analyzed in the population have no deviation from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (P > 0.05).     

The discrimination potential of ultraviolet-visible spectrophotometry, thin layer chromatography, and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy for the forensic analysis of black and blue ballpoint inks

The knowledge of the discriminating power of analytical techniques used for the differentiation of writing inks can be useful when interpreting results. Ultraviolet-visible (UV-VIS) spectrophotometry, thin layer chromatography (TLC), and diffuse reflectance Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) were used to examine a population of 21 black and 12 blue ballpoint writing inks. Based on corroborative results of these methods, the discrimination power for UV-VIS, TLC, and FT-IR was determined to be 100% and 98% for the black and blue inks, respectively. Generally, TLC and UV-VIS can be used to differentiate the colorant components (i.e., dyes and some pigments) found in inks. As FT-IR can be utilized to identify some of the noncolorant components, it was determined to be an excellent complementary technique that can be implemented into an analytical scheme for ink analysis.     

Sexing and stature estimation criteria for Balkan populations

Abstract:  Two standard measurements, maximum femur length and head diameter, were collected by International Criminal Tribunal (ICTY) anthropologists. Only Kosovans had both femur dimensions for both sexes. Antemortem stature data were available only for Kosovan and Croatian males. Despite these limitations, the data offer the opportunity to examine ethnic variation and to present sex and stature estimation criteria for these groups. Additional data from Croatians and from American Whites were used for comparison in certain parts of the analysis. Femur variation was considerable. Kosovans can be characterized as short and robust, Bosnians as tall and less robust, and Croatians are tall and gracile, resembling American Whites more than the other groups. Some limited antemortem data on stature was also available, allowing stature estimation equations to be estimated for Croatians and Kosovans. Antemortem stature estimates were obtained from interviews with relatives and are shown to overestimate actual stature. We argue that equations predicting height obtained from relatives is the most realistic in this case because that is the height to which an estimate obtained from bone lengths will be compared. Kosovans were also shown to have experienced slight secular increase in femur length over the past 70 years.