Ghassan Salamé is the author of The Temptation of Mars. War and Peace in the 21st Century”, published by Éditions Fayards. The professor emeritus of international relations at Sciences Po Paris and former Lebanese minister looks back on the third century that has passed since 1990 and tries to imagine the world in the years to come. As a guest of France Inter, he reacts to the deaths of several dozen people on Thursday in Gaza while distributing humanitarian aid.
“It is a crime because there was a kind of stampede that we experience when people are hungry,” said the international relations expert. “There have already been around ten children who have starved to death. This is proven. “People compete for the meager rations they can get, but more than that, it was the Americans, not the residents of Gaza, who were found to have been shot at.” And that most of the victims (…) died from gunfire,” emphasizes Ghassan Salamé.
In total, around a hundred people died and almost 700 were injured. A dramatic event as a senior Hamas official told AFP this Sunday that a humanitarian ceasefire in the Gaza Strip was possible “within 24 to 48 hours” if Israel accepted the demands of the Palestinian Islamist movement. These include the return of displaced Palestinians to the northern Gaza Strip and an increase in humanitarian aid.
A book like “a grid”
In his work, Ghassan Salamé tries to “create a grid about the increasingly restless world that is difficult to summarize in one or two sentences.” A book, partly written by Ghassan Salamé during the Covid period, dealing with the future. “I started saying, 'This is what's going to happen': I think Russia could invade Ukraine again. I think there will be an explosion in the Middle East. I think there will be tensions around the Taiwan Strait (…) That's what I had to get from the future to the present,” he explains.
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These different tensions around the world mean that the idea of “perpetual peace” is a far cry from the late 1990s, when convergences between countries were imagined. This hope for “eternal peace” has disappeared, Ghassan Salamé continues: “It wasn’t me who lost it. The reality is that an entire generation experienced the year 1990 as a kind of relief, as a decisive turning point in the international world. “Relations, found after around fifteen years that this hope had been betrayed,” laments the former Lebanese culture minister .
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