i met Joshka Fisher on the Chernobyl 10th anniversary memorial conference in Kiev. He was one of the featured speakers, the leader of the German Green Party. In April of 1996 he was talking about the EBRD and Siemens, he was talking about the political pressure needed to end nuclear power in Europe.

Today he is that pressure. Fisher is now the Foreign Minster of the newly elected Red-Green coalition in Germany. He is determined to block the EBRDs funding of the R4/K2 reactors in the Ukraine.

France's EDF and Germany's Siemens have driven this project from its inception, with Westinghouse pushing the US to cooperate. These three multinational nuclear constructors lobbied for this demonstrably unneed project (the Ukraine has a 100% oversupply of electricity and the economy continues to decline).

But when Westinghouse was bought out by British Nuclear Fuels, the US mostly lost interest in the project. If Germany refuses to fund the $300 million plus requested to complete this $1.6 billion project (identical in nature to Temelin, only at two different sites), the project will die. The Foreign Ministry is strong opposed by the German Ministry of Economics, which still wants to fund this project and Siemens.

But if Fisher wins, and thus these reactors which were supposed to replace Chernobyl can not be built, then no more reactors will be conceivable candidates for multilateral (or German) funding in the east. Potentially, the policy could cover the German Banks which are trying to fund Temelin with loans.

Augusto Pinochet has been my argument for the potential wise use of violence for over two decades. Hitler was well before my time, but i remember Pinochet, i have talked to the people who escaped his small holocaust. I've heard stories too awful to retell. The press says 3,000 Chileans were killed, the number is as wildly inaccurate as the 31 reported killed at Chernobyl. Unlike structurally corrupt democracies - had Pinochet been assassinated at any point in his 17 year reign, there was quite some chance his genocide would have passed with him.

Today the Lord Justice of the British House of Lords heard the last arguments in the case against Pinochet and said it was an "important and very difficult case." Difficult because it sets the threshold for justice a notch higher than the world has been willing to permit in the past. Important because it changes one of the long standing rules of statehood - "unemployed dictators go free". Marcos, the Somosas (sp?), The Shah of Iran and many others have been able to watch the decline of their former empires in foreign comfort, protected from prosecution for the crimes of their terrorist pasts by rich rouge states, like the US.

Should justice prevail, in the London court and in the German government - we could be looking at new a new millennium in which ruthless dictators and nuclear power finally get swept into the ashbin of history.