In President Mahmoud Ahmedinijad’s recent visit to the United Nations in late September, he easily became the most-watched head of state. In his various speeches, he took the UN and US to task for presiding over the wars on Afghanistan
A prominent human rights campaigner in Saudi Arabia told western journalists last month that the government plans to hold national elections in three years’ time.
There are signs that cracks are appearing in the alliance of strange bedfellows in South East Asia. Governments are beginning to realise that they have been negligent of domestic politics; as general elections loom in countries like Malaysia and Indonesia...
General Pervez Musharraf is not the first Pakistani ruler to believe that he has a divine right, not only to rule, but also to rearrange the political system because he alone knows what is best for the country.
The Malaysian government has bungled anew with the fresh sodomy charges it has brought against the jailed former deputy prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim.
Politics in Malaysia is at a crossroads. The aftermath, or rather the aftershock of Anwar’s verdict, which virtually all Malaysians have now dismissed as a shameless show-trial, is still felt all over the country. The judgement, as Anwar himself described it, ‘stinks to high heaven’.
Elections have become the latest fad around the world. It seems everyone has discovered that elections can be a useful tool to fool almost all the people almost all the time. At the end of February, Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, held elections to end military rule but brought to power a former military dictator, general Olusegun Obasanjo.
The Anwar Ibrahim corruption trial ended abruptedly on March 23, when the presiding judge, Justice Augustine Paul, ended proceedings without the defence having completed presented their closing arguments.
Some things seem resistant to change in Kuwait, with the autocratic ways of governance foremost among them. Last month’s reshuffle of the Kuwaiti cabinet to avoid an imminent parliamentary no-confidence vote is the latest dramatic episode highlighting the persistence of the ruling Al-Sabah family...
