With Ariel Sharon, the butcher of Beirut, at the helm, the “only democracy in the Middle East” has gone berserk. It is using US-supplied Apache helicopters against Palestinian activists, in complete disregard of human life. Amer Hudeiri, a Hamas activist, was martyred on August 5 when Israel fired two missiles at his car in the West Bank town of Tulkerm...
August 2 was the 11th anniversary of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Eleven years later, the consequences of the invasion continue to cloud the political landscape in the Middle East, as proven by Washington’s doggedness in sounding the drums of war against Baghdad.
Colonel Mu’ammar Qaddafi, Brother Leader of the Revolution in Libya, arrived in Khartoum on July 17 for two days of talks with president Omar Hassan al-Bashir in connection with the peace proposals sponsored jointly by his country and Egypt.
Saudi Arabia would not usually engage in public squabbling with the US, with which it has a ‘strategic alliance’, and Washington would not usually humiliate one of its most valuable and dependable proxies in the Middle East.
It was an appalling display of barbarism: on July 19 Jewish settlers ambushed the al-Itmeizi family and murdered three of them, including a 10-week-old baby girl, Diya. Four other family members were wounded.
Heavy-handed police tactics succeeded in preventing a protest-march by thousands of minority Kabyle Berbers in Algiers, the Algerian capital, from taking place on July 5, the 39th anniversary of the country’s ‘independence’ from France. Yet, despite its success in averting another potential flashpoint in the three-month-old popular uprising, the military-backed regime continues to teeter on the brink of total collapse.
The hottest confrontation between Hizbullah and Israel since Israel’s retreat from most of South Lebanon in May last year began shortly after noon on July 1 when two Israeli warplanes fired two air-to-surface missiles at a Syrian radar-station near the village of Sar’in al-Tahta in Lebanon’s eastern Beqa’a Valley.
A Hamas mujahid was martyred in an operation against an Israeli target in the Ghazzah area of occupied Palestine on July 9. He was Nafez Ayesh al-Nadher, aged 26. He was driving near the Kissufim crossing-point between Ghazzah and 1948 Palestine and detonated his vehicle as a military vehicle passed. Israeli sources denied that any of its soldiers had been involved.
Is the past finally catching up with Ariel Sharon, better known as the “Butcher of Beirut”? A case was lodged in a Brussels court on June 18 by survivors of the massacre at Sabra and Shatila refugee-camps (1982), accusing the Israeli prime minister of genocide and crimes against humanity.
When, on May 3, US president George W. Bush said in a speech to the American Jewish committee that “we must turn the eyes of the world upon the atrocities in Sudan” but only as a “first step”, adding that “more will follow”, he knew what he was talking about.
Throughout his rule, president Husni Mubarak has governed Egypt under an emergency decree, using his dictatorial powers to persecute the Islamic groups that have always constituted the most vocal opposition to his regime.
On June 4, when members of the United Nations security council failed to reach agreement on a new sanctions plan proposed by the US and Britain, they decided to extend by one month, instead of the usual six months, the programme under which Iraq can sell oil to raise funds to buy food and to pay “reparations” to western governments.
Iraq won a significant political victory on July 4, when the US and Britain were forced to abandon their ‘smart sanctions’ proposals and agree to a five-month extension of the ‘oil-for-food’ programme.
The US made a hasty return to its Middle East imbroglio this month, when CIA director George Tenet returned to the region to act as a mediator for “security co-ordination” between Israel and Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority.
For more than a year irrefutible new evidence of war crimes committed by French forces during the Algerian war of independence has been surfacing in French newspapers and in memoirs by senior French generals. These men personally directed the atrocities now being revealed...
The Israeli war against the Palestinian people reached new heights on May 18, when Israel used F-16 fighter aircraft supplied by the US to attack targets in Nablus and Ramallah. A total of 10 people were killed in the two attacks.
Algeria does not need a fresh eruption of Berber nationalism after a debilitating decade-long ‘civil’ war waged by the secular establishment, dominated by the military, against the country’s Islamic movements.
Palestinian ‘president’ Yasser Arafat launched his expected crackdown on popular movements sustaining the Al-Aqsa Intifada last month. Dr Abdul Aziz al-Rantisi, the Hamas spokesman in Ghazzah, was arrested on April 28, reportedly for making ‘inflammatory’ statements.
The Sudanese government, which has been wooing Washington for months to escape US sanctions and diplomatic isolation, is now furious with the Bush administration because it has revealed its position on the civil war, siding completely and unequivocally with the spectacularly misnamed the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM).
Just weeks after the Arab governments humiliated themselves with their utter failure to support the Palestinian intifada at their Arab League meeting in Amman on March 28, Islamic Iran showed the way forward with the unqualified support offered to the Palestinians at the opening of its International Conference on the intifada and the zionist problem in Tehran on April 24.
