All over the Muslim world, Ramadan is a time of peace, reflection and piety. In Algeria, however, it has become known as an annual peak in the brutal and apparently mindless killings of innocent people that the government blames on Islamic activists, but most ordinary people attribute to forces linked to Algeria’s security agencies.
Hizbullah secretary-general Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah gave renewed hope to the families of prisoners in Israeli jails last month, when he declared that a German mediation over an exchange of prisoners with Israel should cover all Arab detainees in Israel, not just Lebanese prisoners.
The trial of some 300 members of the outlawed Moroccan Islamic Justice and Charity Group (Jama’at al-’Adl wal-Ihsan) started on December 11. They are among some 800 people arrested for taking part in rallies marking the United Nations Human Rights Day held on December 10 by human rights and Islamic groups.
Palestinian and Israeli negotiators opened separate talks with US officials in Washington on November 19, the first stage of a new effort to restart the ‘peace process’ that was stalled by the launching of the Al-Aqsa intifada at the end of September.
In a country blessed with vast oil and gas reserves, nine million Algerians, out of thirty million, live below the poverty line. A million children suffer from malnutrition, with a fifth of them suffering very serious consequences to their health.
During his recent official visit to Libya, prime minister Massimo D’Alema of Italy, the North African country’s former colonial ruler, had the agreeable experience of seeing Mu’ammar Qaddafi trying to ingratiate himself to the west by pledging to join the west’s war on Islam and using his influence to unlock African doors for Rome.
The arrival of the holy month of Ramadan normally evokes greater degrees of piety and solidarity among Muslims, but its approach this year has already triggered a bitter and dirty competition between Arab television stations for audiences.
Abdelkader Hachani, a senior leader of the banned Algerian Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), was assassinated in Algerian capital, Algiers, on November 22. Hachani was shot in the chest several times as he was leaving a dentist’s clinic. His assassin was not captured.
The Assads of Syria have a great deal to learn from Jordan’s Hashemite family about the arrangement of a peaceful succession. When, early this year, the dying king Husain dismissed his younger brother and crown-prince of 33 years, the 53-year-old prince Hassan, to clear the way for his son to succeed him, the matter ended there...
President Husni Mubarak stepped up his assault on the Ikhwan al-Muslimun in Egypt earlier this month by issuing a presidential decree transferring the cases of 20 of the movement’s most senior and prominent members, who were arrested last month, from the civil court system to military courts.
Over 3,000 Egyptian migrant workers in Kuwait were rounded up by police and packed off to desert internment camps at the end of last month, following two days of street troubles on October 30-31.
When Algerian press-reports in mid-October alleged that president Abdul-Aziz Bouteflika’s failure to appoint a cabinet since his inauguration in April was because of interference from Algeria’s generals, he was indignant.
Egyptian president Husni Mubarak’s new regime has arrested 20 of the Ikhwan al-Muslimoon’s most senior and prominent members this month, in the most severe crackdown since 1995.
Morocco’s king Muhammad VI is being hailed in his country and abroad as a reforming monarch who is far more sensitive to human rights issues than his late father, king Hasan II, who died in July.
In a new twist to the latest US efforts to internationalise the Sudanese conflict and force the secession of the country’s so-called ‘Christian South’, American aid-agencies have accused Washington of prolonging Africa’s longest and costliest war.
Shaikh Rachid Al-Ghannouchi, the exiled leader of Tunisia’s An-Nahda Islamic movement, led a five-day hunger-strike by 20 protestors outside the Tunisian embassy in London fron October 20-24. The protest was in support of Islamic activists imprisoned in Tunisian jails...
Egypt, Jordan and Yassir Arafat’s ‘Palestinian National Authority’ (PNA) recently concluded a formal treaty with the US and Israel on combatting Islamic movements, according to Israeli and British media reports quoting senior security and other officials.
In the wave of democracy that has recently broken across the Arab world, long-standing autocrats apparently vaccinated against political death have been returned in fool-proof referendums or rigged elections...
Less than a month after Sudan became an oil-exporting country, Sudanese opposition groups claimed responsibility for an attempt to destroy a section of the pipeline linking the Hegleig oilfield in the west of the country to the Bashair terminal on the Red Sea.
Algerian president Abdul Aziz Bouteflika claimed a major victory in the September 16 referendum on his ‘progress towards peace’. The results, announced by the ministry of the interior the next day, showed that 98.63 percent of voters had answered ‘yes’ to the single question...
