First there was the troika - the president, prime minister and army chief - that ruled Pakistan. Now it is a foursome, with the chief justice elbowing his way in. In a perverse sense, it could be called progress towards democracy by 25 percent.
Can a country which is too proud to apologize to ‘natives’ for the massacre committed by its own troops (in Amritsar, India) as long ago as 1919 bring itself to admit that the ‘mad cow disease’ and the related Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease (CJD) it hosts, and exports, have put world health at risk - when such admission is certain to lead to political and economic consequences?
By including Harkatul Ansar, a Muslim group battling the Indian occupation army in Kashmir, on the list of ‘terrorist’ organisations, the US has served noticed that it has joined the Hindus’ crusade against Kashmiri Muslims.
The schizophrenic existence of the Pakistani ruling elite was on display during the six-day visit of Queen Elizabeth, the British monarch, to the ‘land of the pure’ from October 6 to 12.
The trilateral ruling elite of America, Europe and Japan is in a quandary. Their industrial-based civilization has created tons of extremely toxic wastes. Many are by-products of cold war military industries. America and Russia currently lead the pack in nuclear waste.
Lebanon has become a graveyard for the Zionists. Thanks to the Hizbullah’s courageous resistance, the Zionist occupiers and their South Lebanese Army (SLA) surrogates have been dealt repeated blows sending them into panicked frenzy.
Africa has caught the attention of Uncle Sam which can mean only one thing: more trouble for the beleaguered continent. As if French and British ‘benevolence’ were not enough, the cigar-chewing Americans, notorious for leaving death and destruction in their wake, can only add to Africa’s woes.
Mention India and it conjures up images of the Taj Mahal, sitar music and dope-smoking hippies tranced by gurus pontificating on the virtues of transcendental meditation.
The US and Britain have increased their shares of the global arms market in 1996 despite claims by Washington and London that they are adopting ethical codes to guide the conduct of foreign policy.
At US$7 trillion, America has the largest economy in the world (the world’s economy is put at $25 trillion). Currently the US also enjoys a robust job growth rate with unemployment put officially at a mere 5 percent, lowest of all the industrialised countries.
That the drug problem is a global menace is beyond dispute. What is less well known is that there are many big timers in this murky business.
Washington’s push to limit the first wave of NATO expansion to only three countries, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, provides a tell-tale sign of the inner contradictions that bedevil the enlargement project.
The game of world politics is full of twists and developments that often confound analysts and observers. The recent NATO decision to absorb new members from Eastern Europe is one such development.
America’s voracious appetite for energy resources and an itch born of its self-appointed role as the world’s policeman has led it into adopting strange postures.
Throughout much of the second half of this century the mere utterance of the name NATO would have conjured up images of the cold war. Contrary to most predictions, however, the end of the cold war did not mark the beginning of the end for NATO.
Democracy has become a popular ploy of dictators to gloss their jaded image. Musclemen around the world are donning civilian plumage in preference to their military uniforms and presenting themselves as less obnoxious creatures. This is particularly true in the Muslim world.
Ever since their deadly debut on the scene of world politics during the last stage of the second world war, nuclear weapons have played a profound role in shaping the conduct of military strategy and inter-State relations.
A tug of war between the Refah-led government of prime minister Necmettin Erbakan and the military establishment over the role of Islam in public life has dominated Turkish political scene since the end of February.
Third June last year a group of British experts on Sudan met in London to discuss Sudan -’Sudan in crisis’. Taking part in the closed meeting were officials from the ministries of defence and trade and industry, from the British aid agency, ODA (Overseas Development Administration)...
Since late 1996, the big story in Washington has been a scandal about foreign donations offered to the Democratic Party’s election fund.
