A day after Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons-inspector, delivered a stinging rebuke to US secretary of state Colin Powell, and rejected Powell’s claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass-destruction, people from around the world voted with their feet against the planned attack on Iraq.
Can Israel ever be repentant, and in what way? by Azzam Tamimi. FOUR years ago when the PLO and Arab governments were racing to make peace with the Zionist entity, millions of Muslims - Arabs as well as others - despaired of ever being able to liberate Palestine and dismantle the Jewish state...
Morocco's king Hasan II, the progenitor of the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty, and launderer of Shimon Peres and the late Yitzhak Rabin into currency acceptable in Arab capitals, paving the way for the 1993 Oslo sellout...
One of the first acts of Barack Obama as president of the United States was to order a review of all Guantanamo Bay detainees. He also announced that the notorious detention camp will be closed in a year. That, however, has not deterred guards at the prison from abusing detainees, as Mohammad al-Gharani revealed in a telephone interview posted on Al-Jazeeratelevision website on April 14.
Like the chicken and egg question, what came first: the torturers or torture memos? Despite the mounting evidence, for years, officials in the Bush administration brazenly maintained: “TheUnited States does not do torture.” This was not stated merely by low level officials. Starting from former US President George Bush down, everyone had memorized this mantra about torture.
The minority Conservative government of Canada appears determined to deny Omar Khadr his Charter Rights even in the face of several court rulings, the latest of which was handed down on April 23. Justice James O’Reilly of the Federal Court issued a clear ruling ordering Canada to seek Khadr’s repatriation from Guantanamo Bay where he has languished since October 2002.
This month, the world may witness the final chapter in the 25-year-old conflict between the Sri Lankan army and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), commonly known as the Tamil Tigers. The civil war, which has killed more than 70,000 people and displaced hundreds of thousands others, was triggered by Tamil demands for an independent homeland in the North and East of the country following decades of complaints about discrimination against them by the majority Buddhist Sinhalese government.
The Taliban’s ascendance in Swat and their brief foray into the town of Buner to the south sent leaders of the self-proclaimed superpower in Washington into panic that surpassed even that displayed by officials in Islamabad. US media reports repeatedly mentioned that Swat is barely 100 kilometres from the Pakistani capital.
Pakistan may have averted a major political crisis when Asif Ali Zardari, besieged in the presidential palace in Islamabad, agreed to the demand of lawyers and opposition leader Nawaz Sharif to reinstate the deposed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, but it would be premature to state that its troubles are over.
The latest crisis in Sudan began on March 14, when the international criminal court (ICC) in the Hague indicted President Omar al-Bashir on seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and issued a warrant for his arrest. Bashir is being held responsible for crimes allegedly committed by his command in the Western region of Darfur, since 2003, by security forces and allied groups said to be “Arab”, financed by the regime to suppress “non-Arab ethnic insurgents”.
Elections in Iran, whether local, parliamentary or presidential, are never dull but this year’s presidential elections are beginning to take on a decidedly more exciting tone. In addition to the incumbent, President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, being in the race, two other leading figures have indicated they will contest the polls: Ayatullah Mehdi Karoubi, and Mir Husain Mousavi.
The democratic bug has spread so far and wide that even dictators are infected by it and find it useful to strengthen their grip on power. They use the democracy card to convince opponents that they respect the wishes of the people while they subvert the process so much that it makes mockery of the whole exercise. The subversion process starts with denying opposition candidates the opportunity to run for office. Electoral boundaries are manipulated to disadvantage opponents.
“You’re going to remember this day for the rest of your life” — these words were uttered by anti-terror police officers to intimidate and terrify British Muslim Babar Ahmad during the brutal assault inflicted upon him in a pre-dawn raid on his home on December 2, 2003. They were right; Ahmad never forgot that day and spent the last five years struggling to ensure that it would live in the memories of the British public forever.
Somalia finally had a new government last month after Sheikh Sherif Shaikh Ahmed, former head of the Islamic Courts’ Union (ICU), was sworn in as president on January 31. The removal from power of the corrupt and docile transitional national government (TNG) and its president Abdillahi Yusuf (controlled by the US and Ethiopia) is undoubtedly a welcome development.
While the February 19 visit of US President Barack Obama to Ottawa led to official chest-thumping about the importance of Canada because it was the first country he graced with his presence since becoming president, it also mobilized various groups to press for Omar Khadr’s return from Guantanamo Bay.
Long before Barack Obama was sworn in as president, the Americans had started to mutter darkly that Hamid Karzai was not only ineffective, he presided over a government that was corrupt and harbored drug and warlords in Afghanistan. While not all charges are false, Karzai alone cannot be blamed for all of them; it appears like another desperate attempt to shift blame for America's own disastrous policies.
One of the consequences of Israel’s barbaric assault on Ghazzah has been to bring to surface the split in Jewish communities in North America and Europe. The split was always there but pro-Israeli groups consistently managed to monopolize media discourse and successfully blackmailed politicians and journalists to toe the line given to them.
Has the internal rumpus within the ruling African National Congress (ANC) had an impact on South Africa’s foreign policy? Or is it that an Israel gone mad has led Pretoria to re-assess its ties with the former apartheid sanction-busting state?
The arrogant powers’ apparatus, which does not believe in any human principles, wishes to dominate the sensitive Middle East region that has enormous wealth and is situated in a strategic geographical area and enjoys great economic advantages. The way they want to achieve that objective is through the usurper zionist Israel that occupies Palestine.
