A 24-year-old roving ambassador of the Taliban, making his rounds of the US, has made quite a stir among Muslims even if his pleas have fallen on deaf ears in the US government.
Battle lines are beginning to harden over the forthcoming “World Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance” in Durban, South Africa, from August 31 to September 7.
Mass-graves containing bodies of civilians executed in the last four months have been discovered near Russian military bases in Chechnya by a Moscow-based human-rights group.
Amid continuing scepticism over the possibility of a pan-African confederation, some 40 heads of state and government have pledged to speed up the birth of an African union.
Once the American experience had provided a foretaste of how terrorism legislation can be misused, it was a foregone conclusion that once the Terrorism Act came into force on 19 February, Muslim organisations would fall like dominoes under its impact.
Tens of thousands of Afghani refugees are at risk of starvation as a result of a three-year drought compunded by US-led Western sanctions. More than 100,000 have been forced to seek shelter in makeshift refugee-camps in Pakistan...
As president Jacques Chirac of France received Robert Kocharyan, the Armenian head of state, who arrived in Paris on February 12 for a five-day state visit...
The Russian government claimed on February 20 that the London School of Economics was being used as a recruitment ground for “Chechen terrorists”.
The US media’s anti-Islam bias is well known; it is reflective of the establishment’s views. Academia in the US, however, used to pride itself on being free of such biases, yet of late the anti-Muslim virus seems to have infected these so-called bastions of intellectual freedom as well.
Kofi Annan, United Nations secretary-general, urged business leaders gathered at Davos, Switzerland, on January 29 to help him to achieve his goal of getting a thousand corporations to back his Global Compact.
The decision of the three judges sitting in the special Scottish court in Zeist, Holland, to convict one Libyan for responsibility of the Lockerbie bombing, and to acquit the other, may cynically (but realistically) be seen as a politically astute judgement, giving every party involved some ground for satisfaction.
Ten years after the overthrow of general Siad Barre, and the collapse of state institutions, Somalia remains shattered — despite the ‘election’ of a new president and parliament that enjoy considerable international diplomatic support, including the approval of the UN, countries of the region and most members of the Arab League.
French legislators voted unanimously on January 18 to recognise the alleged genocide of Armenians by Turks in 1915. At the same time the British government published plans for a memorial day on January 27 for genocide victims worldwide, designed mainly to commemorate the Jewish holocaust and Armenian genocide.
Hopes of a less strident foreign policy from the new American president, George W. Bush, even in such areas as oil, especially vis-a-vis Iran, may be misplaced. While Bush and Dick Cheney, his vice-president, are beholden to oil interests, American officialdom has the tendency to act in incredibly stupid ways.
Russian president Vladimir Putin signed three major decrees in one week last month, making important changes to the Russian occupation regime in Chechnya...
Laurent Desire Kabila, the assassinated president of the Congo Democratic Republic, is finally buried, and his son, Joseph, is to succeed him.
One of the oft-repeated cliches about Kashmir is that the issue is complicated and cannot be resolved quickly. The premise is false, although the conclusion may be correct.
The trusted adviser of Kazakhstan’s president Nursultan Nazarbayev on oil-matters, economic planning, education, investments, health-care, pensions and communications is an American deal-fixer who shuttles between his offices in Almaty (the Kazakh commercial capital) and the New York headquarters of his company, Mercator.
The Turkish army’s drive to crush the country’s Islamic movement continues unabated. The latest episode is the postponement of a debate on a constitutional amendment that would make it difficult to close political parties.
Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s announcement last month extending the ceasefire in Kashmir has generally been welcomed, although it has not prevented the Indian occupation army from continuing its murderous campaign against civilians.
