The first anniversary of the massacre of unarmed civilian protestors in the eastern city of Andijan by security forces acting on Uzbek government orders on May 13, 2005, has also attracted worldwide attention, mainly because the basic issues raised by the tragedy have so far not been addressed.
Sri Lanka's one-and-a-half million Muslims (8 percent of the island's population) feel that they are caught between the hammer and the anvil. A number of incidents in the last few monthshas caused deep concern among the second largest minority: the fear is that they too face increasing insecurity not only because of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the East but also because of chauvinists within the Sinhala majority in the South.
Somalis have one language, one religion (Islam), and constitute a single ethnic group, and should not have found great – let alone insurmountable – difficulties in being united and living in peace together. Yet their country is in ruins, split into Somaliland, a former British protectorate in the north, and Somalia, a former Italian colony, in the south.
There is an old saying about Afghanistan that goes something like this: when God wishes to punish someone, He sends them to attack the Afghans. The US and its ally, Britain, have blundered into Afghanistan on the pretext of fighting terrorism, but in reality to advance Western interests.
Kyrgyzstan has become subject to both ethnic unrest and armed conflict between the ruling elites and Islamic groups. It is not, therefore, surprising that the corrupt and autocratic rulers of the Central Asian Muslim country have allowed both Russia and the US to maintain troops there as part of the international ‘war against terrorism'.
According to official pronouncements from Islamabad, Pakistan has never had it so good economically under the present dispensation. Officials point to the booming real estate and stock markets as well as rising sale of commodities such as cars, particularly the number of Mercedes Benzes on the road, to support their case.
The attacks carried out by four Muslim suicide-bombers in London on July 7 last year were inexcusable and properly treated by the government as ‘terrorist acts' that posed a serious threat to public safety and security. But its hasty attribution of the bombings to al-Qa'ida, and its decision to enact seriously flawed anti-terrorist laws and orders, have now been brought into question.
Rich countries, led by the US, spend millions of dollars in the Horn of Africa to pre-empt what they call "al-Qa'ida's designs" to turn the region – particularly Somalia – into a "safe haven". But they have clearly chosen to ignore urgent appeals by international aid and food agencies to save the lives of millions of the region's population that are at risk of imminent death from famine caused by a combination of conflict and drought.
America’s anti-Iran rhetoric, already intense, has gone into overdrive since the release on March 16 of US President George Bush’s second report on national security strategy. It reads more like an anti-Iran diatribe than a serious analysis of the US’s situation under Bush.
Speaking in Algiers on February 12, at the beginning of a tour of North African countries designed to secure their support for the US's agendas in the Muslim world, US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld promised to strengthen military ties with North African countries. During a joint appearance with Algeria's president, Abdulaziz Bouteflika, he said: "We look forward to strengthening our military-to-military relationship and our cooperation in counter-terrorism."
The controversy surrounding Denmark’s offensive cartoons refuses to die down. Demonstrations and protest rallies continue in various parts of the world, including Europe and North America, where Muslims reside as minorities. Some of the largest rallies took place in Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Pakistan.
Religious conflict between Nigerian Muslims and Christians is traditional, and the clashes between members of the two faiths which took place in late February are not a new phenomenon. What is new is that the clashes were set off by the cartoons recently published by Danish and other European newspapers that depicted the Prophet Muhammad (saw) in an extremely offensive manner.
All is not well in the "land of the pure": the "stans"—Baluchistan and Waziristan (both North and South)—are on fire; the dams' controversy has subsided somewhat, but has been replacedby the fury surrounding Europe's cartoons. The anger of the protests is also fuelled by the exorbitant prices of essential commodities, and Pakistan's opposition parties, sensing blood, are going for the jugular.
Since the conflict in Darfur began three years ago, about 180,000 people have died, mainly because of hunger and disease; about 2 million have been displaced. Clearly, the conflict is too vicious and costly to be allowed to continue, but the current efforts of the African Union (AU) to resolve it are not equal to the task. But the so-called international community cannot seriously be concerned about the fate of the people of Darfur or of Sudan as a whole.
The controversy resulting from Europe's insulting cartoons merely confirms what Muslims have always known: that there is deep animosity for Islam and Muslims within the Western establishment. It was to reflect on this and other matters that the conference “Peace and Justice in the Age of Imperialism” was organised on the occasion of the twenty-seventh anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
People all over the world held events on February 23 to remember the tragedy of the Chechen people, after the Save Chechnya Campaign, a support and advocacy body based in London, led a campaign to have February 23, the date of Stalin’s deportation of the Chencens to Central Asia in 1944, proclaimed as World Chechnya Day.
The West, led by the US and Britain, has worked itself into a lather over Iran's removal of seals from centrifuges at the Natanz nuclear facility to enrich uranium by turning it into a gas (uranium hexafluoride) as part of its civilian nuclear-research programme.
Six Asia-Pacific countries – the US, China, India, Australia, Japan and South Korea – held a conference, the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, in Sydney (Australia) on January 11. It was their reaction to the conference held in Montreal in December by the signatories of the original Kyoto Protocols in order to renew and extend those Protocols.
The Save Chechnya Campaign (SCC) UK proposes to commemorate the Stalin-era genocide of the Chechen people as World Chechnya Day (WCD) on Thursday 23 February 2006. This momentous tragedy in the history of the Chechen people resulted in the deaths of about two thirds of the Chechen people.
The inauguration of Afghanistan's new assembly on December 19 was a fairly accurate reflection of the country's present plight: Dick Cheney, dubbed vice president for torture in his own country, came all the way from Washington to preside over the bizarre event that nearly did not happen because three days earlier a bomb had exploded outside the building.
