President Nursultan Nazarbayev secured a third seven-year term of office after receiving 91 percent of the votes in a probably rigged poll on December 4, while his main challenger, Zarmakhan Tuyakbai, came second with only 6.6 percent. Most pre-election predictions were that the corrupt, authoritarian ruler of oil-rich Kazakhstan would win, but with a much smaller majority.
The latest round of trade negotiations held by the World Trade Organization (WTO) was characterised by all the features that have become familiar parts of such high-profile gatherings.The trade ministers of the 150 member-states, and 6,000 other delegates, spent six days in intensive negotiations at a major international conference venue, barricaded by hundreds of police and security personnel to protect the WTO and the Western powers that run it from the wrath of ordinary people from all over the world who recognise the talking shop for what it really is: a way of forcing the world’s poorest countries to accept and legitimise a trade regime designed to protect and further the interests of the economic elites of the world’s richest countries.
By taking a firm and principled stand over its right to enrich uranium under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran has forced the US to blink. The meeting on November 24 of the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna was a far more civilized affair than the bellicose threats issued by the same body two months earlier.
The donors' conference in Islamabad on November 19 might as well have been held on Mars, as far as the victims of Pakistan's devastating earthquake are concerned. Donors pledged US$5.8 billion ($0.6 billion more than what Pakistan had asked for), but the sting is in the detail.
Are parliamentary elections – or, for that matter, presidential polls – inevitably rigged in a Muslim country that happens to be strategically placed, oil-rich and allied to Western countries, particularly the US? The answer seems to be "yes".
Last month, the British charity MARCCH convened a major conference on “Chechen after Maskhadov”, in cooperation with other Chechen support groups in the UK. It was attended by AHMAD MUSA, a contributor to Crescent International and a supporter of the Save Chechnya Campaign (SCC).
1Since it agreed to start accession talks with Turkey in October, the European Union has been highly critical of Turkey's human-rights record, including its treatment of the Kurds, who are concentrated in the south east of the country.
Disasters, whether natural or manmade, bring out both the best and worst in people. The earthquake that rocked Northern Pakistan and Azad Kashmir on October 8 has brought out the generous spirit of Pakistan's people and exposed the ineptitude of Pakistan's government.
The decision of the European Union summit at Luxembourg on October 4 to hold accession talks with Turkey (over Austria's objections) was hailed by both Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, and Jack Straw, Britain's foreign minister (Britain holds the current EU chairmanship), as “historic”.
President Bush and Condoleezza Rice, his Black secretary of state, are so desperate to defend their now-discredited campaign to establish democratic rule in the Middle East, and in Central Asia, that they are evoking the history of the civil rights movement in the US.
Afghanistan’s thrice-postponed presidential election, due to be held on October 9, is turning into a grand farce. Far more people are registered than are eligible to vote, though that hardly cramps the American installed-puppet Hamid Karzai’s style...
Iran won what may be regarded as a partial and temporary victory at the International Atomic Energy Commission (IAEA) on September 24, when the UN nuclear agency’s board refrained from acceding to American demands that it immediately refer Iran to the UN Security Council for alleged breaches of the nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty (NPT).
That Pakistan's president, General Pervez Musharraf, shook hands with a war criminal like Ariel Sharon of Israel—better known as the Butcher of Beirut—was bad enough; it was even worse that he chose to do so on the twenty-third anniversary of the Sabra and Shatilla massacres (September 14-16).
As if Hurricane Katrina had not caused quite enough damage, Rita came roaring in and swept across Louisiana and Texas, putting out of action more than 25 percent of the US's oil-refining capacity.
Turkey has been a trusted and valued member of NATO for a long time, as it has been an associate member of European economic organisations. Turkey first applied to join what was then the EEC in 1959 and signed an association agreement with it in 1963, which strongly implied that it would later become a member.
On August 24 the British government announced details of new measures to be taken against foreign Muslims living in Britain. Foreign Muslims will be deported from Britain, or not permitted to enter the country in the first place, if they are considered by the government to be “fostering hatred or fomenting, or glorifying terrorist violence”.
Nothing illustrates the West’s hypocrisy better than its attitude to the issue of nuclear technology and its use for the generation of energy. There are several layers of hypocritical behaviour: countries that do not possess nuclear know-how must be denied its use because it is alleged that this would lead to their making nuclear weapons.
The peace deal signed last January for which the late John Garang fought for more than two decades secures for southern Sudan the right to secede, which it will exercise through a referendum to be held in six years’ time. There is little doubt that Garang would have insisted on the referendum being held, had he lived, and that the southerners will vote for secession because of their strong hostility towards the north and their backers’ keenness to have the “largest Muslim-dominated country in Africa” broken up.
By camping outside US president George Bush’s Crawford ranch and demanding to meet him, the mother of a slain American soldier has given a human face to the anti-war movement. She has also energized it in a way that had not seemed possible only a few weeks earlier.
Even the elaborate Independence Day celebrations on August 14 could not conceal the panic that has gripped Pakistan’s ruling elites since America’s military and nuclear agreements withIndia in June and July respectively.
