Articles

Time was obviously not on the side of Australia and the US, right from the day respected alim Abu Bakar Basyir was sentenced to jail two years ago for a crime he was too frail to plan or carry out. On 14 June, it was like a discordant alarm-clock that went off too early for Canberra, the self-appointed deputy sheriff of Bush's international police force.

The death of Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi in an American air strike on June 7 has been greeted with joy by the beleaguered US regime. Among Muslims, his image was mixed: some saw him as a courageous resistance leader, fighting against a global superpower, others as a murderous sectarian extremist. NASR SALEM discusses the life and legacy of a symbol of modern Iraq.

After making a grand retreat from the deliberately contrived nuclear standoff with Iran that even its close allies had found distasteful, US officials still continue to behave as if everyone must snap to attention whenever they click their fingers. This was again seen on June 21, when US president Bush was in Vienna for talks with European rulers.

Even before the annual meeting of heads of member-states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) opened on June 15, officials in Washington were pulling their hair at what they perceived as a challenge to US hegemony in the vital Eurasian region.

Muslims in Canada were startled by the arrest on June 3 of 15 individuals, all of them Muslims, on charges related to terrorism. Two other alleged suspects were already in jail for gun-smuggling. Five of the 17 are under 18 years of age, so their names cannot be divulged, but that has not prevented the police or intelligence agencies from leaking damaging information about them.

The agreement reached on June 22 at Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, by Somalia's nominal transitional government and the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) – which is in control of the capital,Mogadishu, and most of southern Somalia – has been hailed as a first step towards the restoration of peace, tranquillity and unity to the violence-ridden "failed state".

In the last issue, we reported on the protests by expatriate workers in Dubai against their treatment there. Now ABD RAHMAN KOYA in Kuala Lumpur reports on the plight of Indonesia domestic workers in Malaysia, and the shortcomings of a new agreement between the countries.

The announcement by US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld during a brief visit to Kabul on May 1, to the effect that the military phase of the campaign in Afghanistan is over, took American soldiers in the country by surprise.

It is a remarkable development that in a country like Egypt, ruled autocratically by a former military officer, members of the judiciary and strongly anti-regime Islamic activists find themselves on the same side in the war the dictator is waging to stay in power and pass it to his son.

What makes some pro-democracy movements popular in the West and others not so popular? Considering the emphasis that the Bush regime has placed on democratisation in the Muslim world as the solution for anti-Western anger among Muslims, one would expect that the eruption of popular protests against a one-party dictatorship led for nearly three decades by the same former military officer might be welcomed in Washington and gleefully publicised by the world’s media.