Articles

The two summit meetings at Sharm al-Shaikh on June 3, attended by US president George W. Bush, Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas, and the leaders of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Bahrain, and at the royal palace at Aqaba, Jordan...

Since its independence from the Soviet monolith (1991), Kazakhstan has been mired in a succession of political crises. Kazakhstan has been the scene of serious human-rights abuses and the denial of fundamental freedoms.

The US has become a menace to the world. This is not merely the opinion of Muslims, but also of its traditional allies. At the G8 summit in France earlier this month, Bush told the Europeans, especially the French, bluntly that they must tailor their policies to America’s interests.

Since the overthrow of Saddam Hussain by the western coalition, there has been much debate about the weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that were used as a pretext to launch the war, but which have not been found.

The "suicide bombing" by two young women (both apparently Chechens) on July 5, which killed 14 people at an open-air rock festival on the outskirts of Moscow, has proven to be a blow to president Vladimir Putin’s efforts to convince the Russian people that the war is over, and has been won.

Yashwant Sinha, India’s external affairs minister, has joined the fire-breathing Indian home minister L K Advani in threatening a "pre-emptive strike" against Pakistan over Kashmir. In an interview published in the Hindustan Times on April 6, Sinha repeated the threat which had first been carried by the French news agency, Agence France Presse (AFP), three days earlier.

That the unanimous approval of the Shari’ah Bill by the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) assembly on June 2 should send the secular elites into a frenzy is a telling sign of the true state of affairs in the "Islamic Republic" of Pakistan.

US attorney general John Ashcroft remains unrepentant despite a stinging rebuke by Glenn A. Fine, his department’s own inspector general, confirming enormous abuses of detainees since September 2001. In a report released on June 3, Fine highlights the mistreatment of 762 persons, some of them held by the government for as long as eight months without charge.

During his African tour this month, there were both questions about the invasion of Iraq and jokes about president Bush, especially relating to the growing US budget deficit. On Iraq he was asked about Iraq’s alleged purchase of uranium from Niger.

President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan is one of Central Asian’s most repressive rulers. Yet the US, which claims to be the world’s main protector of human rights, has made him its ‘best friend’ in the region since September 2001.