Articles

The UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva debated a new code, the Human Rights Norms for Business, on April 8, in the face of strong opposition from companies and governments in the West and developing countries...

In the decade since the genocide in Rwanda, which resulted in the murders of more than 800,000 people in 100 days, the Muslim population of the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic West African country has more than doubled...

The Sudanese government has over the years been under strong pressure from western countries and international organisations, led by the US, to concede to rebel groups (which are predominantly Christian) the right to secede from the mainly Muslim north...

Even by modern standards, the last month has been spectacularly bloody in the scale of the political violence seen. It opened with the Ashura killings in Iraq and Pakistan, in which several hundred Shi’a were slaughtered...

The assassination of Shaikh Ahmed Yassin as he returned to his home after fajr prayers on March 22, 2004 (Safar 1, 1425) was a shock but not a surprise. Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon had declared him to be at the top of the list for assassination, and he had survived an attempt on his life in September last year, when Israeli fighter aircraft fired several missiles at the building in which he was staying...

The recent flare-up of ethnic violence involving Syria’s Kurdish minority (apparently inspired by the constitutional gains made by the Kurds in Iraq) and the growing US pressure on Damascus to sign a peace deal with Israel and "end its occupation" of Lebanon, indicate the increasing threats to the stability of a country that is already undermined by the enduring alliance between the ruling Asad dynasty and the Ba’ath party...

One of the first messages to have been proclaimed by the Islamic Revolution and the line of the Imam was that the Islamic Revolution in Iran is neither of eastern nor of western affiliation...

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire (30th anniversary edition). Pub: Continuum International, New York, 2003. Pp: 183. Pbk: $15.95.

José María Aznar, the right wing prime minister of Spain who was the only European leader to join George Bush and Tony Blair in their invasion of Iraq, paid the price for his defiance of Spanish public opinion on March 14, when the Spanish electorate voted him out of office...

Production of this issue of Crescent International has been considerably hampered by the fact that it has coincided with the series of one-day cricket matches between Pakistan and India at the beginning of the Indian team’s first tour of Pakistan since 1989...