Articles

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.

Book reviews are usually written about new publications. But it is surprising how often important works by major writers are forgotten simply because they are perceived to belong to an earlier generation...

​The War We Could Not Stop: The Real Story of the Battle for Iraq edited by Randeep Ramesh. Pub: Guardian Newspapers Ltd., with Faber and Faber Ltd., London, 2003. Pp: 303. Pbk: £7.99.

Last month’s bomb-blasts at Western targets in Saudi Arabia and Morocco followed the conclusion of the US invasion of Iraq. The bomb-explosions in Riyadh on May 12 killed 24 people and wounded dozens. Four days later another 24 people were killed in five blasts in Casablanca, Morocco...

Several weeks after the US’s occupation of Iraq, its rule is in chaos. Iraq was the most advanced Arab country before the US destroyed its infrastructure in 1991; even after 1991, despite UN sanctions, there was a modicum of civil infrastructure and service provision...