Articles

The tragedy of the Iraqi people is turning into a farce in the Arab rulers’ hands. As if the insults traded between colonel Mu’ammar Qaddafi of Libya and crown prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia at the Arab League summit on March 1 were not enough, the OIC also got in on the act on March 5 in Doha.

Eleven Palestinians, almost all non-combatants, were killed in the northern Ghazzah town of Jabalya on March 6, during the Israeli military’s third major incursion into Ghazzah in less than a week.

What’s in a NAM? This was answered even before the so-called non-aligned countries, which constitute the Non-Aligned Movement, began their summit in Kuala Lumpur on February 24. For many heads of state who attended, it was a short holiday in the tropics.

While the Philippine armed forces were bombarding Muslim villages and towns in the south of the country, a large and powerful bomb exploded on March 4 at Davao airport in southern Philippines, killing dozens of foreigners.

Despite eighteen months of relentless bombing, the US has failed to turn Afghanistan into a democratic paradise with groceries in every shopping plaza and a McDonald’s at every street corner. This is frustrating for US president Bush...

Pakistan has been afflicted by two curses since the beginning of its existence: one a quirk of geography and the other of choice. At its birth Pakistan was saddled with an enemy, India, many times its size; and its ruling elites’ desire to pursue "friendship" with America is the second, warping its policies in the process.

At a time when the world is debating the legality and morality of America’s determination to invade and occupy Iraq, the Turkish parliament’s rejection on March 1 of a motion allowing US troops to deploy in Turkey on their way to northern Iraq was widely seen both as a major act of anti-American defiance from a state which has recently seen a (vaguely) Islamist government win power...

Endgame: Britain, Russia and the Final Struggle for Central Asia by Jennifer Siegel. Pub: I. B. Tauris & Co., London, 2002. Pp: 284. Hbk: $29.50.

The Assassination of Lumumba by Ludo De Witte (translated by Ann Wright and Renee Fenby). Pub: Verso Books, London/New York, 2001. (Published in South Africa by Jacana, www.jacana.co.za). Pp 226. Pbk: $15.00.​

The US and Great Britain (effectively one entity, the US/GB, in terms of their Iraq policy) proposed a draft resolution supposedly authorising military action against Iraq to the UN Security Council on February 24...