Articles

The US made a hasty return to its Middle East imbroglio this month, when CIA director George Tenet returned to the region to act as a mediator for “security co-ordination” between Israel and Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority.

For some Americans, the ‘information revolution’ has transformed life radically. Yet for others the new technology and the ‘new economy’ it has helped to set in motion have only created a new dividing line between the information “haves” and “have-nots.”

For nearly a decade Canada has been regarded by the United Nations as the best country in the world to live in; this may be true, but there are persistent problems reflected in statements of officials and organizations that mar this image. The most obvious is racism, an attitude almost universal in European and North American societies.

When the Muslim Central Asian countries became independent in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, their leaders — who had been regional heads of the KGB in most cases — promised prosperity and democracy.

Iranian president Sayyid Mohammad Khatami was re-elected to office on June 8, in the country’s eighth presidential elections since the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

The excitement generated by Indian prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s invitation last month to Pakistani chief executive general Pervez Musharraf, for peace talks in Delhi, quickly proved hollow when the very different positions of the two sides were made clear.

The Albanian Muslims of Macedonia, who constitute more than a third of the country’s population, are fighting for the constitutional rights enjoyed by the Slav majority but denied to them, and for autonomy only in the regions inhabited predominantly by them.

Among the few notable results in Britain’s general election on June 8 was the strong showing of the British National Party (BNP) in the constituencies of Oldham East and Oldham West in Lancashire.

The Society of Muslim Brothers in Egypt by Brynjar Lia. Pub: Garnet Publishers, Reading, UK. Pp: 328. Price: £30.

History, it is often said, is written by the victors. In these terms, the Ottoman sultanate has been doubly damned, its history having been variously written by the West that dismantled it and Turkey’s nationalist-secularists, who have been determined to accept the West’s contempt for it.