Articles

The Turkish government requested 45,000 body-bags from the UN on August 24, giving the first clear indication of the final death-toll it is expecting from the earthquake that struck north-western Turkey at 3am on the morning of August 17.

Over fifty years after the United Nations proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the human rights of the vast majority of people in the world are completely unprotected.

It is difficult to believe, surveying Pakistan’s 52-year history, that when the country was founded in 1947, Islamic activists all over the world looked to it for leadership and inspiration.

Societies governed by man-made laws run the risk of getting into awkward situations. Take the example of Canada where the Supreme Court ruled last month that the provincial government must change within six months the Family Law Act of Ontario relating to spousal benefits.

‘Internationalisation’ has become the new buzzword in the post-Kargil environment in Pakistan. Government spokesmen miss no opportunity to put the most positive spin on the Washington Agreement that prime minister Nawaz Sharif was humiliatingly forced into on July 4.

Arab interior and justice ministers met in Jeddah, in the Hijaz, on August 1 to establish structures for the implementation of the Arab treaty against ‘terrorism’ which came into force on May 7 following its ratification by seven Arab League member states.

With a new king in Morocco, and a recently elected president in Algeria, relations between the two North African neighbours - frosty at the best of times, over the western Saharan issue - have suddenly thawed.

Indonesian national police chief General Rusmanhadi announced the beginning of a new six-month offensive against Islamic rebels in Ache Sumatra on August 5.

The welcome that Israel’s new prime minister received in Arab capitals following his election victory was not unprecedented. The praise for the Zionist state’s most decorated general as a ‘trustworthy man of peace’ has its parallel in the late Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s sudden visit to Jerusalem in November 1977.

The student demonstrations in Tehran during the second week of July were widely interpreted, especially in the west, as a major crisis in the Revolution and possibly even the beginning of the end for the Islamic Republic. Western media and government officials welcomed them as the beginning of a popular uprising against the Islamic state.