Articles

Of the five explosions carried out on May 11 and 13, India said one was a hydorgen bomb (thermonuclear explosion). Evidence had emerged months prior to the explosions that India had indeed embarked on the fusion route and made some progress.

Twelve Uzbek Muslims were sentenced to jail terms ranging from five to eight years last month, after being found ‘guilty’ of belonging to illegal Islamic organizations and other charges

Talks between Belgrade and Prishtina on the future of Kosova finally began last month, following pressure on Kosova president Ibrahim Rugova by Richard Holbrooke, the US diplomatic ‘troubleshooter’ who mediated the Dayton Peace Agreement which ended the Bosnian war in December 1995.

Within two weeks of India’s five nuclear explosions, Pakistan responded with five tests of its own on May 28 followed by one more on May 30. Not only did it out-bang India but also turned the near-gloom in Pakistan into euphoria.

The first point any informed reader will note about this book is that Malcolm uses the Serbian form ‘Kosovo’ throughout in preference to the Albanian form ‘Kosova’, used by Kosovars themselves. As in the Bosnian case, the use of terminology in discussing Kosova is politically sensitive.

When the Arab interior and justice ministers’ meeting in Cairo in late April finally signed an accord on the only thing they normally agree on - the need to fight Islamic activism, euphemistically referred to as terrorism - Arab secular commentators and politicians hailed it as a secure bulwark against the dark forces of anarchy and backwardness.

‘I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.

Lebanon, it is commonly joked in Beirut, has three presidents: Elias Hrawi, Rafic Hariri and Nabih Berri. ‘What about Hafez al-Asad?’ asked a recent visitor to Beirut.

From Bangladesh through Central Asia to Iraq, tens of millions of Muslims have been poisoned, many terminally, as a result of pollution from nuclear dust, pesticides and arsenic in water wells - all at the hands of western governments, international aid agencies and Russia, as the dominant power in the former Soviet Union.

While Afghan factions are locked in a power struggle for control of territory, they are losing their people to Christian missionaries in the refugee camps in Peshawar.