Rogue States: the Rule of Force in World Affairs by Noam Chomsky. Pub: Pluto Press, London, 2000. Pp: 252. Pbk: UK£10.99.

US president Bill Clinton earned plaudits around the world on new year’s eve when he announced that he had signed the International Treaty agreed in Rome in 1998 which set out the parameters for the establishment of a standing International War Crimes Tribunal.

ZAFAR BANGASH, Director of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought (ICIT), discusses the US’s latest proposals in the Middle East ‘peace process’, and the best way forward for the Palestinians.

In Algeria the year 2000 was one of undiminished violence and bloodshed, very different from the harmony that president Abdul-Aziz Bouteflika claims to have ushered in by his offer of amnesty to the country’s armed groups.

The Emir of Bahrain, Shaykh Hamad bin ‘Issa al-Khalifah, announced in a speech marking the country’s National Day on December 16 that he will be taking the country another step towards democracy. But, like everything about politics in the Gulf Arab states, the Emir’s notion of political reform is of a controlled process in which freedom and participation are not rights of the citizenry but rather favours granted by the ruler.

The six member-states of the Gulf Corporation Council (GCC) signed a defence pact on December 31, pledging themselves to come to each other’s aid in the event of attack.

Dr Mazen al-Najjar, a former adjunct professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa, was released from prison on December 15, 2000, after more than 3 and a half years in jail as a victim of the US’s notorious “secret evidence” system.

Like other Arab dictators, General ‘Umar Hassan al-Bashir thinks that nothing can offset the precipitous decline in public support for his regime like prattling about democracy and holding elections boycotted by all major opposition groups. In a press conference in Khartoum on December 29, the head of Sudan’s General Election Authority...

The long-awaited Hamoodur Rahman Commission Report into the East Pakistan debacle of 1971 was finally released on December 30, 2000, although “sensitive” segments still remain out of the public eye. Even the 700 pages that have been released...

Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s announcement last month extending the ceasefire in Kashmir has generally been welcomed, although it has not prevented the Indian occupation army from continuing its murderous campaign against civilians.

In a new twist in the west’s escalating campaign against the independence-seeking ethnic Albanians in southeastern Serbia, the NATO-led ‘peacekeeping force’ in Kosova (KFOR) on January 8 launched a propaganda campaign to discourage the rebels from continuing their armed struggle.

President Islam Karimov, a dictator well-schooled in the old methods of Soviet repression, is intensifying his regime’s crackdown on all forms of dissent, whether Islamic or secular.