LONDON: Free, fair, and transparent democratic elections are no longer strangers to Africa. Indeed, they have become a regular occurrence. But the presidential and parliamentary elections in the Democratic Republic of the Congo at the end of (...)
STRASBOURG: In the 1990s, the world averted its eyes to genocide in Rwanda, and to the “Great Lakes War” in eastern Congo, which claimed upward of five million lives — the most in any war since World War II. Will such silence and neglect prevail (...)
BELGRADE: Chasing impossible dreams has driven Serbia and Kosovo into a corner. A return to armed conflict may be impossible — at least for now — given NATO's military presence in Kosovo (though it will be halved in the next few months to only 5,000 (...)
BRUSSELS: The price of freedom, it is said, is eternal vigilance. But that price can take the form of morally squalid decisions in which innocent people bear the brunt of the cost of freedom's defense.
Under the cover of the Cold War, Western (...)
BRUSSELS: Two decades ago, Ethiopia was a Cold War battlefield. On the ideological map of the world, it was Soviet territory, a land of famine, dictatorship, and civil war. But, with the overthrow of Mengistu Haile Mariam's Marxist-Leninist (...)
STRASBOURG: After almost two decades as a failed state torn by civil war, perhaps the world should begin to admit that Somalia - as it is currently constructed - is beyond repair.
Some of the country, however, can meet at least a basic standard (...)
STRASBOURG: The European Union recently embarked on a policy of "constructive engagement with Belarus. None too soon. Previously, EU policy was to isolate Belarus, which itself was seeking isolation.
That policy achieved almost nothing, save for (...)
BRUSSELS: Has the "energy weapon of the 1970's - the withholding of energy supplies for political ends - returned? Using oil or gas as a political weapon is easier said than done, of course, but this year's renewal of the Russia-Ukraine gas dispute, (...)
DAKKA: As fears about the Islamization of politics in the Muslim world grow, Bangladesh, with the world's fourth-largest Muslim population (126 million), has moved dramatically in the opposite direction. Bangladesh is usually heard about only when (...)
Though the crisis triggered by Iran's illegal capture of 15 British naval personnel nears an end, it is difficult not to see how the European Union's irresolute and contradictory approach to the abductions only made matters worse. Faced with a (...)
The world is consumed by fears that Iraq is degenerating into a civil war between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. But in this looming war of all against all, it is Iraq's small community of Assyrian Christians that is at risk of annihilation. Iraq's (...)