Aid and Development Archive

POLAND’S LAST COMMUNIST LEADERS IN THE DOCK — The Warsaw district court opened proceedings last Friday against former Communist Party Chairman Wojciech Jaruzelski and six other high-ranking former communist officials. They are charged for their roles in the declaration and maintenance of martial law in 1981, which resulted in mass arrests and politically motivated murders. Lawyers for Jaruzelski, 84, argued the declaration was a defensive move designed to prevent a Soviet invasion in response to the Solidarity union movement’s growing people power, but rights advocates have long decried the large scale abuses that occurred in the approximate 18 months Poland […]

Seen from space Saudi Arabia looks like a chunk of reddish clay chiseled from a vast slab linking the Arabian Gulf in the east to the Atlantic coast of Mauritania in the west. This desert-like landscape, stretching almost 5,000 miles across the Middle East, stands in stark relief to the green, fertile lands of Turkey and Europe to the north and the central African jungles of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo to the south. However, looking closer, from the perspective of an airplane flying over the kingdom, one would notice that the great sand sea of Saudi Arabia […]