Briefing Archive

“Munich to US: ‘Don’t Send Your CIA Thugs out into Europe’s Streets’“. Thus ran the triumphant headline on the Spiegel Online’s English-language site a day after it became know that the Munich Public Prosecutor’s Office had issued arrest warrants for 13 suspected CIA employees presumed to have participated in the abduction of German citizen Khaled Al-Masri in early 2004. Just one day later, however, the headline had acquired a certain unintended irony as reports emerged that Masri himself had beaten up a social worker in his hometown of Neu-Ulm, leaving the man hospitalized for three days. The assault occurred on […]

THE ONCE AND (ALMOST) CURRENT KING — Afghan President Hamid Karzai took time away from his country’s growing problems earlier this week to report to parliament on King Zahir’s improving condition following his hospitalization in India on Feb 4. King who? After living in exile in Rome for 27 years, 92-year-old former King Zahir Shah returned to Kabul in 2002 following the defeat of the Taliban. But for U.S. republican sensitivities he might well have ended up as Afghanistan’s restored monarch. In the loya jirga (tribal conference) that determined Afghanistan’s political future, the idea of restoration had strong support. Older […]

The revelation late last Wednesday (Jan. 31) that British police and intelligence services had interrupted an imminent kidnapping and execution plot in Birmingham is illuminative of the challenge Britain currently faces in dealing with its internal extremism. But perhaps more importantly, it is indicative of the broader realities of the current state of this global phenomenon. According to media sources, the plot involved the kidnapping of a Muslim British soldier and the group of extremists in question (nine arrests have been made thus far) planned to torture him, force his “apology” for his actions in Iraq and then ultimately decapitate […]

WASHINGTON — “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” may have prompted Americans to run and find Kazakhstan on a map. But another recent development appears to have a growing number of Washington insiders talking seriously about political discord in the massive former Soviet republic. A rising young Kazakh politician visited Washington recently trying drum up support from U.S. policy makers and journalists for his newly established and reform-minded Kazakh political party — the official registration of which he claims is being obstructed by his country’s “draconian law on political parties.” The second largest of […]

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — For years, paramilitary death squads and guerrillas waged a campaign of terror and violence against the indigenous Kankuamo people in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains of northeastern Colombia. Their goal was to seize coca plantations, control narcotrafficking routes and profit from large infrastructure projects. In Kankuamo areas, the paramilitaries would gather the people together to watch as they brutally killed someone, or tossed their victims in the road to be run over by cars. Now, however, many of those and other paramilitary leaders are in jail, facing harsh penalties and potentially large payments that are […]

MONROVIA, Liberia — To Liberians, she is President Ellen, or “our iron lady.” Her supporters call her a difference-maker and a straight talker, a leader who says what she’s going to do and then does it. Those qualities have inspired admiration and even love for President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first female president. “She love the country,” Roland Watson, a driver for an aid agency, said. “I think she want to make things happen in this country.” The same cannot be said about Liberia’s former presidents, who presided over 14 years of civil war that claimed 250,000 lives and impoverished […]

PRISTINA, Kosovo — Standing in front of an aerial photograph of Kosovo’s biggest ski resort, Kirk Adams gets visibly excited. “You’ll get half a meter of powder here” — he points to a ridge on the mountain — “and you have it all to yourself. You’re skiing fresh tracks all day.” The resort, which Adams frequents, is a former Yugoslav ski area in a remote town called Brezovica. The whole complex is slipping into disrepair. Only one of nine lifts is functional. The two hotels are shabby, functional at best. “As a resort it’s a nightmare,” Adams concedes. “But it […]

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth in a series of articles by Rhea Wessel on the rights of Muslim women in Europe, particularly Turkish women in Germany. The stories will appear occasionally on World Politics Review. Read the rest of the articles in the series here. STUTTGART, Germany — Hülya Kalkan recently joined the growing ranks of German women of Turkish descent who have written condemning accounts of their young lives. In her book, “I Just Wanted to be Free,” published in 2005, Kalkan relates how she and, a few years later, her younger sister Esme narrowly escaped being forced […]

BANGKOK, Thailand — At precisely 7:09 a.m. on Feb. 24 Thailand will collectively hope for good luck. The army generals now running the country think the country needs uplifting and have decreed this date an apparently auspicious time for a bout of national “merit-making” to be led by senior Buddhist monks. The Land of Smiles, as the Tourist Authority of Thailand labels the country, has not had much to smile at recently. Since the military coup last September, the economy has slumped, bombs have killed people in Bangkok, cracks have appeared in the runways of the capital’s brand new $4 […]

Five years before the Islamic Revolution, Iran produced 6.1 million barrels of oil a day. By the end of 2006 the Iranian oil industry was only pumping 3.9 million barrels a day, 5 percent below its OPEC quota. Barely able to produce any oil for export or cope with escalating domestic demand, Iran’s energy industry has been sliding steadily toward crisis. Yet Iran’s oil reserves are second only to Saudi Arabia’s, and its gas supply is eclipsed only by Russia’s. Having vast energy reserves and the technology to extract and refine them, however, are two different things. A mega-deal struck […]

U.S. authorities are pushing forward with a newly designed system of special military tribunals to try suspected terrorists detained at the U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay. With the first cases expected to be announced this month, it remains to be seen whether such high-level suspects as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the accused mastermind behind the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, will be on the docket. Congress passed legislation calling for the new system in September, after President George W. Bush announced the transfer of KSM to Guantanamo, and after the U.S. Supreme Court deemed an earlier tribunal system set up […]

When Joe Mason’s 10-year-old daughter saw electricity for the first time in her life, she danced. The years of war, 1989 to 2003, ruined the public power supply in this capital. Liberians with means relied on generators; those without money, however, lived in the dark. Given her father earns $90 a month as a hotel clerk, Mason’s daughter could not have known what electricity was until President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf turned it on in July 2006, illuminating the lamps on Monrovia’s major streets. “A new day,” Mason said. But more than six months later, the electricity that powers those lights […]

The Bush administration’s current suspicion that Iran plans to manufacture nuclear weapons is not the first time that Washington has faced such intentions from Tehran, but earlier the circumstances were different. In the late 1970s, U.S. intelligence learned that Iran’s ruler, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, had secretly set up a nuclear weapons development program. According to the Washington-based Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, between 1974 and 1978 the Iranians were carrying out “laboratory experiments in which plutonium was extracted from spent [nuclear] fuel using chemical agents.” Plutonium is an ingredient for nuclear weapons. The difference between then and now […]

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Former rebel turned governor, Irwandi Yusuf, stunned many with his victory in the first direct provincial election held in Indonesia’s once pro-secessionist province of Aceh on Dec.11, 2006. Yet, with post-election pleasantries now over, the former academic has a tough job ahead, as hefty expectations weigh on his three-year term, due to start on Feb. 8. Irwandi’s election is the direct result of the peace deal signed between the Indonesian government and the Gerakan Aceh Merdeka (GAM) in Helsinki, Finland, on Aug. 15, 2005. The peace ended a separatist war that had killed nearly 30,000 since 1976. […]

On Jan. 17, 2007, Philippines military chief Gen. Hermogenes Esperon confirmed that Abu Sulaiman, a senior leader of the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG), died the previous day during a fierce gun battle with government troops on Jolo Island. His death represents a major blow to one of the world’s most notorious terror organizations. Abu Sayyaf (“Father of the Sword”) is primarily an indigenous movement based in the Muslim-dominated regions of the southern Philippines. Its stated goal is to promote an independent Islamic state encompassing western Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago, areas of the southern Philippines heavily populated by Moro Muslims, […]

UNTIMELY DEPARTURE — The U.S. intelligence community is upset at John Negroponte’s sudden departure from his post as the director of national intelligence after less than two years. According to one insider, Negroponte has left unfinished the important structural reform he began shortly following his appointment as overall head of the country’s 15 intelligence services two years ago. President Bush shifted Negroponte, a veteran diplomat, from national security to fill the second ranking position at the State Department when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s first choice, Robert Kimmitt, the deputy secretary of the Treasury, didn’t want to transfer to Foggy […]

Just two days after U.S. President George W. Bush delivered his State of the Union address, it was the turn of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to lay out his government’s agenda. Abe’s policy speech to the Diet last Friday touched on similar themes — the need for stability in the Middle East, the character of the country’s children — and all against the back drop of troubling poll numbers. The key difference is that while Bush was making his speech after heavy losses in midterm elections, Abe is trying to avoid a similar routing in his country’s upper house […]