Briefing Archive

NASHIK, India — On a recent afternoon, Seetabai Atthre heard a faint cry from the edge of a vineyard her family has cultivated for more than 40 years on the arid plains of northern Maharashtra state. Searching through the furrows, she found her husband, Vishal, smoldering on the ground next to an empty can of kerosene. He died in a local hospital three days later from severe burns. The Atthre farm had not turned a profit in more than two years, and 65-year-old Vishal could no longer secure loans from local banks to pay off the interest on the $5,600 […]

After two months of post-election turmoil, which claimed up to 1,500 lives and displaced more than half a million people, Kenya is slowly recovering from civil strife. A power-sharing deal between erstwhile rivals President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga seems to have pulled the east African country from the brink of a civil war. The United States and other donors are sinking millions of dollars into the implementation of the deal, which will make Odinga an executive prime minister and give him two deputies. But the heart-on-the-sleeve moments that greeted the deal — especially from Odinga’s side — […]

BEDDAWI, Lebanon — Nael Abu Siam is struggling to keep reality at bay for his children. Ten months ago, his home was destroyed in a conflict between Lebanese soldiers and radical Islamic militants at the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon. “First I told them that nothing has changed, just that we change houses to repair the first one,” said the 40-year Palestinian refugee. But as the months have gone by, the pretext has become more difficult to sustain. The members of the Siam family are among 33,000 Palestinian refugees displaced from their homes by the conflict at Nahr […]

OBSERVERS QUIT SRI LANKA MISSION — A group of 11 international observers assigned to oversee a Sri Lanka presidential inquiry into 16 human rights cases resigned en masse March 6, citing undue government interference in the process, on the same day Human Rights Watch released a scathing report branding Sri Lanka as the disappearance capital of the world. “The proceeding of inquiry and investigations have fallen far short of the transparency and compliance with basic international norms and standards pertaining to investigations and inquiries,” the panel said in a statement released to the press. Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa invited […]

On March 6, President George W. Bush delivered a major speech on homeland security to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The President thanked DHS employees for their hard work and recounted some of the department’s recent achievements. Bush also warned against complacency: “We must also remember that the danger to our country has not passed. Since the attacks of 9/11, the terrorists have tried to strike our homeland again and again.” In an op-ed published on the same day, Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff, the former and current DHS secretary, also claimed that during […]

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — Although it has received much less attention than the violence in Belgrade following Kosovo’s declaration of independence last month, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia’s neighbor to the west, has also seen violence in the wake of the Kosovo declaration. In recent weeks, up to 10,000 protestors in the Bosnian city of Banja Luka, the de facto capital of the majority-Serb Bosnian province of Republika Srpska, have stormed the streets and attacked the U.S. Consulate and other foreign diplomatic missions. The Banja Luka rioters demand that Republika Srpska (RS) be allowed to secede. Observers insist that the Banja Luka protestors are […]

Late last month, the executive director of the World Food Programme (WFP) told the Financial Times that the U.N. agency would soon be forced to consider “cutting [its] food rations or even the number of people reached.” This comes as soaring inflation in staple food items such as wheat, corn, rice, and soybeans has produced hunger riots in developing countries and left governments grasping at straws for a solution. Over the past eight years, the price of food worldwide has increased 75 percent; the price of wheat has gone up a dramatic 200 percent. Struggling to keep up with inflation, […]

TENSION IN THE ANDES — It was inevitable that the Organization of American States would express its strong disapproval of Colombia’s incursion into Ecuador to take out FARC leader Raúl Reyes. The South American continent is a patchwork of contiguous countries, and the idea of troops trespassing in and out of countries at will raises serious issues of sovereignty. Brazil, for example, borders no less than 10 other countries; Bolivia has five immediate neighbors, and virtually every other country has a minimum of three. There was, however, no question of going so far as condemning the Colombians, because everyone (with […]

The news of Venezuelan tanks and troops massing along the border with Colombia must have old Latin revolutionaries sighing with nostalgia. It is as if the old days of idealistic dreams, when every bearded university student was a would-be Ché Guevara, had never left; as if someone had conjured back those old days filled with utopian possibilities. You have to hand it to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, a character straight out of a García Márquez novel. Chávez would not countenance a hundred years of revolutionary solitude. Instead, the man with the power to stop the clock and wind it back […]

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico – Despite a number of significant steps to increase security along the U.S.-Mexican border in recent years, violence along the frontier is growing as Mexican drug cartels increase their involvement in human and drug smuggling into the United States. Meanwhile, a Bush administration initiative to provide significant law enforcement aid to Mexico is stalled in Congress amid old questions about the best way to fight the drug war. Since 2001, the Bush administration has increased the number of border patrol agents from 9,000 to 15,000, with another 3,000 to be added by the time Bush leaves office. […]

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — The death of FARC commander Raúl Reyes is being seen here as a significant turning point in Colombia’s internal armed conflict with Latin America’s oldest insurgency, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. While the killing of Reyes on Ecuadorian soil has sparked a diplomatic crisis between Colombia and its neighbors, it is the impact of his death on the country’s conflict that will be noted in the annals of Colombian history. Colombian President Álvaro Uribe was elected to power with a mandate to crush the rebels. For the last six years, the government’s counterinsurgency campaign, bankrolled largely […]

The line of those waiting patiently for the demise of Fidel Castro was a long one. For nearly 50 years the queue included foreign exiles, eager businessmen, American politicians, and numerous Cuban dissidents. Yet when the moment finally arrived late last month, it wasn’t nearly the historic, providential occasion most had envisioned. Rather than go out with a bang — which very nearly happened at the height of the Cold War — Castro chose instead to slip quietly from view, the world’s most infamous, and recently bedridden, autocrat leaving his followers with nothing but the vague plea that he wished […]

BRUSSELS — NATO and European Union officials in Brussels met the landslide election victory of former Russian President Vladimir Putin’s chosen successor, Dmitry Medvedev, with ambivalence this week. Officials of both bodies expressed little optimism that a change of leadership will bring any great change in the direction of Russia’s increasingly assertive foreign policy. Medvedev won more than 70 percent of the vote, defeating three candidates who had no chance to confront Medvedev in debates and had little realistic chance of victory after Putin named his successor. According to Russia’s Central Election Commission, 64 percent of eligible voters participated in […]

On March 1, the conflict over the disputed outcome of last month’s presidential elections in Armenia turned deadly when riot police and Interior Ministry troops clashed with armed opposition demonstrators in the capital city. Dozens of people were killed or injured in downtown Yerevan, where tens of thousands of Armenians had engaged in round-the-clock street protests and established a makeshift tent camp. The incident apparently started with a police tracer bullet accidentally ricocheted and killed a demonstrator, enraging the protesters to attack the police. The government responded to the melee by declaring a state of emergency in the capital and […]

BELGRADE, Serbia — As editor-in-chief of Serbia’s oldest and most prestigious daily newspaper, Politika, I am at a loss to explain the West’s stubborn support for Kosovo independence to my readers. Only nine years ago, my country was bombed for 78 days by the most powerful military alliance the world has ever seen, and the last thing I want is to pour oil over the fire of anti-Western sentiment. But the truth is, I find myself grappling with the same bitterness and resentment as most of my countrymen. I was very much part of the democratic upheaveal that rid Serbia […]

MIAMI — The specter of war looming over Colombia and Venezuelafollowing the recent killing of a Colombian rebel leader comes amid anongoing and significant increase in Venezuela’s military spending inrecent years. Venezuela’s military buildup and continuing concernsabout its government’s ties to left-wing rebels provide aworrying context for Venezuela’s recent troop mobilization, though mostanalysts still believe the chances are slim that the current crisiswill spark a military conflict.Colombia’s decision over the weekend to cross into Ecuador to kill rebel leader Raúl Reyes and 16 members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who were reportedly camped just a mile from […]

The Israeli experience in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 should warn Americans against having an Army that has become so focused on irregular and counterinsurgency warfare that it can no longer fight large battles against a conventional enemy. In an important essay in the Journal of Strategic Studies, Israeli scholar Avi Kober recently noted that years of policing by the Israeli Army in its territories had degraded its ability to fight the Hezbollah enemy that used conventional tactics. The result was a significant battlefield defeat for the Israeli Army. The American Army is in a similar condition today, and […]