Six members of the French charitable association L’Arche de Zoé — “Zoë’s Ark” — are presently being held prisoner in N’Djamena, the capital of Chad. They are charged by Chadian authorities with kidnapping. The six were arrested on Oct. 25 while preparing to “evacuate” from the country some 103 children who had allegedly been made orphans by the conflict in neighboring Darfur. As it turns out, however, the vast majority of the children were neither orphans nor from Darfur. Could a well-meaning humanitarian initiative have thus degenerated into simple crime? Rony Brauman, former president of the French NGO Médecins sans [...]
The quick one-day visit between President Bush and Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda in Washington Nov. 16 was by all accounts a successful “meet and greet.” However, it fell far short of the substantive policy agreements and memorable photo-ops that characterized such meetings during the era of former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. Bush and Fukuda had open discussions on issues ranging from North Korea to global warming to beef. However, the lack of substantive agreements that resulted highlights alarming trends in the U.S.-Japan alliance. If not properly managed, the new rifts in the alliance — in large part attributable to [...]
MITROVICA, Kosovo — At first glance, Mitrovica looks like an unremarkable post-industrial mining town. A cloud of smoke hovers over a sprawl of dusty roads dotted with Yugoslav-era apartment blocks and an unattractive monument to local zinc miners, both Serb and Albanian, who battled against the Nazis during World War II. Today, the city is divided by a river and a bridge, symbols of the ethnic strife that exploded in violence in 1999 and again in 2004, driving Mitrovica’s Albanians to the south, and Serbs to the north, of the Ibar River. The final scheduled talks between Kosovo and Serbia [...]
