Conflict

The clashes between Moroccan forces and rebels in the disputed region of Western Sahara has taken a toll on reportage. Morocco has been accused of increased hostility towards Spanish journalists trying to cover the conflict. According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), 10 Spanish journalists were on Monday prevented from reaching the city of Laayoune in the conflict zone. Their tickets on a Royal Air Maroc (the official carrier) flight from Casablanca were cancelled...

The son of a Baloch nationalist leader who was killed during Pakistani military ruler Pervez Musharraf’s rule has offered a bounty of Rs 1 billion and 100 acres of land to any person who beheads the former dictator. The offer was made by Talal Akbar Bugti, the son of late leader Nawab Akbar Bugti and chief of the Jamhoori Watan Party, in the North West Frontier Province town of Quetta on Saturday. Nawab Bugti was killed in a cave, about 150 miles east of Quetta in August 2006. Musharraf, on the...

Directly challenging extremist ideology through exposing the fallacies, contradictions and harmful effects of jihadist concepts and actions is a better way of tackling them than closing down extremist websites, a think-tank has concurred. Quilliam, a London-based think-tank whose founders are former ideologues of UK-based extremist Islamist organisations, has based its conclusions on an 18-month study of Arabic-language websites that eventually focused on 20 discussion forums. Unlike earlier...

Palestinian and Israeli children not only suffer the direct physical consequences of violence, they are also being psychologically scarred by the high levels of violence they witness. Researchers from the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR) have found that nearly 50 percent of Palestinian children between the ages of 11 and 14 have seen other Palestinians upset or crying because someone they knew or loved had been killed by Israelis. Nearly the same proportion reported...

Maintaining bookmarks is a wonderful practice. But when one has to make a selection of 20 from hundreds of bookmarked items, not many of which you would remember anyway, it doesn't seem to be a very wonderful task at hand. It is tedious. One has to go through every second item to remember what on earth it was about. Of all the things that I do, I had been maintaining a bookmark folder dedicated to articles on Kashmir. I, initially, thought of compiling a list of 10 articles that all non...

It has taken the UN three months to react to street demonstrations in Kashmir which have left over 100 people dead. UN secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday called for an immediate end to violence in Kashmir after recent deadly clashes there. “The Secretary-General regrets the latest loss of life,” his spokesperson Martin Nesirky told reporters. “He calls for an immediate end to violence and urges calm and restraint by all concerned.” The UN reaction came a day after an Indian all-party...

The Omar Abdullah government knows how to instill faith among the people of Kashmir. By heaping insult upon injury, of course. It has shamelessly been doing so for the past so many months, and it has done so again by reinstating four police officials who had been suspended after the sensational killing and rapes of two women in Shopian last year. The suspension period of the four police officials has been treated as on-duty and they have been absolved of all charges. They have been reinstated on...

The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 (AFSPA, for short) is very much in the news. And so are a host of officers of the Armed Forces, both retired and serving, who have voiced their desire for the Act to continue. It needs to be seen why they are being strident about an Act that has been repeatedly called “draconian” by many who are knowledgeable about it. What also needs to be exposed are the deceptive arguments they have been dinning into our ears. The Chief of Army Staff, Gen VK Singh...

The amount of deals in the international arms market has dropped drastically in the aftermath of the financial crisis. A new report has concluded that the value of worldwide arms deals in 2009 was $57.5 billion, a drop of 8.5 percent from 2008. The major arms suppliers worldwide are the US, Russia and Germany, the three countries alone accounting for close to 60 percent of all deliveries. The figures come from a recent report of the Congressional Research Service (CRS), a division of the Library...

Two radio stations in Mogadishu were taken off air on Sunday and their equipment confiscated by rebels. HornAfrik Radio and Global Broadcasting Corporation were separately raided by fighters from the Al-Shabaab and Hizbul Islam respectively. HornAfrik staff said armed militia from the Al-Shabaab broke into the premises of the radio station in Bakaro market of Mogadishu on Saturday evening, chased away journalists working in the station before destroyin g cassettes and CDs in the studios and its...