Archive

HIV prevalence is rising rapidly in Burma/Myanmar, fuelled by population mobility, poverty and frustration that breeds risky sexual activity and drug-taking.

General Musharaff is telling western leaders exactly what they want to hear. But the West's new engagement with Pakistan is based on some dangerous misconceptions - and could easily backfire 

The Yugoslav Army’s arrest on 14 March 2002 of a leading Serbian politician and a U.S. diplomat signals that for the first time the Army has openly entered the political arena and is explicitly attempting to set limits on political debate and policy.

Indonesia’s efforts to end the separatist rebellion in Aceh entered a new phase in April 2001 with the launching of a military offensive against the guerrillas of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM).

In February 2002, negotiations to end the most dangerous confrontation of Colombia's decades of civil war collapsed. Nearly four years earlier, the newly-inaugurated President Andrés Pastrana had opened talks with the country’s major remaining rebel groups, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-Ejército del Pueblo (FARC) and the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), with great enthusiasm and hope. But the fighting never ended while the talks sputtered on, and the country now appears headed for a new round of violence in its cities and against its infrastructure. The international community is concerned about the implications not only for Colombia’s people and its democratic institutions, but also wider regional stability.

The law does not yet rule in Bosnia & Herzegovina. What prevail instead are nationally defined politics, inconsistency in the application of law, corrupt and incompetent courts, a fragmented judicial space, half-baked or half-implemented reforms, and sheer negligence. Bosnia is, in short, a land where respect for and confidence in the law and its defenders is weak.

Despite broad international condemnation and a tremendous thirst among the people of Zimbabwe for change, the Zimbabwe African National Union - Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) government succeeded in systematically manipulating the March 2002 election process to ensure another six-year term for President Robert Mugabe.

A series of incidents has highlighted the frailty of the military and political situation in Afghanistan and raised questions regarding the international community's approach to stabilising the country.