Saudi Arabia’s rigid sex segregation, compulsory male guardianship of women and other ”grossly discriminatory” policies are a denial of fundamental rights, a leading human rights watchdog says on Monday. Women are treated like legal minors who have no authority over their lives or their children, finds a new report by Human Rights Watch.
Arab human rights activists have condemned a Saudi religious edict calling for the execution of two writers for apostasy — giving a rare glimpse of tensions over Islam inside the conservative kingdom. King Abdullah recently called for the first time for a dialogue among Muslims, Christians and Jews, after discussing the idea with Pope Benedict XVI.
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/ 14 December 2007
Intelligence agencies and security experts are divided over events in Algeria: one view is that the violence of recent years is the work of the homegrown GSPC (the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat), still fighting the civil war that tore the country apart and killed thousands in the 1990s.
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/ 13 October 2007
It was early afternoon and still uncomfortably hot when the convoy rolled up, sirens wailing, outside the town hall. Machine-gun-toting Palestinian police officers in blue, mottled camouflage gear surrounded a white four-wheel drive as the VIP stepped out. ”Welcome to Hebron, Mr Blair,” declared the mayor, Khaled Osaily.
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/ 20 September 2007
Israel’s declaration that the Gaza Strip is an ”enemy entity” is yet another alarming development in the ever-fractious situation in the Middle East. The move is intended to warn of, and ostensibly to justify, a cut-off of fuel and electricity to the territory — home to 1,5-million people already living in appalling conditions.
Hamas has good reason to celebrate the release of the BBC’s Gaza corrrespondent Alan Johnston, for its success demonstrates to the Palestinians and to the wider international community that it can run the show in the Gaza Strip, less than three weeks since taking it over. Jubilant spokesmen wasted no time in making the connection between the BBC man’s freedom and their own wider political ambitions.
Tony Blair is to make his first working visit to Ramallah on the West Bank in July as a special envoy of the quartet of Middle East peacemakers to discuss Palestinian state-building, it emerged last week after he was confirmed in the high-risk job amid scepticism about his chances of success.
Khaled Mashal, the influential political leader of the Palestinian Islamist movement, Hamas, insists attacks on Israel will continue, despite overwhelming Israeli retaliation that has cost scores of lives in the Gaza Strip in the past two weeks. Speaking in Damascus recently he asserted it was the right of the Palestinians to resist ”Zionist aggression” regardless of whether their actions were effective.
Hip-hop came to Libya last month, courtesy — improbably — of the British Council, introducing a novelty to a country hungry for contact with the West after its long isolation. This was light years away from the council’s fusty old image of Shakespeare and morris dancing, and a measure of just how much Moammar Gadaffi’s Jamahiriya — the world’s only “state of the masses” — is changing as it comes in from the cold.
Old Middle East hands like to quote the adage: ”If you think you understand Lebanon, you haven’t been properly briefed.” The country’s sheer complexity, with its mosaic of religions, sects and allegiances and links to competing foreign powers, can make it fiendishly difficult to understand.