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Editor’s Note: In March, Kurt Pelda, Africa Bureau Chief of the Swiss daily the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, traveled to eastern Chad on the border with the Sudanese crisis region of Darfur. Over 200,000 Sudanese refugees live in eastern Chad, having fled the violence in Darfur. The region likewise serves as staging grounds for the Darfur rebels fighting against the Sudanese government, although this is less known. During his three weeks traveling in the region, Pelda kept a diary. By virtue of the author’s firsthand observations and his numerous conversations with local Sudanese and Chadians, foreign aid workers and Darfur rebels, […]

MEXICO CITY — Mexican President Felipe Calderon took office last December promising to create jobs, crack down on drug traffickers, improve infrastructure and reduce rampant inequality. But any progress towards tackling these national priorities hinges on a much more mundane topic — tax policy. This is why Calderon’s recent fiscal reform initiative, currently being discussed by a Mexican congressional committee, is a crucial test. To make his promises reality, he needs more money, and improving the nation’s anemic tax collection is the only solution. “It’s pretty clear that we don’t raise enough revenue to do all the things we want […]

On June 7, at the G-8 summit in Heiligendamm, Putin surprised his fellow heads of state by offering to provide the United States with unprecedented access to real-time data from the Russian-leased Gabala radar station in Azerbaijan. In return, Putin proposed that Washington freeze its plans to deploy a ballistic missile defense (BMD) radar in the Czech Republic and BMD defensive interceptor missiles in Poland. Putin and other Russian officials argued that, by using the Gabala complex, the United States would be able to closely monitor missile tests in Iran and would have ample time to deploy BMD against an […]

Editor’s Note: Corridors of Power is written by veteran foreign correspondent and World Politics Review Editor-at-Large Roland Flamini and appears every Monday. FOREIGN OPINION ON LIBBY — Lewis “Scooter” Libby is the Paris Hilton of Washington politics. Luckily for him, his local sheriff was more powerful than Hilton’s sheriff, and the commuting of his sentence can’t be reversed, as hers was. That view is scattered through foreign (and for that matter, domestic) editorial comment on President Bush’s decision last week to quash Libby’s jail time. Other points widely made were (1) that Vice-President Cheney’s disgraced chief-of-staff had lied to the […]

Editor’s Note: For more, watch our Web cast with Luke Hunt in Hong Kong. HONG KONG — When Britain’s Prince Charles shook hands with then-Chinese leader Jiang Zemin and farewelled an empire, opinion was firmly divided over how Hong Kong would prosper under an estranged motherland. The optimists predicted democracy, unparalleled wealth and autonomy. Hong Kong would thrive as a center for commerce, the gateway to China and prove itself truly independent and international. Others were far less generous, forecasting the territory would become “just another Chinese city” dictated to by Communist authorities in Beijing who had only a scant […]

ACCRA, Ghana — When London-based Tullow Oil announced last month that it had discovered oil off the country’s west coast, a few Ghanaians thanked God for the blessing. Others, including President John Kufuor, reveled in the prospect that Ghana’s precious new resource would fuel faster growth and create more jobs. Kufuor suggested that oil would transform his country, which experiences 12-hour power cuts every two of three days, into an African tiger. Even government critics considered the find of up to 600 million barrels of reserves at the West Cape Three Points block, operated by Kosmos Energy of Texas, to […]

Editor’s Note: Rights & Wrongs is a weekly column covering the world’s major human rights-related happenings. It is written by regular WPR contributor Juliette Terzieff and appears every Friday. ICRC BREAKS SILENCE OVER BURMA — In an extremely rare move, the International Committee of the Red Cross June 29 issued a harsh public censure of the Burmese government over systematic human right abuses of civilians and detainees, including forced relocations, arbitrary detentions and murder. “The ICRC has repeatedly drawn attention to these abuses but the authorities have failed to put a stop to them. . . . The continuing deadlock […]

Two weeks ago, ABC News broadcast images of a bizarre so-called “graduation ceremony” taking place somewhere in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The host of the event was none other than Mansoor Dadullah: the newly appointed military chief of the Taliban. The “graduates” consisted of supposed candidates for suicide attacks who, having completed their “training,” were allegedly being dispatched to the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Germany: all countries with troops in Afghanistan. Mansoor Dadullah is the younger brother of the late Mullah Dadullah: the former Taliban military chief who was killed by coalition forces in mid-May. […]