Iran is a land that cannot be easily pigeon-holed.

 America’s sworn enemy which brands the United States the “Great Satan” is the only country in the Middle East where citizens went onto the streets with a candlelit vigil in a spontaneous show of sympathy immediately after 9/11.
 

The Islamic Republic, the embodiment of radical Islam in the eyes of many a Western politician, is also the place where the most popular public holidays hark back to Iran’s Zoroastrian past that pre-dates Islam.

 And then there are the women in their veils. Many you can hardly see, shrouded in their black chadors — a word which literally means ‘tent’ — holding the edges of the cloth in their teeth to keep it tightly bound round their faces.

 Look elsewhere, particularly in the upscale parts of town, and the veil hardly covers their heads, pushed back behind bouffant hair styles, more Yves Saint Laurent than Islam. “Bad hejab” it’s called. (Persian and English share the same word for “bad”, perhaps testimony to ancient linguistic roots.)

 But the omnipresent veil tells you little. Whether all enveloping or pushed back on the head to the limits - and beyond - of acceptability, it gives no indication of where women see their place in society or their political view.
 I first travelled to Iran in 1999. Politically a very different time. Pro-reform politicians had swept to power. Change was in the air although, as it happened, it didn’t last long.

 On that occasion, I was travelling with a U.S.-Iranian friend who was touring the Islamic Republic as part of some research. The trip took us to Ardebil, a city in northwest Iran.

 We had met a kindly man on the flight. He insisted we stay with his family. We declined many times, but this was not traditional “taarof”, the Iranian tradition of making an offer that the recipient is expected to decline. He meant it. And we agreed.
   

We were having lunch. The wife with her neat veil served the food, with her daughter’s help. The men were seated. The women chose to eat in a separate room. We tucked in. Then, after finishing, the wife and daughter joined us for tea. We chatted.

So what has the revolution achieved? my friend asked, speaking 20 years after the Islamic Republic emerged.
   

The husband answered, well, it’s been tough, we still have many problems, but we have made progress. He listed the advances. His wife was listening with increasing agitation.

Finally, unable to hold herself back, she blurted out her  response. In short, he was talking nonsense, she said. She laid into his account with vigour - in front of the visitors - perfectly confident that her opposing and less rosy view of Iran’s progress was just as valid.

That’s what struck me. It’s not what the wife said that mattered. It was her assertiveness. There seemed no inequality in that room. Eating apart and wearing a headscarf were just tradition or polite custom, it was not a statement about her position. Her words that spoke volumes.

That scene in 1999 is just as relevant today. But the political landscape is different. Reformists are no longer in government pushing for social and political change. Hardliners hold the reins of power. And different images now come to the fore: those of women battling to change their status in the eyes
of the law.

It is the era after Shirin Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Peace prize in 2003 for her work on democracy and human rights. She was the first Iranian, first Shi’ite Muslim and first Muslim woman to be so honoured.

She and other activists are fighting for the same divorce rights as men, to have their witness given the same weight in court and seeking other changes that will put them on a par. They pay a heavy price.

Suspended jail sentences for their actions or even time inside are not uncommon . The Iranian authorities deny discrimination and say they are simply implementing Islamic sharia law.

What women are fighting for highlights their aspirations but their determination tells you more about where they see themselves, as equals, even if the activists number just a small
minority in this country of 70 million.

The Islamic Republic often seems as intricate and complex as the mosaic tiling on its mosques. It’s difficult to categorise. Veiled women, whether covering up for conviction or because the law demands it, suggest appearances can indeed deceive.

The pessimism haunting me about Iraq’s future disappeared last week as I returned to Baghdad from a vacation in Syria.

In Syria, my eight-year old son Hani enjoyed the things that we Iraqis have not been able to do since the war began in 2003: staying out late, spending time in parks and open-air restaurants, visiting historical sites.

When I left Baghdad last year, car bombings scarred the capital almost daily, and people lived fearfully as they crept around a city encased by concrete blast walls and barbed wire.

Before making the long drive to Syria last year, I hid my hair with a scarf, fearing the al-Qaeda militants who once held sway in the towns along the highway through Anbar province.

Because the Sunni Arab militants have targeted journalists, I also hid my press badge.

But after Anbar’s tribal leaders turned against al-Qaeda and teamed up with U.S. forces to chase them out, the province has become a relatively safe place.

During the 20-hour bus ride home, my family and I met a young man named Alaa. He had been persuaded by his relatives to return to Baghdad after three years in Syria.

Alaa, one of the 2 million Iraqis who have fled the country since the U.S-led invasion unleashed sectarian killing and indiscriminate bloodshed, left after gunmen kidnapped him. His family paid $20,000 for his release. Now he had decided he could return.

Last year, when I returned to Baghdad from my holiday, even though I had only been away for a few weeks, I had to readjust. I was horrified to see my native city appear as if it had been hit by a nuclear bomb. The streets were covered with wreckage and trash, and whole neighbourhoods were deserted.

Al-Rabia Street, where I used to walk and shop, was pocked by craters and its stores were destroyed. It was almost beyond the point of recognition.

This year, when I came back I was thrilled by signs that Baghdad is being slowly rebuilt, piece by piece.

After the bus dropped my family in western Baghdad, we took a taxi home. We asked the driver to take a shortcut through the Adhamiya neighbourhood. Before the U.S.-Iraqi security drive began in Baghdad in February of 2007, a trip through Adhamiya, a hotbed for Sunni insurgents, would have been unthinkable.

Across the city, I could see street cleaners clearing trash and construction workers paving the sidewalks.

The next day, my neighbours were having a wedding. The entire neighbourhood rang out with sound of musicians. Children from all around came to listen to the music and dance in the street outside.

That would have been impossible a year ago. A friend’s wedding in Baghdad I attented in 2007 had no musicians and was conducted in silence.

Hani, as usual, wanted to stay in Syria, where he had developed a love for swimming.

There are not many swimming pools in Baghdad. But I have promised Hani I will take him to one of the two pools I’ve heard will open here as part of an effort to revive the city’s parks and public spaces.

But much more is needed. Officials hope to spend billions of dollars in coming years to repair Baghdad and overhaul its public works, but so far the government has not spent much of  the money earmarked for reconstruction.

Lubna, a Shi’ite friend of mine who owns a stationery shop in a Sunni area in Baghdad, joined me in last year’s trip to Syria. She was considering moving there and starting over, fearing the violence targeting Shi’ites in her neighbourhood.

She has scrapped those plans, and is instead trying to expand her business in Baghdad.

Life truly is changing in Baghdad. The place I used to call a ‘city of ghosts’ is being resurrected.

(Aseel Kami is an Iraqi reporter in the Baghdad bureau of Reuters)

“Should I wait until she’s finished?” asks a soldier from an Italian Alpine regiment, in their distinctive feathered Tyrolean-style hat, to her police colleagues as they patrol an area of Turin notorious for addicts known as “Toxic Park” and see a woman shooting up.

Incidents like this one reported in Corriere della Sera newspaper seem to support Italian police unions’ doubts about Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s initiative, which began this week, to put 3,000 soldiers on the streets of 10 cities for the next six months to help the police fight a supposed crime wave. Some police officers believe military personnel, even those hardened by peace missions abroad, do not have the training needed to fight crime.

But as the first few hundred soldiers took to the streets this week — wearing barrack-dress uniform with sidearms only for street patrols, but camouflage combat gear and rifles for guard duty on “sensitive” targets like embassies and railway stations — many city mayors hailed the exercise as a success. The military man in charge of the operation, Giuseppe Valotto, said the public reaction had been “incredibly positive” and helped improve citizens’ perception of their own safety. Soldiers even notched up a few “collars” in their first few days on joint patrol with the police, hauling in 12 African immigrants in Naples accused of faking fashion brands, chasing a thief through the streets of Bari and nabbing a man in Milan who had snatched the takings of a bar from the till.

Being style-conscious Italians, of course, the troops carried off their street duties with the requisite swagger and Rome’s right-wing mayor, Gianni Alemanno, who has worried about them scaring off the tourists, appeared taken with the Grenadiers of Sardinia helping out with guard duties in Rome, saying: “They looked like they were out of a film, really perfect, they have a great image.”

But the political opposition, and the media, has asked if it is really necessary to draft in a token number of soldiers in a country that already has 230,000 police and carabinieri, and where the crime rate is not alarmingly high compared to the rest of Europe anyway. A new study by research centre Censis released this week shows, for example, that Italy has the lowest murder rate of the biggest European countries and one which is falling already. One union leader suggested the military should be drafted into Italian building sites instead to combat a growing cause of death among Italians — fatal accidents at work, where Italy ranks top in Europe, according to Censis.

The opposition also points out that Berlusconi has mobilised the military while simultaneously reducing funding for the police in the budget.

The foreign press appears sceptical too, with the Financial Times saying in a comment piece this week that Italy’s new conservative government might to well to focus instead on combatting corruption, where the country has the worst record in the European Union apart from Greece, according to Transparency International’s global corruption Index. Forbes magazine called the operation a “diversion tactic” by Berlusconi to shift the focus away from the country’s sagging economy, which it said has the lowest growth in the euro zone and is heading for recession.

But, as often seems to happen in Italy, Berlusconi comes in for fiercer criticism from the foreign press than from the domestic audience. While putting soldiers on the streets to combat a crime wave of dubious proportions might spark protest in some countries, so far it has been limited to a few banners and handbills in the capital saying “Free Rome”.

Soldiers took power in a coup in Mauritania on Wednesday after presidential guards deposed President Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdallahi when he tried to dismiss senior army officers. Abdallahi took over only last year after winning elections to replace a military junta that had ruled since it toppled the previous president in a bloodless coup in 2005. The largely desert nation, one of Africa’s newest oil producers, has suffered five coups since 1978 but Africa as a whole has transformed its reputation for violent government ousters in recent years after notching up around 80 successful coups and many more abortive attempts between the 1950s and 2004.

There have only been a handful of military seizures in the last five years compared to the heyday of military takeovers in the 1960s. In the mid-70s around half of African countries had military governments. Since then, democracy has gradually made ground and attempts to seize power are strongly frowned upon.

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation and once notorious for military government, suffered its last coup in 1993. 

The African Union condemned the Mauritania coup within hours on Wednesday, demanding that constitutional rule be restored. The AU was established in 2002 to replace the Organisation of African Unity which was discredited by its tendency to turn a blind eye to violence and tyrannical government in its member states. The AU has strongly condemned previous attempts to overthrow legitimate governments by force and threatened to “excommunicate” rebels who came close to overthrowing the Chadian government last February before being repulsed by forces loyal to President Idriss Deby. But despite the AU’s strong rhetoric, African diplomacy has generally had little success in reversing coups. 

Most African governments are now anxious to attract booming foreign investment on the continent and nervous that coups or crises like that in Zimbabwe, whose economy has collapsed, will frighten off overseas investors.

Razia Khan, Chief Africa Economist at Standard Chartered Bank, warned that ripples from Mauritania’s coup could spread wider.

“This news will come as a setback to perceptions of improved governance (in Mauritania). It should also result in some focus on the political stability of Africa’s new oil economies, more broadly. A timely reminder of what is at stake and the risks — not favourable for investor sentiment.”

What do you think? Will Mauritania’s coup damage the economies and prospects of other African countries?. Should the AU take muscular action to reverse the military takeover?

The streets of the Egyptian capital Cairo have been unusually quiet since the start of the month and cabbies say they now drive around in fear of the massive police presence, evident at all major intersections. The big junctions have a police “liwa” on duty — equivalent in rank to an army major-general — along with up to a dozen subordinates enforcing, or perhaps working out how to enforce, a draconian new traffic law.

The newspapers publish daily reports of the number of tickets they have given out the previous day — at least several thousand, for offences such as failing to wear seat belts or stopping beyond the white line at a junction.

On the first day some drivers were ticketed because they did not have the first aid kit which the new law requires them to carry, although the Interior Ministry had postponed that requirement for three months until pharmacies could stock up on them.

Egyptians assume that this unusual requirement is designed to benefit some businessman close to the government but no one has identified a suspect or produced any proof. With millions of vehicles on the road, many of them without working lights or brakes,let alone first aid kits, much money is at stake.

What has most put people on edge is the sudden shift away from tolerance of rock-bottom driving practices and vehicle maintenance standards. The trouble with the new system is its unpredictability.

One driver of a four-wheel-drive vehicle was stopped and had his licence seized because the vehicle had a metal crash bar attached to the front. When the driver argued that was how the cars rolled off the production line and came out of the showroom, his argument fell on deaf ears.

Drivers have warned me that I should have all the dents and scratches patched up on my car in case the police don’t like the look of it. But I’m happy to take my chances. After all, most cars are in worse shape and they can’t remove half the vehicles from the streets of Cairo without massive disruption.

Even since the new law came into effect, policemen have still been seen taking money from drivers, not a good omen for what the Interior Ministry billed as a fresh start. As long as those meant to enforce the law are taking bribes, there will be no law enforcement, as one taxi driver put it.                 

Sudan’s ambassador to the United Nations Abdalmahmoud Abdalhaleem says Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, is “a screwdriver in the workshop of double standards” for seeking to prosecute the president of Sudan, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, for genocide in Darfur.  He rejects the term genocide and says the prosecutor is unfairly picking on Africa’s largest country and ignoring war crimes elsewhere.

Moreno-Ocampo accuses Bashir of launching a genocide campaign in 2003 that was intended to wipe out three ethnic groups in Darfur, a desolate and remote region of western Sudan where oil was discovered in 2005. He says the Sudanese leader used mass murder, rape, deportation and “slow death” by starvation and disease to kill tens of thousands in Darfur.  Moreno-Ocampo wants the ICC judges to issue an international arrest warrant for Bashir.

Khartoum rejects the charges and says it will never hand over any of its citizens to The Hague, where the ICC is based. Like the United States, Russia and China, Sudan is not a party to the ICC, though the Security Council referred the issue of Darfur to the court in 2005.

Abdalhaleem says that if the judges decide to indict Bashir it will ignite a “curtain of fire” that will engulf all of Sudan and the region. He has yet to provide details, but U.N. peacekeeping officials say they are worried.

China, Russia, South Africa and others fear an indictment of Bashir would shatter the fragile peace process in Darfur and have vowed to push the Security Council to freeze the ICC investigation of Bashir. The United States, Britain, France and other Western powers say they do not want to tamper with the independence of the ICC and oppose intervening.

The African Union, the Arab League and non-aligned nations have also urged the council to suspend any ICC indictment of Bashir. Russia’s U.N. envoy Vitaly Churkin has said that the countries calling for a suspension comprise roughly two-thirds of the earth’s population.

Those arguing for a suspension say the top priority should be the full deployment of all 26,000 U.N.-African Union peacekeepers (only 9,500 are there now) and a swift end to the 5-year-old conflict in Darfur, in which international experts believe at least 200,000 have died, with another 2.5 million left hungry and homeless.

Richard Dicker, an international justice expert at the New York-based Human Rights Watch, says the opposite is true — nothing could be better for peace in Darfur than to indict, arrest and try the man believed to be responsible for orchestrating the genocide.

What do you think?  Is the West guilty of applying double standards for justice in the developing world?  Do you fear a “curtain of fire” in Africa if Bashir is indicted? Should the world push for peace in Darfur now and worry about indictments later?  Or should justice come first for the victims of war crimes in Darfur, whatever the cost?

Iraq’s leaders have overcome many hurdles in their struggle to rebuild their country after the ouster of Saddam Hussein in 2003.  But agreeing on the fate of the “ethnic tinderbox” of oil-producing Kirkuk is a particularly testing one.

Why has Kirkuk proven to be such an obstacle? For many, settling its fate seems to be an easy task.

The dispute largely revolves around Kurdish demands to incorporate the city into their autonomous northern Iraq region.  Arabs and Turkmens want the city to remain under the control of the Iraqi government as it has always been.

For an outsider the dispute might seem to be an administrative question of who will manage the city but Kirkuk’s fate has taken on national and regional dimensions since U.S.-led forces toppled Saddam. It has fuelled the ethnic conflict between Arabs
and Kurds and drawn in regional powers, especially neighbouring Turkey.

Kurds look at the city inhabited by Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens as their historic capital, while Arabs and Turkmen argue it equally belongs to them.

While Sunnis and Shi’ite Arabs are locked in a power struggle across the country, they are united in rejecting ceding the city to the Kurdish autonomous region.

But Kirkuk is more than a piece of real estate inheritance. The city sits on a sea of “black gold” — Iraq’s biggest oil field, which has become more lucrative with crude prices above $100 a barrel.

From a regional perspective, Ankara opposes Kurdish control of Kirkuk not only out of concern for the rights of fellow Turkmens in Iraq but also because it will bolster its own Kurdish minority’s demands for autonomy.

Watching an independent Kurdistan gradually taking shape across its border, Ankara fears that Kirkuk’s oil could strengthen the autonomous region in the face of a weak central government in Baghdad, and realise Kurdish aspirations for a region-wide Kurdish state, possibly encompassing southern Turkey and parts of Iran and Syria.

After years of trying and failing, Iraqi leaders are trying to reassure friends and foes that they are close to a deal on the future of Kirkuk. But even if parliament adopts a compromise hammered out behind closed doors, it is difficult to see how it will be implemented.

Tributes have been pouring in for Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian author, former Soviet dissident and Nobel Literature prize laureate who died on Sunday aged 89.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, described the author of “The Gulag Archipelago” and “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” as a man of unique destiny and said: ”He was one of the first people who spoke up about the inhumanity of Stalin’s regime with a full voice, and about the people who lived through this but were not broken.”

French President Nicolas Sarkozy called him ”one of Russia’s greatest consciences of the 20th century” and said: ”His refusal to compromise, his ideals and his long and eventful life make Alexander Solzhenitsyn a romantic figure, an heir of Dostoyevsky’s.”  He said Solzhenitsyn “belongs to the pantheon of world literature.” 

London’s Daily Telegraph said Solzhenitsyn ”was not only a great man, but a passionately committed writer - he believed it was his moral duty, in the face of systematic totalitarian obfuscation, to record Russia’s 20th-century experience for posterity.” 

The Washington Post described him as ”a symbol of freedom and the durability of the human spirit” whose subject matter was the struggle between good and evil in the Russian soul.

Yury Osipov, president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, last year said Solzhenitsyn was “the author of works without which the history of the 20th century is unthinkable”.  

Solzhenitsyn was widely read in the West and in Russia even though he did not court fame. He had admirers both for his literary work and for the contribution he made as a dissident.  

How good a writer do you think Alexander Solzhenitsyn was? How important do you think his role was as a dissident and as the nation’s moral conscience?     

First on Zimbabwe, now on Darfur, Western countries have lost out at the U.N. Security Council to African states backed by China and Russia.

A Western attempt to get sanctions imposed on Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s government flopped on July 11. Three weeks later, when it came to renewing the mandate of peacekeepers in Darfur, Western countries bowed to demands to include wording that made clear the council would be ready to freeze any International Criminal Court indictment of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for genocide. The United States abstained, but that made no difference to the vote.

The question had long come up in Western countries as to how much Africa mattered to them given what often seemed intractable wars, famine, disease and poverty. From an African perspective, Western countries - often former colonial powers - have sometimes been accused of arrogance, meddling and ignorance of the continent’s realities.

But while Africa’s economies were once dependent on aid and finance from the West, it is China and other Asian countries that are now rushing to invest, helping to drive unprecedented growth. How Africa will deal with the new investment was a key topic at this week’s meeting in Mauritania with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. G8 countries, meanwhile, appear to be falling short on their promises of aid.

Investment from China comes without the conditions that Western countries or institutions might insist on. Meanwhile, China has been very ready to back African friends in diplomatic forums such as the United Nations. Russia is less important as an investor, but has taken a similar diplomatic line.

So how relevant does the West remain in Africa? And if its influence is waning then will that give African countries a chance to do a better job of solving problems their own way? Will it give a freer hand to leaders with little concern for democracy, human rights and government accountability?

What do you think?

Radovan Karadzic has finally appeared in public without his disguise for the first time in more than a decade. The former Bosnian Serb leader looked gaunt after 11 years on the run as he stood before a judge at a United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

Some media commentators said he was a shadow of his former self but there were still signs of defiance from the man who defied the West for so long during the 1992-95 Bosnia war. Some said his performance brought back memories of the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian leader who died in detention in 2006 before his trial at The Hague ended.

      Karadzic says it is unimaginable that he could get a fair trial because the world’s media have already branded him a war criminal. 

     Here’s what some of the world’s media are saying about him and his trial.

     The Paris-based International Herald Tribune said Karadzic ”seemed a shadow of the flamboyant ideologue who incited Bosnian Serbs to follow him into an ethnic war that turned into genocide.” It quoted specialists who say that prosecuting the case against Karadzic will be simpler than the case against Milosevic.    

    The Washington Post said Karadzic was purse-lipped and defiant. “In remarks cut short by the judge, the former Bosnian Serb leader suggested he would attempt to expose alleged double-dealing by the West, particularly the United States, in the wake of the 1992-95 Bosnian war. That could presage the kind of political grandstanding that former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who also represented himself, used to sidetrack his prosecution before he died in his cell at the tribunal’s detention center in 2006.”   

     The Financial Times in London said that unlike Milosevic, Karadzic had not sought to question the court’s legitimacy but tried to score procedural points. The Independent newspaper in London said justice must be quick but ”the most difficult dilemma is how to give a fair trial to a man who wants to be tried unfairly.”  

    The Sydney Morning Herald and the Gulf Daily News highlighted Karadzic’s allegations a deal was offered by the United States. The Chinese news agency Xinhua highlighted the fact that Karadzic was gravely concerned about his life because he said the United States might be seeking to “liquidate” him.  

   An article in the Gulf Daily News also noted: “Mothers of those killed in the Srebrenica massacre sat around a television set in their small Sarajevo office and charged that Karadzic was given rights that their husbands and sons were denied.” 

    The Arab News contained an article portraying Karadzic as a “showman who always sought the limelight”.  

        What did you think of Karadzic’s appearance and what do you expect of his trial? Will it be fair?