The World Today

What you see in Iraq is not necessarily reality. A useful early warning was the two soldiers standing on the Iraqi side of the Habur Gate border with Turkey. Their black berets were emblazoned with the metal insignia showing the Iraqi eagle and flag and they certainly looked like Saddam Hussein’s soldiers. But they were, in fact, peshmerga fighters of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the group which controls the crossing point.

Now that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has got the parties talking again, is it time to open the champagne? Not exactly. After all, this is Cyprus; and no one has yet lost money betting against a settlement. The scope for delay and prevarication, for misunderstandings feeding old suspicions, for zero-sum calculations causing negotiations to bog down, is considerable.

This month’s general election will highlight three key conundrums of Spanish politics.

Breaking The Real Axis Of Evil: How To Oust The World’s Last Dictators, By 2025,by Mark Palmer. Published by Rowan and Littlefield, October 2003

How do we cope with a world so interdependent that disruption in one area can have quite unforeseen consequences elsewhere?

Apartheid restricted blacks to ownership of just thirteen percent of South Africa’s land, so land reform has been high on the economic policy agenda for ten years. The focus has been on the more than 85 million hectares owned by white commercial farmers. The government intends to transfer thirty percent of this to black farmers by 2015, but the pace has been slow. Radical threats of farm invasions in the fertile Mpumalanga province east of Johannesburg and creeping invasions in some areas of KwaZulu-Natal have raised the spectre of the Zimbabwean disaster, and affected investor confidence in agriculture.