Regional affairs

Farrah Hassen

In light of international peace conferences that have taken place there, the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh appears to have earned the moniker, “The City of Peace.” But not if one looks beneath the surface. It was the September 4, 1999 Sharm el-Sheikh Memorandum that supposedly committed Israel and the PLO to implement the Oslo II Accords of September 1995. They never got implemented. The negotiations over the contentious issues of Jerusalem, borders, refugees and settlements did not yield positive results.

Eiad Wannous

When Mustafa Kamal Ataturk founded the modern republic of Turkey in 1923, and served as its president until his death fifteen years later, he had one objective: modernization. This was done through concentrated secularization of Turkey’s politics, economy, society, and cultural life. Under his guidance, elected parliaments (composed of the only legal party, chaired personally by Ataturk) passed a number of bold laws. Probably the most revolutionary were those on Turkey’s education and its legal system. He abolished all religious courts and replaced them with secular ones, doing the same with the Islamic curriculum. Islam was left out of the republican bodies and all related institutions.

Ahmed Salkini

or over a year now, scholars, analysts, and politicians in the United States, and elsewhere, have obsessed over the Syrian-Iranian ‘alliance’ and over the ways to break it. This discussion resonated throughout different European capitals, as well as in the Middle East. With palpable indicators that the US administration was entrenched in its policies of isolating both, Iran and Syria, the rhetoric of forcing a ‘wedge’ between Damascus and Iran quieted down for some time. However, as foreign and Arab emissaries proceeded to pour into Damascus, and with the warm reception Syria received at the Arab Summit in Riyadh, along with the recent meeting between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem, the ‘wedge’ argument resurfaced.