As Ariana flight 404 from Dubai touched down at Kabul International Airport, its applauding passengers straining to locate family members among those standing on top of the arrivals building, Mosa Gholam personified impatience. And a little aggravation.
It might have been because he hadn't slept for a week. It may have been because he nearly missed the flight after a fellow returnee with an incorrectly named ticket nearly grounded the group in Dubai.
And of course much of…
In August 2001, during an Australian election campaign, about 400 people seeking asylum in Australia were saved from a sinking boat by the Norwegian ship, the Tampa.
The Australian government forced the Tampa out of Australian waters through the use of commandos and the navy. Tampa followed the old unwritten law of the sea to save those in distress and the conservative Howard government ignored and denigrated this unwritten law.
Australia and the…
Dozens of Afro-Colombians fled from their home village, Villahermosa in the department of Choco;, in 1997, caught between guerrillas and paramilitaries. Some 6,000 displaced people from 49 villages, including Villahermosa, fled to Pavarondo;. After some months there, the women among them issued a statement:
“We women from Pavarandó want and need our voice to be known in the country and in the world because of what we have been living through for the last nine months…
The population of Chocó in the north of Colombia is 70 per cent Afro-Colombian, 20 per cent indígena. The zone has attracted the interest of multinationals (because of its reserves of petrol and coal) and of logging companies. And the price of land doubled in one year following president Samper's announcement in 1996 of a new plan for an inter-oceanic link, connecting the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
It was in 1996 that the Colombian government launched a counter-insurgency campaign.…
While I was reading this book, the north of England saw some of the worst race riots in Britain for over a decade. In the lead-up to the recent General Election, main-stream politicians competed with one another to see who could produce the most right-wing immigration policies. In Oldham,one of the cities worst hit by the race riots, the leader of the far-right British National Party polled just under 15% of the vote. It is for these reasons that Teresa Hayter's book could not havebeen…
