libya - The Chronikler

The mediocrity of evil

Many of the leaders held up as representing the epitome of evil were extraordinarily and spectacularly untalented, incapable and incompetent. With this mediocrity of evil, it is almost a wonder that they managed to rise to the top at all.

Bordering on inhumanity: How Slovenia and Croatia illegally deport refugees and migrants

Rather than being allowed to apply for asylum, thousands of refugees and migrants attempting to enter Slovenia and Croatia are being illegally and often violently spirited across the border to Bosnia, and out of the EU.

Tunisia: Freedom and the pursuit of unhappiness

With greater freedom has come greater unhappiness in Tunisia. Behind this apparent paradox is economic hardship and nostalgia for a past that never was.

Prisoners of our guilty consciences

The intensifying crackdown on the media and civil society in Egypt leaves Egyptians who are out of the country feeling powerless to help and guilty about the freedoms they enjoy.

Unsung death on the Nile – Part I

Once the mother of our world departed, her ghost arrived, plunging me into the memory hole which grief opens up, where the past becomes its own present and the present morphs into a kind of phantom future.

The Arab media paradox: Free expression amid repression

Frustratingly for Arab dictators and despots, no matter how much they try to silence, intimidate or co-opt the media, new loud and critical voices emerge.

The Middle East’s new century

As the Middle East stumbles perilously close to its own “world war”, seeds of change are already sprouting hopes of a better century ahead.

The West’s hidden tribalism

Tribalism and sectarianism afflicts Western societies too. So why is that they seem to be tearing the Middle East apart?

Arabic is the language of Arab (dis)unity

The romantic myth that speaking Arabic meant that Arabs share “one heart and one spirit” led pan-Arabism to talk unity while walking the path of disunity