Southern Cone

Argentina: indigenous summit in Buenos Aires

Indigenous leaders from across Argentina's 17 provinces met in Buenos Aires to coordinate resistance to dispossession from their ancestral lands by development interests.

Iraq

Iraq: Yazidis demand autonomous zone

Haider Shasho, commander of the Yazidi ethnic milita, was arrested by Kurdish forces for refusing to submit to their command and advocating a Yazidi autonomous zone.

North Africa

Mali: Tuareg rebels demand autonomous Azawad

Mali's government is boasting a deal with Tuareg leaders granting autonomy to the northern homeland of Azawad—but the biggest rebel factions are holding out for more power.

Southeast Asia

Will Burma opium war draw in China?

The latest fighting in Burma's opium-producing hinterlands involves a Han Chinese ethnic group, the Kokang. Some 50,000 have fled across the border into China.

Greater Middle East

PKK announces deal with Turkish state

Turkey and the Kurdish rebel movement announced a landmark political deal that calls for the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) to lay down arms and join the civil political process.

Greater Middle East

ISIS and the neocons: fearful symmetry?

The map that ISIS has drawn up of its proposed "caliphate" has internal borders closely mirroring the new borders that neocons seek to impose on the Middle East.

Southeast Asia

Harsh abuses seen in Burma opium war

Despite a democratic opening and hopes for peace with ethnic insurgencies, horrific accounts of rights abuses continue to emerge from Burma's opium-producing hinterlands.

Europe

Mineral struggle in new Kosova violence

Street-fighting in Kosova's capital Pristina was portrayed as more Serb-Albanian "ethnic hatred," but it came as workers occuiped the Trepca mining complex to resist privatization.

Greater Middle East

Yemen’s Houthi rebels: Iran’s proxies?

Claims that the Houthi uprising in Yemen is an Iranian plot ignore that the Houthis' brand of Shia is heretical to Iran's ayatollahs—and that Yemen's Shi'ites have real grievances.