As the PML-Q – a party that split from Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League N – faced defeat in the 2008 election due to its support for military ruler Pervez Musharraf, one family was confident of keeping its […]

Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N, not to be accused with the breakaway PML-Q, had to wait until 2013 to profit from disillusion with the PPP and take over Pakistan’s government. But they were on the ascendant in the 2008 pol […]

Despite her assassination, Benazir Bhutto was to play a major role in Pakistan’s 2008 rally. Her recorded voice and her picture meant she was the star at election rallies addressed by her husband, Asif Ali Z […]

I visited Pakistan in 2007 as then-president Pervez Musharraf’s military regime was about to fall, locked in conflict with the main political parties and with the formerly compliant legal apparatus, in p […]

Jeremy Corbyn’s victory has annoyed all the right people (pun intended). It’s back to the 1980s so far as abuse and distortion are concerned. So, how loony is the left? And can Corbyn’s supporters defend him again […]

In 2007 the rule of General Pervez Musharraf was drawing to an end. His seizure of power in 2001 had encountered little opposition but his failure to tackle corruption and poverty and his support for the US’s p […]

Everyone’s surprised by the support garnered by Jeremy Corbin and Bernie Sanders, not least their most ardent supporters. The British Labour Party may soon have a leader who can be described as left-wing without i […]

Hamid Gul, the former head of Pakistan’s ISI military intelligence died on Sunday. I met him at his home in Rawalpindi in 2007 and found a man who was bitter about having been declared an enemy by the West for his […]

In 2005 I covered Afghanistan’s first post-invasion parliamentary election. Here’s my account, written at the time, of how women and independent candidates struggled to make their voices heard, despite quotas, in […]

I don’t want to sound patronising here, Yanis Varoufakis certainly has more academic qualifications than me and could undoubtedly teach me a thing or two about economics, but it does seem that his time as a […]

After three years in power, Hamid Karzai – or his Western sponsors – decided it was time that Afghans should have the chance to directly elect him, or an alternative of their choice. Although they were the […]

Whether you agree with the result or not, the massive No vote in Sunday’s Greek referendum was a courageous choice. Nobody knows what will happen now – not the Greeks, not the troika … not even Angela […]

There was a surprise result in the 2004 Indian general election, which I covered for RFI. Congress won despite the BJP’s boasts of “India shining” thanks to its economic management. Much of the middle class […]

As I’ve just reported in a much-tweeted story on RFI’s website, the French government collected a record 19.3bn euros from tax dodgers in 2014, up from 18bn in 2013, and it expects to collect even more in […]

This piece was left out of my previous post on Iraq 2003. A strange and heartbreaking feature of the fall of Saddam Hussein was the hundreds of relatives of his victims who were searching for their loved ones, […]

In my first post on this blog I predicted that the US will one day provoke a war with China in an attempt to maintain its global hegemony. The formulation was deliberately provocative and, of the three reasons […]

Given the exciting outcome of Turkey’s parliamentary election, I’m taking my accounts of assignments out of sequence and publishing this from last year’s presidential election. Erdogan won with a satisfactory […]

Saddam  loyalists fought US troops at the foot of our hotel one night, local people pleaded for food, water and medicines Shia pilgrims turned out in their thousands in the holy city of Kerbala, this was the Iraq […]