As if the Western Sahara did not have enough tangles, an old debate about fishing rights has reemerged to weave fresh knots. Most of the fish that swarm...

President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali was never entirely happy running the country in the shadow of its founding father, Habib Bourguiba. He died on 6 April and...

A new drive for peace in Western Sahara is signalled by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan's choice of a new Special Envoy. Former United States Secretary of...

The arrest of dozens of school and college students during demonstrations in the south-east - traditionally a barometer of popular tension - broke the veneer of total calm...

President Abdelaziz Bouteflika enjoys a surplus of that most sought-after North African blessing, Baraka (God-given luck). He inherited a flagging peace process, needed to show tangible results and...

Egypt is in the throes of a nationalist backlash, a reaction to claims in the Western media, particularly in the United States, that the co-pilot of the airliner...

The ruling party barons remain unchanged: some have been around since President Gamal Abdel Nasser's day. The new faces are mainly technocratic and junior: gradualist and market-oriented reform...

Abdelkader Hachani was murdered by a lone gunman on 22 November as he waited to see an Algiers dentist. He was the leading Islamist at liberty, nominally number...

King Mohammed VI affirmed his new authority with the summary dismissal of Driss Basri, the late King's veteran Minister of State for the Interior. Four months after the...

A five-man Libyan 'business delegation' visited Kinshasa last month to express Colonel Moammar el Gadaffi's 'desire to invest in the diamond sector', said local press reports. The Libyans,...