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More than a decade after their independence, each of the Central Asian states is on its own particular path of political and economic development. While most have achieved at least partial integration within the international community, one stands out as an exception: the remote former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan, on the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea.

On 3 November 2002, an unmanned U.S. “Predator” aircraft hovering in the skies of Yemen fired a Hellfire missile at a car carrying a suspected al-Qaeda leader, four Yemenis said to be members of the Aden-Abyan Islamic Army, and a Yemeni-American who, according to U.S. authorities, had recruited volunteers to attend al-Qaeda training camps.

Since January 2002 when President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah officially declared Sierra Leone’s brutal eleven year civil war over, numerous efforts have been made to consolidate the peace.

The first hundred days have come and gone, and Colombians continue to hold high hopes that President Álvaro Uribe will lead the country out of its entrenched crisis by strengthening security and resolving the decades-long civil war.

The latest phase of the negotiations in Machakos, Kenya closed on 18 November 2002 with the signing of an important new Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on power sharing and an extension of the earlier MOU on cessation of hostilities and unimpeded aid access.

Seven years after the end of the war, the issue of refugee return continues to be contentious for Croatia.

In preparing for and orchestrating the proximity talks that marked the end of the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia & Herzegovina (BiH), the authors of the Dayton Peace Accords (DPA) placed a particularly high priority on the return of refugees and internally displaced persons to their pre-war homes.

The right of internally displaced people (IDPs) and refugees to return to their homes in Kosovo is indisputable, and has become a top priority of the international community, and the United Nations Interim Administrative Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK).

As the Indonesian-led investigation proceeds, the Bali attack on 12 October 2002 looks more and more like the work of Jemaah Islamiyah (JI). But what exactly is Jemaah Islamiyah and how does it operate?