But it won’t happen – not any time soon, and not with the current set of leaders in charge. There will be talks about talks, and there may even be talks. But you can bet your bottom shekel they will lead precisely where every other round of negotiations has led, from Madrid to Oslo to Camp David to Annapolis – down a dead end of continued occupation and war.

This isn’t because, as some claim, the Israel-Palestine conflict is some mind-bendingly complex problem with no ready solution. In fact, there is already a detailed plan on offer, supported by the US, the UN, the EU, the Arab League, and Israeli-Palestinian civil society, to create two states for two peoples, based on the 1967 lines with minor “land swaps”, and with Jerusalem as a shared capital.

And polls of Israelis and Palestinians show that a majority of both peoples continue to support it.

Israel’s hard-line prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has paid lip-service to the two-state solution. But look at the small print, and it’s clear he is unprepared to make the concessions necessary to bring it about. Netanyahu refuses to consider dividing Jerusalem or to base the border on the 1967 lines – which is like negotiating a divorce settlement on the understanding that one side will keep the family home, the life savings, and the kids.

Other members of Netanyahu’s ruling coalition are more honest: “Two states for two peoples is not the government’s official position,” one bluntly said in a Knesset debate on Tuesday.

The Palestinians, meanwhile, have long made clear they support the main points of the two-state plan. We now know that, even on the most sensitive issue – the fate of refugees displaced by the conflict – they have shown they are ready to compromise by accepting that only a “symbolic” number will be allowed to resettle in Israel.

But the Palestinians’ lack of bargaining power leaves them with no way of putting pressure on an Israeli government that rejects the global consensus. And what’s more, with the Palestinian Authority kept afloat by taxes collected on its behalf by Israel, and on aid from the US and other foreign donors (which accounts for a third of its annual budget), it has no choice but to toe the line, paying lip service to a peace process that offers no hope of peace.

And that, ultimately, is the reason why both sides will engage in this US-sponsored dumb show in the full knowledge it will fail. The Palestinians must negotiate in “good faith” –  providing cover for the continued growth of Israeli settlements – because doing so is the only way to keep the money flowing. And Israel must go through the rigmarole of pretending to seek a deal because, with government budget cuts looming, it needs the $3 billion aid (plus extras) it receives each year from the US, and the international legitimacy even a fraudulent peace process provides.

If you want the bottom line about why these sham talks are taking place, look at the bottom line. Each side has too much invested in the status quo to tell Hague and the other visiting dignataries the truth: that the current “peace process” is no more than a PR process. The conflict will drag on, with no imminent end in sight. After all, why wage peace when war makes for such good business?

Better late than never. But Angell’s work can perhaps be read in another, less comforting way. His argument rested on the assertion that because finance and the spread of credit demanded peace and stability, military conquest no longer guaranteed access to the forms of wealth produced by a modern economy. Flip this around, and he might also have been pointing to an important feature of the ongoing euro-crisis: transformed by global financialisation, European integration and monetary unification have facilitated a process of wealth transfer against which states and their citizens no longer have any obvious safeguard. Angell’s Europe at peace, made safe for and by money, has become a world in which fin­ance holds sway, social solidarity collapses and fairness suffers.

How did we end up here and did it have to be this way? How did we come to find ourselves living through a crisis in which banks and finance dominate the headlines, as both sinners and saviours? A world in which the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank put other global institutions in the shade, a world in which salaries in the City of London stand at record multiples of average earnings? Most fundamentally, a world in which, more than previously, money is used to make money and not things. Money moves around the world faster than before and does so with ever more destabilising results, and Angell’s belief that credit and stability were connected now has a quaint ring to it. In an era when middle-class wealth has become hostage to fluctuations of the stock market, the extreme complexity and opacity of computer-generated transactions based on conjectural projections of events has taken us far away from his vision of a world of capitalist rationality.

No less distant from our own times is his happy confidence in the political role of the citizen and the strength of the democratic system. The financialisation of the global economy has brought with it the most acute crisis of democracy since the Second World War. As huge sums of money slosh across the continent, voters in the creditor north feel ignored when their politicians bail out the debtor south, while voters there feel powerless in the face of IMF and ECB diktats. Both bodies thus weaken the legitimacy of politicians and of politics itself.

***

It was about 200 years ago that a conception of Europe emerged for the first time which linked stability, civilisation and peace to the triumph of capital. Angell’s argument really originated in this moment, when thinkers such as Benjamin Constant, Jeremy Bentham and Henri de Saint-Simon wrote off the war-making of the ancien régime and revolution as symptoms of an older, more bloodthirsty age, and predicted the coming of a brave new world run by merchants, lawyers and engineers. In the same era, the City of London became the unquestioned world centre of international banking. Karl Marx analysed the new power of capital, dissolving traditions and uniting the world through the cash nexus. But he shared the prevailing optimism that history was travelling in the right direction – after all, he projected the eventual triumph of a working class incarnating the hope of human emancipation.

All of these thinkers were Europeans, and, for all of them – whether liberals, scientific technocrats or communists – Europe was the laboratory for that form of social harmony they thought best suited to the modern age.

By the time of the run-up to the First World War, the growing importance of banks and speculators was attracting wide attention, especially from radicals and peace activists. J A Hobson was the first to make use of the term “imperialism” to account for the way profiteers such as Cecil Rhodes had grabbed control of British foreign policy and led the country into the Boer war. In his classic study Finance Capital, published in the year after the 1909 pamphlet that Angell turned into his book The Great Illusion and still worth reading today, the Austrian-born Marxist economist Rudolf Hilferding described the growing power of the banks. He saw a new cause of war in this, and thus a further catalyst for world revolution.

From today’s perspective, what is striking about such analyses is their confidence: fin­ance and financiers might be setting private profit ahead of the public welfare but there were collective responses to this, both domestic and international, and they could not get away with it for ever. Hobson saw the internationalisation of colonial control as the best guarantee that colonial peoples and their resources would be managed for their own and the general good, rather than for the sake of profiteers. Hilferding, like Marx, saw capital’s international character as likely ultimately to prove self-defeating. He welcomed the monopolistic position of finance because it was going to simplify the workers’ ultimate task and help them bring the entire economy under their control.

The First World War expanded criticism of the banks because in many quarters it was customary to blame them for the tensions that had presaged this war and seemed likely to fuel a new one. If Angell believed that wars broke out when the influence of capitalists was not heeded, others believed the exact opposite: speculators revelled in creating conflicts and profiting from them, reaping the rewards while ordinary people paid the price.

In the interwar thrillers of Eric Ambler, for instance, the ultimate puppet-masters are shadowy entities such as the Eurasian Credit Trust. “It was the power of Business, not the deliberations of statesmen, that shaped the destinies of nations,” one of his characters comments. From this perspective it is worth pondering whether our inability any longer to imagine a reason for a general war in Europe does not serve in its own right to soften public anger at financiers, because it removes one of the main historic causes of suspicion of them. Bankers may have an image problem today, but arguably what needs explaining is why this is not worse than it is, and why it has had so few repercussions for the way they run their businesses compared to the 1930s. One of the reasons, surely, is that the old anxiety about profiteers, which ran through European history for much of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, has vanished. Who even speaks of profiteers today?

It was the 1929 Wall Street crash that discredited finance for a generation and more. The ensuing collapse of the gold standard around the world made globalisation go into reverse. Capital controls became an unremarkable fact of life. In one country after another, the state took over from the private sector in making major investment decisions and in regulating relations between workers and employers. At the same time, the rise of the Soviet Union posed a grave new challenge. European politicians seeking to stabilise capitalism responded on several fronts, parcelling out landed estates in eastern Europe to the peasantry, founding new central banks and formalising international co-operation through bodies such as the Bank for International Settlements. It was the threat of Bolshevism that brought managed capitalism to Europe and, with it, new conceptions of the state as the guarantor of collective welfare.

Thus the “European model” combining liberty and social solidarity, which commentators such as Tony Judt and Jeremy Rifkin hailed a decade or so ago as the civilised alternative to American capitalism, originated in the fear of communism and the looming presence of the USSR on Europe’s margins. Where avoiding communist revolution was the priority, the politicians were willing to give a growing share of national income to labour, curb potentially destabilising capital flows, use the state as a guarantor of social peace, and equalise wealth and opportunities by expanding the tax base and bankrolling welfare. But what would happen when no one feared communism any longer and took the stability of parliamentary democracy for granted?

Today, when globalisation remains a powerful if waning ideology, it is easy to forget that the “European model” was extraordinarily successful. In the 30 years after 1945, high growth rates, unmatched before or since, paid for an expansion of the state as provider of social services and banished memories of mass unemployment. The Americans helped, providing a security guarantee to western Europeans and modest incentives towards regional co-operation.

What emerged domestically was a form of economy that combined a high degree of state direction of investment behind tariff barriers and exchange controls with gradual liberalisation of trade. The very unglamorous early years of the Common Market in fact stand out in retrospect as a spectacular political success, because it was in those years that “Europe” – as the western Europeans liked to term what they were doing – demonstrated its indispensability in helping restore legitimacy to that form of political community most Europeans clearly preferred to live in, the nation state. What the historian Alan Milward called the postwar “rescue of the European nation state” was in its way a European triumph, too: national resurgence and international integration proceeded hand in hand, much as 19th-century nationalists such as Mazzini had said they should.

This highly managed version of capitalism emphasised economic regulation and assigned a secondary role for finance. Yet long before the collapse of communism, the possibility for Europe to go in another direction entirely was being explored. The Second World War raised the question of what Europe was for, and in Britain several émigré intellectuals explored the economic issues in depth. From Oxford, the Polish economist Michał Kalecki underscored the political implications of full employment, anticipating that employers would sooner or later successfully put pressure on politicians to roll back Keynesian-style policies because of their impact on profits. From his own, very different, libertarian starting point, Friedrich Hayek praised the idea of a European free market while attacking the idea that a continental federation with supranational regulatory powers could ever win sufficiently wide political consent across member states.

The great Hungarian polymath Karl Pol­anyi differed profoundly in his views from Hayek but he, too, reminded readers that a return to the dream of the self-regulating market was always a possible alternative to the economic planning he personally preferred; neither was natural and both had their champions. In his prophetic 1945 article “Universal capitalism or regional planning”, Polanyi argued that as Europe emerged from the war it faced a choice between an American model of a liberalised, open, world economy and a Soviet model that was based on planning, protected borders and heavy state involvement. Perhaps even more than the two other men, he was acutely aware that Europe’s choice of capitalism would henceforth be conditioned by larger international considerations.

***

It took time, but in the 1970s they were all in varying ways proved right. The business counteroffensive that Kalecki had foreseen came to pass, helped by a revival in interest in Hayek’s ideas. Internationally, the critical switch was a change in US thinking from global Keynesianism to a much more finance-based foreign economic policy. The dollar’s abandonment of gold in 1971 could have led to the end of America’s central role in international finance, a rift in the transatlantic alliance and a return to greater domestic policy fragmentation and autonomy. By the end of the decade, however, the US had opted for the anti-inflationary crusade that would restore the dollar’s global prominence and bring western Europeans into line. The 1976 sterling crisis and IMF intervention were a turning point; Maggie Thatcher followed, and eventually so did even François Mitterrand and the French Socialists.

What emerged was simultaneously an assault on the power of organised labour in the developed north – an assault from which it has never recovered – and something else whose consequences were foreseen by virtually no one: an extreme deregulation of banks and financial institutions which unleashed their ability to make profits across the world. As manufacturing languished, brute capital became more profitable and salaries in the financial sector took off.

This process of financialisation originated in the US but it was driven through by international agencies. In fact, it cannot be understood except as a campaign that helped powerful coalitions to emerge between the leading banks, the US Treasury and the IMF and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Representing a compact between the free-marketeering ideology of Wall Street and the western Europeans’ desire for rules and codes, they spread the new norms – of capital liberalisation, deregulation of banks and the credit sector, and internal privatisation of state-owned businesses – from one continent to another. A series of debt crises, also symptoms of this new, financialised world, offered the serendipitous means for the IMF to spread the neoliberal gospel.

Under the European Commission president Jacques Delors, a French Socialist, Europe signed up. Opting to promote integration through the monetary system was a natural response to the exchange-rate volatility of the 1970s and 1980s. But there were two problems. One was that the needlessly rigid rules that were introduced along with the euro removed much of what discretionary power was left to EU member governments once the currency was adopted. The other was that the tiny size of the European Union budget made it impossible to achieve the other plank of Delors’s modernising vision – a real mechanism for funding social solidarity across the EU. All that was left was money.

Today the consequences of financialisation, within and outside Europe, are clear enough. Look at average growth rates during the Trente Glorieuses and during the past 30 years: the comparison makes sobering reading. Banks and hedge funds may have increased their profitability, but national and continental economic performance have lagged sharply behind. One reason for this is that globalisation has made the world more crisis-prone, not less so: nostalgia for the dictator António Salazar in Portugal or communism in Russia reflects how the greater self-sufficiency of the years before 1980 brought greater predictability and stability. And it has also made the world much less equal or fair. The trend towards equalisation of wealth and incomes that occurred within European societies between 1945 and 1975 has been stopped, and the curve, without exception in Europe, now points the other way, towards an ever-widening income gap, which is forcing large sections of the population to recalibrate their social expectations for themselves and their children.

In so far as the EU stands for the defence of the single currency, it thus finds itself aligned against those very priorities – ­stability, solidarity, equality – that helped restore the legitimacy of democracy to the western half of the continent after 1945. The recent divide between creditor north and debtor south makes these problems far more acute, but in fact they existed before the crisis hit. Even then, they lay at the heart of the fundamental political challenge that financialisation has produced, the challenge posed by the decoupling of political from economic power. The euro-crisis has made this challenge evident, and more morally troubling.

In these circumstances, what demands explanation is not the emergence of organised protest, but the lack of it. Why, we need to ask, do people find it so hard to imagine alternatives? Taxpayers are bailing out the financial sector. So why haven’t they demanded more regulation, more control of pay, and ultimately a rebalancing of relationships between finance and manufacturing, between global liquidity and nationally rooted communities?

The main reason is the absence of widely believed alternatives. The revolutionary left, whether communist or anarchist, has failed at the ballot box, which may not matter to its adherents but signals its lack of political weight. In the few cases where it has succeeded, as in austerity-riven Greece (with Syriza), its recipes for the crisis are scarcely revolutionary. People may have soured on the globalisation dream but politicians continue to regard the financial markets as indispensable in more or less their present form. Domestically, what is striking is the degree to which recovery programmes today rely simply on expanding liquidity through the banking system rather than by means of the kind of ambitious public works projects that characterised recovery across Europe after 1945. Thus, while the left hand of Whitehall chastens the banks, its right hand begs them to kick-start a new boom.

Internationally, too, the idea that the removal of capital controls which took place in the past 30 years might need to be rolled back – that a sharper distinction might legitimately be drawn (the old distinction, in fact) between productive, long-term investment and short-term, speculative flows – has scarcely begun to be voiced, though there have been faint murmurs of it in recent IMF discussions.

Even if there were persuasive alternatives, would they be heard? Back in the 1820s, public opinion was a “Divinity”, a novel democratising and rationalising impetus that would force the old elite to modernise. In the age of the internet and the blogosphere, who still believes this? Here, as in other senses, Europe is living through the collapse of older certainties. Democracy has been won – but what has that meant? On its own, it guarantees the hegemony of a set of institutions and practices, not any particular policies. After all, the forces that made for social justice emerged not out of democratic institutions per se, but out of deep ideological anxieties and rivalries, rivalries that served to fetter the power of the markets and won wide political support for so doing.

Absent those ideological rivalries, or any new forms of effective collective mobilisation, and nothing checks the European social model from continuing to disintegrate. Europe=euro: in the shadow of this equation, all the other older, nobler and more ambitious versions of what Europe might stand for have faded away. An interesting possibility thus follows – might the dissolution of the euro be necessary in order to save something of the European idea? Or would we merely find ourselves with neither? We may yet find out.

Mark Mazower is the director of the Centre for International History at Columbia University. His most recent book is “Governing the World: the History of an Idea” (Allen Lane, £25)

It wasn't enough that the gun control legislation so cherished by his administration appears to have foundered on the rocks of an obstructive congress. Nor that, a couple of weeks ago, the same congress in its infinite recalcitrance allowed the country to fling itself off the sequestration cliff. Nor even that Republican insistence that the State Department's handling of the Benghazi attacks was mismanaged continues to hang around like a terrible smell on a breezeless day.

First to emerge this week was the bigger scandal: that the Internal Revenue Service has been intentionally targeting right-wing groups, including Tea Party groups for extra and unfair scrutiny, singling them out by name. It is unclear as yet whose initiative this is, but it has rightly caused a storm of outrage from all over the political spectrum. 

Punch-drunk and struggling to regain control of the news agenda, Obama demanded – and got – the resignation of the acting IRS commissioner, Stephen Miller on Wednesday, but this appears not to have worked; congressional Republicans have the scent of blood now. If they can prove the White House was encouraging the IRS to target right-leaning political organisations – extremely unlikely though this is – it could be Obama's Watergate. Much more likely is that such a link won't be found, but every Republican committee-chair in both houses will be queuing up to take a swing; to grandstand and to drag Obama through the mud. 

Enter Representative Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, whose hearings this week have shaped him as a sort of nemesis-figure for the administration, and whose new-found fame will only grow as the story develops with him in the limelight.

Just the IRS scandal would have been enough to rock the administration. But the week held more. On Monday it emerged that the Department of Justice had secretly obtained several months' worth of records from private phone conversations between editors and reporters at the Associated Press as part of an investigation of a leak – an unprecedented liberty to take with the freedom of the press.

In just a couple of days, Obama's government machine had managed to inflame both their political opponents and the press to apoplexy. 

Everyone on the government side, in fact, spent the week furiously buck-passing. At first, Attorney General Eric Holder, up to bat against the inescapable Issa, defended the phone record seizure; then, in exchanges with Issa at the latter's committee hearings that became extremely heated indeed – at one point Holder dramatically snapped back at Issa, calling his conduct “unacceptable and shameful” - but ultimately shoved the responsibility for ordering the subpoena on his deputy, James Cole.

 Meanwhile, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney has spent an unenviable week trying desperately to keep his boss away from both scandals – which has ultimately meant dumping blame on those in the DoJ and the IRS, attacking the Republicans as acting for partisan gains. 

He hasn't been particularly successful. This is the kind of week that can hobble a Presidency. With Issa, revelling in the spotlight, set to grill former IRS commissioner Doug Shulman next week, various committees of both houses of congress are now piling in to add their own investigations, looking for their own slice of the publicity pie. It looks certain that things are going to get worse for the Obama administration before they get better.

Haytham Manna, a veteran activist from Dara’a, the city where the Syrian revolt first erupted in March 2011, leads the National Co-ordination Body for Democratic Change (NCB) outside the country. It is Syria’s other opposition; the most visible one, the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, is rooted in Turkey and Qatar, while the NCB has more of a political presence inside the country.

Like the National Coalition, the NCB is an umbrella of different groups; but whereas the former leans towards the exiled Muslim Brotherhood and the Sunni Gulf states, the NCB is more secular, a hotchpotch of leftists and Kurdish nationalists, many of whom were formerly working underground. Much of the external opposition is happy to lead the charge for Nato arms or intervention, but Manna and the NCB would prefer to grow the democratic forces within the country – to foment something between a “national dialogue” and a “national revolution”. It has made him unpopular among many Syrians.

When I meet Manna, in London on a rare visit from his base in Paris, I ask about his brother, who was arrested, tortured and killed by Assad’s security services early on in the revolt. Does he understand people who decided then that the only way to get rid of the Syrian regime was through force? “Understanding is one thing,” Manna says. “But recommending it, following it as a political programme, is another. When you’re in a situation like ours, you can’t take on the job of psychotherapist . . . They’ve given the regime a longer life with this way of struggle. We were a really attractive force for the society. Now we are not.”

The Syrian opposition hadn’t quite won the democratic argument, he thinks; given the forces arraigned against it, the best approach was to expand the movement and use pressure from the Arab League and the UN Security Council to force the regime out. But in the early months of the uprising, people were looking to army defectors just to protect their demonstrations – was he against even that? Of course not, he says. “Self-defence means that when someone comes to your house to attack, you can use the right to defend yourself. This is normal in all societies. But from the moment when you go to attack a military unit or confront or occupy a quarter of a city or a village, that’s another thing.”

Manna’s most compelling – and prescient – arguments aren’t moral, but strategic and political. Fighting an armed insurgency is expensive and he worries that, following the Arab spring, Turkey and the oil-rich states of Saudi Arabia and Qatar are using their influence among the cashstrapped Syrian rebels to push their own agendas and jockey for regional position. Perhaps as a result, he and his colleagues aren’t often seen on al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya, the two Gulfbased satellite channels that have been cheerleading for the armed revolt.

Manna trained as an anthropologist and you can hear it in the timbre of his arguments. “We think that today the organic structure of the society will dominate any violent action,” he says. “It will be sectarian, it will be Islamist, it will be tribal. It will be not be civil or republican.” If Islamist groups dominate, “it will be about vengeance”. But if that’s what most Syrians want, shouldn’t they have it?

“There isn’t a majority for that. If there was, why not? But 40 per cent of Syrian society, the minorities, are not with the Islamist project [Manna includes Kurds, the 10 per cent who are largely Sunni but not Arab, so don’t fit squarely in either camp], and I don’t think that the 60 per cent who are Arab Sunnis will want it either. I don’t think all of them are with the jihadist groups.”

What started out as a movement for freedom and democratic rights may well end up as the foil for a pointless but all-encompassing regional war. For their reliance on the Gulf states, Manna has labelled the external opposition in Turkey and Qatar “traitors” and stands by it. The feeling is mutual, I tell him. At the border between Syria and Turkey last summer, I came across an ageing rebel sentry cradling a Kalashnikov under a tree and asked him what he thought of Manna. “Haytham Manna is a traitor,” he barked. “He works with Bashar al-Assad, and with [Syrian] state security. We will not let him back into Syria when we win.”

James Harkin’s e-book “War Against All: the Struggle for Northern Syria” is out now (Kindle, £1.49)

My mother and I married men from Pakistan. Although our marriages took place thirty years apart, they were only registered under Sharia, or Islamic religious law, in Pakistan. Both our marriages ended in divorce, yet the circumstances and our attitudes couldn’t have been more different.

My mother didn’t have any say in her divorce. She’d worked as a teacher in Pakistan before she was married off to my father in 1964, then a migrant textile mill worker in Bradford. After 15 years of marriage and three children, my father decided to return to Pakistan alone. A couple of years later, he sent mum the finalised Islamic divorce papers by post. The matter was taken completely out of her hands. She wasn’t even consulted. Mum felt so humiliated at the thought of becoming a divorced woman, that she couldn’t even bring herself to tell anyone what had happened for months. Mum says she understood that some marriages were not as successful as others, but the notion of her own marriage ending in divorce was inconceivable.

You’d hear about certain girls who couldn’t get along with their in-laws for whatever reason. People would say, “That girl isn’t worthy. She couldn’t conform.” There’d be a hint that the girl had some bad habits, or worse, that she was immoral. But that idea of things finishing altogether – well, that was unthinkable. You never heard about that.

For decades afterwards, mum maintained that a lifelong separation would have served her better than the dishonour of a divorce. It didn’t matter that she was better qualified and more articulate in English than her husband. While these skills no doubt enabled her to raise her children alone, she didn’t regard herself as empowered. She still viewed divorce as the ultimate curse, something the community would use to judge her character.

It’s not that my mother wasn’t aware of her religious rights. It’s just that in her mind, the moral stigma was greater. She knew that although Islam discourages divorce, the faith does acknowledge that situations may arise when marriage no longer fulfils its purpose. She also knew of several examples in Islamic texts and history which emphasise the woman’s right to divorce.

One oft-quoted Hadith, a teaching of the Prophet Muhammad, involves a girl who raised a complaint that her father had given her in marriage against her will. The Prophet told the girl that she was at liberty to choose or reject her husband. The girl chose to stay in the marriage, explaining that she had only wanted to know whether women had any rights in the matter.

My mother fell victim to the way in which Sharia law discriminates against gender, by making it much easier for a man to end a marriage. A woman can be divorced if her husband simply pronounces talaq (divorce) three times, although ideally he should not exercise this right without first seeking counsel or negotiating with his wife. However, the practice is frequently abused.

There are ways in which a woman may divorce her husband under Islamic law, although these are more drawn out than the simple pronouncement that men are decreed. At the time of marriage, a woman may ask her husband to delegate the power of pronouncing the divorce to her, thereby giving her the authority to dissolve the marriage contract. What’s more, a husband can no longer reclaim this power once he has transferred it to his wife. Since Islam regards marriage as a contractual relationship, a Muslim woman may also protect herself with the equivalent of a prenuptial agreement. She may seek a divorce if any of the agreed conditions are violated. In practice however, attaining such entitlements can be difficult. With many unions still arranged by parents, it can be difficult for the bride to make such demands at the time of marriage, particularly if she is yet to build a rapport with her husband.

The most common method for a woman to seek a divorce is to apply to a Sharia law body, a long and drawn out process, and not without expense. This is the route I took in Pakistan, where my marriage was registered, when I found myself several years into an unhappy marriage. Unlike my mother, divorce to me seemed the natural course of action. Although I was worried about the moral judgement I would draw as a divorcee, my freedom and happiness were ultimately more important. I was simply asserting my right.

I also realised that if my Pakistan-based husband opposed the divorce, it would be up to me to persuade the judge to end the marriage, and for that, I would have to navigate the minefield of the family courts in Rawalpindi. Instead, I set about persuading my husband to grant me a divorce through the Muslim family courts in Rawalpindi, where the marriage had been registered.

Attitudes aren’t just changing because British Muslim women are becoming more financially independent. Muslim women are also becoming more empowered and ensuring they educate themselves on their religious rights. Although divorce is deeply discouraged in Islam and seen as the last resort, it is nevertheless halal (permissible) for either the husband or the wife to ask for the marriage to be terminated.

Although it is still women that bear the brunt of the burden of shame when it comes to divorce, there is now recognition that the wife isn’t automatically at fault if a marriage breaks down. Moreover, with Muslim matrimonial websites now offering specific dating services for Muslim divorcees, there is also a growing appreciation that there is life and romance beyond divorce.

The funding cut of $123,807 would jeopardise the future of Toronto Pride, just four week’s before the annual one million-strong downtown parade and a year before it is due to host the global lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) festival, WorldPride 2014.

According to Toronto journalist Andrea Houston, the move to withdraw city money from Toronto Pride is being spearheaded by councillors David Shiner and James Pasternak - the latter is seeking to have the phrase “Israeli apartheid” banned.

This proposed ban is supported by Anita Bromberg, from the Jewish human rights organisation, B'nai Brith. She added that there is no place for such language because Pride is not political: "This is a city-wide celebration. I am deeply offended."  

Francisco Alvarez, co-chair of Pride Toronto, says Pasternak and his colleagues are wrong to suggest that by allowing QuAIA to participate in the parade they are endorsing its viewpoint and should face financial penalisation.

“That is just not true,” he says. “We do not hold any view with regard to the Israel/Palestine conflict at all. We simply provide a platform for groups that are organized within our community to express their views, as long as they conform with the laws of the land ... It sounds to me that, since we won’t reject QuAIA, [Pasternak] is making a link that we are supporting their perspective. We support them as a community group. We support other groups as well.”

Another councillor, Frank Di Giorgio, told Canada’s leading LGBT news magazine, Xtra!, that the dispute is one of “competing rights.”

“The message that [QuAIA] sends out ... I believe in protecting rights, but I draw the line when you start protecting one right that infringes on another right. Then you have to look at it in closer detail ... I suspect we will try and use sanctions if we have to, like, for example, not providing funding if they don’t fall in line.”

The co-chair of Queer Ontario, Nick Mulé, believes councillors Di Giorgio and Pasternak are more interested in censorship opinions than protecting rights. It’s inaccurate to describe the dispute as one of “competing rights,” he argues, because the right to religious freedom doesn’t mean the right to suppress other people’s viewpoints.

“They are trying to shut down dialogue and infringe on freedom of expression,” he says. “QuAIA is not a people-hating group. Their message is a critical analysis of political policy. If we don’t have the freedom to critique policy, then we are really in trouble as a society.”

I agree. I am amazed that in a supposedly liberal democracy like Canada the country’s main Pride parade can be threatened with the removal of city funding because some councillors disagree with one organisation and one slogan.

Their demand for a ban is straightforward censorship. It’s a direct attack on free speech and the right to protest - and, some people might say, borderline blackmail.

Pride parades should be open to all individuals and organisations that support LGBT human rights. There should be no political vetting, unless the participants are homophobic, incite violence or oppose the human rights of others.

Lots of people may disagree with QuAIA and even find their rhetoric offensive. But in a democracy they have as much right to free speech as pro-Israeli groups. The main issue is not whether QuAIA is justified in its criticisms of Israeli policy but whether it has a right to freedom of expression.

QuAIA does not support violence against Jews or Israelis. It is merely protesting against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and the abusive, humiliating subjugation of the Palestinian people by Israeli soldiers and extremist settlers. This occupation and mistreatment hurts both straight and LGBT Palestinians, which makes it a legitimate concern for LGBT people everywhere who care for universal human rights.

I was proud to march with Queers Against Israeli Apartheid in the 2011 New York LGBT Pride parade. I found them passionate, idealistic and humanitarian. There were no anti-Semitic chants. They want a homeland for the Palestinians. They support a just cause: the human rights of LGBT and straight Palestinians.

Although many people find the apartheid accusation offensive, in the occupied territories Israel has an apartheid-style system of separate settlements and separate roads for Jews and non-Jews. Palestinians have their own segregated check-points and border-crossings, plus a separation wall which, whatever its supposed justification, divides two peoples based primarily on their ethnicity.

While pro-Israelis reject the apartheid analogy, it has been echoed by the Nobel peace laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He says the Israeli system in the occupied territories segregates two peoples and involves many different laws that discriminate against Palestinians, either by intention or default.

Some people question why the fate of the Palestinians concerns me. Well, I am a human rights defender who believes in the principle of universal human rights. To me, human rights are for everyone, including Israelis and Palestinians, whether gay or straight.

Human rights are about more than gay rights. I am not a gayist. I never judge any government or people solely on their stance on LGBT issues. It is important to consider all aspects of human tights, not just gay ones. By any standards, LGBT and straight Palestinians are being denied human rights by Israel, as well as by their own regimes.

Israel is gay-friendly. Very commendably, it has good equality laws for LGBT people: the best in the Middle East. Indeed, vastly better than the surrounding homophobic Arab tyrannies.

But there is a downside too. Although Israel likes to use its gay rights record to project a liberal image to the outside world, it refuses asylum to Palestinians fleeing homophobic and transphobic persecution.

The truth is that Israel’s LGBT-friendly democracy is, to a considerable extent, based on the conquest of the Palestinian people. No amount of progressive LGBT policies can justify Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, the building of illegal new settlements and the on-going seizure of Palestinian farms and houses. Moreover, some of the victims of these Israeli expropriations are gay Palestinians.

LGBT equality in a society based on the dispossession of the Palestinian people is not true liberation; it colludes with oppression. Queers Against Israeli Apartheid are right to expose the tainted rainbow flag that flies over Israel.

Peter Tatchell was a founding member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (UK) in 1982. He has repeatedly condemned human rights abuses by Israel and the Palestinians, particularly by the Hamas regime in Gaza. More information about his human rights campaigns: www.PeterTatchell.net

At dawn on 14 May, 2008 - not long after Robert Mugabe had lost a first-round Presidential election to his bitter foe Morgan Tsvangirai - Tonderai slept while his wife Plaxedes made porridge for their two children at their home in the impoverished township of Mabvuku, east of Harare. Around eight armed men wearing masks and dressed in plain-clothes barged in and pulled him from his bed. “They’re going to kill me,” Tonderai shouted to his wife, as they dragged him outside, still in his underwear. His children watched from the doorstep as he was shoved into a truck and driven off.

A week later, in a Harare mortuary with bodies on the floor and failing electricity, Cosmas Ndira recognised his brother’s decomposing remains only by his height and his distinctive wrist bangle. According to the post-mortem, he’d been asphyxiated.

Amid all the bloodshed of Zimbabwe’s 2008 election, it was the murder of the 30-year-old Ndira that caught the international media’s attention. In death, the tall, charismatic youth leader for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party, who had been arrested 35 times - more often it’s said, than anyone in the country’s political history - became known as ‘Zimbabwe’s Steve Biko’. Like South Africa’s anti-apartheid icon, he had made the ultimate sacrifice for his country’s freedom.

I first met Tonderai in 2004 and on my regular trips to Zimbabwe he would take me to places which were otherwise off-limits, and introduce me to people on the front-line of the country’s political struggle.

His laid-back manner and languid, reggae man, dread-locked style masked an unshakeable resolve, and an antenna highly tuned to danger. To Zimbabwean activists his deeds became legendary: once when the police were hunting for him he joined the search party without them realising who he was, and twice he escaped custody by jumping out of a truck. But during the febrile days in 2008 when Mugabe’s long reign appeared to be drawing to an end, the regime’s desire to eliminate its enemies took on a new urgency.

Today [14 May], on the fifth anniversary of Tonderai’s abduction and murder and with another election looming, much has changed in Zimbabwe: Tsvangirai and Mugabe are in an uneasy power-sharing agreement, the devastated economy has been revived, a new - albeit flawed - constitution has been agreed, some Western sanctions have been lifted, and Zimbabwe and the UK recently held their first bilateral talks in more than a decade.

Deep political fault-lines remain, but for all its messy, difficult compromises, the accommodation between Tsvangirai’s MDC and Mugabe’s Zanu-PF has improved the lives of many ordinary Zimbabweans. This year’s election could as easily see this relative stability continue, or herald more violence and repression. Yet at some point, past crimes must be reckoned with, and the country’s culture of impunity stretching back more than 30 years finally broken.

When Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980 after a seven-year civil war between Ian Smith’s white minority regime and the guerrilla forces of Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo, an amnesty was granted and no-one was held accountable for the many atrocities committed. Some Rhodesian intelligence and army officers even moved seamlessly to work under the new government - led by the very people they had recently tortured or tried to kill. In 1988 another amnesty was granted, this time for those guilty of the Gukurahundi massacres, in which around 20,000 civilians were murdered by government forces in Matabeleland, western Zimbabwe.

The course of this history isn’t about to change. Last October the Zimbabwe Human Rights Commission (ZHRC) was set up to investigate human rights abuses. But its remit was limited to crimes committed after 2009, and in January its chairperson resigned because of its lack of credibility and independence.

Speaking at Tonderai’s funeral, Morgan Tsvangirai demanded justice for the victims of state-sponsored violence: “We can forgive all other things, but I think we would have stretched our humility too far if we forgave this. Mugabe and his cronies are always preaching about sovereignty. They should know that no sovereignty is greater than giving people the right to live,” he said.

Five years on, as Tonderai’s friends and family gather in Mabvuku to remember him, his status among many Zimbabweans as a national hero is secure. But as long as his killers – and the many other perpetrators of political violence in Zimbabwe – evade justice, the “sovereignty” Tsvangirai spoke of remains an illusion.

The old man raises his strigine eyebrows in amazement. When I am introduced to Mr Aw a few moments later, I tell him what I have overheard.

"How does that make you feel?" he asks me.

"Nauseas," I reply.

Tash Aw is no stranger to travel. Born in Taipei and raised in Kuala Lumpur, he moved to the UK to study law in the early 90s and has lived in London ever since. His first novel, The Harmony Silk Factory (2005), centred on the life of the enigmatic textiles magnate Johnny Lim, and was set in 1940s British-controlled Malaya. His second, Map of the Invisible World (2009), examines Malaysia and Indonesia post-independence, at a time when the maps were being redrawn and multiple voices aimed to rewrite the historical record, freed from the influence of foreign rule. He travels regularly around south-east Asia to research, teach, explore and visit relatives. It was on one such journey that his new subject presented itself.

"People of my generation, born in the 70s, think of Malaysia as a country built on immigration. Everyone came from somewhere else at one time or another. It's in the genes. Previously, people gravitated to the big cities of the west, but about ten years ago I started noticing that people were leaving, as they had always done, but now to China. At first it tended to be people in low-skill work, waiters or construction workers, but gradually it became bankers and lawyers and now yoga teachers and lifestyle coaches."

Five Star Billionaire, Aw's most recent novel, is a long, sprawling work assembled in the Balzacian mode: distinct narrative strands weave together the experiences of Malaysian migrants (shifting and tumbling up and down the socio-economic ladder), trying to make new lives for themselves in rising China.

"Ultimately, what I wanted to show in the novel is that immigration is often a lonely thing, a difficult thing. It doesn’t matter how rich you are."

Of course the movement north has more intimate cultural implications, as many migrants are ethnically Chinese. Their families have been living overseas for generations. What they believe to be "traditionally Chinese" has long been wiped away in the Cultural Revolution and the emergence of market-driven economics.

"I’m currently teaching at Nanyang University in Singapore, where there has been a huge influx of mainland Chinese people encouraged by the government. Singaporeans blame them for rising costs. They exhibit the same xenophobia everyone else does. But what I find interesting is that these are ethnically Chinese people being xenophobic towards other ethnic Chinese: it is a very complex form of bigotry."

The point of convergence for Gary Gao, a pop star whose career is falling apart, as much as for Phoebe, the factory worker who adores his music, is Shanghai. Arguably there is no greater symbol in Asia for the collision of cultures and competing histories – and for the creation of the new China.

"In Beijing, everyone is very cynical of Shanghai," Aw says. "They call it a city of foreigners – but I think that gives Shanghai a real edge. It has always been a place people have arrived, thinking they could make their mark."

"A lot of what Shanghai is, is tied up in the language. It gives the city a certain independence. There is a popular stand-up comedian there who does shows in the Shanghai stadium to 50,000 people who's very anti-government, very satirical. But a lot of it is ignored by Beijing because it’s in Shanghai, and the sophisticated Shanghai-dweller isn’t representative of the rest of China at all."

When Phoebe starts dating, the ideas she was raised with in Malaysia appear outmoded, particularly with regard to modesty and dress.

"One of the first times I lived there, I had my parents over to visit. My mother was so shocked to see how much flesh young Shanghainese women showed. It’s not like that back home. People are conflicted in Asia – China particularly – about what social values should be. Many see themselves as the polar opposite of Americans, but I see a lot of similarities in that you have a country which is so big and diverse, it really doesn’t need the rest of the world, economically or culturally."

The novel delves into disputes about land appropriation, heritage and pop culture – the book’s chapters are given headings such as "Move to Where the Money Is", "Forget the Past, Look Only to the Future." Yesterday’s propaganda has been displaced by the self-help mantra.

"It’s a novel about how people see China, not just how western people see China, but how the various Chinese people see China. People from Shanghai and Beijing don’t even see each other as part of the same race."

Aw is reluctant to cohere to the dominent presentation of China as a monolithic culture. The novel refuses to see any individual's story as being anything but his or her own. "We are dealing with a country that is really a continent. You can’t summarise it. When the Chinese government vetoes the vote on Syria or pulls out of the climate change talks even the BBC, who are normally neutral, say something like ‘the Chinese don’t like being pushed around’ and I think, do they mean me? The denial of difference is damaging in any context, but particularly so in China. The differences in China, what it respresents, is what I am keen to explore. We don’t see enough of it in literature."

Five Star Billionaire is out now (Fourth Estate, £18.99)

After a while, I asked where he got his news. “RT,” he said at once. Seeing my look of confusion, he clarified: “Russia Today. You should watch it. It gives another perspective to what you get on BBC and CNN. They always show up the Americans on human rights, and they love the bankers’ crisis.”

You may not know RT, but Tom is not alone in watching it. According to the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board, which compiles UK viewing figures for television stations, between two and a quarter and two and a half million Britons tuned their tele - visions to RT during the second half of last year. It is, it boasts, the most popular news channel in Britain after the BBC and Sky. Its YouTube feed has more than 740,000 subscribers and over 970 million views. Not bad for a channel its detractors dismiss as a Kremlin propaganda mouthpiece – it is statefunded through the Russian Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communications.

At a time when western media sources are losing money, and even the BBC has been forced to cut its budget by 20 per cent over the next four years, RT’s financial health will allow its voice to become ever more prominent. Moscow correspondents frequently speculate which western journalists will move to RT when their own outlet goes bust.

In October last year, Putin personally intervened to block a finance ministry proposal to cut RT’s funding. The channel will receive more than £250m this year, approximately the same sum as the BBC World Service received from the British government in 2011- 2012. And where the World Service will lose its direct government funding from 2014 and be paid from the licence fee instead, thus squeezing its budget, Putin will keep RT healthily supplied with cash.

In January I visited the new RT offices in Moscow, eight storeys high and clad inside and out in the channel’s corporate colours of green and grey. Dozens of smart vans, each tagged with the RT logo, were lined up in the snowy car park. Inside were three cavernous, adjoining state-of-the-art studios for the English-, Spanish- and Arabic-language services. Lights hung in the gloom above the presenters’ heads, illuminating the remotecontrolled cameras that moved silently from position to position. Off-camera, journalists huddled over their screens, preparing scripts for the groomed presenters.

RT now has more than 2,000 employees, up from just 300 at its launch. The channel has started broadcasting in HD and it has launched a video news agency. At present the station does not broadcast in Russian, but it is revamping its Russian-language website. All these changes signal its ambition.

The rise of RT reflects important changes in how people get their news and how that news is funded. Along with its rivals – the Qatari-funded al-Jazeera, the Iranian-funded Press TV, the Chinese-funded CCTV – it represents an effort to undermine the standard western model of news reporting, at a time when major media companies are coming under tight budgetary constraints.

On first viewing, RT is just another 24-hour news channel: the same glossy-lipped presenters, the same graphics, the same global reach. But watch it for a while, or sift through its offerings on YouTube, and you realise it is following a very different track.

Through an editorial policy of letting pretty much anyone on air and with cash backing from the Kremlin, it has become a televisual home for disaffected viewers in the west, a refuge for the Occupy and hacktivist generation, which believes that its own countries’ TV stations are in the pocket of corporate interests. Margarita Simonyan, RT’s editor-in-chief, is even prepared to call it the “anti-Fox News”.

Its strand The Truth Seeker – presented by Daniel Bushell, a posh Brit whose on-screen style appears to owe a significant debt to Brass Eye’s Chris Morris – reported on Barack Obama’s re-election last November, as all channels did. RT put in for an interview and, as expected, its request was refused. Its next step was less orthodox. The Truth Seeker created Legobama, a Lego figure of Darth Vader whose head had been replaced with that of a black Lego character. RT jerkily stopmotion- animated it and made it answer questions on drone strikes in a poor imitation of the president’s accent.

Max Keiser’s weekly Keiser Report specialises in lambasting the western banking system, often describing government responses to the financial crisis as “genocide”. Following the British government’s decision to remove child benefit from higher-rate taxpayers, Keiser commented that George Osborne would “sacrifice his child . . . throw the child into a volcano if it meant getting a good deal on a derivative”.

In comparison, the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who last year hosted a series of interviews on the channel with global rebels, including the Hezbollah leader, Hasan Nasrallah, came across as rather conventional. His interviewing style was gently probing, if not quite hardball.

For the more extreme end of inter - rogation, viewers should seek out Peter Lavelle’s CrossTalk, where the guests are encouraged to “jump in any time you want” and do, often making the discussion degrade into barely comprehensible shouting. Producers slyly undermine their guests with banner headlines contradicting whatever they are saying, and Lavelle throws in hand grenades of controversy if things are going too smoothly.

The right-wing British commentator Douglas Murray was unprepared for Lavelle’s approach when he appeared as a guest in 2010 to discuss France’s burqa ban. Visibly baffled throughout the programme, he lost his temper when Lavelle dropped in an offhand remark about the 11 September 2001 hijackers not being fundamentalists.

RT has long specialised in publicising alternative “truther” interpretations of the 9/11 attacks and even ran a lengthy investigation called “911 reasons why 9/11 was (probably) an inside job”, but Murray appears not to have known this and wrote of his confusion for the Daily Telegraph. “I leave it to readers to work out why the Russians would want to be pumping this kind of filth around,” he concluded. It is a good question.

Granted, delving too deeply into the logic of Putin’s actions is not always wise. His unquestioning support for the Syrian government is disturbing, and his backing of a ban on American adoptions of Russian children (in retaliation for a US law that bars Russian violators of human rights from entering the United States) is inexplicable. Shortly after New Year, he won a photo opportunity by granting Gérard Depardieu Russian citizenship to help him avoid rising income taxes in France – at the cost, presumably, of the permanent alienation of the French president, François Hollande.

But given that RT is a long-term funding priority, it plays a significant part in how Putin wishes to run his country. He gained control over Russian television early in his tenure as president, driving out the media magnates Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky, taking over their channels and winning favourable coverage as a result. RT was his attempt to do the same to the world.

The channel was launched as Russia Today in 2005 (the name change to RT came four years later). It had long angered Putin that western journalists insisted on concentrating on human rights abuses in Chechnya, arrests of leading businessmen, the erosion of Russia’s democratic institutions, and its endemic corruption. The country was not as bad as it was being painted, officials said, and creating RT would give them a canvas of their own.

“Russia is a major country and a massive country, so it needs to make its position known to audiences all over the world,” Margarita Simonyan told Reuters at the time. Simonyan had previously worked as a Kremlin reporter for state television, one of the most high-profile media jobs in the country, and so had shown her reliability. Nevertheless, it was quite a promotion; she was 25 when she was appointed to the new post. (Simonyan long ago learned to use sarcasm to deflect speculation about her rapid rise, remarking in a recent blog post that she is sad no one nowadays thinks she is anyone’s mistress. “I’m getting old,” she lamented.)

Although she sounds like an American because she spent a year in New Hampshire as a schoolgirl, Simonyan decided that her channel should speak the Queen’s English. She advertised in the Guardian for journalists and Moscow was flooded with young, enthusiastic Brits, mostly straight out of journalism school, who were trained in presenting, editing, reporting and all the other skills necessary for running a television station. Laura Smith, who is now RT’s London reporter, was part of that first intake, leaving a job at a law firm to join the channel. “I had a twoweek training course and it was only by chance that the training course I went on was for on-camera people rather than newsroom people,” she told me. “Two weeks before, and I would have been in the newsroom. It was all a bizarre chance.”

Smith and her fellow new arrivals, together with Russian veterans, got the channel up and running in December 2005 and it has been broadcasting ever since. Around that time, the Kremlin also brought in the PR consultancy Ketchum to improve the country’s image, and among its consultants was Angus Roxburgh, a former BBC journalist who has written about his experiences working for Putin in his book The Strongman, published in February this year.

“My guess – or interpretation, really – is that they were getting pissed off with the bad publicity that Putin had already attracted and decided, in time-worn Soviet style, to ‘combat’ it with a channel of their own,” he told me. “That fits certainly with the impression I gained working with them that they wrongly believed the ‘message’ could be improved without changing the reality.”

In its early years, RT struggled with presenting a Russian slant on the news that was both truthful and interesting, and its own reporters will confess it could be dull. A study by the BBC’s monitoring unit at the end of its first month remarked that its reports “lack a sense of spontaneity and urgency customary with the regular, unscripted updates on rolling news channels . . . bureaucrats and even ministers may be fair game for criticism, but the president is beyond reproach”.

The channel stayed that way for its first three years and not many people tuned in – but all that changed in August 2008, when Russia and Georgia went to war over the disputed enclave of South Ossetia. Many westerners were aggressively courted by Georgian politicians. “Today we are all Georgians,” wrote Senator John McCain, then running for the US presidency, as he tried to turn this squalid little war into a campaign booster.

Russian journalists fought back, taking their lead from Putin, who labelled the Georgian campaign to regain South Ossetia “genocide”. They portrayed the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, as a psycho - path encouraged by the west. The truth that later emerged (not least from a European Union investigation) was inevitably somewhere in between, but RT had come into its element. With banner headlines proclaiming mass slaughter, RT relentlessly pushed Russia’s insistence that its intervention was for humanitarian reasons.

Some western channels, particularly Fox News, were hardly less biased in covering the war. RT repeatedly aired a Fox interview in which two South Ossetians from California tried to thank the Russian government but were cut off by the anchor. Fox’s many detractors could watch the take-downs on YouTube, which started carrying RT in 2007. Simonyan’s channel began to win a whole new audience.

“This was probably one of the first stories that really got the international audience and mass media to pay attention to RT in a big way,” Simonyan told me in an email (she was not in Moscow when I visited RT). “As soon as the fighting broke out there was a mainstream media consensus on what was going on, who were the good guys and the bad guys, in a way that made the facts on the ground seem incidental . . . Back then we faced a lot of international criticism for our coverage, but when the EU commission report came out several months later, it debunked the mainstream narrative and exposed how multilayered the situation really was.”

Having won this new audience, RT invested heavily in western advertising to expand its reach further. This included a poster campaign in 2009-2010 that juxtaposed Barack Obama and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with a question: “Who poses the greatest nuclear threat?” Another poster overlaid an M16-bearing US soldier and a masked man holding a rocket-propelled grenade and asked: “Is terror only inflicted by terrorists?” RT stoked the controversy by claiming that the posters had been banned from US airports, and perhaps they had.

Aside from the reporting of South Ossetia, Simonyan named two other stories that made her particularly proud. First was RT’s coverage of the Arab spring; it was notably more cautious than western channels in its reception of the rebellions in Libya, Egypt and elsewhere (a position which, no doubt coincidentally, was identical to that of Putin, who is opposed to any foreign intervention but his own). Second was its reporting on Occupy Wall Street, the story that cemented RT’s position with a new generation of rebels in the west.

RT proudly boasts that it was the first TV channel to cover the US protesters’ attempt in September 2011 to seize New York’s financial district, which it splashed on the first day under the headline “America’s Arab spring?”.

A later report began: “It is now day 12 of the Occupy Wall Street protests. While they continue to garner minimal attention from the mainstream media, it’s clear the protests are growing in strength and number.” It then aired an exclusive interview with a young woman who had been pepper-sprayed by police officers. “The police brutality had really taken me off guard. There was little distinction between protester and journalist. Press credentials meant nothing during these rallies,” its correspondent Lucy Kafanov later said in a press release issued to mark the Emmy award nomination that RT won for its coverage.

RT does not lie, but it is selective about what facts it uses. Indeed, from its coverage of US politics, you might gain the impression that the only thing saving the Obama administration from collapse is police oppression of dissidents. “Several well-respected individuals have recently warned on the possibility of a severe social crisis erupting in the United States,” RT warned on 21 January, basing its conclusion on quotes sometimes more than six years old. Its relentless focus on Washington’s opponents has, however, won the channel their gratitude.

Its coverage of Britain is similarly slanted towards marginal voices. Ukip’s Nigel Farage is a regular guest, as is George Galloway of Respect. In a recent edition of The Truth Seeker Galloway was described simply as “a UK member of parliament who’s raised millions for victims of war”. Neither Farage nor Galloway responded to my request to comment, but Loz Kaye, the leader of the UK Pirate Party and another occasional guest on the channel, was more forthcoming.

In the 2011 Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election, Kaye won just 0.3 per cent of the vote and would have come last, had it not been for the Bus-Pass Elvis Party. RT treats him with the same respect as it would the leader of any party, however, and has invited him on air at least nine times to comment on internet rights and civil liberties. Perhaps helped by its support, Kaye’s share of the vote rose in the 2012 Manchester Central byelection to almost 2 per cent.

“I won’t deny that it’s very useful that there is a channel that’s very interested in alternative voices,” he said. “It would be foolish to deny they don’t have a particular view which is obviously very critical of the US, but I think that’s legitimate. I’m very critical of a lot of what the US is doing myself. But I don’t think anyone could accuse me of joining a Kremlin project.

“It’s a lot more complex than people give it credit for. People within the hacktivist community have been very vocal on the Pussy Riot case, for example. A lot of us were aware of them long before the mainstream politicians defended their cause.”

RT’s controversy-fuelled approach is reminiscent above all of Fox News, another wealthy news organisation that likes to rail against the “mainstream media” as if that were a category that did not include itself. However, when I asked Simonyan if it was fair to call RT a kind of “anti-Fox” or “Fox News in the mirror”, she refused to rise to the bait. “The anti-Fox moniker might be occasionally fitting in the US market, though worldwide RT isn’t defined by its position vis-à-vis any one specific network. Comment and opinion are important, yes, but we always remain focused on getting the facts right, not ignoring them,” she wrote in English. “We’re not courting controversy – apparently ‘controversy’ is something you get if you simply report on any story in a way that’s different from how the rest of the international media is covering it.”

Curiously, shortly after Simonyan finished replying to my emailed questions, she sent a rather less nuanced message in Russian to her 63,000 Twitter followers (4,000 more than Russia’s foreign ministry).

“A British journalist that interviewed me today said that in the world they call us the anti-Fox News. I hadn’t heard this, but I agree,” she wrote, ending with a little smile.

We know why Fox News does what it does – it is profitable, and its reports influence politics in the United States and beyond. But why advert-free, publicly funded RT should feel so well placed to stir debate outside Russia remains something of an enigma, particularly given that the issues it highlights are often those on which Russia is most vulnerable to criticism.

Russia is aggressively capitalist, with astonishing inequalities of wealth and rampant corruption. Male life expectancy lags behind that of countries such as Bangladesh. The state prosecutes opposition activists such as Pussy Riot, and 30 journalists have been murdered with impunity in the country since 1992. In July, it adopted a law allowing the government to force websites offline without a trial.

And yet, RT campaigns on all these issues in other countries. This is not to say it does not cover dissent in Russia. It reported on the Moscow protests in the winter of 2011-2012 – but Simonyan tweeted that the organizers would “burn in hell” and the reports lacked the detail of its work on Occupy. That is a pattern that holds true for almost all matters that affect both Russia and the west.

Take how it reported on two suicides in January this year: that of the US internet freedom advocate Aaron Swartz, charged with hacking into an academic database, and that of the Russian activist Alexander Dolmatov, who faced prosecution for participating in an unsanctioned protest.

RT’s The Big Picture ran a sombre tribute to Swartz who, it said, had inspired so many others to become involved in his cause. “For the rest of us who still believe as Aaron did in a free and open internet . . . we can only hope he provides the same sort of spark in death as he did in life,” the programme’s host, Thom Hartmann, said. Other video reports on the death carried such headlines as “US government haunts activists like Swartz, ignores banksters and prison torture”, “American Gulag” and “Threshold of tyranny passed”.

Dolmatov killed himself after the Nether - lands refused his application for asylum and he faced deportation to Russia for trial. This suicide rated just a single mention on the RT website.

It is inevitable that many of the western activists who appear on RT face criticism for lending their voice to such a one-sided project. Most of them ignore it but Assange felt he could not. Before his chat show aired last year, the WikiLeaks founder gave a long interview to RT to explain why he had chosen it as a partner.

He remarked that RT had supported his cause for many years and that it had a good audience in the US, implying it was a useful vehicle for his message. As for people who thought he was getting into bed with the Kremlin, they had misunderstood.

“I think it’s a pretty trivial kind of attack on character. If they actually look at how the show is made: we make it, we have complete editorial control. We believe that all media organisations have an angle, all media organisations have an issue,” he said. “RT is a voice of Russia, so it looks at things from the Russian agenda. The BBC is a voice of the British government. Voice of America is a voice of the American government. It is the clashing of these voices together that reveals the truth about the world as a whole.”

This has long been RT’s line, too. In June 2011 it broadcast a programme called War on RT?, in which it quoted Glenn Beck, then a host on Fox News, calling it “the Pravda of today”, and also National Public Radio, which warned RT viewers against thinking it was a normal news network: “Just because it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck doesn’t make it a duck.”

RT responded, not by saying it was unbiased, but by insisting that everyone else, too, was biased. The programme’s host suggested that, in sum, objectivity is a myth and it is better to be honest about that than to hide behind specious claims of presenting the truth. For RT’s Russian employees, working for the channel thus becomes a patriotic project.

“When you come to the office, you have to understand why you do what you’re doing, not just because they pay you the money, but there’s also a sense of trying to get successfully or less successfully the Russian perspective out,” Alexei Kuznetsov, deputy head of news, told me as we sat in a small office next to the main studios. “It’s the voice of my country that’s being heard worldwide and that’s what makes me proud. Working for other news agencies, when you’re local hire, it’s just basically work for money, full stop. Here you get the sense that you’re actually doing something very important for your nation, and you’re trying to make your country popular, you’re trying to make your country recognisable.”

I asked Laura Smith, the London correspondent, if she worries about working for a channel that so merrily pushes a government line. “I don’t see myself as working for a government organisation. It never comes into what I do at all,” she said. “And I think the project itself – the RT project, taken in isolation – is excellent, and that’s all I’ve got to say about that.”

Her job was to find people not being given access to the media and to see what they had to say. She wanted RT to be watched in combination with other channels so that viewers could gain the broadest possible perspective. She seemed sincerely troubled that some viewers might be consuming it in isolation. “I think that marginal voices should be given some kind of airtime,” Smith said. “We’ve had a long relationship with Ukip, for example . . . Sometimes I meet people at demonstrations who say, ‘Oh, I watch RT, and it’s our only source of information about the world,’ and I find that quite worrying.”

As to what exactly it is for, there can be no doubt that Putin believes that controlling a medium gives power over content. At a press conference just before Christmas, he was slightly thrown when a question from a Los Angeles Timesreporter concerning the ban on US adoptions was greeted by applause from the assembled journalists.

“I understand that you work for the Los Angeles Times, and not for Pravda or Izvestia, and that you have to take a certain position,” Putin said, revealing himself – at least when it comes to propaganda – to be the unreconstructed KGB agent that his enemies always say he is. That is where to look for an expla - nation of RT. Deep into his 14th year in power, the president appears to have given up on improving Russia. Instead, he funds RT to persuade everyone else that their own countries are no better.

Oliver Bullough’s latest book is “The Last Man in Russia: and the Struggle to Save a Dying Nation” (Allen Lane, £20)

The Ahmadis are a vilified religious minority in Pakistan, who have undergone decades of persecution. It comes down to a theological dispute. Ahmadis believe that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who founded their movement in pre-Partition India in 1889, was a messiah. That contradicts the central belief in mainstream Islam that Muhammad was the final prophet.

In 1974, a law was passed that not only declared Ahmadis non-Muslims, but banned them from “posing as Muslims”. They have not voted since; doing so would be a tacit acceptance that they are not Muslims, as they would be placed on a voter list with other religious minorities, such as Christians and Hindus. Voter registration forms require Ahmadis to disassociate themselves from the Prophet Muhammad; they say that to do so is against their religion, and so the stalemate continues.

“We are Muslims so we want the majority to accept us as Muslims,” Bilal Haider, the president of the Ahmadi Youth Committee in Karachi tells me when we speak on the phone. “Until then we cannot vote.” Like many young Ahmadis, he is angry. “When a political party confirms they will give us our rights, then we will vote for them. Until then, I cannot see the situation changing.”

Although the community has not voted for more than three decades, this year there was some fanfare around the boycott. This is because the level of official discrimination appears to be getting even worse. In 2011, the Election Commission issues instructions for an “Ahmadi-only” voter list, separate even to the other religious minorities. “It is the worst kind of discrimination and bigotry,” says Saleem Uddin, the spokesperson for the Jama’at Ahmadiyya, the community’s main organisation. “It is an attempt to exclude Ahmadis from the national discourse.”

Uddin lives in Rabwah, a quiet town in central Punjab where around 90 per cent of the population is Ahmadi, considered the headquarters of the community. I met him in the headquarters of an NGO in a central area of Islamabad, days after the boycott was announced. His statement created quite a stir on social media, with comparisons being drawn between the steady marginalisation of the Ahmadis to the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany.

The Ahmadi issue was a hot topic after a video surfaced in late April of someone from Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) party meeting with an Ahmadi community leader in London. Khan promptly released a video statement swearing that he had not solicited Ahmadi votes, and that if he was elected, he would not repeal anti-Ahmadi laws. As the only untested political force, Khan was the Ahmadis’ last hope for their cause to be taken up by someone in the mainstream. So his keenness to disassociate himself from this group as a depressing moment, for both Ahmadis and those concerned with human rights. This is one vote bank which no politician has any interest in winning.

Uddin, a large, softly-spoken man who shrinks from cameras, explains that the separate “Ahmadi-only” voter lists could have serious ramifications. He shows me a photocopied page from the electoral roll. The full address of each individual is listed. There is one column for “family number”, which typically consists of about five digits or letters. But Ahmadis do not have a family number: they are listed simply as “Q”, which stands for “Qadiani”, a common but derogatory term for Ahmadis. “We are already on the hit-list for terrorists,” says Uddin. “This list is made public for all cities, so people can now target us even more easily.”

The risks are very real. In 2010, more than 90 people were killed after the Taliban bombed an Ahmadi mosque in Lahore. Last year, more than 100 Ahmadi graves were desecrated in the city, with graveyards elsewhere in the country also attacked. Individual acts of vigilantism and official harassment are almost more disturbing than big terrorist attacks, because they are so routine. There are currently 278 legal cases registered against Ahmadis for “impersonating Muslims”. There are many recorded instances of people breaking into Ahmadi houses and forcibly removing Arabic inscriptions of Qu’ranic verses. Protected by the law, these vigilantes do not fear any consequences; indeed, it is often the police carrying out these acts.

In the province of Punjab, students must write down their religion when sitting external examinations, and many have suffered harassment not just from other students but from teachers. It is not unusual for individual Ahmadis to receive threatening phone calls and letters. “This is psychologically disturbing, because people do not always know how serious the threat is,” says Uddin. The situation has undoubtedly worsened as extremism and sectarianism have spread, but in the case of Ahmadis, the persecution, which has its basis in discriminatory laws, is state-sanctioned.

Uddin was in Islamabad to hold an informal Q&A session about the vote boycott. One young Ahmadi man, visibly frustrated, argued that the community must take part in the political process if it is to have any chance of bringing change. But the argument always ends with the same point: it is impossible for Ahmadis to participate without effectively renouncing the Prophet Muhammad, which their religion forbids them from doing.

Tentative attempts by President Musharraf to end the practice of separate voter lists in 2002 were shelved after pressure from the religious lobby. I ask Uddin if there is any hope of the situation ever improving. “Religion must stop being the dominant force in politics,” he says.  Given Pakistan’s current political landscape, it does not look like that is happening any time soon.

“It is disappointing that the Ahmadi community feels that they cannot be properly represented in the current electoral process in Pakistan,” says Mustafa Qadri, Pakistan researcher for Amnesty International. “This is yet further demonstration of the disenfranchisement of this heavily persecuted community. It looks unlikely the situation will change soon – in fact, it appears to be getting worse."

While the English-language media is cautiously sympathetic to the Ahmadi cause, the Urdu-language press, which has a much, much larger audience, is certainly not. Discriminatory and inflammatory statements are commonplace; “The US is destroying Pakistan through Qadianis” (The Daily Jang, May 2012); “Qadianis are enemies of Islam and agents of Jews” (The Daily Express, May 2012); and “Apostates must be killed. To declare Qadianis as a non-Muslim minority was an act of generosity for them” (The Daily Khabrain, July 2012).

Speaking after the conference, I ask Uddin whether being unable to vote is really the biggest priority for Ahmadis, given the scale of serious, daily persecution they face. “Oh very much so, it’s very important,” he says. His eyes mist up. “I would love to vote. I pay my taxes. I am a Pakistani. So why am I a second class citizen?”

Click here to read more from Samira Shackle on the run up to the general election on 11 May and the place of minority communities in Pakistan

The Bundesliga has become, arguably, the pre-eminent league in Europe (although it still trails Spain in the Uefa coefficient table). As such, Germany is reaping a harvest planted 14 years ago. To outsiders, German football looked as strong as ever. Dortmund had won the Champions League in 1997 and Bayern were within seconds of winning in 1999. Germany had won Euro 96, played in England, with a team bolstered by players from the east who, it had been widely predicted, would make a united Germany unbeatable. But beneath the surface there were concerns, and the German authorities had the wherewithal not only to recognise them but to do something about them.

After a lucrative television deal had been agreed in 1992, newly rich clubs started looking abroad for transfers. Some of the players they brought in were top-class but many were signed just because they were cheaper than domestic players, whose prices had become inflated, while others offered little beyond an off-the-shelf exoticism. Over the five years that followed, the proportion of foreign players in the Bundesliga doubled, rising from 17 per cent to 34 per cent. That inevitably had an impact on the development of German players and the national manager, Berti Vogts, took the unprecedented step of fast-tracking the South African-born forward Sean Dundee for German citizenship, which he secured in 1997. Injury stopped him from ever playing for Germany, but a year later Paulo Rink, a Brazilian with German grandparents, did.

That hinted at desperation, a sense enhan - ced by poor performances at the 1998 World Cup (a limp quarter-final exit to Croatia) and Euro 2000 (when they were so bad that they became the first German team in 34 years to lose a competitive match to England). Something had to be done and in May 1999 it was. Franz Beckenbauer, a vice-president of the German football federation (DFB), Erich Ribbeck, who had succeeded Vogts as national coach, and the DFB’s director of youth development, Dietrich Weise, outlined a scheme to ensure the development of young German players. All clubs in the top two divisions in Germany were required to build academies, and 121 national centres were established to help ten-to-17-year-olds with technical practice.

That was part of it, but German football has also benefited from two other factors over which the DFB had no control. As the centres were established, the citizenship laws were relaxed, and as a result a number of top-class German-qualified players from immigrant backgrounds have emerged, perhaps most notably Mesut Özil, now at Real Madrid.

The economy helped as well by falling and rising at precisely the right time. By 2002, 60 per cent of all players in the Bundesliga were foreign. But then the Kirch TV conglomerate, which had underwritten the Nineties boom, collapsed. Facing ruin, most of the clubs sold off their expensive foreign stars and invested in cheaper local youth. The pioneers were VfB Stuttgart, who finished second in the Bundesliga in 2002-2003 with a team that included the young talents of Timo Hildebrand, Andreas Hinkel and Kevin Kurányi. This season, only 47 per cent of players in the Bundesliga are not qualified for Germany.

Now, with Germany’s economy at least stronger than most, if not quite booming, the top German clubs are able to hold on to talent for longer and to be more selective about buying foreign talent. Bayern took in £69m in TV revenue last season – a relatively modest figure compared to the £168m that Real Madrid brought in (Chelsea were the leading English club, earning £118m, the result of their run to the Champions League final) – but their commercial revenue, boosted by deals with Deutsche Telekom, Lufthansa, Adidas, the Paulaner brewery, Audi, Coca- Cola, Samsung, Siemens, Burger King, Continental and Sheraton, outstrips everyone else’s, totalling £163m.

There are further reasons, off the pitch, for English fans to look on the German model with envy. For one thing, provision of standing terraces at league matches helps keep ticket prices low: for instance, the average cost of a ticket at Bayern, the sixth most expensive club, is £31.25. Contrast that with Arsenal, the most expensive club in England, where prices for List A games (the most attractive ones) range from £62 to £126. And, for another, there is the “50+1” rule, which stipulates that the members of a club must own a minimum of 51 per cent of its shares, preventing the sort of buyout by foreign owners so common in the Premier League.

There is just one caveat before we hail a new age of German supremacy and it is the sense that, although Bayern and Dortmund have certainly benefited from the youth programme, economic factors have been far more important in establishing them among the Champions League elite. Bayern have agreed the signing of the brilliant 20-year-old forward Mario Götze from Dortmund (for £31.5m) and they may also end up buying the Polish forward Robert Lewandowski, who scored all four goals for Dortmund in the first leg of their semi-final first-leg win over Real Madrid in April.

Dortmund have achieved something extraordinary in recovering from near bankruptcy in 2005 (aided by a loan from Bayern) to win the Bundesliga in each of the past two seasons, but their wage bill is slightly less than half that of Bayern’s. It is hard to believe they can continue to fight that inequality – and if they don’t, then what European football has witnessed this season is less the rise of the Bundesliga than the rise of Bayern Munich. Even if Dortmund do somehow manage to cope with selling their best player each season, there are concerns in Germany that the Bundesliga faces a “Spanish problem” – a distribution of wealth so unequal that two sides inevitably dominate, not just winning the league but crushing their opponents every week.

It is one of the ironies of the capitulation of Barcelona and Real Madrid in the semi-finals that their domestic dominance may have counted against them, rendering both sides so unused to playing teams of roughly equal stature that when called on to fight they found that they had forgotten how to do so. Yet this is a problem across Europe: Manchester United cantered to the Premier League title, Paris Saint-Germain are cruising away in France and Juventus were untroubled in Italy.

The great worry is that the economics of the game are such that the cycle of one country dominating and then another has been replaced by the emergence of super-clubs that are outgrowing their domestic leagues.

“I left everything in Quetta – my house, my shop,” he says. “But you cannot put a cost on your life, or your family’s life. It is not safe for us there. Every time my son stepped out to school it was a trauma wondering if he would come home. It is not a good place for us.”

Ahmed is a member of Pakistan’s beleaguered Hazara community. The Hazara are a Persian-speaking Shia minority who emigrated from Afghanistan more than 100 years ago. They have long been the target of a campaign of terror by sectarian Sunni militants. All Shias face a threat, but the Hazara are easily marked out by their distinctive central Asian features.

Around 500,000 Hazara live in Quetta, the capital of Balochistan, a lawless province in Pakistan’s south-west. They have been mercilessly targeted by violent militant groups such as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, who continue to operate with impunity. According to the Human Rights Watch, 375 Shias died in 2012, with at least 100 of those from the Hazara community. In Quetta, as well as elsewhere in the country, individual Hazara have routinely been shot dead by gunmen on motorbikes, meaning that in certain areas, simply leaving the house is a major risk.

That death toll has already increased dramatically in 2013. On 10 January, two massive suicide bombs ripped through a snooker hall on Alamdar Road, in a predominantly Hazara area of Quetta, killing nearly 100 people. After the bombing, the community refused to bury their dead, sitting in the streets in sub-zero temperatures with the coffins until the government took action. The cabinet of the provincial assembly was dismissed and governor’s rule announced but on 16th February, another huge bomb was detonated near Hazara Town, this time killing 73.

Since then, security has been significantly tightened up in the main Hazara areas of Quetta, but this has had its own negative effects. Ahmed describes how these areas, already ghettoised, have been even more cut off. This affected business for shopkeepers, as people from other communities now avoid the area. University students also face problems getting out of the area to attend their lectures. “Fear was our constant companion, so I have brought my family to Islamabad,” says Ahmed.

He was not alone. Zaman Hussain, head of the central office of the Hazara Democratic Party (HDP) in Quetta, says that many Hazara have fled Balochistan. Many have sought refuge in Australia, America, or the United Kingdom, while others have left behind their property moved to other areas of Pakistan. There is no data to back it up, but he estimates that as many as 100,000 have left their homes.

Despite the grave threat to their lives, those Hazara who remain are refusing to be silenced. Pakistan is gearing up for a general election on Saturday 11 May, the first democratic transition in its history, and this incredibly vulnerable community is determined to take part.

Ruquiya Hashmi, 62, is Quetta’s first ever female candidate for the National Assembly. She is also Hazara. The first few times I call her mobile phone, she doesn’t answer. When we do speak, she is full of apologies: she has been wary of taking calls from unknown numbers because she has been receiving death threats for the last 10 days. “They call my phone and say, ‘don’t participate in this election’. Threatening letters have also been sent to my office, and my workers get calls too,” she says. “I am a double target because I am a woman and I am Hazara.”

She has not been given much state protection. “The government has totally failed to provide us security. They have given us one policeman and he barely knows how to use a gun, so I have my own personal security guards.”

Hashmi, a member of the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-Q), is standing for both the National Assembly and the Provincial Assembly (in which she has already held a seat for some years). Despite the very serious threats, she is undeterred. “I want to stand in this election for the people of Quetta – not just the Hazara. We want peace.”

Inevitably, the terrible law and order situation, and the high threat faced by her community in particular, has impacted on her ability to campaign. Unable to hold any campaign rallies or public meetings, Hashmi has been going door-to-door in the Hazara areas. For the last fortnight, she has been unable even to do that. “I try to go to one or two houses a day, but I cannot move around much. No-one is safe here, but I will raise my voice.”

She is not the only member of the Hazara community to defy the odds and stand in elections. Mohammed Raza, spokesperson of the HDP, says that from his party, there are five candidates standing for seven seats in the Provincial and National Assemblies. “Our party was already on the terrorists’ target list before the election period, so our movement is very restricted,” he says.

On 23 April, a suicide bomber blew up his car at a checkpoint at the entrance to a Hazara district. Six people were killed. Raza, and other HDP members who I speak to, believe that the target was their nearby campaign office. Many party members were gathered there when the bomb went off.

“We had some government security after the January bombing, but four months ago, they took it back,” says Raza. “At the start of April, the intelligence services told us not to even go to our local market because of hit men targeting our community.”
Hussain says that although security has improved since the bombings early this year, the government has stopped short of a targeted operation. “They know where the terrorists are but they are not doing anything about it,” he says.

Individual residents of Hazara areas have been receiving threatening phone calls, and there is the possibility of attacks on polling day. But Hazara politicians and community leaders are confident that people will come out to vote, despite the very real risks. “We want to raise our voices,” says Hussain.

At his kiosk in Islamabad, Ahmed, who has registered for a postal vote, is cautiously optimistic. “We Hazara are Pakistanis too and it is our right to cast our votes. Most of us have lost relatives and friends. When we protested peacefully on the streets, we had the provincial government dismissed. So who knows what we can do at the ballot box?”

Click here to read more from Samira Shackle on the run up to the general election on 11 May and the place of minority communities in Pakistan

In the preceding eight days, he has appeared at more than 50 jalsas (rallies) across the country, travelling by helicopter so he can visit up to three or four – sometimes more – sites in a day. These barnstorming rallies are the cornerstone of his campaign. Khan, with his celebrity status, charisma, and huge personal fan base, knows that he is the main attraction of his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) party, and he’s making sure he gives the people what they want.

As Khan zooms around the country, his staff are trying, as best they can, to keep up by road, which is no mean feat given the huge distances in Pakistan. On the four hour drive from Islamabad to Faisalabad, his team tells me how security has got tighter and tighter over the course of the campaign. For this particular rally, we’ve had to submit our names and other details to the organisers to facilitate backstage access.

But that information isn’t doing us any good with the police, who seem to be enjoying the power trip. We can see the stage gate, which is about 30 metres from the barbed wire. “No-one goes through without a security pass,” says the policeman, smugly. We try to explain that our passes are at the gate, if someone could just go and check our names, but they are having none of it. The senior PTI workers I’m with are unimpressed, to say the least, but their status is doing nothing to budge the police.

Suddenly, there is a kerfuffle. A man has broken through the side of the barricade and is making a run for it to the gate. People are shouting after him but he’s just a retreating back, like the Roadrunner, cutting a shape through the line of armed security guards. “Who is that?” I ask. The reply comes: the local candidate, who has effectively had to break into his own rally.

The security last Sunday may have been over-zealous, but it is with good reason. According to the Interior Ministry, Khan is high up in the “top five” targets for terrorists, with only Nawaz Sharif, current electoral frontrunner and head of the Pakistan Muslim League – Nawaz (PML-N), facing a greater risk.

While members of the media tend to be on the stage with Khan rather than in the crowd, it’s probably one of the least safe places to be. He is one of the only politicians who refuses to address the crowds from behind a bulletproof glass, although in a concession to security, he has taken to wearing body armour under his trademark salwar kameez. Khan’s frenetic road show across the country has made media access very difficult; journalists have no option but to join on the campaign trail where they can and fight through his army of close supporters to grab 10 minutes with him before he helicopters to his next event.

As it has played out, it was not terrorists that struck Khan down but an unfortunate accident. At a rally in Lahore last night, he fell 10 feet as he was being lifted onto the stage. Luckily, Khan is not in a serious condition, though he is reportedly in considerable pain due to injuries to his skull and back. Images and videos of the incident instantly beamed around the globe. There is a sense of pathos that Khan has been stopped in his tracks, so near the conclusion of his momentum-building tour. In almost every area, the crowds and the energy really have been impressive.

The doctors have advised a week of bed rest. Tomorrow’s huge rally in Islamabad, which was supposed to be the climax of a hectic campaign, will go ahead – but Khan will address the crowds by video link.

This being Pakistan, home of the conspiracy theory, many people are speculating that “external forces” contributed to Khan’s “accident”, and that someone caused it deliberately to sabotage his campaign. Clearly, watching the video, this is absurd. After all, Pakistan is hardly known for its stringent health and safety standards.

More importantly, Khan’s accident may have brought an early end to his rousing public appearances, but it is unlikely that at this stage, it will make much difference. Sharif remains the frontrunner, and Khan remains the wildcard candidate: victory would be a surprise, but it is not totally inconceivable. As Khan said from his hospital bed, in a TV statement released just hours after his fall, it is now up to the voters.

Transgender people, known colloquially as hijras or khusras, are a long-standing part of South Asian society. In Pakistan, there are an estimated 500,000 members of this community, which includes castrated men, intersex people, transsexuals, and transvestites. They are a traditionally marginalised group, who make a living by begging and dancing at weddings or other events. 

In previous elections, they have been unable to vote, because they were not willing to classify themselves as men to receive official documentation. However, in 2011, a Supreme Court ruling recognised them as a third gender – neither male nor female – which allows them to get ID cards, cast votes, and stand as candidates. The 11 May election will be the first in Pakistan’s history which includes transgender candidates. 

“We are poor people,” says Lal, who is standing for a seat in the Provincial Assembly. “I don’t have any vehicle so I am going door to door campaigning on foot or by rickshaw.” She stops and laughs. “The other candidates are big crocodiles and I am just a simple cow.”

Like many hijras, Lal lives with other members of the community. Unlike most transgender people in the west, South Asian hijras strongly identify as a third gender – rather than as male or female. They even refer to themselves as “shemales”, a term considered highly derogatory in the west because of its association with pornography and the sex trade. Despite this distinct identity, hijras use the female pronoun because there is no neutral alternative. They have their own social norms – all dress in women’s clothes, and many have undergone castration – but a range of identities come under this umbrella.

During my interview with Lal, two younger hijras sit on a mattress on the floor, occasionally pitching in. Others come in and out of the small one storey house, which has pink walls and a huge poster of Madam Lubna as a young dancer. Many of these women are estranged from their families, and joined the hijra community in their teens (Lal was 15). As a result, these groups are tightly knit. When older members of the community are too old to make a living from dancing at functions, the younger ones support them.

Lal says that she has not encountered any hostility from the local population. “I have been living in this area for the last 35 years so people know me. I am standing as a shemale but not just for my own community. I want to help poor people and improve education, health services, and sewerage. The poor people of this area are happy I am standing.” However, as she is talking, the odd detail comes out: people have defaced and removed some of her election posters, and her Facebook account was recently hacked.

Other transgender candidates have faced a more direct threat. Bindiya Rana is standing for the Provincial Assembly in the southern city of Karachi, where there is a large hijra community. For the last five years, she has been a social worker, helping not only transgender women, but rape victims and the unemployed. Rana had to fight to get her nomination papers accepted by the Supreme Court. It was initially rejected by the Election Commission on the basis of her gender, but an appeal ruled in her favour and she has been allowed to stand. “My victory was when I successfully filed those nomination papers,” she says. “I feel I have already won.”

Like Lal, Rana has lived in her area for many years, and claims that most people have received her candidacy well. “They want to talk about sewerage, bad hospitals, lack of education, lack of medicine, not about my gender,” she says. “They know I have been working for this community for a long time.”

But not everyone feels that way. “In the last three weeks, since my candidacy was accepted, I am receiving phone calls from unidentified numbers. They say ‘maybe you will not live to see the 11 May’ and tell me not to participate in the election. Now I don’t sleep in my own house at night, I go to stay with other shemales. But I believe in God and I am not scared of anybody.”

Almas Bobby, head of the Pakistan Shemale Foundation. Photograph: Samira Shackle

Transgender women occupy a strange place in South Asian society. To an extent, they are accepted – perhaps more than one might expect in a socially conservative country like Pakistan. Yet they also stay within their predefined social roles. “It is an ambiguous space,” explains Dr Anuja Agrawal, a sociologist at Delhi University and author of Gendered Bodies: The Case of the ‘Third Gender’ in India. “There is a place for them, where they are allowed to come at auspicious occasions and people think it’s okay to give them money. They are on the periphery of society, yes, but that periphery is very much part of the structure as a whole.”

There is a deep-seated belief, particularly in less educated areas, that hijras have the power to bestow curses or blessings. According to a study by Dr Humaira Jami, lecturer in psychology at Islamabad’s Quaid-e-Azam university, this is rooted in the religious belief that God bestows the unfortunate with special powers. The folklore goes that if you do not give money to hijras on the birth of a son, they will claim him for their own. 

Unable to find normal employment, transgender women frequently have no option but to rely on begging or to turn to sex work. The fact that transgender women are contesting this election is one step on the road towards stepping out of this marginalised social position. 

“It has been very hard for hijras to get integrated into the modern economy,” says Agrawal. “They are not totally rejected by society, but it is hard for ambiguously gendered people to move out of their traditional roles. Standing in elections is definitely important: it reflects an attempt to get integrated into modern democratic institutions and expand one’s sphere of influence.” 

Almas Bobby is the head of the Pakistan Shemale Foundation, an organisation she started in 2004 to protest for the rights of transgendered people. She is an articulate trans-woman who speaks good English and slips easily into amusing impressions of prominent public figures and her own co-workers. 

“Before in Pakistan, there was no concept of our community having rights,” she says when we meet at her spacious house in Rawalpindi. “The main problems were harassment by dirty men, and police harassment. They would come to our houses, rape us, burn our hair, and the police did nothing. Even civil society didn’t accept us, because we are just seen as fun.”

The tide turned in 2004, when transgender women started to protest at police stations when their community members were attacked. This resulted in the first arrests of men for harassment. All the candidates I spoke to agreed that the situation has improved even further since the 2011 Supreme Court ruling that granted them ID cards and the associated legal rights.

“Before there were terrible problems,” says Lal. The two women who live with her nod agreement as she describes men banging on their door at night, trying to get in, and routine harassment on the streets. “But now it’s much better, since we have our legal status. They are afraid to bother us.”

Across the border in India, hijras were granted voting rights (with a similar “third gender” classification) in 1994. In 1998, Shabnam “Mausi” Bano was elected to the state legislative assembly in Madhya Pradesh, where she remained an elected politician til 2003. Hijras have since established their own political party, Jeeti Jitayi Politics (JJP), which translates to “politics that has already been won”.

Out of a total field of 23,000 candidates standing for the Provincial and National Assemblies in the 11 May polls, transgender candidates make up just six or seven. They are all standing independently of any political party. Resham, who like many hijras goes only by a first name, was standing for the National Assembly in the Shekhapur area of Punjab. She tells me she withdrew her papers after one of her rivals promised to take action to protect hijras in the area if she agreed to step down. But Rana, Lal, and other candidates, are continuing their campaigns, tirelessly walking from door-to-door and lobbying their neighbours for votes.

“This is the first drop of rain, I know,” says Bobby. “But if we do not have success in this election, then next time, next time, next time. In Pakistan’s 65 years, the women have not completed their struggle for rights. We are a third gender. It will take time, but we hope it will be good for the next generation.” 

Haaretz reports:

The officials said the shipment was not of chemical arms, but of "game changing" weapons bound for the Lebanese militant Hezbollah group. They say the airstrike was early Friday. They did not say where it took place.

CNN adds a crucial piece of context: the attack took place without an incursion into Syrian airspace. Barbara Starr, its Pentagon correspondent, writes:

Based on initial indications, the U.S. does not believe Israeli warplanes entered Syrian airspace to conduct the strikes.

Haaretz confirms that the Israeli air force has what are referred to as "standoff" bombs, designed to coast low along the surface before hitting their targets, which could "in theory" allow Israel to attack Syria from Lebanon. Indeed, CNN reports that the Lebanese army claimed 16 flights by Iraeli warplanes penetrated Lebanon's airspace between Thursday and Friday.

It is the second time that Israel has hit Syria in recent months. The Guardian reports:

Israel bombed a convoy in Syria in January, apparently hitting weapons destined for Hezbollah, according to diplomats, Syrian rebels and security sources in the region.

While Israel remains technically at war with Syria – having occupied the Golan Heights area of the country in 1967 and never signed a peace treaty since – the two nations have remained peaceful until recently. If, as Israeli officials claim, these are solely to do with the far more recent conflict with Lebanon, then the stakes in the Middle East have not changed substantially.

Update: An earlier version of this post mistakenly identified the source of the arms.