蜜芽传媒

Owen Bennett Jones presents insight, analysis and wit from 蜜芽传媒 correspondents around the world. In today's edition, Frank Gardner on the enduring tensions in Bahrain and John James on the Ivorian and Liberian refugees who're now finally close to getting back home.

Is Bahrain going backwards?

Many commentators in the Middle East and elsewhere have made some acerbic comments about the West鈥檚 uncertainty - and apparent ambivalence - about how to react to the Arab Spring. It's in Bahrain where that uncertainty has been perhaps most clearly on display. The demand for greater democracy there has been met with state violence - and also with Western indifference.

But a recent visit left Frank Gardner suspecting that the demand for reform isn't going away.

A longed-for homecoming - to a land many want to leave

The UN refugee agency has long argued that those people who have fled persecution generally want to go back home even if, to other people, that home looks like a difficult place to be. Both Liberia and Ivory Coast have suffered outbreaks of extreme violence in recent years, and it's often been peaceful rural communities which have borne the brunt of the fighting.

Yet, as John James has been hearing on the border - a remote zone which the urbanites of Abidjan often call "the wild west" - citizens of both countries are now desperate to return to their villages.