Word: strongman
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...Zimbabwe has plunged into horrendous violence while you have been mediating. With respect, if we continue like this, there will be no country left.' MORGAN TSVANGIRAI, opposition leader, in a recently published letter to Zimbabwe's appointed mediator, South African President Thabo Mbeki, accusing him of favoring strongman Robert Mugabe. Mbeki's spokesman has called the letter a fabrication...
...unusual for an Asian politician to find himself in a defensive crouch. The day of the strongman has passed. For more than two decades, countries throughout the region have been undergoing transitions from authoritarian, patriarchal regimes to messy democracies that sometimes seem to be almost ungovernable. Asians are flexing their political muscles, exercising their civil rights vigorously even beyond the ballot box - and woe betide the leader who fails to deliver what he promises. Despite winning the presidencies of their respective countries by wide margins, Thaksin Shinawatra of Thailand and Joseph Estrada of the Philippines were tossed out of office...
...showed me the rubble of his destroyed schoolhouse. Only two things had been salvaged from the building: a small globe used for geography lessons and a framed photograph of junta leader Than Shwe, which normally hung at the front of the classroom. I asked if the 75-year-old strongman was a good person. The teacher laughed: "No, very bad." So why had he saved the picture? The teacher struggled for the right English word. "Scared," he said. Then he brought his wrists together to mime handcuffs...
...That is a political line with a very bloody history. Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic and his supporters used it to foment Yugoslavia's wars of dissolution in the early 1990s, when they stirred up the defiance of Serb enclaves against independence for Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. These sentiments were invoked again in 1999, when Milosevic's security forces tried to push ethnic Albanians out of Kosovo. All these efforts ended in war and tragedy, not least for Serbs. Yet the failure of extreme nationalism to improve the lot of Serbs doesn't appear to have blunted its appeal...
...retired three-star Army general, has spelled out just how shaky that alliance with the Sunnis is. "Our new Sunni friends insist on being paid for their loyalty," Odom told the Senate Foreign Relations committee last Wednesday. He cited one estimate that the U.S. military is paying a local strongman $250,000 a day to keep the peace in a 36-square mile swath of the country. "Remember, we do not own these people, we rent them - and they can break the lease at any moment...