Word: baseness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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General Alexander Mikhailov clearly wishes he were somewhere else. "I had my fill of fighting these monkeys three years ago," he complains to us, as we wait in Mozdok, a military base three hours by plane from Moscow that is the nerve center of operations against Chechnya. There is no point in trying to make "whites" out of the Chechens, he says. What the republic needs is a "good old governor-general...
...missiles reduce to rubble what was left of Gudermes after the 1994-96 war, Russian officials talk increasingly of turning this grim railway town with a peacetime population of 38,000 into Chechnya's new capital. No problem, says a Russian airborne general, as we stand in a forward base just outside Gudermes listening to the steady rumble of heavy artillery and long salvos of Grad missiles. "We could establish the capital on this hill if we were told to." We are informed confidentially that a high-level delegation from Moscow will be flying in. But a brief, chaotic visit...
...officer commanding the base, Colonel Yuri Em, invites us to lunch. No one was expecting us, we are told as we sit down to a light but tasty lunch of borscht followed by meat and buckwheat and served by young women in dazzling white mess jackets. Somehow this does not seem like daily fare. The soldiers on perimeter duty are not very talkative, in part because there are officers present. Morale is definitely higher than during the last war; casualties for many units have so far been...
...baobab tree for maybe two days. The sun burns through the branches of the tree that the locals say God grew upside down because it looks as if its roots are on top. She has two children with her, and they play in the dust, chasing chickens around the base of the huge tree, eating roasted corncobs from the campfire. A 4x4 truck with Zambian registration draws up, and a black man in a khaki safari suit gets out. The woman reaches inside her bra and draws out a twist of dirty cloth. Inside the wrapping are five diamonds...
...military service and dropped out of Bordeaux University to immerse himself in various leftist political and ecological movements. In 1975 he and his wife decided to move to the country, take up sheep farming and join a local peasant movement against the planned extension of an army base in southern France. Arrested for "invading" the base during a 1976 protest, Bove spent three weeks in prison but had the satisfaction of seeing the military project canceled five years later...