Word: controller
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2000
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...orgy of killing, maiming and torture that has gripped Sierra Leone for the past decade is a portly, ebullient former army corporal and wedding photographer. But Foday Sankoh doesn't personally hack the hands off children or slaughter their parents in his drive for political power and control over Sierra Leone's diamond fields; for that he relies on an army of abducted teenagers, forced at gunpoint to rape or kill loved ones - a brutal measure designed to cut off the road home - before being dragged into the bush, where Sankoh's drug-addled legions become their only family...
...pretty sweet deal for a man who'd been bound for the firing squad a few short months earlier: Clinton and Jackson were urging a war criminal to agree to order his men to lay down their arms, in exchange for his country's vice presidency and ministerial control over the diamond fields that had financed his rebellion. And in a failed and lawless state such as Sierra Leone, ministerial control meant a lot more than majority shareholding...
...urged Nigeria to take charge, and in February 1998 the ECOMOG intervention force seized Freetown, restored Kabbah to power and arrested Foday Sankoh, who was later sentenced to death. But a year later, the RUF overwhelmed ECOMOG and recaptured the capital, freeing Sankoh and savaging the civilian population. Government control was only restored after weeks of fierce fighting, in which Nigerian troops at times matched the brutality of the rebel fighters...
...They'd have accepted the deal, if it was workable. The reason it wasn't, though, was because of the diamonds. This is not a civil war in the true sense. Sankoh doesn't represent the poor, or have any coherent political program. This is just a grab for control of the diamond fields by a despised army whose only agenda is making its leaders wealthy. I talked to a number of captured rebels, and they had no political ideology; they were simply teenagers who'd been kidnapped, drugged, often forced to kill or rape their loved ones...
...have decided to raise the white flag. The result: That coveted CD of Britney Spears' warblings will now be $2 to $5 cheaper at a music store near you. The music biz's Big Five - Sony, Bertelsmann, EMI, Universal and Time Warner (corporate cousin to this web site) - which control 85 percent of the $15 billion CD market, settled with the FTC Wednesday on charges that they've been leaning for years on music retailers to fix CD prices by threatening to withhold promotional budgets from stores that don't adhere to a so-called "minimum advertised price...