Word: strongman
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...forbidden the police from evicting squatters from some 600 farms. The president's campaign - which threatens to drive away foreign aid donors and investors - appears to be a desperate bid to rally rural voters, and began after city dwellers overwhelmingly rejected Mugabe's constitution in February. In response, the strongman has taken to blaming Zimbabwe's woes on its handful of white citizens and on "homosexuals in the British cabinet...
...That fear is underscored by Mugabe's apparent willingness to ignore the courts and intimidate his opponents by extra-legal means. But it is Zimbabwe's electorate that bears the cost of its president's policies, and Mugabe may be facing that most uncomfortable of symptoms for a strongman: Voters appear to have stopped following the president's orders...
Israel - and the U.S. - had hoped to conclude a land-for-peace deal with Syria before the ailing, 71-year-old Assad leaves office, for fear that a successor may lack the strongman's authority to make security concessions to the Jewish state in exchange for the return of captured territory. But Sunday's failure to secure any agreement means that it might well be left to Syria's next leader to chart the way to peace with Israel. Chances of an early breakthrough may be diminished by Israel's Lebanon withdrawal - which deprives Syria, with its substantial military control...
...standoff. The fact that President Clinton's old friend Nawaz is now saying General Musharraf launched his coup in retaliation for the Pakistani premier's doing Washington's bidding - and the assassination of his lawyer in mid-argument - may slow the chemistry between the U.S. president and the Pakistani strongman...
Russian voters clearly want a strongman, but the battle to be that strongman may be fought primarily in Chechnya. Sunday's Russian parliamentary election saw an unlikely surge by a party cobbled together only last month with the backing of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, signaling that the war in Chechnya has turned the former head of the intelligence service into the man to beat in next summer's presidential election. The Communists held a predictable lead with around 28 percent with most of the vote counted Monday, but the Unity party backed by Putin was running a close second with...