Word: tribalization
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...where politics is played like karate (a sport at which Constantine excels). Jordan's Hussein is doing his best to stave off antimonarchist rioters instigated by his leftist neighbors, Syria and the United Arab Republic. Only last week the new African nation Burundi ended the 400-year-long tribal rule of King Ntare...
...surely as belief in the king's divine right to rule-at least in the West. Today's monarchs can be roughly divided into three types: Europe's chairman-of-the-board king, who presides over his country but is not its chief executive officer; the tribal king of Africa and the Middle East, who most of the time still really leads and still does it from horseback; and the god king of Asia, whose divinity is fading but whose power persists and most closely resembles the old notion of heaven-touched royalty...
Coups have become the rule rather than the exception in populous Nigeria, which is divided into four rival regions and torn by tribal competition. In 1966 alone, two rulers have been murdered, along with countless of their countrymen, in bloody riots and slaughters. When Army Boss Yakubu Gowon, 31, seized power in July in the last coup, he promised that his military government would quickly "fade away," presumably without the necessity of another coup. Last week Gowon announced that he had changed his mind, at least for now, and that he personally would draft a new constitution for Nigeria...
Gowon's proposed constitution makes sense enough. To ease the tribal tensions that threaten to tear the country apart, he proposed dividing Nigeria's four regions into "no fewer than eight and no more than 14" separate states within a federation. Gowon also extended his ban on all civilian political activity, refused to withdraw Northern army units from the suspicious East and West, and made his only obeisance to Eastern feelings by promising a federal "rehabilitation program" to aid the 40,000 merchants and bureaucrats of the Eastern Ibo tribe who were driven out of the North...
Bedrock opposition to Gowon's plans came from Eastern Regional Leader Odumegwu Ojukwu, like Gowon an army lieutenant colonel, who has resisted every attempt to slice the East into tribal minorities and favors a loose confederation of regions with considerable political autonomy for each. Ojukwu's Ibos dominate the oil-rich East, and they want to keep things that way. Gowon, commanding 7,000 troops who are armed with sophisticated weapons and stirred by a stern Moslem faith, could easily put intense-perhaps fatal -pressure on Ojukwu's single battalion of 2,500 men. If he decides...