Word: airstrips
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Chevron also had to contend with irate Foi and Fasu tribesmen who, armed with spears, axes and bows and arrows, occupied the project's airstrip and attacked some company officials. The tribespeople demanded a more favorable split of the oil royalties between them and the provincial government and fulminated over damage to their hunting and fishing grounds. The take was subsequently improved from a 20%-80% division to 30%-70%; after Chevron built medical facilities for the villagers and buried the pipeline, peace was restored...
When Captain John Anderson flew into Kismayu last December, the door of his C-141 air transport opened to admit a blast of foul air. "It was the smell of rotting flesh," he recalls. Not far from the airstrip was a pile of partly dismembered bodies in a shallow mass grave, victims of a local warlord. In some places, Somalis who at first welcomed the Americans became resentful when they realized that the U.S. would not simply wipe out the warlords who were terrorizing them. At the same time, soldiers found themselves in mortal danger whenever they seemed...
...PLAIN AT Dien Bien Phu, where almost 4,000 French soldiers died and nearly 11,000 were taken prisoner 39 years ago, President Francois Mitterrand listened as General Maurice Schmitt pointed out the landmarks: the mountains from which General Vo Nguyen Giap's troops bombarded the fields below, the airstrip, the hilltop positions that fell one by one until General Christian de Castries and his exhausted men finally surrendered on May 7, 1954, ushering in the end of France's colonial rule in Indochina. "I felt the need to pay my respects," said Mitterrand, who called the war a "mistake...
These days he avoids trips to the capital or other major cities, although the Gbadolite village airstrip can accommodate the supersonic Concorde that Mobutu charters from Air France as well as a number of Boeing jets in the presidential fleet. Exquisite flower gardens and vast plantations of pineapple imbue Gbadolite with an air of bucolic tranquillity. But it is a Potemkin village: most of the electricity is switched off when the dictator and his circle are absent, leaving thousands of townspeople to fend for themselves in the tropical darkness...
...Bill Dowell faced comparable difficulties when he had to travel to Liberia to co-report our cover story. With Monrovia's main airport still under rebel control following the bloody civil war that ousted President Samuel Doe, Dowell flew in on a tiny Cessna that landed on a , makeshift airstrip. Nearby lay the charred remains of a Russian-built transport plane that had failed to make such a landing a few days earlier. Dowell also visited Francophone Ivory Coast, Senegal and Mali. Michaels, meanwhile, fanned out as far afield as Zambia, Zaire, Burkina Fasso, Nigeria, Benin and Togo...