Word: banja
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...ensconced in his opulent offices at the Austrian League for the United Nations - but he was still under siege. Freedom of Information Act requests had pried open the 1987 Washington report that put Waldheim on the Justice Department's "watch list." The document placed him in Banja Luka in the summer of 1942, when the Nazis had rounded up the city's Jews and the Wehrmacht was fighting an anti-partisan offensive in the Kozara Mountains to the north. Reprisal killings against civilians were part of the Germans' brutal efforts to quell armed dissent in the region. The report didn...
...less complex now than it was then; Waldheim was no card-carrying Nazi, but he had been an officer in a unit that had a very dirty war in the Balkans. His clean-vest spiel particularly rankled me because I'd been spending a fair amount of time in Banja Luka myself. Less than a year before my interview with Waldheim, the city's principal mosque had been totally razed by Serbs, and most of the Muslim population driven out of the city. In the summer of 1992, Serbs in Banja Luka had taken me on a bizarre tour...
...true depth of Waldheim's involvement in Banja Luka and elsewhere in the Balkans may never be known for certain. By the end of his life he'd regretted having referred to his military service there as a duty done, and he acknowledged that it was a mistake to have excised the Balkans from his memoirs. More importantly, and largely as a result of what will always be known as the Waldheim Affair, Austria finally got beyond its mythic self-image as the first victim of National Socialism and faced up to its own share of responsibility in Hitler...
...sanitation, which at a minimum means a pit latrine. Most Ethiopians don't make the connection between the way they dispose of human waste and their family's health; instead, they believe that "diseases are transmitted by the will of God," says Worku Fentahun, head of health for the Banja district in the country's north. As a consequence, the average Ethiopian child suffers five to 12 episodes of diarrhea a year. Based on studies by the country's government and the World Bank, and by the Ethiopian Ministry of Health, between 50,000 and 112,000 Ethiopian children under...
...Birhanu Worku, who cultivates half a hectare or so of potatoes and barley, was one of the first in Banja to build a pit latrine three years ago. It's a simple affair: a hole in the ground, 1 m across and 3 m deep, covered with a concrete slab and surrounded by mud walls, a thatched roof and a bamboo door. Outside the toilet is a plastic watering can, which Worku has jerry-rigged to dispense a trickle of water for flushing. His neighbors, he says, "came and asked me why I built it and how it worked...