Word: belgians
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Though odds are against him, there is a glimmer of hope in the person of Rene Preval. The 53-year-old Belgian-educated businessman comes to office burdened with a reputation as a hard-left radical but seems to approach the job with realism. He could not be more unlike the ethereal Aristide: practical, plainspoken, decisive. "I know we must translate democracy into improvements in everyday life," he told TIME shortly before his inauguration...
PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI: Receiving the presidential sash from predecessor Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Belgian-educated agronomist and former Haitian Prime Minister Rene Preval completed Haiti's first peaceful exchange of democratic power since it broke from France in 1804. Because Preval has little independent political support within the country, he is nagged by the notion that he is warming the presidential chair for a glorious return four years from now by Aristide, who may not succeed himself under Haiti's constitution, but can run again later. The problems of the western hemisphere's poorest nation will not wait...
That may not be far from the truth. For more than two years, the tiny central African nation of Burundi has been at war with itself. As in neighboring Rwanda, the country's minority Tutsi tribe, once the overlords of this former Belgian colony, are engaged in a deadly conflict with the once subservient but more populous Hutu. Human-rights workers report that clashes between the Tutsi-dominated army and Hutu rebels left some 15,000 dead last year, most of them civilians from both tribes caught between the warring parties. The killing continues: moderate government officials, students, foreign diplomats...
Founded by a Belgian homeopath named Luc Jouret, the cult at first seemed to be a harmless New Age mishmash of astrology and health regimens professing to trace some of its ideas back to the Knights Templar, an order of Crusaders. By late 1994, the directions his sect was taking became horribly clear when Jouret and 52 fellow Templars were found dead as part of mass immolations in Switzerland and Quebec...
...deepening corruption scandal in his home country of Belgium forced Willy Claes to step down from his post as NATO Secretary-General, complicating Bosnian peace efforts. Claes resigned a day after the Belgian Parliament voted to force him to stand trial on charges of corruption, bribery and forgery in connection with a military-contract kickback scandal in the late 1980s, when he was the country's Economics Minister. Claes maintains that he is "totally innocent...