Word: commando
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...blazes!" That was South African Defense Minister Magnus Malan's response last week to those who criticized his army's latest commando raid into black-ruled Zambia. The soldiers had allegedly attacked installations of the outlawed African National Congress, South Africa's largest black political movement. But Malan's angry words, uttered only days before South Africa's white voters were set to go to the polls this week, epitomized the attitude of State President P.W. Botha's government toward all opposition, both domestic and international...
...Livingstone, near Victoria Falls, undoubtedly strengthened the Botha government's standing among its right-wing supporters. So did a crackdown on demonstrations by students in Cape Town and Johannesburg. At the University of Cape Town, where some 300 white, black and mixed-race students gathered to protest the commando raid, police used tear gas, leather whips and bird shot to break up the meeting. On May Day, fearing another wave of unrest, the government banned rallies called by 20 black unions...
...Afrikaners organized a fierce resistance to the British in the Boer (farmer) War (1899-1902). Outnumbered and outgunned, they took to the bush and engaged in guerrilla attacks (the word commando is one of their contributions to the English language). Britain's commander, Lord Horatio Kitchener, was no less fierce; he sent troops to burn down the Boer commandos' villages. Women and children were rounded up and confined in a new kind of establishment: concentration camps. Of the estimated 60,000 prisoners, some 26,000 women and children succumbed to famine and disease. When it was all over, the British...
There was a time, after the elections of 1948, when the English speakers tried to resist the Afrikaners' complete political takeover. Some 250,000 mainly English war veterans, bitter about their antagonists' widespread pro- Nazi sympathies, formed a paramilitary organization called the Torch Commando (with Oppenheimer financing) to oppose the Afrikaners. There was even talk of secession in the pre-eminently English-speaking province of Natal in 1953 and again in 1960-61, when the Nationalists declared South Africa a republic and led it out of the Commonwealth. But eventually the English minority fell back on the comfortable tradition...
...FOUND A LIKELY source wearing fatigues and a "Mom and Dad were martyred and went to heaven and all I got was this lousy T-shirt." He introduced himself as Holy Jihad Freedom Commando X. "But you can call me Tim," he added...