Word: crackdowns
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...crackdown had been harsh, fiercely and unexpectedly harsh. Military authorities rounded up thousands of Solidarity members, dissidents, intellectuals, artists and some 30 former government officials, including ex-Party Boss Edward Gierek. Tanks ringed factories and mines, and soldiers and police used force to clear out resisting workers, leaving at least seven dead and hundreds injured when miners in Katowice fought back with axes and crowbars. The shock was doubly traumatic because in the preceding months Poles had won more freedom than any other nation in the Soviet bloc. The country had developed a thriving
...reaction might yet give the Soviets an excuse for an outright takeover, Washington decided from the start that its responses would indeed be primarily words. Through the early days, Haig and other officials confined themselves to restrained expressions of "concern" and cautiously voiced hopes that the martial law crackdown would only be "a temporary retrogression, not a change in the overall historic trend toward reform" in Poland. As one top diplomat explained: "We want to tread the fine line between taking positions that would incite violence and bloodshed and perhaps [Soviet] intervention on the one hand, and avoid positions which...
...attacked an American during their eleven-year campaign to destroyItaly's Establishment. Terrorism in Italy peaked in 1978, when 2,395 terrorist attacks were attributed to Italy's left and right including the Brigades' kidnaping and murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro. But a police crackdown, aided by the testimony of Brigades and other terrorists turncoats, has led to 1,650 arrests across the ideological spectrum and has reduced the number of terrorist acts to about 900 this year...
...flow of information slows to a trickle after the crackdown...
Usually, when a crisis flares, the chief concern of news organizations is getting their reporters and cameramen on the scene. But when the crackdown came in Poland, the Western press faced a different problem. Scores of journalists, including two TIME correspondents, were already inside the country, but they could not get their dispatches out except by subterfuge. Said Los Angeles Times Managing Editor William Thomas: "We've never seen such a complete clampdown on all avenues of information." Added New York Times Foreign News Editor Robert Semple Jr.: "Even in Iran you could always find a telex somewhere...