Word: deaths
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Facing the almost certain victory of the right-wing, death squad-linked ARENA party in this month's presidential elections, the Salvadoran leftist guerrillas have offered to end the war. In return they have requested a six-month delay in the elections, allowing them time to organize for and participate in the presidential race. Despite anticipated outrage from the right, the centrist President Duarte has offered a compromise six-week extension...
...first days after the Ayatullah's shocking death threat, governments and the general public alike in the U.S. and Western Europe were slow to react. Who could believe that a book that practically nobody had read -- and an often obscure if sometimes brilliant one, at that -- was the catalyst precipitating a bizarre international crisis...
Some Americans found the Bush Administration surprisingly slow and reserved in its response. But at midweek the President finally stepped up to the White House lectern and criticized Khomeini's death sentence as "deeply offensive to the norms of civilized behavior." Bush warned that Washington would hold Iran accountable for "any actions against U.S interests." While it was the strongest statement thus far from anyone in the Government, there was little more that the Administration could do. The U.S. had no diplomatic pawns to move, nor had it ever ended the trade embargo imposed on Iran in 1979. In fact...
...most astonishing ideological pirouette was performed by President Khamenei, who had seemingly tried to defuse the crisis a few days earlier when he spoke of Rushdie's possible repentance. But Khamenei sounded almost as fierce as the Ayatullah last week, saying of the death edict, "The long black arrow has been slung and is now traveling toward its target. There is nothing more that can be done." Western governments, he added, had made the mistake of confusing "freedom of expression with the freedom to insult 1 billion Muslims...
Rushdie's friends worried aloud about how he could make a life for himself under the Ayatullah's threat of death. Would he hire guards, or remain in seclusion, or retreat to some distant land? Few held out any hope that Khomeini would simply change his mind because the real victims of the Rushdie affair were not only the hapless author and his wife but the 50 million citizens of revolutionary Iran. After a decade of terror and death, the country had seemed to be in the early stages of recovery. But by his actions last week Khomeini brought that...