Word: factionalization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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While the contours of the deal seemed clear, the mechanics posed nettlesome questions. Among the most vexing was a condition contained in the letter former British hostage John McCarthy brought to Perez de Cuellar from Islamic Jihad, a fundamentalist Shi'ite faction, operating under the banner of the pro-Iranian Hizballah, that holds several Westerners. It called for "the release of our freedom fighters from prisons in occupied Palestine and Europe." To whom that referred was anybody's guess -- and for whom Islamic Jihad presumed to speak was no more apparent. Was this a bargaining point or an implacable demand...
Unbelievers have an interest in this religious faction fight, if only because so much social policy revolves around sex and its consequences. Are America's Christians (still more than 85% of the population, according to a recent survey) going to order their erotic lives by rules and their inevitable accompaniment, guilt? Are they going to order their erotic lives at all? Samuel Johnson once contrasted preachers who deplored intoxication because it "debases reason, the noblest faculty of man," with preachers who warned drinkers that "they may die in a fit of drunkenness." (Johnson preferred the preachers who did not mince...
Terror organizations with a Marxist-Leninist ideology are also in trouble because their political dogma has been so discredited that they are losing members and morale. The Japanese Red Army, which launched a series of bloody attacks in the 1970s, is down to 20 members. Germany's Red Army Faction is a similar example, though its small remaining core group can still inflict serious pain. R.A.F. assassins have killed two leading German financiers since December...
Western Europe cannot afford to be euphoric either. Besides the Red Army Faction, the Irish Republican Army is still grimly at work. So is the Basque separatist E.T.A., busily planting bombs as Spain prepares to welcome millions of visitors to the 1992 Summer Olympic Games in Barcelona and the World's Fair in Seville. Even if state-sponsored terrorism fades, much of the world is $ likely to be as perilous as ever...
...were under way, the ex-dictator reportedly instructed the guerrillas from a secret location nearby. He is said to have acceded to government demands to designate Phnom Penh as the seat of the four-party Supreme National Council, consisting of the Khmer Rouge, the Hun Sen faction and two noncommunist groups...