Word: factionalized
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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...
...pace of liberation quickened on Saturday, when another Hizballah faction called the Revolutionary Justice Organization issued a communique stating that one American hostage would be set free within 72 hours. The message was accompanied by a photograph of Joseph Cicippio, the comptroller of American University of Beirut, who was abducted on Sept. 12, 1986. On Sunday, however, the group released a different hostage, Edward Austin Tracy, 60, a writer from Burlington, Vt., who was snatched one month after Cicippio. Tracy, who had spent 1,757 days in captivity, was driven immediately to Damascus to be turned over to U.S. authorities...
...other hostages when he was kidnapped in January 1987. British diplomats and friends in Lebanon had warned him not to return, saying the situation was too dangerous. Waite ignored them. He vanished while waiting in a go-between's home to meet representatives of Islamic Jihad. For years no faction claimed to be holding him, and nothing was heard of him. Many Western officials privately concluded he had been killed, possibly because he was suspected of working with the Reagan Administration in the arms-for-hostages swap with Iran...
...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...