Word: fiefdom
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...government, and they have a large but unacknowledged North Vietnamese military presence to back their claim. What is fundamentally at issue is whether Laos will emerge as a reasonably independent buffer state that might help to bring some stability to Indochina, or as an out-and-out fiefdom of Hanoi...
...apparent until Henry Kissinger and the North Vietnamese negotiators in Paris finally agree on an overall Indochina peace plan (see THE NATION). Even so, reports Simms after extensive interviews with government and Pathet Lao leaders in Vientiane, the odds seemed heavily weighted in the direction of a North Vietnamese fiefdom. Government leaders, says Simms, seemed "completely despairing" about the possibility of being left with North Vietnamese forces still entrenched on Laotian soil. The Communists, by contrast, eagerly welcomed a ceasefire. The Pathet Lao spokesman in Vientiane, Soth Pethrasy, said confidently, "We are the party of victory...
...Cocos Islands, a glistening coral archipelago, lie midway between Australia and Ceylon in the Indian Ocean. The main island, with a population of 500, has been ruled more or less benevolently like a feudal fiefdom for the past 145 years by descendants of a Scottish sea captain named John Clunies-Ross. He settled in the coconut-growing islands in 1827, imported Malay workers from Java to harvest the copra for export, and in 1886 his grandson obtained a grant in perpetuity to the islands from Queen Victoria...
...free themselves from the Secretariat by making their annual budget and program reports accountable only to the General Assembly, which is not equipped to be an administrative body. They have built pint-sized superstructures, asserting reasonably enough that it is better to be the director-general of a small fiefdom than a third assistant deputy in a larger one. Almost every agency, without any central coordination, has also begun to run its own fund drives for voluntary contributions. This has become an effective device for securing further independence from the parent body while, in some cases, more than doubling...
...little man with the face of a thoughtful, testy owl, Smallwood ran his "poor, bald rock," as he once called Newfoundland, as a personal fiefdom. Nonetheless, he was dearly loved by most of the 500,000 Newfies-"a community of Irish mystics cut adrift in the Atlantic," in the colorful phrase of Novelist Paul West-and his picture adorned the poorest living rooms in tiny fishing ports with names like Blow-me-down and Come-by-Chance. Newfoundland admired Joey simply for being his outrageous self: he would sneer at the Tories for being the "waffle-iron salesmen...