Word: formerly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...signed a historic peace deal with the Indonesian government in 2005, in the wake of the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami, which claimed about 160,000 lives in Aceh alone. Today, Aceh's governor is a tsunami survivor and former GAM rebel called Irwandi Yusuf, whose background seems tailor-made for REDD: he was trained as a veterinarian and once worked for FFI. "He's one of the few Indonesian politicians who gets it," says Linkie. "He's thinking way beyond his five-year electoral term." In June 2007 Irwandi banned commercial logging in his province, "an unprecedented environmental...
...hour from Geumpang is an FFI camp manned by 10 so-called community rangers, all trained and salaried by FFI, all former poachers, loggers or GAM guerrillas. Keeping them company are five mahouts and their elephants, which are employed for jungle patrols. The camp was set up a year ago. Conditions are basic. The rangers live in tents near a shallow river flowing past overgrown farmland abandoned during the conflict but now slowly being recultivated by returning locals. Insects shriek from the thick jungle beyond. The rangers have discovered that they can get a weak signal - just enough to send...
...this wall," as a champion of diplomacy. Other one-liners were not quite so diplomatic. In 1984, Reagan said, "We begin bombing in five minutes," over a microphone he thought had been turned off. For some, this supposed joke is an example of his hawkishness not only toward the former Soviet Union but also toward Grenada, Cuba and others. If this is what counts for "diplomacy," no wonder we are in such trouble. Dean Wolfe, Surprise, Ariz...
...called moderate Taliban can be coaxed to break ranks with their extremist leaders, there is a hopeful precedent. Starting in early 2007, tens of thousands of Iraqi insurgents were persuaded to lay down their weapons in exchange for cash and jobs, usually as part of local militias fighting their former al-Qaeda allies. Building on that example, General Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander of international forces in Afghanistan, wrote in his recent assessment of the Afghan war that NATO "must identify opportunities to reintegrate former mid- to low-level insurgent fighters into normal society by offering them...
...plan worry that Karzai's corruption-riddled government is so detested that money and jobs will not be enough, on their own, to woo fighters to switch sides. "Paying the low-level [Taliban] may work temporarily, but it won't solve the main problems," says Ishaq Nizami, the former head of the TV and Radio Directorate under the Taliban regime. "There is so much corruption and no laws. In many areas the Taliban have been able to bring security and justice, which the government has not done. Even if some fighters turn, they will turn back again when they understand...