Word: french
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Throughout the Middle East, it was a bad week for the forces of moderation. In Beirut, four French television crewmen were kidnaped on Saturday by unknown gunmen. Earlier, the shadowy Islamic Jihad, believed to be the umbrella organization that includes Shi'ite Fundamentalist groups like the Iranian-backed Hizballah (Party of God), announced that it had killed French Researcher Michel Seurat, 37, one of the four other Frenchmen kidnaped in the Lebanese capital during the past two years. Six Americans and one Briton are still missing. The reasons for the alleged murder: retaliation against the French for their pro-Iraq...
...membership is scattered. Ferdinand Marcos will evidently settle in Hawaii. "Baby Doc" Duvalier has moved to the French Riviera, at least for the time being. Uganda's Idi Amin has managed to make himself all but invisible in Saudi Arabia. The Central African Republic's Emperor Bokassa has found a home near Paris. And so on. But such men are rarely welcomed, and never feel at home, in the places where the jet stream has deposited them. They keep out of sight...
...pain of being a pariah! French authorities last week allowed Jean- Claude ("Baby Doc") Duvalier, Haiti's ousted dictator, to quit the lakeside luxury hotel where he, his wife Michele and their entourage have holed up for a month. His destination: St. Vallier-de-Thiey, a pastoral community within minutes of the silvery beaches of the French Riviera. Baby Doc has reportedly been placed under a relaxed form of house arrest that limits his movements to the immediate area...
...former dictator has even grander designs in the region, namely, a $7 million chateau nearby with 240 acres. Duvalier's arrival was met with local protests. While authorities deny that Baby Doc will be permitted to live in France permanently, no country has yet offered him refuge, and the French seem resigned to letting him stay on--at least long enough to get his backhand in shape...
Even Prime Minister David Lange conceded that the tactic was "really a strange way of trying to obtain the liberty of two guilty people." Still, Lange charged last week in a letter to French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas that Paris has blocked $7 million worth of imported New Zealand lamb brains to pressure Wellington into releasing two French intelligence officers involved in the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, the flagship of the international environmental organization Greenpeace. A Greenpeace photographer was killed in the incident, which occurred while the vessel was docked in Auckland harbor last July...