Word: guerrillas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When a publicity-hungry guerrilla gang kidnaped miner Scott Royden Heimdal near the Colombia-Ecuador border last April and demanded a $1.5 million ransom, his family in Peoria, Ill., despaired: the sum was utterly beyond its reach. Then Marge and Roy Heimdal heard that the kidnapers had cut the ransom to $60,000, and issued an appeal for help. Over the next four days, all Peoria joined in a frantic campaign to raise the cash. Children sold lemonade; retirees held bake sales...
Environmentalist Kerr, 35, is the Ralph Nader of the old-growth preservation movement. As conservation director of the Oregon Natural Resources Council, a grass-roots coalition, he has spearheaded a guerrilla campaign in the courts, Congress and the media to drive the old-growth timber industry out of business. "Social change comes with social tension. We will do anything that's legal, anything," he says. "The more heat I take as a lightning rod, the better it is for this issue...
...will be 72 next month, but his burdens are at least as heavy as they were when he led an urban guerrilla band or sweated out 27 years in prison. He heads a liberation movement that is striving to turn itself into a political party. At the same time, he is trying to organize negotiations with the South African government on a new and just constitution...
Theoretically, Mandela and his organization also advocate continuing "armed struggle" against the government, but in practice that option faded when the A.N.C. agreed to operate as a legal party. In any case, the congress has demonstrated its ineffectiveness at guerrilla warfare over three decades. Violence is not politically useful in South Africa; the white security forces contain it easily. Change there has become inevitable mostly because blacks outnumber whites about 5 to 1 and are becoming stronger politically and economically...
Just when Sri Lankans thought they had seen the end of it, war returned last week with blistering force. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a guerrilla group fighting for an independent ethnic Tamil homeland, attacked several police stations in Sri Lanka's northeastern province. At least 300 people are believed to have died in the first days of fighting; some reports said at least 100 of them were policemen executed by the rebels. The government dispatched an additional 4,200 troops to the region (the total now: 15,000) and began using helicopter gunships, artillery and aerial bombardment...