Word: guerrillas
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Rwandan President Paul Kagame followed a well-trod route to power in Africa, from child refugee to guerrilla leader to civilian president. Like other African strongmen, human rights groups have accused him of abuse of power, particularly for slow progress on human rights and for, they say, using the 1994 genocide as an excuse to repress the opposition. But since he deposed President Pasteur Bizimungu and assumed the presidency in 2000 and was formally elected in 2003, Kagame's government has also racked up impressive successes. It shows no tolerance for corruption, it has been hailed for its success...
...consensus among the diplomatic community in Kigali is that Kagame is a benevolent dictator. One senior Western official says that, contrary to predictions that Kagame would follow the African pattern of guerrilla leaders turning corrupt autocrat, he is devolving power and enforcing accountability. Last year, he gutted the central bureaucracies and handed many powers to local mayors, who now report every three months to the President. "It's democracy with constraints," says the diplomat. "You're free to criticize, but you can't bring up the ethnic question, or you'll end up in jail." Kagame points out that...
...August briefing. "If they continue their behavior and we put together the file that's necessary, I think it would be fairly convincing." U.S. diplomats in the region, meanwhile, push the view that Meles is a reformed rebel turned aspirant democrat, whereas Eritrean President Isaias Afewerki is an unreconstructed guerrilla leader...
...Among those charged with conspiracy to kill, kidnap and maim, among other accusations, was General Vang Pao, a member of the Hmong minority whose guerrilla forces had been funded by the CIA during the Vietnam War to fight the Viet Cong-aligned communists of the Pathet Lao. Along with an estimated 200,000 Laotian Hmong, Vang Pao fled to the U.S. after America withdrew from Indochina in 1975 and communist forces took over Laos and Vietnam. Now, the 77-year-old ex-CIA operative, along with nine other Laotian-born Americans and a former U.S. Army ranger who served...
...need more jails or laws in Nicaragua, we need more opportunities for young people," says Commissioner Hamyn Gurdi?n, head of the police effort to demobilize gangs. Gurdi?n - who during the 1970s, at age 16, had gone into the mountains to join the Sandinista rebels - says that guerrilla experience, shared by many police officers, helps them to empathize with gang members and identify personally with the three-step demobilization process: cease-fire, disarmament and social reintegration. "That experience made us sensitive to their problems," he said. "Their life, the lack of opportunities they have, that is what it was like...