Word: gunpoint
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...five long weeks they have been held under threat of death in the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Their arms have been bound, and they have been forbidden to speak to one another. Their captors have subjected them to intense questioning, and even threatened some of them at gunpoint. All the while, crowds of fanatical followers of the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini have demonstrated outside the embassy walls...
...Penh, once a placid, luxury-loving city of broad avenues and towering hibiscus trees, became a ghost town as the Khmer Rouge force marched the city's refugee-swollen population to resettlement on rural communes that were no better than slave-labor camps. Even the wounded were prodded at gunpoint from hospital beds ?and left to die along the roadside if they were too weak to walk. At the camps, Cambodians of all ages were forced to work from dawn until after dusk planting rice. Families were separated, Buddhism abolished as the state religion and virtually every trapping...
...stem the flow, Macias ordered all the boats in the country destroyed. When labor shortages appeared on his cocoa plantations, he pressed 20,000 of his countrymen into slavery at gunpoint. Recalled one Guinean: "If you didn't go, you were shot." His approach to dissent was epitomized by the way he dealt with one group of 150 political prisoners: they were lined up in a stadium on Christmas Eve and shot as loudspeakers played the tune, Those Were the Days, My Friend...
...instructed the police not to "arrest or pursue criminals" until further notice-thereby giving the capital's organized criminals free rein. As if to prove the government's impotence, a group of disaffected young Iranians, seeking to leave the country on expired passports, seized 150 hostages at gunpoint and closed down Tehran's international airport for more than 20 hours...
...Vietnamese, along with other refugees from Cambodia and Laos, have been trapped at temporary camps in the region: besides the 76,000 in Malaysia, there are 161,000 in Thailand, 32,000 in Indonesia, 58,000 in Hong Kong. Last month Thailand repatriated 42,000 Cambodians at gunpoint, sending them back across the border to danger and possible death. Thousands are forcibly kept on ships in Hong Kong awaiting permission to go ashore. In Hong Kong, picnickers sail with silent embarrassment past the Skyluck, with its 2,664 Vietnamese survivors and its beseeching banners, HAVE MERCY...