Word: ironic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...throng, which has been growing steadily, surges ahead. The red iron gates have eased open a crack, enough to let through a single file of supplicants. Inside, 12 Somali guards dressed in battle fatigues and armed with M-16 rifles issue orders. Wielding 3-ft. wooden switches, they herd the people into neat rows at the rear of a large earthen courtyard. In 30 minutes more than 2,000 people are seated on the ground while others stream in: nomad women wrapped in black shawls, grandmothers in tattered sackcloth, lone children naked but for a makeshift shirt. At one point...
Before the Bosnian war, Prijedor, a town of 30,000 six miles from Kozarac, was a busy industrial center. Now its rail yards are silent. The lumber mills, food-processing plants and iron mines have shut down. Schools will not open this fall. The Serbian militia provides almost the only employment...
...self- mortification, and lusted to harvest souls. They strove to break down native sexual and religious customs, but, as Vollmann tells it, were more tolerant of the Indians' prolonged and joyous ritual torture of captured enemies. Tribes sold their souls (literally) as dearly as possible, in return for iron hatchets, copper cook pots, measles and smallpox, a few guns and, rather late in the game, brandy. When they could, they caught the Jesuits and tortured them, thus increasing the clerics' chances of canonization. (Pere Jean de Brebeuf, one of the murdered Jesuits, was made a saint...
Journalists have visited some of the camps and pieced together eyewitness accounts from refugees and escapees. At the Omarska iron-mining complex in northwest Bosnia, according to a former prisoner interviewed in the New York newspaper Newsday, more than a thousand Muslim and Croat civilians were held by Serbs in metal cages stacked four high, without food or water. He said groups of 10 to 15 were removed every few days and shot; many others were beaten to death. British television footage of an open-air jail at Trnopolje showed thousands of prisoners who were dirty, dazed and emaciated...
...presidential commission has called for the phase-out of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, the two special services that broadcast news behind the Iron Curtain for over 40 years. The group said the $207 million-a-year operations duplicate the Voice of America, the general overseas U.S. network. The recommendations contradict those of a previous Bush task force. The latest report also urges shutting down the Cuba-beamed TV Marti and skipping the start-up of a Radio Free China. Both have influential congressional backers...