Word: kinsmen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...they make mistakes. The code of conduct is strict: nondescript clothing, four-door family cars, no drunkenness, no loud parties. Also no failures, no excuses, no second chances. This unforgiving system produces few defections: the penalty for dissent is death, not only for cell members but also for their kinsmen back home in Colombia...
Much in the style of Liberia's late President Samuel Doe, Siad Barre, a onetime policeman who seized power in a military coup in 1969, sealed his own fate by depending more and more on his kinsmen and overreacting to any challenge to his autocratic rule. Former U.S. diplomat Chester Crocker, a professor at Georgetown University, calls Siad Barre an "old-style, feudal, tribal chieftain." The country is ethnically homogeneous -- 98.8% are Somalis -- so there are no significant tribal hatreds. But its 8 million people are split into rival clans that have been battling one another for centuries...
...border, crippling the communications network in a string of towns from Zangelan to the Lenkoran region on the Caspian Sea. Thousands of Soviet Azerbaijanis gathered on the banks of the Araks River, the natural divide between the Soviet Union and Iran, set up loudspeakers and urged their Iranian kinsmen to join in a crusade for a unified homeland...