Word: kinsmen
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Father Frank Mihalic, a Jesuit missionary in New Guinea since 1948, views with sadness the degree to which education has alienated the young from their "one talks," as kinsmen are called. "They don't like history because history is embarrassing," he says. "They wince when I talk about the way their dad or their mom lived." Mihalic and other members of his order have intervened to prevent the government from burning spirit houses, used during tribal initiation rites. But other missionaries often tell the young people that their customs are primitive and barbaric. Relatives who have left villages...
...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...
...extremists who are holding the three Americans are seeking the release of 17 of their kinsmen and allies who are imprisoned in Kuwait for bombing several buildings, including the French and American embassies in 1983. The Administration's position: it will not negotiate with terrorists and will not ask Kuwait to do so. In any case, the Kuwaitis have said they would refuse any such request...