Word: lasting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This is not Nouri's first scuffle with hard-liners: in an impeachment trial last year, parliament ousted him as Minister of the Interior for permitting student demonstrations. Since then, his main vehicle of dissent has been the national daily Khordad. The newspaper has published defiant antiregime opinions by prominent clerics, notably Grand Ayatullah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who has been under house arrest since 1997 for questioning velayat-e-faqih, the absolute authority of the clergy. In an explosive article, a young cleric, Mohsen Kadivar, even criticized the royalist tendencies of the clerics and their treatment of Supreme Leader Ayatullah...
Some Khatami supporters fear that bullying tactics will deal a fatal blow to the President's reforms and perhaps trigger a repeat of last summer's student riots, which in turn could prompt a military crackdown. However, Khatami may still be able to pull off a victory. His strategy is to send a flood of loyalist candidates to the election board, so that even if political stars like Nouri are barred, a solid number will survive the vetting process and get elected. Some analysts are predicting that the regime's heavy-handed tactics could wind up mobilizing the sort...
...head before a minder steadied him. Another aide whispered the presidential oath in his ear as he pretended to read the words out loud from the folder thrust into his hands. It was an awkward beginning in front of the national assembly for Abdurrahman Wahid, a stroke victim who last Wednesday became the first freely elected President of Indonesia. And it was a bitter denouement for Megawati Sukarnoputri, the presumed front runner who had been left sucking for air by a series of political maneuvers she hadn't even seen coming...
...euphoria to violent despair and back. But despite the ethnic violence, lynchings and looting in major cities and the carnage in seceding East Timor, this sprawling archipelago of 210 million people has not disintegrated into ungovernability or civil war. Some had predicted the world's next Yugoslavia, but after last week, Indonesia had instead completed its graduation from a military-backed dictatorship to the world's third largest democracy (after India and the U.S.). "Indonesia is born again," said military historian Salim Said. "This is a chance to finally see if civilians can run the country...
...June's national elections. But subsequently the former housewife failed to reach out to other parties to guarantee herself a majority in the assembly. Muslim parties began to rail against the prospect of having a female President. Wahid and Megawati had been very close in the reformist campaign last year, but even he came to resent her aloofness after the June polls: a mobile phone he carried whose number only she knew "rarely rang," according to one of his aides...