Word: leftist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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That seemed to be a clear call for a crackdown on the opposition, and the government took the cue. It immediately closed down 44 papers and magazines, and expelled five more Western correspondents (bringing to eleven the number deported thus far). In a particularly provocative move, it evicted a leftist Islamic group, the people's Mujahedin, from its headquarters in the former offices of the Shah's Pahlavi Foundation. Mujahedin leaders claimed Khomeini himself had assured them that they could keep their headquarters if they engaged only in normal political activity, but the authorities in Tehran...
...chief targets of the new measures, however, were the mutinous minority groups and their leftist allies. In another fiery speech, Khomeini said flatly: "If we had set up scaffolds in public squares and strung up these devils at the beginning of the revolution, we would have had none of these troubles." In ordering the army and his own Islamic guards to march to Kurdistan, he warned his military commanders: " You will meet revolutionary action yourselves if you fail to move into Kurdistan within 24 hours...
Khomeini had several motives in seeking to crush the Kurds. Most of all, he hopes to demonstrate the futility of intransigence to all the minority groups. Besides that, he wants to deprive the leftist insurgents of the haven that the Kurds have traditionally provided them. Finally, he is using the Kurdish challenge as a way of raising the spirits and fighting ability of the demoralized armed forces...
...military front, Hassan has been locked for almost four years in a no-win war against the guerrillas of the leftist Polisario Front, which is fighting to turn the barren but phosphate-rich, 103,000-sq.-mi. slab of desert into an independent "Saharan Arab Democratic Republic." At home, he has had to contend with rising public anger and labor strikes prompted by a deteriorating economy; it has suffered both from the decline in the price of phosphates, which provide a third of Morocco's export earnings, and from the war's cost, estimated at $1 million...
...sound of prayer coming from the local mosque, Gulam Mustafa, a leather goods manufacturer and local Bengali leader, says he has appealed repeatedly to the Home Office to help halt the attacks. The Bengalis' cause was taken up last year by the Anti-Nazi League, a leftist group formed to combat the National Front, but Bengalis are wary of being caught in the crossfire between left and right. "We need all the understanding possible to get along with the host country," explains Mustafa, "but we are the scapegoats in the confrontation. Where are our rights...