Word: militiaization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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That mission may become a greater challenge within the parameters of the pact. Vermeesch and his battalion are based in a former Shi'ite militia hot spot, which promises only more sectarian tensions as Sunni families who fled the town begin to return to their old neighborhoods, which remain dominated by the Shi'a. Attacks are much fewer than last year but still average one a day, Vermeesch says. Now, under the security agreement, U.S. forces can no longer carry out a raid, search, cordon or even a patrol without their Iraqi counterparts. In the past two weeks, four minor...
...there was ever a true villain in Rwanda's genocide, Theoneste Bagosora was it. Bagosora, a senior Rwandan army official at the time of the 1994 slaughter, allegedly drew up lists of those marked for death two years before the killing began. He organized militia training and made sure recruits were armed, sometimes without his superiors' knowledge. Once the genocide started, Bagosora was just down the road - and fully aware of what was happening - as 10 Belgian peacekeepers were seized and killed...
...regime has a long-established willingness to use violence against its political opponents. In Matabeleland in the mid-1980s, his army killed thousands of civilians in a campaign to bloody the opposition Zapu Party. When his ruling Zanu-PF lost the March election, the security forces and allied militia were again unleashed to bludgeon Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) into backing out of a presidential runoff vote. Yet when Zimbabweans protest, with backing by world leaders, at its government's refusal to be voted out - the normal channels of democratic process - that action has little or no effect...
...clean democracy that has alienated the very Afghans that the West depends on to build a strong, stable country. Educated moderates, such as Samimi, have no love for the Taliban, but they have also become disillusioned with the current government's failings, as exemplified by the unaddressed predations of militia commanders. Francesc Vendrell, the former European Union envoy to Afghanistan, holds that "warlordism," as he calls it, is just as much at the root of the insurgency as religious ideology. "In Muslim society justice is the most essential element and, here in Afghanistan, people simply don't see it exist...
...first time warlords have had positions of power in Afghanistan. Following the 1989 withdrawal of Soviet troops, rival mujahedin groups that had united to drive the foreigners out turned on each other, further destroying the country in a brutal civil war marked by warlord rule. The government collapsed, and militia commanders were able to seize territory, terrorize the population and, in some cases, even issue currency. The Taliban capitalized on widespread disgust with their savagery, eventually coming to power in 1996. The U.S., unwilling to commit large numbers of ground troops when it went to overthrow the Taliban government, relied...