Word: muslim
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...destruction equally enraged Muslims -- roughly 12% of India's population of 870 million -- and ignited the gravest crisis in India since the religious massacres that followed independence in 1947. Muslim and Hindu mobs armed with knives, hatchets and fire bombs attacked each other's houses of worship, homes and people in Bombay, Calcutta and other cities. A semiofficial death count topped 1,000, though the true toll was believed to be much higher. Muslim mobs burned Hindu temples and homes in the neighboring, predominantly Islamic countries of Pakistan and Bangladesh; more than 30 people were killed in Pakistan. Even...
Serb artillery shoots from the slopes on one side of the city, and Muslim shoots from the other. Sometimes they throw shells at each other. Sometimes they drop them into town. The big shells arrive with a crisp, concussive WHUMP! But sniper fire you hear only at the shooting end -- an irregular background noise of flat, hard pops. You look up wildly at the hills and imagine the snipers squinting through cross hairs. You wonder what they may be able to see through the mist. You pause to decode the physics: the sound you hear has been taking its time...
Wiesel leads his delegation into the palace of Alija Izetbegovic, Muslim President of the shrunken republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is only an archipelago of besieged fortresses now. Wiesel has come to try to project a little of his luminous sanity and decency in the war zone, to hold everyone to a higher standard and possibly to make some of the killers ashamed of what they are doing. In an ornate ceremonial room painted toxic green, Wiesel, wonder rabbi out of Auschwitz, sits side by side with Izetbegovic, whom the nationalist Serbs see as the spearhead of a fundamentalist Muslim...
...Popovic barks on. "They say they are innocent! But did they tell you about the lists of Serbian women they kept that they wanted to put into harems?" There it is again, the Muslim horde. Wiesel calms the colonel and pleads for more blankets for the prisoners...
...McLuhan's famous metaphor sees the world as a global village. Actually, it has become a global city, a megalopolis with some rich neighborhoods and many poor neighborhoods and some that are terribly dangerous. Unfortunately, the big city has no police department, and the neighborhoods (the former U.S.S.R., the Muslim world, South Africa) are getting more dangerous. Almost everyone agrees it is too late for military intervention in Bosnia. The place makes me think of W.B. Yeats' haunting line, "And wondered what was left for massacre to save." The place to intervene, they say, now must be in Kosovo...