Word: nation
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...many Papua New Guineans, it's not surprising that their nation stands on the front lines of China's global campaign. Located on the eastern half of the world's second largest island, P.N.G. is the most linguistically diverse region of the world, with at least 800 distinct local languages spoken by just 6.5 million people. Yet despite the tribal diversity, the nation is unified in at least one aspect: suspicion of foreign exploitation of its plentiful resources, ranging from natural gas and timber to fisheries and gold. Tensions exploded in the 1990s on the P.N.G. island of Bougainville, where...
...even some of the more modest predictions about Jacob Zuma's rise to power had been correct, South Africa would be an empty, corrupt dictatorship by now. Back in 2006, South African memoirist Rian Malan ended his dismal assessment of the nation's prospects ("Not civil war, but sad decay") in British magazine the Spectator by asking: "Anyone want a house here?" A year ago, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu said he was "deeply saddened" when Zuma staged a party coup against his predecessor Thabo Mbeki, "deeply disturbed" that both had used institutions of state in their struggle and warned that...
...football World Cup - whose expected 500,000 fans will deliver an unprecedented challenge to his government's ability to deliver on security, transport and infrastructure upgrades. Zuma has also set himself other ambitious targets against which the South African public can judge him. In his state of the nation address in June, the new President promised half a million public-works jobs by the end of this year and 4 million by 2014; universal primary education and 95% enrolment in secondary schools by 2014; a 50% cut in new HIV infections and 80% coverage of antiretroviral treatment drugs...
...Bhambatha rebellion, during which on June 10, 1906, the British imperial army massacred hundreds of Zulus in Mome Gorge, just below his home town, that he "came to understand and to be angry about colonial oppression." An old-fashioned, almost Victorian outlook remains. He may embrace polygamy - in a nation of millions of single mothers, Zuma calls it socially responsible - but the President disapproves of alcohol and television (both are "killing the nation," he told the teachers' conference in Durban), has boasted about how as a boy he used to "knock out" homosexuals and laments the disappearance of corporal punishment...
Just a Beginning Can he succeed? The problems South Africa faces would challenge even the best- run nation, and South Africa is far from that. State institutions have been hurt by the departure or exclusion of apartheid-era workers and their replacement with officials too often appointed for their political connections. Zuma's aide says the biggest obstacles to success are "corruption and ineptness in the bureaucracy." But reforming the civil service would mean turning on many of those who put him in power. "There is one very bold thing that can be done," says Andrew Feinstein, a dissident former...