Word: northerner
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Ever since gold miners first scraped their fortunes out of the hills of Northern California, America's most populous state has been a land of titanic dreams. These days, though, it's a place with big problems. Its $42-billion budget deficit would make an out-of-control Hollywood director blush - and bankrupt a small nation. Its schools are failing, air quality is worsening, and unemployment neared 10% as of December. The only thing larger than its litany of woes is the roster of political celebrities who are testing the waters for a run for governor in 2010, when term...
...ignoring abuses committed by its Afghan proxies. One of the worst offenders, alleges Samimi, is Abdul Rashid Dostum, an ethnic-Uzbek warlord who helped in the triumphant ousting of the Taliban in 2001, when, backed by U.S. special forces, he led hundreds of men on horseback to liberate the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. Dostum's militia is accused of that war's worst human-rights atrocity, in which hundreds of his captives suffocated to death after having been locked inside shipping containers. He denies the charges. Samimi is not concerned about Dostum's wartime activities...
...many mothers in Afghanistan, Maghferat Samimi has affixed a photo of a child to her mobile phone. But the 2 1/2-year-old is not her daughter. She is a rape victim, one of scores that Samimi, a researcher with the Afghanistan Human Rights Organization, has documented in the country's northern provinces over the past year. Witnesses to the child's abduction by a local militia commander have had their rape claim backed up by a nearby hospital, but the district police chief maintains that the child fell on a stick. The chief's objectivity in the matter, however, is hardly...
...that of the 14th century Central Asian military conqueror Tamerlane. The money to build the house, Dostum says, came from Afghan President Hamid Karzai, for whom he was military chief of staff. According to Dostum, Karzai pays him $80,000 a month to serve as his emissary to the northern provinces. "I asked for a year up front in cash so that I could build my dream house," he says...
...foreigners turned on one another in a brutal civil war. The government collapsed, and militia commanders were able to seize territory and terrorize the population. The Taliban capitalized on widespread disgust with the warlords' savagery, coming to power in 1996. After Sept. 11, the U.S. relied on the northern warlords and their militias to help oust the Taliban. Many of those leaders were given prominent positions when the new Afghan government was formed, enabling them to claw back credibility that had been lost because of their behavior in the civil...