Word: polishing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...curbstones. Newly painted red-and- white pavement glistens, and gardeners are trimming shrubs in Maha Bandoola Park, next to the Sule Pagoda. All that effort by Burma's seven-week-old military government is part of an official campaign to "Keep Rangoon Pleasant." The cleanup is an attempt to polish the military's tarnished image -- and that has doomed it from the start. "They think we will like them if they clean up the city," says a shop clerk on Merchant Street. "We will never forget or forgive what they have done...
Just before Margaret Thatcher's visit to Poland last week, Prime Minister Mieczyslaw Rakowski had nothing but praise for her firmness in tackling Britain's economic problems. "I would very much like to be a pupil in her school," said Rakowski. Polish officials admired her effectiveness in curbing unions that blocked industrial reorganization...
...next day Thatcher became the first Western leader permitted to visit Gdansk for a meeting there with Walesa, receiving a rousing welcome from thousands of Poles chanting "Solidarnosc! Solidarnosc!" "You have achieved so much," she told Walesa and other Solidarity officials after lunch at St. Brigid's presbytery. Polish intellectuals pointed out a crucial difference between Thatcher's efforts to rein in British trade unions and Rakowski's confrontation with Solidarity. Unlike Poland's government, said Stanislaw Gebethner, a political science professor at the University of Warsaw, "Mrs. Thatcher carries legitimate power through democratic elections...
Thatcher made a modest offer to give Poles management training but snubbed the government's pleas for Western loans and relief on Poland's $36.4 billion foreign debt. The day when Polish officials grant real political freedoms, she said, "you will find your friends ready, not just to stand and cheer, but to help in practical ways...
...Lesniks, a small tribe of hunter-gatherers, have been conquered by a marauding band of Poles, whose leader, Krol Rudy, wants to establish an agricultural base to feed his vision of a unified Polish nation. Those Lesniks who escaped the butchery of the invasion hide in the neighboring mountains, gathering strength for a counterattack. But Cybula, their elder, receives a peace offering. Cybula has his doubts, not only about his enemy's intentions but about the new way of life posed by the prospect of tilling the fields: "It was not necessary to tickle and scratch Mother Earth to make...