Word: putsch
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...young Red Guards on a murderous rampage that destroyed Liu's government and Deng's party. Thousands, if not millions, were killed. Lin became Mao's heir, but soon fell under suspicion of trying to turn Mao into a powerless figurehead. To avoid his own arrest, Lin attempted a putsch that failed. Premier Zhou Enlai was left in charge, but he too ended up in Jiang's sights as she maneuvered to succeed...
...eggshell fragility of the compromise quickly became evident, however, when Aristide promptly declared that the amnesty must not cover the top putsch leader, army chief Lieut. General Raoul Cedras, whom he labeled a common criminal. The vaguely worded accord, which needs to be ratified by Haiti's Parliament, was a "miracle," said an OAS diplomat, "but we'll need another miracle to make it stick...
...Nixon also survives in a far more favorable sense: he has lost none of his sure instinct for gauging the force and direction of the tides of power in world affairs. For example, writing immediately after the failed Moscow putsch of last August, he predicts with remarkable prescience that the Soviet Union will dissolve into a "commonwealth of free and equal nations" that "will coordinate, not govern, the actions of republics." Consequently, his advice on foreign policy is well worth the attention even of those who still gag on hearing his name...
...putsch leaders claimed that brute force was necessary to end Gamsakhurdia's brief, tyrannical rule. But they have set a dangerous precedent for the new republics. In overthrowing a popularly elected President, the Georgian rebels discredited the country's fledgling democratic institutions and opened the way for the kind of cyclical struggle between armed political clans that has hampered the growth of democracy elsewhere in the developing world. Says Soviet nationalities expert Paul Goble: "The idea that Gamsakhurdia is a fascist thug being replaced by liberals is nonsense." Not only is Georgia's own future clouded, but there...
There is one Georgian who rivals Gamsakhurdia in stature and who, as a former local Communist Party boss, knows every eddy in the complicated crosscurrents of Tbilisi politics: former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. In talks with the putsch leaders last week, he offered his help in getting democratic reform back on track. He publicly praised the takeover as a "democratic revolution" and promised "to devote all my energy to starting a movement of international support for building a democratic Georgia." Shevardnadze would certainly lend any post-Gamsakhurdia leadership the kind of authority it needs in the West...