Word: rebel
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...humanitarian equivalent of a rock star. (I'll eat my hat if he does not meet Bono in the next 12 months.) Beah, 26, slight and handsome with a ready but wary smile, has written a memoir, and it's a doozy. Separated from his parents at 12 when rebel soldiers attacked his Sierra Leonean village, by 13 he was a child soldier and a drug addict. By 19 he was living in the U.S., at Oberlin College, in Ohio. In February he's starting on a book tour...
...Washington Post reported that some proceeds from the Iran sales had been placed in a CIA-managed Swiss bank account also used to fund the rebel forces in Afghanistan as well as Jonas Savimbi's troops fighting the Marxist government in Angola. Citing a "well-placed senior Administration official," the Post claimed the U.S. and Saudi Arabia had each placed $250 million in the account this year. Commingling the Iranian proceeds with these funds was described by the Post's source as a "dumb" mistake by an impatient CIA employee who did not wait for the creation of a separate...
...Victor, like all N.P.A. fighters, uses a nom de guerre. The platoon's machine gunner is called Comrade Bren.) A handsome man dressed in shin-length shorts and orange flip-flops, Victor first apologizes for his poor English (he speaks it perfectly), then for our circuitous journey: a rebel operation had caused more "bad weather" to the south. "Our people were carrying out a punitive action," says Victor, meaning an assassination by an N.P.A. "sparrow unit" or death squad. The man killed was a farmer, he explains, but his role as a police informer had earned him "a blood debt...
...from a nearby river. Their entire week is plotted out: from Monday to Friday, there's military and medical training, plus basic education and indoctrination sessions; weekends are devoted to food production and cultural activities. Even off duty, the platoon stays on message, gathering around a guitar to sing rebel songs or-possibly for the benefit of the platoon's foreign guests-the N.P.A.'s own anthem: "The New People's Army is not the army of the rich/ Which follows the orders of the greedy/ Awakened, we freely join the People's Army/ We offer our lives...
...large part of the story. Surveying more than 70 civil war outbreaks since the 1960s, they show that poor countries--with low per capita incomes and low growth rates--were significantly more likely to suffer civil war than richer countries. Put simply, it's easier to recruit people to rebel armies when the alternative to grinding axes is grinding poverty. At the same time, countries that rely heavily on exports of primary products (such as oil and diamonds) are prone to civil war because such commodities are easily appropriated and traded by rebel leaders. As Collier puts it, "Diamonds...