Word: regional
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...what officials are calling a political massacre "unequaled in recent history." A dozen journalists were slain, along with the wife of gubernatorial hopeful Ismael Mangudadatu. President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo declared a local state of emergency and vowed to pursue the perpetrators, who were alleged to be connected to the region's current governor, an Arroyo ally...
...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...
...governments that are taking the lion's share of any investment profits. Still, tensions can bubble up in surprising ways. In July, an al-Qaeda wing in North Africa vowed to target Chinese immigrants living there as revenge for the recent ethnic strife in China's largely Muslim Xinjiang region. The next month, riots against Chinese traders broke out in the Algerian capital Algiers, where residents accused the foreigners of failing to respect Islam. Last year, nine Chinese oil workers living near the Darfur area of Sudan were kidnapped by an unknown group. Five were later killed. An international trade...
...More troubling for the Indians than the Obama Administration's prioritizing of Afghanistan was a paragraph in the joint statement released during the President's Beijing visit: it welcomed Chinese involvement in South Asia and spoke of Beijing's ability to "promote peace, stability and development in that region." In New Delhi, this was read as a sign of U.S. acceptance of China viewing South Asia - India's neighborhood - as part of its own sphere of influence. Chellaney sees the statement as a "return to a kind of Cold War thinking where two great powers can dictate terms...
...President Obama has encouraged the Taliban to simply wait out the Americans. Supporters counter that by declaring that the U.S. commitment is finite, the President is forcing Karzai and the Pakistanis to take more responsibility for fighting the Taliban. That debate may be missing the point: everyone in the region is already acting on the assumption that the U.S. presence is temporary, knowing that America can't sustain a permanent occupation. One reason Karzai has made common cause with some notorious thugs is that he feels the need to have some muscle behind him when the U.S. goes. The Pakistanis...