Word: relics
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...Shabby Relic. At a press conference, Amin admitted only that six officers had been killed in a short-lived uprising that had been staged by dissident tribesmen of the army's Tiger battalion. After that, he claimed, one man had been killed and another wounded when tribesmen "burst into" the military police headquarters in the capital. The clear impression was that Amin was building pretexts for staffing both the government and his Soviet-equipped armed forces largely with members of his own small Moslem tribe, the Kakwa...
Indeed, Uganda is a shabby relic after six years of monumental misrule. The economy is a shambles. Nobody is starving, since there are plenty of bananas, the main staple for both food and (in distilled form) liquor. Corn, tapioca and yams also help ensure enough food for survival. But apart from the soil, not much of anything works today in Idi Amin's Uganda. Coffee and cotton were Uganda's chief export crops, but Asian and European marketing expertise has gone, and exports have declined drastically. At a time when coffee is at world-record high prices...
...reality lies in the Patriarch's story. Garcia Marquez says that he learned everything he could about actual dictators, then forgot it all in order to write the novel. The Patriarch ages, contemptibly deaf and senile, gradually cut off from authority by bureaucrats who preserve him as a useful relic. He caricatures Franco propped up by his bodyguards in motorcades and at podiums, or the pathetic fake photograph of Mao swimming in the Yangtze River. His solitariness is the loneliness of power taken to its extreme and most human degree...
...China's border policy is the massive settlement of its Han people among the native inhabitants. In Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, the 120,000 Chinese cadres are much in evidence, and the exiled Dalai Lama's Potala Palace is no more than a well-tended cultural relic. Urumchi, the capital of the Sinkiang Uighur autonomous region, has grown from 80,000 people in 1949 to 800,000 today, of whom 60% are Han, only 40% the traditional nomadic peoples-Uighurs, Kazakhs, Kirghiz and Mongols...
Over Lhasa, the golden roof of the Potala Palace sparkled in the thin air. Once the living heart of Tibetan Buddhism, spiritual and temporal seat of the Dalai Lama, Potala is now a cultural relic. It remains an architectural wonder. Designed as fortress, labyrinth and spiritual sanctuary, Potala rises 13 stories high and stretches 460 yards along the dominating hillside. Across the front of the palace, in giant white letters on a black background, was a solemn epitaph: ETERNAL GLORY TO CHAIRMAN MAO TSE-TUNG, GREAT LEADER AND GREAT TEACHER...