Word: sectarian
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...EXECUTED. Fabianus Tibo, 60, Marinus Riwu, 48, and Dominggus da Silva, 42, Christian militants convicted of plotting the massacre of at least 70 Muslims on Sulawesi during sectarian violence on the Indonesian island in 1998-2000; in Poso, Indonesia. Rights groups criticized the trio's 2001 conviction, claiming that Muslims had received lighter sentences for similar crimes, while the Vatican issued a plea for clemency last month. Christians rioted across eastern Indonesia following the executions...
...reinforce the Bush Administration's "stay the course" message by pointing to forthcoming handovers of power or elections, the creation of a national unity government or the killing of the terrorist Zarqawi as potential watershed moments. But all those milestones have long been passed, and still the insurgency rages, sectarian killings are at an all-time high, reconstruction remains hobbled by the security situation and a slide toward civil war threatens to tear the country apart. In July alone, Iraq lost more civilians than the U.S. did on 9/11 - then, that grim feat was repeated in August...
...problem is not, however, managerial. Those crying out for an Iraqi Mandela to reconcile sectarian foes in pursuit of the greater good - or even an Iraqi Mubarak, the benign authoritarian leader of Egypt who enforces stability with an iron hand - may not have noticed that the forces unleashed and empowered by the U.S. invasion and its democratic aftermath render both options unlikely...
...Iraq's ethnic and religious breakdown would actually require more than one Mandela to hold the country together. But leaders reaching out across sectarian and ethnic lines have not fared well in Iraqi democracy. The secular democrats were heavily defeated in the first post-Saddam election, and were further marginalized in the second as Iraqis voted almost exclusively on religious and ethnic lines...
...Secretary General Kofi Annan on Monday warned that Iraq is teetering on the brink of collapse as a nation-state, and more than 40,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the U.S. invasion that has turned the country into the fulcrum of regional instability, sectarian conflict and terrorism. So, President Bush's audience at the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday cannot help but recall his address to the same forum four years ago, when he made a case for war with Iraq based on a litany of what turned out to be spurious claims concerning active nuclear and chemical...