Word: separatists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...life, warriors are judged by their prowess on the battlefield; in death, by the manner of their dying. When Russian special forces cornered Chechen separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov in a basement in the village of Tolstoy Yurt, Chechnya, last week, they offered him the chance to surrender. When he refused, the Russians say, they blasted the concrete bunker in which he was hiding, killing him in the process. That final gesture of defiance has transformed Maskhadov's reputation. For years, many former comrades disdained him as a weak political leader who, after a victorious war of secession against Russia...
...tsunami left more than 123,000 dead in Indonesia's Aceh province. But when negotiators in Helsinki last week announced a breakthrough in talks between separatist rebels and the Indonesian government, it appeared that some good might come from the tragedy. The Free Aceh Movement, known as GAM, offered to drop its demand for independence. "There's not a single member of the GAM negotiating team who hasn't lost family members in the tsunami," says Damien Kingsbury, an Australian academic who advised the rebel negotiators in Finland. "There's a very deep sense of loss and the suffering...
...wants to form its own political party and run in elections after a peace agreement is signed. Current law, however, bars those who have been involved in separatist activity from taking part in local elections...
...marked man. In 1989, after Saddam Hussein's army had ravaged the Kurdish population of northern Iraq with chemical weapons, the dictator offered amnesty to all Kurdish soldiers who fought against him--except one. Saddam ordered his minions to hunt down Talabani, a chief of the Kurdish separatist guerrillas known as the peshmerga. If Talabani was caught, Saddam vowed, he would put him to death...
...fundamental constitutional issues, and that Ibarretxe's proposal "leads to a dead end." Indeed, when the Spanish parliament votes on the plan in the coming months, it is certain to reject it. Ibarretxe vows to put the question to the Basque people in a referendum, though only once the separatist terrorist group ETA declares a cease-fire. "If there are no negotiations," he says, "I'll consult the Basque people." That move could backfire, if it ever even happens. Separatist sentiment was on display when thousands marched on Jan. 8 in Bilbao, but a poll last week showed Basques oppose...