Word: southerning
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Zimbabwe, the physical heart of southern Africa, is once again its political and spiritual battleground. As I write this, President Robert Mugabe is trying to block democratic change that challenges his 28-year rule. But he and his party, the Zimbabwe African National Union?Patriotic Front, do not regard the people's votes as the arbiter of power - or, if they do in theory, they do not accept in practice that they could ever lose an election. In Mugabe's eyes, his right to rule derives from his status as the leader of the liberation movement, the breaker of white...
Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, has always been crucial to the politics of southern Africa. Ruthlessly grabbed by Cecil Rhodes and a ragtag army of white adventurers in the 19th century, it became virtually a European country, the original inhabitants driven from their land and reduced to workers and servants. Although Rhodesia had one of the continent's best-educated African populations, it denied Africans political power. In 1965, after Britain tried to force change on the white settlers, they declared it an independent, white-ruled republic. Black majority rule? "Not in a thousand years," proclaimed the white leader, Ian Smith. That...
...outsiders, the peaceful transitions from white to black rule in Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa were nothing short of miraculous. Many expected that white rule in Southern Africa would end in a bloodbath. But there was a price. While the new rulers accepted the notions of Western-style multiparty democracy, in their hearts the liberation movements did not contemplate that they could lose power at the ballot...
...escalating tension in the relationship between Washington and Moscow. President Bush on Tuesday strongly backed NATO membership bids by the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia, a move fiercely opposed by Moscow, which sees it as an effort to extend a geopolitical rival's presence to Russia's southern and southwestern frontiers. Although some European NATO members are reluctant to antagonize Russia by forging ahead with inducting Georgia and Ukraine, President Bush made clear that he backs the launch of the membership process for the two countries...
...Hence the appeal, for Putin at least, of a compromise accepting the presence of the missile shield on its borders in exchange for keeping its southern neighbors out of NATO. It remains to be seen, however, whether President Bush - who talked passionately on Tuesday about the need for NATO to admit Georgia and Ukraine - is ready to split the difference...