Word: strongman
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Once a port of call for NATO warships, Malta under Labor increasingly turned to the Soviet Union, North Korea and Libya for economic and military aid. So close were security ties with Libyan Strongman Muammar Gaddafi that Maltese officials tried to warn Tripoli minutes before last year's U.S. air raid on Libya...
That is surely good news for Aquino, whose People Power revolution helped drive former Strongman Ferdinand Marcos from office just over one year ago. Since then she has been beset with a mild flurry of rightist plots aimed at either unseating her or destabilizing her government. An 18-year Communist insurgency stopped briefly but resumed with a vengeance last February. For the economy, the result was that the Philippine GNP, which had dropped 5.6% in 1984 and another 3.8% in 1985, continued to fall through the first half of 1986 before ticking up an almost unnoticeable...
...battles at Ouadi-Doum and Faya-Largeau handed Libyan Strongman Colonel Muammar Gaddafi one of the most ignominious defeats of his 18-year rule. State-run Chadian radio hailed the capture of the 12,500-ft. airstrip at Ouadi-Doum as the "beginning of the end of Gaddafi's expansionist dreams." The debacle not only delivered a near fatal blow to Libya's occupation of northern Chad but also damaged Gaddafi's standing at home, where Libyans are already grumbling about a sickly economy that is suffering from the slump in oil prices...
...object of Helms' ire was General Manuel Noriega, commander of Panama's defense force and the nation's strongman since 1983. Helms accused Noriega, a onetime intelligence chief and right-hand man of the late populist dictator Omar Torrijos, of being "head of the biggest drug-trafficking operation in the Western Hemisphere." Even Noriega's staunchest supporters in Washington suspected that Helms was on to something. Says one Reagan Administration official: "Noriega gets a cut of every kind of illicit business down there...
Chad's 20-year civil war took a startling, bloody turn last week as some 2,000 rebels battled three Libyan columns in Chad's Tibesti mountain region. The guerrillas, who earlier helped Libya gain a foothold in northern Chad, broke with Libyan Strongman Muammar Gaddafi after his troops shot and wounded Rebel Leader Goukouni Oueddei last October...