Word: tribalized
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...danger is that Zaire, a vast territory 20% larger than Mexico, could begin to disintegrate, plunging its 250-odd tribal groups into a nightmarish civil war of the kind that has left tens of thousands dead in Somalia and Liberia. Shortages of food and gasoline are severe; road and rail links between major cities have been virtually swallowed by the encroaching jungle. Even in the capital's Mama Yemo hospital -- named for Mobutu's deceased mother -- children suffer without medication, and hundreds of victims of the AIDS epidemic die untreated. In the trackless bush, where millions of peasants and tribesmen...
Mobutu still managed to cut a dashing if reptilian figure on the international stage. Resplendent in his leopardskin toque, symbol of his authority as a traditional tribal chief, the jovial dictator has had little difficulty charming nearly all U.S. Presidents stretching back to John Kennedy. Political friendships with a long line of leaders in China, Romania, France, North Korea, South Africa and Israel (where he trained as a paratrooper) made him a widely traveled statesman. Some were seduced by Mobutu's eagerness to serve as a bulwark against Soviet expansion in the heart of Africa, others by Zaire's natural...
...more a tribal artist than Picasso. But his primitivism came from inside, and part of the originality of his art lies in his effort to take back his gods from the man who, with such momentous consequences for art 30 years earlier, had appropriated them...
...Balkans have become a sort of Bermuda Triangle into which human decencies vanish without a trace. In the post-cold war era, it is unsettling to think that conscienceless tribal ferocity may catch on around the world. Rape, of course, has been an apparently inevitable part of war since men first threw rocks at each other -- or anyway since Rome was founded upon the rape of the Sabines. Joseph Stalin expressed a prevailing (male victor's) view of rape in war. When Yugoslav Milovan Djilas complained about the rapes that Russians had committed in Yugoslavia, Stalin replied...
...simplify; they can yell. But they make an impact that sets in motion the deeper operations of judgment. The secular faith of the 20th century insists that history is progress, that time's arrow points the human race towards an ever brighter future. Then the world dissolves again into tribal bloodletting, and we wonder whether history is cyclical, always orbiting through the same thickets of hope and misfortune. When we look at news photographs, we bring to them the questions that history forces upon us: What should we think of human affairs? What is to be done? Pictures...