Word: waldheim
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...days later Saddam held an impromptu news conference in Baghdad with journalists accompanying Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, who secured the release of 80 Austrian hostages. The foreign nationals he was holding, Saddam said, are "to prevent attacks from happening." Saddam vowed to remain in Kuwait and derided the kingdom's former rulers for "sitting around gambling tables wasting millions." U.S. and Western intervention in the gulf was "naked aggression," Saddam charged, warning, "Whoever collides with Iraq will find columns of dead bodies, which may have a beginning...
...attend since the Communist government had not let him leave the country in many years. But now Havel is the government -- and he had R.S.V.P.ed, after all. So off to Mozart's birthplace the Czechoslovak President went last week, even if it did mean meeting his Austrian counterpart, Kurt Waldheim, thus breaching the international isolation imposed on the Austrian leader because of his dubious wartime past...
...Waldheim thought he would get a p.r. windfall from Havel's visit, he underestimated his man. Though a beaming Waldheim introduced Havel to the crowd in glowing terms, the playwright President did not return the compliment. Instead, using language that was indirect but clear enough, he verbally lacerated his opposite number, who for years concealed his service as an officer in a German army unit linked to Nazi atrocities in the Balkans during World War II. Choosing the fear of history as his theme, Havel called "the expectation that one can glide through history unpunished and rewrite...
...repeatedly emphasized that their visits were private, not official, and for added effect, they cut their stays short, leaving Austria within several hours of their arrival. Still, the visit enraged many Jews, four of whom, including American Rabbi Avi Weiss, were arrested for public disorder after they shouted at Waldheim before Havel spoke...
Since his election in 1986, Waldheim has wooed only one other Western head of state to Austria, Cypriot President George Vassiliou, who visited Vienna in early July. With two years left in his term and with the boycott against him broken, Waldheim might yet have other callers. But after his encounter with Havel, he just might prefer his solitude...