Word: warlord
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...hard to get people to agree even on what they disagree about, nobody lobbies for sending children into battle, and the people who put them there serve as the kind of villains any storyteller would love. The first person the controversial International Criminal Court will try is a Congolese warlord accused of conscripting kids...
...Whether Somalia can rebuild itself as a nation state depends on its ability to create a central government whose power trumps that of any one warlord. And a month after Ethiopia invaded in a lightning advance that ousted the ruling Islamists and installed the centrist Transitional Federal Government (T.F.G.) in Mogadishu, the prognosis has to be: unlikely. The T.F.G. has little popular support inside Somalia and - crucial in a place where muscle counts most - only a hastily reconstituted army of retired soldiers to protect it. The T.F.G. needs help. But from whom...
...Even then, the wages paid by the security forces are minuscule compared to what a fighter can earn working for a heroin-trafficking warlord. Still, says Jawad, government recruiters are able to play on patriotism and moral duty. "We should not look at strictly on a dollar basis," he says. "This is building Afghanistan, and the other path is destroying Afghanistan. So people are willing to take some sacrifices providing they're able to feed their children...
...Farewell My Concubine, nicely arranges the vectors of comradeship and competition, power and conscience. Zhou Xiaowen's direction is on the stolid side, but his coaxes his lead actors into giving superb performances, full of the intelligent fury the material demands. This is a movie headed for tragedy (the warlord orders Jianli blinded by the fumes of horse urine!), and by the end two of the three are dead. The lieutenant, driven mad with jealousy on hearing of Yueyang's affair with Jianli, murders and mutilates her. Shadow nearly becomes a Sino splatter movie when a courtier tells the warlord...
...ceremony installing the warlord as emperor, the weakened Jianli takes a frail swipe at his exalted friend-foe. Few people notice. "History will record that when you were installed, I attacked you," Jianli says, and the now-Emperor replies, Wrong. I write the history books. And they will say I kept you alive, because you are my eternal shadow." Jianli has poisoned himself, so as not to be anyone's shadow, and gasps out his last word: "Brother." To put the musician out of his misery, the Emperor ritually stabs him. Then we hear the anthem Jianli has composed. "Everlasting...