Word: westernizes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...This inertia of habit may ensure that after 50 years, even a debilitated ETA could be hard to eradicate. "Think of those communist parties in Western Europe, or neo-Nazi groups, who don't have the slightest chance of ever returning to power - they're still around," Sánchez-Cuenca says. "An organization is a lot harder to kill than an individual...
...years after the Russian Revolution and 20 years on from the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe's last Soviet-style government is finally on its way out. In Moldova this week, four months after popular upheaval, the Communist Party accepted defeat in a national election. Four pro-Western opposition parties must now scrabble together a coalition which they say will distance the country from Moscow, more fully embrace democracy and integrate with Europe. "This is definitely the beginning of something new," says Viorel Ursu, Moldovan analyst with the Open Society Institute in Brussels. "The difference between the Communists...
...world's radar. There is even a board game called Where is Moldova?, designed to teach geography. Locked between Ukraine and Romania, it has the sad distinction of being Europe's poorest country. About a sixth of its population works abroad, largely in menial jobs on the streets of Western Europe. But it made headlines in April when thousands of Moldovans, mostly young people, took to the street crying fraud after elections that returned the Communist Party to power. Protesters torched buildings and ransacked the presidential palace. (Read: "Ghosts of Kosovo...
...Over the past few years a new breed of young Muslim activists, most of them educated and from the middle class, have aggressively embraced a stricter version of Islam, rejecting anything Western and Christian. Boko Haram began life as a peaceful group focused on the study of the Koran, according to Abdulmumin Sa'ad, a Muslim scholar and professor of sociology at the University of Maiduguri. "The idea was that there is a lot of sin in the larger society and their parents had amassed a lot of ill-gotten wealth," says Sa'ad, who taught some of the militants...
...Western diplomats worry that the security vacuum may allow foreign terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda to move in. Osama bin Laden is widely admired in the arid north. It has become fashionable for Muslims to name their sons after him, while his picture adorns T-shirts and posters. In a speech in 2000, bin Laden named Nigeria as among "the region[s] most qualified for liberation." "Clearly there is a lot of concern in Washington with the idea that al-Qaeda can gain a foothold within the 65 million-strong Muslim population in northern Nigeria," says the U.S. official...