A DATE - February 23 1981 – and the words “Everyone on the floor!” are inseparable in Spanish memories because on this day at 6.23pm a Guardia Civil lieutenant colonel brandishing a pistol barked this order as he strode into the Madrid parliament chamber.
Last May, Rodrigo Rosenberg Marzana spoke from the grave via a pre-recorded video message: “If you are watching or listening to this message, it means I was murdered,” he said. Rosenberg’s macabre had come horribly true and he was shot whilst cycling in Guatemala City on May 10.
By Angela Moran - After 20 years of socialist governments, Chile has a democratically-elected conservative president for the first time since 1958. No longer equating conservatism with the rightwing dictatorship imposed by General Augusto Pinochet in a military coup in 1973, Chile’s voters chose Sebastian Piñera to succeed Michele Bachelet as president.
CROATIA’S general elections on January 10 were won by the opposition party, the Social Democrats, headed by Ivo Josipovic, with just over 60 per cent of the poll.
LAST month the BBC described Yemen as ‘a troubled country fast becoming a major training centre for militants, with several hundred al-Qaeda members believed to be operating there’. The event prompting this appraisal was a failed, almost farcical attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian, a University College London graduate, to blow up a Northwest Airlines plane as it was about to land in Detroit last Christmas Day.
THE outgoing president of Uruguay, Tabare Vazquez, compared his country’s elections on November 29 with those in Honduras, held the same day. They might appear similar, argued Vazquez, but they were not because the Honduras elections were imposed by an unlawful government after president Manuel Zelaya was ousted by Roberto Micheletti last May.
Beset by the recession, corruption scandals and rising criticism, when Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis called an early election on September 2 he and his supporters knew that victory was not assured. Karamanlis maintained that the government needed a fresh mandate to handle the economic crisis and although polls put the governing right-wing New Democracy (ND) party six per cent behind the Pan Hellenic Socialist Party (PASOK), the longer an election was delayed, the greater the defeat awaiting the ND.
Although the brunt of the fighting and casualties amongst NATO troops in Afghanistan is borne principally by the United States and Britain, other countries suffer losses there, too. But, on September 17, six Italian paratroopers lost their lives when their two armoured vehicles were destroyed by a car bomb parked near the US embassy in Kabul.
THE news on September 14 that Russia will lend Venezuela $2.2 billion for an immense arms’ buying spree came as no surprise because the deal had already been thrashed out before the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, arrived in Madrid three days earlier.
According to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Norwegians Joshua French and Tjostolv Moland are spies, a conclusion confirmed on September 8 by a military court in Kisangani (formerly Stanleyville).
Member states attending last month’s one day extraordinary summit meeting of Unasur (Union of South American Nations) in Bariloche (Argentina) paid so much attention to President Alvaro Uribe’s decision to allow the United States to use Colombia’s military bases, that other issues were pushed to one side.
ANSWERS to the much-asked question, ‘Why is Africa so poor?’ vary depending on geography and nationality, and Hajia Amina Az-Zubair, senior adviser to the Nigerian president on poverty issues, told a BBC interviewer last week that colonialism was partly to blame. Colonialism set up trading patterns aimed at benefiting the coloniser, not the colonised, Zubair explained, ‘and it was all about take, not build’.
At least 20 people died and many more were injured, on August 17, in a suicide bombing in Nazran, the capital of Ingushetia. They were the latest casualties of the Caucasus’s endemic violence when a lorry loaded with explosives rammed the gates of the city’s police headquarters. The explosion, which was heard all over the city, produced a fire which raged for hours and destroyed nearly all of the headquarters’ cars and adjoining buildings.
It is a present-day cliché that one community’s terrorists are another’s freedom fighters and in Ethiopia the government classes the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) as a terrorist group.
Ingrid Betancourt, 48-year-old daughter of a former Colombian government minister, was kidnapped by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 2002 while campaigning as presidential candidate for her own Green Party.
The phrase ‘troubled history’ could have been coined expressly for Chechnya, a predominantly Moslem republic which was annexed by Russia in the 19th century.
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