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Mrs_hart "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Mrs_hart
Post Number: 104 Registered: 01-2006
Rating: N/A Votes: 0 (Vote!) | Posted on Friday, January 20, 2006 - 06:10 pm: |
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"We recognize this change is not a change for change's sake, but a fundamental break with the past, therefore requiring that we take bold and decisive steps to address the problems that have for decades stunted our progress." - Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, newly elected president of Liberia - the first woman ever elected president of an African nation. Johnson-Sirleaf was finance minister and went into exile at the time of the 1980 coup by Samuel K. Doe, but has been criticized for supporting Charles Taylor's rebel movement in 1989. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/16/AR2006011600277. html "I was a woman, separated, a socialist, an agnostic...all possible sins together." - Michelle Bachelet, just elected first woman president of Chile, third in Latin America, remembering how she expected opposition from military conservatives when appointed defense minister. A member of the same Socialist Party as President Salvador Allende, Bachelet was arrested and forced into exile after the CIA-sponsored coup that killed Allende and installed Gen. Augusto Pinochet in 1973. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/15/AR2006011500866. html
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Mrs_hart "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Mrs_hart
Post Number: 105 Registered: 01-2006
Rating: N/A Votes: 0 (Vote!) | Posted on Friday, January 20, 2006 - 06:20 pm: |
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Harvard-educated Johnson-Sirleaf was finance minister at the time, but was spared, she said in a recent interview, "by the grace of God." Twice imprisoned in the 1980s by Doe's junta, Johnson-Sirleaf fled into exile. Bachelet's father was an air force general who was arrested and tortured for opposing the 1973 coup that brought Pinochet to power. Alberto Bachelet died in prison of a heart attack, probably caused by the torture, Bachelet says. A 22-year-old medical student at the time, Bachelet was also arrested along with her mother and later forced into five years of exile, first in Australia, then in communist East Germany.
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