Consider becoming a member: Become a Patron!
Busy day for politics throughout the world, this March 29, 1998.
Russian Communists will seek a vote in parliament Wednesday urging President Boris Yeltsin to withdraw his nomination of Sergei Kiriyenko as prime minister, party leader Gennady Zyuganov said Monday. He said Communists and their parliamentary allies would propose that Yeltsin withdraw the nomination and instead convene a round table meeting of political leaders to discuss how to replace the cabinet sacked by Yeltsin last week. The Communists are the biggest group in parliament. Yeltsin nominated Kiriyenko, the 35-year-old former energy minister, to replace veteran premier Viktor Chernomyrdin. The Duma is due to vote on the nomination on Friday.
If it rejects the president’s candidate three times, Yeltsin said he will call a new election.
Meanwhile, on the eve of Ukraine’s second post-Soviet parliamentary election, many voters struggled to decide which of the dozens of political parties has the best chance of reviving the country’s depressed economy. Thirty parties were vying for seats in the Verkhovna Rada, the single-chamber parliament All contestants vow to lift Ukraine out of the economic doldrums that have persisted since independence in 1991, despite a measure of stability achieved in 1996 after a ravaging period of hyperinflation. Besides that common platform, Communists are promising union with former Soviet republics, moderate nationalists are offering closer ties with the West and centrists vow to create a strong Ukraine.
And the remnants of Cambodia’s communist Khmer Rouge movement have turned their guns on each other and the jungle stronghold that has withstood repeated government offensives is now torn by factional fighting. A journalist who returned Sunday from the Khmer Rouge headquarters in northern Cambodia Reach Sambath of Agence France-Presse said the movement’s leaders had fled to higher ground and were pounding a breakaway group with artillery fire. The mutineers have been joined by 4000 Cambodian government soldiers at the Khmer Rouge base of Anlong Veng and some 10000 people from the region have fled into the surrounding jungles he said. Cambodian officials said on Sunday that government troops had taken control of part of the Khmer Rouge territory which spreads for miles through – jungles and villages along the northern border with Thailand.
And that’s just a sample of what went on, this 29th day of March in 1998 as reported by The BBC World Service Newshour Program.
