After all, the struggle for an independent Namibia has gone on for 22 years of guerrilla war and cruel repression.

People were encouraged to denounce neighbors who managed to be a bit better off, and this provided a basis for cruel repression putting everybody down.

Although he was an absolute ruler, and approved much of the cruel repression that accompanied the Islamic takeover, Ayatollah Khomeini repeatedly warned his fellow clerics not to lose touch with popular opinion.

His pervasive, and often cruel and petty, repression, in the words of one of the country's most famous samizdat writers of the Ben Ali years, Om Zied, "put a policeman in everyone's head".

American principles and interests are best served when these constituencies understand that all the advantages of economic, technological and strategic ties with the U.S. remain available - but only if China stops cruel repression.

The economic-political elite scarcely noticed the country's widespread dissatisfaction with the political stagnation of the Porfiriato, the increased demands for worker productivity during a time of stagnating or decreasing wages and deteriorating work conditions, the cruel repression of worker's unions by the police and army, and the highly unequal distribution of wealth.

So it was considered all the more quixotic when in 1996 Spain's best-known investigating judge brought suits against the military leaders of Argentina and Chile, where the governing right-wing military mounted particularly cruel repressions of the left in the 1970's.

And in keeping, he had practiced the usual cruel repression.

The statues toppled in Tirana and in the port city of Durres symbolized decades of cruel repression and poverty for many in this isolated Balkan nation of 3.2 million.