All that Ethiopians knew about the council were the names of its two strongmen, Lieut.
In another, the two strongmen, dressed in heavy overcoats and fur hats, converse in a snowy forest.
He allowed two strongmen to stay on — Atta Mohamed Noor, the governor of Balkh Province, in the north, and Abdul Razziq, the police chief of Kandahar — even though they were known for corruption and human-rights violations.
They involve territorial disputes between local commanders belonging to different factions, and stem from the continuing rivalry between the two strongmen of the north, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, the deputy defense minister, who is Uzbek, and Gen. Ostad Atta Muhammad, a military commander, who is Tajik.
France has had two strongmen named Napoleon.
Tyrannies may look stable under one strongman; but they can slide into instability, even bloody chaos, if a transition goes awry.
Egyptians are in no mood to swap one strongman for another.The second big test for the new president is the economy.
It haunts Iraq too, where the total number of casualties is believed to have surpassed 100,000 but has never been officially determined; and where one strongman was traded for another, albeit under a more pluralistic system with a democratic veneer.
The flow is an important source of weapons for the uprising and a case of bloody turnabout, as the inheritors of one strongman's arsenal use them in the fight against another.
But even the officers of the new force say they face challenges in building national veneration around the military, as well as in breaking old habits of officer cronyism and allegiance to one strongman or another.
Weightlifting and power lifting is their forte and I had a chance to speak to one strongman, Deamo Bagugo, as he trained in the island's fire station which doubles up as the gym.
