A force of 12,000 policemen stormed the colony and evacuated the 70,000 residents overnight to a swampy area four kilometres away (that turned into another, still extant, slum called Cheetah Camp).
In imitation of Tsar Peter the Great, who constructed St Petersburg in a swampy wilderness to act as a window to Europe, Putin showcased his modernizing credentials with an Olympic complex on a swampy coast and a brand new skiing resort in the mountains.
His Niger Delta People's Volunteer Force pushed oil prices to record highs in 2004 with attacks and threats against production in the delta's swampy creeks.
There are now just 200 asylum seekers in the detention centre on swampy, tropical Manus Island in northern PNG, which was established in 2001 as part of former prime minister John Howard's "Pacific Solution".
Most of the Brazilian architects who competed to design Brasilia ignored the site's topography completely.The best example of native pig-headedness, however, must be Peter the Great of Russia, who founded St Petersburg in the most barren, swampy, freezing, remote and indefensible corner of his huge empire.
The Earth had already tilted towards chaos, long before it sank deep into a swampy labyrinth in Flanders.Other things lasted, when the Great War was supposed to have mortally damaged them.
Riau is flat and swampy, whereas neighbouring West Sumatra is made up of towering volcanoes and narrow, fertile valleys.
Sometimes crew are kidnapped and taken into the swampy Delta region before being released for ransom.In a curious twist, the Angolan authorities say that the case of the MT Kerala was a "faked hijacking", alleging that the crew had deliberately turned off the ship's communications.
Campo Dos, a swampy hamlet near Apartadó in the Urabá region, north-west Colombia's banana country, was the scene for the first demobilisation of troops from the right-wing United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), in which 452 fighters known as the "Banana Block" gave up their weapons to the government.
A makeshift refinery can ruin swathes of swampy bush, as fires lit beneath cauldrons of crude oil rage out of control.
The Delta, originally under swampy forests, had been opened up by logging companies, who laid the first railway tracks in the early 1800s.
