The Contemporary History

Manuel Noriega

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A close ally of the U.S. military and intelligence establishment from the late 1950s to the late 1980s, General Manuel Noriega was the dictator of Panama from 1983 to 1989.

Intimately involved with U.S. covert efforts to overthrow the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua and to combat leftist revolutionary movements elsewhere in Central America, Noriega ran afoul of U.S. policy-makers in the aftermath of the Iran-contra affair; was indicted on federal drug charges in February 1988; and was overthrown in late December 1989 in the U.S. invasion of Panama.

He surrendered to U.S. officials in early January 1990; was transported to the United States; tried for drug trafficking in April 1992; found guilty in September; and sentenced to 40 years in prison, where he has remained. Convicted in France for money laundering, and in Panama in absentia for murder, it is unlikely that he will ever be freed.

Manuel Antonio Noriega Moreno was born on February 11, 1938, in Panama City, the illegitimate child of a poor single woman who died when he was a small boy. Raised by his godmother in Panama City, he entered the military and was trained at the Military School of Chorrillos in Peru, where in the late 1950s he was recruited by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

His relationship with U.S. intelligence agencies deepened during his training at the School of the Americas in Fort Gulick, Panama, where he completed his coursework in 1967. Commissioned as an intelligence officer in the Panama National Guard the same year, he rose rapidly in rank. In 1969 he helped dictator General Omar Torrijos fend off a coup attempt, and soon after was appointed the country’s Chief of Military Intelligence.

A shrewd political operator who deftly played both sides of the fence, through the 1970s he received hundreds of thousands of dollars as a CIA informant, and passed U.S. secrets to Fidel Castro and other U.S. adversaries. Allegedly complicit in the July 1981 plane crash that resulted in Torrijos’s death, with U.S. backing he became the country’s de facto head of state in August 1983.

By this time he was working closely with the administration of U.S. president Ronald Reagan in its efforts to overthrow the Sandinistas. He also used Panama’s strict secrecy laws to launch drug money-laundering operations, actively collaborating with the drug cartels of Medellín, Colombia.

Washington turned a blind eye to his role in the drug trade, emphasizing instead his collaboration with U.S. hemispheric "war on drugs". Despite mounting evidence of Noriega’s involvement in the drug trade, in 1987 Attorney General Edwin Meese issued Panama the Drug Enforcement Agency’s "highest commendation" for the country’s anti-narcotics efforts. Meanwhile Noriega’s base of support, in Washington and at home, had eroded.

The Iran-contra scandal purged Washington of many of his top supporters, while opposition in Panama mounted, mainly in consequence of his brutality in dealing with his opponents. The ax fell in February 1988 with a 12-count indictment on racketeering and narcotics charges issued by U.S. federal prosecutors.

After nearly two years of escalating tensions, on December 20, 1989, U.S. forces launched "Operation Just Cause", invading Panama, killing an estimated 300 civilians, wounding 3,000, and seizing Noriega. Launched in the name of the "war on drugs", the invasion had a negligible impact on the hemispheric drug trade, which has grown rapidly since.

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)

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The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is a trilateral trade pact among the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Implemented on January 1, 1994, the agreement is intended to foster open and unrestricted commercial relations among its three signatories.

Supplemental agreements, also part of NAFTA, are the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC), the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC), and the Understanding on Emergency Action (Safeguards). Administered in the United States by the International Trade Administration of the Department of Commerce, NAFTA is one of several regional trading blocs in the Western Hemisphere.

These include the Andean Community of Nations (CAN, among Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Peru, f. 1969); the Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM, f. 1973), the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR, among Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Paraguay, f. 1991), and the Central America–Dominican Republic–United States Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR, f. 2004).

NAFTA’s supporters conceive of the agreement as an important stepping stone in the creation of a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which would include the 34 nation-states and territories of the Western Hemisphere.

In its goal of fostering unrestricted commercial relations, NAFTA follows the principles of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor, the World Trade Organization (WTO).

NAFTA has sparked a huge debate between its supporters and opponents. Its principal supporters in the private sector consist of the hemisphere’s largest corporations, most of which are based in the United States.

They argue that in all three countries NAFTA will increase living standards, create new jobs, protect the environment; and ensure compliance with labor laws. Its principal opponents include labor, environmental, faith-based, indigenous rights, and consumer rights groups.

They maintain that NAFTA, like the WTO, promotes a "race to the bottom" by favoring large corporations over smaller enterprises, benefiting the rich more than the poor; increasing inequality, causing a net loss of jobs, fostering environmental degradation, and failing to adequately protect the rights of workers.

The communiqués of sub-commander Marcos, spokesperson of the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico—a group whose rebellion against the Mexican government was timed to coincide with NAFTA’s implementation—convey many of the principal arguments of NAFTA’s opponents.

A large scholarly literature mirrors this debate. On the whole, the evidence demonstrates that NAFTA has increased trade dramatically while failing to meet its supporters’ expectations with regard to employment, poverty, inequality, the environment, and labor rights. In Mexico, poverty, inequality, and unemployment have all increased substantially since NAFTA’s implementation.

In the United States and Canada, the creation of new jobs has not kept pace with the outflows of capital and jobs traceable to NAFTA. The leftward tilt in Latin American politics since the 1990s has buttressed that continent’s opposition to multilateral trade agreements like NAFTA, the WTO, and the proposed FTAA.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

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The NATO alliance is dedicated to the maintenance of the democratic freedoms and territorial integrity of its 26 European and North American member countries through collective defense.

This alliance has been the dominant structure of European defense and security since its founding in 1949 and continues to serve as the most formal symbol of the United States’ commitment to defend Europe against aggression. Following the end of the cold war, the organization also took on a peacekeeping and stabilizing role within Eurasia.

NATO was founded with the Washington Treaty of April 4, 1949, which was signed by Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Great Britain, and the United States.

The 12 founding members were later joined by 14 others, including Greece and Turkey, which allowed the alliance to secure the Mediterranean. From the outset, NATO was intended to deter Soviet expansion into central and western Europe.

The Washington Treaty reflected the will of the signatories to further democratic values and economic cooperation, to share the obligations of defense individually and collectively, to consult together in the face of threats, to regard an attack against one member as an attack against all members, and to collectively and individually assist the victims of an attack.

The treaty also delineated the geographic boundaries of the alliance, created the North Atlantic Council to implement the treaty, made provisions for new members to join, governed ratification according to constitutional processes, and made provisions for review of the treaty.

NATO’s civil and military organization materialized during 1949–95. The basic structures developed during this period remained into the 21st century. The civilian headquarters for the North Atlantic Council (NAC), which maintains effective political authority and powers of decision in NATO, is located in Brussels, Belgium.

NATO’s secretary-general chairs the NAC and oversees the work of the International Staff (IS). Member countries maintain permanent representatives. The council serves as a forum for frank and open diplomatic consultation and the coordination of strategic, defense, and foreign policy among the alliance members.

Action is agreed upon on the basis of common consensus rather than majority vote. Twice a year the defense ministers of the member countries meet at the NAC, and summit meetings involving the heads of state of each member country occur, during which major decisions over grand strategy or policy must be made.

After the end of the cold war, the NAC was supplemented by the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC) as well as the NATO-Russia Joint Council. These newer bodies facilitate peaceful coordination and cooperation between NATO and the Russian Federation and other former members of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact alliance.

The secretary-general of NATO also chairs the Defence Planning Committee (DPC), which is tasked with planning for the collective defense of the member countries. The DPC provides guidance to the alliance’s military authorities to improve common measures of collective defense and military integration. The DPC consists of the permanent representatives; like the NAC, the DPC also serves as a forum for meetings between the defense ministers of the member states twice a year.

The senior military representatives of the member states form the Military Committee. The Military Committee is subordinate to the NAC and consists of the chiefs of staff of the member nations, who advise the NAC on all military matters and who oversee the implementation of the measures necessary for the collective defense of the North Atlantic area.

The committee is supported by the International Military Staff (IMS), which meets twice a year at chiefs of staff level and more often at the national military representatives level. Until 2003 operational control of military forces operating under the NATO flag fell to Allied Command Europe and Allied Command Atlantic.

In 2003 NATO undertook a major restructuring of its military commands. The Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) became the Headquarters of Allied Command Operations (ACO). ACT is tasked with driving transformation in NATO and establishing future capabilities, while ACO is responsible for current operations.

Throughout the cold war NATO faced a powerful counter-alliance in the Warsaw Pact and turmoil within the organization itself. Indeed, in 1949 the alliance members could only marshal 14 divisions of military personnel against an estimated 175 Soviet divisions.

At the NAC meeting in 1952, the members established a goal of fielding 50 divisions backed up by several thousand aircraft by the end of the year and 96 divisions by 1955. Also in 1952 the alliance introduced a new strategic concept: mass conventional defense of Europe coupled with long-range nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact members.

However, the cost of raising the 96 divisions required to implement this strategy proved too great, and it was quickly abandoned. In 1953 Dwight Eisenhower put forward a new strategy, which focused more on nuclear deterrence.

The new strategy came to be known as "massive retaliation" and would have involved extensive use of nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union and eastern Europe if their forces had broken through NATO’s conventional defenses in central Europe.

Nuclear crises over Berlin and Cuba in the late 1950s and early 1960s suggested a need for a more gradual strategy than massive retaliation. President John F. Kennedy endorsed a strategy of "flexible response" in 1961–63, which favored deploying more conventional forces in central and northern Europe from both the United States and the other NATO members.

Disagreement over this new strategy led France to withdraw from NATO’s integrated military command structure in 1967. NATO adopted a new doctrine in December 1967, which endorsed a flexible conventional and nuclear response to Soviet aggression. At the same time, the NAC adopted a new grand strategy favoring stable and peaceful relations with the Warsaw Pact countries.

NATO was further challenged in the mid-1970s when the Soviet Union deployed large numbers of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe that were capable of striking all of the European NATO allies.

In response the members agreed to deploy Pershing II and cruise missiles in West Germany, the United Kingdom, the Low Countries, and Italy. However, a more cordial relationship between the alliance and the Warsaw Pact during the 1980s led to the dismantling of these intermediate weapons at the end of that decade.

After the end of the cold war, NATO retained several important formal and informal functions. First, it serves as a permanent and institutionalized link between the United States and an ever-growing number of European allies. In addition, it prevents the renationalization of European defense policies.

Moreover, NATO allows an institutionalized relationship with Russia and several of the former Warsaw Pact countries that have yet to join the alliance. Finally, it serves peacekeeping and stability functions in Europe and Asia.

NATO invoked article 5 of the Washington Treaty for the first time following the September 11, 2001, attacks against the United States. Many NATO countries participated in the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan against al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Jaafar Numeiri

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Jaafar Numeiri was born in January 1930 in Omdurman, the Sudan. In 1952 Numeiri graduated from the Sudan Military College, and in 1966 he graduated from the U.S. Army Command College in Texas. Influenced by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Free Officers Movement in Egypt, Numeiri joined a group of military officers sympathetic to pan-Arab, socialist ideas.

In 1969 Numeiri, with the help of four other officers, orchestrated a coup to overthrow the Sudanese government. He then became the new prime minister and chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) and renamed the country the Democratic Republic of the Sudan.

In July 1971 Sudanese communists staged a coup, and Numeiri was imprisoned. Shortly after his incarceration, Numeiri escaped and rallied loyal forces to put down the revolt and brutally crush the communists.

Numeiri quickly moved to strengthen his base of political support by changing domestic and foreign policies. In the 1971 referendum on the presidency, Numeiri received a 98.6 percent affirmative vote and was sworn in for a six-year term as president.

Spurred by Numeiri’s view of Arab socialism, in 1969 the Sudan agreed in the Tripoli Charter to coordinate foreign policies with Libya and Egypt. This union, which developed into a federation of Arab Republics, was extremely short-lived and was never really implemented.

Numeiri inherited the problem of civil war in the southern Sudan, which had begun in 1955, even before Sudanese independence. A positive step toward resolving the war was taken in 1972 with the signing of the Addis Ababa Agreement. A cease-fire was declared in the south, and autonomy was granted to the non-Muslim southern region of the Sudan.

In an effort to bolster support for his regime, Numeiri imposed sharia, Islamic law, over all of the Sudan in 1983. He also unilaterally decreed the division of the south into three regions corresponding to the old provinces; these decisions led to the resumption of the civil war.

The mounting economic crisis led to urban riots, and spreading famines in rural areas marked the final phase of the Numeiri era. In April 1985, while Numeiri was out of the country on official business, the military launched a successful coup against his regime.

Until 1999, when he was allowed to return to the Sudan, Numeiri remained in exile in Egypt while the Sudan continued to suffer through civil war, drought, famines, and mounting political repression from Islamist forces.

Canada Nunavut Territory

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As early as 1963, some natives of Canada’s Northwest Territories began agitating for greater autonomy within a nation where the vast majority live within 200 miles of the U.S. border. In particular the eastern Inuit (formerly called Eskimos) sought to control more aspects of their Arctic lives above the tree line.

Not until 1999 was Nunavut ("our land" in the Inuktitut language) separated from other northern territories by an act of Parliament. On April 1, 1999, the Territory of Nunavut was born with Iqaluit, a city of 6,000, as its capital.

Canada’s creation of Nunavut was a dramatic example of the growing awareness of indigenous rights in several nations. As in the United States, where Native Americans began rallying for recognition and respect, creating the American Indian Movement, aboriginal groups in Australia and Canada’s 630 officially recognized "First Nations" likewise began demanding greater self-determination. In 1973 after a long period of refusing to abide by most treaty rights, Canada changed course and signed six major treaties, including Nunavut’s.

Straddling the Arctic Circle, and including Ellesmere and Baffin islands and Cape Dorset—a center of Inuit indigenous art—Nunavut has a population of 29,500, 80 percent of it Inuit, in 26 settlements spread across 770,000 square miles, a fifth of Canada’s total land mass.

Most of this vast territory is inaccessible by road or rail; everything arrives, expensively, by air. The government of Nunavut, whose first premier was lawyer Paul Okalik, oversees an annual budget of about $500 million (U.S.), more than $18,000 per resident. About 84 percent comes from the federal government in Ottawa.

Prior to the 1950s most Inuit were still leading traditional lives based on hunting and fishing. The cold war changed that. In an agreement with Canada, the United States built the Distant Early Warning, or DEW, Line, a system of radar installations designed to detect Soviet invasion across the North Pole.

Although the DEW Line was useless against nuclear submarines or intercontinental ballistic missiles, it remained in place for 30 years. In 1985 Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney and U.S. president Ronald Reagan signed a new defense agreement. Abandoned DEW Line installations littered the Arctic landscape, in some cases leaching PCBs and industrial solvents into the ground.

Around the same time as the DEW Line’s installation, Canada’s government began to move Inuit families into permanent settlements where they were offered health care, education, and other services, but at a price. Their new lifestyle pushed many Inuit communities from subsistence hunting to fur trapping for the cash needed to buy newly available "southern" goods.

Reliable sources of income remain scarce in Nunavut, although mining, fisheries, tourism, and cultural products are being aggressively explored. The Internet plays a significant role, allowing Nunavut’s widely separated citizens to communicate with each other and the world via expensive satellite hookups that leaders hope to replace with fiber-optic installations.

The emergence of global warming patterns in the Arctic poses both threats and opportunities. Some believe that the storied Northwest Passage, now frozen most of the year, will soon be navigable in summer, cutting almost 5,000 miles from a sea voyage between Europe and Asia.

Nunavut’s government has discussed building a deepwater port and a 185-mile all-season road. On the other hand, climate change would likely further endanger Inuit ecology and traditions of self-sufficiency.

Julius Nyerere

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Julius Kambarage Nyerere, born in 1922, attended a mission school in Tanganyika, Makerere University College in Tanganyika, and the University of Edinburgh. He returned to teach at a Roman Catholic school near Dar es Salaam and was known as Mwalimu, or teacher.

In 1954 he organized the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) and was elected to the legislature as Tanganyika prepared for full independence in 1961. Nyerere was elected as the first prime minister of the newly independent state and became President of the Republic in 1962. When Tanganyika and Zanzibar unified as Tanzania, Nyerere became the nation’s first president in 1964.

In the 1967 Arusha Declaration, Nyerere instituted a state program of ujamaa (familyhood) based on collective sharing, traditional African values of the family, and collectivization of farms.

Ujamaa, a form of African socialism, was supported by the People’s Republic of China, but in the global economic system, Nyerere’s ujamaa failed to bring economic growth, and in 1976 he was forced to admit defeat and end the program.

Nyerere was an effective spokesperson in the campaign to end the apartheid system in South Africa and was also one of the founders of the Organization of African Unity (OAU).

He hosted the African National Congress and Pan-African Congress, as well as other African nationalist movements that struggled against western imperial forces in Mozambique and Rhodesia. He was also a sharp critic of African dictatorships and publicly condemned Idi Amin’s dictatorship in Uganda.

In the first contemporary military intervention by an African state against other, under Nyerere’s leadership, the Tanzania military attacked Amin and forced him out of power.

Refusing to run for reelection, Nyerere retired voluntarily in 1985. He was succeeded by Ali Hassan Mwinyi and served as a sort of elder statesman in Africa until his death in 1999.

Olympics

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One of the goals of Baron Pierre de Coubertin—founder of the modern Olympic Games and organizer of the first modern games in 1896—was to encourage international understanding through sports, and help to create a more peaceful world.

But after 50 years and two world wars—the bloodiest and most violent wars the world had yet seen—the Olympic dream of de Coubertin seemed very distant indeed. Too often the competition between nations would overshadow the competition of the athletes, and occasionally even the athletes themselves would be the center of controversy.

In fact the Olympic Games found themselves, in 1948, in the middle of the geopolitics of the cold war. The world found itself poised on the brink of nuclear confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, and it seemed the world needed the Olympic Games and de Coubertin’s vision of peace now more than ever. Often, however, the Games would be just another proxy in the ideological battle between liberal democracy and communism.

One of the most famous incidents of the 1956 Melbourne Games was the water polo match between the Soviet Union and Hungary. This match followed the Soviet quashing of the Hungarian uprising; because of political tension between the countries, the match was contested with such intensity that blood was seen in the swimming pool.

But in addition to political theater, the games also provided many moments of genuine human drama, where athletes strove to best one another under daunting pressure, after years of sacrifice and training.

For the 1960 Summer Games, held at Rome, the games were broadcast live on television throughout Europe. Highlights of the games were Cassius Clay’s (Muhammad Ali) gold medal in boxing, and Abebe Bikila’s barefoot gold medal–winning performance in the marathon.

The 1968 Winter Olympics were held at Grenoble, France, with many events spread around the region. The French skier Jean-Claude Killy, aged 24, won all three Alpine skiing gold medals. The 1968 Summer Games were held at Mexico City; the high altitude brought athletes in as much as a month early to acclimitize.

Bob Beamon broke the world long jump record at the games; his record stood until 1991. The 1972 Summer Olympics were held at Munich, Germany, where U.S. swimmer Mark Spitz won seven gold medals and the Soviet Union’s gymnast Olga Korbut won three gold medals.

These games also featured the controversial results of men’s basketball in which the American team believed that it had been cheated out of the gold medal. The games are best remembered, however, for the attack by Palestinian terrorists on the Israeli team, which resulted in the death of 17 people.

At the 1976 Olympics held at Montreal, Canada, extra security was introduced. These games featured a boycott by African nations that protested the presence of New Zealand. The cause was a match between a New Zealand rugby team and a team from South Africa. This was in violation of a Commonwealth boycott of South Africa.

The major stories of the games were Lase Viren winning both the 5,000 m and the 10,000 m again, and the Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci, aged 14, winning gold medals with the first-ever perfect score in Olympic gymnastic competition.

At the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Olympics, artificial snow was used, and the U.S. speed skater Eric Heiden won five gold medals. This also marked the presence of the first Chinese Olympic team since 1948 (prior to the Communists taking over).

For the United States, these games will always be remembered for the "Miracle on Ice", the victory of the American ice hockey team over the superior Soviet squad; for many, the American victory was seen as a win over communism.

The 1980 Summer Games were held at Moscow, USSR, with 100,000 people at the opening ceremony. However, the United States led a boycott over the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in the previous year.

The games were best remembered for the rivalry between British runners Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett; each won one gold medal. The 1984 Summer Games were held at Los Angeles. The Soviet Union and its close allies organized a boycott in retaliation for the U.S.-led one four years earlier.

The best-remembered events of these games included the 200 m record set by U.S. runner Carl Lewis, who also won the 100 m, the long jump and the sprint relay, matching the feats of Jesse Owens in 1936; and also another U.S. runner Mary Decker falling over in the women’s 3,000 m race and blaming the British/South African runner Zola Budd.

The Los Angeles Olympics was also the first summer games to which China sent a team since 1948. There was also some international concern over the high level of advertising and commercial endorsements during the games.

At the 1988 Summer Games held at Seoul, South Korea, there were no major boycotts or security problems in spite of worries about North Korea’s hostility to the games. In the track events, Florence Griffith-Joyner won three gold medals for sprinting, and Kristin Otto of East German won six gold medals.

The Seoul Olympic Games also saw Ben Johnson, a Canadian sprinter, winning the 100 m race in world record time only to be stripped of his gold medal three days later after he failed a drug test.

The 1992 Summer Olympic Games, held in Barcelona, Spain, saw the athletes of the former Soviet Union contesting as a single team for the last time, the return of South Africa, and also a team sent by the reunited Germany. In 1994 the Olympic Winter Games were held, this time at Lillehammer, Norway, beginning a different timetable for the Winter Olympics.

At the Atlanta Summer Olympics in 1996, the centenary games, a bomb killed two people in the Centennial Olympic Park, but fears of international terrorists proved unfounded with a local man arrested for the bombing. At the Nagano Winter Olympics held in 1998, curling, women’s ice hockey, and snow boarding were all introduced as new Olympic sports.

The Sydney Olympic Games in 2000 saw the summer games return to the Southern Hemisphere for the first time since 1956. The new events introduced included the triathlon and tae kwon do. The public cheered the presence of the team from East Timor at the Opening Ceremony, and also the North Korean and South Korean athletes who marched together.

The highlight was Australian Aboriginal runner Cathy Freeman winning the women’s 100 m race in front of a home crowd. It saw the U.S. team win 40 gold medals, 24 silver medals, and 33 bronze medals; Australia’s team won 16 gold medals, 25 silver medals, and 17 bronze medals.

The 2002 Winter Olympic Games were held at Salt Lake City, Utah. The choice of Salt Lake City saw accusations of corruption and bribery that had first occurred following Atlanta being awarded the Olympics in 1989.

A number of members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) were found to have received bribes in exchange for their votes, with files held in Salt Lake City revealing demands for and expectations of bribes by IOC delegates being made public.

In a similar story, during the pairs figure skating competition, a judge was accused of collusion in awarding the gold medal to the Russian pair over the Canadian skaters; the situation was resolved when both figure skating pairs were awarded the gold.

In 2004 the Summer Olympic Games were held at Athens, Greece, the site of the first of the modern Olympic Games held in 1896. These games witnessed several scandals, the majority of them involving performanceenhancing drugs. At least 20 violations were noted, the most of any Olympic Games.

The issue of athletes taking drugs to gain an edge over rivals has become one of the dominant concerns of the games in the 21st century. In addition, the International Olympic Committee must also deal with the issue of letting professional athletes into a competition that was originally designed just for amateurs.

Some critics contend that allowing professional athletes will give developed nations an unfair advantage over underdeveloped nations, while others contend that the records set at the Olympics will mean little unless the best athletes are allowed to compete. Despite these challenges—and the ever-present fear of terrorist attacks—the Athens Games saw a record 202 nations participate with over 11,000 athletes.

The Olympic Games have proved to be a tempting avenue for nations to express a political point of view, or in more drastic fashion, commit violence in the name of one cause or another.

Despite the intrusion of politics, it is perhaps a testament to de Coubertin’s dream that athletes the world over still strive together in peaceful competition along the ideals expressed in the Olympic motto: Citius, Altius, Fortius (Faster, Higher, Stronger).

Organization of American States (OAS)

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The Organization of American States (OAS) was founded on April 30, 1948, in Bogotá, Colombia, by 21 member states. Successor organization to the Pan American Union (1889–1947) and retooled to correspond to the changed security environment of the post–World War II era, the OAS was founded as a regional agency of the United Nations.

Its purposes, according to its official charter, are "to strengthen the peace and security of the continent; to promote and consolidate representative democracy, with due respect for the principle of non-intervention; to seek the solution of political, juridical, and economic problems... ; [and] to eradicate extreme poverty", among others. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., since its founding, in 2007 the OAS counted 35 member states, with Cuba suspended from participation since 1962, making 34 active member states.

Mirroring the organizational structures of the United Nations, the OAS is governed by a General Assembly and Permanent Council and led by a secretary-general elected every five years.

It has numerous affiliated organizations, organs, and entities, including the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, f. 1959); the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission (CICAD, f. 1968); Inter-American Committee Against Terrorism (CICTE, f. 1999); and many others.

Four "Protocols" introduced major revisions to the original OAS Bogotá Charter: the Protocols of Buenos Aires (1967), Cartagena de Indias (1985), Washington (1992), and Managua (1993). In 1994 the OAS organized the first Summit of the Americas, an event henceforth held every few years.

Since its founding, the OAS has been dominated by the United States. During the the cold war era, its overriding concern was limiting Soviet and communist influence in the Western Hemisphere.

Because Marxist, communist, and socialist doctrines proved popular in many parts of Latin America in the postwar era, OAS member states could pursue one of three options: openly defy the United States and adopt a socialist or Marxist-oriented government; ally with the United States in its anticommunist policies; or pursue a "third way" by aligning with neither the Soviet nor the U.S. bloc.

In a handful of instances, OAS member states openly defied the United States, such as in Guatemala (1944–54), Bolivia (1952–64), Cuba (1961– ), Chile (1970–73), Nicaragua (1979–90), Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), and Venezuela (1999– ).

In these and other cases, the United States violated the OAS charter regarding nonintervention, which stipulated that "No State or group of States has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other State" (Chapter IV, Article 19). More often, OAS member states cooperated with U.S. anticommunist efforts or sought to pursue a nonaligned stance in international affairs.

The United States most commonly interpreted the latter as alignment with international communism and therefore a direct threat to its national security. In the post–cold war era, the OAS has exerted a greater degree of autonomy from U.S. domination.

Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)

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The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was established in 1960. Its first meeting was held in 1961, and, beginning in 1965, it was headquartered in Vienna. The charter members included Venezuela, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia.

Abd Allah al-Tariki, the Saudi director of petroleum affairs, played a leading role in the organization’s inception. OPEC membership was later expanded to include Libya, Algeria, Indonesia, Qatar, Nigeria, UAR, Gabon, and Ecuador.

In 1968 the major Arab oil-producing nations formed OAPEC (Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries). OPEC members met on a regular basis to set quotas for production; however, the organization lacked the mechanism to enforce the quotas, which were frequently ignored or openly flouted by individual producing nations.

Nations with large populations such as Iran, Algeria, and Nigeria tended to push for price increases. Nations with small populations and lesser economic domestic demands preferred stable prices. Because of their production capacity and huge reserves, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were able to increase production to prevent price increases or to keep prices low.

In the 1980s Saudi Arabia’s proven oil reserves contained over 168 billion barrels, Kuwait had over 66 billion barrels, and Iraq had 43 billion barrels, as compared to 27.3 billion barrels in the United States. By the 1980s the United States was also importing over half its oil, as compared to only 25 percent in the early 1970s.

In 1970 the new revolutionary government in Libya under Muammar Qaddafi forced production cuts to secure higher royalties. The petroleum companies—dominated by the so-called seven sisters, Western-owned corporations—bitterly opposed such pressure tactics, but because of ever-increasing demands they ultimately agreed to Libyan terms. The rest of the oil-producing nations soon followed suit and secured similar concessions. The price of oil then rose from $2 to $3 per barrel and then to $5 per barrel.

During the peak of the oil boom in the 1970s Sheik Ahmad Zaki Yamani, secretary-general of OPEC from 1968 to 1969, served as the Saudi Arabian minister of petroleum. During the 1973 Arab-Israeli War King Faysal in Saudi Arabia was persuaded to use oil as a weapon, and cuts in supplies to those nations supporting Israel were announced.

However, Faysal was a staunch anticommunist, and, when the United States and Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat argued that the oil boycott could increase the threat of communism in the Arab and Muslim world, King Faysal effectively ended the boycott by withdrawing Saudi support in 1974. In 1986, when Yamani supported raising oil prices, King Fahd removed him from office.

With its huge reserves Saudi Arabia, and, to a lesser extent, Kuwait, could force price modifications by simply increasing production. By 1996 Saudi Arabia had become the world’s largest petroleum exporter. After the Iran-Iraq War Kuwait began to flood the market, exceeding its quota and driving down prices.

The lower prices hurt Iraq at the very time that it was desperately trying to increase revenues to rebuild its economy; this was a contributing factor in the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the resulting First Gulf War. Depressed prices, largely caused by high production by the Arab Gulf states and Saudi Arabia, also contributed to Ecuador’s withdrawal from OPEC in 1992.

Owing to increased demand by burgeoning Indian and Chinese economies and ongoing wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East, the price of oil reached $60 per barrel in 2006 and prices continued to rise.

High prices resulted in huge profits for Western oil companies as well as for the oil-producing nations. In one quarter of 2006 Exxon-Mobil, the world’s largest petroleum corporation, posted profits of over $7 billion.

Although governments talked about cost control measures, alternative fuel sources, and conservation, few practical programs were adopted either in the West or in Asia. Thus it remained certain that petroleum would continue to be the world’s primary energy source for the foreseeable future.

Pakistan People's Party

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The Pakistan People’s Party was founded by Berkeley and Oxford-educated politician and lawyer Zulfikar Bhutto. During the presidency of General Ayub Khan, Bhutto served as a cabinet member and eventually as foreign minister.

Ayub went to war with India over Kashmir in 1965, and eventually, with the intervention of the Soviet Union, signed the Tashkent Agreement, which restored prewar boundaries and diplomatic relations between the two countries. Bhutto opposed Ayub’s signing of the Tashkent Agreement, resigned his post, and formed the Pakistan People’s Party in 1967.

The People’s Party championed the causes of socialism and democracy and denounced the Ayub regime as a dictatorship. Bhutto’s countrywide campaign against Ayub also drew support from businessmen, small factory owners, students, and rural dwellers.

Under the pressure of mounting public unrest, Ayub resigned in 1969 and handed over power to General Yahya Khan. When elections were held in 1970, the People’s Party captured a majority of votes in West Pakistan, whereas a clear majority was won in East Pakistan by the Awami League of Sheik Mujibur Rahman.

While the Awami League promoted greater autonomy for East Pakistan, the People’s Party argued for a strong centralized government. Differences between the two parties, and General Yahya’s inability to play a neutral role in the conflict, led to civil war. In 1971 East Pakistan seceded to become Bangladesh, and the People’s Party formed a government in Pakistan.

In power, the People’s Party stood for the nationalization of industry and education and for land reform. At the same time, Bhutto drafted the country’s fourth constitution, according to which he gave himself the title of prime minister, reduced the president to a figurehead, and granted himself powers that were as broad as those held by the military dictator whom he had opposed.

Factionalism within the People’s Party, accusations of preferential politics, a tribal uprising in Baluchistan over the exploitation of local resources such as natural gas, and underrepresentation of Baluchis in the structures of the state undermined Bhutto’s government.

The deaths of thousands in the uprising in Baluchistan, oppressive measures taken by Bhutto against political opponents, and accusations of having rigged the elections of 1977 led to a military coup by the army chief of staff General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq.

Bhutto was tried for orchestrating the murder of a political opponent, found guilty, and hanged on April 4, 1979. The leadership of the People’s Party was assumed by his daughter, Benazir Bhutto.

After General Zia-ul-Haq was killed in a plane crash, rumoured to be sabotage, the People’s Party came to power under Benazir Bhutto in the elections of 1988. However, her government was short-lived, she was arrested, and her government dissolved by Ghulam Ishaq Khan, the president at the time.

The People’s Party next came to power in 1993, but the government was again short-lived; violence between ethnic and linguistic groups erupted frequently in Karachi, the government lost control of the urban center, and a power struggle between Benazir Bhutto and her brother Mir Murtaza Bhutto led to divisions within the party. In 1996, during his sister’s tenure as prime minister, Murtaza Bhutto was shot dead outside his residence in a police encounter.

Opposition leaders accused the People’s Party of state terrorism against its political opponents, and the government was dismissed in 1996 again under charges of mismanagement and corruption. Benazir Bhutto continued to head the party in exile and upon her return to Pakistan in 2007. After her assaisination on December 27, her husband and 19-year-old son were appointed party co-chairmen.

Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)

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The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was established in 1964 under Ahmed Shukairy to represent Palestinian national demands for self-determination. In 1964 the Palestine National Council (PNC, or parliament) of 350 representatives met in East Jerusalem and voted on the Palestine National Charter, or declaration of independence, that declared historic Palestine as the homeland of the Palestinian Arabs. The charter has been amended several times.

In 1968 the charter added that "armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine". In 1988 the PLO under Yasir Arafat’s orders agreed to drop the use of terrorism, recognize Israel’s right to exist, and essentially accept the establishment of the independent state of Palestine in the Occupied Territories of the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank—the so-called mini-state solution.

Although some Palestinian groups opposed Arafat on these issues—the changes were agreed upon by the Palestine National Council, dominated by pro-Fatah Arafat supporters. Fatah (the Palestine National Liberation Movement) continued to dominate the PLO until 2006.

After the Arab defeat in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Shukairy stepped down as chairman of the PLO, and Yasir Arafat, the leader of Fatah, the largest guerrilla group, was elected chairman.

Arafat remained the leader of the Palestinian national movement until his death in 2004. The PLO constantly struggled to remain independent from any Arab government and often found it difficult to steer a neutral course among rival Arab governments.

Secular and all-inclusive, the PLO was an umbrella organization of some 10 different Palestinian groups, including the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), under Dr. George Habash, and the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP), led by Naif Hawatmeh; the Arab Liberation Front, supported by Iraq; and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command, a PFLP splinter group supported by Syria and sometimes Libya.

The Palestine National Council operated until the 1993 Oslo Accords as a government in exile. The PNC comprised over 300 members, including fighters, union members, students, and women. The Palestine Central Council acted as an advisory board of approximately 60 representatives from all the various factions.

The Executive Committee ran the PLO on a daily basis and comprised 15 members. In contrast to many other Arab governments, the PLO was highly democratic and engaged in lively and often public debates about strategies and tactics.

The Palestine Liberation Army (PLA) was the PLO’s military wing and was often made up of fedayeen (self-sacrificers). By the 1970s the PLA had an estimated 10,000 fighters based mostly in Lebanon and Syria.

After the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon the PLA was forced to scatter to a number of Arab countries. After the establishment of the Palestine Authority (PA) under the 1993 Oslo Accords, many soldiers were subsumed under the police force.

The Palestine National Fund was the PLO’s economic arm. The fund was financed by donations from Palestinians in exile as well as taxes levied on Palestinians working in some Arab nations such as Libya. Individual Arab governments, such as oil-rich Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, also provided aid. Those regimes cut off aid after the PLO supported Saddam Hussein and Iraq in the First Gulf War.

After the 1967 war, some groups within the PLO endorsed terrorist attacks on civilians. The PFLP simultaneously skyjacked four planes, landing them at a remote airstrip in Jordan in 1970; this incident precipitated "Black September", when the Jordanian army attacked and defeated Palestinian forces and ousted the PLO, which then moved its base of operations to Lebanon.

Attacks on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics followed in 1972. The cycle of violence escalated as PLO groups launched raids inside and outside of Israel and Israel assassinated Palestinian leaders in the Middle East and Europe. As a result many innocent civilians on both sides were killed and wounded.

Within the Arab world the PLO was recognized as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Although it was condemned as a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States, the PLO gradually gained international recognition, and, once it renounced terrorism and recognized Israel’s right to exist, even Israel and the United States entered into both public and secret negotiations with it.

The PLO also established an extensive network of social services, including schools, orphanages, and hospitals. The Palestine Red Crescent was active in providing health and emergency care. SAMED provided an economic infrastructure of small businesses, workshops, and factories manufacturing textiles and even office furniture in Lebanon and Syria.

Many of these institutions were destroyed in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. In the 1970s the PLO also sponsored some agricultural cooperatives in Sudan, Somalia, and other African nations. It also sponsored art and cultural events.

The Palestine Research Center, based in Beirut, focused on collecting materials and publishing books and articles on Palestinian history in order to preserve its cultural heritage. The center was also destroyed, and materials were taken by the Israelis in the 1982 war. The PLO also maintained information bureaus and had diplomatic representatives in major world capitals.

In the midst of the 1987 Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, in the occupied territories, a rival Islamist organization, Hamas, emerged to challenge Fatah’s leadership. Financed by devout Muslims, especially in conservative Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia, Hamas prospered first among poor Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip.

Because it competed with the PLO, Israel initially ignored Hamas but subsequently found that in many ways it proved a more dangerous enemy. When the PLO, in spite of concessions to Israel, failed to achieve a viable Palestinian state, many more young Palestinians who had grown up under Israeli military occupation joined Hamas.

When the Palestine Authority was established in the territories evacuated by the Israeli military in 1994, Arafat became the leader of the PA; he won a clear-cut majority as president in open and fair elections in 1996.

However, the PA leaders, most of whom were members of Fatah who had spent years outside the Occupied Territories, were also accused of corruption and inefficiency. After Arafat’s death Mahmud Abbas was elected president in 2005.

Fatah dominated the Palestinian parliament until it was defeated by the Islamist Hamas party in the 2006 elections and Ismail Haniyeh became prime minister. As the two main political forces—Fatah and Hamas—competed for power and the Israeli occupation of most of the territories continued, the future of the PLO remained uncertain.

Pathet Lao

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The term Pathet Lao (land of Lao) is generally used to describe the communist movement of Laos that began in 1945 and continued until 1975, when Laos became communist. It was one of three groups active in the politics of Laos, the other two being the Royal Lao Government (RLG) and the neutralists.

Laos became a French protectorate in 1893. During World War II, the Japanese took control of Laos and declared it independent from French colonial rule on March 9, 1945. After Japan’s surrender, an independent Lao Issara (Free Laos) government was proclaimed on September 1, joined by the Pathet Lao, with its strong nationalist leanings.

There was a Lao committee section in the Indochinese Communist Party, and the separate existence of the Lao communist movement was established in 1945. The leader of the Pathet Lao, Prince Souphanuvong, had met the Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh in 1945 and gained control of central Laos with the help of Vietnamese troops.

The prince had nurtured the communist movement and was prepared to fight against the French, who had seized the capital city, Vientiane, in 1946. Laos was soon engulfed in the First Indochina War, and the Pathet Lao fought along with the Vietminh and the Khmer Rouge. The granting of limited independence on July 19, 1949, by the French was not accepted by the communists.

However, Souvanna Phouma joined the new French-sponsored government in February 1950, where Souphanouvong proclaimed the parallel government of Pathet Lao along with its political organ, Neo Lao Issara (Lao Free Front).

The French defeat at Dien Bien Phu on May 7, 1954, ended its colonial rule in Indochina. The Pathet Lao was recognized as a political party with control over Phong Saly and Sam Neua Provinces and began to consolidate its position.

In December 1959 the military-dominated government of Phoumi Nosavan arrested the Pathet Lao members of the National Assembly, although Souphanouvong escaped. Laos was plunged into civil war. North Vietnam supported the Pathet Lao by sending arms, ammunitions, and troops.

The U.S. government included Laos in its containment strategy defense against North Vietnam and China. Another attempt was made to bring peace to Laos with the Geneva Accords of 1962. But the attempt failed, and Laos was soon embroiled in the Vietnam War.

A three-pronged coalition between the Pathet Lao, the royal government, and the neutralists did not last long, and the United States and Hanoi stepped up economic and military assistance to their respective allies.

War in Laos became a sideshow in the Vietnam War, marked by heavy civilian death toll. The Pathet Lao military advance captured more territory and by 1972 controlled four-fifths of the land and half the population of Laos.

Finally, the signing of the Paris Peace Agreements on Vietnam in 1973 led to accelerated negotiations in Laos. An agreement on Restoring Peace and Achieving National Concord on Laos was signed in the same year. With the United States out of South Vietnam, the North Vietnamese conquered the south in 1975.

After the fall of South Vietnam, the Pathet Lao assumed effective control of Laos, and the coalition government in Laos was dissolved. On December 2, 1975, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (LPDR) was formed with Souphanouvong as president.

Victor Paz Estenssoro

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Leader of Bolivia’s Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionaria, or MNR) and a leading figure in the Bolivian revolution, Victor Paz Estenssoro was elected to the presidency four times and played a major role in Bolivia’s 20th century history.

His overall political trajectory over four decades can be described as a gradual shift from the militant left to the neoliberal right, though whether that transformation entailed an abandonment of principles or growing pragmatism remains a matter of debate.

Born in Tarija, Bolivia, on October 2, 1907, to a prominent family, he received his law degree from San Andrés University in La Paz in 1927. Thereafter he occupied a variety of administrative posts before serving as deputy in the National Congress, where he emerged as a leading figure in the opposition movement.

In 1941 he cofounded the MNR, a leftist political party advocating far-reaching social and economic reforms. From 1943 to 1946, he served in the cabinet of Colonel Gualberto Villarroel but was forced out by domestic and U.S. opposition.

Finishing third in the 1947 presidential elections, he triumphed in 1951, results nullified by the oligarchic regime of Mamerto Urriolagoitia. There followed a period of widespread social unrest, spearheaded by labor unions and peasant leagues, culminating in April 1952 in the overthrow of the government and the MNR’s assumption of power.

In his first administration, Paz Estenssoro launched an ambitious program of social and economic reform-slashing the size of the military, extending the franchise, nationalizing the tin mines, breaking up large estates, and instituting universal public education—that met many of the demands of his constituency but galvanized right-wing opposition to MNR rule.

That opposition mounted during the administration of his successor and MNR cofounder Hernán Siles Zuazo, as did the political polarization of the country. During Siles Zuazo’s presidency, Paz Estenssoro served as ambassador to Great Britain before returning to Bolivia to seek another term as president.

He won handily, and in his second term struggled to keep the fragmenting MNR together and consolidate the gains of the revolution, while fending off a resurgent oligarchy and military and growing challenge from an increasingly militant left, led by his vice president, the labor leader and populist Juan Lechín. Expelling Lechín from the MNR and amending the constitution to permit his reelection, he won a third term in 1964 but was promptly ousted in the military coup of November 3, 1964, which ended the Bolivian revolution.

Going into exile in Lima, Peru, he returned to Bolivia to lend his support to the left-leaning military regime of Hugo Banzer Suárez, an action that led to a break with Siles Zuazo and undermined his populist credentials.

Soon repudiating the Banzer regime, in 1974 he was expelled from the country and went into exile in the United States. He returned in 1978 to run again for president, came in third, and after the results were nullified by the military, ran again in 1979, coming in second. The military again intervened, and in 1980 Paz Estenssoro again went into exile.

In 1985 he was elected as president for the fourth and last time, during which he followed a neoliberal model, slashing state expenditures and reining in hyperinflation. He retired from politics in 1989 and died on June 7, 2001, leaving a complex political legacy.

Juan Domingo Perón

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Subject of what many consider the most powerful political mythology in the modern history of Argentina—that of Peronismo (Peronism)—Juan Domingo Perón remains, despite his eminently public life, a deeply enigmatic figure—at once a populist, a man of the people, a friend of the working class, a dictator, a demagogue, an enemy and ally of the military, and the politician most responsible for a host of failed government policies that nonetheless continue to resonate among large segments of the populace.

For three decades—from his burst onto the political stage in 1944–45 until his death in office in 1974—Perón dominated the Argentine political landscape, while his ambiguous and divisive legacy endured long after his death. Understanding modern Argentine history requires understanding the complex political legacy he bequeathed.

Born on October 8, 1895, in a small town near Lobos in the province of Buenos Aires to a farming family, by some accounts out of wedlock, Perón entered the military at age 16 and rose gradually in rank.

In 1929 he married Aurelia Tizón, who died nine years later of uterine cancer. In 1938, the year of his wife’s death, he traveled widely in Europe, where he came to admire the regime of Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

In 1943 he participated in a coup against the conservative regime of Ramón Castillo, and soon after became head of the Department of Labor—one of the weakest government ministries—which he used as a platform to build his own power base, forging alliances with segments of Buenos Aires’s powerful labor unions.

Named vice president and secretary of war, on October 9, 1945, he was ousted and jailed by enemies in the military. There followed one of the defining events of modern Argentine history, when mass demonstrations by los descamisados (the shirtless ones) forced his release on October 17.

Four days later he married the actress Eva (Evita) Duarte. Until her death, also from uterine cancer, in July 1952 at age 33, Evita was wildly popular among working people and coequal in creating and popularizing the Perón mythology.

Building on his strong political momentum, Perón was elected president in February 1946. During his first term (1946–52), at the height of his political power, he implemented a host of populist policies intended to solidify his support among the country’s powerful labor unions, proclaiming his populist vision a "third position" between capitalism and communism.

His policies sparked rising government debt and growing economic crisis while polarizing Argentine society into Peronist and anti-Peronist factions. Reelected in 1951, he was ousted in September 1955 in a military coup. For the next 18 years he lived in exile, mainly in Spain, in 1961 marrying nightclub singer María Estela Martínez, or Isabel Perón.

Following years of military dictatorship marked by growing social discord and political polarization, he returned to Argentina in 1973 and won his third term as president. He died in office on July 1, 1974, his wife and vice president, Isabel, succeeding him until her ouster by a military coup in March 1976.

Philippine Revolution (1986)

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A popular, spontaneous, nonviolent, and distinctly religious movement restored democracy to the Philippines, on February 22–25, 1986. After nearly 400 years of colonization by Spain and the United States of America in the first half of the 20th century, the Philippines enjoyed a democratic form of government until Ferdinand Marcos became president in 1965. However, in 1972 Marcos declared martial law, citing communist insurgency but in reality because he faced the prospect of defeat in the presidential elections.

Martial law (lifted in 1981) was disastrous for the country. Government-sanctioned atrocities occurred frequently, the media was rigidly controlled, and anyone suspected of being a dissident was imprisoned.

One such political prisoner was Benigno Aquino Jr. (nicknamed "Ninoy"), a brilliant politician who was elected to the National Senate at the age of 35 and became Marcos’s most serious rival to the presidency. He was imprisoned for eight years.

In 1980 Aquino was allowed to travel to the United States for surgery, and, for the next three years, he lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his family. But he was assassinated in 1983 upon returning to the Philippines.

An independent panel investigating his murder put the blame on a military conspiracy involving "some of the country’s highest ranking officers", but without giving any names. The event galvanized the nation as millions of Filipinos mourned his death and led to the "People Power" movement.

However, it took three more years before People Power would become a reality. In the interim, opposition to the Marcos regime became more frequent and vocal. Public rallies and demonstrations were often met by military reprisals. Eventually the military, too, became divided, with some calling for reform.

Late in 1985 Marcos called a "snap" presidential election on February 7, 1986. It was a move calculated to restore his popular mandate. Many people welcomed this, although it was a foregone conclusion that there would be massive electoral fraud. Corazon ("Cory") Aquino, the assassinated leader’s widow, with neither political aspirations nor experience emerged as the popular candidate.

Expectedly, Marcos declared himself the winner. But the People Power nonviolent revolution would eventually triumph by the defection of two men in Marcos’s camp: the civilian defense minister and a high-ranking general of the armed forces.

They were supported by the archbishop of Manila, Cardinal Jaime Sin, who called on Filipino civilians for help. At first a trickle, then hundreds of thousands of ordinary Filipinos from all economic strata responded, converging on the streets with no weapons, calling on the advancing soldiers and marines to join the protest.

First Woman President

Within four days, the number of defecting soldiers made it clear that Marcos no longer controlled the military. The United States asked Marcos to step down from power and to desist from military action. Fearing for their lives, Marcos and his family were flown out of the country and took refuge in Hawaii. Corazon Aquino was inaugurated as president on that day, the first woman president of the Philippines.

The popular and nonviolent People Power revolution of 1986 restored democracy, but it did not solve all the problems of the country. Twenty years later, the country still faces many political, economic, and social ills. But what People Power demonstrated was the moral superiority of nonviolent and prayerful resistance to political tyranny and moral evil.

Augusto Pinochet Ugarte

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President and dictator of Chile from the bloody overthrow of democratically elected Marxist president Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, until his resignation from the presidency in March 1990, General Augusto Pinochet ranks among the most controversial figures in modern Chilean history.

The years of his rule as president and dictator (1973–90) saw large-scale human rights abuses by the Chilean military, with an estimated 3,200 dissidents killed and disappeared, and thousands more imprisoned, tortured, and exiled.

The 17 years of his dictatorship also saw major neoliberal reforms of the country’s economy, as promoted by the "Chicago Boys", that resulted in the privatization of many state industries and entitlement programs—most notably the social security system—and that severely circumscribed the role of the state in the national economy. A polarizing figure, revered by some and decried by others, Pinochet left a complex legacy of state repression and radical economic reform with which Chileans continue to grapple.

Born in the Pacific port city of Valparaiso on November 25, 1915, the son of a custom’s inspector, Pinochet graduated from Santiago’s military academy in 1937. In 1971 he was appointed to the key post of commander of the Santiago army garrison.

In the midst of rising social and political tensions sparked by Allende’s socialist policies, Pinochet garnered the trust of the president, who in August 1973 named him commander in chief of the army.

Three weeks later Pinochet led the coup that resulted in Allende’s overthrow and imposition of military dictatorship. The months following the coup were the most violent of the regime, with tens of thousands of Allende supporters rounded up, interrogated, and imprisoned, and hundreds executed.

Among the most enduring images of the Pinochet dictatorship was the scene in the Santiago’s main sports stadium in late 1973, used as a clearinghouse for recently arrested prisoners, with a sunglasses-clad Pinochet overseeing the detention and interrogation process.

In 1980 a new constitution made the nation’s military the "guarantors of institutionality" and imposed a range of limitations on citizens’ political activities. In 1988 a plebiscite showed a solid majority opposed to continuing dictatorship, and in 1990 he stepped aside to permit national elections and a return to democratic government.

The human rights violations of the Pinochet regime were documented in the final report of the National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation (the Truth Commission, or Rettig Report), presented in February 1991 to then-President Patricio Aylwin.

On stepping down as army chief, Pinochet was granted a permanent seat in the country’s Senate, immunizing him from prosecution. Human rights activists pursued a novel legal strategy by charging him for genocide, torture, and kidnapping in a Spanish court. In October 1998 he was arrested in Britain on the charges. There ensued a 16-month legal battle over the Spanish court’s extradition order.

In 2000 he returned to Chile and was declared unfit to stand trial due to mental and physical ailments. Living the rest of his life in seclusion with his family, dogged by lawsuits and legal charges, he died on December 10, 2006. Public opinion polls after his death showed that slightly more than half of Chileans believed that he should have been prosecuted for his regime’s human rights violations.

Poland

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Poland was the most rebellious of the Soviet-bloc countries, with mass protests in 1956, 1968, 1970–71, 1976, and 1980–81. The society was heavily influenced by the Catholic Church, and the memory of the Polish pope, John Paul II, remains very strong.

After the political changes of 1990, Poland made fast progress toward achieving a market economy and a democratic government and making Polish democracy work effectively by civic engagement in public discourses.

Roundtable talks on Poland’s first free elections took place in 1988–89. In April 1989 the communist leadership agreed with the Solidarity leadership on competitive elections, where just 35 percent of the seats were open to genuine competition.

During the following presidential elections, in November 1990, Lech Walesa—a former electrician, shipyard worker, and leader of the opposition since 1980—became the first democratically elected president of Poland. Later on, the parliamentary elections were held with the participation of over 100 political parties. The country saw a rough democratic start, and elections were declared again in 1993.

At that time, the successor of the communist party, the Alliance of the Democratic Left (SLD), received the largest share of the votes. In November 1995, in the second presidential elections, Aleksander Kwasniewski defeated Walesa and became the second president of democratic Poland.

The leading political issue of the last years of the 1990s was negotiations with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Poland joined the defense organization in 2000. During subsequent years, talks with the European Union (EU) regarding the Polish accession received much attention. Poland joined the EU in May 2004.

In the presidential elections of 2000 and the parliamentary elections of 2001, the successor of the Communist Party, the SLD, won. However, that government lost popularity rapidly after it failed to fulfill promises to upgrade the road network of the country and to undertake a profound reform of the national health system.

In addition, these years saw corruption scandals. Right after Poland’s admission to the EU, the cabinet resigned and a new cabinet was formed, with Marek Belka as prime minister.

Secrecy in the governing party and scandals contributed to the outcome of the presidential and parliamentary elections of 2005, when the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) and Citizens Platform (PO) became the largest parties in the Polish parliament, the Sejm.

PiS leader Jarosław Kaczynski declined the option of becoming prime minister because his twin brother, Lech Kaczynski, was still in the race for the presidential seat. Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz was nominated for that post; however, Jarosław Kaczynski is still considered one of the most influential persons in contemporary Polish politics.

Lech Kaczynski did win the presidential election. The main emphasis of his presidency was on combining modernization with tradition and Christianity. The influence of the Kaczynski might increase European skepticism and the focus on Polish Catholic traditions in the near future.

In the second half of the 1980s Poland’s economy struggled with mounting macroeconomic imbalances, which culminated in 1989, when hyperinflation and an extremely high central budget deficit hit the country.

After that time, Poland was regarded as one of the most successful transition economies in eastern and central Europe. The country’s GDP per capita rose from 31 percent of the EU average in 1992 to 41 percent by the end of the 1990s.

One of the challenges of the economic policy was transforming the excessive and poor investment inheritance from the command economy, which was achieved by injecting new technologies into old plants. In addition, most industry subsidies were removed, and the market was opened up to international cooperation.

Between the early 1990s and the mid-2000s, the country received over $50 billion in direct foreign investment. With the collapse of COMECON in 1990, Poland had to reorient its trade, and in few years Germany had become its most important trade partner, followed by other EU countries.

Despite all of Poland’s economic successes, there has been an unusually complicated situation in Polish agriculture and rural areas. Poland was the only country in the Soviet bloc whose farmland remained for the most part in private hands.

The farmers’ dramatically low income levels affected their farms in terms of production and development. Over half of the farms produce only for their own needs, with minimal commercial sales. Despite its small farms, Poland is the leading producer of potatoes and rye in Europe and a large producer of sugar beets.

Unlike the dramatic developments in Polish politics and economics, its society changed at a different pace. The political transformation of 1989–90 was the culmination of radical social change, which profoundly affected Polish society. New social movements and the fundamentals of a civic society were in place by the late 1980s.

Disappointment in the society in the early 1990s was in large part due to high expectations of the rapid political and economic changes, which exceeded the possibilities of the weak economy. A significant share of Polish society is Euro-skeptic, opposing globalization and stressing traditional national and Catholic values.

Polish cultural life flourished even under communist rule, but the political and economic changes opened up new possibilities for generations of artists. Polish jazz, with its special national flavor, is known worldwide, and the film industry of the country has been one of the most important in Europe.

Polish avant-garde theater, along with various high-culture music festivals and art exhibitions, are world famous, and Polish popular culture has been receiving growing attention and sponsorship within the country as well.

Pol Pot

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Pol Pot (born Sar Saloth) came from a rather wealthy peasant family in the central Cambodian Kampong Thum Province. Through family connections to the Cambodian Royal Court, he was able to gain access to a formal education in both Cambodia and France.

He was not the best student and ended up in a technical school. While studying in France, Pol Pot joined several communist organizations and student groups, including the Cercle Marxist, whose members would later provide the leadership of the Cambodian Communist Party.

Antidemocratic policies imposed by Cambodian King Sihanouk and rampant corruption in the electoral process after the 1954 Geneva Conference convinced the left that they would never gain control over Cambodia through peaceful means.

A 1962 government roundup of Cambodian leftist and communist leaders left Pol Pot in charge of the party. In 1963 Pol Pot went into hiding in the jungle near the Vietnamese border and contacted the North Vietnamese government hoping that it would aid his communist movement and revolutionary aims.

Help was not forthcoming due to North Vietnam’s agreements with Sihanouk over their use of the border for the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It was in the border camps that Pol Pot fashioned the Khmer Rouge ideology.

The Khmer Rouge held that Cambodia’s rural peasant farmers were the working-class proletarians. This was necessary because Cambodia had almost no industrial working class and because most of the Khmer Rouge leaders came from peasant backgrounds.

In 1968 Pol Pot transformed himself into an absolutist leader and minimized collective decision making in the Khmer Rouge leadership. This coincided with a continuing growth of the party due to successive waves of government repression, which also shifted the loyalty of the peasants toward the Khmer Rouge.

In 1970 the national assembly voted to remove Sihanouk from power and expel the Vietnamese from the border region. This caused an antigovernment alliance between the Khmer Rouge and Sihanouk. Their main military force consisted of 40,000 Vietnamese sent to secure access to the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

During this time, the Khmer Rouge began to "liberate" significant portions of Cambodia and remolded society into their view of agrarian paradise. Communes were organized, private property was banned, and the trappings of wealth were removed from the people.

They evacuated all cities and towns they controlled and sent their people to work in rice fields. Former military and government officials, along with the rich and those who had an education, were "purged" (murdered).

These policies were applied to the entire country and even Khmer Rouge members after Phnom Penh fell in 1975. Eventually, more than one-quarter of Cambodia’s population of 8 million was killed through starvation, sickness, or murder. Education all but ceased after most intellectuals were murdered.

In late 1978 Vietnam invaded Cambodia after a series of border clashes instigated by the Cambodians. A new Vietnamese-backed regime was installed in January 1979 after Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge fled the capital for the Thai border region.

For the next 19 years, Pol Pot led an insurgency against the new government until his death. The legacy of the Khmer Rouge has been continuing misery brought on by their sowing of millions of Chinese-supplied land mines over significant areas of Cambodia.

Portugal

2012-02-14T21:31:00.000-08:00

Portugal has been a land of paradoxes. For much of the 20th century, it was simultaneously a weak, agrarian, poverty-stricken, isolated state on the periphery of Europe and the seat of a vast colonial empire. It had used an alliance with Britain to sustain this paradox for a long time.

Portugal relied on Britain to keep Spain at bay and to secure its claim to its colonial holdings. In return, the Royal Navy enjoyed access to a far-flung network of colonial ports to be used as coaling stations.

Modern nationalism in Portugal dates from the popular reaction to the British ultimatum of 1890, which foiled a Portuguese scheme to connect Angola and Mozambique by seizing the intervening territory.

For half of the 20th century, the country was governed by Western Europe’s most enduring authoritarian regime. Then, in 1974–76, it became the only North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) country to experience a full-fledged social revolution. After approaching the precipice of civil war, Portuguese society backed down and built a working democracy.

Portugal overthrew its monarchy in 1910. The country established a new constitution the following year and became Europe’s third republic, after Switzerland and France. There were several coups over a 16-year period. In reaction to labor unrest in the early 1920s, extra-parliamentary right-wing organizations arose. These groups lent their support to a bloodless military coup in 1926.

Two years later, in the wake of financial crisis, the military regime brought an economics professor out of the obscurity of the University of Coimbra and named him minister of finance.

António de Oliveira Salazar had a limited set of priorities in that office: to generate a budget surplus and to stockpile gold. He proved to be quite effective at what he set out to do. He quickly overshadowed a succession of military prime ministers and won supporters among officers, clergy, businessmen, bankers, and landowners.

The New State

The military regime was a little more stable than its predecessor. Salazar, whose star was already rising within the regime, founded a new party in 1930, the National Union (União Nacional), to unify the regime’s supporters. In 1932, as the Great Depression advanced, he was appointed prime minister, a position he would hold for the next 36 years.

Salazar promulgated a new constitution in 1933, establishing the New State (Estado Novo). The National Assembly, consisting of the Chamber of Deputies and the Corporatist Chamber, had severely limited powers. Salazar selected nearly all candidates personally.

Rights and liberties proclaimed by the constitution were nullified by government regulation. Various sectors of society were organized from above in corporatist fashion. The political police maintained surveillance over potential opponents, many of whom fled into exile. Censors erased any hint of dissent.

From 1936 to 1944 Salazar was also minister of war. In that position he found he could shrink the size of the army and control officers’ salaries, transfers, retirements, and even marriages.

Officers were encouraged to marry wealthy women so that their salaries could be kept low. A politicized government-run militia, the Portuguese Legion (Legião Portuguesa), partially offset the army’s influence.

Thus it was Salazar, not the military, who consolidated the authoritarian regime. His was a conservative, corporatist police state, but it was not a true fascist state. It did not seek to overthrow traditional elites or mobilize society around its goals.

Rather, Salazar sought to demobilize—or even freeze—society and to reject modernity. Rather than exalting war, Salazar strove for a kind of neutrality. In any event, his austere policies left the armed forces with a very low level of effectiveness.

Spain and World War II

Salazar viewed Spain’s leftist Popular Front government as a threat. When General Francisco Franco rebelled against it in 1936, launching the Spanish civil war, Portugal officially followed the lead of Britain and France by promising nonintervention, but surreptitiously funneled aid to Franco.

Franco’s agents were allowed to operate on Portuguese territory. Thousands of volunteers went to Spain to fight against the Republican cause. At the end of the war, in March 1939, Salazar and Franco signed a treaty of friendship and nonaggression, known informally as the Iberian Pact.

Salazar declared Portugal’s neutrality in World War II on September 1, 1939, the very day Poland was invaded. He also sought to keep the war as far away as possible by bolstering Spain’s neutrality. In the wake of its civil war, Spain was in no condition to take an active role in World War II, but Portugal’s position highlighted the potential costs of even a passive role, as in allowing the Germans to pass through to take the British stronghold of Gibraltar.

The strategic situation changed for the Iberian Peninsula as the Germans became tied down in the Soviet Union and the Allies moved into North Africa and Italy. It was now highly unlikely that Spain would intervene on Germany’s side. Salazar allowed himself to be persuaded to join the Allied cause, albeit passively. From the Allied perspective, the Azores were the key objective.

Situated in the mid-Atlantic, these Portuguese islands would be useful bases both for antisubmarine warfare and for refueling transatlantic flights in the buildup prior to the great invasion of France. First Britain, and then the United States, acquired access to facilities there, and Portugal ceased selling tungsten to Germany while still claiming to be neutral.

Postwar Portugal

Portugal’s shift put it on the winning side, improving its bargaining position in postwar Europe and increasing its chances of getting back East Timor and Macao, which had been occupied by the Japanese.

Still, the semifascist state was in an ambiguous position after the war. It began to describe itself as an "organic democracy" rather than a "civilian police dictatorship", an expression that had been used in the 1930s.

Portugal was not invited to the San Francisco conference, which established the United Nations, and was denied UN membership until 1955. Portugal was, however, a founding member of NATO chiefly because the United States still wanted access to bases in the Azores.

Portugal’s relations with the United States and NATO replaced its traditional alliance with Britain. Unlike Britain’s earlier guarantee of Portugal’s overseas territories, however, NATO’s area of responsibility was expressly restricted to Europe to avoid its being drawn into colonial wars.

A certain "softening" marked the Salazar regime in the postwar era. There was no real institutional change, but some of the more fascistlike institutions were allowed to erode. On the other hand, after a dissident general managed to win 25 percent of the vote in presidential elections in 1958, the direct election of the president was discontinued.

A degree of economic liberalization led to the growth of the service sector and a larger middle class in the 1960s. Industry, previously limited to textile production, added electrical, metallurgical, chemical, and petroleum sectors.

A stroke immobilized the dictator in 1968, although he lingered for two more years. His successor was Marcello José das Neves Caetano, who, not coincidentally, had also succeeded him in his chair at the University of Coimbra.

Caetano brought technocrats into the regime, retired some of Salazar’s old-school hangers-on, and favored economic development over cultivated stagnation, but again the basic system remained.

Africa

War was spreading in the African colonies of Portuguese Guinea (Guinea-Bissau), Angola, and Mozambique. The policy of the New State had been to instill pride among the Portuguese in their empire, a legacy of Portugal’s glory in the age of discovery. The state also reasserted national control over the colonies, where foreign corporations had conducted much of the economic activity.

African farmers were compelled to shift from subsistence crops to cotton for the Portuguese market in the 1930s, and more so as World War II disrupted other trade sources. Portuguese investment in Africa began to take off in the years after the war. Portuguese emigration tripled the white population of Mozambique and quadrupled that of Angola between 1940 and 1960.

Initially, even the outbreak of the wars of national liberation spurred economic growth, as the state responded by boosting civil and military investments. All of these changes disrupted the lives of the Africans, and many of them also undermined the few existing bases of support for Portuguese rule.

In 1961 a revolt against forced cotton cultivation broke out in Angola. Fighting escalated with retributions and counterretributions; it spread to Guinea in 1963 and Mozambique in 1964. The government quickly repealed forced cultivation and forced labor. It also mobilized troops and dispatched them to Africa.

Large numbers of Africans were concentrated in strategic villages (aldeamentos) where their actions could be controlled. In 1961 the United States called on Portugal to decolonize. The insurgents sought and received military aid from the Soviet bloc and China.

In order to fight the leftist insurgency most effectively, the military high command assigned junior officers to read the political tracts of African revolutionary leaders, such as Amílcar Cabral of Guinea-Bissau.

To their ultimate surprise, a sizable number of junior officers were convinced that the insurgents were right. Some of them also concluded that Portugal itself was an underdeveloped Third World country in need of "national liberation".

Revolution of The Carnation

A diverse group of disgruntled junior officers in 1973 formed a clandestine political organization, the Armed Forces Movement (Movimento das Forças Armadas, MFA). On April 25, 1974, the MFA deposed Caetano. The New State collapsed without resistance. Holding red carnations, demonstrators had persuaded other military units not to resist.

The MFA then stepped back, but this proved only temporary. The young officers would soon be in the midst of a political free-for-all to determine the direction of the revolution. They too coalesced into a number of factions built around competing political orientations and personalities.

Captain Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho became the focal point of one radical faction, once styling himself as the Fidel Castro of Europe. Colonel Vasco Gonçalves began as a moderate, but moved to a position close to the Portuguese Communist Party. A moderate faction, later dubbed the Group of Nine, formed around Lieutenant Colonel Melo Antunes.

Finally, further behind the scenes until the last stages of the revolution were the "operationals", a group of officers largely concerned with professional military matters and associated with Lieutenant Colonel António Ramalho Eanes.

The Junta of National Salvation (Junta de Salvação Nacional) was formed from moderate senior officers. General António de Spínola, a former military governor of Guinea-Bissau, was invited to lead the junta as provisional president of the republic.

Palma Carlos, a liberal law professor, was named provisional prime minister. Political parties of all stripes were legalized, and political prisoners were released. Political exiles streamed back into the country.

Cease-fires were arranged in Africa. In one of the most fateful decisions of the new regime, the leaders promised elections for a constituent assembly within a year, the first real elections in over half a century, and with universal suffrage and proportional representation.

The revolution had released popular tensions that had been building up for decades. Turmoil spread quickly in the newfound freedom, and rival power centers competed to control the situation. Spurred on by the newly legalized Portuguese Communist Party, Maoists and other leftist groups and workers staged strikes and seized factories, shops, and offices.

Students took over schools and denounced teachers for "fascist sympathies". Services broke down, and shortages became common. Right-wing groups, especially in the conservative rural north, began to mobilize and arm themselves.

In July the Palma Carlos government collapsed amid the turmoil, and prominent members of the MFA moved into key positions. Carvalho was promoted to brigadier general and put in charge of the army’s new Continental Operational Command (Comando Operacional do Continente, COPCON), which became the principal arbiter of order as the police disintegrated.

Colonel Vasco Gonçalves was appointed to the position of prime minister. The MFA radicals regularly overruled Spínola’s decisions and also forced him to accept the independence of the colonies.

In September a major demonstration planned by Spínola to bolster his position forced a confrontation with COPCON, which resulted in Spínola’s resignation. General Francisco da Costa Gomes, who was more sympathetic to the left, assumed the presidency.

The most radical phase of the revolution began in March 1975. Spínola launched an unsuccessful coup attempt on March 11. In response, the radical wing of the MFA abolished the Junta of National Salvation and formed the Revolutionary Council (Conselho da Revolução), some 20 officers responsible only to the MFA Delegates’ Assembly.

The council nationalized the banking system, press, utilities, and insurance companies. With elections for the Constituent Assembly scheduled for April 25, the anniversary of the revolution, the MFA pressed a "constitutional pact" on the six largest parties, which recognized the permanent supervisory role of the MFA in a "guided" democracy.

Turnout was high for the elections, in which 12 parties competed, but the outcome shocked the radicals. The moderate Socialist Party came in first with 37.9 percent, followed by the right-of-center Social Democrats (originally called the Popular Democrats) with 26.4 percent. The Communists, the electoral ally of the MFA radicals, garnered only 12.5 percent.

Talk of Civil War

The MFA responded during the "hot summer" (verão quente) of 1975 by styling itself as a national-liberation movement. In the south, landless agricultural laborers seized large estates and declared them collective farms. Moderate Socialists and Social Democrats resigned from the government. Small freehold farmers formed armed groups, held counterrevolutionary demonstrations, and bombed the offices of leftist parties.

Plans were drawn up for a possible alternative government in the north. COPCON was beginning to disintegrate, and individual army units were under pressure to declare their political orientation. Both society and the MFA itself were becoming increasingly polarized, and there was talk of civil war.

As a consequence of the growing tension, Gonçalves and his government were pressed to resign at the end of August, and they did so. A new, more moderate provisional government was installed.

Dissatisfied with this outcome and determined not to "lose" the revolution, radical paratroopers attempted to organize a coup in November 1975. Like Spínola’s coup attempt, however, this backfired. Lieutenant Colonel António Ramalho Eanes, of the MFA’s professional military faction, led a purge of the MFA radicals. COPCON was disbanded and Otelo, its commander, placed under house arrest.

Eanes was named army chief of staff and made a member of the Revolutionary Council. The "constitutional pact" was renegotiated in February 1976. Elections were held for the new Assembly of the Republic in April, and Eanes was elected president in June with 61.5 percent of the vote in the first round.

The Constituent Assembly sought to avoid both the weak, unstable governments of the 1911 constitution and also the authoritarianism of the 1933 constitution. Based on the French model, the new system called for both an elected president with real powers and an executive prime minister chosen by a majority party or coalition in a freely elected parliament.

The renegotiated constitutional pact still called for socialism as the goal of government and society and institutionalized the legacy of the revolution. Moreover, it retained the Revolutionary Council, still a self-appointed and purely military institution, and gave it the power to safeguard the legacy of the revolution and judge the constitutionality of legislation passed by the civilian government.

The first elected government was led by Mário Soares of the moderately leftist Socialist Party. In 1979 however, a center-right government of Social Democrats and Christian Democrats was elected. The inherent tension between the elected government and the essentially undemocratic council became evident as the cabinet sought to privatize portions of the economy.

After a standoff that lasted roughly from 1979 to 1982, a process of normalization set in and the undemocratic vestiges of the revolution were gradually excised. In particular, a constitutional reform in 1982 abolished the Revolutionary Council and sent the army back to the barracks.

In the elections of 1986 Soares became Portugal’s first civilian president in 60 years, replacing Eanes. Another constitutional reform, in 1989, eliminated the requirement to keep the nationalized sector of the economy.

The moderate Socialist and Social Democratic parties had increasingly come to dominate the political system, reducing the need for multiparty coalitions and increasing the stability of government. Portugal had become a far less hierarchical and far more pluralistic, democratic, and dynamic society than it had been before 1974.

In 1986 the European Economic Community (now the European Union) accepted Portugal and Spain simultaneously as members. The opening to trade, the inflow of European investments for infrastructure and other purposes, and the constitutional changes of 1989 spurred growth and helped transform the economy.

Economic growth surpassed the European average in the 1990s and until 2002. While, like any country, Portugal was not without its scandals, controversies, and disagreements, by the end of the century it had become integrated as a solidly democratic, stable, and respected member of the European community.

Prague Spring

2012-02-14T07:53:00.000-08:00

Czechoslovakia became fully communist in February 1948 and was a member of both the Warsaw Pact and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON, the Soviet counterpart to the Marshall Plan). As such, it had very close ties to the Soviet Union, politically as well as economically.

During the 1960s, following the ascension of Nikita Khrushchev to the position of premier, the Soviet Union’s relations with its satellite nations in eastern Europe softened, leading to greater flexibility in their political and economic policies. One of the greatest tests of how far this new flexibility would stretch was initiated by Alexander Dubcek, the political head of Czechoslovakia.

Another factor influencing these events was the spread of student movements across the continent of Europe, particularly in West Germany, Italy, and France. In 1967 these student movements spilled over into Czechoslovakia and dovetailed with increasing intellectual dissent among some of the Communist Party membership.

Internally there were deep-rooted fissures in the unity of the state. The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was fragmented, stemming from the political trials of the 1950s, which revolved around questioning party comrades’ commitment to Stalinism.

As the party discussed economic changes, two unforeseen developments occurred. Some among the party began to call for relaxed censorship, and Slovak nationalists began to demand a greater share of political power.

These events led to the resignation of president and first secretary of the Party Antoni´n Novotný. Later in March Ludwig Svoboda assumed the post of president, due to legislation that mandated that these two positions be separated, as Novotný’s criticism of early reforms foundered.

Dubcek then implemented a series of radical reforms collectively known as the Action Program. These reforms allowed freedom of expression rather than strict censorship; promoted open, public discussion of important national issues; democratized the KSC; provided amnesty for all political prisoners for the first time in 20 years; encouraged greater economic freedom; allowed noncommunists to assume high-ranking government positions; and opened investigations into the political trials of the 1950s.

These reforms became known as the Prague Spring, harkening back to the 1956 attempts of Hungarian Imre Nagy to redefine the role of the Communist Party within the state. The reforms were officially approved by the government on April 5, 1968; however, a rift between liberal communists, who supported Dubcek, and hard-line communists, who supported Moscow’s policy, became more clearly defined.

Czechoslovak intellectuals responded by calling for long-term commitment, through the publication of a manifesto, which became known as the "Two Thousand Words". The Soviet reaction to this manifesto was swift and critical, which pushed Dubcek’s government to officially condemn its ideas in order to preserve its delicate relations with the Soviet Union.

Czechoslovakia’s Warsaw Pact neighbors saw this blossoming of freedoms, particularly the "Two Thousand Words", as a potential danger that threatened to spill over the border and raise public protest within their own nations.

However, initially through a series of meetings, it seemed as if the Warsaw Pact nations would allow these experiments to continue. In late July and early August of 1968, at the border village of Cierna nad Tisou, the political leadership of Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union met to discuss these developments.

This meeting was followed by an additional conference, adding delegates from Bulgaria, East Germany, Hungary, and Poland, which convened at Bratislava on August 3. These meetings ended with promises of renewed friendship and commitment to socialism; yet Warsaw Pact troops began to mass along the border with Czechoslovakia.

Suddenly, during the night of August 20–21, 1968, the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact nations sent 500,000 troops across the border, while Soviet aircraft landed special forces directly in the capital city of Prague, seizing control of key transportation junctures and communication networks.

The native population responded with defiance, seen in public protests and demonstrations, and more than 80,000 political refugees streamed into the West, seeking asylum. The Soviets suffered minor military losses of 96 killed and 87 wounded; only 11 of those killed died due to direct confrontation with Czechoslovak citizens.

By mid-September, Warsaw Pact troops had killed more than 80 Czechoslovakian citizens, seriously wounded another 266, and lightly wounded an additional 436. The Soviet Union was unable to establish an alternative government, and initially kept Alexander Dubcek in his post.

Dubcek gave in to Soviet demands and repealed his progressive policies. In April 1969 the Soviets installed Gustav Husák as Dubcek’s replacement, and Husák then carried out "normalization" efforts and presided over a purge of the KSC.

Prague Spring marked the end to the flexibility of Khrushchev, but it also stood as a harbinger of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika of the 1980s. Under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev this autonomy would cease to exist, a trend that lasted until the time of Gorbachev and the early rumblings of the revolutions of 1989.

Brezhnev made this policy shift clear; essentially the "Brezhnev Doctrine" meant that although the Soviet Union would not normally interfere in the affairs of its satellite states, if the system of socialism itself was under direct threat the Soviet Union would help any communist regime maintain power against the threat of overthrow.

Vladimir Putin

2012-02-14T03:17:00.000-08:00

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in Leningrad on October 7, 1952, and was very much a product of the Soviet system. His family background was ordinary and reflected the hardships of postwar Soviet life.

Putin applied himself to improving his position in the Soviet order and looked, once he graduated in law from Leningrad State University, to a career in the security services (KGB) as the best method of doing so.

Following initial duties dealing with Leningrad dissidents, Putin took up from 1985 to 1989 a KGB posting in East Germany. After the collapse of the East German regime, Putin moved to the international affairs section of his old university and within a short time joined the Leningrad politician Anatoly Sobchak as an aide; following Sobchak’s election in 1991 as mayor, Putin became deputy mayor.

His abilities were noticed in Moscow, and he joined the Kremlin staff in 1996 as an assistant to Pavel Borodin overseeing Russian economic assets. This post soon brought him to the attention of President Boris Yeltsin, who, in 1998, appointed Putin head of the Federal Security Service (the replacement for the KGB), from which post Putin quickly rose to be head of the Security Council in 1999.

These times were unstable ones for Yeltsin and the Russian Federation. Within a period of 18 months several prime ministers came and went. When Yeltsin fired Sergei Stepashin in August 1999, he appointed Putin prime minister. He was now in position for succession to the presidency, which unexpectedly came his way when Yeltsin resigned on December 31, 1999, and Putin became acting president.

A presidential election followed in March 2000, and Putin won convincingly. The backing of the security services and many economic reformers gave him a political base to overcome any threats from the nationalist Fatherland Front.

In his first years in office, Putin faced a number of crises stemming from the unrest and malaise of the Yeltsin years. Chechnya, controlled by Islamic militants, was clearly the most significant. He attempted to resolve the war, but terrorist bombings in Moscow brought a swift and punishing military retaliation.

In addition, he wanted to reverse some of the decentralizing traits of the Yeltsin years, and this meant imposing more Moscow control over the outlying regions through a system of appointed governors.

He moved against the oligarchs who had profited during the Yeltsin years. The crisis following the sinking of the submarine Kursk in August 2000 hurt Putin’s reputation when the government appeared incapable of reacting to the disaster.

In terms of policy, Putin wanted to restore something of the order and pride that had existed during the Soviet era. This meant that some old symbols of state were preserved along with the belief in centralizing control over both the economy and the media. Following Putin’s Unity Party landslide victory in the 2003 parliamentary election, it was suggested that control of the state media produced the favorable results.

On March 14, 2004, Putin won decisively his second term in office. He continued his campaign to strengthen state powers. There were also improvements in the justice system and reform of the difficult tax laws that inhibited investment and development.

Some see recent actions as a reflection of the antidemocratic instincts that lurk behind the scenes in Putin’s administration. Putin’s 2004 support of Viktor Yanukovych in the Ukrainian election was viewed by critics as an exercise in undue influence on the affairs of a neighboring independent state.

In foreign affairs, Putin built positive relationships with much of the West, including the president of the United States, although he opposed the Second Gulf War. However, after the events of September 11, 2001, he was generally supportive of U.S. action in the War on Terror, including the use of bases in former Soviet Central Asian territories.

His country’s own campaign against Islamic terror made him a willing ally. His provision of nuclear technology and advanced weapons to Iran raised doubts as to his sincerity. He also reluctantly accepted the U.S. abrogation of the ABM treaty as part of America’s missile defense program.

Putin cooperated with the enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which now includes former Baltic Soviet Republics bordering Russia. Relations with Europe were strengthened by an agreement in 2005 with Germany to construct a major oil pipeline that should bring economic benefits to both Russia and Germany. Putin also attempted to build favorable relationships—economic and political—with his Asian neighbors, China and Japan.

It is too early to determine Putin’s legacy but he maintained his popularity with campaigns against corruption and the oligarchs. Economic improvements and stability were welcomed by a public often left in turmoil following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Although not an open democracy on Western terms, and with features that suggest the possibility of returning to old ways, Russia remains a world force and one that has the unrealized potential for full democratic development.

Muammar Qaddafi

2012-02-14T02:59:00.000-08:00

Muammar Qaddafi was born in the desert region of Sidra (Sirte), Libya, in 1942. He was the youngest child from a nomadic Bedouin family. Qaddafi attended the Sebha preparatory school in Fezzan, where he formed a secret society, the Free Officers, patterned on Gamal Abdel Nasser’s group in Egypt that championed the causes of pan-Arabism and Arab socialism.

In 1961 Qaddafi was expelled from Sebha because of his political activism. In April 1963 Qaddafi became a trainee officer at the military academy in Benghazi and began to work his way up through the army officer corps.

In 1966 he volunteered to go and study with the Royal Corps of Signals in Britain, where he learned radio electronics and telecommunications. He was able to develop a code that the secret Free Officers group used to maintain contact with one another throughout Libya.

Qaddafi and his close friends from Sebha became the core of the revolutionary group that overthrew King Idris and removed Italian influence from Libya. Qaddafi called off the projected coup against the king twice before going ahead with it on September 1, 1969.

While Idris was out of the country, the Free Officers arrested the king’s leading supporters in a bloodless coup. The first objective was to take control of the main barracks and the radio station. After securing the radio station, Qaddafi gave an impromptu speech announcing that the monarchy had ended and that Libya had been given back to the people.

Qaddafi was appointed president of the Revolutionary Command Council, the main governing body of the country. The Free Officers promptly refused to renew agreements with Britain and the United States for their military bases in Libya; they also emphasized Arab unity.

They nationalized most banks and other business and declared Islam the religion of the state while stating that religious freedom would be accorded to all other faiths. In the midst of the cold war, the Western nations,—particularly the United States—were hostile to these changes and Qaddafi’s fiery brand of Arab nationalism.

In hopes of creating a pan-Arab state, Qaddafi proclaimed the Federation of Arab Republics (Libya, Egypt, and Syria) in 1972, but the three countries could not agree on specific terms. In 1973 Qaddafi talked for the first time about his third universal theory, an economic and political philosophy that was neither capitalist nor communist.

At this time he also nationalized all foreign petroleum assets. Increased revenues from petroleum during the 1970s enabled Qaddafi to initiate massive programs of domestic development and to build a modern infrastructure.

At the same time, Libyan forces occupied the 60-mile-wide Aouzou Strip on the border of Chad. The skirmishes between Libya and Chad continued sporadically for years to come. Qaddafi gave massive amounts of financial aid to African nations and was a prominent figure in the Organization of African Unity.

In 1974 Qaddafi gave up all his political and administrative functions, but still remained head of state and commander in chief of the armed forces. On March 2, 1974, Qaddafi proclaimed that Libya was to be known as the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahariya. He subsequently stepped down from all public offices but remained the real ruler of Libya from behind the scenes.

In 1975, Qaddafi published the first of three documents called The Green Book, which expounded his personal philosophy and political belief translated into a program of action. The Green Book became part of every Libyan’s life and was studied in schools; extracts were broadcast daily, and its slogans were publicized throughout the nation.

Part one of the book, The Solution of the Problem of Democracy—The Authority of the People, concentrated on the political structure of Libya and rejected the concept of parliamentary democracy.

Part two, published in 1977 and entitled The Solution of the Economic Problem—Socialism, discussed the weaknesses of both communism and capitalism. Part three, published in 1981 and entitled The Social Basis of the Third Universal Theory, dealt with a wide range of issues including nationalism and the status of minorities and women.

Qaddafi’s hostility toward Israel and the West brought him closer to the Soviet Union. Western governments also blamed him for a series of terrorist attacks against civilian targets.

In 1981 U.S. and Libyan air forces clashed over the Gulf of Sidra. Hoping to stop terrorist attacks, President Ronald Reagan authorized a bombing raid to assassinate Qaddafi in 1986. Although his adopted daughter died in the attack, Qaddafi survived this and other attempts on his life.

During the 1990s, Qaddafi began to adopt a more moderate approach to the West and provided financial compensation for some terrorist victims in order to repair diplomatic relations.

Al-Qaeda

2012-02-14T02:08:00.000-08:00

Al-Qaeda (Arabic for "the base") is a worldwide Sunni Islamist militant insurgent group. Founded by Osama bin Laden in 1988 in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda is now dedicated to driving the United States out of the Middle East specifically and out of Muslim countries generally, to destroying Israel, and to toppling pro-Western governments in Islamic countries and replacing them with Islamic fundamentalist governments.

These three goals lead to the organization’s ultimate goal, which is the reestablishment of the caliphate, a nation uniting Muslims and spanning the Islamic world.

The organization is believed to be highly redundant, both financially and operationally. While the various cells that make up the organization are accountable to higher-level leadership, operations appear to be left to the individual cells, while higher levels provide material and logistical support.

Ideas and targets coming from the upper echelons filter down to the individual cells responsible for coordinating and executing the attacks. This redundancy increases the organization’s resiliency; when cells are destroyed or captured, the losses can be contained more effectively than if al-Qaeda were a more linear organization.

Al-Qaeda’s training camps are likewise well organized. The extent of the training and organization is best seen in the group’s multivolume Encyclopedia of Jihad. Several thousand pages in length, the encyclopedia details the bureaucratic workings of the group.

Covered topics include guerrilla warfare, assembling booby traps, tactics for fighting against armored or aerial combat units, urban warfare, intelligence security, data gathering, and chemical weapons tactics.

The group has been linked to or accused of taking part in terrorist acts across the globe beginning in the early 1990s. A list of the attacks against U.S. interests attributed to al-Qaeda includes the 1992 hotel bombings in Aden, Yemen; the February 6, 1993, bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City; attacks carried out on U.S. military forces in Somalia in 1993 and 1994; the June 25, 1996, truck bombing of the Khobar Towers residential compound in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia; the near-simultaneous bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on August 7, 1998; the suicide bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen on October 12, 2000; and the September 11, 2001, airline hijackings and attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

The United States is not the group’s only target, however. Al-Qaeda also is linked to the April 2002 bombing of the El Ghriba synagogue in Tunisia; the October 2002 nightclub bombing in Bali, Indonesia; the November 2003 bombings of synagogues and a British bank in Istanbul, Turkey; the March 11, 2004, train bombings in Madrid, Spain; and the July 7, 2005, London transit bombings.

Al-Qaeda is most often represented and understood in regard to its founder, Osama bin Laden (aka Abu Abdallah). Bin Laden was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on March 10, 1957. When he was six months old, his father, Muhammad bin Laden, the Yemeni immigrant who established the Saudi Binladin Group, relocated to Jeddah, where Osama grew up.

The Soviet Union’s December 1979 invasion of Afghanistan galvanized the Muslim world in defense of Afghanistan and provided the West with a proxy war through which to combat the Soviet Union. Bin Laden, who had studied economics at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, was one of many spurred to action in defense of Afghanistan.

He made his first trip to neighboring Pakistan in 1980, where he sought ways to contribute to the jihad. Bin Laden made several monetary contributions to the mujahideen, but quickly began looking for other ways to contribute.

Bin Laden joined with Palestinian cleric Abdullah Azzam to found the Services Bureau (Makhtab al-Khidimat, or MAK) in Pakistan in 1984. Azzam, who had taught at King Abdul Aziz University while bin Laden studied there, was indispensable in recruiting.

In addition to providing relief to war victims in Afghanistan, the MAK organized and coordinated the volunteers, donations, and weapons coming into Pakistan and Afghanistan in support of the jihad.

Azzam believed that the young Arab men streaming to Pakistan to participate in the jihad should be scattered among the Afghan functions. Azzam felt that such a mixing of Arabs among the local forces would reap benefits both in Afghanistan and abroad.

Bin Laden saw the situation differently and sought to create his own separate Arab fighting force. He believed that such a force would be a superior fighting unit compared to local Afghan forces. Bin Laden broke with Azzam and established training camps for his Arab force near Jaji, in eastern Afghanistan.

From this base, which they dubbed al-Masadah (the Lion’s Den), bin Laden’s "Arab Afghans" engaged the Soviets in the battle of Jaji in the spring of 1987. It was at this time that bin Laden grew closer to the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) and one of its most prominent members, Ayman al Zawahiri, who would become bin Laden’s deputy in al-Qaeda.

When the Soviets announced their planned withdrawal in April 1988, bin Laden began preparations to perpetuate and expand his forces. He began by moving his unit to the area around Jalalabad, Afghanistan, which became known as al-Qaeda; bin Laden would later say that the name remained with the group by accident. Following the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia.

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, bin Laden, who had consistently expressed his contempt for the "atheist" Hussein and his Ba’athist government, approached the Saudi king with a plan to use his Arab Afghans to drive Hussein’s forces from Kuwait.

The Saudi government sought to restrict his movements within the kingdom. Bin Laden obtained permission in early 1991 to travel to Pakistan on the pretext of checking in on some business interests and never returned to Saudi Arabia.

In early 1992 bin Laden and al-Qaeda moved to Sudan, where they remained until 1996. Al-Qaeda and the National Islamic Front (NIF), the ruling party in Sudan, enjoyed a symbiotic relationship.

The NIF granted al-Qaeda a safe haven and freedom of movement, while bin Laden made substantial investments in Sudanese industry and agriculture and undertook several large-scale construction projects to develop the infrastructure and agricultural and industrial production capacity of Sudan.

While in the Sudan, bin Laden directed his forces in actions against the communist government of South Yemen. The Arab Afghans also were sent to Bosnia, where they had a substantial impact on that conflict. Bin Laden dispatched al-Qaeda forces into Somalia in response to the buildup of U.S. forces.

In December 1992 President George H. W. Bush sent 28,000 U.S. troops into Somalia on a humanitarian mission in support of United Nations (UN) relief efforts. Bin Laden and al-Qaeda dismissed all humanitarian claims and interpreted the U.S. presence as a way of putting pressure on Islamic regimes and as an effort to establish another base from which to attack Muslim nations.

Al-Qaeda regarded Yemen as a major victory. First, even though the hotels bombed in Yemen did not house U.S. personnel, the transfer of U.S. troops out of Yemen shortly after the hotel bombings indicated to al-Qaeda that they had been successful in driving the Americans from Yemen.

Bin Laden also claimed that the militarily superior U.S. forces were driven from Somalia by a poor, ill-armed people whose only strength was their faith. In his 1996 fatwa declaring war against the United States, bin Laden claimed that the most important lesson to be learned from Somalia was that the United States would flee at the first sign of resistance.

The year 1994 was a watershed for bin Laden. He survived two assassination attempts and in April was stripped of his Saudi citizenship in response to the growing threat he represented to the regime.

A final step in his radicalization came in August, when the Saudi government imprisoned clerics Salman al Awdah and Safar al Hawali, who were among the first and most prominent of the clerics circulating cassettes of their sermons against the continued U.S. presence in the Arabian Peninsula, and whose imprisonment bin Laden would later mention in his 1996 fatwa.

Bin Laden and al-Qaeda left Sudan in 1996 and returned to Afghanistan, a move prompted by several factors. In addition to the assassination attempts, bin Laden faced international pressure on the NIF and its de facto leader, Hassan al-Turabi.

The United States and Saudi Arabia sought to have bin Laden silenced and his activities curtailed, and al-Turabi found it increasingly difficult to maneuver and protect bin Laden.

When Sudan started pressuring bin Laden, he returned to Jalalabad. There bin Laden and al-Qaeda entered into a symbiotic relationship with the Taliban ("the students"), who were in the process of consolidating their control over much of the country.

This relationship was similar to that with the NIF in Sudan; bin Laden and his organization gained considerable freedom of movement and protection, while his benefactors benefited from agricultural, infrastructural, and industrial investment and development.

It was during the period between bin Laden’s return to Afghanistan and the 1998 fatwa that civilians became targets. Both the 1996 fatwa and bin Laden’s 1997 CNN interview spoke of civilians as collateral damage, not as legitimate targets in and of themselves.

By 1998 this had changed, and the fatwa issued February 22, 1998, explicitly stated that Americans and their allies, civilians and military alike, were now al-Qaeda targets anywhere they could be found.

Communications from al-Qaeda repeatedly stress their belief that Western governments oppress Muslims and Muslim nations and are engaged in a war against Islam. Bin Laden describes the presence of U.S. forces in "the Land of the Two Holy Places" (Saudi Arabia) as the greatest insult and threat faced by the Islamic world since Muhammad’s lifetime.

In addition to decrying U.S. support for Israel, the group condemns U.S. support for what it considers "apostate regimes", particularly Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden also points to the sanctions imposed on Iraq following the Gulf War as one reason to reject any human rights arguments coming from the West.

Al-Qaeda’s idea of the ummah (community of believers; the Islamic world) in opposition to the world derives from the teachings of two prominent Islamic scholars.

Ibn Taymiyyah (1263–1328) was a 14th-century Islamic scholar who taught that jihad is the duty of each individual Muslim when Islam is attacked, that the Qu’ran should be interpreted literally, and that all Muslims should read the Qu’ran and Hadith (the sayings of the Prophet) for themselves and not rely on a learned clergy. A second influence on al-Qaeda was Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), an Islamist associated with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

Describing the world as existing between states of belief (Islam) and unbelief (jahiliyya), Qutb condemned Western and Christian civilization. Urging jihad against all enemies of Islam, Qutb believed that there is no middle ground and that all Muslims must take to jihad when Islam is threatened.

These influences are apparent in al-Qaeda’s activities and rhetoric. Bin Laden believes that since the Christians, Jews, and Hindus have nuclear weapons, it is only fitting that Muslims obtain them as well.

Bin Laden also echoes Ibn Taymiyyah in his assertions that the Saudi government is aiding the "crusaders" in plundering the wealth of the ummah, the vast Middle Eastern oil reserves, and by acting to keep oil prices below fair-market value.

Al-Qaeda’s leadership cadre is well educated. Bin Laden has a university degree in economics, and his inner circle contains doctors; agricultural, civil, and electrical engineers; and computer scientists, but no religious scholars.

Rahman’s fatwa echoed the call to attack the United States and its allies—civilian and military, anywhere in the world—and contained exhortations to sink ships, shoot down airplanes, and burn corporations and businesses.

Two separate attacks on U.S. warships were made in subsequent years, with the USS Cole attack following an unsuccessful attack on the USS The Sullivans one year earlier. On September 11, 2001, the plot masterminded by Ramzi Binalshibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who were arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and 2003, respectively, proceeded along the lines of Rahman’s fatwa.

Quebec Sovereignty Movement

2012-02-14T01:17:00.000-08:00

Canadian history has been plagued by issues of national identity since 1763, when Britain conquered New France in the French and Indian War. Britain’s Québec Act of 1774 recognized the rights of French-speaking Roman Catholics.

The British North America Act of 1867, the basis for Canada’s constitution, is premised on a doctrine of "two founding nations" in which the English-speaking and French-speaking cultures are recognized as equal partners.

Because the two national identities exist in a country that has traditionally favored Anglophones, Quebec (Québec), the heart of Francophone Canada, and its leaders have tried to assert their nationalism as a distinct cultural community within Canada.

The modern sovereignty movement is a product of the 1960s. It is a demand for political independence for Quebec combined with economic association with the rest of Canada. It was introduced by René Lévesque, a former Liberal cabinet minister and popular broadcast journalist who organized the Parti Québécois (PQ) in 1968. PQ gained support when the 1969 Official Languages Act seemed to trivialize Quebec’s demand for special status.

In the October Crisis of 1970, a radical fringe group called the Front de Libération du Québec kidnapped James Cross, the British trade commissioner in Montreal, and Pierre Laporte, Quebec’s minister of labor and immigration. Quebec soon asked the Canadian armed forces to intervene, and the next day the federal government banned the FLQ under the War Measures Act.

Laporte’s body was found October 17, and a group holding Cross released him in return for safe passage to Cuba in early December. A federal inquiry later ruled that the suspension of normal civil liberties had been illegal.

In 1976, the PQ gained control of Quebec’s government and promised to consult the people of Quebec before taking any steps toward independence and secession. Four years later, majority-French provincial voters soundly rejected a referendum to authorize sovereignty negotiations with Ottawa.

Even so, the PQ was reelected in 1981, and in 1982 it refused to accept the new Canadian constitution. When the PQ removed sovereignty-association from its party platform in 1985, the Liberal Party regained control of the Quebec assembly.

Reorganized under the leadership of former finance minister Jacques Parizeau, the PQ again promised to declare Quebec independent after the voters of Quebec voted oui in a referendum.

The Meech Lake Accord, which agreed to conditions that Quebec had placed on its acceptance of the national constitution, collapsed in 1990 due to opposition. A subsequent package of constitutional reforms, presented to voters in a 1992 national referendum, was also defeated.

By 1994 the Bloc Québécois, a national party devoted to Quebec sovereignty, had won enough votes to become the official opposition party in Ottawa. Another sovereignty referendum in 1995 lost narrowly.

Canada was startled in November 2006 when Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper proposed a resolution, passed overwhelmingly by Parliament, stating that the 7 million "Québécois form a nation within a united Canada". Although this recognition was called "symbolic", it was unclear whether it might spark a renewed push for Quebec’s independence.

Sayyid Qutb

2012-02-13T06:43:00.000-08:00

Sayyid Qutb was born in an Egyptian village in 1906. Although the family was poor, Qutb’s father was educated and was an early supporter of the Egyptian nationalist movement. As a boy Qutb attended the local religious school (kuttab), where he reputedly had memorized the Qu’ran before his teenage years.

He attended a teacher’s college in Cairo and in 1933 earned a degree from Dar al-Ulam, the prestigious secular Egyptian university established in the late 19th century. After graduation Qutb worked for the Ministry of Education. A prolific writer, Qutb wrote fiction, poetry, and news articles during the 1930s.

Qutb studied for a master’s degree in education in the United States on a scholarship from 1948 to 1950. Qutb’s enmity toward the West seems to date from his stay in the United States, where he was infuriated by the racism, materialism, and casual social exchanges between the sexes that he observed there.

After traveling through Europe, he returned to Egypt and resigned from the Ministry of Education. In 1953 he joined the Muslim Brotherhood and was appointed director of the brotherhood’s propaganda section.

In the early 1950s Qutb may have been the brotherhood’s go-between with Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Free Officers Group; he initially supported the 1952 revolution and the overthrow of the corrupt monarchy of King Farouk.

But after Nasser refused to institute an Islamic state, the brotherhood opposed him. After a failed assassination attempt on Nasser in 1954, members of the brotherhood were persecuted, and Qutb was imprisoned and tortured.

He observed other brotherhood members being tortured and killed and concluded that violence was justifiable to overthrow Muslim leaders and regimes that were unjust and did not adhere to the sharia and Islamic precepts.

While in prison Qutb wrote a commentary on the Qu’ran and an Islamic manifesto, Ma’alim fi al-Tariq (Milestones). He became more radical as the repression of the brotherhood intensified.

Qutb condemned Western civilization as primitive and materialistic and argued that Muslim leaders who adopted or cooperated with the West were in conflict with Islamic culture and tradition. He warned of jahiliyyah (ignorance), which he believed was imposed by the adoption of Western culture.

He rejected the ideologies of Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx, asserting that Marxism resulted in the enslavement of mankind. Qutb held an ultraconservative view of the role of women in society. He argued that although the Qu’ran mandated the equality of all humans the role of women was to maintain family values, with men as the head of households.

For Qutb the Qu’ranic text, and to a lesser degree the Hadith, were the sources of all law; be believed that the Qu’ran provided a comprehensive guideline for the conduct of all aspects of human life. Authority emanated from God and the Qu’ran; therefore jihad, or holy war against the modernization of the West and against unjust, corrupt Muslim rulers was the duty of true believers.

He advocated the creation of committed cadres of devout believers to teach Muslim youth and to struggle against "ignorant" or unjust regimes in the Islamic world as well as against the West.

Qutb was released from prison in 1964, but shortly thereafter was imprisoned again on charges of sedition and terrorism. Although in Milestones he had fallen just short of advocating the overthrow of Nasser’s regime, he was found guilty after a public trial. Qutb was executed in 1966 and promptly became a martyr for members of the brotherhood and a myriad of breakaway Islamist organizations.

For Qutb a theocracy was an ideal, and he envisioned the creation of a new society and government. He was a major force in 20th century Islamist movements. His books were translated into many languages and influenced a wide variety of contemporary Islamist movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran. Qutb’s brother taught in Saudi Arabia, where he also influenced future Islamist radicals.

The Egyptian Ayman Zawahiri followed Qutb’s precepts and in turn became a theoretical mentor to Osama bin Laden. Qutb’s works have also remained a major force for the Muslim Brotherhood, an important factor in Egyptian politics until the present day.

Yitzhak Rabin

2012-02-13T04:45:00.000-08:00

Yitzhak Rabin was a key Israeli military and political leader. Born in Jerusalem in 1922, Rabin earned a degree from an agricultural college and joined the elite Palmach forces that fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. He became chief of staff and led the army during the stunning Israeli victory in the 1967 war.

Rabin was the Israeli ambassador to the United States from 1968 to 1973. After returning to Israel, he ran for the Knesset on the Labor Party ticket. He vied with his rival Shimon Peres for the position of prime minister after Golda Meir’s government fell and defeated Peres for the leadership position.

Rabin served as prime minister from 1974 to 1977 and was instrumental in rebuilding the army after the 1973 war (Yom Kippur War). He also signed the initial disengagement agreement with Egypt over the Sinai Peninsula. Following reports of his wife having had, under Israeli law, an illegal bank account in the United States, Rabin stepped down as prime minister.

For much of his military career, Rabin was a hard-liner with regard to the Palestinians and Arab nations. He advocated the use of strong force to crush the Palestinian Intifada when it erupted in the Occupied Territories (the Gaza Strip and the West Bank) in 1987. Rabin was again elected prime minister in 1992.

Following protracted secret negotiations, he agreed to the 1993 Oslo accords and signed a much-publicized agreement with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), represented by Yasir Arafat, in a ceremony hosted by then president Bill Clinton on the White House lawn. Under the agreement the Israelis agreed to a gradual pullout from selected portions of the West Bank and Gaza in exchange for full recognition by the PLO.

The agreement was opposed by both Israeli and Palestinian extremists and hard-liners. In 1994 Rabin signed a peace treaty with King Hussein of Jordan, with whom—in contrast to Arafat—he had cordial relations. Rabin was awarded the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize along with Peres and Arafat.

Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir, an Israeli fanatic who opposed the settlement with the Palestinians, in 1995. The assassination shocked Israeli society but it also reflected the deep divisions within Israel over the exchange of peace for land.

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman

2012-02-13T04:26:00.000-08:00

The founding father of Bangladesh, Banga Bandhu (Friend of Banga) Sheikh Mujibur Rahaman, was born on March 17, 1920, in Tungipara village in the Faridpur district in erstwhile East Pakistan. He was the third child of Sheikh Luthfur Rahman and Sheikh Sahara Khatun. After the partition of India in 1947, Mujibur built his career in East Pakistan as an active politician championing the cause of Bengalis.

Although religion was the common factor in East and West Pakistan, there were economic, social, and linguistic differences. East Pakistan (East Bengal until 1956) was less developed than the west, and the discriminatory policies of West Pakistan increased the marginalization of the eastern part of the country.

Mujibur was emerging as a prominent leader in the wake of the imposition of Urdu as the official language. His Muslim Students League formed an All-Party State League Action Council in March 1948. Mujibur, also called Mujib, became the joint secretary of the East Pakistan Awami Muslim League (called the Awami League from 1954) when it was formed in June 1949.

In 1952 the police brutally crushed the movement to make Bengali one of the official languages of Pakistan. Cracks had already opened in united Pakistan, and it was Mujib who spearheaded the cause of separation from the west.

Mujib contested as a candidate of the United Front, which had been formed by the Awami League for the 1954 general elections. The following year the Awami League demanded autonomy for the eastern wing of Pakistan. Under the presidency of General Mohammad Ayub Khan the Bengalis were further alienated.

Mujib and the people of East Pakistan witnessed a harsh military regime exploiting and dominating the eastern wing. The Ayub government was dismayed at Mujib’s popularity and imprisoned him many times.

Mujib spelled out a six-point program in February 1966 demanding autonomy for all provinces of Pakistan. He was accused of engineering the secession of East Pakistan, and proceedings were initiated against him in the Agartala Conspiracy Case of 1968.

In the 1970 elections to the National Assembly of Pakistan, Mujib’s Awami League secured an absolute majority, winning 162 seats out of 313. The new president of Pakistan, Muhammad Yahya Khan, was in no mood to give power to Mujib.

The convening of the National Assembly was postponed. On March 25 Mujib declared the independence of East Pakistan, which was renamed Bangladesh. He was taken to West Pakistan in March 1971 to be tried for treason.

With Indian military assistance Bangladesh was liberated on December 16, 1971. Meanwhile, the government of Pakistan had sentenced Mujib to death. But because of international pressure, he was finally released and became the first prime minister of Bangladesh on January 12, 1972.

Mujib faced the difficult task of governing the nation, which faced the challenges of rehabilitation and reconstruction. Disagreements with Pakistan remained. Mujib signed a 25-year friendship treaty with India. Most countries recognized Bangladesh, which also became a member of the United Nations.

Mujib followed a nonaligned foreign policy. He promulgated a constitution in 1971 containing the principles of secularism, socialism, and democracy. Mujib also launched welfare programs.

The Awami Party won the elections of 1973 with a massive majority. But poor governance, corruption, opposition from disgruntled elements, and natural disasters created problems. Mujib declared a state of emergency in 1975.

A presidential form of government was initiated with Mujib as president for life. In June the Awami League became the only legal party. On August 15, 1975, Mujib and 15 of his family members were assassinated by young army officers.

The military government that followed passed the infamous Indemnity Ordinance giving indemnity to the assassins. It was not until 1998 that the culprits were sentenced to death, when the Awami League government of Sheikh Hasina, daughter of Mujib, came to power.

Ronald Reagan

2012-02-13T02:58:00.000-08:00

Ronald Wilson Reagan was an actor who served two terms as the 33rd governor of California and later served two terms as the 40th president of the United States. Reagan’s presidency contributed to the end of the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union and witnessed the collapse of communism in eastern europe.

At the end of Reagan’s administration, the United States was enjoying its longest period of peacetime prosperity without recession or depression. His administration cut taxes, reformed the tax code, offered a temporary solution to the Social Security issue, reduced inflation, continued deregulation of business, and increased military spending.

Critics have commented that Reagan was unconcerned with income inequality, and his dedication to military spending increased the federal deficit as well as trade deficits internationally and may have been instrumental in causing the stock market crash of 1987.

Overall, Reagan was one of the most popular U.S. presidents of the 20th century, exiting office more popular than when he began. Nicknamed the Great Communicator by the media, Reagan dominated the decade of the 1980s in the United States to such an extent that the two are linked inextricably together.

Reagan was born on February 6, 1911, in Tampico, Illinois, and was raised with strong Christian values. He attended high school in the nearby town of Dixon. In 1928 Reagan entered Eureka College, where he studied economics and sociology. Reagan graduated in 1932. After graduation, he worked as a radio sports announcer.

Following a 1937 screen test, Reagan won a Hollywood contract and began a lengthy acting career, appearing in 53 films over the next two decades. In 1940 he played the role of George Gipp in the film Knute Rockne, All American.

In the film, Reagan delivers the memorable line "Win one for the Gipper!" From this role, Reagan acquired the nickname "the Gipper", which he retained throughout his life. In 1935 Reagan was commissioned as a reserve cavalry officer in the U.S. Army.

After the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States became involved in World War II, and Reagan was activated and assigned to the First Motion Picture Unit in the U.S. Army Air Forces, which made training and propaganda films. Reagan’s efforts to go overseas for combat were rejected due to his astigmatism.

While in Hollywood, Reagan married actress Jane Wyman in 1940 and had a daughter, Maureen, and later adopted a son, Michael. Following his divorce, Reagan married Nancy Davis, also an actress, in 1952, and had two children, Patricia Ann and Ronald Prescott.

Reagan became president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1947 to 1952 and again from 1959 to 1960. Although raised in a strong Democratic household, Reagan shifted his political views, primarily because of the Republican Party’s strong condemnation of communism.

He became involved in disputes over the issue of communism in the film industry. During the 1950s Senator Joseph McCarthy initiated a series of hearings to root out communism in the United States.

Particular scrutiny was placed on Hollywood, and actors marked as communists faced exile from the film industry. Reagan claimed that Hollywood was being infiltrated by communists and kept watch on suspected actors for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

As Reagan’s film career waned, he moved to television, hosting and performing for, General Electric Theater and starring in television movies. His employment for General Electric required extensive travel as a GE spokesman. Reagan delivered numerous anticommunist speeches, which brought him to the attention of the Republicans.

In 1966 Reagan was elected governor of California by a margin of 1 million votes, and he was reelected in 1970. During his first term Reagan froze government hiring but approved tax increases to balance the budget.

In 1969 Reagan sent 2,200 National Guard troops to disband a student protest on the Berkeley campus of the University of California. He worked to reform welfare and opposed construction projects that hindered conservation or transgressed onto American Indian ranches.

Although Reagan supported capital punishment, his efforts to enforce this position were hindered by the Supreme Court of California’s decision to invalidate all death sentences passed prior to 1972. A constitutional amendment quickly overturned this decision.

Reagan’s first attempt to secure the Republican nomination for president in 1968 was unsuccessful. He tried again in 1976 against incumbent Gerald Ford, but was narrowly defeated at the Republican National Convention. In 1980 Reagan won the Republican nomination and selected as his running mate former Texas congressman George H. W. Bush.

The United States was suffering from a period of high inflation and unemployment, fuel shortages resulting from instability in the petroleum market, and the international humiliation of the yearlong confinement of U.S. hostages in Iran. Reagan became popular, consequently winning in a landslide over incumbent Jimmy Carter. The Republican presidential victory accompanied a 12-seat change in the Senate, the first Republican Senate majority in over 25 years.

First Days

Reagan assumed the office of president on January 20, 1981. The Iran hostage crisis ended with the release of the U.S. captives the same day, which led to allegations that a covert agreement delaying their release had been negotiated between the Iranian government and Reagan’s future cabinet.

On March 30 Reagan was nearly killed in an assassination attempt but quickly recovered and returned to office. Reagan’s first official act was to end oil price controls.

In 1981 Reagan fired the majority of federal air traffic controllers when they embarked on an illegal strike, setting limits for public employees unions and signaling the acceptability of businesses’ taking stronger bargaining positions with unions.

Reagan steered his desired domestic legislation through Congress in an effort to stimulate economic growth and reduce inflation and unemployment. He followed a plan calling for cutbacks on taxes and government expenditures, refusing to deviate from this course when the strengthening of national defenses increased the national deficit.

To curb inflation, Reagan supported Federal Reserve Board chairman Paul Volcker’s plan to tighten the monetary supply by dramatically increasing interest rates. Reagan also sponsored wide-ranging tax cuts to boost business investment.

Reagan simultaneously limited the growth of welfare and other social programs. Beginning in 1983 the economy began to recover. However, increased military spending as part of Reagan’s cold war policy caused the national deficit to soar.

A renewal of U.S. self-confidence due to a recovering economy and heightened international prestige propelled Reagan and Bush to win their second term in an unprecedented landslide against Democratic challengers Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro, winning the electoral votes in 49 out of 50 states.

During his second term, Reagan overhauled the income tax code, eliminating many deductions and exempting millions of people with low incomes. Although Reagan’s opponents claimed his economic policies increased the gap between the rich and the poor, the income of all economic groups rose in real terms.

He also passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, granting compensation to Japanese Americans who had been interned during World War II. Reagan signed legislation authorizing capital punishment for offenses involving murder in the context of illegal drug trafficking and launched a "war on drugs", which was led by Nancy Reagan.

Reagan was staunchly against abortion. Although his appointees to the Supreme Court—including Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman Supreme Court justice—shifted the balance in favor of conservatism, the Supreme Court voted to uphold Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion. The gay rights movement criticized Reagan for not responding adequately to the arrival of HIV-AIDS in the mid-1980s.

However, the Reagan administration spent almost $6 billion on HIV and AIDS research. By 1986, Reagan had endorsed large-scale prevention and research efforts. In 1984, Reagan was the first U.S. president to invite an openly homosexual couple to spend an evening at the White House.

Foreign Policy

Reagan’s foreign policy during his presidency called for "peace through strength" and a close alliance with Britain. Reagan confronted the Soviet Union head-on, arguing that only from a position of military superiority could the United States negotiate an end to the cold war and secure U.S. interests abroad.

Reagan reasoned that the Soviet Union could not keep up with the United States in a full-scale arms race. He increased defense spending 35 percent while seeking improved diplomatic relations with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

In keeping with this Reagan Doctrine, he actively supported anticommunist efforts in Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. The Reagan administration supported Afghani insurgents, including Osama bin Laden; Poland’s Solidarity movement; the contras in Nicaragua; and rebel forces in Angola.

The United States increased military funding for anticommunist dictatorships in Latin America and was accused of assassinating several Latin American heads of state. A communist attempt to seize power in Grenada in 1983 prompted a U.S. invasion.

Reagan and Gorbachev negotiated a treaty to eliminate intermediate-range nuclear missiles and to continue disarmament. However, Reagan supported the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which proposed the launching of a space-based defense system to render the United States invulnerable to a nuclear attack. Opponents of the plan labeled it Star Wars and argued that the plan was unrealistic and violated international treaties.

In 1985 Reagan conducted a goodwill visit to Germany. He visited Kolmeshohe Cemetery to pay respects to the soldiers there, unaware that many had been members of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler’s Waffen-SS. Reagan also visited the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where he condemned the Holocaust.

Reagan declared war against international terrorism, taking a strong stand against the Lebanese Hizbollah terrorist organization, which was holding Americans as hostages and attacking civilian targets following Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

Reagan’s administration also took a strong stance against Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank and Gaza. U.S. involvement in Lebanon led to a limited United Nations mandate for an international force. The September 16, 1982, massacre of Palestinians in Beirut prompted Reagan to form a new international force.

Diplomatic pressure forced a peace agreement between Israel and Lebanon and U.S. forces withdrew following an October 1983 bombing that killed over 200 marines. Reagan sent U.S. bombers to Libya after evidence revealed government involvement in an attack on U.S. soldiers in a West Berlin nightclub.

Reagan’s administration maintained the controversial position that the Salvadoran FMLN and Honduran guerrilla fighters, as well as a wing of the anti-apartheid African National Congress (ANC), constituted terrorist organizations.

During the Iran-Iraq War, Reagan sent naval escorts to the Persian Gulf to maintain the free flow of oil for U.S. use. The Reagan administration came to increasingly side with Iraq under the assumption that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was less a threat than Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini.

While supporting Iraq, the United States covertly supplied Iran with military weapons in order to fund contra rebels in Nicaragua. This arrangement, known as the Iran-contra affair, became a huge scandal. Reagan declared his ignorance of the arrangement. As a result, 10 members of Reagan’s administration were convicted and many others were forced to resign.

Reagan addressed the nation from the White House one last time in January 1989, prior to the inauguration of George H. W. Bush as the 41st president. Reagan returned to his estate, Rancho del Cielo, in california, eventually moving to Bel Air, Los Angeles.

In 1989 Reagan received an honorary British knighthood and was made Grand Cordon of the Japanese Order of the Chrysanthemum. In the early 1990s he made occasional appearances for the Republican Party and in 1993 was granted the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In 1994 Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. His health worsened following a fall in January 2001 that shattered his hip and rendered him immobile. By late 2003 Reagan had entered the final stages of Alzheimer’s disease, and he died of pneumonia on June 5, 2004. He was buried at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California.

Syngman Rhee

2012-02-12T23:31:00.000-08:00

Syngman Rhee was the controversial, strongly anticommunist, and increasingly authoritarian first president of South Korea, serving from April 1948 until April 1960.

He gained office through a popular election in 1948, led South Korea through the Korean War, and was reelected twice, although not without controversy, before being forced from office in the wake of the fraudulent 1960 election.

Born in Hwanghae Province on March 26, 1875, Rhee—also known as Yi Sung-man—labored passionately to create a modern, independent Korea. Having studied the Chinese classics and repeatedly failed the civil service examinations, Rhee enrolled in and eventually taught at a Western-style school run by U.S. Methodists.

In 1896 he helped found the Independence Club, a Western-leaning nationalist organization hoping to fend off the growing interventions by Japan, Russia, and China in Korean affairs.

Weary of his proposed reforms, the conservative Korean government imprisoned Rhee for seven years, during which time he was tortured and also converted to Christianity, which he considered "the religion of liberty".

Freed in 1904, Rhee traveled to the United States to petition U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt to help Koreans oppose expanded Japanese influence. This effort failed, and Japan increased its control and formally annexed Korea in 1910. Rhee stayed on in the United States, where he earned a B.A. from George Washington University in 1907, an M.A. from Harvard in 1908, and a Ph.D. in theology from Princeton in 1910.

He returned to Korea in 1910 as chief Korean secretary of the Young Men’s Christian Association in Seoul. A year later he was forced into exile because of his organizing against Japanese rule.

He would spend the next 33 years in Hawaii and Washington, D.C., where he would continue working on behalf of a modern, independent Korea. In 1920 he became the first president of the exiled Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea. His main strategy was to build support for Korea in the international community, particularly the United States.

After defeating the Japanese in World War II, the United States occupied the southern half of Korea. Rhee, by now back in the country, helped found the National Society for the Rapid Realization of Korean Independence.

In 1948 he handily won United Nations (UN)–sponsored elections for president of the Republic of Korea (South Korea). He was known for his desire to reunite the Korean Peninsula, his commitment to democracy, and his strong opposition to communism.

In the two years after his election, Rhee intensified cold war tensions in East Asia by calling for a "march north" to destroy Kim Il Sung’s communist regime. But it was Kim’s Communist forces that invaded South Korea in June 1950.

After the Korean War broke out in June 1950, Rhee proved a steady, but difficult, ally of the United States. In 1951 he reorganized the military in order to root out corruption and inefficiency. But he also routinely undermined U.S. efforts by rejecting any peace deal that stopped short of reunifying Korea. He also called on the United States to counter Chinese intervention more aggressively, including bombing China.

By August 1953, however, the prospect of intensified hostilities with the north and worsening relations with the United States forced Rhee to accept a divided Korea. The United States deployed troops along the demilitarization zone both to protect the south from invasion from the north and to thwart Rhee’s aggressive tendencies.

For most of the 1950s, Rhee repeatedly worked to consolidate his hold on power. In 1951 he founded the Liberal Party. In 1952 he engineered changes in the constitution to guarantee his victory in the election. When these changes were rejected in favor of a parliamentary system, he declared martial law. In the ensuing general election, Rhee won 72 percent of the vote.

As the 1956 election approached, Rhee once again forced changes into the constitution to eliminate the provisions limiting presidents to two terms. He then won the election with 55 percent of the vote, a low number considering that his rival, Sin Ik-hui, had suffered a heart attack and died 10 days earlier.

South Korea made significant economic and social progress under Rhee. The expansion of the school system after independence and the modernization of the military contributed greatly to the changes that transformed Korea. Massive U.S. aid combined with the government’s import-substitution policies yielded strong growth.

In 1960 Rhee and the Liberal Party once again rigged the presidential election. This time, however, a protest movement led by students became widespread, and governmental security forces killed 142 protesters. These events forced Rhee’s resignation. He fled to the United States and died five years later in 1965 in Hawaii.

Rhodesia/Zimbabwe Independence Movements

2012-02-12T09:04:00.000-08:00

Zimbabwe, or Rhodesia, as it was known until 1980, is a landlocked nation of 13 million people occupying the plateau between the Limpopo and Zambezi Rivers, bordered by Zambia to the north, Botswana to the west, Mozambique to the east, and South Africa to the south.

While the rest of Britain’s African colonies, including two of Rhodesia’s neighbors—Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Nyasaland (Malawi)—gained independence as part of a wave of decolonization, Rhodesia remained a bastion of minority white rule because of its influential European population. Even after the country gained majority rule in 1980, white control of land continued to be a crucial issue in Zimbabwe.

At midcentury, mostly because of the country’s substantial mineral wealth and fertile soil for tobacco cultivation, Rhodesia’s white population enjoyed one of the highest standards of living in the world.

The country’s black residents, however, who made up over 95 percent of the population, possessed little political power and received just 5 percent of the nation’s income. Having gained control by force roughly a half-century earlier, whites made up one-twentieth of the population but held one-third of the land.

At the end of World War II the political winds began to change. Britain moved to grant independence to many of its colonies in Asia and Africa. Rhodesia, which had been a British-chartered corporate colony at the turn of the century and a self-governing British colony since 1923, took on a new political form in 1953 with the establishment of the Central African Federation. Southern Rhodesia dominated this confederation; it exploited the copper of Northern Rhodesia and the labor of Nyasaland.

The arrival of independent rule in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Nyasaland (Malawi) in 1964 brought considerable anxiety to the white population of Southern Rhodesia, who believed that Britain favored majority rule.

In response, in November of 1965, Ian Douglas Smith, an unabashed champion of white rule, announced the Unilateral Declaration of Independence, which cut the country’s ties with Britain and established the independent nation of Rhodesia. In a referendum, overwhelming numbers of the white population supported Smith. Britain responded by imposing diplomatic and economic sanctions.

The cold war struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union for influence around the world, including in the nations of Africa, complicated these developments. U.S. relations with Ian Smith’s white-ruled Rhodesia at the time shows the ambivalent position of the United States.

On the one hand the United States valued the support of Rhodesia, which contained vast reserves of strategic minerals, especially chromium, and adopted a strongly anticommunist stance. Yet, at the same time, the United States worried that support for Smith’s white supremacist government would cost it needed friends in rapidly decolonizing Africa.

In 1965 U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson condemned Smith’s unilateral declaration of independence and, following Britain’s lead, imposed economic sanctions. Although these sanctions could have been even stronger, U.S. trade there declined from $29 million in 1965 to $3.7 million in 1968, a real blow to the Rhodesian economy. At the same time, though, Rhodesia received substantial support from some within the United States.

The Byrd Amendment of 1971, which was enacted with the support of the Richard Nixon administration, punched a significant hole in the sanctions against Rhodesia. According to this law, the United States could not ban the importation from a non-communist nation any material needed for national defense if that same material would otherwise be purchased from a communist nation.

Since chromium, a key resource for many modern weapon systems, was also imported from the Soviet Union, the United States was forced to allow trade with Rhodesia. Imports of chromium grew from $500,000 in 1965, to $13 million in 1972, to $45 million in 1975.

Organized black resistance to white rule in Rhodesia took shape in the late 1950s, and the two main oppositional parties, parties that would dominate Zimbabwean politics well beyond independence, were established in the early 1960s.

In 1957 the African National Congress, based in Bulawayo, and the African National Youth League, based in Salisbury (present-day Harare), combined to form the Southern Rhodesian African National Congress under Joshua Nkomo. Banned in 1959, this group was succeeded by the National Democratic Party, which was itself banned in December 1961.

Shortly thereafter, the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) was established. A major split occurred in 1963, resulting in the formation of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU). ZAPU was mostly Ndebele and Chinese-leaning; ZANU was mostly Shona and Soviet-leaning.

ZAPU and ZANU adopted different strategies at different times. During the 1960s, as white Rhodesians like Ian Smith grew more extreme, African nationalist methods became more militant and confrontational.

Both ZANU and ZAPU began attacking white farms in 1964, but they quickly realized they were outmatched by the Rhodesian military. A more moderate group, the African National Council—organized by Bishop Abel Muzorewa—sprang up during the early 1970s. None of these groups had much success.

The situation began to shift during the late 1970s. In 1975, after long wars, two Portuguese colonies in southern Africa, Mozambique and Angola, gained their independence. Black-ruled Mozambique became a safe haven for many of the guerrilla groups opposing the white regime in Rhodesia. In 1975 the two most important of these groups—ZANU, under Robert Mugabe, and ZAPU, under Joshua Nkomo—joined forces to become the Patriotic Front.

Jimmy Carter’s victory in the U.S. presidential election of 1976 also played a role in shifting the context of Rhodesian politics. Concerned about the U.S. reputation in other parts of black Africa, the Carter administration began to push for a settlement to the conflict. In general, the United States supported majority rule with protection of white interests.

The British called the Lancaster House Conference in an attempt to broker a lasting solution. The resulting settlement guaranteed majority rule for Zimbabwe, a transitional period for whites, and a multiparty system.

At the center of the settlement was a new constitution, which gave the vote to all Africans 18 years and older, reserved 28 seats in the parliament for whites for 10 years, and guaranteed private property rights. In the election of February 1980, voting mostly followed ethnic lines. ZANU–Popular Front won a clear majority, making its leader, Robert Mugabe, the prime minister.

ZAPU–Popular Front, which had recently split from ZANU-PF, joined the white members of parliament in opposition. Taking its name from the 14th- and 15th-century stone city of Great Zimbabwe, Rhodesia became Zimbabwe on April 18, 1980. The war for majority rule, which had cost over 25,000 lives, most of them black, was over.

Under Robert Mugabe’s rule, Zimbabwe in the 1980s pursued socialist-leaning policies not unlike those of many other countries in Africa. It expanded social programs that had been denied under white rule. And, although it claimed to want to redistribute land, in reality it moved slowly to break up successful white farms.

This cost the regime politically but it enabled Zimbabwe to continue to feed itself. Overall, during the early 1980s many Zimbabweans saw real improvements in the quality of their lives.

As the 1980s unfolded, Mugabe began to show authoritarian tendencies. Even early on he rounded up opponents, censored the press, and gave broad authority to security forces. At first he was able to get away with this because of his wide support, especially in rural areas.

Mugabe won the March 1996 election with 92.7 percent of the vote, but only a very small number of Zimbabweans bothered to vote. The decrease in voter participation revealed the growing discontent of Zimbabweans with Mugabe. On top of this, in the early 1980s a civil war that would last until 1987 broke out in Matabeleland, a stronghold of the ZAPU-PF.

In the late 1990s Mugabe initiated two very controversial programs. In 1997, he began seizing white-owned land without compensation and quietly encouraging landless blacks to move onto white farms. These farms had previously fed the nation and provided work for large numbers of people, mostly black.

In 2002 Mugabe appropriated the remaining white land and ordered white farmers to offer payments to former workers. Because many of the blacks who moved onto the white land had few farming skills, the nation soon faced a food crisis.

Critics, moreover, claimed that Mugabe handed out the best land to his family, friends, and close supporters. In another controversial move, in 1998 Mugabe deployed the military in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to help its government fend off an armed rebellion.

The situation in Zimbabwe seems precarious. During the 2002 elections Mugabe rigged the voting and jailed opponents, especially the supporters of the Movement for Democratic Change, led by Morgan Tsvangirai. Neighboring nations supported Mugabe but other African nations, such as Kenya and Ghana, condemned his move.

Famine conditions persist in Zimbabwe, and the people struggle with skyrocketing prices and extremely high unemployment. That no system is in place to determine a successor to the aging Mugabe portends a divisive struggle to come.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

2012-02-12T08:07:00.000-08:00

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were accused of illegally giving information about U.S. atomic research to the Soviet Union. They were convicted of espionage on March 29, 1951, and executed on June 19, 1953. Their codefendant in the trial, Morton Sobell, received a 30-year sentence.

The trial was highly publicized and took place during the so-called Red Scare, when many in the United States felt their way of life was threatened by the Soviet Union and by the expansion of communism in general. For this and other reasons, including anti-Semitism, many believe that the Rosenbergs did not get a fair trial and that Ethel Rosenberg in particular was not guilty of the charges.

Julius Rosenberg was born in New York City and attended religious and public schools and City College, from which he graduated with a degree in electrical engineering. He was active in the Steinmetz Club, a branch of the Young Communists League, and later joined the American Communist Party. Rosenberg was a civilian employee of the U.S. Army Signal Corps from 1940 to 1945.

Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg also attended public and religious schools in New York City and went to work for a shipping firm after graduation from high school. She was active as a union organizer and joined the Young Communist League and later the American Communist Party. The Rosenbergs were married in 1939 and had two sons, Michael and Robert.

The Rosenberg trial can only be understood in the context of the development of atomic weaponry and the cold war. The United States is the only nation ever to have used atomic weapons: Atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the closing days of World War II.

Information regarding the production of such weapons was closely guarded, and the United States believed it was the only country with the scientific knowledge to produce an atomic bomb. When the USSR tested its first atomic weapon in 1949, people were shocked at how rapidly they had developed atomic weapons capability.

The explanation was simple: The Soviets had access to some of the information the United States believed had been kept secret. In 1950 the German/British scientist Klaus Fuchs, who had worked in the United States on the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb, confessed to having passed essential information to the Soviet Union.

The investigation resulting from this confession led FBI agents to David Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, who confessed his own involvement in a spy ring that he said also included his wife, Ruth, and his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg.

The "Venona Cables" were a key source of evidence in the investigation of Soviet spy operations in the United States in the 1940s. These cables carried encrypted messages to and from the Soviet Union and revealed the extent of Soviet espionage activity in the United States during that time.

The Venona Cables presented clear evidence that Julius Rosenberg was guilty of espionage and implicated David and Ruth Greenglass as well. They did not provide similar evidence against Ethel Rosenberg, who was convicted largely on the testimony of her brother, David Greenglass.

He later admitted that at least some of his testimony against the Rosenbergs was false and that he lied in order to protect his wife, who was granted immunity from prosecution.

Many people around the world were shocked by the Rosenbergs’ execution, particularly when more important spies received lighter sentences. For instance, Klaus Fuchs, who provided the Soviet Union with information essential to building an atomic weapon, was sentenced to 14 years in prison and served nine.

The execution of Ethel Rosenberg in particular shocked many people, since there was little evidence against her and it was presumed that the threat of execution was meant to coerce her to testify against her husband or him to testify against others.

Both Rosenbergs refused to confess or to name others, a decision that may have led to their deaths. There were many protests worldwide against their convictions and appeals stop the execution, including one from Pope Pius XII.

Public interest in the Rosenberg trial remained strong, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg assumed a place as characters and symbols in popular culture.

Chechnya and Russia

2012-02-12T07:53:00.000-08:00

In the early years, the leaders of the new Russian Federation were worried that Russia could unravel along ethnic lines as the Soviet Union had done. They responded strongly to the one ethnic republic that did attempt to secede, Chechnya, even though that response was delayed by the general chaos prevailing in Russia in the early 1990s.

The Chechens were a Muslim people of the Causcasus Mountains who, in the 19th century, had fought a prolonged war against the Russian occupation of their region. Like several other Soviet minorities they had been accused by Stalin of collaborating with the Nazis, and they were all deported to Soviet Central Asia afterward.

Nikita Khrushchev allowed their return, but when the Soviet Union collapsed, the Chechens sought secession. Under Dzhokhar Dudayev, a former Soviet air force general, Chechnya declared independence in 1991.

Yeltsin declared a state of emergency in Chechnya, issued a warrant for the arrest of Dudayev, and sent a detachment of Interior Ministry troops. The Chechens easily repulsed the half-hearted intervention, by ruse more than by force, and seized strategic facilities within their republic.

Yeltsin ordered an economic blockade and then, given the chaotic state of Russia at the time, basically ignored the situation for the next three years. The lack of any police force facilitated smuggling and other criminal operations.

In a search for outside resources and allies, the Chechens made contacts with mafias from Russia and Islamist extremists from the Middle East. Corruption spread, the economic situation grew dire, and Dudayev became more dictatorial.

After supporting a failed attempt by a rival Chechen faction to seize power, Russia sent three armored columns into Chechnya on December 11, 1994. The Russian legislature, which had not been informed, protested vociferously.

The invasion did not go smoothly. The Russians made a hasty and ill-prepared assault on Grozny, the republic’s capital, which they seized only after a month-long bombardment that killed an estimated 25,000 people and left the city a ruin.

Dudayev and his fighters receded into the mountains, from where they conducted an extended guerrilla campaign. Civilian casualties continued to run high. The struggle attracted Islamist volunteers from North Africa, the Middle East, and Afghanistan.

In March 1996, with presidential elections looming in Russia, Yeltsin offered to negotiate with Dudayev through an intermediary. A Russian missile killed Dudayev in April. Fighting flared again in June, and the Chechens reoccupied parts of three cities, including Grozny.

A cease-fire was finally signed in August. Russian troops began to withdraw. Although the agreement left Chechnya’s permanent status to be decided, the republic proceeded to act as if it were independent.

Aslan Maskhadov, the chief of staff of the Chechen armed forces and a former Soviet army colonel, was elected president of the republic in January 1997. Little rebuilding was accomplished, however, and Maskhadov was unable to establish order. In the prevailing lawlessness, kidnapping for profit became a widespread practice. In an effort to outflank the Islamists in factional infighting, he imposed Islamic law and courts.

Chechnya became the focus of attention again in 1999. Shamyl Basayev, formerly a field commander and briefly a prime minister under Maskhadov, had broken with the Chechen regime. In April 1998 he and a Jordanian-born Islamist founded the Congress of the Peoples of Chechnya and Dagestan, which proposed to unite these two adjacent ethnic republics.

In August 1999 they launched a raid into Dagestan and then declared that the republic had seceded from Russia. The following month, a series of bombs exploded in apartment buildings in Moscow and other Russian cities. The act was widely attributed to the Chechens.

On August 9, 1999, Yeltsin dismissed Sergei Stepashin, who had been prime minister for three months, and appointed Vladimir Putin to replace him. Putin had catapulted through a number of Kremlin staff positions to become head of internal security in July 1998.

He was still generally unknown to the public when he was named prime minister, but he quickly became associated with the new Chechen war, which was known as Putin’s "antiterrorist operation". Opinion polls gave Putin an approval rating of 33 percent in August, 52 percent in September, and 65 percent in October, in a land where few politicians rose above single digits.

In October Russian armor was once again moving into Chechnya, without any distinction being made between the Chechen government and renegade commanders. The army performed more effectively this time. The cities were taken quickly, and a pro-Russian Chechen administration was put in place.

Resistance, however, would drag on year after year in the countryside, and there would be terrorist attacks in other parts of Russia. Russian forces would respond at times with extreme brutality. With the bomb blasts fresh in people’s minds, however, this Chechen war was far more popular with the Russian public than the previous one.

Four months before the legislative elections of December 1999, Yeltsin once again created a new party from scratch, Unity, a party completely dependent on the Kremlin for funding, expertise, and personnel. Putin gave it his public endorsement, and the party, too, became identified with the Chechen war effort.

Unity won 23 percent of the party-list vote and 64 single-member districts, leaving it second only to the Communist Party. In third place was Fatherland–All Russia, a coalition of personalistic parties built around prominent governors. For the first time, the State Duma had a dominant bloc of parties that were not ideological adversaries of the Kremlin.

Yeltsin, within seven months of the end of his second term in office, surveyed a political landscape that suddenly appeared quite favorable. He then shocked the world by promptly resigning on December 31, 1999, and naming Putin as acting president.

An early presidential election was called for March 26, 2000, which Yeltsin’s chosen successor would now approach with all the advantages of incumbency while other candidates were caught off guard.

Indeed, Putin won in the first round with 52.9 percent of the vote against 10 other candidates, despite having been a virtual unknown the previous August. He promptly obliged his predecessor by issuing a blanket pardon for anything Yeltsin might have done during his years in office.

As president, Putin no longer devoted himself solely to the prosecution of the war. Economic reform continued but Putin’s primary focus appeared to be order, stability, security, and consolidation of the Russian state.

Russia was very much in need of order by that time, but Putin’s notion of consolidating the state reflected his upbringing within the Soviet Union. Rather than make state institutions more effective, he set out to make all institutions dependent on the president.

Russian Federation

2012-02-12T05:03:00.000-08:00

In the years after 1991 Russia experienced a revolution in the name of reform. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had been a one-party dictatorship that strove to control all aspects of life. Its collapse unleashed a host of social forces and triggered an array of experiments as people sought simultaneously to create a democratic government, a market economy, and a civil society.

Other countries, including other remnants of the Soviet Union, were attempting similar experiments on different scales at the same time. No one, however, had ever attempted this before, and there was no blueprint to follow.

During this period, the administration of Boris Yeltsin would be identified with the destruction of the old structures, a struggle among alternative visions, and chaotic and sometimes contradictory efforts to build something new. The administration of Vladimir Putin would represent a longing to reestablish order, stability, and security.

The Soviet collapse in 1991 came with remarkable rapidity. Unlike the collapse of czarist Russia in 1917, which was also sudden, this one was neither preceded by a world war nor followed by a civil war. There were relatively few violent conflicts, and those tended to be clashes between rival nationalisms.

The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had underestimated the attraction of nationalism to his country’s various constituent peoples and had overestimated people’s loyalty to the communist system.

In forcing people, officials and citizens alike, to conceal their personal beliefs as well as inconvenient political and economic facts, the Soviet system had denied its own leaders the ability to gauge the true situation and had denied people in general the possibility of fully developing their own ideas.

Gorbachev’s efforts to reform the system, in part by releasing the energies of the citizenry in the hope of using them against a sclerotic bureaucracy, resulted in the system’s demise.

Free multicandidate elections to a new national legislature in 1989 and elections to republic-level legislatures in 1990 unleashed a mass of rebellious and conflicting demands. In the course of the year, most of the republics declared "sovereignty" within the Soviet Union, that is, they asserted that republic law would henceforth be above federal law.

The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, as the Russian portion of the Soviet Union was officially known, did so on June 12, 1990. At about the same time, the media began to free itself of government control.

On the anniversary of the sovereignty declaration, June 12, 1991, while the republic was still part of the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin, a former Communist Party official who had fallen out with the leadership, became Russia’s first elected president.

A failed reactionary coup launched by party, military, and police officials in August 1991 was the final blow in the centrifugal process that was tearing the Soviet Union apart. In the aftermath, the Communist Party was dissolved and no comparable integrative institution was created to replace it.

Yeltsin began appearing alongside Gorbachev, the Soviet president, as a coequal. Key republics, especially Ukraine, began to believe they would be better off without the "burden" of the other republics and moved toward independence. At the very least, they ceased forwarding tax receipts to the capital, compelling Russia to take over responsibility for financing central state functions.

On December 8, 1991, confronted with Ukraine’s precipitous unilateral independence, Yeltsin and the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus declared their republics a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), even though Russia had never formally withdrawn from the Soviet Union.

Leaders of other republics, petrified at the prospect of their sudden isolation, immediately demanded membership in the CIS as well. On December 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned from the presidency in frustration. No one attempted to replace him, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics legally ceased to exist. In many ways it had already evaporated, although just when this occurred is difficult to determine.

After a brief attempt to maintain unified CIS armed forces, the republics took control of the military assets of their respective territories and created their own armies. Republics with nuclear arms stationed on their territories agreed to send them to Russia.

Each republic also acquired its portion of the assets of the Committee for State Security, which continued to exist in some form. In Russia the KGB underwent a series of renamings and reorganizations that ultimately left it as five separate entities: one each for internal security, foreign intelligence, border defense, communications security, and the personal protection of state leaders.

Redefinition

With the Soviet Union gone, the next question was what would replace it. The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic eventually renamed itself the Russian Federation.

The re-creation of a Russian national identity was somewhat complicated, not only by the presence of more than 120 ethnic minorities within the federation’s borders and by the fact that some 25 million ethnic Russians were now living as minorities in the 14 other successor states of the Soviet Union, but also by the fact that the pre-Soviet Russian state had included the entire Soviet territory. In the other former Soviet republics, as in Eastern Europe, the communist system could be viewed as something imposed by the Russians.

There, nationalists, anticommunists, democrats, and economic reformers could form coalitions, at least in the beginning. In the Russian Federation, although some Russian nationalists had seen the other republics as a burden, others had identified with the Soviet Union as a great power and saw its collapse as a tragedy.

Some adherents of the Soviet system and some Russian nationalists nostalgic for the old empire saw in the CIS a potential replacement that would ultimately amount to a rebirth of the Soviet Union. This never came about.

The leaders of the various republics focused on their own entities, and the CIS itself failed to develop into an alternative power center. Rather, the CIS functioned as a loose association that oversaw the peaceful severing of the numerous ties that linked the republics to one another.

Russia, not the CIS, inherited the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons, United Nations seat, overseas embassies, and foreign debt. This, however, did not prevent Russia from pressuring the more reluctant successor states into joining the CIS during the 1990s. Only the three Baltic States remained outside.

In the early days, Russians were concerned that the unraveling might not stop with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Within the Russian Federation were former "autonomous soviet socialist republics", now simply termed "republics", regions with a substantial non-Russian ethnic population. Several of these declared sovereignty over their natural resources and asserted the primacy of their laws over federation law. Some appeared to be contemplating independence.

In March 1992 all but Tatarstan and Chechnya signed the new Federation Treaty; Yeltsin was compelled to renegotiate center-periphery relations on an ad hoc basis with several individual republics and even ethnic Russian regions. Tatarstan signed such an agreement in February 1994. In the end only Chechnya carried out the secessionist threat, triggering two wars with the Russian army.

Politically, two tendencies were prominent in the early years of Russian independence. For members of the first group, the highest-priority goals were the establishment of democratic norms and the rule of law, the creation of a viable market economy, and integration into the Western world.

For the second group, the highest priorities were building a state strong enough to defend itself, both internally and externally; assuring that national industries survived; and preserving Russian uniqueness.

Constitutionally, the form that the Russian government was to take was also under dispute. The muchamended constitution of 1978 remained in force while negotiations continued over a new Russian constitution. In this, as in economic policy, Yeltsin and the legislature took strongly opposed positions.

The legislature at the time continued the cumbersome form innovated in the Gorbachev era: a Congress of People’s Deputies, with 1,068 members, that was supposed to meet twice a year, vote on the most important issues, and elect from among its own members a smaller legislature— the Supreme Soviet—to meet between its own sessions. The constitution’s provision that the legislature was the supreme state body was not modified after the creation of the elected Russian presidency in 1991.

Crisis and Confrontation

The period from the end of 1991 to late 1993 was marked by economic crisis and political confrontation that ended in bloodshed. The two poles of confrontation centered on the reformist presidency and the holdover parliament, the Congress of People’s Deputies, which fought a protracted battle over who held ultimate authority.

For the post of prime minister, Yeltsin named Yegor Gaidar, a young academic who had taught himself market economics during the late Soviet period, but the legislature refused to confirm him. Gaidar, nonetheless, continued in office as acting prime minister for one year.

The economy was in dire shape, quite apart from the normal inefficiencies of the centrally planned Soviet system. In the name of economic reform the Gorbachev government had ceased issuing orders to state-owned economic enterprises, but he had failed to establish the institutions of a market economy, resulting in a state-run system that did not work properly. The breakup of the Soviet state exacerbated the situation by disrupting economic ties between regions.

Gaidar’s response was a rapid shift, often termed "shock therapy", to free prices, balanced budgets, and monetary restraint. This went into effect on January 1, 1992, and resulted in an enormous leap in prices in addition to the already existing shortages of supply.

Normally, the shortages and rising prices should have worked as an incentive for enterprises to increase production. State enterprises, however, had not been privatized, and adequate market-based incentives had not been established.

Wholesale trade, at the time, was still widely regarded as a form of illegal "speculation". The implicit assumption that an economy dominated by gigantic plants producing military equipment could instantaneously convert to the production of consumer goods was probably naive in any event.

Managers commonly viewed the inflation as an opportunity to increase revenues while working less. When monetary restraint restricted cash flows, enterprise managers informally extended credit to each other and expended their political influence trying to get subsidies reinstated.

The Congress of People’s Deputies was the main focus of their attention. Elected in March 1990, the Congress was permeated with state-enterprise managers and former communists, most of whom now called them-selves "independents".

It repeatedly doled out payments to bankrupt enterprises, undermining the intended impact of Gaidar’s policies; issued resolutions that contradicted government policies; and threatened the president with impeachment. For his part, Yeltsin responded with the threat to establish a "presidential republic". Each side ignored the acts of the other, contributing to a growing general disregard for the law.

The personification of resistance to the president was the speaker of the Congress, Ruslan Khasbulatov; he and vice president Aleksandr Rutskoi moved steadily closer to the opposition. Both had been Yeltsin allies at the beginning of the transition.

In late 1992 Gaidar left the office of prime minister. His replacement, Viktor Chernomyrdin, was initially more acceptable to the Congress. Chernomyrdin was a hybrid bureaucrat-entrepreneur.

As minister of the gas industry, he had participated in a "spontaneous privatization" that converted the ministry into one of Russia’s largest and most profitable companies, Gazprom. Nonetheless Chernomyrdin and his finance minister, Boris Fedorov, maintained the austerity policies and even closed some inefficient state enterprises.

A referendum on economic reform and the division of power between the executive and legislative branches in April 1993 gave Yeltsin enough support to press ahead with his programs. Yeltsin and the legislature each began drawing up a new draft constitution.

The crisis came to a head in September 1993. To break the impasse, Yeltsin dissolved the Congress of People’s Deputies and called for a referendum on a new constitution and elections for a new legislature in December. Meeting in emergency session, the Congress impeached Yeltsin and declared Rutskoi president.

On Yeltsin’s order, army units surrounded the legislative headquarters on September 27, but 180 members refused to leave. After a standoff of several days, Rutskoi called for a popular uprising, which led to some street disorders but not the outpouring of support that he had anticipated.

Armed men seized the mayor’s office on October 3 and attempted to take the Ostankino television facility, where a firefight with Interior Ministry troops lasted for several hours. At this point, the army dropped the neutral position it had sought to maintain.

On October 4 tanks opened fire, and by that afternoon the rebel leaders—including Khasbulatov and Rutskoi—had emerged and surrendered. After the "October events", no parliament would defy the president so openly again. Disputes, however, were far from over.

Constitution and Elections

Yeltsin’s draft constitution was approved by referendum in December 1993, in the shadow of the October events. It created a bicameral legislature, called the Federal Assembly (Federal’noe Sobranie).

The upper house, the Federation Council (Soviet Federatsii), had two members representing each of the country’s constituent regions, territories, and republics. The lower house, the State Duma (Gosudarstvennaia Duma), had 450 members, half of them elected from single-member districts and half from party lists.

The legislature was real, not a rubber stamp, but the constitution clearly gave the preponderance of power to the president. The president named the prime minister and cabinet, who were responsible to him.

The cabinet, therefore, did not have to reflect the distribution of parties in the State Duma, so there was no incentive to form coalitions to build a parliamentary majority. Initially, committee chairmanships were doled out among parties and factions in proportion to the number of seats they held.

Technically, the State Duma had the right to approve or disapprove the president’s choice for prime minister, but if it rejected three candidates it was the legislature, not the government, that was subject to dissolution. Moreover, the president had the power to issue decrees on his own.

The first post-Soviet parliamentary elections were held simultaneously with the referendum approving the constitution, two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A number of political organizations had essentially evaporated in the interim. The parties that did exist were often small, fractious, personalistic, and only loosely connected to the electorate.

Parties arose, combined, split, recombined, and vanished with great ease. The most substantial and organized party was the newly constituted Communist Party of the Russian Federation, although it lacked anything resembling the status and power of the former Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The results of the elections were far from what Yeltsin and the reformers would have hoped for. The largest percentage of votes in the party-list portion of the ballot went to the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, a misnamed authoritarian, ultranationalistic grouping with a leader, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who was once described as a "dangerous buffoon".

The communists came in second. The reformists had split the vote by dividing into four separate parties that constantly squabbled among themselves, the two most important being Gaidar’s neoliberal Russia’s Choice and the more social-democratic Yabloko.

Despite the evident potential for renewed polarization, Russian politics did not return to the chaos of the pre-October days but settled down into a relatively normal pattern. Politicians of various stripes gradually became accustomed to open politics and even adept at it.

Despite their extremist rhetoric, the ultranationalists proved relatively supportive of the government, and the communists could be counted on for a backroom deal when the need arose. The fractious reform parties, never satisfied with compromise, often created the greatest difficulty for the reform process.

Gaidar’s original reform plan came to be implemented more consistently, without Gaidar. Prime Minister Chernomyrdin became increasingly prominent, while Yeltsin occasionally receded into the background amid rumors of drinking and the state of his health.

Economic policy was no longer undermined by subsidies granted to bankrupt factories by the legislature. Also, the privatization program made progress, although this required a presidential decree. The economic situation began to stabilize, but it did not fully recover and grow.

With new legislative elections planned in December 1995, Yeltsin eliminated elections for the upper house and determined that each jurisdiction would be represented by its governor and its legislative speaker.

He also attempted to create two new parties as the basis for a two-party system: One, a center-right organization intended to become the government party, was led by Prime Minister Chernomyrdin; the other, envisioned as a center-left loyal opposition, was led by Ivan Rybkin.

Chernomyrdin’s party, called Our Home Is Russia, managed to draw about 10 percent of the vote as long as he was prime minister. The second party, which was actually listed on the ballot as "Ivan Rybkin’s bloc", never got off the ground. The relatively poor showing, if nothing else, indicated the limits on Yeltsin’s ability to manipulate the electorate.

Forty-three parties participated in the 1995 elections, but only four of them surpassed the 5 percent threshold necessary to obtain seats under the proportional-representation system.

The four that did succeed were the Communists, the ultranationalist Liberal Democrats, Our Home Is Russia, and the social-democratic Yabloko. The Communists received the largest share this time, setting the stage for Russia’s first post-Soviet presidential election, to be held in two rounds in June and July 1996.

The Communists’ hard core of support constituted about 20–30 percent of the electorate at this time. Support was especially strong among pensioners and others who had suffered extreme hardships during the inflation and chaos of the early reform period. They had trouble, however, breaking beyond that core.

Yeltsin, who had been doing very poorly in opinion polls, ran an anti-Communist campaign and eked out a plurality of 35 percent in the first round. Communist candidate Gennadii Zyuganov finished just behind him with 32 percent. Eight other candidates were eliminated from the second round.

After hiring the third-place candidate as his national security adviser, Yeltsin then managed to consolidate the anti-Communist vote and was reelected in the second round, 54 percent to 40 percent. Significantly, all sides accepted the results of the election without protests or claims of fraud.

Rwanda/Burundi Conflict

2012-02-12T02:19:00.000-08:00

Rwanda and Burundi were, until World War I, occupied by the Germans, being a part of German East Africa. Captured by the Allied armed forces, they were administered as Ruanda-Urundi by Belgium under League of Nations trusteeship and, from 1945, under United Nations (UN) trusteeship.

The entity was split in 1959 into Burundi and Rwanda, and on July 1, 1962, the two countries became independent with the formation of the Kingdom of Burundi and the Republic of Rwanda. Both faced regular ethnic problems centering on the Tutsi-Hutu rivalry, with the Hutu forming 85 percent of the population of each country and the Tutsi being a much better educated minority.

In the year before Burundi became independent, there was political trouble that followed the UN-supervised elections of September 1961 that saw the Parti de l’Unité et Progrès National winning but their leader, Prince Louis Rwagsore, being assassinated several weeks later.

There was more instability when two prime ministers, Pierre Ngendandumwe and Joseph Bamina, were assassinated before an attempted coup d’état took place in October 1965. Thousands were killed as the government sought to maintain its power. However, it gave too much power to the army, which, in November 1966, overthrew the monarchy and established a republic under President Michel Micombero.

The last former king, Ntare V. Ndizeye, staged a coup attempt in 1972 but was killed in the attempt, which was immediately blamed on the Hutu—the government being drawn from the Tutsi minority.

As the Tutsi government sought revenge on its opponents, some 100,000 Hutu were massacred. In 1976 Micombero was overthrown in a military coup, and the new president, Jean-Baptiste Bagaza, tried to moderate the government and introduce reforms that stopped the oppression of the Hutu.

However, Bagaza was overthrown in 1987 in a coup d’état organized by Major Pierre Buyoya, who suspended the 1981 constitution and dissolved opposition parties. In August 1988 some 20,000 Hutu were massacred by the government, and many Hutu refugees fled to Rwanda.

In Rwanda, the monarchy was removed in 1959, before independence, and at independence, in 1962, the Hutu-led Parti du Mouvement de l’Emancipation Hutu—led by Grégoire Kayibanda—came to power.

There were massacres of some 20,000 Tutsi, and in 1973 Kayibanda was overthrown by General Juvénal Habyarimana, a former defense minister, who became president. He formed the Mouvement Révolutionnaire National pour le Développement. It was not until 1978 that the constitution was restored; Habyarimana was relected in 1983 and again in January 1989.

It was the 1988 ethnic tensions in Burundi that sent large numbers of Hutu refugees from Burundi across the Rwanda-Burundi border. Many Tutsis also settled in Uganda, where they became Anglophiles, in contrast with the Rwandan and Burundi governments, which maintained connections with France.

Fighting in both countries came to a brief halt, and in April 1994, when negotiations to end the fighting were starting to make progress, the plane carrying Habyarimana back to Kigali, the Rwandan capital, was shot down with a French missile. All on board, including President Ntaryamira of Burundi, were killed. This was the opportunity that the extreme Rwandan Hutus were eagerly awaiting to try to take over control of Rwanda.

It is not known for certain who shot down the plane, but the Hutu government of Rwanda blamed the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF)—Tutsi rebels who were based in Uganda—while the RPF blamed the hard-liners in the government who did not want to share power. The killing of the president gave the extreme Hutus an excuse to unleash their Interahamwe militia on the Tutsis and moderate Hutus, killing up to 900,000 of them in horrific massacres.

Several UN solders were killed while protecting moderate politicians in Kigali, and the remainder of the UN forces was evacuated from the country. The UN Security Council—Rwanda was a member at the time—did nothing to try to stop the genocide, which only ended as the RPF forces won the civil war, capturing Kigali soon afterward.

The RPF inherited a devastated country and did their best to arrest the perpetrators of the genocide but hundreds of thousands of Hutus—extremists and their supporters—fled into the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Since the coming to power of the government of President Paul Kagame in Rwanda, there has been a concerted effort to rebuild the country shattered by ethnic tensions, war, and genocide.

With a large number of the intelligentsia of the country murdered or in exile overseas, Kagame has managed gradually to rebuild the infrastructure of the country and at the same time prosecute those guilty of horrendous atrocities.

The United Nations Security Council did adopt Resolution 977 in February 1995, setting up the International Criminal Tribunal based in Tanzania. The Kagame government has objected to it because it has refused to sanction the death penalty even for the most heinous of crimes.

Some of those caught in Rwanda, in some cases having been found guilty of murdering hundreds of people with machetes, have been tried and executed, with others jailed. In spite of the tensions and hatreds engendered by the war, the civil society is gradually being improved in Rwanda, with conditions also improving in Burundi.

Prior to the recent civil war, many tourists had visited Rwanda to see the mountain gorillas. These numbers had increased following the film Gorillas in the Mist (1988) about Dian Fossey who lived with the gorillas and nurtured many of them, especially one known as "Digit". After the war it was revealed that most of the gorillas survived, and some tourist groups are, once again, visiting Rwanda.

Ecological Crisis in Sahel

2012-02-12T01:23:00.000-08:00

The Sahel region is the semi-arid part of western and north-central Africa that is located between the Sahara in the north, and the humid savannah of the south — much of it being in what was formerly French West Africa.

It covers the region from the Atlantic Ocean, covering northern Senegal, southern Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta), southern Niger, northeastern Nigeria, south-central Chad, and through to the Sudan. Some descriptions have it including a small part of southwestern Morocco (formerly Western Sahara), and going through to Eritrea.

In the second part of the 20th century, with a large increase in the population of the Sahel, there has been massive soil erosion and desertification. Much tree and scrub cover has been removed to allow for the collection of firewood and for the creation of more farmland.

Subsequent rainstorms have taken away much of the topsoil, destroying the fertility of the land and turning much of it into wasteland. Overgrazing has continued to make the situation worse, accentuated by bad land management. This in turn has led to the expansion of the Sahara in spite of a number of attempts to prevent this.

A bad drought in 1968 led to the destruction of many of the crops grown in the Sahel, and, with more years of drought in the early 1970s, the problems became worse. In 1972 the entire Sahel received almost no rain, and in the following year the Sahara started increasing up to 60 miles (100 km) a day in the south.

Some 100,000 people died from starvation and related diseases in 1973, and, although international relief aid managed to help, severe drought and famine hit the Sahel again in the period 1983–85. In recent years, as the situation has become far worse, it has been associated with global warming and greenhouse gases, although direct human activity is certainly to blame.

The situation was so bad that in 1973 the United Nations Sahelian Office (UNSO) was created to try to address the problems facing the Sahel. The International Fund for Agricultural Development was founded in 1977 to deal with this and similar environmental problems; in the 1990s the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) was adopted. Although the UNCCD has managed to make progress, the ecological crisis has exacerbated many tribal and other tensions in the region, such as in Darfur.

Treaty of San Francisco

2012-02-11T22:49:00.000-08:00

The Treaty of San Francisco, signed on November 8, 1951, and implemented on April 28, 1952, restored full sovereignty to Japan after its unconditional surrender at the end of World War II and ended the U.S. occupation.

The negotiations over the treaty revealed differing notions of what had caused World War II and of what Japan’s role in the world should be. Engineered primarily by the United States, the treaty quickly became caught up in the cold war rivalries.

In March 1947 U.S. general Douglas MacArthur, who headed the Allied Occupation Authority in Japan, ignited a heated debate about the proper terms of Japan’s rehabilitation when he publicly stated his preference for a relatively short U.S. occupation, believing that Japan had been democratized and demilitarized and that a long occupation would only create resentment.

This view was countered by those who pushed for massive reparations from Japan as well as its complete demilitarization. This group believed that the lax enforcement of the Versailles Treaty, which had ended World War I and established terms for the German reparations and demilitarization, had created the conditions for World War II.

A different assessment of the Versailles Treaty emerged among those who advocated a "soft" approach to the peace treaty. This group, which eventually included U.S. secretary of state Dean Acheson as well as MacArthur, argued that it was the harsh conditions of Versailles that had, by humiliating and isolating Germany, contributed to the rise of Nazism. This group also worried that the United States should be careful not to overextend its military presence in Japan.

The negotiations were complicated by cold war diplomacy. The United States worried about granting Soviet Russia and the newly established communist People’s Republic of China a significant role.

It also wanted to guarantee that Japan would become a U.S.- friendly bulwark against communism in East Asia. In particular, the U.S. military wanted to retain control over Japan for an extended period to guarantee access to its military bases in the area.

The United States eventually adopted a "piecemeal strategy" of granting Japan full sovereignty and disregarding the calls for a longer occupation. It met the concerns of the British Commonwealth of Nations with a U.S.-backed security network that would include Australia and New Zealand.

It satisfied the concerns of the Philippines with promises of aid and security. The United States also decided that neither the Chinese Communist nor the Chinese Nationalist governments would be invited to the treaty conference. This formula won significant bipartisan support in the United States.

The official treaty conference took place in San Francisco in 1951. Fifty-one nations were represented (India chose not to attend). The United States engineered the final result, causing delegates from the Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia to walk out. Eventually 48 nations signed the treaty.

The final terms of the treaty reflected a victory for the pragmatists who had worried that overly harsh conditions would push Japan away from the West. Although it stripped Japan of all territory gained since 1895 and rejected the pardoning of war criminals, the treaty established immediate sovereignty for Japan and limited reparations it owed to its World War II victim nations. The United States–Japan Security Treaty, signed two hours after the peace treaty, guaranteed a U.S. military presence.

Not all Japanese were happy with the treaty. Many Japanese wanted to see the process of democratization and demilitarization continued. They were surprised by the number of bases the United States maintained in Japan as well as the ban on diplomatic relations and trade with communist China.

In retrospect, the relatively generous terms of the treaty reformed Japan as an important member of the Western camp during the cold war. Japan never again threatened the security interests of the West or of other East Asian nations.

Sandinista National Liberation Front

2012-02-11T22:37:00.000-08:00

The Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nactional, or FSLN, or Sandinistas) was a neo-Marxist politico-military organization founded in 1961–62 by a small group of Nicaraguan revolutionaries inspired by the example of the Cuban revolution.

Its goals were to overthrow the Somoza dictatorship and establish a nationalist, socialist, democratic, internationally nonaligned revolutionary state. As such, it was but one of several dozen revolutionary groups to emerge in Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s, and remained relatively obscure until the late 1970s.

On July 19, 1979, it became one of only two revolutionary organizations in modern Latin American history to seize state power after a prolonged armed conflict (the other was Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement).

It ruled Nicaragua from 1979 to 1990, when it was voted out of office, after which it became a minority party in a series of coalition governments. In 2006 a reconstituted FSLN captured the presidency with the election of longtime Sandinista leader and former president Daniel Ortega.

The group was named after Nicaraguan rebel leader Augusto C. Sandino (1895–1934) at the insistence of FSLN leader Carlos Fonesca Amador, who envisioned blending the group’s neo-Marxism with the country’s homegrown traditions of popular struggle, and interpreted Sandino as "a kind of path" and a potent symbol by which to more effectively generate popular support.

In addition to Fonseca, FSLN founders included Tomás Borge Martínez, Noel Guerrero Santiago, Pedro Pablo Ríos, Bayardo Altamirano, Silvio Mayorga, Iván Sánchez, and Faustino Ruiz.

Of this group only Borge survived to witness the revolution’s triumph; after 1979 he became Interior Minister. Other early members included Germán Pomares and Santos López, the latter the only early FSLN member who had fought in Sandino’s army (1927–34).

In the 1960s and 1970s the movement went through several phases and was shaped by a complex sequence of events. In general, the organization shifted its emphasis from the military to the political realm (gaining the political sympathies of the populace), and from organizing rural folk (campesinos) to organizing students, workers, and the urban poor.

Among the most significant events marking the early history of the movement were the 1963 Coco River and Bocay campaign and the 1967 Pancasán offensive in the mountains near Matagalpa, the latter nearly destroying the group and, coming the same year as Che Guevara’s capture and execution in Bolivia, compelled a strategic rethinking.

Thereafter, most organizing efforts shifted to urban areas. The aftermath of the December 23, 1972, Managua earthquake, which killed some 10,000 people, left 250,000 homeless, and exposed the corruption of the Somoza regime, enhanced the stature of the FSLN and other dissident groups.

In December 1974, in an audacious raid on the home of wealthy businessman Chema Castillo, the group captured and ransomed for $1 million several high-ranking officials and forced the release from prison of 14 Sandinista leaders.

In retaliation, from 1975 the Somoza regime arrested and killed many Sandinistas, including Carlos Fonseca in 1976. In the late 1970s the group fractured into three main "tendencies": the "Prolonged People’s War" faction (led by Tomás Borge, Henry Ruiz, and Bayardo Arce); the "Proletarian Tendency" (led by Jaime Wheelock, Luis Carrion, and Carlos Nuñez); and the "Insurrectional Tendency", or "Third Way" (led by Daniel Ortega, his brother Humberto Ortega, and Victor Tirado López).

In 1978–79 a series of insurrections in Managua, León, Estelí, and other cities, led by the Insurrectional Tendency, spelled the demise of the Somoza regime. After July 1979 these three factions were reunited in the nine-member National Directorate, which exercised de facto political power during the years of Sandinista rule.

Saudi Arabia

2012-02-11T22:19:00.000-08:00

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is the largest Arab country on the Arabian Peninsula. Bordering Jordan, Iraq, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Yemen, Saudi Arabia has played an important strategic role in the Middle East. Islam’s two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, are located in Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia is divided into 13 provinces, and, until the 1960s, most of the population was nomadic. Most Saudis are ethnically Arab, although some are of mixed ethnic origins. Many Arabs from neighboring countries work and live in Saudi Arabia but are not citizens. Of a population numbering approximately 26 million, 7 million are foreign citizens, mostly from South Asia. There are also a significant number of Westerners living in Saudi Arabia. All citizens are required to be Muslims.

Saudi Arabia is a monarchy ruled by King Abdullah bin Abd al-Aziz al-Saud, who assumed the throne upon the death of his half brother Fahd bin Abd al-Aziz al-Saud in 2005. The 1992 Basic Law established the system of government and the rights of citizens and provided for rule according to sharia, which is Islamic law. The Qu’ran is the constitution of the land, and there is no separation of church and state.

The country held its first municipal elections in 2005. The king is an absolute monarch whose powers are tempered only by the sharia and other Saudi traditions. The king consults with the Majlis al-Shura, or Consultative Council; the Council of Ministers; the ulema (religious leaders); and other senior members of the Saudi royal family. The Council of Ministers approves legislation, which must be compatible with sharia.

While the Basic Law provides for an independent judiciary, the king serves as the highest court. The Saudi judicial system imposes amputations of hands and feet for serious robbery, floggings for lesser crimes such as sexual deviance and drunkenness, and beheadings for more serious crimes. Religious police enforce strict social rules.

The Saudi economy is based on petroleum and gas resources, and the government controls most of the revenues. Approximately 40 percent of the economy is privatized. Saudi Arabia contains nearly 25 percent of the world’s oil reserves and is the largest exporter of petroleum in the world. Saudi Arabia has also played a central role in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

Oil production increased during the reign of King Faisal ibn Abd al-Aziz; Faisal became king following the abdication of his inept half brother King Saud ibn Abd al-Aziz. He introduced various reforms and attempted to modernize the kingdom. With the support of his wife, Queen Iffat, Faisal introduced education for females.

A devout Muslim, Faisal also worked to increase the Islamic political identity in the Arab world. After the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Saudi Arabia’s strategic importance increased, and Faisal built up the nation’s military capabilities. During the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, Faisal moved to mix oil and politics by withdrawing Saudi oil from nations that supported Israel.

He also advocated the return of Jerusalem to Muslim rule. In 1975 Faisal was assassinated by a nephew, and his half brother, King Khaled ibn Abd al-Aziz, known for his pro–United States stance, assumed the throne. Following his death in 1982, Fahd ibn Abd al-Aziz became king.

The Saudi government supported the growth of the private sector to decrease economic dependence on oil and to increase employment opportunities. In the 1990s, water shortages hampered efforts toward agricultural self-sufficiency and the per capita income decreased from almost $25,000 in the 1980s to about $8,000 by 2000. In order to increase employment for its citizens, the government attempted to Saudize the economy by replacing foreign labor with Saudi workers.

Counterterrorism efforts dominated Saudi politics in the early 21st century. After 15 Saudi hijackers perpetrated the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, the Saudi government intensified its antiterrorism campaign.

However, the future of the authoritarian monarchy remained uncertain as the Saudi government attempted to combine sweeping programs of modernization with the continuation of traditional and puritanical ways of life.

School of the Americas

2012-02-11T22:09:00.000-08:00

The School of the Americas—called by its critics the "School of the Assassins"—was founded by the United States in 1946 in Fort Gulick, Panama, as the Latin American Ground School (LAGS). In 1949 it was renamed the U.S. Army Caribbean School-Spanish Instruction and in 1963 the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA).

In 2001, largely in response to years of protests by human rights organizations, the U.S. Congress renamed it the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC) and relocated it to Fort Benning, Georgia. Despite these formal changes in its name, the School of the Americas has remained consistent in its core mission: to provide U.S. Army-directed, Spanish-language military training to Latin American militaries.

Since its founding, the SOA has trained an estimated 60,000 soldiers in counterinsurgency warfare; interrogation techniques; commando and psychological warfare; sniping; military intelligence; civil-military relations; and related courses of study.

According to a June 1996 report issued by a four-person independent Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB) appointed by U.S. President Bill Clinton, the SOA "used improper instruction materials in training Latin American officers from 1982 to 1991 [that] condone practices such as execution of guerrillas, extortion, physical abuse, coercion, and false imprisonment".

The findings echoed the criticisms of human rights organizations that include America’s Watch and Amnesty International, and of the United Nations Truth Commission Report on El Salvador (1993), which found that many of the most egregious violators of human rights in El Salvador’s 12-year civil war were graduates of the SOA.

Their crimes included the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero (1980); the El Mozote Massacre (1980, in which more than 900 civilians were killed); and scores of other massacres in El Salvador. In 2002 the Center for Justice and Accountability won a $54.6 million lawsuit in the U.S.

District Court in Florida against two former Salvadoran generals and SOA graduates (General Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, Director-General of the Salvadoran National Guard, 1979–83, and General José Guillermo Garcia, Minister of Defense, 1979–83) for their role in a series of human rights abuses in El Salvador in the 1980s.

The organization "School of the Americas Watch" (SOA Watch), awarded the 2004 International Alfonso Comín Award for its promotion of peace and justice in the Americas, has compiled data linking SOA graduates to tortures, murders, massacres, and other human rights abuses in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. SOA Watch’s list of "notorious graduates" includes Manuel Noriega (Panama), Efraín Ríos Montt (Guatemala), Roberto D’Aubuisson (El Salvador), and scores of others.

WHISC acknowledges that some SOA graduates have committed human rights abuses, while maintaining that "[the] purpose of the Institute is to provide professional education and training to eligible personnel of nations of the Western Hemisphere within the context of the democratic principles set forth in the Charter of the Organization of American States ... while fostering mutual knowledge, transparency, confidence, and cooperation among the participating nations and promoting democratic values, respect for human rights, and knowledge and understanding of United States customs and traditions". In 2007 WHISC’s operating budget was $7.5 million.

Shanghai Communiqué

2012-02-11T10:10:00.000-08:00

A Joint Communiqué was issued in Shanghai on February 27, 1972, by the United States and China on the occasion of President Richard. Nixon’s visit to the People’s Republic of China.

The Shanghai Communiqué would officially break the cycle of antagonism between the two countries and would be the instrument on which their new relationship would be built. The communiqué is also important because it allowed the two sides to embrace friendly relations while deferring the contentious issue of the status of Taiwan.

The first steps toward reconciliation were taken in 1969 when the United States relaxed certain trade and travel restrictions to China. By 1970 the two sides had reopened informal talks in Warsaw.

In April of 1971 Chinese officials invited the U.S. table tennis team to Beijing, resulting in a well-publicized visit and a warm welcome by the Chinese government. By June of 1971 President Nixon had revoked the 21-year trade embargo with China.

On July 9 of the same year, U.S. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger secretly visited Beijing in order to lay the foundation for President Nixon’s trip and to take steps toward the normalization of relations between the two countries. On July 15, 1971, Nixon shocked the world by announcing that he would visit China to seek the normalization of relations between the two nations.

From February 21 to February 28, 1972, Nixon visited China, meeting with Chinese leaders including the chairman of the Communist Party Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung). Toward the end of the trip, the two sides announced the Shanghai Communiqué, which was the product of months of intensive negotiations.

The communiqué announced that progress toward the normalization of relations between China and the United States was in the interests of all countries. It stated that both sides wished to reduce the danger of international military conflict and that neither should seek "hegemony" in the Asia-Pacific region. It also asserted that each was opposed to efforts by any other country or group of countries to establish such hegemony.

On the issue of Taiwan, both sides outlined their respective positions. The Chinese stated that the government of the People’s Republic of China was the "sole legal government of China" and that Taiwan was a province of China.

The Chinese further argued that all U.S. forces and military installations must be withdrawn from Taiwan. The United States declared that the U.S. government would not challenge that position.

The United States also expressed its hope for peaceful settlement of the "Taiwan question". The United States further affirmed its ultimate objective as the withdrawal of all U.S. forces and military installations from Taiwan. In the meantime, the United States pledged to reduce its forces and military installations on Taiwan.

The two sides agreed to the expansion of cultural, technological, and commercial contacts to complement the normalization of diplomatic relations. Both expressed their hope that the gains achieved during Nixon’s visit would open up new prospects between the two countries and would contribute to the relaxation of tensions in Asia and the world.

President Nixon would refer to his visit to China as the week that "changed the world". His visit reflected China’s alignment with the West against the Soviet Union and resulted in a fundamental change in the global balance of power.

The United States no longer had to prepare for war against China and could focus its resources against the Soviet Union. Better relations would have benefits for the People’s Republic of China as well.

They allowed China an ally in a potential confrontation with the Soviet Union. The format of the communiqué allowed China to claim an equal footing with the United States in the world, something it had long sought. Mao would hail the visit as a "great diplomatic victory" for China.

Despite this progress, U.S. support for Taiwan would prevent the establishment of formal U.S.- Chinese diplomatic relations for several years. On January 1, 1979, the United States would finally establish normal diplomatic relations with China, removing its troops from Taiwan and abrogating the U.S.- Taiwan Defense Treaty. Despite opposition from Chinese officials, the United States continued to maintain the right to sell defensive weapons to Taiwan.

Lal Bahadur Shastri

2012-01-31T06:14:00.000-08:00

Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indian prime minister at the time of the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, was born on October 2, 1901, at Mughalsarai, Uttar Pradesh. Shastri graduated from Kashi Vidya Peeth in Varanasi in 1926, attaining the degree of shastri (equivalent to a bachelor’s degree).

His surname, Shastri, was taken by him from this degree. He was attracted to the freedom movement while at school and participated in the noncooperation and civil disobedience movements launched by Mohandas K. Gandhi.

After India’s independence Shastri became the home minister of Uttar Pradesh state. He then joined politics on the national level, became the general secretary of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) in 1951, under Jawaharlal Nehru as president, and became a close confidant of Nehru.

Shastri was a humble man and tolerant of opposing viewpoints, but never wavered from his convictions. He resigned as railway minister after an accident near Ariyalur, Tamil Nadu, taking responsibility for the event. Shastri was a very capable organizer of the Congress Party and contributed to the success of his party in general elections.

After Nehru’s death on May 27, 1964, party stalwarts favored the noncontroversial Shastri as his successor as prime minister. As prime minister, he tried to solve the rising problem of food shortage in the country and worked to ameliorate the condition of the peasantry.

Shastri showed strong determination and iron will in his dealings with Pakistan. These had been bad since independence. But the second Indo-Pakistani Wars began during Shastri’s premiership. India had been humiliated in the Sino-Indian War of 1962, and Pakistan exploited the situation by fomenting trouble on the western border of India. Shastri made diplomatic efforts to solve the problem but failed.

The conflict began in the Rann of Kutch region in Gujarat in March 1965 when Pakistani infiltrators entered Kashmir. The war was a stalemate. The United Nations Security Council called for a cease-fire on September 22. Then a meeting of the premiers of India and Pakistan, arranged by Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin, took place in the city of Tashkent.

The Tashkent Agreement was signed by Shastri and Pakistani president Ayub Khan on January 10, 1966. It restored normal relations between India and Pakistan. Both armies went back to the positions they had held before the war, and the cease-fire line became the de facto border between the two countries.

Shastri suffered a heart attack and died the next day. A grateful nation awarded him with the highest honor, Bharat Ratna, posthumously. Shastri had left an indelible mark in Indian politics because of his leadership quality, honesty, and steadfast determination.

Shining Path

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Founded in the 1960s but not active in guerrilla activities until May 1980, the Maoist-oriented Communist Party of Peru (Partido Comunista del Perú), popularly known as the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), was the brainchild of former university professor Abimael Guzmán.

For 12 years, from 1980 until Guzmán’s capture by the Peruvian military on September 12, 1992, in Lima, Shining Path waged a rural and urban guerrilla campaign against the Peruvian state.

Based mainly in rural areas, Shining Path controlled sections in the south and central part of the highlands, and had taken their struggle to the shantytowns of Lima and other cities. The insurgency prompted a security crackdown by three successive presidents in which the Peruvian military committed tens of thousands of documented human rights abuses.

The Shining Path movement provided President Fujimori with a pretext for his "self-coup" of April 1992, when he dissolved the Peruvian Congress and suspended constitutional guarantees, soon followed by a purge of the judiciary and his assumption of dictatorial powers.

The Shining Path movement, in conjunction with the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru, MRTA)—and the state repression that these guerrilla movements engendered—had the effect of heightening the militarization of the country and creating a legacy of violence and impunity that endured into the 21st century.

The ideology inspiring Shining Path’s guerrilla movement was an amalgam of various strains of leftist and Marxist theories of imperialism, capitalism, and armed struggle that gave primacy to the political thought of Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong.

Senderistas (as members of the group were known) rejected the concept of "human rights". In keeping with this ideology, Shining Path’s principal weapon was its use of terror and violence against civilians it identified as its enemies.

Alienating large sectors of the peasantry, not only by its brutality but by its lack of respect for indigenous and rural customs, the group also tried to outlaw alcohol, ban community celebrations, and close markets in city and countryside, with the aim of starving Lima and ultimately seizing state power.

Many peasant communities responded by forming rondas, or community patrols, to defend themselves against Sendero assaults. The group survived its leader’s 1992 capture, though its activities dropped off markedly, and it no longer posed a threat to the state.

According to the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation of Peru, in the final two decades of the 20th century a total of 69,280 civilians were killed or disappeared by Shining Path, the MRTA, paramilitary squads, and the Peruvian military, with the Shining Path responsible for more than half (54 percent) of the total.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva

2012-01-31T04:33:00.000-08:00

A former shoeshine boy, street vendor, metalworker, and longtime labor leader, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (universally known as "Lula") was elected president of Brazil in 2002 with some 61 percent of the popular vote; four years later, despite an unfolding corruption scandal, he was reelected for a second term.

His rise to political power represented a key element in a broader shift in Latin American politics in the 1990s and 2000s toward a pragmatic and democratic left-populism that viewed the neoliberal economic policies espoused by the United States and international financial institutions (particularly the International Monetary Fund and World Bank) as antithetical to the interests of their nations’ citizens and of Latin America’s and the world’s poor.

Along with Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Néstor Kirchner in Argentina, Evo Morales in Bolivia, and other political leaders swept into office in the post–cold war era, President Lula has worked to deepen democratic institutions and improve the living standards of the majority, while at the same time working within the structures of global capitalism dominated by the more advanced industrial countries of Europe and North America.

Born in October 1945 to a poor peasant family in the state of Pernambuco in Brazil’s impoverished northeast, as a small child Lula moved with his mother and seven siblings to the coastal city of Guarujá in São Paulo state. Like many poor working-class children, he received a spotty education, instead working in the city’s informal economy to help his family make ends meet.

When he was 11, his family moved to São Paulo, where he worked in a number of factories, including a copper processing facility and an automobile plant. As a young man he became increasingly involved in union politics; this was during the period of military dictatorship (1964–85), when state authorities violently suppressed militant labor activism.

Lula’s involvement in the labor movement deepened through the 1970s and 1980s. In 1978, following an AFL-CIO-sponsored tour of the United States earlier in the decade, he was elected president of a local steel-worker’s union.

After being arrested and jailed for illegal union and strike activities, in 1980 he helped found the Worker’s Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT); three years later he was a founding member of the Central Worker’s Union (Central Única dos Trabalhadores, or CUT). In 1982, in the midst of these union and political activities, and with the country still in the grip of military dictatorship, he ran for office in the São Paulo state assembly.

He was defeated, but four years later, following the democratic opening after 1985, won a seat in the National Congress as a Worker’s Party member. Using his congressional seat as a platform, he ran for president in 1989, losing the election but gaining national attention for his plainspoken left-populism.

He ran again in 1994 and 1998 and, after softening his party’s platform to ease the jitters of the investment and financial sectors, captured the presidency in 2002. His administration’s policies can be described as moderately left-reformist, with an expansion of public sector spending in health care, education, social security, energy, and related arenas, coupled with careful debt and monetary management.

The response of the international financial community, and of the Brazilian electorate, has been mostly positive, though many of his erstwhile supporters have expressed disappointment at what they see as excessive compromise and dilution of his socialist vision. Whether his administration will be able to maintain the delicate balance between meeting the needs and aspirations of transnational capital and of the country’s laboring classes remains to be seen.

Singapore

2012-01-31T04:24:00.000-08:00

Singapore became in independent country on August 9, 1965. This island nation at the southern tip of western Malaysia has since become a regional powerhouse. Singapore’s 4 million citizens, by marked contrast with many other countries of Southeast Asia, enjoy a high standard of living second only to Japan’s in Asia.

Singapore has ancient beginnings. It was part of the Sultanate of Johore until 1819, when Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, representing Great Britain, made a treaty with the sultan and established the island as a British trading settlement. The name Singapore comes from the word Singapura, meaning "Lion City".

As a Crown Colony of the British Empire, it became an impregnable fortress. In 1941 Japan entered World War II, simultaneously attacking Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, and Malaysia. By early 1942 the Japanese army was progressing rapidly down the peninsula.

The city was shelled and bombed, and several thousand troops and civilians were killed in the fighting. The garrison on Singapore surrendered on February 15, 1942. Thousands of Allied troops were marched into captivity.

The Japanese found themselves in possession of a valuable stronghold and significant quantities of Allied weapons and ammunition. Japan established an infamous prisoner of war camp at Changi, where Allied prisoners languished under inhumane conditions.

After World War II Singapore resumed its busy trading focus, and in 1959 it became a self-governing Crown Colony with Lee Kuan Yew, a British-educated barrister, as its first prime minister.

On September 2, 1962, a referendum was held on whether to form a union with Malaya. Seventy-three percent of the electorate voted in favor. On September 16, 1963, Singapore became part of the new nation of Malaysia, a self-governing dominion of the British Commonwealth.

Four areas were combined to make up Malaysia: the Federated Malay States, Singapore, British North Borneo, and Sarawak. Indonesia and the Philippines opposed the union, and Indonesia supported rebels in Malaysia after its formation.

In 1965 Singapore left the Malaysia Federation to become a sovereign country. The island section of Malaysia was expelled over the status of ethnic Malay and Chinese in the population.

Singapore, as a separate nation, was a success. On September 21, 1965, it became the 117th member of the United Nations. President Lee Kuan Yew is regarded as the father of modern Singapore.

As leader and founder of the People’s Action Party (PAP), he campaigned energetically to form a multiracial government along nonracial lines. He maintained law and order and emphasized hard work. The government is famous for efficiency, and its people for being hard-working and forward looking.

In August 1967 Singapore joined Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Thailand to form ASEAN—the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. The association pursued aims of accelerating economic growth, social progress, and cultural development, and the promotion of peace and stability in the region. In 1971 Britain ended its military association with Singapore with the closure of the British Far East Command.

Lee retired in 1990 as Singapore’s reputation for efficiency and hard work grew. Today, the nation-state is crowded—population density in 2003 was just over 6,000 people per square kilometer. Life expectancy is 77 years for males and 81 for females. Singapore has become the success story of Southeast Asia.

Sino-Soviet Treaty (1950)

2012-01-31T02:19:00.000-08:00

The People’s Republic of China was proclaimed on October 1, 1949, and won immediate recognition from the Soviet Union and Eastern European communist nations. Not yet secure after winning the civil war against the Nationalists, China needed support from the Soviet Union.

Thus Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung), chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), declared his "lean to one side" policy to form an international united front with the Soviet Union.

Mao went to Moscow in December 1949, his first trip abroad, ostensibly to help celebrate Joseph Stalin’s 70th birthday but more importantly to negotiate a treaty with the Soviet Union. A 30-year treaty of friendship, alliance, and mutual assistance was signed on February 14, 1950, clearly directed against the United States.

A second agreement allowed the Soviet Union to continue its presence in Port Arthur and Dairen in China’s southern Manchuria and to operate a railway in the region (rights Stalin had obtained at Yalta in 1945 without agreement from China) until 1952. The treaty provided for a $300 million loan from the Soviet Union in five equal annual installments between 1950 and 1955.

During the next decade the Soviet Union sent tens of thousands of scientists and advisers to help the Chinese army, navy, air force, and 156 industrial enterprises during China’s First Five-Year Plan.

A total of 6,500 Chinese students went for advanced studies to the Soviet Union instead of Western countries; Russian replaced English as the compulsory second language in Chinese schools. In 1952 the Soviet Union returned to China the over U.S. $1 billion of loot it had taken from Manchuria at the end of World War II.

China agreed to recognize independence for Outer Mongolia, a part of China that had become a Soviet satellite in 1924. In October 1950 China intervened in the Korean War to prevent the collapse of North Korea, an ally of both China and the Soviet Union.

By the late 1950s the Moscow-Beijing Axis was collapsing for many reasons. Although both nations were ruled by communist parties, the CCP had from its inception resented Moscow’s domination and interference. Although Mao respected Stalin’s seniority in the communist world, he firmly rejected Nikita Khrushchev’s similar claim after Stalin’s death, and Mao offered himself as the world communist leader.

Mao also denounced Khrushchev as revisionist for his de-Stalinization policy after 1956. In 1959 Khrushchev withdrew an earlier promise to help China build a nuclear bomb and recalled Soviet aid workers from China. Mao called Khrushchev a coward for backing down before the United States in the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

Mao’s claim to be an original contributor to Marxism-Leninism, with special relevance to the non-Western world, was rejected by Moscow. Finally, China felt aggrieved over large territorial losses to imperial Russia in the 19th century and wanted the Soviet Union to acknowledge that they were the result of unequal and therefore illegal treaties, claims that the Soviet Union firmly rejected.

Relations deteriorated further when Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev sent troops to Czechoslovakia in 1968 and announced his doctrine that the Soviet Union had the right to intervene in communist countries that deviated from its interpretation of the socialist cause. Serious border clashes between the Soviet Union and China occurred in 1969, and war loomed.

Solidarity Movement

2012-01-30T10:40:00.000-08:00

Despite the fact that from 1945 to 1989 the Soviet Union imposed significant control over the internal and external affairs of eastern European nations, that control was never complete. At one time or another that situation was true in all Eastern bloc nations, but nowhere so much as in Poland. The Poles demonstrated their independent streak at intervals in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s.

In many instances there were riots and bloodshed, and Soviet troops stationed in Poland ostensibly as defense against a Western attack were used to keep order. In 1953 the Polish premier informed the Soviets that while he would accept military assistance from Soviet troops already in the country, he would mobilize the entire Polish army to fight them if more were sent in. In 1980 a labor union that named itself Solidarity would come into being. It would eventually play a principle role in the ending of the communist regime in Poland.

Solidarity was founded in September 1980 in immediate response to increasing food prices, which had already precipitated several strikes. There was already a basic organization in place around which representatives of the striking workers could meet and discuss issues. This was the Workers Defense Committee, which had come into being as a result of strikes, riots, and the killing and injuring of workers in the 1970s.

The month before Solidarity was formed, almost 20,000 workers struck at the Lenin Shipyard in the city of Gdansk. These strikers, led by Lech Walesa, a shipyard electrician, locked themselves in the shipyard and were soon communicating with other groups who were joining in strikes of their own.

The workers presented a list of demands that were granted by the government, which included the ability to organize free unions that were not sponsored or sanctioned by the Polish Government. With this victory, Solidarity would come into being, replace the old Workers Defense Committee, and then begin to grow throughout the country.

In December another group, calling itself Rural Solidarity, which was the agricultural equivalent to the industrialized organization, also came into being. Growth was dramatic, and by mid-1981, nearly all laborers were members of or represented by Solidarity.

The Polish government, which had made the concessions that allowed Solidarity to legally come into being, began to view developments with alarm. The same concern applied to the Soviet leadership. Leonid Brezhnev and members of the Soviet Politburo made their concerns increasingly clear to Poland’s head of state, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, who would feel pressure from the Soviet Union and at home.

Encouraged by its newfound legalized existence and successes thus far, Solidarity became active in 1981, calling for additional strikes and increasing its demands. By late 1981, faced with the demands of Solidarity, Jaruzelski was coming under increased pressure. He received frequent calls from Brezhnev demanding that he put a stop to Solidarity’s activities.

At the same time the Soviet army moved closer to the Polish border and conducted substantial maneuvers with other Warsaw Pact troops, thus underlining the threat that if he did not act on his own, Jaruzelski could face an invasion. At least that is what Jaruzelski said years later when on trial for treason.

That trial, from which he was later acquitted, tried to resolve whether Jaruzelski had saved Poland from invasion by what he did to Solidarity or had betrayed Poland’s independence, however limited that might be.

In mid-December 1981 Jaruzelski finally took action. Solidarity was suppressed. Lech Wałesa and the other leaders of the union were imprisoned, and martial law was imposed. The Polish army now ran everything in the country, and any union activities, strikes, or demonstrations would be met with force.

Eventually the leaders of Solidarity were quietly released, and, although the organization was illegal, it did remain active. Its leaders remained in contact with each other, and an underground organization, based on those that had existed during World War II, emerged. Western journalists were able to bring to the West a picture of Solidarity, no longer legal and not functioning as it had but still alive.

Having imposed order, Jaruzelski was now compelled to improve the Polish economy. Brezhnev had died in 1982, and his two immediate successors were also dead by 1985 when Mikhail Gorbachev assumed responsibility for leading the Soviet Union.

In the 1980s the Soviets were beginning to exercise looser control and endless assistance to the Eastern bloc nations. Jaruzelski’s attempts at reform were now opposed by Solidarity, which was reemerging as a political force.

Widespread strikes in Poland forced Jaruzelski to begin conversations with Wałesa and the Solidarity leadership. Solidarity was once again legalized in April 1989, and that same year it won a crushing majority in the national elections.

A coalition of Solidarity and Communists formed a government in August 1989, and Wałesa, who less than 10 years before had been jailed for his union activities, was now president of Poland.

Since that time, Solidarity has declined in both membership and influence. There were personality and philosophical clashes among several of the leaders, not least of whom was Wałesa. It can also be argued that once it had defeated a common enemy that posed a major threat, it could not maintain cohesion on all issues. It did not have any of its candidates elected in 2001, and the membership is about a tenth of what it was in the early 1980s.

Somalia (1950–2006)

2012-01-27T08:04:00.000-08:00

Following the end of World War II, the British administered Somalia until 1950, when it was divided, with southern Somalia put under Italian trusteeship and the Ogaden returned to Ethiopia, with the remainder of Somalia, held by the British, prepared for independence.

The decision to allow the Italians to supervise any part of Somalia was controversial given their colonial record in the region, and it sparked riots in 1950. Elections were held in southern Somalia in 1956, and these were won by the Somali Youth League.

In February the Somali National League won a majority in elections in northern Somalia. The platforms of both groups were to reunify Somalia and achieve independence which was granted on July 1, 1960.

The first president of Somalia was Aden Abdullah Osman Daar, who had served in the Italian colonial administration until 1941. He had been president of the National Assembly until 1960 when he became president of the Constituent Assembly, a position he held until independence.

The first prime minister, Mohammed Ibrahim Egal, was from British Somaliland; he joined the Somali National League Party in 1956 and became its secretary-general two years later.

He held the position for just over two weeks before stepping down on July 12, 1960, to become minister of defense. Replacing him was Abdirashid Ali Shermarke, from the Somali Youth League, who had studied political science at the University of Rome.

Unfortunately, not long after independence, Somalia became embroiled in a dispute with the British who granted the Somali-dominated Northern Frontier District of Kenya to the Republic of Kenya. Somalia broke off diplomatic relations with Britain in 1963.

The main problem facing Somalia was the integration of the two halves of the country, plagued by ethnic rivalries, and worries that infrastructure development in one part of the country was disadvantaging the other.

Tensions with Kenya and Ethiopia proved intractable. War with the latter broke out over the Ogaden in 1964. Although it did not last long, it served to destabilize the country, which was becoming beset with factional troubles and the proliferation of political parties and corruption.

In 1964 Shermarke was replaced as prime minister by Abdirizak Haji Husain, also from the Somali Youth League, and on July 10, 1967, Shermarke was elected as president of Somalia, a post he held until his assassination on October 15, 1969, by Somali police officers.

The assassination led to a military coup six days later, which brought Major-General Mohammed Siad Barre to power. He then became president of the Supreme Revolutionary Council and head of state, also serving as prime minister until January 30, 1987.

Siad Barre was involved in introducing a program he called "scientific socialism", by which he sought to integrate Somalia. One of these policies was the creation and dissemination of a written Somali language.

In 1975 a drought struck Somalia, and this led to a famine which saw thousands of people in Somalia, and also in neighboring Ethiopia, dying. Two years later Somalia attacked Ethiopia, with Siad Barre keen to create his Greater Somalia which was to include the Ogaden (from Ethiopia), Djibouti, and also northern Kenya.

In 1977 Somalia was in news headlines all over the world when a German Lufthansa Flight 181 from Majorca, Spain, was hijacked to the Somali capital, Mogadishu. There the GSG-9, a crack German antiterrorist commando force formed after the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, stormed the plane and released the hostages unharmed.

Forced to Flee

Surviving an attempted military coup in April 1978, Siad Barre came to lead an increasingly autocratic regime that started to face trouble from internal Somali resistance groups. In particular, the Somalia Salvation Democratic Front used bases in Ethiopia to attack Somali soldiers, eventually overrunning parts of northern Somalia.

In August 1990 the Somali Salvation Democratic Front allied with two other groups, the Somali Patriotic Front and the Somali National Movement (SNM), to form a loose coalition. Siad Barre himself had been seriously injured in a car accident in May 1986, but remained in control of Mogadishu. He was forced to flee the country on January 26, 1991, going first to Kenya and eventually settling in Nigeria in 1992.

With the victorious rebels seizing control of Mogadishu, Ali Mahdi Muhammad became the president of the country, with the task of bringing together the various factions. Northern Somali separatists appointed the leader of the SNM, Abdurahman Ahmed Ali, as president of the breakaway Somaliland Republic.

Fighting continued, and Ali Mahdi hastily left the Somali capital in November 1991 after the supporters of General Mohammad Farrah Aydid attacked Mogadishu, capturing the city after bloody street fighting. Aydid then proclaimed himself head of the new government, managing to fight off an attack in April 1992 by supporters of Siad Barre.

Aid agencies estimated that as many as 2,000 people were dying each day from hunger in and around Mogadishu alone. With Aydid holding food supplies only for his supporters, the United Nations felt the duty to act, and on August 12, 1992, they had permission from Aydid to deploy troops to protect the aid workers.

The result was 500 armed United Nations soldiers being deployed and a massive relief operation taking place. This part of the aid operation went well, although there were some problems in the towns of Baidoa and Bardera in the west of the country.

By mid-1993 the aid mission had been changed with the U.S. marines being deployed to achieve political objectives. This seemed to include the overthrow of the Aydid government, which led to a U.S. helicopter attack on an alleged Aydid munitions base on July 12, 1993, killing a large number of Somali clan leaders who had gathered for a conference.

The political climate moved against the Americans as the clan alliances reformed. On October 3, 1993, some 140 U.S. marines abseiled from Black Hawk helicopters into Mogadishu, with their mission being to abduct two senior lieutenants of Aydid.

The operation was planned to last no longer than an hour, but some U.S. Marines were pinned down by thousands of armed Somalis; by the time they were evacuated the following morning, there were 18 U.S. Marines killed and more than 70 badly injured.

Factional Shifts

With the United States clearly against General Aydid, he moved to form alliances with some of his erstwhile enemies, the Americans unable to keep up with the factional shifts. In November 1994 Aydid called a General Conference on Somali Reconciliation, but Ali Mahdi boycotted it, as did the Somali Salvation Alliance.

In June 1995 Aydid himself was ousted by Osman Ali Ato. Following the death of Aydid in 1996, his son, Hussein Aydid, a former U.S. Marine who had been involved in the Somali operation, became the leader of the United Somali Congress and took his father’s title as interim president of Somalia.

Hussein Aydid refused to take part in the National Salvation Council when it was formed by leaders of 26 of Somalia’s factions in January 1997. They agreed on a peace formula that saw the introduction of a federal system for the country, allowing the warlords to retain their local power bases.

This meant that by 1998 the country was effectively divided into three parts: Somalia, consisting of the southern provinces around Mogadishu; the former British areas in the north becoming Somaliland; and Puntland in the northeast. Frequent peace conferences were to be held to try to work out common policies on certain issues.

Although the infighting had died down, the problems over the famine continued with 650,000 people facing food shortages in April 2000. This led to food riots and instability in Mogadishu, forcing the warring factions to declare Baidoa the "provisional capital". By this time, large numbers of educated Somalis had fled.

An interim Somali National Assembly was formed in October 2001 with Salad Hassan Abdikassim (Abdiqasim Salad Hassan) as the interim president. Problems with Ethiopia continued, and the interim prime minister, Ali Khalif Galaydh, accused Ethiopia of trying to destabilize the country, supporting some of the clans that wanted separatism. Abdikassim appointed himself interim president of the Transitional National Government, and in November 2001 Abshir Farah Hassan was elected as the interim prime minister.

The September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and the subsequent War on Terror saw the U.S. military take a keen interest in Somalia and the level of Islamic fundamentalist influence in the country. Since then the Somali "government" has gradually come to support, however reluctantly, the United States in its War on Terror. The United States has consequently rewarded pro-U.S. groups in the country.

On October 14, 2004, Abdullah Yusuf Ahmed became president, taking over from Salad Hassan Abdikassim, and in November 2004, Ali Mohammed Ghadi became prime minister of the transitional federal government. However, after a failed assassination attempt, Prime Minister Ghadi fled Mogadishu, returning in 2006 when Ethiopian troops, aided by the United States, backed him and on December 21, 2006, started a new war in Somalia.

South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO)

2012-01-27T05:46:00.000-08:00

The South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), or the Manila Pact, was formed in Manila on September 8, 1954, by the United States, Great Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Thailand, and the Philippines.

A special protocol added Cambodia, Laos, and South Vietnam to the protection of SEATO. The main reason behind the formation of a collective defense treaty in Southeast Asia was the containment of communism. The United States in the cold war period wanted to prevent communism from spreading.

After the defeat of the French in Indochina the Geneva Conference had been called in 1954. While the peacemaking process was going on in Geneva, the United States initiated SEATO. The main architect was the U.S. secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, who wanted collective defense against communist aggression.

After the establishment of communism in China, there was apprehension in the United States that South and Southeast Asia faced a threat from communists. North Vietnam had become communist, and in Laos the Pathet Lao had become powerful.

Bangkok was the headquarters of SEATO. The post of secretary-general was instituted in 1957, and a Thai diplomat named Pote Sarasin was the first person to hold the post. The articles of the treaty spelled out the motives, principles, and functioning of SEATO.

In the preamble, the sovereign equality of states was recognized. The members pledged under the provisions of article I to settle disputes by peaceful means. Article III envisaged economic cooperation and social well-being. SEATO had a provision that all members should agree on intervention in case of a dispute.

This became an obstacle to intervening in the crises of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, as there was no unanimity among members for intervention. There were joint military exercises each year among the signatories. According to the provisions of the Geneva Conference Cambodia, Laos, and South Vietnam could not join a military alliance.

A Pacific Charter was added to the treaty at the insistence of the Philippines, calling for the upholding of the principles of self-determination and equal rights. Any attempt to destroy the sovereignty and territorial integrity of member states would be checked. There would also be cooperation in economic development and social welfare among signatories.

The treaty was viewed as another attempt to bring the cold war to South and Southeast Asia. Only three Asian states, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Thailand, had joined it. India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar were in favor of a policy of nonalignment. In its ongoing conflict with India, Pakistan thought SEATO might be helpful. It also had a dispute with another neighbor state, Afghanistan.

The Philippines and Thailand had close military cooperation with the United States. Manila was in favor of a multilateral pact due to the influence of the United States. The joining of the Philippines invited criticism from the Afro-Asian bloc, alleging that it was serving the designs of neocolonialism in the region. Thailand joined SEATO because of security concerns.

Great Britain wanted its presence felt in the region and was also concerned with the security of Hong Kong and Malaya. France lost interest after the debacle in Indochina but it considered SEATO a barrier to the expansion of communism. Australia and New Zealand were committed even though an alliance with the United States, the ANZUS pact, had been signed in 1951.

The Soviet Union, China, and North Vietnam condemned the treaty. They pointed out that the inclusion of Cambodia, Laos, and South Vietnam in the sphere of action of SEATO was contrary to the spirit of the Geneva Conference of 1954. China attacked SEATO for threatening peace in Asia.

SEATO was not helpful to the United States and Thailand in preventing ongoing communist victories in Indochina, including during the Vietnam War. Thailand and the Philippines helped the administration of the United States by providing air bases and sending troops, but in the civil war in Laos in 1961–62, it was more out of their close relations with the United States rather than an obligation under SEATO.

One of the factors was the clause that demanded unanimity before action could be taken. In the meeting of the SEATO Council of Ministers on March 27, 1961, multilateral intervention was not possible due to the French opposition. Great Britain also did not support intervention, lest it jeopardize the peace effort in Geneva in 1961 pertaining to Laos.

It was only a question of time before SEATO would end. The United States relied on its military might in the Vietnam War while Great Britain, France, Australia, and New Zealand did not want to get involved. Pakistan and France withdrew from SEATO in November 1973 and June 1974, respectively.

After the communist victory in the Indochinese states in 1975, SEATO became an anachronism in the region, and it was decided to disband the treaty in a meeting in September 1975 held in New York. SEATO was formally dissolved two years afterward.

Southern Baptist Convention

2012-01-26T08:53:00.000-08:00

The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is the largest Protestant body in the United States. Baptists emerged after the First Great Awakening in New England and quickly found the southern United States a fertile region for growth. Committed in equal degrees to a conservative doctrine, aggressive evangelism, and local congregational autonomy, Baptists felt the strains of slavery.

In 1845 tensions led to the formation of the SBC, which allowed Baptists in the South to pursue missions and educational efforts on their own. Their regional seclusion protected the denomination from the schisms of the early 20th century. Indeed, Baptists eschewed the kind of denominational controls exercised by many other churches, particularly regarding doctrine.

Free of theological controversies and experiencing numerical, institutional, and regional expansion, Southern Baptists enjoyed great self-confidence. Baptists believed that they were called to convert the South, that the South would lead the nation, and that the United States would lead the world.

Denominational unity was critical to fulfilling this mission, but by the second half of the century expansion brought diversity, and a series of small theological rifts in SBC educational efforts portended greater controversies in the future.

Although their divisions were mild in comparison with debates in other denominations, Baptists in the South suffered a more shattering blow during the Civil Rights controversies of the 1940s–70s. Many southerners saw these changes as a threat to their traditional way of life.

Conservatives grew anxious and less tolerant of change of any kind; progressives felt remorse over decades of SBC inaction. By the 1970s prosperity and urbanization seemed to be taking the South into the secular currents sweeping the rest of the nation. It was against that background that a bitter battle between conservatives and moderates exploded during the 1980s.

For years, conservatives contended, denominational boards and seminaries had been controlled by liberals who were allowing liberalism to undercut the theological foundation of the church’s evangelistic mission. Now they were organizing to take back their church.

From the moderates’ perspective this same effort appeared a departure from Baptist traditions of respect for local autonomy and the right of believers to interpret the Bible for themselves. Moderates charged that conservatives were advocating the kind of coercive denominational intrusions and the mingling of religion and politics that Baptists traditionally rejected.

Conservatives successfully framed the debate as one of accepting or rejecting the Bible, and the majority of SBC members sided with them. Moderates charged them with securing power through questionable parliamentary maneuvers, but, by the end of the 1980s, the conservative takeover of the SBC was all but complete.

Dissolution of the Soviet Union

2012-01-26T07:46:00.000-08:00

In 1989 eastern European countries of the Warsaw Pact, which had been beholden to the Soviet Union since the end of World War II, had their communist governments replaced with noncommunist governments. For the first time in over 30 years the borders between eastern and western Europe were opened.

The following year the Congress of People’s Deputies changed the Soviet constitution and removed the Communist Party’s monopoly from the constitution by allowing multiple parties. In March the Baltic States held elections and their national independence parties gained majorities in each of the republics. At this time Lithuania decided to declare its independence from the Soviet Union, the first republic to do so.

In June 1990 Russia declared its right to rule itself separate from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. During the remainder of the summer the other republics also declared their right to self-rule. Mikhail Gorbachev tried to find a way to salvage the Soviet Union.

His efforts were to be put to a vote in August 1991, but hard-line communists launched an unsuccessful coup in Moscow. The failed coup brought the Communist Party down, and none of the republics was interested in trying to save the Soviet Union. On Christmas Day 1991 Gorbachev resigned, ending the Soviet Union.

Throughout 1989 Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria, which had been under Soviet control since the end of World War II, established democratic governments and cut their ties with the Soviet Union.

Seeing these events, the Baltic countries started to voice their desire to be free of the Soviet Union also. The Baltic countries had been absorbed by the Soviet Union as part of a treaty (the Nazi-Soviet Pact) it had made with Nazi Germany in 1939.

Gorbachev did not care how a republic had come to be part of the Soviet Union; in his view none of the republics should be allowed to leave the Soviet Union. Seeing the events in eastern Europe only encouraged the Baltic republics. Attempts to buy off the republics with token freedoms only encouraged them to continue to push for separation from the Soviet Union.

Following the Baltic republics’ lead was the Moldavian Republic. Originally part of Romania, Moldavia was given to the Soviet Union as part of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Independence movements also appeared in the Trans-Caucasian region of the Soviet Union, made up of the republics of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.

In Armenia and Azerbaijan, the growth in nationalistic parties also led to a dispute between them over the Nagorno-Karabakh region. In Georgia, the massacre of female protesters in the capital of Tbilisi in April 1989 only fueled the desire to be free of the Soviet Union.

In early February 1990, the Communist Party’s Central Committee met to consider a draft proposal to allow multiple parties. The congress also created the office of the president of the Soviet Union and elected Gorbachev to the office.

After the congress, in April, Gorbachev announced the Law of Secession, which laid out the process that the republics would have to follow in order to gain their independence. The process was long and drawn out.

One of the first uses of the law was to pressure Lithuania to do as the Soviet government said or face the consequences. Lithuanian president Vytautas Landsbergis refused, saying that a foreign power had no right to make decisions about how his country should be run. On April 18, the Soviet government started an economic blockade of Lithuania.

The Soviets lifted the blockade on June 29 when the Lithuanian parliament suspended the independence decree. Latvia (May 4) and Estonia (May 8) followed Lithuania’s lead, and even though Gorbachev outlawed their decrees, they did not suffer the blockade as Lithuania did.

The Baltic republics were not the only ones moving toward independence. In Russia, the Russian Supreme Soviet elected Boris Yeltsin as chairman on May 29. Running against 13 other candidates, Yeltsin introduced a platform that pushed for Russian sovereignty in the Soviet Union, making Russian law take precedent over Soviet law; provided for multiparty democracy; and declared that Russia should conduct its own foreign policy with all other countries, including other republics of the Soviet Union. The actual declaration came on June 12, 1990, at which time Russia also declared its right to control the natural resources of its country. Other republics followed suit.

Through the end of 1990 Lithuania continued to try to work out a deal with the Soviet government, but the Soviets continued to stall. Therefore, on January 2, 1991, Landsbergis withdrew the suspension of the independence decree. In response to this action, paramilitary police in Vilnius (the capital of Lithuania) and Riga (the capital of Latvia) seized various buildings.

Then on January 7 the Soviet Ministry of Defense ordered troops into all three of the Baltic States as well as Moldavia, Georgia, and the Ukraine. The Soviet military continued to occupy buildings belonging to the Lithuanian government, and on January 13 it attacked the capital’s television center and in the process killed 14 people and wounded over 200.

At about the same time, Gorbachev was telling the Soviet government that force would not be used against the people of Lithuania. These contradictory actions and talk hurt Gorbachev, who claimed not to have had any advanced knowledge of what the military was going to do.

A few days later, on January 20, violence broke out in Latvia when Soviet paramilitary police stormed a government building in Latvia and killed two local police officers. The Baltic republics gained support from Russia when Yeltsin signed a document recognizing the independence of the Baltic States on behalf of Russia, which was exerting its right to conduct its own foreign policy separate from that of the Soviet Union.

Although the Baltic republics had started out leading the move toward independence from the Soviet Union, Russia now began to take a more prominent role. In January 1991 Gorbachev issued a decree that the Soviet army was to patrol the streets of the larger cities in the Soviet Union to help stop crime and control protests; Russia objected.

When Yeltsin attacked Gorbachev during a television interview, Yeltsin found himself under attack by various groups. Although Gorbachev’s actions might be decidedly anti-independence for the republics, he still had the support of many of the people in the Soviet Union and Western countries.

On March 17, 1991, the idea of maintaining a union of the republics was put to a vote of the people of the Soviet Union. The vote passed, although six of the republics (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Armenia, Georgia, and Moldavia) did not participate in the referendum since they claimed that they were not part of the Soviet Union.

Yeltsin claimed that the referendum was nothing more then an attempt by Gorbachev to generate support for his leadership. Gorbachev then called a conference and invited Yeltsin and the presidents of eight other republics to talk about a proposal for a new Union Treaty and new Union Constitution. Gorbachev and the other presidents signed a declaration supporting the drafting of a new treaty and constitution.

May saw more changes as the republics continued to move away from the Soviet Union. On May 5 the Russian branch of the KGB separated itself from the Soviet Union’s institution. Moldavia changed its official name to the Moldavian Republic, dropping the words Soviet and Socialist. Then on May 26 Georgia had its first-ever direct presidential election.

The Coup

Gorbachev and Yeltsin continued to work out the details of the new Union Treaty. The treaty would keep the Soviet Union alive, but would limit the areas over which it could exercise control and make participation in the union voluntary. Before the treaty was enacted, a group of hard-line communists launched a coup to remove Gorbachev from power. The coup lasted for only three days.

The committee in charge of the coup announced a state of emergency and placed Gorbachev under house arrest, cutting off his ability to communicate with the outside world. They then tried to get him to sign a decree declaring a state of emergency, but he refused. With Gorbachev’s refusal to cooperate, the coup started to come unraveled.

The plotters had planned to arrest Yeltsin also, but missed their chance. Instead, Yeltsin went to the Russian Parliament building and appealed to the citizens of Moscow to ignore the unlawful coup. The military was unwilling to move against the civilians, and the coup ended on August 21.

Gorbachev returned to Moscow. Because of the coup, Yeltsin became the hero of the hour, and his popularity grew rapidly. Unfortunately for Gorbachev, his popularity plummeted and accelerated the decline of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin forced Gorbachev to return control of the natural resources and enterprises on Russian territory back to Russia from the Soviet Union.

December saw the Soviet Union brought to an end. On December 1 the Ukraine held a referendum to allow the people to vote in support of or against the declaration of independence from the Soviet Union. The referendum passed by a wide margin.

Then the leaders of Russia, the Ukraine, and Belarus met to determine the future of the Soviet Union and their republics. On December 8 they announced the end of the Soviet Union and the creation of a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Membership in the CIS was open to all former members of the Soviet Union and any other state interested in joining.

On December 12 Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan joined the CIS. More meetings were held on December 21, and Moldavia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia joined. During this meeting the republics agreed to abolish the position of president of the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev still held the position, but on December 25, he announced his resignation. With Gorbachev’s resignation the remaining members of the Soviet Parliament had the Soviet flag removed from the Kremlin, and at midnight on December 31, 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

Space Exploration

2012-01-26T03:30:00.000-08:00

Humankind’s exploration of space began in the 1950s, with the first satellite, the Russian Sputnik, launched by rocket on October 4, 1957. It was followed on November 3 by another, carrying a dog named Laika.

The United States moved into space exploration on February 1, 1958, with Explorer I. A stream of similar robotic craft followed from both countries, carrying instruments that made various important discoveries.

Early space pioneering efforts built on the works of pre–World War II inventors such as the Russian schoolmaster Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, whose writings set out the basic principles for rocket propulsion, suggested multistage vehicles, and proposed liquid hydrogen as a fuel.

In the United States, Professor Robert Goddard suggested a method for reaching the moon. Goddard built rockets too, and in 1935 successfully launched one that reached a height of two kilometers.

Rocketry in World War II saw the invention of the V2 missile, with a range of around 300 kilometers, a top speed of 6,000 KPH, and a payload of over a ton. Following the war many German rocket engineers, including Wernher von Braun, were brought to the United States, while Soviet forces captured personnel and equipment from the V2 launching site of Peenemunde.

On April 12, 1961, the Soviets again led the way with the launch of Yuri Gagarin, a Russian cosmonaut, into space to become the first human to leave Earth. His mission lasted 1 hour and 48 minutes; he made a single orbit of the planet. The United States countered with a Mercury space capsule carrying Alan B. Shepard on May 5.

The effects of space travel on humans were of course largely unknown. The early manned missions resulted in considerable study of the physical damage of g-force, radiation, and weightlessness.

Rapid developments in hundreds of areas followed, as spacesuits, living quarters, and methodologies for delivering food were all pioneered, along with rapid improvements in the speed, range, and payload of rockets.

Meanwhile, robot explorers were recovering more data to inform manned missions. The first probe to journey to the Moon was launched on September 12, 1959, by the Soviet Union. Luna 2 reached its destination in 34 hours. The U.S. probes in the main were spurred by President John F. Kennedy’s address to the U.S. Congress on May 25, 1961.

The Ranger probes explored the Moon’s surface, photographing it before crashing into it; the probe therefore provided transmitted data that resolved images of around half a meter across, in contrast to the best telescopes of the time, which could only resolve to around 500 meters.

There was much debate on what the surface of the Moon actually looked like and whether it could support the landing of a heavy manned craft. Was the surface so rough no spacecraft could touch down without damage? Was the Moon dust so thick that any spacecraft would sink into huge drifts?

The Lunar Orbiter series of probes were designed to map the surface of the Moon so the best sites for exploration could be chosen. By the end of the five missions, 99 percent of the moon had been photographed to a resolution of 66 meters or better, and smaller areas had been photographed to within one meter.

The space race saw the Americans and the Russians competing as to who could reach the moon first; the dual projects were underscored by the cold war and the military implications of mastering space flight. In the end, the Russians never put a man onto the surface of the Moon but instead landed several robot explorers.

Both sides were, by the mid-1960s, progressing further down the road of manned spacecraft that could carry more than one astronaut. The rockets to launch the progressively heavier spacecraft began to increase in size, with the eventual development of the Saturn series, which still remain some of the most powerful lifting devices ever built.

In the United States, the Mercury one-person spacecraft was followed by the two-person Gemini craft. The three-person Apollo vehicles were developed, a two-part craft that included a lunar lander as well as a command section that would stay in orbit while the lander descended to the Moon’s surface.

The Russian program saw many achievements. The first female in space was Valentina Tereshkova, who completed 48 orbits in the Soviet Union’s Vostok 6 on June 16, 1963. The first space walk—a weightless venture outside a capsule—was achieved by Aleksei Leonov on March 18, 1965. The walk lasted for 10 minutes.

However, the Soviet Union’s space program was not without human cost: On April 23, 1967, the landing parachutes of the Soyuz 1 space capsule failed and cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov was killed. On January 27, 1967, the new U.S. Apollo program experienced tragedy when a fire broke out in the command module during a launch of the first piloted flight, designated AS-204.

Three astronauts died: Mercury and Gemini mission veteran Virgil Grissom; Edward White; and Roger Chaffee, an astronaut preparing for his first spaceflight. The subsequent investigation and report saw substantial improvements to mission safety. The AS-204 mission craft was renamed Apollo 1 in honor of the crew.

Powered by the enormous Saturn V three-stage rockets, the Apollo missions grew in their ability to take the astronauts further from the surface of Earth. On October 11, 1968, the first manned Apollo mission flew successfully; around the same time Russian spacecraft carrying live animals were successfully orbiting the Moon before returning to Earth.

Apollo 8 made the first human-manned circumnavigation of the Moon in December 1968. Apollo 10 was a "full dress rehearsal" of the proposed landing and carried out all of the proposed operations short of an actual descent to the lunar surface, although it descended to within nine miles of the Moon in the detached lunar module.

On July 20, 1969, after a four-day trip, Apollo 11’s lander separated from the main spacecraft with astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin on board, while Michael Collins remained in orbit. The lunar module, named Eagle, successfully touched down, and, shortly afterward, filmed by the remotely controlled camera attached to the outside of the spacecraft, Armstrong emerged to back down the short ladder to the surface.

His steps were watched by millions of people via a television signal beamed back to Earth, with many millions more listening via radio. As Armstrong’s foot touched the surface of the Moon, he spoke the words, "That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind". Mankind had reached another world.

A total of seven lunar landings were made, with significant achievements made on each mission. Some 381.6 kilograms of lunar rocks were brought back to Earth, and each successive landing after Apollo 11 left behind an automated surface laboratory. The last three missions carried extremely sophisticated mapping cameras, and other instruments measured magnetic fields, chemical composition, and radioactivity.

Craft Failure

Apollo 13’s mission was aborted due to craft failure. An oxygen tank on the spacecraft had blown up and the normal supply of electricity, light, and water to the craft was lost around 200,000 miles from Earth.

A unique and innovative program of rigged repairs and procedure invention followed, resulting in the eventual safe return of the three astronauts to Earth. Apollo missions continued until December 1972, with different sites visited and a wheeled lunar rover successfully deployed to carry astronauts further from the spacecraft.

The missions increased the duration of time spent on the surface from hours to days. Twelve astronauts walked on the lunar surface. The last astronaut to leave the Moon was scientist Jack Schmitt.

Further space exploration programs commenced with Skylab, a section of a Saturn V rocket that was successfully placed in orbit and visited on several occasions by teams of astronaut/scientists who stayed in residence for ever-lengthening periods to conduct experiments. The program terminated in 1979.

A Soviet-American rendezvous in space, the Apollo-Soyuz mission, took place in 1975. The development of the space shuttle, a reusable craft capable of returning in a glide to Earth’s surface, began in 1970, centering around the idea of a cheaper alternative to previous craft.

The program used these spacecraft from their first flight in 1981 until the present. The shuttle fleet can each carry a payload of 30,000 kilograms to orbit. Mission loads have consisted of satellites, experiments, and materials for the International Space Station.

The Soviets also pursued a permanent presence in space. A series of space stations called Salyut were launched, using Soyuz spacecraft on ferry missions. In 1986 Salyut was followed by the modular space station Mir.

Following improved relations between Russia and other nations at the end of the cold war, Russian cosmonauts joined with the other countries contributing to, and working within, the International Space Station.

Stark Reminder

Space flight is not without its hazards, as was discovered in the early days of space exploration with the loss of the Soyuz 1 and Apollo 1 crews. Improvements in safety through redesign and development of spacecraft and propulsion systems have greatly reduced risk of catastrophic failure.

Nevertheless, the severe stresses placed on spacecraft and their systems, together with the risk associated with the application of cutting-edge technology, continue to make manned spaceflight inherently dangerous. Stark reminders of this were the loss of the spacecraft and crew of the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia.

The Hubble Space Telescope is the largest astronomical telescope ever sent into space. Launched in 1990 by a space shuttle, the telescope’s placement outside Earth’s atmosphere gives it a unique view of the universe.

Built by the Lockheed Missiles and space company, the space telescope has a length of 13.3 meters, or 43 feet 6 inches; a diameter of 3.1–4.3 meters, or 10–14 feet; and a weight of 11,600 kilograms, or 25,500 pounds.

NASA named the world's first space-based optical telescope after the U.S. astronomer Edwin P. Hubble. Dr. Hubble confirmed an "expanding" universe, which provided the foundation for the big bang theory.

With a mission duration of up to 20 years, Hubble is visited regularly by space shuttle crews for regular servicing. At an altitude of 380 miles (612 kilometers) in a low-Earth orbit, the telescope completes an orbit of Earth every 97 minutes. Sensitive to ultraviolet through near infrared light, the telescope relays to Earth three to four gigabytes of information per day.

Powered by two 25-foot solar panels, the telescope has revealed new information on the age of the universe, made findings on black holes, and provided visual proof that dust disks around young stars are common, reinforcing the assumption that planetary systems are plentiful in the universe.

Hubble's Replacement

Scheduled for launch in 2011, the James Webb Space Telescope is intended to replace Hubble. This telescope will see objects 400 times fainter than those visible with Earth-based telescopes. By contrast, the Hubble can see objects 60 times fainter than those visible with Earth-based telescopes.

The first components for the International Space Station were taken into orbit in 1998, and the station received its first crew on November 2, 2000, marking the first day a permanent human presence in space was achieved.

The space station has grown and evolved into an unprecedented laboratory complex. Offering a microgravity environment that cannot be duplicated on Earth, the station furthers knowledge of science and of how the human body functions for extended periods of time in space.

By the time the station had been operating for five years, 89 scientific investigations had been conducted. A complete characterization study of the radiation environment in the station was done, with evaluation of models of radiation shielding by the station’s structure.

With 15,000 cubic feet of habitable volume assembled by late 2005, the space station at that point had more room than a conventional three-bedroom house. Astronauts and scientists from a variety of nations have visited and worked in the space station.

Civilian and private missions into space have been achieved. The California millionaire and former NASA rocket scientist Dennis Tito was the first private space tourist to visit the ISS for a 10-day excursion in April 2001.

Test pilot Mike Melvill took the privately built rocket plane SpaceShip One to an altitude of more than 100 kilometers, the acknowledged point at which space begins, on July, 12, 2004.

Robot explorers have also achieved an enormous amount in the conquest of space. The first interplanetary explorer, the United States’ Mariner II, was launched on August, 26, 1962, to explore Venus and successfully reported a high surface temperature and the absence of a magnetic field.

In January 2004 two NASA robot explorers named Spirit and Opportunity landed on Mars. The six- wheeled craft crawled over the surface, measuring, photographing, and analyzing, and surprised their controllers by continuing to function for over a year, during which time they traveled for several miles.

On December 25, 2004, the NASA Cassini spacecraft, nearing Saturn, released the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe toward the surface of the ringed planet’s largest moon, Titan. Parachuting to the Moon’s surface, the probe’s cameras and spectrometers analyzed the chemical composition of Titan and transmitted data back to scientists on Earth.

Other probes have been sent to all of the planets in the solar system, including distant Pluto with the launch of the New Horizons probe in January 2006. Some probes have had lengthy careers and considerable success.

The Pioneer space probe, launched on March 2, 1972, was the first spacecraft to travel through the asteroid belt and the first spacecraft to make direct observations and obtain close-up images of Jupiter. It made its closest encounter with Jupiter on December 3, 1973, passing within 81,000 miles.

Pioneer’s last, very weak signal was received on January 23, 2003. Pioneer 10 continues into interstellar space, heading for the red star Aldebaran, about 68 light years away. It will take Pioneer over 2 million years to reach its destination.

Another development of the post-Moon program has been the space community’s understandings of asteroid dangers. A "dinosaur-killer" strike is now thought to be avoidable, due to a program of surveying and tracking all heavenly bodies.

Such ambitious ideas have been supported by the success of missions such as the Stardust spacecraft, launched in 1999. This mission managed to capture particles from a comet beyond the Earth-Moon orbit and return them to Earth.

Other aspects of space exploration are numerous. The discovery of other planets orbiting distant stars has been made possible; the Earth is ringed by satellites enabling advanced communications and a Global Positioning System (GPS); and superior meteorology and detailed imaging have been developed. Various spin-offs from the space program for the everyday world include such variables as the development of freeze-dried foods and materials such as Teflon.

Progress has been not as fast as science fiction written from the 1930s to the 1980s depicted—space flight has proved expensive and difficult, and the manned Moon bases and Martian cities have not happened.

However, other nations besides the United States and the Soviet Union—a collective European approach and manned missions from China—have begun space exploration and plans are under way to see a human presence on both the Moon and Mars.

Two basic difficulties have to be overcome if human exploration of other stars and their solar systems is to succeed. The first is the speed of the spacecraft. The fastest vessel ever built (by 2006) was the New Horizons probe, which achieved a speed shortly after launch of 10.07 miles per second, or 36,256 MPH. The nuclear-powered craft crossed the Moon’s orbit around nine hours after liftoff. Even at this speed, the estimated mission duration to Pluto is around nine years.

If the mission were manned, this would mean an overall duration of 18 years traveling plus the exploration time. If this craft’s speed were applied to reach the nearest star system to Earth, the mission time would be hundreds of years. Therein lies the second major problem—the duration humans can withstand space conditions.

The long-term effects of weightless space flight are still being studied, but it is doubtful that such missions could be withstood by a human crew. Scientists believe the craft would have to have some sort of gravitational compensation. A manned, one-way, long-term mission is also an unknown, although science fiction has done a great deal to explore both of these issues.

Indeed, space flight may have provided some answers by extrapolating various scenarios from the work of physicists that may get around interstellar exploration problems.

If space is not an empty vacuum and contains distortions, as has been proved, then the "warps" in space may provide points where great distances can be surpassed, rather in the way a fly can travel from one end of a curved scarf to the other end by simply flying between the two points rather than walking the entire length of the scarf.

There may also be ways to build spacecraft that fly at much faster speeds; light sails, antimatter rockets, and drives utilizing alternative theories of gravity and electromagnetism might allow much greater speeds. But then other problems arise: that of the relativity time-space equation, for example, and how to get humans to cope with the acceleration and deceleration speeds such a spacecraft would demand.

Although the difficulties of exploring beyond the solar system are great, they may not be insurmountable. One fact remains: If humans want to survive beyond the certain degradation of our own star and its planetary system, then space exploration must be continued.

Spain

2012-01-26T02:59:00.000-08:00

Post–World War II Spain was still affected strongly by the results of the Spanish civil war of 1936–39. Francisco Franco’s authoritarian regime continued to censor the press and did not abide by a constitution.

After the defeat of fascist governments in World War II, Franco did mitigate some fascist tendencies within his government, stressing instead the Roman Catholic Church, the monarchy, and society as the corporatist pillars of Spain, but not enough to prevent economic isolation by other international actors.

However, at the same time industrialization and economic development contributed to a contrary force of secularization. The corporatism of the state thus began to depend more and more on Franco.

Spain’s colonial influence would not succeed Franco, either. The Spanish ended their rule over Spanish Morocco in 1956, and over the rest of their African colonies over the next two decades. In 1968 Spanish Guinea gained independence and renamed itself Equatorial Guinea.

Right before Franco died, Morocco’s King Hassan II took advantage of Spain’s weakness and took over Spain’s only remaining colony—Western Sahara—in the Green March. However, despite these colonial losses, Franco did pass on to his successor, King Juan Carlos, the beginnings of an economic and political liberalization that would reap the "Spanish Miracle".

Indeed, the hierarchical nature of the state did not persist after Franco’s death in 1975. Juan Carlos appointed Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez to rush in an era of democratization through legislation sometimes referred to as the "new Bourbon restoration". Suárez was elected in 1977 under the Unión de Centro Democrático party.

After the elections, the Spanish constitution was drafted in 1978 by a committee made up of the deputies of most of the main political groups. It was signed by the king in 1979. Suárez’s power weakened, however, and he resigned as president and party leader on January 29, 1981.

Finding a successor was difficult in what became a very tense political and economic climate due to economic struggle, difficulty creating a new territorial organization of Spain, Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (or ETA, a Basque separatist organization) terrorist attacks, and the army’s lukewarm support of democratic institutions.

In this political atmosphere, democratic governance in Spain was tested by a 1981 coup that was called 23-F and El Tejerazo. Antonio Tejero, with 200 armed officers from the Guardia Civil, stormed the Spanish Congress of Deputies as it was electing Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo the new Spanish president.

Tejero and the officers held the cabinet and parliament hostage. No one was harmed and the coup ended largely because the king called upon the army to abide by the orders of the democratically elected civilian authorities.

Social democratic rule began in 1982 with Felipe González’s Socialist Party winning the elections. Spain’s democratic rule was fairly stable from that point until 1996. Domestic reforms under González’s administration included the legalization of abortion, education reforms, and increased personal freedoms.

Also during this era, Spain made many advances in integrating back into the international economic and political community. It joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Economic Community in 1986. With integration came some important changes for the Spanish economy.

Technological and industrial investment in the country increased, despite its persistently high unemployment rate. Ironically, although Spain was able to make progress in international integration, it still suffered from regional separatism and regional groups seeking autonomy from Spain.

In 1996 González was defeated, in part due to government corruption, and José María Aznar’s Popular Party (PP) took over. During the PP’s term, Spain’s economy benefited from high domestic demand and export-led growth.

It continued down the path of European integration, joining the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and adopting the euro in 1999. Yet again Spain suffered from internal divisions. ETA attacked tourists and Spanish officials again in 1999. Nevertheless, the PP won the 2000 elections.

The attacks continued. In 2001 army Lieutenant Colonel Pedro Antonio Blanco García was assassinated. An enormous street demonstration of over 1 million Spaniards protesting the assassination occurred the next day. Unfortunately, the killings continued.

After some ETA members were killed in a car bomb that August, the ETA retaliated with a series of the bloodiest attacks since 1992, which included the assassination of Supreme Court justice José Francisco Querol Lombardero, his driver, bodyguard, and a bystander, and injuries to 60 others.

In 2003 Aznar supported the U.S. "War on Terror" in the Iraq War, possibly resulting in the March 11, 2004, train bombings in Madrid. Nearly 200 people were killed and over 1,500 injured. Although the government blamed ETA, al-Qaeda operatives carried out the attacks.

In the elections that followed, the PP lost to the Socialist Party. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero took over as prime minister. Aznar, however, had decided not to run, despite not being barred from running for a third term.

Zapatero immediately withdrew Spanish troops from Iraq. Under his administration, Spain approved a same-sex marriage law with the support of a majority of the population. In contrast to Aznar, Zapatero’s relations with the United States were strained. However, he maintained good relations with the United Nations and the European Union.

Sri Lanka

2012-01-26T01:57:00.000-08:00

The island nation of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka gained independence from British rule on February 4, 1948. The country followed a nonaligned foreign policy and participated in various world bodies such as the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Asian Development Bank.

Sri Lanka also became a member of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). For 10 years the country was ruled by the United National Party (UNP) of Don Stephen Senanayake (1884–1952). After facing hardship under a socialist economy, Sri Lanka became the first country in South Asia to liberalize its economy.

Sri Lanka also became a member of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). For 10 years the country was ruled by the United National Party (UNP) of Don Stephen Senanayake (1884–1952). After facing hardship under a socialist economy, Sri Lanka became the first country in South Asia to liberalize its economy.

The government passed the 1956 Sinhala Only Act, which made Sinhala the official language. The onslaught of Singhalese nationalism marginalized the Tamils. The Tamils, living in the north and east, constituted about 18 percent of the population. They feared dominance by the Sinhala majority, who were 74 percent of the population. A separatist movement was launched, resulting in confrontation between the two communities.

The concept of Tamil Elam (homeland) was broached by several Tamil militant groups. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), under the leadership of Velupillai Prabhakaran, was emerging as the leading militant group. A large-scale riot broke out in 1977, and in the 1980s civil war broke out.

Terrorist attacks by the LTTE and riots became common. Indian premier Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by Tamil militants in the state of Tamil Nadu, India. The president of Sri Lanka, Ranasinghe Premadasa, also was assassinated in Colombo.

After two decades of bloodshed, there was a formal cease-fire in February 2002 under the auspices of the government of Norway. Chandrika Bandaranaike of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party became president. Meanwhile, the country was devastated by a tsunami in 2004. A lasting solution to the ethnic conflict had proved illusory, and large-scale human rights violations were committed by the army and the LTTE.

Civil war began again in 2005, and violence continued in 2006. Peace talks were held in February and April 2006 in Geneva, but these did not produce any concrete results. In July and August 2006 there was heavy fighting in the Muslim-dominated Muttur region.

St. Lawrence Seaway

2012-01-26T01:35:00.000-08:00

Begun in 1954 and completed in 1959, the St. Lawrence Seaway, a wonder of engineering for its time, is a 2,342-mile-long series of canals, locks, and seaways constructed jointly by Canada and the United States to allow ocean-going vessels access to the Great Lakes. It streamlined shipping and created additional hydroelectric facilities along its route.

The seaway opened to commercial traffic on April 25, 1959. The total cost was $470 million, of which Canada provided $336.2 million and the United States $133.8 million. Canada’s St. Lawrence Seaway Management Corporation manages 13 locks, while the U.S. St. Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation manages two locks.

The hydroelectric facilities are administered by Ontario Power and the New York State Power Authority. Depending on weather conditions and ice management, the seaway is generally open from April to mid-December, approximately 250 days per year.

There are seven locks between Montreal and Lake Ontario, a distance of 187 miles. Each lock is 766 feet in length, 80 feet wide, and 30 feet deep, and all channels are dredged to a depth of 27 feet. To ensure proper depth it was necessary to flood some areas, displacing and relocating residents of river towns. Technically not part of the seaway, the two Soo Locks in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, are slightly larger and connect the upper Great Lakes with Lake Superior.

Ninety percent of the freight shipped consists of bulk commodities. Westbound traffic primarily carries cargoes of steel, coal, and iron ore; 40 percent of eastbound cargo is grain. Inter-lake trade accounts for four times the tonnage handled for international markets.

In recent years, proposals by the U.S. and Canadian governments to deepen the seaway and enlarge its locks have met with resistance. Those who seek to expand seaway traffic point out that the St. Lawrence project is operating at only half the capacity envisioned when the project began in the 1950s, while another, even older, water "highway", the Panama Canal, is achieving full capacity and more.

Opponents of the seaway’s expansion fear damage to water quality in the world’s greatest freshwater system and point to damage already caused by invasive animal and plant species introduced by shipping on the seaway. Studies claim that 182 nonnative species have entered the Great Lakes system, two-thirds of them since 1959 when the seaway opened.

Student Movements (1960s)

2012-01-26T00:48:00.000-08:00

The most striking result of the baby boom was the activism of college students during the 1960s. In the United States, the initial impetus for student activism came from the Civil Rights movement. As the decade wore on, students in the United States and elsewhere found more elements of the "establishment" that required political action: the Vietnam War, the draft, and charges that universities were complicit with the military.

The first major student protest organization, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was founded in 1960 by Ella Baker, who had organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for Martin Luther King, Jr. She believed that existing civil rights organizations were out of touch with African-American students who were willing to push the movement further. Also in 1960 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) emerged from the Student League for Industrial Democracy, created in the 1930s to try to build a political left in Great Depression America.

SDS became the central institution of what would soon be called the New Left. In June 1962, 59 SDS members and sympathizers, including some SNCC members, assembled at an AFL-CIO camp in Port Huron, Michigan, to develop a political manifesto.

The resulting Port Huron Statement was written by student Tom Hayden. It suggested that U.S. universities should become the locus for a new movement concerned with empowering individuals and communities.

SNCC was the first of these organizations to achieve national prominence. Its members, who had initiated sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, took part in the Freedom Rides of 1961, testing federal court orders desegregating interstate bus terminals. They conducted voter registration programs in several southern cities and demonstrated against segregation.

In 1964 SNCC and CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality) staged "Freedom Summer", during which white college students were invited to teach African-American children and assist with voter registration efforts in Mississippi.

During that summer, three student activists, whites Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman and African-American James Chaney, were murdered by white racists. The University of California, Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement began when students returning from Freedom Summer found their university restricting political activity on campus.

White resistance to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act led activists in both SDS and SNCC to see themselves as allies of revolutionaries in the rest of the world and to move further left.

Stokely Carmichael (later Kwami Ture), who became chairman of SNCC in 1966, coined the slogan "Black Power" to express African-American pride, which had the effect of driving white activists out of the organization.

SDS and other white-dominated activist groups had, by this time, become outraged at the escalation of the war in Vietnam. The first "teach-in" against the war took place at the University of Michigan during the spring of 1965. In April a march on Washington organized by SDS drew 20,000 protesters. It was the first of many.

Concentration on antiwar politics had an unforeseen consequence. In 1964 SNCC staffers Mary King and Casey Hayden anonymously circulated a position paper noting male dominance in movement organization.

Later, they publicly raised the importance of feminism in civil rights and antiwar groups. Some men in the movement saw women’s issues as a trivial distraction from their own concerns about the draft. King and Hayden’s work led to women’s caucuses.

In May 1968 youth uprisings in Paris nearly brought down the government of Charles de Gaulle. A general strike led by elite Sorbonne university students, joined by many French workers, decried France’s education system and its role in the Vietnam War.

That same year, Czechoslovakia’s "Prague Spring" tried to implement "socialism with a human face" in the teeth of Soviet domination. In August Warsaw Pact troops crushed the movement, while in the United States riots erupted between Chicago police and student activists during the Democratic National Convention.

Violence escalated in 1970 when National Guard units shot and killed students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State and Jackson State Universities, touching off protests on many other campuses. But by then SNCC and SDS were collapsing. SDS had splintered at its 1969 convention into a number of groups, the best known of which, the Weathermen, took its name from a Bob Dylan song.

Renamed the Weather Underground, this group is best remembered for a Greenwich Village explosion in which three members blew themselves up while assembling explosives. Broad-based student activism declined after the draft was discontinued in 1973.

U.S. Suburbanization

2012-01-25T10:02:00.000-08:00

Suburbanization describes a process by which U.S. city dwellers moved from central cities into residential areas characterized by single-family homes with lawn space. It is generally associated with the period directly following World War II, but suburbanization is a much older process.

The term "suburb" has been in use since 1800. Although it originally applied to a pastoral existence, connected to but outside the central city, it is now associated with the basic ideals of U.S. family life.

The form of the U.S. city has been changing since the development of the steam engine. As the railroad replaced the stagecoach as a means of transportation, it became possible to live farther from the center of the city while still working in the central business district.

The streetcar accelerated this outward movement, and automobiles accelerated it even more, creating "bedroom communities" with access to commuter trains, buses and ferries, and parking lots. By 1940 only 20 percent of U.S. citizens lived in the suburbs, which were regarded as communities for the upper class.

A shortage of housing in cities with significant concentrations of war-related industries led to the building of suburban communities to house workers during World War II, but the diversion of resources for the war effort created a national housing shortage for returning servicemen. Ninety-seven percent of all new single-family dwellings built between 1946 and 1956 were surrounded by their own plots.

The period saw the cottage industry of single-family home construction transformed into a major manufacturing process. The most famous example of this is Levittown, which is named after the family who built it.

In 1946 Levittown was 4,000 acres of potato fields in Long Island, New York; by 1950 it was a town with 17,400 separate houses. Similarly the developers of Lakewood, in Los Angeles County, California, purchased 3,500 acres in 1949 and had built and sold 17,500 houses by 1953.

The new suburbs were characterized by low density, architectural monotony, and economic and racial homogeneity. Soon businesses, especially retailers, opened branch stores in the suburbs, creating shopping malls to reach consumers who had moved there. The suburbs continue to grow as the urban/suburban relationship in the nation’s metropolitan areas evolves.

This is evident in the explosive growth of suburbia in the formerly rural hinterlands of cities in the southern and southwestern United States, now known as the Sun Belt, which attract homeowners with promises of fine weather, large acreages, and air-conditioning.

Sudanese Civil Wars

2012-01-25T05:36:00.000-08:00

The Sudan has been the theater for several major intercommunal conflicts since the 1950s. During the British administration of the Sudan under the Condominium Agreement, North and South Sudan had been administered separately. The north, with historic ties to Egypt, was predominantly Muslim and Arabic speaking.

The population in the south was primarily black and a mixture of Christians and animists, speaking a variety of African languages. The British restricted Sudanese living north of the 10th parallel from traveling farther south, and the Sudanese living below the 8th parallel from traveling north. This helped sow the seeds of future conflicts.

The first Sudanese civil war broke out shortly before Sudanese independence in 1956 and lasted until 1972. The Addis Ababa Agreement was signed in 1972, ending hostilities and giving the southern Sudan considerable self-rule and autonomy.

The peace held until President Jaafar Muhammad Numeiri broke the agreement in 1983 by trying to create a federated Sudan. President Numeiri moved to implement Islamic sharia law over all of the Sudan, including the Christian population.

Newly discovered oil reserves in the southern territory also provided a motive for more northern interference in the region. Led by Colonel John Garang, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) launched an all-out war against northern domination, further weakening Numeiri.

The Numeiri regime was overthrown in a military-led coup in 1985, but the civil war continued as Islamist forces gained power in Khartoum. Negotiations for a cease-fire ended in 1986 when SPLA forces shot down a civilian aircraft.

The National Islamic Front (NIF) then joined the northern forces to ensure that Islamic law was retained. This endangered hopes for future peace talks because one of the primary demands of those in the south had been the repeal of Islamic law.

Southern forces retained control over most of the southern countryside, and in 1989 further negotiations collapsed over the issue of Islamic law. In 1991 the tide changed when the Ethiopian government was deposed, depriving the south of its main ally and arms supplier. Inter-rival fighting among groups in the south further weakened the resistance against the north.

As almost all of the fighting had occurred in southern provinces, the region had experienced massive population dislocation, food shortages, and destruction. Throughout the 1990s, the south was torn apart by inter-tribal warfare as well as numerous offensives from the north.

With substantial international pressure, the 2003 peace talks made progress, and the two sides signed the Naivasha Treaty on January 9, 2005. The treaty guaranteed autonomy for southern Sudan for six years, after which a referendum was to be held regarding complete independence. Monies from oil reserves were to be divided equally between the north and south, and both north and south armies were allowed to remain in place.

The peace treaty was imperiled after John Garang, the new co-vice president, was killed in a helicopter crash. Riots broke out in the south, where many believed the regime in Khartoum had been responsible for Garang’s death. However, a tentative peace held, and Salva Kiir Mayardit became the new SPLA leader and Sudanese vice president.

The United Nations (UN) established the UN Mission to Sudan under UN Security Council Resolution 1590 in March 2005; the mission was to protect and promote human rights in southern Sudan and to help to maintain the peace. However, an uprising in the western Darfur region put the mission and Sudanese unity in danger.

The Darfur region, predominantly Muslim, rebelled in 2003, accusing the government of neglect; it used this as a basis for secessionist claims. The central government launched a brutal campaign of scorched earth against Darfur and aligned itself with Arab militias known as the Janjaweed.

Many in Darfur fled into neighboring Chad, thereby creating an international crisis. By 2006 the government in Khartoum claimed victory and signed the Darfur Peace Agreement supervised by the African Union Mission in Sudan, but this failed to halt hostilities, and the conflict continues.

These ongoing civil wars have decimated large sectors of the Sudanese economy. The fluctuating price of cotton, the primary cash crop, has further weakened Sudan’s economic prospects. The discovery of small oil reserves raised hopes, but with the ongoing violence, it is difficult to gauge the positive effects of this resource.

Severe labor shortages and the emigration of large portions of the educated elite in both the north and south have also had negative impacts on Sudan’s recovery. Therefore it seems likely that the Sudan will remain a volatile and unstable region for the foreseeable future.

Haji Mohammad Suharto

2012-01-25T03:11:00.000-08:00

The second president of Indonesia after Sukarno, General Haji Mohammad Suharto was born June 8, 1921, in Kemusuk Argamulja, central Java. His military career began with the Japanese occupation from 1942 to 1945.

After Sukarno’s declaration of independence in 1945, Suharto fought against the Dutch and later joined the Indonesian National Army. In the violent upheaval of 1965, he was instrumental in crushing the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI, or Indonesian Communist Party) coup and rose rapidly after this event.

As Sukarno’s political authority weakened, Suharto began to strengthen his position. By an executive order in 1966, Sukarno was forced to grant emergency powers to Suharto. Under Suharto Orde Baru (New Order) was established, emphasizing economic development and social harmony.

Relations with Western countries improved and confrontation with Malaysia ended, but relations with China deteriorated. Indonesia became a founding member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The military became powerful and extended its hold over economic management, which led to large-scale corruption.

Suharto also restricted political party activity. By March 1967 he was the acting president and he was elected president on March 21, 1968. He continued to hold the office until 1998, being reelected unopposed five times. His Golkar Party also won every election during this time.

Suharto’s regime suppressed secessionist movements and added Western New Guinea, a former Dutch colony under United Nations (UN) temporary executive authority after a stage-managed election in 1969. However, he had to deal with the Organisasi Papua Merdeka (OPM, or Free Papua Movement) and its guerrilla campaign against the government of Indonesia.

Suharto also faced problems from the province of Aceh after the formation of the Gerakan Aceh Merdeka (GAM, or Free Aceh Movement), which demanded independence in 1976. He suppressed the rebellion by force and martial law, but discontent remained.

East Timor was a former Portuguese colony. Suharto ordered an invasion and incorporated it into Indonesia in 1976. A guerrilla war against Indonesian occupation continued amid reports of brutality by the army.

In 1998 talks between Portugal, Indonesia, and the United Nations resulted in a plebiscite for the East Timorese people. However, the Indonesian army and a pro-Indonesian militia unleashed a reign of terror in the region that killed more than 1,300 people and sent 300,000 people fleeing into West Timor.

Suharto faced challenges on the economic front also, as his profligate spending and corruption forced the economy to falter. Beginning in the 1990s, opposition to his authoritarian regime gained intensity.

The financial crisis of Asia in 1997 resulted in the plummeting value of the Indonesia currency, which lost 80 percent of its value in 1998. Riots escalated after May 1998, causing him to resign on May 21, 1998. He was replaced by Vice President Jusuf Habibie.

Suharto was placed under house arrest in 2000. In 2003 the Human Rights Commission of Indonesia began to examine atrocities committed under his regime. By then Suharto was in poor health, often hospitalized, and therefore spared prosecution. Indonesia returned to democratic government after his fall. Suharto died in Jakarta on January 27, 2008, from multiple organ failure.

Ahmed Sukarno

2012-01-25T01:34:00.000-08:00

A charismatic leader, Ahmed Sukarno left an indelible imprint on the history and politics of Indonesia. Born on June 6, 1901, he was the most important leader of the nationalist movement and the first president of the Indonesian Republic.

After graduating from Bandung Technische Hoogeschool in 1926, Sukarno joined the nationalist movement and was instrumental in establishing the Perserikatan Nasional Indonesia (PNI, Indonesian Nationalist Union) on July 4, 1927. The PNI voiced the indigenous sentiment against colonial rule. He was imprisoned and exiled, returning to Jakarta after the Japanese occupation in 1942. Sukarno had a flair for flamboyant oratory.

Sukarno enumerated the Pancasila, or five moral postulates, on June 1, 1945, as guidelines for governing Indonesia: nationalism, internationalism, consent, social justice, and belief in God. Unable to suppress the independence movement, the Netherlands signed the Hague Agreement of December 27, 1949, ending its colonial rule. Sukarno and Muhammad Hatta became president and prime minister, respectively.

The new constitution provided for a parliamentary form of government in which president Sukarno was a mere figurehead, with his rivals dominating the political scene. There was political instability and the collapse of five successive cabinets in six years. There were revolts against the central authority in West Java, Kalimantan, south Sulawesi, and Sumatra.

Sukarno criticized the ineffective government and began to assert his authority gradually from 1955, instituting a "guided democracy" in 1957 that replaced democratic with authoritarian rule. On July 5, 1959, Sukarno reinstituted the 1945 constitution, assuming executive authority, ruling by decree. In July 1963 Sukarno was made president for life by a compliant assembly.

From the early 1960s Sukarno directed his attention to grandiose plans of projecting Indonesia into the international arena and himself as leader of the nonaligned bloc.

Examples of his image building were his hosting of the 29-nation Afro-Asian conference at Bandung in 1955. He also hosted the Asian Games and the games of the Newly Emerging Forces (NEF). In 1957 he nationalized Dutch businesses. In 1963 he annexed the western half of Papua New Guinea, or Dutch New Guinea.

Sukarno broke off relations with the newly formed Malaysia in 1963 and attempted to destabilize it by guerrilla attacks. Indonesia withdrew from the United Nations after the admission of Malaysia.

Sukarno then consulted communist nations with Moscow responding with foreign aid. Domestically, inflation, corruption, deficit spending, and victimization of the Chinese business community led to economic ruin. Inflation reached a staggering proportion, and the economy was on the brink of collapse.

The attempted coup in September 1965 sealed Sukarno’s fate. General Haji Mohammad Suharto took leadership in crushing the coup on September 30. As a result, the political authority of Sukarno was fatally weakened by Suharto, who became the president in March 1967. Sukarno, stripped of presidential powers, was banned from any political activity and remained under house arrest in Jakarta until his death on June 21, 1970.

There was a revival of the popularity of Sukarno in 1980s, because many people had become disenchanted with the dictatorial military regime of Suharto. They honored his struggle against colonialism. Megawati Sukarnoputri, his eldest daughter, became the symbol of the pro-democracy movement that opposed Suharto, and she was elected president of Indonesia from 2001 to 2004.

Taiwan (Republic of China)

2012-01-25T01:22:00.000-08:00

The Nationalist (Kuomintang, or KMT) government of the Republic of China (ROC) lost the civil war against the Chinese Communist Party in 1949 and retreated to Taiwan, an island province that had been seized by Japan in 1895 and returned to China after World War II.

About 2 million people from mainland China fled to Taiwan, joining about 6 million people who had earlier migrated to the island, mainly from the Fujian (Fukien) province across the Taiwan Strait.

Chiang Kai-shek, who was elected president of China under the constitution in 1947 and who had stepped down in 1949, resumed his presidency in 1950. He was reelected president four more times and died in 1975. Chiang ruled Taiwan in an authoritarian manner and invoked martial law because of the threat of invasion from the communist-ruled People’s Republic of China (PRC).

With the failure of the George Marshall mission to mediate the Chinese civil war, the United States became a bystander in the Chinese conflict until the invasion of Communist North Korea (later aided by "volunteers" from the PRC) of pro-Western South Korea in 1950.

The U.S. Seventh Fleet then began to patrol the Taiwan Strait to prevent a PRC invasion of Taiwan, and in 1952 the United States and the ROC signed a Mutual Defense Treaty (ended in 1979), which provided protection for Taiwan.

By 1954 Chiang’s government had completed a successful equitable land reform that transferred ownership to cultivators. Resource-poor Taiwan relied on social and educational reforms to produce a literate citizenry. U.S. economic aid helped to reform all aspects of the economy so that an even greater rate of growth became possible when it ended in 1964.

Industrial development began with labor-intensive light industries that capitalized on a literate workforce. Infrastructure building allowed the economy to shift to heavy, and later high technology, industries.

In 1978 the National Assembly elected Chiang Ching-kuo (son of Chiang Kai-shek) president; he was reelected in 1984 and died in 1989. Chiang Ching-kuo accelerated the rapid economic development of Taiwan, called an economic miracle by the rest of the world. He began political reforms that ended martial law, granted freedom of the press, and allowed opposition political parties.

The Chiang "dynasty" ended with Chiang Ching-kuo’s death (he had disavowed succession by his family members), and he was followed by his vice president, Lee Teng-hui. Lee continued democratization and won two more terms, the second by a universal suffrage vote (rather than election by the National Assembly) under an amended constitution.

In the 2000 election, the opposition Democratic Progressive Party candidate won the presidency. Taiwan thus added to its accomplishments the "political miracle" of a peaceful transformation from one-party rule to multiparty democracy without violence.

With a population of 23 million, it continued to be one of the most advanced and prosperous nations in Asia. However, Taiwan’s political future remained unclear because of the PRC’s stated goal of national unification, by force if necessary.

Taliban

2012-01-15T23:21:00.000-08:00

Osama bin Laden was born on March 10, 1957, in Riyadh, into a family who owned a construction dynasty estimated worth $5 billion by the mid-1990s. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, they began a war in which 1 million people were killed and 5 million were sent into exile.

During the war, Osama bin Laden, then 22, lobbied his family and friends to support the cause of the Afghan freedom fighters, the mujahideen, and made several trips to Pakistan, where he continued his fundraising work.

During this time the United States also supported the cause of the mujahideen against the Soviets. The Reagan administration authorized the CIA to establish training camps for the mujahideen in Afghanistan and Pakistan and asked King Fahd of Saudi Arabia to match U.S. contributions.

King Fahd instructed the minister of intelligence, Turki al-Faisal, to raise money from private sources and Faisal, knowing of bin Laden’s efforts toward the cause, entrusted bin Laden with the task of raising money. Besides raising money for the effort, bin Laden helped encourage Arab volunteers to fight in Afghanistan against the Soviets. He kept a database of his volunteers; the word database translates to Arabic as al-Qaeda.

When the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989, the United States withdrew its support for the mujahideen, and the country was plunged into chaos and civil war. When Iraq, built up as a major military power by the United States against Iran, invaded Kuwait, the United States sent thousands of troops into Saudi Arabia. The U.S.-Saudi alliance was criticized by bin Laden, who objected to the presence of U.S. troops on land sacred to Muslims.

Bin Laden began publicly criticizing the Saudi regime. As a result, he was placed under house arrest. He convinced King Fahd that he had business to take care of in Pakistan as a means of escaping the country, and eventually found refuge in Sudan with Hasan al-Turabi, the leader of the country’s Islamic Front.

While in Sudan, bin Laden opposed the presence of U.S. troops in Somalia, and al-Qaeda affiliates in Yemen bombed two hotels housing American troops in transit to Somalia. Following an attack by al-Qaeda on the World Trade Center in 1993, the Saudi government froze bin Laden’s assets in the country and stripped him of his citizenship.

Meanwhile, in 1994, the Taliban (translated as "students"), a small group of graduates from madrassas (schools of Islamic learning) led by Mullah Muhammad Umar, took control of the city of Kandahar, Afghanistan. The Taliban were able to seize leaders of warring factions, and called for the city to disarm. Fatigued by two years of anarchy, the city willingly agreed to the restoration of order.

The Taliban announced that it was their duty to set up an Islamic society in Afghanistan, and gained popular support. By 1996 they had taken Kabul and established a government willing to provide sanctuary to Osama bin Laden and to accept his support of their regime.

In 2000, bin Laden was linked to the attack on the American guided missile destroyer USS Cole in Aden Harbor, Yemen, and on September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda was held responsible by the United States for the attack on the twin towers and the Pentagon. While the Taliban regime fell as a result of U.S. attacks on Afghanistan on October 10, 2001, the United States was unable to capture Osama bin Laden or destroy the Taliban.

Tamil Tigers

2012-01-15T20:43:00.000-08:00

The Tamil Tigers, officially known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE, concentrate operations predominantly in Sri Lanka with the goal of achieving a separate state for the majority Tamil regions located in north and east Sri Lanka.

The rebel group gains much of its internal support from the Tamil agricultural workers and dislocated Tamil youths. Tamil Tiger operations have targeted both military and political objectives since the early 1970s.

The United States, the European union, Canada, and India all consider the Tamil Tigers a terrorist organization. Under the leadership of its founder, Velupillai Prabhakaran, the LTTE argues that they are freedom fighters.

Until the 1970s the Tamils insisted upon autonomy but did not resort to violent methods. After a long period of attempts to negotiate, Tamils adopted the belief that the Sinhalese-dominated Sri Lankan government was unwilling to negotiate.

A number of militant organizations were created—including the New Tamil Tigers and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. In 1979 the LTTE began a campaign of attacking military targets, including a July 1983 killing of 16 army soldiers that led to the killing of thousands of Tamil civilians.

In response to the violence, LTTE membership dramatically increased. By 1984 the LTTE had begun higher intensity attacks and created a naval unit called the Sea Tigers. In 1987 a special elite unit of LTTE members known as the Black Tigers was formed.

By 2001 the LTTE inexplicably dropped its call for a separate Tamil state and reduced its demands to regional autonomy. Norway negotiated a cease-fire, which as of mid-2006 was tenuous at best. In the summer of 2006 calls for a "Final War" for Tamil Eelam independence emerged.

The LTTE, in addition to its military activities, provides a host of government services. The LTTE’s de facto government funds schools, hospitals, police stations, courts, and other municipal services. The LTTE informal government operates under the precepts of socialism. The LTTE also has a political wing, the Tamil National Alliance, although formal attempts have not been made by the LTTE to create political parties.

External support for the Tamil Tigers has come from a number of Indian regimes. That support ended with a LTTE associate’s assassination of Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. In addition the international arms of the Tamil Tigers, located in London and Paris, have facilitated a number of purchases of weaponry.

Funding for activities originates in expatriate Tamil communities in the West. Other fund-raising activities include extortion and illegal trade as well as legitimate business fronts and charities. Many terror analysts note that part of the Tamil network includes cargo ships. This has prompted concerns over the use of the fleet in terror operations.

Very few Tamil rebels are captured alive. This is because of a rigorous training regime that includes political indoctrination emphasizing the importance of not being captured. Hence Tamil recruits typically wear a capsule of cyanide around their necks and are encouraged to commit suicide rather than face capture.

In addition, the LTTE were one of the first modern terrorist groups to encourage suicide bombings. Much has also been written concerning the LTTE practice of recruiting children to fight in the rebellion.

The rebel organization has participated in both a conventional war and attacks targeting civilians. The Tamil Tigers have also been accused of ethnic cleansing. Specifically, the Tamil Tigers attempted to remove all non-Tamil residents from the Tamil state of Jaffna in 1990.

Tashkent Agreement

2012-01-15T20:38:00.000-08:00

The Tashkent Agreement of 1966 brought a temporary end to the 1965 war between India and Pakistan and was important subsequently in regulating negotiations over the disputed territory of Kashmir.

The United Nations (UN) had organized a cease-fire in 1965 when it became clear that the fighting had the possibility of endangering large population centers. After 17 days of fighting, neither side wished to resume hostilities owing to the vulnerability of their people, the lack of ammunition and supplies, and the lack of war goals that could be held.

Arms suppliers in the United States and the United Kingdom as well as in China were unwilling to provide more weapons. Consequently, all parties were amenable to finding a means of diplomatically resolving the confrontation.

Soviet prime minister Alexei Nikolaevich Kosygin invited both sides to a conference at Tashkent in the southern Soviet Uzbek Republic. The subsequent agreement was signed by the president of Pakistan, Mohammad Ayub Khan, and the Indian prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, on January 10, 1966. Unfortunately, Shastri died the following day of a heart attack.

The main provisions included the withdrawal of all troops to their prewar positions, the restoration of diplomatic relations, the promise not to intervene in the internal affairs of the other side, and the agreement to hold discussions concerning various social and economic issues.

The oversight of the withdrawal of forces was conducted by the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) and the United Nations India-Pakistan Observation Mission (UNIPOM). These missions were successfully concluded.

The permanent end to war and the renunciation of terrorist activities in Kashmir were not included in the final treaty, and both India and Pakistan suffered from some measure of internal disorder. In the case of Pakistan, unrest forced the resignation of Ayub Khan, the head of a military government, in 1969.

Meanwhile, Shastri was succeeded by Indira Gandhi, whose administration was troubled by right-wing opposition. The two countries were at war again in 1971 as part of the secession of East Bengal from Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh.

Tlatelolco Massacre (1968)

2012-01-15T20:34:00.000-08:00

In one of the most important and controversial episodes in postwar Mexican history, on October 2, 1968, police and army units violently suppressed a demonstration in Tlatelolco Square in the heart of Mexico City. The government’s version of events differed starkly from those of eyewitnesses and the version that gained currency among much of the populace.

The crackdown contributed to a growing crisis of legitimacy for the ruling party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), fueling popular sentiments that the PRI was corrupt, dictatorial, and antidemocratic, and tarnishing Mexico’s image on the eve of the country’s hosting of the 1968 Summer Olympics.

The roots of the October 1968 events in Tlatelolco have been traced to the upsurge in student and worker democratic and anti-PRI activism from the late 1950s, including the Teachers’ Movement in 1958; the Railway Workers’ Movement in 1958–59; demonstrations in support of the Cuban Revolution (1959); a massive student strike at the National University (UNAM, spring 1966); and protest movements in the states of Puebla (1964), Morelia (1966), and Sonora and Tabasco (1967).

More immediate antecedents include the government’s mobilization of an antiriot paramilitary squad, the granaderos, in response to street fights between two Mexico City schools in July 1968, and again in response to student protests commemorating the anniversary of Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement. Tensions mounted throughout August as students held huge demonstrations at the UNAM and the National Polytechnic Institute.

The events prompted the formation of a National Student Strike Committee, which issued a list of demands that included disbandment of the granaderos and release of all political prisoners. An estimated 500,000 people, mostly students and workers, participated in antigovernment demonstrations in Mexico City’s central square (Zócalo) on August 27, to that date the country’s single largest mass protest.

Law enforcement agencies responded with tanks and armored cars, killing at least one student. In mid-September, President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz ordered 10,000 army troops to occupy the UNAM campus. Some 500 protesters were jailed, and in the ensuing weeks tensions throughout Mexico City ran high.

The exact sequence of events on the evening of October 2 in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (Plaza of the Three Cultures) in the District of Tlatelolco, where 5,000 to 10,000 protesters had gathered, remains disputed. The next day the government claimed that terrorists had opened fire on the police from a nearby building and that police had responded to the unprovoked attack.

Most newspapers at the time reported from 20 to 28 protestors killed. Eyewitnesses recalled with near unanimity that police and army units had instigated the violence, dropping flares from helicopters before spraying machine-gun and small-arms fire indiscriminately into the crowd, killing hundreds.

The British newspaper The Guardian estimated after "careful investigation" that 325 were killed, a figure cited by Mexican writer Octavio Paz as the most plausible. In the ensuing days and weeks, thousands were jailed.

Memories of Tlatelolco remained fresh into the 1990s and after, evidenced by a 1997 congressional investigation into the massacre and the 2006 indictment of ex-president and then-interior minister Luis Echevarría for his role in the events, which remain a festering wound in the nation’s collective memory.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was one of the most eloquent 20th-century voices for religion in an increasingly secular world. As a distinguished paleontologist and a Jesuit priest, he tried to synthesize evolutionary science with the incarnation of Christ.

His ideas were new, speculative, and bold enough to figure into deliberations as diverse as the founding of the United Nations and the formulation of several Vatican Council documents. Even today his name is cited for a spiritual perspective on the convergence of human communication due to the Internet.

He was born in France into a devout Catholic family of 11 children in 1881. His father was an intellectual and a farmer, and his mother was a great-grand-niece of Voltaire. Teilhard’s father provided his son a keen interest in science, and his mother an inclination toward mysticism.

He received a top-notch Jesuit education and entered their novitiate program by 1899. By 1911 he was ordained a priest after doing assignments in England and Egypt. World War I interrupted further studies in geology, and he saw action on the front lines. His close calls with death prompted him to consider a more speculative approach to science.

After the war he brilliantly defended his doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1922. Soon thereafter he accepted the chair of the geology department at the Institut Catholique. From this platform he now began to publicize ideas about the synthesis of science and religion, and the resulting controversy cost him his license at the Institut and forced him abroad to do his research and study.

For almost the rest of his career he lived abroad, almost as in a self-imposed exile. Most of that time he spent in China (1926–46), and there he collaborated with the Chinese Geological Survey and helped to discover the Peking Man skull. He wrote his important books, The Divine Milieu and The Human Phenomenon, during these years.

For one brief time after World War II he returned to France, but the Jesuits refused to allow him to take an academic position lest he receive more critical scrutiny. He was banned from lecturing in public or publishing his writings. He decided to go to New York in 1951. Lonely and suffering, he died on Easter Sunday, 1955, and is buried in a Jesuit cemetery there.

From a scientific point of view it is difficult to establish the methodology and provability of Teilhard’s ideas. He has clearly advanced the fields of geology, stratigraphy, and paleontology, with a supreme competence in the areas of China and the Far East. However, his dominant interest and the source of his infamy was in "anthropogenesis", a new study focusing on the evolutionary position of humanity.

He proposed that evolution had entered a new phase with the emergence of humanity, whereby complexity and consciousness converged and spiritualized evolution. The final development of humanity he termed the "Omega Point", and he connected this perfection with Christ.

In 1962 the Catholic Church issued a warning against the uncritical acceptance of Teilhard’s theories, though it did not question his scientific contributions or his integrity of faith. The best way of categorizing his unsystematized though eloquent speculation is as process theology, or perhaps even as a form of Christian pantheism.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta

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Small of stature but solid in fortitude, Mother Teresa was born on August 26, 1910, in Skopje, Albania. The youngest of the children of Nikola and Dran Bojaxhiu, she was baptized Gonxha Agnes. Her father’s sudden death when Gonxha was eight left the family in difficult financial straits and left her mother as her guide for character and vocation. Her local Jesuit parish also contributed strongly to her formation.

At 18, desiring to become a missionary, Gonxha joined the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Sisters of Loretto) in Ireland. There she received the name Sister Mary Teresa after St. Thérèse of Lisieux. In December she departed for India, arriving in Calcutta on January 6, 1929.

After making her first profession of vows in May 1931, Sister Teresa was assigned to the Loretto Entally community in Calcutta and taught at St. Mary’s School for girls. On May 24, 1937, she made her final vows. From that time on she was called Mother Teresa. She continued teaching at St. Mary’s and in 1944 became the school’s principal.

On September 10, 1946, during the train ride from Calcutta to Darjeeling for her annual retreat, Mother Teresa said she experienced a divine love for souls, a force within her that motivated her for the rest of her life.

She felt called to establish a religious community, the Missionaries of Charity sisters, dedicated to the service of the poorest of the poor. Nearly two years passed in discernment before Mother Teresa received permission to begin.

On August 17, 1948, she dressed for the first time in a white, blue-bordered sari and left Loretto to enter the world of the poor. On December 21 she went for the first time to the slums to find and serve among "the unwanted, the unloved, the uncared for". After some months she was joined by a number of her former students.

On October 7, 1950, the new congregation of the Missionaries of Charity was officially established in Calcutta. By the early 1960s Mother Teresa began to send her sisters to other parts of India. In February 1965 she opened a house in Venezuela. It was soon followed by foundations in Rome and Tanzania and, eventually, on every continent. During the years of rapid growth the world began to focus its attention on Mother Teresa.

Numerous awards honored her work. An increasingly interested media began to follow her activities. Her humble stature and effective work also attracted the attention of many intellectuals and celebrities, many of whom were touched by her spirit.

Mother Teresa’s life bore witness to the joy of loving, the dignity of every human person, the value of little things done faithfully, and the surpassing worth of faith in God. But only after her death was it revealed that her interior life was marked by a painful experience of feeling separated from God. At times she grappled with profound doubts and fears about her work and her faith.

Despite increasingly severe health problems, she continued to govern her society of sisters and respond to the needs of the poor and the church. By 1997 Mother Teresa’s sisters numbered nearly 4,000 and were established in 610 foundations in 123 countries. In March 1997 she handed on her duties as superior to a newly elected successor.

On September 3, 1997, Mother Teresa died. She was given a state funeral by the government of India, and her body was buried in the headquarters of her order. Her tomb quickly became a place of pilgrimage. Less than two years later, in view of Mother Teresa’s widespread reputation of holiness and the miracles reported as connected to her intercession, Pope John Paul II permitted official discussions about her canonization as a saint to begin. On October 19, 2003, he beatified Mother Teresa before a crowd of at least 300,000.