The Contemporary History

Arab-Israeli War (1982)

In 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon in an attempt to eliminate the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) once and for all. In 1970, following Black September, when Palestinian forces were defeated in Jordan, the PLO moved its base of operations to Lebanon. The presence of large numbers of Palestinians further disrupted the fragile Lebanese political system, which was based on a confessional system reflecting the many different religious communities in the country.

When the PLO launched attacks from southern Lebanon, Israel often retaliated by attacking Lebanon and demanding that Lebanon control the PLO. Some Lebanese, particularly the Maronite Christians who held the preponderance of political power, blamed the PLO for the problems with Israel and for Lebanon’s domestic instability. They also wanted the PLO out of the country.

After civil war broke out in Lebanon in 1975 the central government ceased to be effective, and the PLO was able to establish a state within a state. Although the PLO was not the major cause for the civil war— internal political contradictions in Lebanon were—it was a contributing factor.

Initially the PLO attempted to remain neutral in the war, but as violence throughout the country escalated, it was drawn into the fighting on the side of the Sunni Muslims, who, unlike other groups in Lebanon, largely lacked their own military militias.

The PLO also provided social services and militarily trained some Shi’i in the south, who traditionally had been the poorest and least powerful group in the country. However, PLO fighters were often arrogant, and gradually Shi’i communities came to resent their presence.

Following increased attacks by the PLO, including terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians in the north, Israel occupied southern Lebanon for 120 straight days in 1978. During this time Israel trained and financed a surrogate force, the South Lebanon Army (SLA), commanded by a former officer of the Lebanese army. It continued to operate as a pro-Israeli force in South Lebanon into the 1990s.

The Israeli attacks depopulated much of South Lebanon, as over 200,000 people, mostly Shi’i villagers, fled to South Beirut, where they settled in slum areas and refugee camps. During the Lebanese civil war Israel also established direct ties with Maronite Christian forces, the Phalange or Kataeb, led by Bashir Gemayel, who was intent on removing the Palestinians from Lebanon and establishing Maronite control over the government.

By 1982 the PLO feared a major Israeli attack in Lebanon and moderated its incursions across the border. But the hard-line Likud government, under Prime Minister Menachem Begin, was determined to crush the PLO. In June 1982 the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal organization, whose leader had been condemned to death by Arafat and the PLO, attempted to assassinate the Israeli ambassador, Shlomo Argov, in London.

The Israelis retaliated with a full-scale invasion of Lebanon. Although the Israeli cabinet had approved an invasion 25 miles into Lebanon, the hawkish Israeli defense minister and war hero General Ariel Sharon ordered troops that had little difficulty securing the south to advance directly on to Beirut.

As the Israelis advanced, the PLO forces also moved north toward Beirut. Within a week Israeli forces had linked up with Bashir Gemayel’s militia in East Beirut and besieged West Beirut, home to about 1 million civilians and also the PLO headquarters. The Israeli air force and navy bombarded the city, and as the siege dragged on, the Israeli military attempted but failed to take the city.

Syrian army

The war resulted in a heavy loss of civilian life, and the international community, appalled by the carnage, demanded a cease-fire. Negotiations led to the withdrawal of PLO leaders, including Yasir Arafat and many fighters, to Tunis on August 16. International forces, including French, United States, and Italian, moved in to protect the civilian population in West Beirut, but within two weeks president Ronald Reagan declared the war over and removed United States troops.

On August 23 Bashir Gemayel was elected president of Lebanon, but to the dismay of Sharon, he refused to sign a peace treaty with Israel. Several days later Gemayel was killed in his headquarters, and his brother ultimately became the new Lebanese president.

In retaliation for the killing—which they blamed on the Palestinians—Lebanese militias, under the observation of Israeli troops, entered the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut, and from September 16 to 18 massacred several thousand people, mostly Palestinian women and children. In Israel major demonstrations against the government erupted for having allowed such attacks.

Although Sharon was held accountable for the massacre and forced to resign, he returned to politics and in 2001 became the Israeli prime minister. In the aftermath of the massacre international forces, including U.S. Marines, returned to Lebanon. They, too, were drawn into the Lebanese civil war and became targets for suicide bombers. Thus, even without the presence of the PLO, the war continued.

In 1983 suicide bombers killed 17 Americans and 40 others at the U.S. embassy, 58 French soldiers in a car bomb, and 241 U.S. Marines in a truck bombing at the supposedly safe Beirut airport. When more attacks and kidnappings followed, the international forces withdrew. Israeli forces also gradually withdrew from Beirut but remained in South Lebanon.

Lebanon descended into greater anarchy until the civil war ended under the 1989 Taif Agreement, brokered by Saudi Arabia and supported by other Arab states. The 1982 war was a military defeat for the PLO and damaged much of its social and welfare infrastructure in Lebanon, but it did not destroy the organization. Tunisia remained the PLO headquarters until the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords, when it moved to Gaza and Jericho in the West Bank.

Initially the Shi’i in South Lebanon welcomed the Israelis but gradually they turned against them when the troops remained. Hizbollah (Party of God), which formed as a result of the 1982 war, became the major Shi’i group to fight against the Israeli occupation. Israel was to sustain more deaths and casualties from the struggle with Hizbollah in Lebanon than from the PLO.

In May 2000 Israel pulled out of southern Lebanon except for Shaba Farms claimed by Syria and as Lebanese territory by Hizbollah. However, confrontations between Israeli and Hizbollah forces continued over the disputed area and in 2006 Israel again bombarded and invaded Lebanon, this time in an attempt to destroy Hizbollah.

Balkans (1991 – present)

Since 1991 the region of the Balkans has been a place of dynamic change. The region (excluding Greece) has been divided into two subregions: the Western Balkans, consisting of Albania and the entities that emerged from the breakup of Yugoslavia—Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia, and Montenegro, and Bulgaria and Romania. The division of the Balkans into two subregions reflects the distinct dynamics in the two sets of states.

For instance, the Western Balkans were subjected post-1991 to the dynamics of building nation-states, while Bulgaria and Romania embarked on the path of postcommunist consolidation of democracy, marked by free elections, market liberalization, and the strengthening of civil society.

However, the underlying feature characterizing the developments in all Balkan countries was the uncertainty of their transition process. This may be the main reason why Slovenia, which emerged from the dissolution of Yugoslavia, not only managed to distance itself from the Balkans with its domestic and foreign policy objectives but also ultimately “left” the region altogether.

Ambiguity dominated the Balkan states for the better part of the 1990s. This pattern changed as a result of the Kosovo crisis of 1999 for two reasons. First, and perhaps tragically, by that time the nation-state-building projects in the western Balkans had reached a plateau of stability, which allowed the countries from that subregion to focus on their democratization. The uneven transition processes in Bulgaria and Romania had led to the establishment of the first reformist governments in those countries.

Second, in the aftermath of the Kosovo crisis the two dominant international institutions in Europe—the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—altered their perceptions of the Balkans.

After 1999 they recognized the candidate status of Bulgaria and Romania and outlined the prospect of membership for the countries of the Western Balkans. Such twin alteration of the intraregional and extraregional trends in the Balkans informed the 21st-century processes in the region.

Bulgaria

Despite their being lumped together, the postcommunist development trajectories of Bulgaria and Romania were characterized by quite different dynamics. The transition in Bulgaria, which began on November 10, 1989, with the removal of Todor Zhivkov as head of state, was in effect an internal coup within the Bulgarian Communist Party.

These developments set up the background for a rather unpredictable transformation process, one that was initiated from “above” and did not reflect a significant social anxiety with the communist status quo. The pattern of power up to 1997 was marked by governments that came, tried their policies, and were ousted by either the corrective of popular unrest or a change of allegiance of coalition partners.

After 1997, however, governments followed the road of democratization and market reforms fairly consistently and pursued the objectives of EU and NATO integration. As a result, on March 29, 2004, Bulgaria became a member of NATO and joined the EU on January 1, 2007.

Romania

In Romania, the transition process began with a series of violent protests across the country in December 1989, which culminated with the execution of the communist dictator Nicolae Ceaus¸escu on Christmas night, 1989. During the winter of 1989–90 a new political formation emerged, which called itself the National Salvation Front (NSF). It established itself as the vanguard of the revolution and ruled in Romania until 1996.

During this period the government was afflicted by internal dissent as a result of the authoritarian tendencies of the NSF leader Ion Iliescu and domestic unrest caused by both the interethnic tensions with the substantial Hungarian minority located in Transylvania and the social disorder caused by the miners’ uprising during 1991. Another set of problems was associated with the NSF’s wavering foreign policy.

Bucharest, Romania, nowdays

After the elections in 1996, however, consecutive governments did away with the uncertainty characterizing the country’s initial transition process. Thus, like Bulgaria, Romania joined NATO on March 29, 2004, and joined the EU on January 1, 2007.

Albania

The post-1991 period in the subregion of the western Balkans was in many respects even more heterogeneous than the one in Bulgaria and Romania. Although all countries in the subregion experienced violent upheavals of one sort or another, they dealt with their effects differently. Albania was the only country from the western Balkans that did not emerge from the dissolution of former Yugoslavia.

Yet internal conflict beleaguered its postcommunist development. The period up to the 1992 elections was generally characterized by chaos, which led to an exacerbation of the division between the north and the south of the country, rapid growth of organized crime, and the beginning of large-scale emigration fueled by the economic deterioration.

Subsequent governments failed to address these problems, which led to a severe crisis in the country during 1997. It was spurred by the collapse of several financial pyramid schemes, which wiped out the savings of the majority of the Albanian population. During the unrest, military depots were raided and scores of weapons were looted.

Order was restored only after the international community dispatched a military force to the country during Operation Alba. Albania did not fully recover from this crisis, and in 2006 continued to be the poorest country in Europe.

Republic of Macedonia

The transition of the other countries from the western Balkans was marked by the wars of Yugoslav dissolution. Unlike the other republics of former Yugoslavia, however, Macedonia succeeded to gain its independence peacefully after a referendum on September 8, 1991. The country’s transition, however, was hampered by the embargo on former Yugoslavia imposed by the international community.

At the same time the country faced an embargo from Greece, which refused to recognize the country by its constitutional name and continued to refer to it as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Concurrently the existence of the Macedonian nation and language was challenged by Bulgaria. Furthermore the ecumenical independence of the Macedonian Orthodox Church continued to be challenged by the Serbian Orthodox Church.

None of these challenges threatened the existence of the Macedonian state as much as the tension caused by the conflict with the substantial Albanian minority in the country. In the wake of the Kosovo conflict the nearly 25 percent of Albanians living in Macedonia demanded greater recognition of their cultural and political rights. This led to violence during 2001.

The conflict was settled under pressure from the international community with the signing of the Ohrid Peace Accords in August 2001. As a result of the implementation of these accords the EU recognized Macedonia as a candidate country in December 2005. It became a member of NATO’s Partnership for Peace program in 1995.

Croatia

The beginning of the democratic transition in Croatia is usually dated to the electoral victory of the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) in the first multiparty elections in April 1990. The vote for the HDZ, led by Franjo Tudjman, was also a vote for independence from Yugoslavia.

The subsequent Homeland War lasted until 1995 and witnessed the territorial consolidation of the country and the exodus of the Serbian minority, as well as the military involvement of Croatia in the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The authoritarian rule of President Tudjman, which lasted until his death in 1999, was characterized by nepotism, criminal privatization, and subversion of constitutional practices.

It was only after the parliamentary and presidential elections in 2000 that Croatia began affiliating itself with European institutions. On May 25, 2000, it became a member of NATO’s Partnership for Peace program. In terms of its relations with the EU, Croatia was the most advanced country from the subregion of the western Balkans. On November 13, 2005, it began its accession negotiations, which were the final stage in gaining membership to the Brussels-based bloc.

Bosnia-Herzegovina

The development of Bosnia-Herzegovina after 1991 was marked by war, which ravaged the country until 1995. During this time, over 250,000 people lost their lives and many more were either internally displaced or fled the country altogether.

After the signing of the General Framework Agreement for Peace (Dayton Accords) in 1995, Bosnia-Herzegovina became a virtual protectorate of the international community with a rotating presidency between the representatives of the three dominant ethnic groups—Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs.

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, nowdays

However, decision-making in the country was overseen by a High Representative of the International Community, who could intervene in the domestic affairs of the state and remove elected officials. Bosnia-Herzegovina gradually overcame the division between the three ethnic communities and progressed with the consolidation of its statehood.

Serbia and Montenegro

Until the Kosovo crisis of 1999, the political process in Serbia and Montenegro was driven by the extreme nationalism propagated by Slobodan Miloševic´, which fuelled the breakup of Yugoslavia. As a result Serbia and Montenegro were involved in several wars and subjected to international sanctions.

Miloševic´’s ouster during the elections of 2000 and his subsequent arrest and transfer to the International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia in 2001 seemed to suggest that the country was distancing itself from the policies of the 1990s. However the murder of the reformist Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic on March 12, 2003, reflected the continuing legacy of the wars.

Montenegro held a referendum on its independence in May 2006 where its citizens voted to become an independent nation. Montenegro declared its independence on June 3, 2006, followed by Serbia’s declaration of independence on June 5, 2006. A further complication was the status of Kosovo, which after the 1999 conflict remained a protectorate of the UN, although still formally a province of Serbia.

In 2006 representatives of the international community, the Serbs, and the Kosovar Albanians conducted talks however, on the status of the province. The talk yielded little progress, as the Kosovo citizens favored independence, which was formally declared in February 2008, despite Serbia’s objectives.

Madres de Plaza de Mayo Argentina

One of the best-known human rights organizations to emerge in response to the dirty wars in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, the Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Association of Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo) began its silent vigils on April 30, 1977, protesting against and demanding accountability for the disappearance of their children during the Argentine military dictatorship (1976–83; it is estimated that during this period the military disappeared between 15,000 and 30,000 persons).

Every Thursday afternoon, from 3:30 to 4:00 p.m., the Mothers would gather at the May Pyramid (Pirámide de Mayo) in the Plaza de Mayo in front of the presidential palace, wearing white head scarves, often carrying photographs of their missing children, and walk slowly in circles, demanding government accountability for their disappeared sons and daughters.

The founding members of the organization included Azucena Villaflor Devincenti (its first president); Berta Braverman; Haydée García Buelas; the four sisters María Adela Gard de Antokoletz, Julia Gard, María Mercedes Gard, Cándida Gard; Delicia González; Pepa Noia; Mirta Baravalle; Kety Neuhaus; Raquel Arcushin; and Señora De Caimi.

The Mothers’ Association slowly grew, despite the detention and disappearance of some of its founding members, including its first president, Azucena Devincenti. By the early 1980s the Madres had grown to several thousand members and garnered the support of key international human rights groups, including Amnesty International and the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

Many consider that the Madres played an important role in delegitimizing the military dictatorship and helping to usher in the period of democratic rule from 1983. The Madres have continued their weekly vigils from 1977, demanding that the government account for their missing children and that the responsible parties be subjected to criminal prosecution, and refusing government offers of monetary compensation (reparación económica) if not accompanied by acknowledgment of responsibility.

In 1986 the group split into two main factions: the Mothers of the Founding Line (Linea Fundadora), led by Hebe de Bonafini, and the Madres; each currently maintains its own Web site. The group has received international accolades for advancing the cause of human rights, including the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought (1992), the United Nations Prize for Peace Education (1999), and the United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights (2003).

The Mothers of the Founding Line has been criticized by some for its lack of internal democracy, cults of personality, and other factors. The Madres also spawned the formation of related groups, including the Association of Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Asociación Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo). Both factions of the Madres continue to demand government accountability for crimes perpetrated during the dirty war, and remain active in the field of human rights.

Yasir Arafat

Yasir Arafat (full name, Muhammad Abdul Rauf Arafat al-Qudwa) was born to Palestinian parents in Cairo in 1929, although he claimed Jerusalem as his birthplace. Educated in Egypt, Arafat earned an engineering degree in 1956. While a student he met other Palestinians, especially Salah Khalaf (1932–91) and Khalil al-Wazir (1935–88), who would become leaders in the nationalist movement.

Although it is not certain that Arafat ever became a full-fledged member, he had contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood, and some of his associates did join the brotherhood. Arafat served as president of the Union of Palestinian Students and, later, the larger General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) from 1952 to 1956.

After graduation Arafat, along with several other key allies, moved to Kuwait, where in 1957 he cofounded, with Khalaf and al-Wazir, Fatah (Harakat Tahrir Filastin, or Palestine National Liberation Movement). In Arabic the acronym meant victory. Al-Asifah was its military arm.

Wazir’s wife, Intissar, also took an active role in the group. Fatah’s first operation against Israel was an attack on a water pump station in 1965. Along with many other nationalist leaders in the mid-20th century, Arafat and Fatah members were influenced by the Algerian War.

On the basis of that struggle they concluded that an independent Palestinian state could only be established through armed struggle with Israel. Arafat’s stated goal was the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine. He took the name Abu Ammar as his nom de guerre; al-Wazir became Abu Jihad; and Khalaf became Abu Iyad. The three leaders were known among Arabs as the abus, or fathers.

The Battle of Karameh in 1968 was a major turning point for Arafat and Fatah. In an attempt to crush Fatah, Israeli forces moved into Jordan and attacked the Fatah base at Karameh. Surprised when Fatah fighters fought back, the Israelis withdrew somewhat hastily. Young Palestinians and others who had been dispirited after the major defeats in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War then flocked to join Fatah in the struggle against Israel.

As a result Fatah became the largest and most powerful of the Palestinian factions and in 1969 Arafat became chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the umbrella organization for a number of diverse Palestinian groups. He served in that capacity until 2004. Under Arafat’s leadership the PLO accommodated political factions on the Left and Right and refused to be aligned with any one Arab government.

The mounting power of the PLO posed an open challenge to the Jordanian monarchy. Consequently in September 1970 King Hussein’s forces attacked the PLO forces and Palestinian refugee camps, driving the PLO and Arafat out of Jordan. Black September, the group that subsequently attacked and assassinated Jordanian officials and Israelis, took its name from the war in Jordan. Although Israel and others alleged that Black September and other organizations that engaged in terror attacks were controlled by Arafat, he denied the charges.

By 1974 Arafat ordered that PLO attacks be concentrated only in Israel and the Occupied Territories of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. In 1974 Arafat achieved international recognition and spoke before the General Assembly of the United Nations. In subsequent years Arab states and most other countries, with the notable exceptions of Israel and the United States, recognized the PLO as “the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinians.”

After being ousted from Jordan, Arafat and the PLO moved the headquarters of their military, political, and social welfare activities to Lebanon. As the central Lebanese government imploded in the course of the civil war in the mid-1970s, the PLO became a state within a state.

The PLO infrastructure of schools, hospitals, businesses, and cultural institutions grew. Fearing major Israeli attacks into Lebanon, Arafat attempted to moderate PLO invasions into Israel along Lebanon’s southern borders, but as the PLO’s political and diplomatic efforts became more effective, Israel was determined to eliminate the dangers the PLO posed.

In June 1982 Israel launched a full-scale invasion into Lebanon with the purpose of destroying the PLO. Arafat and the PLO were quickly besieged in Beirut, where they held out against massive Israeli bombardments from the sea, land, and air. Negotiations by the international community resulted in the withdrawal of Arafat and the PLO leadership from Lebanon and their relocation to Tunis.

Israel attacked PLO headquarters in Tunis in 1985, but Arafat escaped; he also was almost killed in a plane crash in 1992. He and the PLO remained headquartered in Tunisia until 1993. Late in life Arafat married Suha Tawil, from a notable Palestinian Christian family, with whom he had one daughter. His brother Fatih Arafat, a medical doctor, headed the Palestinian Red Crescent for many years.

Arafat was a master at maneuvering among the Arab leaders, with whom he often had difficult relations, as well as among conflicting Palestinian factions, often playing one against the other. In 1988 the Palestine National Council (the equivalent of the Palestinian parliament) declared a Palestinian state with Arafat as the president.

By this time Arafat supported the so-called ministate solution, whereby the Palestinian state would include the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, all territory taken by Israel in the 1967 war and occupied by its military forces since that time.

Following secret talks between Israeli and PLO representatives in Norway, Arafat agreed to the 1993 Oslo Accords, which provided for the phased withdrawal of Israeli forces from parts of the Occupied Territories and PLO recognition of Israel. The accords were signed by Arafat and Israeli leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres in a much-publicized ceremony in Washington, D.C. Arafat shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Rabin and Peres.

Israel withdrew from portions of the Gaza Strip and Jericho, and Arafat returned to what Palestinians hoped would be the gradual creation of a fully independent state. Arafat was elected president of the new Palestinian National Authority (PNA) in 1993 and held the position until his death. Although he personally lived a simple life, Arafat was accused of allowing corruption among high-level Palestinian officials in the PNA and within Fatah. He retained a patriarchal hold on power.

As negotiations faltered, Arafat became increasingly isolated. At the 2000 Camp David negotiations Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak offered to return much of the Occupied Territories in return for an end to conflict, with no terms for the resettlement of the refugees.

Arafat rejected the offer but failed to make a counteroffer. Negotiations broke down completely, and many young Palestinians turned to the Islamic nationalist organization Hamas, which launched attacks—including suicide missions—within Israel and the Occupied Territories.

In 2000 and 2001 a new intifada (the al-Aqsa Intifada), or Palestinian uprising, broke out. Israel retaliated by reoccupying territory it had previously vacated. Israeli forces surrounded Arafat in his compound in Ramallah, and for the last two years of his life, he remained under what amounted to house arrest.

After some time of failing health he was moved to a hospital in Paris, where he died of uncertain causes in 2004. After Israel rejected Arafat’s wish to be buried in Jerusalem, his body was brought back to Ramallah for burial amid massive scenes of mourning among Palestinians. Although Arafat had failed to achieve an independent Palestinian state, he remained the leader who had made the existence of the Palestinian people and their quest for self-determination a matter of international concern.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide

A major and highly controversial figure in the modern history of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was born in Douyon in southern Haiti on July 15, 1953. After being orphaned as an infant, he was raised by the Society of Saint Frances de Sales (the Salesians), a Roman Catholic religious order.

Educated at Salesian schools, including the Collège Notre-Dame, from which he graduated with honors in 1974, he continued his education at a number of religious schools in Europe, North America, the Middle East, and elsewhere, and at the University of Haiti, before his ordination as a Roman Catholic priest in 1982.

A gifted orator and organizer, he was especially influenced by liberation theology, a strand of Roman Catholicism that became prominent from the 1960s and emphasized issues of social justice and political activism in alleviating the poverty and oppression of the poor and marginalized. In 1983 he was appointed to a parish in a Port-au-Prince slum, where he worked in a medical clinic and a halfway house for street children.

His activism and charisma attracted a large following and helped him build a social base for his subsequent political career. In 1986 popular uprisings led to the end of the Duvalier dictatorship, creating a political opening Aristide would soon exploit. His fiery oratory and social radicalism alienated the church hierarchy, leading to his expulsion from the Salesian order in 1988.

In 1990 in the first genuinely democratic elections in Haitian history, Aristide captured the presidency with two-thirds of the popular vote. He called his supporters “Lavalas,” which translates from the Haitian Creole as “cleansing flood” or “avalanche.”

His first tenure as president lasted less than eight months—from his inauguration on February 7, 1991, to the military coup that ousted him on September 30. Going into exile in Venezuela and the United States, he was returned to power following a United States military intervention in 1994.

During the same year he renounced his priesthood, marrying United States citizen Mildred Trouillot two years later. Constitutionally barred from running in the elections of December 1995, won by Raoul Cédras, in 2000 he won a second term. Political gridlock followed, and after a long period of political unrest, he was overthrown in a military coup in February 2004 and compelled to leave the country.

From exile in South Africa he proclaimed himself the legitimate president of Haiti. Denounced by his opponents as a self-serving agitator who advocates violence in the pursuit of political power, and revered by his many supporters as the embodiment of the aspirations of Haiti’s poor and oppressed, he remains a polarizing and controversial figure in the modern history of the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country.

Armenia and Azerbaijan

The Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic were constituent members of the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991 when the former became the Republic of Armenia and the latter the Azerbaijani Republic.

Armenia, as a part of the Soviet Union, saw a considerable period of peace. However, the intelligentsia of the area had suffered greatly during the rule of Joseph Stalin, with tens of thousands of Armenians being executed or deported. The tensions eased with the death of Stalin and the emergence of Nikita Khrushchev.

The next 25 years saw rising standards of living, with improvements in education and health care. Many of those exiled were also able to return. From the 1970s Western tourists started to visit Yerevan and some other parts of Armenia. With glasnost during the 1980s, the situation improved considerably.

Similarly, in Azerbaijan, there was suffering under Stalin, with some Azerbaijanis having supported the Germans during World War II. This also led to mass executions and deportations. During the 1950s Azerbaijan was transformed with the enlarging of the oil industry. This continued throughout the 1960s and helped provide money for an increase in civil engineering projects and infrastructure.

In 1988 the governing council of Karabakh, officially the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast, an enclave in Azerbaijan with 180,000 people, voted for unification with Armenia. Azerbaijanis, largely Shi’ite Muslims, then attacked the predominantly Christian Armenians at the Azerbaijani town of Sumgait.

There was an upsurge in nationalist sentiment in both republics, with 250,000 Azerbaijanis living in Armenia and 500,000 Armenians in Azerbaijan at the start of the dispute. Many of these fled, and to make the situation worse still, in December 1998, an earthquake hit northern Armenia, destroying most of the town of Spitak, and also hitting Leninakan and Kirovakan, killing 25,000 and leaving 500,000 homeless.

With a rise in Azerbaijani nationalism in 1989, the local government started blockading Nagorno Karabakh and Armenia. In January 1990 the border between Nakhichevan and Iranian Azerbaijan was torn down, and Armenians in Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital, were massacred. With weapons stolen from army bases and depots, Armenian and Azerbaijani militia were soon fighting each other.

The Soviet army was sent in and managed to fight its way into Baku, with hundreds dying. The Communists won the elections for the Azerbaijan Supreme Soviet (parliament) in 1990, and on August 30, 1991, Azerbaijan declared independence. Armenia followed suit on September 23. Full independence came about on December 25, with the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union.

In Azerbaijan, Ayaz Mutalibov, leader under the Communists, became president, remaining in that position until May 18, 1992, when Isa Gambarov took over as acting president. On June 16, 1992, Abulfez Elchibey became president, being replaced on June 24, 1993, by Heydar Aliyev, who was acting president until September 1, when he became president in his own right. The former Soviet politician Aliyev started to exploit the oil reserves of the country. He managed to reduce unemployment and establish closer relations with Turkey.

As he was dying, on October 15, 2003, his son, Ilham Aliyev, won the presidential election, for which he was the only candidate, and was sworn in as president 16 days later. In 1994 Azerbaijan became a member of the NATO Partnership for Peace, allying itself closely with the West, and since 2001 has been a member of the Council of Europe. In 2004 Azerbaijan joined the NATO Individual Partnership Action Plan.

Nearly 99 percent of the 94 percent who voted in the 1991 referendum supported independence for Armenia. It became an independent country later that year but suffered greatly from a blockade by Azerbaijan. This was made worse when Turkey also blockaded the country in April 1993 after Armenian forces launched a military offensive against Azerbaijan.

As Azerbaijan sought closer ties with the West, Armenia sought more engagement with the Russian Federation. Through intermediaries from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), there has been an end to fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh, although there has been much political ferment with increasing unemployment and some 600,000 people leaving the country between 1992 and 1998.

Robert Kocharyan became acting president when Levon Ter-Petrosyan stepped down and has been president from April 9, 1998. During his time in office, there has been increasing dissatisfaction with the authoritarian way in which the country has been run, with dissidents being jailed and opposition parties banned.

In recent years, with economic problems plaguing the country, there has been the emergence of the Union of Right-Wing Forces that was founded in Yerevan on May 29, 2000. On March 21, 2002, at the Permanent Council meeting of the OSCE, Armenia once again reiterated its claims to Nagorno-Karabakh, with both governments now determined on a peaceful solution.

Arms Race/Atomic Weapons

Atomic weapons and the arms race were inseparable from the inception of the former: Developments in physics in the 1930s led physicists to believe that nuclear fission could be used as a weapon, and when World War II began, scientists stopped publishing on the topic of fission in order to avoid sharing information with the enemy.

No one was yet sure what form a fissionbased weapon would take, but the Allied nations were concerned that Nazi Germany would develop it first. In the United States the Manhattan Project was supported by enormous resources beginning in 1942.

Research occurred at various sites across North America and was overseen and organized at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the desert provided safe sites for weapons testing. Though British scientists participated, as did many European exiles, the Soviet Union was not included in the project.

Not until after Germany’s surrender did the Manhattan Project finish its work. The first test, code-named Trinity, was conducted on July 16, 1945. The first nuclear explosive, a nondeployable bomb nicknamed the Gadget, was a sphere of high explosive covered with surface detonators that directed the explosion inward, compressing a plutonium core in order to start a nuclear chain reaction that grew at an exponential rate. The Gadget exploded with a blast equal in force to about 18 thousand tons of TNT—tonnage of TNT became the standard measure of nuclear bombs thenceforth.

The test was a success. Aural and visual evidence of the explosion reached as far as 200 miles away. Almost immediately two bombs were prepared for the ongoing war in the Pacific: Fat Man, a plutonium bomb like the Gadget, was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9; three days earlier at Hiroshima, Little Boy, a uranium “gun-type” bomb that worked by shooting one piece of uranium into another to start the chain reaction, had been dropped.

Little Boy was the first gun-type nuclear bomb used, and while it seemed likely to work, it was at that time untested. Hundreds of thousands died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, prompting a Japanese surrender a week later.

Future warfare would have to acknowledge the existence of nuclear weapons. Though the Soviets had been left out of the Manhattan Project and the United States was the only country with the capability to produce nuclear arms, the Soviet Union had been receiving information about the project throughout its duration thanks to its espionage efforts.

Development of Soviet nuclear weapons had to be conducted without the extraordinary brain trust of Los Alamos, but had the advantage of requiring less innovation. Penal mining provided uranium, and on August 29, 1949, the Soviets successfully detonated First Lightning, a 22 kiloton Fat Man–style fission bomb. Four years after the start of the “Atomic Age,” and years before U.S. military intelligence had predicted the Soviets would succeed, the nuclear arms race was under way.

In the aftermath of World War II the United States and the Soviet Union became the most significant and resourceful superpowers. New international alliances like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact transpired along ideological lines as much as geographical ones.

The arms race was, on one level, simple one-upmanship: a competition through which tensions could be worked out, as they were in the Olympics and the space race. Though both the United States and the Soviet Union quickly acquired the necessary means to do significant and catastrophic damage to their opponents, escalation continued as the arms race drove them both.

The United States countered the Soviet acquisition of “the bomb” by developing the hydrogen bomb—also called the fusion bomb or the thermonuclear bomb. While the first generation of nuclear weapons used fission, the hydrogen bomb relied on nuclear fusion: the process of nuclei fusing into a larger nucleus and releasing energy as a by-product, the same process that fuels the Sun.

On May 9, 1951, in the United States, Operation Greenhouse detonated a thermonuclear device codenamed George, with an explosive yield of 225 kilotons. Like the Gadget, George was a nondeployable device used to test the basic principles that would be involved in the design of its successors; a year later, Ivy Mike was detonated with a yield of 10.4 megatons (10,000 kilotons), and the hydrogen bomb officially became part of the United States nuclear arsenal. The Soviets kept pace, detonating a preliminary fusion device in the summer of 1953 and a fullscale thermonuclear bomb in 1954.

The destructive force of these new bombs was commonly measured in megatons, making the first atomic bombs seem almost trivial in comparison. A Fat Man–type bomb could eliminate a smaller city like Nagasaki; a hydrogen bomb could eliminate a major city and its infrastructure and produce considerably more fallout.

Secrecy was part of the world of nuclear weaponry from the start. In the cold war years, new policies regulated information relevant to the design of nuclear arms: The 1946 Atomic Energy Act put nuclear technology under civilian control and banned the divulging of information related to such to any foreign nation.

Eight years later a new act went substantially further: All nuclear technology was “born secret,” which is to say that it was automatically classified without need for evaluation. Nuclear technology was deemed to be a matter of national security. It is widely speculated that the born secret policy is unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court has yet to hear a case pertaining to it.

Throughout the 1950s much of the innovation of the arms race was concerned with methods of deployment. The B-47 Stratojet and B-52 Stratofortress—strategic United States bomber jets designed to penetrate Soviet borders— and interceptor aircraft designed to intercept and eliminate bombers were early examples of such innovations.

Bomb deployment was also made more user-friendly, requiring fewer specialists and bringing the utility of nuclear weapons closer to that of conventional explosives, which required limited instruction on the part of the soldiers deploying them.

Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) allowed rival nations to deploy nuclear payloads without needing a pilot at all, and the United States proceeded to build missile installations throughout Europe, while the threat of Soviet missiles in Cuba sparked the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

Some attention, of course, was paid to defense against nuclear attacks, not only the fallout shelters and cautionary films that became prevalent in the 1950s, but also antiballistic missiles to shoot down ICBMs before they struck their target, anti-aircraft artillery and fighter jets to intercept bombers, and increasingly sophisticated radar systems to detect incoming attacks.

These preventative measures could not keep up with the offensive capabilities of a nuclear arsenal, though, and the development of nuclear submarines, which could launch a missile from the ocean—far from tactical targets—provided each side in the cold war with second-strike capability: the ability to ensure a retaliatory attack in the event of the other side’s first strike.

Given the destructiveness of megaton bombs and the amount of fallout that would result from their wide-scale implementation, second-strike capability led to a state of what was called mutually assured destruction (MAD).

As a defense strategy, MAD calls for the development and stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction in order to force a situation in which it is infeasible for either side to attack, because of the certainty of devastating retaliation. What may have at first seemed counterintuitive was nevertheless a critical component of cold war thinking that led to the détente, or eased tensions, of the 1970s.

Meanwhile, as the United States and the Soviet Union remained dominant in the nuclear field, other nations developed programs of their own: Among the NATO allies, the United Kingdom and France both became nuclear powers by the end of 1960, while the People’s Republic of China followed suit in 1964, at a time when Sino-Soviet relations were at enough of an ebb that China was a potential threat to either the United States or the Soviet Union.

During détente, the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT) was signed by by a number of states, though it was not until 1992 that France and the People’s Republic of China signed. The NNPT limited the spread of nuclear capability by permitting only those five states then possessing them—which also happened to be the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council—to own nuclear weapons.

It further permitted the use of nuclear power by other states, but only under conditions that would limit their ability to manufacture nuclear weapons. Any states not explicitly granted rights under this treaty would have to apply to the International Atomic Energy Agency, a regulatory branch of the United Nations, to pursue any nuclear technology activity.

The easing of tensions also led to armament control treaties in the late 1960s and early 1970s. SALT I (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks), held in Helsinki, Finland, between the Soviet Union and the United States, restricted the production of strategic ballistic missile launchers and submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and further treaties limited nuclear testing and forbade nuclear weapons in space. Détente ended when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 he returned anti-Soviet rhetoric to pre-détente levels, calling for massive escalations in order to force the Soviet Union into economic collapse as a result of defense spending.

One of his initiatives threatened the balance of MAD: The Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed Star Wars, would employ a space-based system to deflect missiles en route to the United States, thus limiting the Soviet second-strike capability. Though the system was never fully developed or employed, aspects of it were adopted by every subsequent administration, even after the cold war ended.

The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START) further limited nuclear arms, and periodic treaties continue to reduce the number of nuclear warheads in operation. The arms race effectively ended when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Though no one possesses the resources of the cold war superpowers, the rest of the world has begun to catch up to the nuclear states: In the post– cold war years India, Pakistan, and North Korea have all tested nuclear devices (North Korea withdrew from the NNPT in 2003; India and Pakistan never signed), and more are sure to follow. The International Atomic Energy Agency estimates that, as of 2006, 40 nonnuclear countries possessed the capability to manufacture nuclear weapons if they desired to.