Chapter 19

In This Chapter

Discovering post-Soviet Russia – and friends

Witnessing the collapse of Yugoslavia

Following the tragedy of Rwanda

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 US President Bush announced a ‘New World Order’ of international harmony and trust. People looked forward to the exciting new millennium with confidence and hope. Certainly the 1990s put the long-running conflicts in South Africa and Northern Ireland more or less to rest. But in Africa and Europe they also brought back horrors everyone thought had gone for good. As the century drew to a close and the Millennium loomed, much in the world had changed, but much had stayed the same.

After the Wall Is Over

The fall of the Berlin Wall led to big changes across eastern Europe. Not all these changes went smoothly. The communist system was based on an all-powerful State controlling every aspect of its citizens’ lives, including their education, their work, where they lived, and even where they could go on holiday. The economy was entirely State-directed and controlled. Moving from this system to a capitalist system where you made your own fortune, or went down, without the State getting involved, and where you were free to speak your mind without worrying about who was listening, wasn’t going to be easy. Westerners didn’t always help the process either, by rubbishing the old system that people in eastern Europe had spent their lives trying to make work. East Europeans soon got the idea of working within a capitalist system, but learned that capitalism had its downside as well. Perhaps it’s not surprising that within a few years of the fall of the Berlin Wall, people could still be heard saying resentfully that life in the old system hadn’t been all bad.

When did the century end?

Just as historians like to talk of the nineteenth century going on really right up to the First World War (see Chapter 2 to find out why they think this), so historians are already pointing out that the twentieth century didn’t really end in 2000: It ended either a bit earlier than that or a bit later, depending on your point of view. The two significant dates are:

10 November 1989: The day the Berlin Wall came down and everyone knew the Cold War really was over.

11 September 2001: Also known as 9/11, the day the World Trade Center came down. 9/11 quickly became the defining sign that a new century had arrived.

But if you want to get technical and go simply by the millennium dates, the twentieth century ended at midnight on the night of 31 December 2000. So all those Millennium celebrations at the start of the year 2000 were a year too early!

Rubble, rubble – rebuilding Germany

As soon as the Wall came down West Germany’s Chancellor Helmut Kohl started talks with his East German opposite number Lothar de Maiziere about reuniting the country. Kohl was a big man who looked as if he might eat the diminutive East German leader for lunch, which was rather how East Germans came to feel about the whole process of reunification.

A single Germany was proclaimed on 3 October 1990 and the cleaners had hardly started sweeping up the streamers and balloons when the whole eastern half of Germany went out of business. Thousands of former East Germans found themselves out of a job; meanwhile West Germans started realising they’d have to foot the bill for rebuilding the East. Learning to become one people again for the ‘Ossis’ and ‘Wessis’ (easterners and westerners) would take time.

The two Germanys had to get permission from the old wartime Allied powers, the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France, before they could reunite the country. Not all of the Allies were sure that they wanted a massive united Germany in the heart of Europe, especially when Chancellor Kohl started talking about extending Germany’s eastern frontier into Poland, prompting unhappy memories of how the Second World War had started (see Chapter 9 if you’re not sure about this). Britain’s Margaret Thatcher even convened a special meeting of history specialists to brief her on united Germany’s track record (their verdict: Not good). But ultimately nothing could stop the drive to end forty years of division and suspicion and put Germany together again.

Secrets and lies

The dreaded East German secret police, the Stasi, had kept detailed files on the population. If you’ve seen the 2007 film The Lives of Others you’ll have an idea of how they went about bugging private houses and apartments. After reunification, many people in former East Germany demanded to see exactly what was in their files. Often they found that their closest friends and colleagues had been systematically reporting on them for years. Perhaps some things are best left unopened.

I like driving in my car (it’s not quite a Jaguar)

Nothing summed up the change that swept across the newly reunited Germany better than the fate of the East German Trabant car. Actually ‘car’ is a rather generous description of this vehicle that appeared to be made of plastic and had a rather less powerful engine than the average lawnmower. Imagine a garage of full-sized toy cars and you’ve got the general idea. Even so, getting a ‘Trabbi’ was the big dream for people in East Germany, and the process was no joke: You had to apply to the authorities and wait sometimes years before you got to make your choice from the dazzling range of officially approved colours: Light blue, slightly lighter blue, very light blue – or beige.

After reunification the Trabbi became a cult item. Young westerners liked to drive them (they liked the irony), Trabbi races were held, and Trabbi films were shown at the cinema. The ultimate status symbol for people in East Germany had suddenly become a national joke.

Russian roulette and the end of the USSR

Russia was led in the 1990s by Boris Yeltsin, the charismatic president of the Russian Federation. Yeltsin’s path – and Russia’s – was determined by two rather different coup attempts: The August coup in 1991 and the October coup in 1993.

1991: The August coup

Old-style communists, fed up with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform programme sending the Soviet Union down the pan (see Chapter 16 to find out why they thought this), had Gorbachev arrested at his holiday home in the Crimea and seized power themselves. Number one reform fan Boris Yeltsin climbed on a tank and told everyone to gather at the White House (the Russian Parliament building) to defy the coup plotters and stand up for change. They did, the coup collapsed, and Yeltsin became such a hero he forced Gorbachev to resign and took over the government himself.

The August coup persuaded the non-Russian republics within the USSR that they wanted out. Yeltsin recognised their independence and, since the Soviet Union now had nothing to be a union of, on 31 December 1991 he formally dissolved it. (For details of the various republics that sprang up, see the ‘Break-away republics’ section later in this chapter.) Yeltsin did try to set up a Commonwealth of Independent States to replace the old Soviet Union, but this idea was like the governor of a gulag (labour camp) expecting released prisoners to keep in touch and the idea didn’t last long.

Getting the old centrally planned, hopelessly corrupt, and inefficient Soviet-era economy to adjust to a capitalist market economy was bound to create chaos as real prices (as opposed to ‘Don’t-worry-the-State-will-pay prices’) kicked in. Sure enough, the rouble became worthless, inflation rocketed, and so did poverty and unemployment. Russia seemed to be heading back to a barter economy. The old-style communists and Russian nationalists in the Supreme Soviet and in the Congress of People’s Deputies decided, ‘Enough already! Yeltsin must go!’

1993: The October coup

The plotters’ cue came when Yeltsin sacked his obstructive, anti-reform deputy president, Rutskoi. When the Supreme Soviet and the Congress of People’s Deputies objected, he replaced them with a Duma and a Senate (both good pre-Revolution non-communist names) and gave himself lots more power. The Supreme Soviet and Congress of People’s Deputies tried to sack him, but Yeltsin, who had the Russian army on his side, simply besieged them inside his old headquarters, the White House (the Russian parliament building, remember). He sent the troops to storm the building, and 148 people were killed in the fighting.

Defeating the October coup made Yeltsin’s position a lot stronger, though world opinion was alarmed at the bloodshed. The Russians were more concerned about how long it was taking to get any of the famous benefits from this democracy idea – a few basics in the shops would be nice. No matter how angry they got, though, Yeltsin was always able to deflect their anger away from him. For instance, he won the 1996 presidential elections mainly by cutting the price of vodka. Otherwise, he just sacked whoever was prime minister at the time (he got through prime ministers the way most of us get through hankies) and carried on.

The difficult times that hit Russia and the old Soviet republics after 1990 made a lot of Russians look back wistfully to the past. Some missed the anti-Semitism and authoritarian government of the tsars, but many more wanted to go back to the good old days when Stalin was in the Kremlin and everyone else knew their place – in the gulag, mostly.

By 1998 Yeltsin’s health was so bad (nearly as bad as the Russian economy’s) that he quickly sacked a few more prime ministers and handed power over to his protégé, the scary Head of Russian Intelligence, Vladimir Putin.

The president is indisposed . . . as a newt

Boris Yeltsin was a colourful character, with a rather alarming tendency to throw off his jacket and party in public. Doing so probably wasn’t such a great idea for a man with a serious heart condition, though it was the result of his wholehearted support for the ancient Russian right to drink yourself under the table. Even the Irish, not a people exactly unfamiliar with the bottle, were taken aback when Yeltsin arrived on a state visit to Dublin so blotto he couldn’t actually emerge from the plane. On the one hand, Russians quite liked this ‘Man of the People’ hard-drinking image; on the other, they felt Yeltsin’s antics were demeaning. Russians didn’t like not being a superpower any more, and Yeltsin’s behaviour just rubbed their noses in it.

Break-away republics

When the Bolsheviks staged the Russian Revolution (see Chapter 4) they seized control of the Russian empire as well. The tsars had taken over huge areas of eastern Europe and central Asia, and under Lenin these all became Soviet Republics too. But once the Soviet Union fell apart, many of these republics decided perhaps it was time they went home now, made their excuses, and declared themselves independent. Regaining independence did not always proceed smoothly:

The Baltic: Lithuania declared itself independent in 1990. Russia sent in troops to stop them, but then Latvia and Estonia did the same and in 1991 the Russians finally accepted the situation. Latvia and Estonia denied full citizenship rights to Russians living within their borders, saying they only settled to ‘Russify’ the countries and swamp the original people. Which was true, though whether that justified denying them citizenship was another matter.

The Caucasus: Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan all got their independence in 1991. Former Soviet Foreign Minister Edward Shevardnadze took over in Georgia but he couldn’t control the corruption and disorder and was caught out rigging elections and deposed in 1993. Armenia and Azerbaijan started fighting over the disputed area of Nagorno Karabakh. The fighting stopped in 1995 but the dispute goes on.

Eastern Europe: Ukraine declared independence in 1991 and insisted the world stop saying ‘the Ukraine’ as though the country were something found in a toolbox. The government of Ukraine wanted to develop a liberal economy with links to the West but the pro-Russian communists in the Ukrainian parliament did everything they could to block it. Result: By 1998 the country was nearly bankrupt. Belarus stuck to Soviet-style policies and even revived the Soviet-era flag: Was declaring independence worth it? Moldova couldn’t decide whether or not to unite with Romania (final answer: No) and got into fierce boundary disputes with Ukraine and Russia.

Central Asia: Uzbekistan became a repressive one-party state. It set itself up as a model Islamic state, but massacring Turks (1989), maintaining a corrupt government, and using child labour to keep the country’s vital cotton industry going was probably not the best way to go about it.

Dismantling the Soviet Union was supposed to help in setting up democratic governments, but all too often the presidents of these new states seemed to think that elections were more fun when you’d fixed the result in advance and that the busy modern head of state needs a busy modern secret police force.

Now, about those missiles

The only trouble with a superpower imploding is that it tends to have rather a large number of nuclear warheads for the new small states to inherit. The West tried hard to ensure that the Soviet Union’s old nuclear arsenal stayed in reliable hands, if Boris Yeltsin could be described in that way, and they sent weapons experts to advise on how the weapons should be dismantled and disposed of (answer: Very, very carefully). But the exact fate of the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal remains a matter of concern to this day.

Chechnya

Ask Russians and they’ll tell you that Chechens are bandits and thieves; ask Chechens, and they’ll tell you that they’ve been fighting to drive the Russians out of their land since the eighteenth century. Stalin’s way of dealing with the Chechens was typically brutal: He deported the whole population to central Asia and they were only allowed back in 1957. In 1991 the Chechens declared independence, like everyone else in the Soviet Union, but rival Chechen warlords soon started fighting each other and the whole state sank into civil war. ‘Told you!’ said the Russians, who’d been doing all they could to encourage the fighting.

In December 1994 President Yeltsin ordered the invasion of Chechnya. Result: Disaster. The rest of the world condemned Russia and the Chechens were so good at ambushing Russian troops that Yeltsin was forced to pull out. Utterly humiliated, many Russians wanted a re-match.

In 1997 Chechnya, which is mainly Muslim, declared Islam the state religion. By then law and order had almost completely broken down and many local bandit groups were launching attacks over the border into Russia. So when Vladimir Putin took over in 1998, he decided to deal with the Chechens once and for all. In 1999 he launched a full-scale invasion.

The second Chechen war was very brutal. Both sides committed appalling atrocities, including torture. The Russians reconquered Chechnya and brought it back under Russian government, but Chechen terrorists hit back. In 2002 they took the audience and players hostage at a Moscow theatre and 130 of them were killed when the Russian security forces used gas to storm the building. In 2004 Chechens took a whole school hostage at Beslan and 331 people died in the gun battle that followed, including 186 children.

International opinion has often condemned Russian actions in Chechnya, but the Russian government says that its strong-arm tactics are all part of the global War on Islamist Terror. Not everyone is convinced.

Oh, East is West

In 2004 ten countries, eight of them from the former Soviet bloc, joined the European Union, which meant their citizens could travel within the EU looking for work. Suddenly western Europe was awash with polite and reliable Polish plumbers and bar attendants. Russia was relaxed about its former satellite states joining the EU, but it was much less happy about them joining NATO, which seven of them did in 2002.

NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) was a Western military alliance formed in 1949 to oppose Soviet expansion; in 1955 the Soviet Union and its allies formed the Warsaw Pact to oppose NATO (see Chapter 10 for details). After communist rule collapsed in eastern Europe the Warsaw Pact folded, but the Americans kept NATO going: They thought it might come in handy if they ever needed to take military action without going through the United Nations.

The death of Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia in the 1990s saw the worst fighting in Europe since the Second World War. The conflict produced cruelty and atrocities on a scale no one would have believed possible in the last decade of the twentieth century.

One big unhappy family

Yugoslavia was made up of a number of different ethnic groups, including Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Muslims and Albanians. By and large these groups lived in their own areas of Yugoslavia. Slovenes inhabited Slovenia up in the north near Italy and Switzerland; the Croats lived in a curiously-shaped region like a letter ‘n’ on its side; the Serbs lived in the southern region of Serbia, which had once been a separate state of its own; the Albanians lived in the southern province of Kosovo. The area where different groups overlapped was in the central province of Bosnia Herzegovina, which had Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Croats, and a large community of Bosnian Muslims. These groups had developed very different cultures. The Slovenes and Croats were Catholic and used the Latin alphabet; the Serbs were Orthodox Christians and used the Cyrillic alphabet; while the Albanians had a language of their own. To find out how such a diverse group of people had all ended up in one country see the sidebar ‘How did one country get into such a big mess’?

These different groups were all formed into one country under Serb leadership at the end of the First World War but underlying ethnic tensions remained, especially between the Serbs and the Croats. These tensions were made much worse in the Second World War, when the Croats helped the Germans to hunt down the Serb-led resistance. After the war Yugoslavia became a communist state under Marshal Tito, who managed to keep the ethnic tensions under control. They hadn’t gone away, however, and after his death in 1980 they gradually worked their way to the surface again. By the end of the decade, Yugoslavia was poised to dive into terrible civil war.

The trouble began in the province of Kosovo. Most Kosovars were Albanian but the Kosovan Serbs ran the province and the Kosovan Albanians didn’t like it. They started attacking their Serb neighbours, who said they’d get their big brother on to the Albanians and appealed to Serbia for help. The new Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, responded by saying that Serbia would stand up for all Serbs, throughout Yugoslavia. In fact, he said Serbia ought to rule the whole of Yugoslavia, as they had in the old days (for that history lesson, see the sidebar ‘How did one country get into such a big mess?’). That idea didn’t appeal much to the Slovenes and Croats, who were already fed up with having to subsidise the poorer areas down south. If the Serbs were going to start talking about taking the country over, the Slovenes and Croats wanted out.

Kosovo was the site of the most important event in Serbian history, the 1389 Battle of Kosovo Polje where the Turks defeated the Serbs and conquered the whole kingdom. For Serbs, losing control of Kosovo would be like Americans giving up Plymouth Rock or Egypt losing the pyramids: Unthinkable.

A war in four parts

Yugoslavia fell apart in four very bloody stages.

War No. 1: Slovenia

When the Slovenes announced they supported the Albanians in Kosovo, the Serbs cut off all trade with them, which was silly since Slovenia had most of Yugoslavia’s industry. In January 1990 Slovenia declared independence, and after a short, but bloody, war the Serbs had to let Slovenia go, muttering that they’d never liked the place anyway.

War No. 2: Croatia

In 1990 Croatia elected a new nationalist anti-Serb and anti-Semitic leader, Franjo Tudjman. Tudjman sacked all Serbs working for the government and introduced Nazi-style racial ‘purity’ laws to stop anyone who wasn’t ‘pure’ Croat from driving or holding insurance. In 1991 Croatia declared independence.

How did one country get into such a big mess?

In the Middle Ages modern-day Yugoslavia was conquered by the Turkish Ottoman empire. The Turks offered easy terms (that is, no taxes) to anyone who converted to Islam, and some of the people in Bosnia Herzegovina did – the modern-day Bosnian Muslims are their descendants. Modern-day Slovenia and Croatia are the areas the Turks’ Catholic neighbours, the Habsburg empire, managed to take over and they’ve remained Catholic to this day. The Christians who remained within the Ottoman empire belonged to the Orthodox Church: The modern-day Serbs and Macedonians are descended from them (if you’re keen to know more – okay, if you’re a bit lost – see European History for Dummies (Wiley)).

After the First World War both the Ottoman and the Habsburg empires collapsed. The Serbs, who had fought on the Allied side, said, ‘Why not give the whole region to us?’ and, essentially, the Allies did. The new ‘Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes’ was to be ruled by the King of Serbia. In 1928 he changed the country’s name to ‘Yugoslavia’ (‘Land of the South Slavs’), though he might as well have called it ‘Greater Serbia’, because that’s what it was.

The Croats hated this new Serb regime. In 1934 the Croat Ustashe resistance group assassinated King Alexander on a state visit to France. When the Germans invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, these ethnic divisions came into the open:

The Croats saw the invasion as a chance to get their own back on the Serbs. The Ustashe put on smart new uniforms and became a brutal pro-German militia.

The Serbs set up a resistance movement called the Chetniks with a charismatic leader called Mihailovic to fight the Germans and get the king back.

The Communists set up a partisan resistance group under Josip Broz (codename: ‘Tito’) to fight the Germans and the Ustashe. But they didn’t want the king back, so they also fought the Chetniks. The Chetniks sometimes betrayed the partisans to the Germans.

The Western Allies sent help to Tito, so in 1945 he was able to take the country over. His partisans promptly massacred captured Croats and Chetniks for what they had done in the war.

After the war Tito set up a federal system in Yugoslavia where all the different ethnic groups could share power together: Any nationalist groups who tried to break the country up got stamped on mercilessly. He opened Yugoslavia to Western tourism and even private industry: He wanted to modernise the country and rid it of the old ethnic hatred. His approach seemed to work, but no one quite knew what would happen after Tito died in 1980.

The Croatian Serbs got together in armed groups called Chetniks to stop Croatia pulling away; the Croats revived the armed military group Ustashe that had been responsible for the assassination of King Alexander in 1934 (see the sidebar ‘How did one country get into such a big mess?’ for more on these events). Both sides committed appalling atrocities, but the Serbs had the upper hand because Milosevic and the Yugoslav army were both helping them. The Serbs besieged Vukovar and massacred its people and they even bombarded the beautiful historic port of Dubrovnik. By the time the UN negotiated a ceasefire in 1992 the Croatian Serbs controlled a third of Croatia. The Croats wanted it back.

Some of the best-known atrocities in the Yugoslav wars were committed by Serbs against the other ethnic groups, but Croats and Muslims also committed appalling atrocities against Serbs. Don’t think the fault all lies on one side.

On 15 January 1992, mainly under pressure from Germany, the European Community recognised the independent states of Slovenia and Croatia. No one argues much about Slovenia, but historians and commentators argue fiercely over whether or not recognising Croatia was wise. Many think doing so led directly to the bloodshed that followed.

By 1995 the Croats were much better organised. They attacked the Croatian Serbs, retook the Serb-held land – and raped and shot as many Serbs as they could find. Serbia had to grit its teeth and accept independent Croatia.

War No. 3: Bosnia-Herzegovina

Bosnia-Herzegovina’s (that’s the proper name, but from now on I’ll call it Bosnia for short) Serbs, Croats, and Muslims had always got on well together, but once Slovenia and Croatia had pulled away, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic, declared he didn’t want Bosnia to go it alone. On the other hand, the Bosnian Croats and Muslims didn’t want to be a small minority inside a vengeful Serbia: They voted for independence.

Slobodan Milosevic kept the Bosnian Serbs supplied with lots of very big guns and they used them to bombard the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, so savagely that the UN imposed sanctions on Serbia, and the EU and the United States recognised Bosnian independence. The UN sent in peacekeeping troops, but the Bosnian Serb commander, General Ratko Mladic, took no notice: He even specialised in taking UN troops prisoner. Mladic’s men attacked the Muslim areas, killing, torturing, and raping as they went. TV cameras showed emaciated prisoners in Serb concentration camps: The situation seemed to be Nazi Germany all over again. Bosnia’s Muslims fled in panic to a series of UN Safe Areas where the UN troops would protect them. Or so they thought.

As if they hadn’t got enough to worry about, Bosnia’s Croats and Muslims now started fighting each other. The Croats shelled the ancient Turkish bridge at Mostar, which linked the Muslim and Croat parts of the town, and brutally forced Muslim prisoners into fuel tanks where many of them were suffocated by the fumes. Muslim troops murdered and tortured Croat prisoners. The savagery in Bosnia went three ways.

In 1995 the Serbs launched a series of savage attacks to win the war before the Americans imposed some sort of peace deal. Serb guns bombarded Sarajevo’s crowded market place. Serb troops attacked the UN Safe Haven of Srebrenica and massacred the Muslims gathered there virtually under the eyes of the Dutch UN troops who were supposed to be protecting them.

The United States decided to act. NATO planes attacked Serb positions and the Americans stuck the leaders of Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia in an air force base at Dayton, Ohio and didn’t let them go till they’d reached a settlement.

The Dayton Accords said:

Bosnia-Herzegovina is to be independent with two self-governing republics, a Croat–Muslim one and a Serb one called Srpska.

The presidency is to rotate between the three ethnic groups.

And why, you may very well ask, couldn’t they have done that from the start?

War No. 4: Kosovo

Everyone had rather forgotten about the tensions in Kosovo until Albanian and Serb Kosovars started fighting each other in 1997. Both sides began massacring as many of the others as they could find, though the Serbs had greater resources for doing so. In 1999 US President Clinton took time off from his busy love life (the nearby sidebar, ‘A tale of two presidents’, explains all) to order NATO air strikes first on Serb positions in Kosovo and then on the Serb capital, Belgrade (though their biggest hits were a crowded train and the Chinese embassy). In June 1999 the Serbs and Albanians finally agreed on an independent Kosovo. NATO troops went in to keep the peace – and discovered evidence of mass murder by both sides.

Actually, we call it ‘mass murder’

When Croatian Serbs bombarded the little Croat village of Kijevo, they gave the world one of the century’s most disgusting phrases. The Serbs wanted the region to be entirely Serb and Kijevo stood in their way, so they systematically destroyed or deported its population and announced that the area had been ‘ethni- cally cleansed’. ‘Ethnic cleansing’ or even just ‘cleansing’ became the standard term for deporting or slaughtering the population of a town or village simply on grounds of their race. It’s probably too late to stop the use of the phrase now, but it provides a ghastly euphemism for mass murder (like the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution’ for gassing people) and it should never have been accepted, still less used, by the world’s press.

New Nations, New Dangers

The last decade of the twentieth century saw big changes, and tragedy, in Africa and the Middle East. The world watched in amazement as South Africa moved away from its repressive apartheid system towards true democracy – without provoking the bloodbath that had seemed inevitable for so long. Tragically, the little state of Rwanda was to more than make up for this lack of bloodshed by tearing itself apart in an orgy of massacre and genocide that shocked the world, while Robert Mugabe’s government in Zimbabwe provided a case study of how to set up a personal dictatorship and reduce an entire country to poverty. In the Middle East, the United States was helping the Israelis and Palestinians to feel their way towards peace, little realising that it would soon face its most deadly enemy – al-Qaeda.

Somewhere over the rainbow – South Africa

By the 1980s the South African government was up against an international boycott of its goods and commerce, and strikes and election boycotts by opponents of apartheid at home (see Chapter 12 for more on the apartheid system and why South Africa had it). In 1988 Prime Minister P. W. Botha declared a state of emergency to deal with the strikers, but in 1989 he suffered a stroke and had to resign. The new prime minister was a very different character, F. W. de Klerk.

Votes for all

De Klerk was determined to find a peaceful way to initiate some genuine democracy in South Africa. He began by removing the ban on the African National Congress (ANC) and releasing political prisoners including, on 11 February 1990, Nelson Mandela. The whole world watched as Mandela walked to freedom, but turning South Africa round wasn’t going to be quite so easy: de Klerk had to convince his own party and both he and Mandela had to win over the Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party, which wanted a separate Zulu homeland. Not until 1993 did all sides finally agree to set up a democracy with equal votes for everyone, regardless of colour.

South Africa’s first ever democratic election took place in April 1994 – a hugely symbolic moment. Africans queued for hours to register for the right to vote for the first time in their lives. The ANC won the election by a landslide and Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s first black president.

The rainbow nation

Mandela wanted to reassure all the peoples of South Africa that they would be valued equally. South Africa was to be ‘a rainbow nation’ of many colours, he declared (and his colourful shirts seemed to take this rainbow idea literally). President Mandela had some serious problems in his in-tray:

Crime: South Africa had a very high rate of violent crime and democratic elections and racial harmony weren’t going to change it.

The Zulus: They were still demanding their own homeland.

Healing the wounds left by the apartheid system: How could justice be done without reopening all the old wounds?

The Spice Girls wanted to meet him

But building harmony wasn’t going to be easy: Memories of the murder and torture carried out under apartheid were still fresh and painful. But the Archbishop of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu, came up with a bold idea.

Truth hurts

Archbishop Tutu set up a special Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Instead of just prosecuting everyone who had committed acts of brutality under apartheid, which would just have filled the country’s jails and left people feeling angry and resentful, his idea was to bring accused and accusers together in an open courtroom and give everyone the chance to speak openly. If the accused recognised – in public – exactly what they had done wrong and declared their remorse, they would receive an amnesty. If they didn’t, then they would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Many people were sceptical about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and felt very unhappy to see the men who’d murdered their loved ones walking free. But somehow Bishop Tutu’s idea worked. It wasn’t easy for former policemen and officials to admit to crimes, especially when they had to listen to the testimony of people they’d beaten or tortured. But these admissions helped South Africa come through the incredibly painful process of facing up to the past so that it could start dealing with the future.

No happy endings

Saying that once South Africa got democracy all its problems were over would be nice, but sadly it’s not true. The crime rate soared and inflation was out of control. The Zulus kept up their pressure for a separate homeland. South Africa suffered from the terrible spread of AIDS throughout Africa, but wasn’t able to do much about it because Nelson Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki, refused to believe the scientific evidence about how AIDS was transmitted. So, no happy endings: This is history, remember, not a film.

How to wreck a country: Zimbabwe

When Zimbabwe became independent in 1980, Robert Mugabe, leader of the Marxist ZANU party, was elected president (Chapter 12 has the details). At first Mugabe worked together with his opponents to get the country going on a democratic basis, but he became increasingly autocratic.

Zimbabwe’s richest land and business was still in the hands of the white minority. Mugabe’s government was up to its eyes in debt, so he sent his old veterans from the fight against white rule to confiscate white farms by force. When other countries said this approach was no way to reach a fair settlement of a genuine land reform issue, Mugabe said he wasn’t going to be preached to by a bunch of colonialists and took no notice.

Meanwhile inflation was out of control and the people were living in dire poverty. Anyone who criticised Mugabe was arrested and beaten, including the Opposition leader, and many were tortured. The rest of the world condemned Mugabe and the European Union banned him from visiting its member countries; more importantly, the other African states condemned what he was doing to the long-suffering people of Zimbabwe.

Genocide: Rwanda

Until the 1990s most of the world was probably a bit hazy about exactly where Rwanda was. For the record, Rwanda was a Belgian colony and it became independent in 1962. Rwanda had two tribal peoples: the minority Tutsi, who had helped the Belgians run the country, and the majority Hutu, traditionally Rwanda’s peasant farmers. Tutsis and Hutus didn’t much like or trust each other. After independence the Hutus turned on the Tutsis (they’d been helping the Belgians, remember) and forced them to flee into Burundi and Uganda. From this position, the Tutsis formed theRwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) to protect themselves against the Hutus. In 1990 the RPF tried invading Rwanda, but failed, which made things even worse for them, because President Juvenal Habyarimana (a Hutu and proud of it) started arresting any Tutsis he could find.

Who shot JH?

President Habyarimana badly needed money – for his army, mainly. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank would only lend to him if he reached some sort of compromise with the Tutsi. Gritting his teeth, in April 1994 the president flew to a meeting in Dar-es-Salaam, where he agreed to take some Tutsis into his government. On his way home with the president of Burundi, his plane was blown out of the sky by a surface-to-air missile. Both men were killed. This event was the signal for the killing to start.

The Hutus blamed the Tutsis for the murder, but the evidence doesn’t support this theory. The Tutsis had nothing to gain from killing Habyarimana – as events showed only too clearly. Most commentators agree that the assassination was probably the work of Hutu militia, angry with the president for making concessions to the hated Tutsis.

Days of slaughter

For months the special Hutu militia, the Interahamwe (‘those who stand together’) had been stockpiling machetes – cheaper than guns and no chance of shooting your own side by mistake. As soon as the assassination was announced, the Interahamwe started killing Tutsis and any pro-Tutsi Hutus, including the prime minister and her Belgian bodyguards. The Interahamwe forced ordinary Hutus to betray their Tutsi neighbours and kill them. Some Tutsis fled to their local churches for protection. The Interahamwe followed them there and some Hutu nuns and priests actually helped kill them.

In the hundred days that followed the president’s assassination, something like one million Tutsis were massacred in Rwanda, nearly all with crude machetes. The world could hardly believe this massacre was happening in the 1990s, on the eve of the twenty-first century – but it was.

Hurting the Hutus

Over in Uganda, the (Tutsi) Rwandan Patriotic Front, horrified by the news from home, invaded Rwanda to save anyone who was left and to take revenge on the Hutus. Now it was the Hutus’ turn to run. Virtually the entire Hutu population fled to hastily put-up refugee camps in Tanzania and Zaire. At one camp in Zaire 50,000 people died of cholera. The Interahamwe controlled the camps and took all the best pickings from the international aid effort for themselves.

President Mobutu of Zaire supported the Interahamwe, but in 1996 Laurent Kabila overthrew Mobutu. He wanted the Interahamwe out of Zaire and he wanted it now. The Interahamwe fled and the Hutus were free to return home.

Where was the rest of the world?

Where indeed. When the killing started the UN evacuated all foreigners – including nearly all of its troops. The Organisation of African Unity appealed to the UN to stay but the Americans didn’t want another disaster like Somalia (see Chapter 13) so the UN had to make do with a small force. Small forces can’t protect whole populations from being massacred, and this one was no exception. The film Hotel Rwanda gives you an idea of the horrors of the Rwandan genocide and the poor showing the UN made in trying to stop it.

In November 1994 the UN set up an international tribunal to deal with cases arising from the Rwandan genocide, but it was small and it worked very slowly. Like the rest of the UN’s efforts, in fact.

A tale of two presidents

In 1992 Democrat Bill Clinton was elected US president. Clinton was the first president from the post-war ‘baby boomer’ generation and certainly the first to play the sax at his inauguration party. His wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, was a professional lawyer who intended to be a very hands-on First Lady; though it soon transpired that her husband had been pretty hands-on with various young women, most notably a young White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. He narrowly avoided impeachment for lying about his affair and some people even said he launched the Kosovo bombing (see the ‘War No. 4: Kosovo’ section) to distract attention away from the scandal.

Clinton came into office with big ideas for social change in America, though most of his plans got shot down by Congress. He did, however, manage to balance the budget, a feat which had always escaped Ronald Reagan, and he had big successes abroad. He helped seal the peace agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (see Chapter 17 for the details), between the different groups fighting in Bosnia (see ‘The death of Yugoslavia’ section), and between the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland (see Chapter 7 and British History for Dummies (Wiley)).

In 2000 Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore, ran for president against George Bush, governor of Texas and son of Clinton’s predecessor, President George H. W. Bush. The election was very close and came down to a few votes in just one state, Florida, where the governor was Bush’s brother Jeb. Florida declared Bush had won, but the Democrats complained that large numbers of Democrat votes were being discounted on highly dodgy grounds. The legal challenges looked set to drag on for months, but the Supreme Court called a halt to them, thereby handing the presidency to George W. Bush. Many commentators still claim that actually Al Gore won that election. If he had, bearing in mind President Bush’s invasions of Afghanistan (2002) and Iraq (2003), the history of the world in the early twenty-first century could have been very different.

The Road to 9/11

Hopes for a peaceful New World Order were dashed only a few months into the new century by the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. Suddenly the whole world had heard of al-Qaeda, but no one knew much about them. Where did this conflict come from?

You’ve got the road map upside down!

In the 1990s Israeli, Palestinian, and American leaders all tried to resolve the long-running dispute about who should own Palestine, but however close they got to a deal, something always wrecked it.

1993: Yitzhak Rabin signs the Oslo Accords with Yasser Arafat agreeing to pull out of the West Bank but in 1995 Rabin is assassinated by an Israeli opposed to any sort of deal with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). The new prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, promptly builds lots of shiny new Jewish settlements on the West Bank.

1998: The Americans force Netanyahu to talk with the PLO but in 1999 the Israelis simply remove him from office. New prime minister Ehud Barak withdraws troops from Lebanon, talks with the PLO, and generally seems far too willing to meet others half way, so in 2001 the Israelis throw him out and elect the ultra-hard-line Ariel Sharon instead.

2001: Sharon invades the Palestinian Authority area in the West Bank and bombards Yasser Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah. Sharon’s action was prompted by a second Palestinian Intifada (uprising – Chapter 17 has details on the first one) which had broken out in protest at his declaration that Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque, two of Islam’s holiest shrines, would remain in Israel’s hands forever. Sharon blamed Arafat (rightly) for organising the uprising, but although he could trap Arafat in Ramallah, he couldn’t defeat the Intifada.

2003: US President George W. Bush announces a ‘Road Map’ to Peace, with Palestine and Israel recognising each other and Palestine stopping the Intifada. Sharon and the moderate Palestinian leader, Abu Mazen, accept the concept, but the Israelis and Palestinians don’t. No one knows why it’s called a ‘road map’.

2003: Sharon builds a concrete ‘security fence’ (that’s a wall to you and me) to separate Israelis and Palestinians. Its critics, including the UN, point out that the wall seems to have annexed some 40 per cent of Palestine’s territory as well. Sharon’s response: ‘Does it really? That’s handy.’

2005: Sharon pulls Israeli troops out of the Gaza Strip and demolishes Israeli settlements. This action causes deep bitterness among the Israeli settlers in Gaza, some of whom have to be removed by force, but it enjoys the support of most Israelis. Shortly afterwards, however, Sharon is incapacitated by a massive stroke that leaves him in a persistent vegetative state.

At the start of the twenty-first century the problem of Palestine was as far from being solved as ever. The United States had been trying to get the two sides talking, but many Arabs thought the Americans were too pro-Israeli.

Wanted dead or alive – Osama bin Laden

Al-Qaeda (‘the base’ or ‘the grid’) is an international network of different Islamist terrorist groups spread across some thirty countries. The network grew out of the Mujahidin, the guerrilla groups who resisted the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s when the United States used to send the Mujahidin arms and money, but after the Russians left, and especially after the First Gulf War against Iraq (1990–1), the Mujahidin began to turn against America. This anti-American feeling developed partly because the US tended to support repressive Middle East regimes (including Saddam Hussein, until he invaded Kuwait), but mainly because US troops were stationed on the holy soil of Saudi Arabia, homeland of the Prophet Muhammad. (See Chapter 17 for all the relevant background.)

As the Taliban gradually won control of Afghanistan in the 1990s, they encouraged al-Qaeda to use the country as its base. The different groups within al-Qaeda saw different aspects of Western life, such as the freedom to criticise religious views, and elements of American foreign policy, such as supporting Israel and failing to protect the Muslims of Bosnia and Chechnya, as hostile to Muslims all over the world. So al-Qaeda began launching spectacular attacks on symbols of American power:

Bomb attack on the World Trade Center (1993): six people killed, and over a thousand injured

Bomb attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (1998): 224 people killed, mostly Africans

Suicide bomb attack on USS Cole (2000): Seventeen killed

The West gradually learned to take al-Qaeda more seriously, until, on 11 September 2001, it launched its most spectacular coup: It hijacked four civilian airliners and crashed them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, bringing them both crashing down, and into the Pentagon; the fourth plane, presumably aiming for the White House, crashed into the ground. ‘9/11’ was the biggest terrorist attack in history and it stunned America.

War on Terror

President Bush immediately declared War on Terror, which initially meant war with Afghanistan. An American-led international coalition invaded the country, overthrew the Taliban, and installed a democratic government.

In 2003 President Bush started threatening Iraq, stating that President Saddam Hussein was storing weapons of mass destruction. When UN weapons inspectors said they couldn’t find any evidence of these weapons, Bush, with Britain’s Tony Blair beside him, went ahead and invaded anyway: Better safe than sorry. Bush also claimed that Saddam Hussein had supported al-Qaeda, which was unlikely, since Iraq was an aggressively secular state and Saddam had been persecuting Muslims for years, but the accusation helped sell the war to the American people.

The Iraq War quickly toppled Saddam: He was tracked down, tried, and hanged. The Iraqis got an elected government, but they also got a Mujahidin-style rising against the Americans and Brits which cost thousands of lives. As so often in the twentieth century, winning the war was much easier than winning the battles that followed. If only Bush and Blair had read this book.