Saturday, February 8, 2020

->1961


Yitzhak Rabin
Shimon Peres
Idi Amin
Pol Pot
Yasser Arafat
Martin Luther King
Hafez al-Assad
Boris Yeltsin
Václav Havel
Saddam Hussein
Kim Jong-il
Muammar Gaddafi
Osama bin Laden
Diana, Princess of Wales
Back to INDEX


Yitzhak Rabin (1922 – 1995)
Yitzhak Rabin was an Israeli politician, statesman and general. He was the fifth Prime Minister of Israel, serving 2 terms in office, 1974-77 and 1992 until his assassination. Rabin was Israel's minister of defense for much of the 1980s, including during the outbreak of the First Intifada in 1987, which began as an uprising of Palestinians against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. 

Rabin led a 27-year career as a soldier. As a teenager he joined a commando force. He eventually rose through its ranks to become its chief of operations during Israel's War of Independence. He joined the newly formed Israel Defense Forces in late 1948 and continued to rise as a promising officer. He was appointed Chief of the General Staff in 1964 and oversaw Israel's victory in the 1967 Six-Day War when Israel recovered the West Bank and the Gaza Strip that they lost in 1948. 

Rabin was born in Jerusalem to Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants of the third wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine from Europe. At the age of 18, Rabin's father emigrated to the United States, where he joined a Zion party. In 1917, Rabin's father went to Palestine with a group of volunteers from the Jewish Legion. Rabin's mother was a daughter of a rabbi opposed the Zionist movement and was sent to a Christian high school for girls. In 1919, Rabin's mother traveled to Palestine and after working on a kibbutz on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, she moved to Jerusalem. Rabin's parents met in Jerusalem during the 1920 riots. Rabin was non-religious.

In 1935, Rabin enrolled at an agricultural school on kibbutz that his mother founded. It was here in 1936 at the age of 14 that Rabin received his first military training, learning how to use a pistol and stand guard. He joined a socialist-Zionist youth movement. He originally aspired to be an irrigation engineer, but his interest in military affairs intensified in 1938, when the ongoing Arab revolt worsened. When he finished school, Rabin considered studying irrigation engineering on scholarship in the USA although he ultimately decided to stay and fight in Palestine. Rabin married during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. 

The 1948 Arab-Israeli War, or the Israeli War of Independence, was fought between the newly declared State of Israel and a military coalition of Arab states over the control of former British Palestine, forming the second and final stage of the 1947-49 Palestine war. There had been tension and conflict between the Arabs and the Jews, and between each of them and the British forces, ever since the 1920 creation of the British Mandate of Palestine. In 1947 these ongoing tensions erupted into civil war, following the adoption of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, which planned to divide Palestine into 3 areas: an Arab state, a Jewish state and the Special International Regime for the cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. 

Following the Israeli Declaration of Independence, a combined invasion by Egypt, Jordan and Syria, together with expeditionary forces from Iraq, entered Palestine. The invading forces took control of the Arab areas and immediately attacked Israeli forces and several Jewish settlements. As a result of the 10 month war, Transjordan took control of much of the West Bank which it annexed, and the Egyptian military took control of the Gaza Strip. No state was created for the Palestinian Arabs. The conflict triggered significant demographic change throughout the Middle East. Around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes in the area that became Israel, and they became Palestinian refugees. In the 3 years following the war, about 700,000 Jews immigrated to Israel, with many of them having been expelled from their previous countries of residence in the Middle East.

In 1941, during his practical training at kibbutz Rabin joined the newly formed Palmach, the elite fighting force of the Haganah. The Haganah was the underground army of the Jewish community during the period of the British Mandate for Palestine. It became the core of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). As a Palmachnik, Rabin and his men had to lie low to avoid arousing inquiry from the British administration. They spent most of their time farming, training secretly part-time. They wore no uniforms and received no public recognition during this time. 

After the end of the war the relationship between the Palmach and the British authorities became strained, especially with respect to the treatment of Jewish immigration. In 1945 Rabin was in charge of planning and later executing an operation for the release of interned immigrants. In a massive British operation against the leaders of the Jewish Establishment in the British Mandate of Palestine, Rabin was arrested and detained for 5 months. After his release he became the commander of the second Palmach battalion and rose to the position of Chief Operations Officer of the Palmach in 1947. During the 1948 Arab–Israeli War Rabin directed Israeli operations in Jerusalem and fought the Egyptian army in the Negev. In the beginning of 1949 he was a member of the Israeli delegation to the armistice talks with Egypt. Like many Palmach leaders, Rabin was politically aligned with the left wing pro-Soviet party. These officers were distrusted by Prime Minister David Ben Gurion and several resigned from the army in 1953 after a series of confrontations. 

In 1964 he was appointed chief of staff of the IDF when Ben-Gurion was replaced as Prime-Minister and Minister of Defense. Under his command, the IDF achieved victory over Egypt, Syria and Jordan in the Six-Day War in 1967. After the Old City of Jerusalem was captured by the IDF, Rabin was among the first to visit the Old City. Following his retirement from the IDF he became ambassador to the United States beginning in 1968, serving for 5 years. In this period the US became the major weapon supplier of Israel. During the 1973 Yom Kippur War he served in no official capacity and in the elections held at the end of 1973 he was elected to the Knesset. 

The Yom Kippur War, also known as the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, was a war fought for 19 days by a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria against Israel. It ended in a stalemate. The war took place mostly in Sinai and the Golan, occupied by Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War, with some fighting in African Egypt and northern Israel. Egypt's initial war objective was to use its military to seize a foothold on the east bank of the Suez Canal and use this to negotiate the return of the rest of Sinai. 

The war began when the Arab coalition launched a joint surprise attack on Israeli positions, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Judaism, which also occurred that year during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Egyptian and Syrian forces crossed ceasefire lines to enter the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights, respectively. Both the United States and the Soviet Union initiated massive resupply efforts to their respective allies during the war, and this led to a near-confrontation between the two nuclear superpowers.

Rabin was appointed Israeli Minister of Labor in 1974 in Golda Meir's short-lived government. Rabin was elected party leader, after he defeated Shimon Peres. The rivalry between these two Labor leaders remained fierce and they competed several times in the next 2 decades for the leadership role, and even for who deserved credit for government achievements. Rabin succeeded Golda Meir as Prime Minister of Israel Following her resignation in 1974. In foreign policy, the major development at the beginning of Rabin's term was the Sinai Interim Agreement between Israel and Egypt, signed in 1975. Both countries declared that the conflict between them and in the Middle East shall not be resolved by military force but by peaceful means. This agreement followed Henry Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy and a threatened "reassessment" of the United States' regional policy and its relations with Israel. The agreement was an important step towards the Camp David Accords of 1978 and the peace treaty with Egypt signed in 1979. 

In 1976 Rabin ordered the Entebbe raid, a successful counter-terrorist hostage-rescue mission in Uganda. A week earlier, a plane with 248 passengers had been hijacked. The hijackers had the stated objective to free 40 Palestinian and affiliated militants imprisoned in Israel and 13 prisoners in 4 other countries in exchange for the hostages. The Ugandan government supported the hijackers, and dictator Idi Amin personally welcomed them. After moving all hostages from the aircraft to a disused airport building, the hijackers separated all Israelis and several non-Israeli Jews from the larger group and forced them into a separate room. 

Over the following two days, 148 non-Israeli hostages were released. 94 mainly Israeli, passengers remained as hostages and were threatened with death. The hijackers threatened to kill the hostages if their prisoner release demands were not met. This threat led to the planning of the rescue operation. These plans included preparation for armed resistance from Ugandan troops. The operation took place at night. Israeli transport planes carried 100 commandos over 4,000 km to Uganda for the rescue operation. The operation, which took a week of planning, lasted 90 minutes. Of the remaining hostages, 102 were rescued, 5 Israeli commandos were wounded and one, unit commander was killed. All the hijackers, 3 hostages, and 45 Ugandan soldiers were killed, and 30 Soviet-built MiG-17s and MiG-21s of Uganda's air force were destroyed. Kenyan sources supported Israel, and in the aftermath of the operation, Idi Amin issued orders to retaliate and slaughter several hundred Kenyans then present in Uganda. 

When the first Intifada broke out, Rabin adopted harsh measures to stop the demonstrations, even authorizing the use of "Force, might and beatings," on the demonstrators. Rabin the "bone breaker" was used as an International image. The combination of the failure of the "Iron Fist" policy, Israel's deteriorating international image, and Jordan cutting legal and administrative ties to the West Bank with the U.S.'s recognition of the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people forced Rabin to seek an end to the violence through negotiation and dialogue with the PLO. From 1990 to 1992, Rabin again served as a Knesset member and sat on the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. 

In 1992 Rabin was elected as chairman of the Labor Party, winning against Shimon Peres. In the elections that year his party, strongly focusing on the popularity of its leader, managed to win over the Likud of incumbent Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Rabin formed the first Labor-led government in 15 years, supported by a coalition with a left wing party, and an ultra-orthodox religious party.

Rabin played a leading role in the signing of the Oslo Accords, which created the Palestinian National Authority and granted it partial control over parts of the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Prior to the signing of the accords, Rabin received a letter from PLO chairman Yasser Arafat renouncing violence and officially recognizing Israel, and on the same day Rabin sent Arafat a letter officially recognizing the PLO. 

After the announcement of the Oslo Accords there were many protest demonstrations in Israel objecting to the Accords. The Oslo agreement was also opposed by Hamas and other Palestinian factions, which launched suicide bombings at Israel. After the historical handshake with Yasser Arafat, Rabin said, on behalf of the Israeli people, "We who have fought against you, the Palestinians, we say to you today, in a loud and a clear voice, enough of blood and tears ... enough!" During this term of office, Rabin also oversaw the signing of the Israel-Jordan peace treaty in 1994. 

Rabin significantly reformed Israel's economy, as well as its education and healthcare systems. His government significantly expanded the privatization of business, moving away from the country's traditionally socialized economy. In 1993, his government set up a program, under which attractive tax incentives were offered to foreign venture capital funds that invested in Israel and promised to double any investment with government funding. As a result, foreign venture capital funds invested heavily in the growing Israeli high-tech industry, contributing to Israel's economic growth and status as a world leader in high-tech. In 1995, the National Health Insurance Law was passed. The law created Israel's universal health care system. Doctors' wages were raised by 50%. Education spending was raised by 70%, with new colleges being built in Israel's peripheral areas, and teachers' wages rising by one-fifth. 

For his role in the creation of the Oslo Accords, Rabin was awarded the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize, along with Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres. The Accords greatly divided Israeli society, with some seeing Rabin as a hero for advancing the cause of peace and some seeing him as a traitor for giving away land they viewed as rightfully belonging to Israel. Many Israelis on the right wing often blame him for Jewish deaths in terror attacks, attributing them to the Oslo agreements. 

In 1995 Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing extremist who opposed the signing of the Oslo Accords. After an emergency cabinet meeting, Israel's foreign minister, Shimon Peres, was appointed as acting Israeli prime minister. Rabin's assassination came as a great shock to the Israeli public and much of the rest of the world. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis thronged the square where Rabin was assassinated to mourn his death. Young people, in particular, turned out in large numbers, lighting memorial candles and singing peace songs. 

After his assassination, Rabin was hailed as a national symbol and came to embody the ethos of the "Israeli peace camp," despite his military career and hawkish views earlier in life.

Back to INDEX


Shimon Peres (1923 - 2016) 
Shimon Peres was an Israeli politician who served as ninth President of Israel for 7 years from 2007 to 2014. He was a member of 12 cabinets in a political career spanning 70 years. Peres was elected to the Knesset in 1959 and was in office until 2007, when he became President. From a young age, he was renowned for his oratorical brilliance, and was chosen as a protégé by David Ben Gurion, Israel's founding father. He began his political career in the late 1940s, holding several diplomatic and military positions during and directly after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. His first high-level government position was as Deputy Director-General of Defense in 1952 which he attained at the age of 28, and Director-General from 1953-1959. 

In 1994, Jordan and Israel signed the Israel-Jordan peace treaty, which had been initiated by himself and by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Peres won the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize together with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat for the peace talks that he participated in as Israeli Foreign Minister, producing the Oslo Accords. During his career, he represented 5 political parties in the Knesset. Peres was polyglot, speaking Polish, French, English, Russian, Yiddish and Hebrew, although he never lost his Polish accent when speaking in Hebrew. In his private life, he was a poet and songwriter, writing stanzas during cabinet meetings, with some of his poems later being recorded as songs in albums. 

Shimon Peres was born in Belarus. His father was a wealthy timber merchant, later branching out into other commodities. His mother was a librarian. Peres' grandfather had a great impact on his life. His family spoke Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian at home, and he learned Polish at school. He then learned to speak English and French. As a child, he grew up in his grandfather's home and was educated by him. His grandfather taught him the Talmud. At one time he heard his parents listening to the radio on the Sabbath and he smashed it.

In 1932, his father immigrated to Palestine and settled in Tel Aviv. The family followed him in 1934. At 15, he attended an agricultural school and lived in a Kibbutz for several years. In 1941 he was elected Secretary of a Labor Zionist youth movement, and in 1944 returned to the Kibbutz where he had an agricultural training and worked as a farmer and a shepherd. In 1944, Peres led an illicit expedition into the Negev, then a closed military zone requiring a permit to enter. The expedition, consisting of a group of teenagers, along with a Palmach scout, a zoologist, and an archaeologist, had been funded by Ben-Gurion to prospect the land for future Jewish settlement of the area so as to include it in the Jewish state. The group was arrested by a Bedouin camel patrol led by a British officer and fined and jailed for 2 weeks.

In 1947, Peres joined the Haganah, the predecessor of the Israel Defense Forces. David Ben-Gurion made him responsible for personnel and arms purchases; he was appointed to head the naval service when Israel received independence in 1948. In 1953, at age 29, he was appointed Director-General of the Ministry of Defense. He was involved in arms purchases and establishing strategic alliances that were important for the State of Israel. He was instrumental in establishing close relations with France, securing massive amounts of quality arms that, in turn, helped to tip the balance of power in the region. Owing to Peres' mediation, Israel acquired the advanced Dassault Mirage III French jet fighter, established the Dimona nuclear reactor and entered into a tri-national agreement with France and the United Kingdom, positioning Israel in what would become the 1956 Suez Crisis. Peres continued as a primary intermediary in the close French-Israeli alliance. He was often involved in tense negotiations with Charles de Gaulle over the Dimona project. 

From 1954, as Director-General of the Ministry of Defense, Peres was involved in the planning of the 1956 Suez War, in partnership with France and Britain. He was sent by David Ben-Gurion to Paris, where he held secret meetings with the French government. Peres was instrumental in negotiating the Franco-Israeli agreement for a military offensive. By 1955, France was shipping large amounts of weapons to Israel. In April 1956, following another visit to Paris by Peres, France agreed to disregard the Tripartite Declaration, and supply more weapons to Israel. Throughout the 1950s, an extraordinarily close relationship existed between France and Israel, characterized by unprecedented cooperation in the fields of defense and diplomacy. Britain and France enlisted Israeli support for an alliance against Egypt. The parties agreed that Israel would invade the Sinai. Britain and France would then intervene, purportedly to separate the warring Israeli and Egyptian forces, instructing both to withdraw to a distance of 16km from either side of the canal. The British and French would then argue, according to the plan, that Egypt's control of such an important route was too tenuous, and that it needed be placed under Anglo-French management. The 3 allies, especially Israel, were mainly successful in attaining their immediate military objectives. However, the extremely hostile reaction to the Suez Crisis from both the United States and the USSR forced them to withdraw, resulting in a failure of Britain and France's political and strategic aims of controlling the Suez Canal.

Peres was first elected to the Knesset in the 1959 elections. He was given the role of Deputy Defense Minister, which he filled until 1965. In 1963, he held negotiations with John F. Kennedy, which concluded with the sale of anti-aircraft missiles to Israel, the first sale of US military equipment to Israel. He continued to challenge Rabin for the chairmanship of the party, but in 1977, he again lost to Rabin in the party elections. In 1976, Peres, as Minister of Defense, along with Rabin, had to deal with a coordinated act of terrorism when 248 Paris-bound travelers on an Air France plane were taken hostage by pro-Palestinian hijackers and flown to Uganda, Africa, 2,000 miles away. Peres and Rabin were responsible for approving what became known as the Entebbe rescue operation. The rescue boosted the Rabin government's approval rating with the public. The only Israeli soldier that was killed during the successful rescue operation was its commander, the 30-year-old older brother of Benjamin Netanyahu. In the few days leading up to the operation, Peres and Rabin leaned toward different solutions. Rabin took steps to initiate negotiations, seeing no other option. Peres, however, felt that negotiating with terrorists, who were demanding the release of prisoners, would in effect be surrender, and thought a rescue operation should be planned. 

Peres succeeded Rabin as party leader prior to the 1977 elections when Rabin stepped down in the wake of a foreign currency scandal involving his wife. As Rabin could not legally resign from the transition government, he officially remained Prime Minister, while Peres became the unofficial acting Prime Minister. Likud under Begin won sufficient seats to form a coalition that excluded the left. After only a month on top, Peres assumed the role of opposition leader. From 1990 Peres led the opposition in the Knesset until, in early 1992, he was defeated in the first primary elections of the new Israeli Labor Party formed by Rabin, whom he had replaced 15 years earlier. Peres remained active in politics, however, serving as Rabin's foreign minister from 1992. 

Secret negotiations with Arafat's PLO organization led to the Oslo Accords, which won Peres, Rabin and Arafat the Nobel Peace Prize. But in 2002, members of the Norwegian committee that awards the annual Nobel Peace Prize stated they regretted that Mr Peres' prize could not be recalled because he had not acted to prevent Israel's re-occupation of Palestinian territory, he had not lived up to the ideals he expressed when he accepted the prize, and he was involved in human rights abuses. After Rabin's assassination in 1995, Peres served as Acting Prime Minister and Acting Defense Minister for 7 months until the 1996 elections, during which he attempted to maintain the momentum of the peace process. In 1994, Jordan and Israel signed the Israel-Jordan peace treaty, which had been initiated by Prime Minister Rabin and Foreign Minister Peres. The treaty brought an end to 46 years of official war between Israel and Jordan. In 1996, Prime Minister Peres conducted massive air raids and extensive shelling in southern Lebanon. 106 Lebanese civilians died when a UN compound was hit in an Israeli shelling. 

In 2000, Peres ran for a 7-year term as Israel's President, a ceremonial head of state position which usually authorizes the selection of Prime Minister. However, he lost to a Likud candidate. Peres made yet another comeback. He led Labor into a national unity government with Sharon's Likud and secured the post of Foreign Minister. Peres was much criticized on the left for clinging to his position as Foreign Minister in a government that was not seen as advancing the peace process, despite his own dovish stance. He left office only when Labor resigned from the government in advance of the 2003 elections. Peres again emerged as interim leader. He led the party into a coalition with Sharon once more at the end of 2004 when the latter's support of "disengagement" from Gaza presented a diplomatic program Labor could support.

In 2005 Peres announced that he was leaving the Labor Party to support Ariel Sharon and his new party. In the immediate aftermath of Sharon's debilitating stroke, there was speculation that Peres might take over as leader of the party. In 2007 Peres was elected President of the State of Israel by the Knesset. 58 of 120 members of the Knesset voted for him in the first round.
“Israel must not only be an asset but a value. A moral, cultural and scientific call for the promotion of man, every man. It must be a good and warm home for Jews who are not Israelis, as well as for Israelis who are not Jews. And it must create equal opportunities for all, without discriminating between religion, nationality, community or sex.”

Peres described himself as a "Ben-Gurionist", after his mentor Ben-Gurion. He felt that Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel was a means to a progressive end in which the State of Israel both inspire the world and survive in a region of the world where it was unwelcome. As a younger man, Peres was once considered a "hawk". He was a protégé of Ben-Gurion and Dayan and an early supporter of the West Bank settlers during the 1970s. However, after becoming the leader of his party his stance evolved. Subsequently, he was seen as a “dove”, and a strong supporter of peace through economic cooperation. While still opposed, like all mainstream Israeli leaders to talks with the PLO, he distanced himself from settlers and spoke of the need for "territorial compromise" over the West Bank and Gaza. For a time he hoped that King Hussein of Jordan could be Israel's Arab negotiating partner rather than Yasser Arafat. Peres met secretly with Hussein in London in 1987 and reached a framework agreement with him, but this was rejected by Israel's then Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir. Shortly afterward the First Intifada erupted, and whatever plausibility King Hussein had as a potential Israeli partner in resolving the fate of the West Bank evaporated. Subsequently, Peres gradually moved closer to support for talks with the PLO, although he avoided making an outright commitment to this policy until 1993.

On the issue of the nuclear program of Iran and the supposed existential threat this poses for Israel, Peres stated, "I am not in favor of a military attack on Iran, but we must quickly and decisively establish a strong, aggressive coalition of nations that will impose painful economic sanctions on Iran", adding "Iran's efforts to achieve nuclear weapons should keep the entire world from sleeping soundly." In the same speech, Peres compared Iranian President Ahmadinejad and his call to "wipe Israel off the map" to the genocidal threats to European Jewry made by Adolf Hitler in the years prior to the Holocaust. Peres remarked that "the president of Iran should remember that Iran can also be wiped off the map." However Peres prevented a military strike on Iran's nuclear program that had been ordered by Benjamin Netanyahu in 2010. 
“We will prove that innovation has no limits and no barriers. Innovation enables dialogue between nations and between people. It will enable all young people - Jews, Muslims and Christians - to engage in science and technology equally." 

Peres was one of the founders of Israel's technology sector. Through personal meetings with the French government, he established collaboration treaties with France's nuclear industry in 1954. He controlled all aspects of Israel's nuclear program. In the 1980s, he laid the economic foundations for Israel's start-up economy. In later years, he developed an obsessive fascination with nanotechnology and brain research. He believed that brain research would be the key to a better and more peaceful future. 

In 2016, Peres, aged 93, suffered a massive brain hemorrhage and significant bleeding causing irreversible damage to his brainstem and he died shortly after. 



On hearing of his death, tributes came from leaders across the world. The President of Russia, Vladimir Putin said: "I was extremely lucky to have met this extraordinary man many times. And every time I admired his courage, patriotism, wisdom, vision and ability." The President of China, Xi Jinping said: "His death is the loss of an old friend for China." The President of the United States, Barack Obama said: "I will always be grateful that I was able to call Shimon my friend."

Peres did more than anyone to build up his country’s formidable military might, then worked as hard to establish a lasting peace with Israel’s Arab neighbors. During his term, he promoted the use of the Internet in Israel and created the first website of an Israeli prime minister. However, he was narrowly defeated by Netanyahu in the first direct elections for Prime Minister. During his presidency (2007-2014), Peres was noted for his embrace of social media to communicate with the public, being described as Israel's first social media president which included producing comedic videos on his YouTube channel. His presence on platforms such as Snapchat, allowed him to pack more punch and humor into the causes he championed, especially peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians. 

Back to INDEX


Idi Amin ( 1923- 2003)
Idi Amin was a Ugandan political leader and military officer who served as the President of Uganda from 1971-1979 and fathered 40 official children by 7 official wives. As the years progressed, Amin's behavior became more erratic, unpredictable, and outspoken. During Amin's time in power, popular media outside of Uganda often portrayed him as an essentially comic and eccentric figure, a "killer and clown, big-hearted strutting buffoon". The foreign media were often criticized by Ugandan exiles and defectors for emphasizing Amin's self-aggrandizing eccentricities and taste for excess while downplaying or excusing his murderous behavior. Other commentators even suggested that Amin had deliberately cultivated his eccentric reputation in the foreign media as an easily parodied buffoon in order to defuse international concern over his administration of Uganda. 

The people of Uganda were hunter-gatherers until around 2,000 years ago, when Bantu-speaking populations migrated to the southern parts of the country. Arab traders moved inland from the Indian Ocean coast of East Africa in the 1830s. They were followed in the 1860s by British explorers searching for the source of the Nile. British Anglican missionaries arrived in 1877 and were followed by French Catholic missionaries 2 years later. 

The Uganda Martyrs were a group of 23 Anglican and 22 Catholic converts to Christianity who were executed on orders of the King of Buganda. The deaths took place at a time when there was a 3-way religious struggle for political influence at the Buganda royal court. The episode also occurred against the backdrop of the "Scramble for Africa." The invasion, occupation, division, colonization and annexation of African territory by European powers. The martyrs were used to enlist wider public support for the British acquisition of Uganda for the Empire. 

From 1886, there were a series of religious wars initially between Muslims and Christians and then, from 1890, between Protestants and Catholics. British commercial interests were ardent to protect the trade route of the Nile, which prompted the British government to annex Uganda and adjoining territories to create the Uganda Protectorate in 1894. The land was rich in mineral deposits and natural produce. 32,000 laborers from British India were recruited to East Africa under indentured labor contracts to construct the Uganda Railway. These immigrants formed the Ugandan middle class running most of the country's shops and businesses. The African Ugandans resented their conspicuous wealth. 

Beginning in 1894, the area was ruled as a protectorate by the British, who established administrative law across the territory. Uganda gained independence from Britain in 1962. The period since then has been marked by intermittent conflicts, including a lengthy civil war which has caused hundreds of thousands of casualties.

From 1900 to 1920, a sleeping sickness epidemic in the southern part of Uganda, along the north shores of Lake Victoria, killed more than 250,000 people. Uganda gained independence from Britain in 1962 as a Commonwealth realm with Queen Elizabeth II as head of state. In 1963, Uganda became a republic but maintained its membership in the Commonwealth of Nations. After a military coup in 1971, General Idi Amin seized control of the country. Amin ruled Uganda as dictator with the support of the military for the next 8 years. He carried out mass killings within the country to maintain his rule. An estimated 500,000 Ugandans lost their lives during his regime. Aside from his brutalities, he forcibly removed the entrepreneurial Indian minority from Uganda. Amin's reign was ended after the Uganda-Tanzania War in 1979, in which Tanzanian forces aided by Ugandan exiles invaded Uganda. 

Amin's regime was described by many countries as racist, erratic and unpredictable, brutal, inept, bellicose, irrational, ridiculous, and militaristic. It was characterized by rampant human rights abuses, political repression, ethnic persecution, extrajudicial killings, nepotism, corruption, and gross economic mismanagement. The number of people killed as a result of his regime is estimated to be up to 500,000 by international observers and human rights groups. 

Idi Amin was born of a tribe renowned for its fierce warriors. He was the son of convert from Roman Catholicism to Islam in 1910. Abandoned by his father at a young age, Idi grew up with his mother's family in a rural farming town in north-western Uganda. Idi`s mother was a traditional herbalist who treated members of Ugandan royalty. Amin joined an Islamic school in 1941. After a few years, he left school with only a fourth-grade English-language education. He did odd jobs before being recruited to the army by a British colonial army officer. His unusual size and strength brought him to the attention of the British army who were recruiting vicious and ruthless soldiers. He started as a private in 1947, and was promoted to Lieutenant in 1961 and to Colonel in 1965 and to Commander in Chief in 1970. 

Amin was the Ugandan light heavyweight boxing champion from 1951 to 1960. He was also a formidable rugby forward, although one officer said of him: "Idi Amin is a splendid type and a good rugby player, but virtually bone from the neck up, and needs things explained in words of one letter". In 1959, Amin was decorated with the highest rank possible for a black African in the colonial British Army of that time. In 1961, he was promoted to lieutenant, becoming one of the first two Ugandans to become commissioned officers. 

In 1965, Prime Minister Obote and Amin were implicated in a deal to smuggle ivory and gold into Uganda from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The deal was part of an arrangement to help troops opposed to the Congolese government trade ivory and gold for arms supplies secretly smuggled to them by Amin. In 1966, the Ugandan Parliament demanded an investigation. Amin began recruiting members of ethnic groups areas bordering South Sudan until his army consisted mainly of South Sudanese soldiers. Eventually a rift developed between Amin and Obote, exacerbated by the support Amin had built within the army by recruiting from the West Nile region, troubled by Amin`s involvement in operations to support the rebellion in southern Sudan and threatened by an attempt on life in 1969 which he suspected Amin orchestrated. 

In 1970, Obote took control of the armed forces, reducing Amin from his post of commander of all the armed forces to that of commander of the army. Having learned that Obote was planning to arrest him for misappropriating army funds, Amin seized power in a military coup in 1971, while Obote was attending a Commonwealth summit meeting in Singapore. Troops loyal to Amin sealed off Entebbe International Airport and took the capital city Kampala. Soldiers surrounded Obote's residence and blocked major roads. A broadcast on Radio Uganda accused Obote's government of corruption and preferential treatment of his home region. Obote took refuge in Tanzania, and was soon joined by 20,000 Ugandan refugees fleeing Amin. 

Amin retaliated against the attempted invasion by Ugandan exiles in 1972, by purging the army of Obote supporters. Soldiers were massacred and some 5,000 soldiers, and at least twice as many civilians, had disappeared. The victims soon came to include members of other ethnic groups, religious leaders, journalists, artists, senior bureaucrats, judges, lawyers, students and intellectuals, criminal suspects, and foreign nationals. In this atmosphere of violence, many other people were killed for criminal motives or simply at will. Bodies were often dumped into the River Nile. The killings, motivated by ethnic, political, and financial factors, continued throughout his 8 years in control with 500,000 people killed. Cheering crowds were reported in the streets of Kampala after the radio broadcast where Amin announced that he was a soldier, not a politician, and that the military government would remain only as a caretaker regime until new elections, which would be announced when the situation was normalized.. He promised to release all political prisoners and to hold free and fair elections to return the country to democratic rule in the shortest period possible. Many regarded Amin as a savior. 

One week after the coup, Amin declared himself President of Uganda, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Army Chief of Staff, and Chief of Air Staff. He announced that he was suspending certain provisions of the Ugandan constitution, and soon instituted an Advisory Defence Council composed of military officers with himself as the chairman. Amin placed military tribunals above the system of civil law, appointed soldiers to top government posts and agencies, and informed the newly inducted civilian cabinet ministers that they would be subject to military discipline. 

Amin, was known by the British as intensely loyal to Britain. This made him an obvious choice as Obote's successor who led a leftist government that the British was not too happy about. Amin went to London and unsuccessfully shopped around for arms to be able to suppress his enemies. Because of his atrocities, the British refused to give him the aid and arms he wanted. He was furious and to humiliate the British, when Briton fell into hard economic times a few years later, he set up a “Save the British Fund” which sent a few shipments of fruits and vegetables to Britain. 

Amin recruited his followers from his own Muslim ethnic group along with South Sudanese. By 1977 60% of the top generals and 75% of the cabinet came from this ethnic group. 85% in Amis administration were Muslim even though they formed only 5% percent of the population. This helps explain why Amin survived 8 attempted coups. The army grew from 10,000 to 25,000 by 1978. Amin's army was largely a mercenary force. Half the soldiers were South Sudanese and 26% Congolese, with only 24% being Ugandan, mostly Muslims. On the persecution of minorities, Amin only said that he was determined to make the ordinary Ugandan master of his own destiny and, above all, to see that he enjoys the wealth of his country. And that his goal is to transfer the economic control of Uganda into the hands of Ugandans, for the first time in their country's history. Amin declared an "economic war", and implemented a set of policies that included the expropriation of properties owned by Asians and Europeans. Uganda's 80,000 Asians were mostly from the Indian subcontinent and born in the country, their ancestors having come to Uganda in search of prosperity when India was still a British colony. Many owned businesses, including large-scale enterprises, which formed the backbone of the Ugandan economy. 

In 1972, Amin decided to humiliate the British for a second time by expelling 50,000 Indian immigrants with British passport. They were given 7 days to pack their things and leave. These were the professionals, the doctors and lawyers and entrepreneurs. Abandoned factories and businesses were given to the first one to claim them, often uneducated illiterates. The businesses were mismanaged, and industries collapsed from lack of maintenance until most were run into bankruptcy which proved disastrous for the already declining economy. This resulted in a total collapse of the Ugandan economic system and into total chaos and unrest. Critics of the regime were rounded up and shot as terrorists. Amin set up official departments where suspects brought in by the military and civic police for torture and executions. 

Initially, Amin was supported by Western powers such as Israel, West Germany and, in particular, Great Britain. During the late 1960s, Obote's move to the left, which included his Common Man's Charter and the nationalization of 80 British companies, had made the West worried that he would pose a threat to Western capitalist interests in Africa and make Uganda an ally of the Soviet Union. Following the expulsion of Ugandan Asians in 1972, most of whom were of Indian descent; India severed diplomatic relations with Uganda. The same year, as part of his "economic war", Amin broke diplomatic ties with the UK and nationalized all British-owned businesses which caused many Ugandans to look on Amin as a savior. 

Then Amin started to purge his army killing all those he felt would not support him. Then he started a genocide purging entire tribes he did not trust for support. While the British were delighted that Amin took over the leftist government, they were unable to control him because he was so unpredictable. He played the bumbling buffoon, but his intentions were deadly serious. 

Relations with Israel soured as Israel, like Britain, refused to support Amin because of his atrocities. In 1972 Amin expelled Israeli military advisers and turned to Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and the Soviet Union for support. Amin became an outspoken critic of Israel. In return, Gaddafi gave financial aid to Amin and the Soviet Union became Amin's largest arms supplier. 

In 1976, Amin allowed a hijacked plane filled with Jewish hostages taken from the Isreaili Olympic team in Munich, he allowed the plan to land at Entebbe Airport. In the subsequent Israeli rescue operation, a group of Israeli commandos were flown in from Israel and seized control of Entebbe Airport, freeing nearly all the hostages. 45 Ugandan soldiers guarding the airport were killed. Amin played out his humiliation by shooting 200 of his senior officials and the one remaining Jewish hostage, a 75-year-old. Amin gave his soldiers a machine gun and a license to kill. Many took that to be as well a license to plunder and rape.

By 1978, the number of Amin's supporters and close associates had shrunk significantly, and he faced increasing dissent from the populace within Uganda as the economy and infrastructure collapsed as a result of the years of neglect and abuse. Several of Amin's ministers defected or fled into exile. To distract his people from the carnage at home, he ordered the invasion of Tanzanian territory, and formally annexed a part. But his troops had only combat experience with unarmed civilians and were no match for the Tanzanian army who counter attacked with groups of Ugandan exiles,. Amin's army retreated steadily, and, despite military help from Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, Amin was forced to flee into exile when the invading Tanzanian army captured the capital city Kampala. He escaped first to Libya, where he stayed until 1980, and ultimately settled in Saudi Arabia, where the Saudi royal family allowed him sanctuary and paid him a generous subsidy in return for his staying out of politics. Amin lived for a number of years on the top 2 floors of the Novotel Hotel. In 2003, Amin was in a coma and near death from kidney failure and died at the hospital. 

We souls who have made this presentation all agree with the assessment that Idi, an uneducated illiterate was a killer of 500,000 people and a clown who played a strutting buffoon but was a clever calculating monster who brought about a tragedy of monumental proportions. He slaughtered thousands of innocent Ugandans in a campaign of ethnic cleansing and executed his enemies live on TV. He ordered his soldiers to torture and kill using sledge hammers while Amin kept the pictures for his own sick amusement. He turned the prosperous country Uganda into a disease ridden backwater Its rivers choked with the corpses of his victims. 

Back to INDEX


Pol Pot (1925 - 1998) 
Pol Pot was a Cambodian politician, revolutionary and mass murderer who led the Khmer Rouge for 34 years from 1963-1997. From 1963-1981, he served 8 years as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. He became the leader of Cambodia in 1975, when his forces captured Phnom Penh. From 1976-1979, he also served as the Prime Minister of Cambodia.

12,000 years ago after the Ice Age, humans occupied Cambodia. The land was rich in quartz and quartzite and the inhabitants left behind many tools. 6,000 years later, hunter-gatherers inhabited the region and left behind their earthenware ceramics. 3,000BC, witnessed the gradual penetration of the first rice farmers from the north. Iron was worked by about 500BC.

In 802AD, the warring Khmer princes were united under the name "Kambuja" marking the beginning of the Khmer Empire which flourished for over 600 years, allowing successive kings to control and exert influence over much of Southeast Asia and accumulate immense power and wealth. The Indianized kingdom facilitated the spread of first Hinduism, then Buddhism to much of Southeast Asia. 

In 1863 Cambodia became a protectorate of France which doubled the size of the country by reclaiming the north and west from Thailand. Cambodia gained independence in 1953. The Vietnam War extended into the country with the US bombing of Cambodia from 1969-1973. Following the Cambodian coup of 1970, the deposed king gave his support to his former enemies, the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge emerged as a major power, taking Phnom Penh in 1975 and later carrying out the Cambodian Genocide from 1975-1979, when they were ousted by Vietnam in the Cambodian-Vietnamese War (1979-91).

The Cambodian genocide was carried out by the Khmer Rouge regime led by Pol Pot in which 2 million Cambodians died or were killed by the regime. The Cambodian Civil War resulted in the establishment of Democratic Kampuchea by the Khmer Rouge, who had planned to create a form of agrarian socialism founded on the ideals of Stalinism and Maoism. Pot Pol presided over a totalitarian dictatorship, in which his government made urban dwellers move to the countryside to work in collective farms and on forced labor projects. The subsequent policies led to forced relocation of the population from urban centers, and to torture, ethnic cleansing of Chinese and Vietnamese urban immigrants, mass executions, use of forced labor, malnutrition, and disease. This led to the deaths of 2,000,000 people, 25% of the total population. The genocide ended in 1979 following the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. 

After Cambodia lost the Cambodian-Vietnamese War in 1979, Pol Pot relocated to the jungles of southwest Cambodia, and the Khmer Rouge government collapsed. For 18 years, from 1979-1997, Pot and a remnant of the old Khmer Rouge operated near the border of Cambodia and Thailand. Until 1993, they clung to power as part of a coalition government that was internationally recognized as the rightful government of Cambodia. 

Pot Pol`s father was a rice farmer who owned 12 hectares (120m x 1000m) of land and several buffaloes. The family was considered moderately wealthy by the standards of the day. At the age of 6 he was sent to a Buddhist monastery in a bustling multi-cultural city where he felt like a “dark monkey from the mountains” and as he grew older, he felt the resentment of the rural population of Cambodia towards the ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese urban inhabitants. He qualified for a scholarship for technical studies in France and studied radio electronics in Paris for 4 years from 1949-1953. He also participated in an international labor brigade building roads in Zagreb in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1950. After the Soviet Union recognized the Viet Minh as the government of Vietnam in 1950, French Communists took up the cause of Vietnam's independence. A year later he joined a communist cell in a secret organization which had taken control of the Khmer Student's Association. He was given the task of evaluating the various groups rebelling against the government. 

After Cambodian independence in 1954, both left and right wing parties struggled for power in the new government. Corrupt elections in 1955 led many leftists in Cambodia to abandon hope of taking power by legal means. In 1962, the Cambodian government arrested most of the leadership of the far-left party before parliamentary elections. Their newspapers and other publications were closed. Such measures had effectively ended any legitimate political role of the socialist movement in Cambodia. The underground communist party secretary was arrested and later killed while in custody, allowing Pot to become the acting leader. At a 1963 party meeting, attended by at most 18 people, he was elected secretary of the party's central committee. He went into hiding after his name was published in a list of leftist suspects. He fled to the Vietnamese border region and made contact with Vietnamese units fighting against South Vietnam.

In 1964, Pot convinced the Vietnamese to help the Cambodian socialists set up their own base camp. The party's central committee met later that year and issued a declaration calling for armed struggle, emphasizing "self-reliance". In the border camps, the ideology of the Khmer Rouge was gradually developed. The central committee members having grown up in a feudal peasant society broke with Marxism, declared that rural peasant farmers were the true working class proletarian and lifeblood of the revolution. A year later and after another wave of repression by king Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge (KR) movement under Pot grew at a rapid rate. Many teachers and students left the cities for the countryside to join the movement.

In 1966, Pot organized a party meeting where a number of important decisions were made. The party was officially, but secretly, renamed the Communist Party of Kampuchea. Lower ranks of the party were not informed of the decision. It was also decided to establish command zones and prepare each region for an uprising against the government. A year later, Pot launched a national uprising with a raid on an army base in an area which already saw 2 years of great peasant unrest. The attack was driven off by the army, but the KR captured a number of weapons, which were then used to drive police forces out of Cambodian villages.

Pot began transitioning from a party leader working with a collective leadership, into the absolutist leader of the KR movement. Where before he had shared communal quarters with other leaders, he now had his own compound with a personal staff and guards. Outsiders were no longer allowed to approach him. Rather, people were summoned into his presence by his staff. The movement was estimated to consist of no more than 200 regular members, but the core of the movement was supported by a number of villages many times that size. While weapons were in short supply, the insurgency still operated in 12 out of 19 districts of Cambodia. In 1969, Pot called a party conference and decided to change the party's propaganda strategy. Before 1969, opposition to King Sihanouk was the main focus of its propaganda. However, in 1969, the party decided to shift the focus of its propaganda in order to oppose the right-wing parties of Cambodia and their alleged pro-American attitudes. While the party ceased making anti-Sihanouk statements in public, in private the party had not changed its view of him.

The road to power for Pot and the KR was opened by the events of 1970, in Cambodia. While he was out of the country, King Sihanouk ordered the government to stage anti-Vietnamese protests in the capital. The protests quickly spilled out of control and the embassies of both North and South Vietnam were wrecked. Sihanouk, who had ordered the protests, then denounced them from Paris and blamed unnamed individuals in Cambodia for inciting them. These actions, along with clandestine operations by Sihanouk's followers in Cambodia, convinced the government that he should be removed as king and head of state. The National Assembly voted to remove Sihanouk from office and closed Cambodia's ports to North Vietnamese weapons traffic, demanding that the North Vietnamese leave Cambodia. The North Vietnamese reacted to the political changes in Cambodia by forming an alliance with the KR and offering them whatever resources they wanted for their insurgency against the Cambodian government. Shortly afterward, Sihanouk issued an appeal by radio to the people of Cambodia asking them to rise up against the government and to support the KR. In 1970, Pot finally returned to Cambodia and the insurgency gained traction.

Pol Pot won the war due to support from Sihanouk, massive supplies of military aid from North Vietnam, government corruption, the cut-off of U.S. air support, and the determination of the Cambodian Socialists. Throughout 1971, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong did most of the fighting against the Cambodian government while Pot and the KR functioned almost as auxiliaries to their forces. He took advantage of the situation in order to gather in new recruits and to train them according to a higher standard than was previously possible. He also put the resources of all KR organizations into political education and indoctrination. While accepting anyone regardless of background into the KR army at this time, Pot greatly increased the requirements for membership in the party. Students and so-called "middle peasants" were now rejected by the party. Those with clear peasant backgrounds were the preferred recruits for party membership. These restrictions were ironic in that most of the senior party leadership including Pot came from student and middle peasant backgrounds. They also created an intellectual split between the educated old guard party members and the uneducated peasant new party members.

In 1972, the guerrilla fighters started to send all the inhabitants of the villages and towns they occupied into the forest to live. They often burnt their homes, so that they would have nothing to come back to. The KR systematically destroyed food sources that could not be easily subjected to centralized storage and control, cut down fruit trees, forbade fishing, outlawed the planting or harvesting of mountain leap rice, abolished medicine and hospitals, forced people to march long distances without access to water, exported food, and refused offers of humanitarian aid. 

As a result, a humanitarian catastrophe unfolded: hundreds of thousands died of starvation and brutal government-inflicted overwork in the countryside. To the KR, outside aid went against their principle of national self-reliance. While the peasants were starving due to the influx of the city population, the KR exported 150,000 tons of rice in 1976 alone. Coop chiefs often reported better yields to their supervisors than they had actually achieved. The coop was then taxed on the rice it reportedly produced. Rice was taken out of the people's mouths and given to the Center to make up for these inflated numbers. 

Pot toured the insurgent/North Vietnamese controlled areas in Cambodia. He saw a regular KR army of 35,000 men taking shape supported by around 100,000 irregulars. China was supplying weapons. Pot organized an independent revenue source for the party in the form of rubber plantations in eastern Cambodia using forced labor. After a central committee meeting in 1972, the party under the direction of Pot began to enforce new levels of discipline and conformity in areas under their control. Minorities were forced to conform to Cambodian styles of dress and appearance. The prohibition to wear jewelry was soon extended to the whole population. A haphazard version of land reform was undertaken by Pot. Its basis was that all land holdings should be of uniform size. The party also confiscated all private means of transportation. The 1972 policies were aimed at reducing the peoples of the liberated areas to a sort of feudal peasant equality. These policies were generally favorable at the time to poor peasants and were extremely unfavorable to refugees from towns who were forced into the countryside.

When the North Vietnamese army's forces began to withdraw from the fighting against the Cambodian government, Pot issued a new set of decrees that started the process of reorganizing peasant villages into cooperatives where property was jointly owned and where individual possessions were banned. The KR advanced during 1973. After they reached the outskirts of Phnom Penh, Pot issued orders during the peak of the rainy season that the city be taken. The orders led to futile attacks and wasted lives within the KR army. By the middle of 1973, the KR under Pot controlled almost two-thirds of the country and half the population. North Vietnam realized that it no longer controlled the situation and it began to treat Pot as more of an equal leader than as a junior partner.

In late 1973, Pot made strategic decisions that determined the future of the war. First, he decided to cut the capital off from contact with outside sources of supplies, putting the city under siege. Second, he enforced tight control over people trying to leave the city through KR lines. He also ordered a series of general purges of former government officials, and anyone with an education. A set of new prisons was also constructed in KR run areas. A revolt to uprising was quickly crushed and Pot ordered that harsh physical torture be used against most of those involved in the revolt. The KR had a policy of evacuating urban areas and forcibly relocating their residents to the countryside. He wrote: "if the result of so many sacrifices was that the capitalists remain in control, what was the point of the revolution?"

In 1974, Pot gathered the central committee of the party together. As the military campaign was moving toward a conclusion, he decided to move the party toward implementing a socialist transformation of the country in the form of a series of decisions, the first being to evacuate the main cities, moving the population to the countryside. The second dictated that they would cease putting money into circulation and quickly phase it out. The final decision was that the party accept his purges of party officials. 

The KR was positioned for a final offensive against the government in 1975. Sihanouk proudly announced Pot's "death list" of enemies who were to be killed after victory. The list, which originally contained 7 names, was expanded to 23, and it included the names of all senior government leaders along with the names of all officials who were in positions of leadership within the police and military. The rivalry between Vietnam and Cambodia also came out into the open. North Vietnam, as the rival socialist country in Indochina, was determined to take Saigon before the KR took Phnom Penh.

In 1975, the government formed a Supreme National Council with new leadership, with the aim of negotiating surrender to the KR. Pot reacted to this by adding the names of everyone involved in the Supreme National Council onto his post-victory death list. Government resistance finally collapsed soon after when the KR took Phnom Penh. As the leader of the Communist Party, Pot became the de-facto leader of the country. He adopted the title "brother number one" or "Pol Pot" which he became known as. Cambodia adopted a new constitution in 1976, officially changing the country's name to "Democratic Kampuchea". The newly established Representative Assembly held its first plenary session electing a new government with Pol Pot as Prime Minister. Sihanouk received no role in the government and was placed in detention. 

The KR regime saw agriculture as the key to nation-building and national defense. Pol Pot's goal for the country was to have 70-80% of the farm mechanization completed within 5-10 years, to build a modern industrial base on the farm mechanization within 15-20 years, and to become a self-sufficient state. He wanted to take the economy and make it the primary source of goods for the nation. Internationally, Pot and the KR gained the recognition of 63 countries as the true government of Cambodia. Pot Pol then severed foreign relationships, and radically reconstruct the society to maximize the production of agriculture. To avoid foreign domination of industries, he refused to purchase goods from other countries.

Immediately after the fall of Phnom Penh, the KR began to implement their concept of Year Zero and ordered the complete evacuation of Phnom Penh and all other recently captured major towns and cities. Those leaving were told that the evacuation was due to the threat of severe American bombing and that it would last for no more than a few days. Western media depicted the events as a "death march", with American sources predicting that the KR policy of forced evacuation would result in famine and the mass death of hundreds of thousands. Pol Pot and the KR had been evacuating captured urban areas for many years, but the evacuation of Phnom Penh was unique in its scale. Pot stated that the first step in progress was deliberately designed to exterminate an entire class. 

Property was collectivized, and education was dispensed at communal schools. Children were raised on a communal basis. Even meals were prepared and eaten communally. Pol Pot's regime was extremely paranoid. Political dissent and opposition was not permitted. People were treated as opponents based on their appearance or background. Torture was widespread, thousands of politicians and bureaucrats accused of association with previous governments were executed. The régime turned Phnom Penh into a ghost city, while people in the countryside died of starvation or illnesses, or were simply killed. There were more than 20,000 mass graves from the Khmer Rouge era all over Cambodia. The death toll reached 2,000,000, with half of those deaths being due to executions, and the rest being attributable to starvation and disease. Many were saved by international aid after the Vietnamese invasion.

Pol Pot aligned the country diplomatically with the People's Republic of China and adopted an anti-Soviet line. China had supplied the KR with weapons for years before they took power This alignment was more political and practical than it was ideological. Vietnam was aligned with the Soviet Union, so Cambodia aligned itself with the Asian rival of the Soviet Union and Vietnam. 

In 1976, Pol Pot's regime reclassified Kampucheans into 3 groupings: as full-rights people, as candidates and as depositees, so-called because they included most of the new people who had been deposited from the cities into the communes. Depositees were marked for destruction. Their rations were reduced to 2 bowls of rice soup per day, leading to widespread starvation. The KR leadership boasted over the state-controlled radio that only 1-2 million people were needed to build the new agrarian socialist utopia. As for the others, as their proverb put it, "To keep you is no benefit; to destroy you is no loss." Hundreds of thousands of the depositees were taken out in shackles to dig their own mass graves. Then the KR soldiers buried them alive. A KR extermination prison directive ordered "Bullets are not to be wasted." Such mass graves were referred to as "the Killing Fields".

When the city population was decimated, Pot Pol turned his cleansing fury to the many ethnic minorities, especially the ethnic Vietnamese. The KR classified people based on their religious and ethnic backgrounds. It had a policy of state atheism. All religions were banned, and the repression of adherents of Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism was extensive. Nearly 25,000 Buddhist monks were massacred by the regime. The regime dispersed minority groups, forbidding them to either speak their languages or practice their customs. They especially targeted Muslims, Christians, Western-educated intellectuals, educated people in general, people who had contact with Western countries or with Vietnam, disabled people, and the ethnic Chinese, Laotians, and Vietnamese. Some were put in camps for interrogation involving torture in cases where a confession was useful to the government. Many others were summarily executed. Husbands with Vietnamese wives were instructed to kill their wives. People that looked Vietnamese were killed.

As Pot Pol`s power grew, so did his paranoia. He began to see enemies everywhere, even among his own supporters. The same year he issued directives to the senior KR leadership to the effect that Vietnam was now an enemy. KR commanders told their men that war with Vietnam was inevitable and that once the war started their goal would be to recover parts of Vietnam that were once part of Cambodia, whose people, they alleged, were struggling for independence from Vietnam. A year later, Cambodia launched raids over the border, which once again left a trail of murder and destruction in villages killing or injuring 1,000 people. 3 days after the raid, Pol Pot officially announced the existence of the formerly secret Communist Party of Kampuchea and finally announced to the world that the country was a Communist state. 

Vietnam sent 50,000 troops into Cambodia in what amounted to a short raid. The raid was meant to be secret. The Vietnamese withdrew after declaring that they had achieved their goals, and the invasion was just a warning. Upon being threatened, the Vietnamese army promised to return with support from the Soviet Union. Pol Pot's actions made the operation much more visible than the Vietnamese had intended and they created a situation in which Vietnam appeared to be weak.

Vietnam also tried to pressure Cambodia through China. However, China's refusal to pressure Cambodia and insist on providing it weapons were both signs that China also intended to act against Vietnam. After making one final attempt to negotiate a settlement with Cambodia, Vietnam decided that it had to prepare for a full-scale war.

When Cambodian socialists rebelled in the eastern zone in 1978, Pot's armies could not crush them quickly. His radio broadcast a call not only to exterminate the 50 million Vietnamese but also to purify the masses of the people of Cambodia. Of 1.5 million easterners, branded as Khmer bodies with Vietnamese minds, at least 100,000 were exterminated in 6 months. Later that year, in response to threats to its borders and the Vietnamese people, Vietnam attacked Cambodia to overthrow the KR. 

The Cambodian army was defeated and Pol Pot fled to the Thai border area. In 1979, Vietnam installed a new government. Pot eventually regrouped with his core supporters in the Thai border area where he received shelter and assistance. Thailand used the KR as a buffer force to keep the Vietnamese away from the border. They also made money from the shipments of weapons from China to the KR. Eventually, Pol Pot rebuilt a small military force in the west of the country with the help of China. China was the main supporter of the KR and its leader Pot. The Chinese provided financial and military support to the party even after its overthrow in 1979.The UN also recognized the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea, which included the KR.

In 1985, the Vietnamese launched a major offensive and overran most of the KR and other insurgent positions. The KR headquarters were completely destroyed. Pot fled to Thailand where he lived for the next 6 years. He officially resigned from the party in 1985 citing asthma as a contributing factor, but he continued to be the de facto leader of the KR and he also remained a dominant force within the anti-Vietnamese alliance. 

In 1989, Vietnam withdrew from Cambodia. The KR established a new stronghold in the west near the Thai border and Pot relocated back into Cambodia from Thailand. He refused to cooperate with the peace process, and he continued to fight against the new coalition government. The KR kept the government forces at bay until 1996, when troops started deserting. Several important KR leaders also defected. The government followed a policy of making peace with KR individuals and groups, after negotiations with the organization as a whole failed. In 1995, Pot experienced a stroke that paralyzed the left side of his body. He ordered the execution of his lifelong right-hand man in 1997 for attempting to make a settlement with the government along with 11 members of his family. Pot was arrested and sentenced to death by a Phnom Penh court but he was given asylum by the KR. 

In 1998, 2 days before the 23rd anniversary of the KR takeover of Phnom Penh, the Voice of America, of which Pol Pot was a devoted listener, announced that the KR had agreed to turn Pol Pot over to an international tribunal. According to Pot`s wife, Pol died in his bed later that night while waiting to be moved to another location. 

Pot Pol was a man who was able to hold on to power by eliminating any and all opposition. Because he could be so generous, kind and loving like a grandfather many Cambodians refuse to believe what a psychopath Pot Pol really was. His psychotic hatred for the Vietnamese was his undoing. Unlike many communist leaders, Pol Pot never became the object of a personality cult. Even in power, the party maintained the secrecy it had kept up during its years in the battlefield and his sisters did not know their brother was Pot Pol. He accused those who opposed him of being traitors and "puppets" of the Vietnamese. He knew that many people in the country hated him for the killings that he deemed necessary. He was like the master in a house who didn't know what the kids were up to. He trusted people too much. He delegated people to take care of central committee business for him, to take care of intellectuals, and to take care of political education. These were the people to whom he felt very close, and he trusted them completely. Then in the end ... they made a mess of everything.

Back to INDEX


Yasser Arafat (1929 – 2004)
Yasser Arafat was a Palestinian political leader. He was Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) 35 years from 1969 until he died, and President of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) the last 10 years of his life. Ideologically an Arab nationalist, he was a founding member of the Fatah political party, which he led for 45 years from 1959 until he died. Opposed to the 1948 creation of the State of Israel, he fought alongside the Muslim Brotherhood during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. 

The Muslim Brotherhood is transnational Sunni Islamist organization founded in Egypt in 1928. For many years the movement was financed by Saudi Arabia, with which it shared some enemies and some points of doctrine, and in 2012 sponsored the elected political party in Egypt. However, it faced periodic government crackdowns for alleged terrorist activities, and as of 2015 is considered a terrorist organization by the governments of Bahrain, Egypt, Russia, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The Brotherhood's stated goal is to instill the Quran and the Sunnah as the "sole reference point for ... ordering the life of the Muslim family, individual, community ... and state". As a Pan-Islamic, religious, and social movement, it preached Islam, taught the illiterate, and set up hospitals and business enterprises. The group spread to other Muslim countries but has its largest organizations in Egypt despite a succession of government crackdowns in 1948, 1954, 1965, and 2013 after plots, or alleged plots, of assassination and overthrow were uncovered. The Brotherhood itself claims to be a peaceful, democratic organization, and that its leader "condemns violence and violent acts". 

The Arab Spring brought it legalization and substantial political power at first, but as of 2013 it has suffered severe reversals. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was legalized in 2011 and won several elections, including the 2012 presidential election when its candidate Mohamed Morsi became Egypt's first democratically elected president, though one year later, following massive demonstrations and unrest, he was overthrown by the military and placed under house arrest. The organization gained supporters throughout the Arab world and influenced other Islamist groups such as Hamas with its "model of political activism combined with Islamic charity work."

Hamas is a Palestinian Sunni-Islamic fundamentalist organization. It has a social service wing and a military wing. It has been the de facto governing authority of the Gaza Strip since its takeover of that area in 2007. During this period it fought several wars with Israel. Hamas was founded in 1987, soon after the First Intifada broke out. This was a Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Hamas is an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas was founded to liberate Palestine, including modern-day Israel, from Israeli occupation and to establish an Islamic state in the area that is now Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The military wing of Hamas has launched attacks against Israeli civilians and soldiers, often describing them as retaliatory, in particular for assassinations of the upper echelon of their leadership. Tactics have included suicide bombings and, since 2001, rocket attacks. Hamas's rocket arsenal, though mainly consisting of short-range homemade rockets, also includes long-range weapons that have reached major Israeli cities.

The attacks on civilians have been condemned as war crimes and crimes against humanity by human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch. A 2017 poll in the Palestinian territories revealed that Hamas violence and rhetoric against Israelis are unpopular and that a majority of Palestinians would rather Hamas "accept a permanent two-state solution based on the 1967 borders." In 2006, Hamas won a plurality in the Palestinian Parliament, defeating the PLO-affiliated Fatah party. Following the elections, the United States, Russia, United Nations, and European Union made future foreign assistance to the Palestinians conditional upon the future government's commitment to non-violence, recognition of the state of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements. Hamas rejected those changes, which led to the Quartet suspending its foreign assistance program and Israel imposing economic sanctions on the Hamas-led administration. 

In the latter part of the 1950s Arafat co-founded Fatah, a paramilitary organization seeking the disestablishment of Israel and its replacement with a Palestinian state. Fatah operated within several Arab countries, from where it launched attacks on Israeli targets. In the latter part of the 1960s Arafat's profile grew. In 1967 he joined the PLO and in 1969 was elected chair of the Palestinian National Council (PNC). Fatah's growing presence in Jordan resulted in military clashes with King Hussein's Jordanian government and in the early 1970s it relocated to Lebanon. There, Fatah assisted the Lebanese National Movement during the Lebanese Civil War and continued its attacks on Israel, resulting in it becoming a major target of Israel's 1978 and 1982 invasions. From 1983-1993, Arafat based himself in Tunisia, and began to shift his approach from open conflict with the Israelis to negotiation. In 1988, he acknowledged Israel's right to exist and sought a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In 1994 he returned to Palestine, settling in Gaza City and promoting self-governance for the Palestinian territories. He engaged in a series of negotiations with the Israeli government to end the conflict between it and the PLO. 

In 1994 Arafat received the Nobel Peace Prize, together with Rabin and Peres, for the negotiations at Oslo. At the time, Fatah's support among the Palestinians declined with the growth of Hamas and other militant rivals. In late 2004, after effectively being confined within his Ramallah compound for over 2 years by the Israeli army, Arafat fell into a coma and died. While the cause of Arafat's death has remained the subject of speculation, investigations by Russian and French teams determined no foul play was involved. Sharon's inner circle constantly discussed how to get rid of Arafat months and weeks before his death. In 2003, the Israeli security Cabinet decided to remove Arafat. In a statement it said "Recent days' events have proven again that Arafat is a complete obstacle to any process of reconciliation... Israel will act to remove this obstacle in the manner, at the time, and in the ways that will be decided on separately..." Prime Minister Sharon refused to give a timetable for his removal, because "It depends on what happens on the ground,". Sharon said: "Arafat is responsible for the killing of hundreds, if not thousands, of Jews,...The sword is hanging over his head, and this is a good thing." Arafat is a controversial figure. The majority of the Palestinian people view him as a heroic freedom fighter and martyr who symbolized the national aspirations of his people. Conversely, most Israelis view him as an unrepentant terrorist. Palestinian rivals, including Islamists and several PLO leftists, denounce him for being corrupt or too submissive in his concessions to the Israeli government. 

Arafat was born to Palestinian parents in Cairo, Egypt, where he spent most of his youth. His mother died from a kidney ailment in 1933, when Arafat was 4 years old. Arafat was heavily beaten by his father for going to the Jewish quarter in Cairo and attending religious services. When she asked Arafat why he would not stop going, he responded by saying that he wanted to study Jewish mentality. At university, he engaged Jews in discussion and read publications by prominent Zionists. By 1946 he was an Arab nationalist and began procuring weapons to be smuggled into the former British Mandate of Palestine.

During the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Arafat left the University and, along with other Arabs, sought to enter Palestine to join Arab forces fighting against Israeli troops and the creation of the state of Israel. However, instead of joining the ranks of the Palestinian Fedayeen, who were training suicide bombers, Arafat fought alongside the Muslim Brotherhood, although he did not join the organization. He took part in combat in the Gaza area. As the war was winding down in Israel's favor, Arafat returned to Cairo from a lack of logistical support. 

Following the Suez Crisis in 1956, Egyptian president Nasser agreed to allow the United Nations Emergency Force to establish itself in the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip, precipitating the expulsion of all guerrilla or "Fedayeen" forces there—including Arafat. Arafat originally attempted to obtain a visa to Canada and later Saudi Arabia, but was unsuccessful in both attempts. In 1957, he applied for a visa to Kuwait which was at the time a British protectorate and was approved, based on his work in civil engineering. There he encountered 2 Palestinian friends, both official members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Both would later become Arafat's top aides. Arafat obtained a temporary job as a schoolteacher. As Arafat began to develop friendships with Palestinian refugees, he and the others gradually founded the group that became known as Fatah which translated into "The Palestinian National Liberation Movement".

Fatah dedicated itself to the liberation of Palestine by an armed struggle carried out by Palestinians themselves. This differed from other Palestinian political and guerrilla organizations, most of which firmly believed in a united Arab response. In accordance with his ideology, Arafat generally refused to accept donations to his organization from major Arab governments, in order to act independently of them. He did not want to alienate them, and sought their undivided support by avoiding ideological alliances. However, to establish the groundwork for Fatah's future financial support, he enlisted contributions from the many wealthy Palestinians working in Kuwait and other Arab states of the Persian Gulf, such as Qatar. These businessmen and oil workers contributed generously to the Fatah organization. Arafat continued this process in other Arab countries, such as Libya and Syria. 

In 1962, Arafat and his closest companions migrated to Syria, a country sharing a border with Israel which had recently seceded from its union with Egypt. Fatah had 300 members by this time, but none were fighters. In Syria, he managed to recruit members by offering them higher incomes to enable his armed attacks against Israel. Fatah's manpower was incremented further after Arafat decided to offer new recruits much higher salaries than members of the PLA, the regular military force of the PLO, which was created by the Arab League in 1964. 

In 1966, Israel launched a major raid against a Jordanian administered West Bank town in response to a Fatah-implemented roadside bomb attack which had killed 3 members of the Israeli security forces. In the resulting skirmish, scores of Jordanian security forces were killed and 125 homes razed. Nasser moved his army and air force to the border of Israel in a threatening show of might. In a surprise move, Isreal attacked first. 

The 6-Day war began in 1967 when Israel launched airstrikes against Egypt's air force. The war ended in an Arab defeat and Israel's occupation of several Arab territories, including the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Although Nasser and his Arab allies had been defeated, Arafat and Fatah could claim a victory, in that the majority of Palestinians, who had up to that time tended to align and sympathize with individual Arab governments, now began to agree that a 'Palestinian' solution to their dilemma was indispensable. 

In the late 1960s, tensions between Palestinians and the Jordanian government increased greatly; heavily armed Palestinian elements had created a virtual "state within a state" in Jordan, eventually controlling several strategic positions in that country. Fatah and other Palestinian militias began taking control of civil life in Jordan. They set up roadblocks, publicly humiliated Jordanian police forces, molested women and levied illegal taxes—all of which Arafat either condoned or ignored. King Hussein of Jordan considered this a growing threat to his kingdom's sovereignty and security, and attempted to disarm the militias. However, in order to avoid a military confrontation with opposition forces, Hussein dismissed several of his anti-PLO cabinet officials, including some of his own family members, and invited Arafat to become Prime Minister of Jordan. Arafat refused, citing his belief in the need for a Palestinian state with Palestinian leadership. 

As the conflict raged, other Arab governments attempted to negotiate a peaceful resolution. As part of this effort, Nasser led the first emergency Arab League summit in Cairo and Arafat's speech drew sympathy from attending Arab leaders. Other heads of state took sides against Hussein, among them Muammar Gaddafi, who mocked him and his schizophrenic father. A ceasefire was agreed upon between the 2 sides, but Nasser died of a massive heart attack hours after the summit, and the conflict resumed shortly afterward. 2 days later Arafat and Hussein agreed to a ceasefire in Amman. The Jordanian army inflicted heavy casualties on the Palestinians—including civilians—who suffered approximately 3,500 fatalities. After repeated violations of the ceasefire from both the PLO and the Jordanian Army, Arafat called for King Hussein to be toppled. Responding to the threat, Hussein ordered his forces to oust all remaining Palestinian fighters in northern Jordan, which they accomplished. 

Arafat managed to enter Syria with nearly 2000 of his fighters. However, due to the hostility of relations between Arafat and Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, the Palestinian fighters crossed the border into Lebanon to join PLO forces in that country, where they set up their new headquarters. Because of Lebanon's weak central government, the PLO was able to operate virtually as an independent state. During this time in the 1970s, numerous leftist PLO groups took up arms against Israel, carrying out attacks against civilians as well as military targets within Israel and outside of it.

In 1970, Arafat declared: 
"Our basic aim is to liberate the land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. We are not concerned with what took place in 1967 or in eliminating the consequences of the 1967 6-day war. The Palestinian revolution's basic concern is the uprooting of the Zionist entity from our land and liberating it." 

In 1972, the PLO hijacked a plane killing 24 civilians. 2 days later, they bombed a bus station, killing 11 civilians. At the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, 11 Israeli athletes were kidnapped and killed. The killings were internationally condemned. Arafat ordered the PLO to withdraw from acts of violence outside Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. 

In 1974, the PLO was declared the "sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people" and admitted to full membership of the Arab League. In his United Nations address, Arafat condemned Zionism, but said, "Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand." He wore a holster throughout his speech, although it did not contain a gun. His speech increased international sympathy for the Palestinian cause. Following recognition, Arafat established relationships with a variety of world leaders, including Saddam Hussein and Idi Amin. Arafat was Amin's best man at his wedding in Uganda in 1975. 

Although hesitant at first to take sides in the conflict, Arafat and Fatah played an important role in the Lebanese Civil War. Succumbing to pressure from PLO sub-groups Arafat aligned the PLO with the communists. Although originally aligned with Fatah, Syrian President Hafez al-Assad feared a loss of influence in Lebanon and sent his army to fight alongside right-wing Christian forces against the PLO. 

After Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 1981, cross-border hostilities between PLO forces and Israel continued. A year later, Israel launched an invasion of Lebanon to expel the PLO from southern Lebanon. The US and European governments brokered an agreement guaranteeing safe passage for Arafat and the PLO - guarded by a multinational force of 800 US Marines supported by the US Navy - to exile in Tunis. 

Arafat returned to Lebanon a year after his eviction from Beirut, this time establishing himself in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli. This time Arafat was expelled. Arafat did not return to Lebanon after his second expulsion, though many Fatah fighters did. Arafat and Fatah's center for operations was based in Tunis, the capital of Tunisia, until 1993. In 1985 Arafat narrowly survived an Israeli assassination attempt when Israeli Air Force F-15s bombed his Tunis headquarters leaving 73 people dead. Arafat had gone out jogging that morning. 

During the 1980s, Arafat received financial assistance from Libya, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, which allowed him to reconstruct the badly damaged PLO. This was particularly useful during the First Intifada in 1987, which began as an uprising of Palestinians against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The first stage of the Intifada began following an incident where 4 Palestinian residents of a refugee camp were killed in a traffic accident involving an Israeli driver. Rumors spread that the deaths were a deliberate act of revenge for an Israeli shopper that was stabbed to death by a Palestinian in Gaza 4 days earlier. Mass rioting broke out and within weeks Arafat attempted to direct the uprising.

The most common tactic used by Palestinians during the Intifada was throwing stones, Molotov cocktails, and burning tires. The local leadership in some West Bank towns commenced non-violent protests against Israeli occupation by engaging in tax resistance and other boycotts. Israel responded by confiscating large sums of money in house-to-house raids. As the Intifada came to a close, new armed Palestinian groups, in particular Hamas, began targeting Israeli civilians with the new tactic of suicide bombings, and internal fighting among the Palestinians increased dramatically. 

In 1988, the PLO proclaimed the independent State of Palestine. Though he had frequently been accused of and associated with terrorism, Arafat repudiated 'terrorism in all its forms, including state terrorism'. He accepted UN Security Council Resolution 242 and Israel's right "to exist in peace and security" and Arafat's statements were greeted with approval by the US administration, which had long insisted on these statements as a necessary starting point for official discussions between the US and the PLO. These remarks from Arafat indicated a shift away from one of the PLO's primary aims - the destruction of Israel and toward the establishment of two separate entities: an Israeli state within the 1949 armistice lines, and an Arab state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. A year later Arafat was elected by the Central Council of the Palestine National Council, the governing body of the PLO, to be the president of the proclaimed State of Palestine. 

Prior to the Gulf War in 1990-91, when the Intifada's intensity began to wear down, Arafat supported Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and opposed the US-led coalition attack on Iraq. Arafat's decision severed relations with Egypt and many of the oil-producing Arab states that supported the US-led coalition. Many in the US also used Arafat's position as a reason to disregard his claims to being a partner for peace. After the end of hostilities, many Arab states that backed the coalition cut off funds to the PLO and began providing financial support for the organization's rival Hamas and other Islamist groups. Arafat narrowly escaped death again in 1992, when an aircraft he was a passenger on crash-landed in the Libyan Desert during a sandstorm. Two pilots and an engineer were killed; Arafat was bruised and shaken.

In the early 1990s, Arafat and leading Fatah officials engaged the Israeli government in a series of secret talks and negotiations that led to the 1993 Oslo Accords. The agreement called for the implementation of Palestinian self-rule in portions of the West Bank and Gaza Strip over a 5-year period, along with an immediate halt to and gradual removal of Israeli settlements in those areas. The accords called for a Palestinian police force to be formed from local recruits and Palestinians abroad, to patrol areas of self-rule. Authority over the various fields of rule, including education and culture, social welfare, direct taxation and tourism, would be transferred to the Palestinian interim government. Both parties agreed also on forming a committee that would establish cooperation and coordination dealing with specific economic sectors, including utilities, industry, trade and communication. 

Prior to signing the accords, Arafat, as Chairman of the PLO and its official representative, signed 2 letters renouncing violence and officially recognizing Israel. In return, Prime Minister Rabin, on behalf of Israel, officially recognized the PLO. The following year, Arafat and Rabin were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with Peres. The Palestinian reaction was mixed. The agreement was rejected by Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan as well as by many Palestinian intellectuals and the local leadership of the Palestinian territories. However, the inhabitants of the territories generally accepted the agreements and Arafat's promise for peace and economic well-being. 

In accordance with the terms of the Oslo agreement, Arafat was required to implement PLO authority in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He insisted that financial support was imperative to establishing this authority and needed it to secure the acceptance of the agreements by the Palestinians living in those areas. However, Arab states of the Persian Gulf—Arafat's usual source for financial backing—still refused to provide him and the PLO with any major donations for siding with Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War.

In 1994, Arafat moved to Gaza City, which was controlled by the PNA, the provisional entity created by the Oslo Accords. Arafat became the President and Prime Minister of the PNA. He then appointed himself chairman of the Palestinian financial organization that was created by the World Bank to control most aid money towards helping the new Palestinian entity. Amnesty International accused Arafat for failing to adequately investigate abuses of torture and unlawful killings of political opponents and dissidents as well as the arrests of human rights activists. 

Arafat continued negotiations with Netanyahu's successor, Ehud Barak, at the Camp David 2000 Summit. Barak was from the leftist Labor Party, whereas Netanyahu was from the rightist Likud Party. Due to insistence for compromise by President Clinton, Barak offered Arafat a Palestinian state in 73 percent of the West Bank and all of the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian percentage of sovereignty would extend to 90 percent over a 10-25 year period. Also included in the offer was the return of a small number of refugees and compensation for those not allowed to return. Palestinians would also have "custodianship" over the Temple Mount, sovereignty on all Islamic and Christian holy sites, and 3 of Jerusalem's 4 Old City quarters. Arafat rejected Barak's offer and refused to make an immediate counter-offer. He told President Clinton that, the Arab leader who would surrender Jerusalem is not born yet. 

After the outbreak of the Second Intifada, negotiations continued. In 2001, suicide bombings by Palestinian militant groups increased and Israeli counter strikes intensified. Following the election of Ariel Sharon, the peace process took a steep downfall. Palestinian elections were postponed. Sharon ordered Arafat to be confined to his headquarters following an attack of an Israeli city. Arafat's long personal and political survival was taken by most Western commentators as a sign of his mastery of asymmetric warfare and his skill as a tactician, given the extremely dangerous nature of politics of the Middle East and the frequency of assassinations.

Some believed his survival was largely due to Israel's fear that he could become a martyr for the Palestinian cause if he were assassinated or even arrested by Israel. Others believe that Israel refrained from taking action against Arafat because it feared Arafat less than Hamas and the other Islamist movements gaining support over Fatah. The complex and fragile web of relations between the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab states contributed also to Arafat's longevity as the leader of the Palestinians. Israel attempted to assassinate Arafat on a number of occasions, but has never used its own agents, preferring instead to turn Palestinians close to the intended target, usually using blackmail. 

Arafat's ability to adapt to new tactical and political situations was perhaps tested by the rise of the Hamas and other Islamist groups espousing rejectionist policies with Israel. These groups often bombed non-military targets, such as malls and movie theaters, to increase the psychological damage and civilian casualties. In the 1990s, these groups seemed to threaten Arafat's capacity to hold together a unified nationalist organization with a goal of statehood. 

An attack carried out by Hamas militants killed 29 Israeli civilians celebrating Passover, including many senior citizens. In response, Israel launched a major military offensive into major West Bank cities. Persistent attempts by the Israeli government to identify another Palestinian leader to represent the Palestinian people failed. Arafat was enjoying the support of groups that, given his own history, would normally have been quite wary of dealing with or supporting him. Arafat was finally allowed to leave his compound in 2002 after intense negotiations led to a settlement to release some PLO prisoners. Arafat promise that he would issue a call to the Palestinians to halt attacks on Israelis if he was released from his headquarter. In 2003, Arafat ceded his post as Prime Minister to Abbas amid pressures by the US.

After the Israeli security Cabinet decided that "Israel will act to remove this obstacle Arafat in the manner, at the time, and in the ways that will be decided on separately", Israeli Cabinet members and officials had hinted on Arafat's death and the Israeli military had begun making preparations for Arafat's possible expulsion in the near future, many feared for his life. 



The compound Arafat was in remained under siege until Arafat's transfer to a French hospital, shortly before his death. Numerous theories have appeared regarding Arafat's death, with the most prominent being poisoning by polonium. 


Back to INDEX


Martin Luther King (1929 – 1968)
Martin Luther King was an American Baptist minister and activist who became the most visible spokesperson and leader in the Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights using the tactics of nonviolence and civil disobedience based on his Christian beliefs and inspired by the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi.

King`s father was a Baptist Reverend who regularly whipped him until he was 15 years old. His father told him that “he would make something of him even if he had to beat him to death." King saw his father's proud and fearless protests against segregation many times. Once he refused to listen to a traffic policeman after being referred to as "boy." Another time, he stalked out of a store with his son when being told by a shoe clerk that they would have to "move to the rear" of the store to be served. 

When King was a child, he befriended a white boy whose father owned a business near his family's home. When the boys started school, King had to attend a school for African Americans and the other boy went to one for whites. Public schools were among the facilities segregated by state law. King lost his friend because the child's father no longer wanted the boys to play together. King suffered from depression throughout much of his life. In his adolescent years, he initially felt resentment against whites due to the "racial humiliation" that he, his family, and his neighbors often had to endure in the segregated South. At the age of 12, shortly after his maternal grandmother died, King blamed himself and jumped out of a second-story window, but survived. King was skeptical of many of Christianity's claims. At the age of 13, he denied the bodily resurrection of Jesus during Sunday school. King became known for his public speaking ability and was part of the school's debate team. One day riding in a bus, he and his teacher were ordered to stand so that white passengers could sit down. King initially refused, but complied after his teacher told him that he would be breaking the law if he did not submit. In 1948, he graduated with a B.A. in sociology and enrolled in a Seminary from which he graduated 3 years later. In 1953, at age 23, King married and over the next 10 years, he fathered 4 children.

In 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus. King led a bus boycott that lasted for 385 days. King was arrested during this campaign, which concluded with the ending of racial segregation on all Montgomery public buses. King's role in the bus boycott transformed him into a national figure and the best-known spokesman of the civil rights movement. In 1963, the FBI, under written directive from Attorney General Robert Kennedy, began tapping King's telephone.

King believed that organized, nonviolent protest against the system of southern segregation laws would lead to extensive media coverage of the struggle for black equality and voting rights. Journalistic accounts and televised footage of the daily deprivation and indignities suffered by Southern blacks, and of segregationist violence and harassment of civil rights workers and marchers, produced a wave of sympathetic public opinion that convinced the majority of Americans that the Civil Rights Movement was the most important issue in American politics in the early 1960s. King organized and led marches for blacks' right to vote, desegregation, labor rights, and other basic civil rights. Most of these rights were successfully enacted into the law of the United States with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. 

King applied the tactics of nonviolent protest with great success by strategically choosing the method of protest and the places in which protests were carried out. Throughout his participation in the civil rights movement, King was criticized by many groups. This included opposition by more militant blacks such as Nation of Islam member Malcolm X. King's intent was to provoke mass arrests and create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. During the protests, police used high-pressure water jets and police dogs against protesters including children. Footage of the police response was broadcast on national television news and dominated the nation's attention, shocking many white Americans and consolidating black Americans behind the movement. King was arrested and jailed early in the campaign.
“Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."

King opposed the Vietnam War because it took money and resources that could have been spent on social welfare at home. The United States Congress was spending more and more on the military and less and less on anti-poverty programs at the same time. "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." King's opposition cost him significant support among white allies, including President Johnson, Billy Graham, union leaders and powerful publishers. King claimed that from Vietnam to Latin America, the country was on the wrong side of a world revolution. King condemned America's alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America, and said that the U.S. should support the shirtless and barefoot people in the Third World rather than suppressing their attempts at revolution. 

King was inspired by Gandhi and his success with nonviolent activism. As a theology student, King described Gandhi as being one of the individuals who greatly reveal the working of the Spirit of God. He reflected:
"Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever before that the method of nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity." 

King's admiration of Gandhi's nonviolence did not diminish in later years. He went so far as to hold up his example when receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, hailing the successful precedent of using nonviolence in a magnificent way by Gandhi to challenge the might of the British Empire. He struggled only with the weapons of truth, soul force, non-injury and courage. Both Gandhi and Martin Luther King had read Tolstoy. King, Gandhi and Tolstoy had been strongly influenced by Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. Another influence for King's nonviolent method was Henry David Thoreau's essay On Civil Disobedience. He was influenced by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system. 

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover personally ordered surveillance of King, with the intent to undermine his power as a civil rights leader. From 1963 until his death in 1968, King was the target of an intensive campaign by the FBI to 'neutralize' him as an effective civil rights leader. In a secret operation the National Security Agency (NSA) monitored the communications of leading Americans, including King, who criticized the U.S. war in Vietnam. Having concluded that King was dangerous due to communist infiltration, the FBI shifted to attempting to discredit King through revelations regarding his private life and attempted to demonstrate that he also engaged in numerous extramarital affairs.

King was assassinated at the age of 39.

Back to INDEX


Hafez al-Assad (1930 – 2000)
Hafez al-Assad was a Syrian statesman, politician, and general who was President of Syria for 29 years, from 1971 till his death. 

Since approximately 10,000BC, Syria was one of centers where agriculture and cattle breeding appeared for the first time in the world. People used vessels made of stone, gyps and burnt lime. Finds of obsidian tools from Anatolia are evidences of early trade relations. The civilization in Syria was one of the most ancient on earth, perhaps preceded by only those of Mesopotamia. Its capital Damascus and largest city Aleppo are among the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. Damascus was the seat of the Umayyad Caliphate and a provincial capital of the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt.

The earliest recorded indigenous civilization in the region appears to have been founded around 3500BC and gradually built its fortune through trade with the Mesopotamian states of Sumer, Assyria and Akkad as well as with the peoples to the northwest, in Asia Minor. Gifts from Pharaohs confirm their contact with Egypt. Around the 14th century BC, various Semitic peoples appeared in the area. With the destruction of the Hittites and the decline of Assyria in the late 11th century BC, the Aramean tribes gained control of much of the interior. A Canaanite group known as the Phoenicians came to dominate the coasts of Syria and also Lebanon and northern Palestine from the 13th century BC. 

From these coastal regions they eventually spread their influence throughout the Mediterranean including building colonies in Malta, Sicily, Spain and Portugal, the coasts of North Africa. They founded the major city state of Carthage in Tunisia in the 9th century BC which was much later to become the center of a major empire, rivaling the Roman Empire. Syria and the entire Near East and beyond then fell to the vast Neo Assyrian Empire (911BC-605BC). The Assyrians introduced Imperial Aramaic as the lingua franca of their empire. This language was to remain dominant in Syria and the entire Near East until after the Arab Islamic conquest in the 7th and 8th centuries AD.

Assyrian domination ended after the Assyrians greatly weakened themselves in a series of brutal internal civil wars, followed by an attacking coalition of their former subject peoples - the Medes, Babylonians, Chaldeans, Persians and the Scythians. During the fall of Assyria, the Scythians ravaged and plundered much of Syria. The Assyrian Empire was followed by the Neo-Babylonian Empire (605BC-539BC). During this period, Syria became a battle ground between Babylonia and another former Assyrian colony, that of Egypt. The Babylonians, like their Assyrian relations, were victorious over Egypt. The Achaemenid Empire, founded by Cyrus the Great, took Syria from Babylonia as part of its hegemony of Southwest Asia in 539BC. The Persians, having spent 4 centuries under Assyrian rule, retained Imperial Aramaic as diplomatic language in the Achaemenid Empire (539BC-330BC). Syria was conquered by the Greek Macedonian Empire, ruled by Alexander the Great in 330 BC, and consequently became a province of the Greek Seleucid Empire (323BC-64BC). It was the Greeks who introduced the name "Syria" to the region. Originally an Indo-European corruption of "Assyria" in Mesopotamia, the Greeks used this term to describe not only Assyria itself but also the lands to the west which had for centuries been under Assyrian dominion. Syria briefly came under Armenian control from 83BC. The Armenians retained control of Syria for 2 decades before being driven out by the Romans. Pompey the Great of the Roman Empire captured Antioch in 64BC, turning Syria into a Roman province.

Control of Syria eventually passed from the Romans to the Byzantines, with the split in the Roman Empire. The Aramaic-speaking population of Syria during the heyday of the Byzantine empire was not exceeded again until the 19th century. Prior to the Arab Islamic Conquest in the 7th century AD, the bulk of the population were Arameans. Syria's large and prosperous population made Syria one of the most important of the Roman and Byzantine provinces, particularly during the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. Syria is significant in the history of Christianity. Apostle Paul, was converted on the Road to Damascus and emerged as a significant figure in the Christian Church at Antioch from which he left on many of his missionary journeys. 

Muhammad's first interaction with the people and tribes of Syria was in 626AD where he ordered his followers to invade. By 640AD, Syria was conquered by the Arab army. In the mid 7th century, the Umayyad dynasty, then rulers of the empire, placed the capital of the empire in Damascus. The country's power declined during later Umayyad rule and Arabic was made official, replacing Greek and Aramaic of the Byzantine era. The Umayyad dynasty was then overthrown in 750 by the Abbasid dynasty, which moved the capital of the empire to Baghdad. In 887, Egypt annexed Syria from the Abbasid. Between 1098-1189 during the Crusades, sections of Syria were held by French, English, Italian and German overlords and were known collectively as the Crusader states. After a century of Seljuk rule, Syria was largely conquered (1175-1185) by the Kurdish warlord Saladin. Aleppo and Damascus fell to the Mongols in 1260. Then the Mamluks arrived with an army from Egypt and defeated the Mongols. 

In 1400, the Muslim Turco-Mongol conqueror Timur also known as Tamurlane invaded Syria, sacked Aleppo and captured Damascus after defeating the Mamluk army. The city's inhabitants were massacred, except for the artisans, who were deported to Samarkand. Timur also conducted specific massacres of the Aramean and Assyrian Christian populations, greatly reducing their numbers. By the end of the 15th century, the discovery of a sea route from Europe to the Far East ended the need for an overland trade route through Syria.

In 1516, the Ottoman Empire invaded the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt, conquering Syria, and incorporating it into its empire. The Ottoman system was not burdensome to Syrians because the Turks respected Arabic as the language of the Quran, and accepted the mantle of defenders of the faith. Ottoman administration followed a system that led to peaceful coexistence among the Shia and Sunni Muslims, Aramean and Greek Orthodoxes, Christians, Armenians, Kurds and Jews.

In 1831, Egypt overran Ottoman Syria, capturing Damascus. The short-term rule over the domain attempted to change the demographics and social structure of the region. He brought thousands of Egyptian villagers to populate the plains of Southern Syria. By 1840, however, he had to surrender the area back to the Ottomans. 

During WWI, the Ottoman Empire entered the conflict on the side of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It ultimately suffered defeat and loss of control of the entire Near East to the British Empire and French Empire. During the conflict, genocide against indigenous Christian peoples was carried out by the Ottomans and their allies in the form of the Armenian Genocide and Assyrian Genocide. In the midst of WWI, in 1916, 2 diplomats, Picot from France and Sykes from Britain, secretly agreed on the post-war division of the Ottoman Empire into respective zones of influence. Initially, the 2 territories were separated by a border that ran in an almost straight line from Jordan to Iran. However, the discovery of oil in the region of Mosul just before the end of the war led to yet another negotiation with France in 1918 to cede this region to the British zone of influence. 

In 1946, Syria became an independent republic following years of French rule after WWII. Democratic rule ended with a U.S. backed coup in 1949, followed by 2 more coups. 8 years later In 1954, a popular uprising against military rule saw the army transfer power to civilians. From 1958-1961, a brief union with Egypt replaced Syria's parliamentary system with a centralized presidential government. The secular Ba'ath Syrian Regional Branch government came to power through a successful coup d'état in 1963. For the next several years Syria went through additional coups and changes in leadership. Syria was under Emergency Law from 1963-2011, effectively suspending most constitutional protections for citizens.

Assad was born to an Alawite family. In 1936, his father was one of 80 Alawite notables who signed a letter addressed to the French Prime Minister saying that the Alawi people rejected attachment to Syria and wished to stay under French protection. Alawites belong to the Shia branch of Islam. Initially they opposed a united Syrian state since they thought their status as a religious minority would endanger them. Assad`s father shared this belief. As the French left Syria, many Syrians mistrusted Alawites because of their alignment with France. Assad left his Alawite village, beginning his education at age 9 in a Sunni-dominated area and he faced Sunni anti-Alawite bias. He was an excellent student, winning several prizes at about age 14.

Assad`s high school accommodated students from rich and poor families. He was joined by poor, anti-establishment Sunni Muslim youth from the Ba'ath Party as well as from wealthy Brotherhood families. He made many Sunni friends, some of whom later became his political allies. While still a teenager, Assad became increasingly prominent in the party as an organizer and recruiter, head of his school's student-affairs committee and president of the Union of Syrian Students. During his political activism in school, he met many men who later serve him when he was president.

After graduating from high school, Assad wanted to be a medical doctor, but his father could not pay for his study. Instead, in 1950 he decided to join the Syrian Armed Forces. Assad entered the military academy in Homs, which offered free food, lodging and a stipend. The Ba'ath Party grew closer to the Communist Party not because of shared ideology, but because of a shared opposition to the West. When Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, Syria feared retaliation from the United Kingdom, and Assad flew in an air-defense mission. After finishing a course in Egypt the following year, Assad returned to a small air base near Damascus. During the Suez Crisis, Egypt was invaded by Israel, followed by the United Kingdom and France. The aim to regain Western control of the Suez Canal and to remove Egyptian President Nasser from power failed. 

Assad approached political parties that welcomed Alawites. These parties which also espoused secularism were the Syrian Communist Party, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party and the Arab Ba'ath Party which espoused a pan-Arabist, socialist ideology. Assad joined the Arab Ba'ath Party and eventually became Secretary General of the Syrian Branch of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party. Ba'athism in Arabic means both "renaissance" and "resurrection". It is an Arab nationalist ideology started in 1940 that promotes the development and creation of a unified Arab state through the leadership of a party representing the working class over a progressive revolutionary government. 



A Ba'athist society seeks enlightenment, renaissance of Arab culture, values and society. It supports the creation of one-party states, and rejects political pluralism to gradually develop an enlightened Arabic society. Ba'athism is based on principles of Arab nationalism, pan-Arabism, Arab socialism, as well as social progress. It is a secular ideology. A Ba'athist state supports socialist economics to a varying degree, and supports public ownership over the heights of the economy but opposes the confiscation of private property. Socialism in Ba'athist ideology does not mean state socialism or economic equality, but modernization. Ba'athists believes that socialism is the only way to develop an Arab society which is truly free and united. Iraq and Syria are Ba'athist states which forbade criticism of their ideology through authoritarian governance. These governments have been labeled as neo-Ba'athist, because the form of Ba'athism developed in Iraq and Syria was very different from the Ba'athism as it originated in 1940. None of the ruling Ba'ath parties pursued a policy of unifying the Arab world.

Assad was an asset to the party, organizing Ba'ath student cells and carrying the party's message to the poor sections and Alawite villages. He was opposed by the Muslim Brotherhood, which was allied with wealthy and conservative Muslim families. The Society of the Muslim Brothers, the Muslim Brotherhood,  is a transnational Sunni Islamist organization founded in Egypt in 1928 gained supporters throughout the Arab world and influenced other Islamist groups such as Hamas with its model of political activism combined with Islamic charity work. In 2012 it sponsored the elected political party in Egypt after the revolution in 2011. However, it faced periodic government crackdowns for alleged terrorist activities by various Arab governments such as Bahrain, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. 

The Brotherhood's stated goal is to instill the Quran, the holy book of Islam and the Sunnah, the verbally transmitted record of the teachings, deeds and sayings, silent permissions or disapproval of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. The Quran and the Sunnah make up the two primary sources of Islamic theology and law. The Sunnah is also defined as a path, a way, a manner of life of all the traditions and practices of the Islamic prophet that have become models to be followed by Muslims. They are the sole reference points for ordering the life of the Muslim family, individual, community and state. For many years the movement was financed by Saudi Arabia with which it shared some enemies and some points of doctrine. 

As a Pan-Islamic, religious, and social movement, it preached Islam, taught the illiterate, and set up hospitals and business enterprises. The group spread to other Muslim countries but has its largest organizations in Egypt despite a succession of government crackdowns in 1948, 1954,1965, and 2013 after plots of assassination and overthrow were uncovered. The Arab Spring brought it legalization and substantial political power at first, but as of 2013 it has suffered severe reversals. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was legalized in 2011 and won several elections, including the 2012 presidential election when its candidate Mohamed Morsi became Egypt's first democratically elected president, One year later, following massive demonstrations and unrest, he was overthrown by the military. The Brotherhood itself claims to be a peaceful, democratic organization. 

The same elite that had governed Syria during the mandate continued in power and they governed in the same manner. The failure in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War led to the downfall of the traditional elite and the rise of the military in politics. The 1948 Arab-Israeli War was the first of many Arab-Israeli Wars. It was fought between the State of Israel and a military coalition of Arab states. There had been tension and conflict between the Arabs and the Jews, and between each of them and the British forces, ever since the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the 1920 creation of the British Mandate of Palestine. British policies dissatisfied both Arabs and Jews. In 1947 these ongoing tensions erupted into civil war, following the adoption of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine which planned to divide Palestine into three areas: an Arab state, a Jewish state and the Special International Regime for the cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

The ongoing civil war transformed into an inter-state conflict between Israel and the Arab states, following the Israeli Declaration of Independence. A combined invasion by Egypt, Jordan and Syria, together with expeditionary forces from Iraq, entered Palestine. Jordan declared privately not to attack the Jewish state. The invading forces took control of the Arab areas and immediately attacked Israeli forces and several Jewish settlements.  As a result of the war, Israel controlled not only the area that the UN General Assembly Resolution had recommended for the proposed Jewish state, but also 60% of the area of Arab state proposed by the 1948 Partition Plan. This included Jaffa, Galilee, West Jerusalem, and some territories in the West Bank. The conflict triggered significant demographic change throughout the Middle East. Around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes in the area that became Israel and they became Palestinian refugees. In the 3 years following the war, about 700,000 Jews immigrated to Israel with many of them having been expelled from their previous countries of residence in the Middle East.

The military's introduction to the Syrian political scene destroyed the oligarchy and enabled the middle class to participate in Syrian politics. However, while their powers were weakened, the traditional elite retained the majority of the wealth produced.  It was in this environment that the ideology of Ba'athism came into being. Of the 150 delegates to the founding congress of the Arab Ba'ath Party in 1947, the majority were either middle-class professionals or intellectuals. By the 1950s the party had managed to acquire an urban middle class base. However, the Ba'ath Party was not a purely middle class party, and from the very beginning, it sent party cadres to rural areas to recruit new members and form new party organizations. 

In 1956, the Ba'ath Party organized the first labor protest in Syrian history. While the Ba'ath Party was strong, its decision to recruit members from across society led to tribalism within the party. Party leaders then opted to overlook democratic norms and procedures. The Ba'ath Party faced a major dilemma: take power through competitive elections or through forceful takeover. Even the liberal and democratic-inclined founding leaders favored forceful takeover, citing the corrupt electoral process. 

In 1958 Syria and Egypt formed the United Arab Republic (UAR), separating themselves from Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Turkey who were aligned with the United Kingdom. This pact led to the rejection of Communist influence in favor of Egyptian control over Syria. All Syrian political parties including the Ba'ath Party were dissolved and senior officers, especially those who supported the Communists, were dismissed from the Syrian armed forces. Assad, however, remained in the army and rose quickly through the ranks. After reaching the rank of captain he was transferred to Egypt, continuing his military education with future president of Egypt Hosni Mubarak. 

Before taking power, the Ba'ath Party gambled that it would be allowed to share power with Nasser in the UAR. The UAR proved to be Egypt-dominated, and the Ba'ath Party was forced to dissolve itself. Several branches had not dissolved during the UAR years. Instead they had become deeply hostile to pan-Arabist thought and had become radical socialists instead. 

In 1961, Syria left the UAR and Assad and other Ba'athist officers were removed from the military by the new government in Damascus. Assad was given a minor clerical position at the Ministry of Transport. Assad played a minor role in the failed 1962 military coup, for which he was jailed in Lebanon and later repatriated. After the success of the Iraqi coup d'état led by the Ba'ath Party's Iraqi Regional Branch, the Military Committee hastily convened to launch a Ba'athist military coup in 1963. The coup was orchestrated by the U.S and a massacre of thousands of suspected communists and other dissidents followed the coup. The military coup had many of the ingredients of a national revolution. 

The revolution was led by an anti-oligarchical alliance of a radicalized lower middle class, strategic members of the officer corps, marginalized minorities and a significant number of peasants who were mobilized for agrarian conflict. In an international context, the revolution took place because the state boundaries established by France were artificial and because of the hostility within the newly established Syria to the creation of Israel. The traditional elite that took power in Syria when the country gained independence had come to power during the French Mandate of Syria and Lebanon. The external imposition of arbitrary state boundaries on Syria with no corresponding popular acceptance led to discontent. The national struggle was shaped by ideologies such as Arab nationalism, pan-Islamism and Greater Syrianism. The growth of the new middle class in Syria fueled discontent since the traditional elite dominated the agrarian sector - the largest sector of the economy - and created most of the wealth. 

The new middle class consisted of capitalists and entrepreneurs who opposed the traditional elite. The monopolization of power by the traditional elite led to the radicalization of the new middle class. The military, which in many countries is conservative and elitist, became radicalized in Syria because the military wanted greater power, believing that the traditional elite were unable to defend the country. A significant group of military personnel were recruited from the new middle class and from the hinterlands. 

In Syria, ethnic minorities were often underprivileged, and a specific ethnicity often belonged to a specific social class. The Alawites was an ethnic group with low social class who began to embrace a radical form of Arab nationalism as promoted by Ba'athism. Without the peasantry there could not have been a Ba'athist revolution in Syria. The new middle class alone could only produce instability, but together with the peasantry, the revolution became possible. The inequality between urban and rural dwellers, together with capitalist penetration of the agrarian sector and the traditional elites' monopolization of most large revenue sources, led to the establishment of peasant movements who fought for change, and opposed the system. The Syrian branch of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party was able to recruit young peasants from radical peasant movements, and because of it, was able to mobilize large sectors of the population.

Assad participated in the 1963 Syrian coup d'état which brought the Syrian Regional Branch of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party to power. 3 years later, in 1966, Assad participated in a second coup, which toppled the traditional leaders of the Ba'ath Party and brought a radical military faction to power. Assad was appointed defense minister by the new government. 4 years later, he initiated a revolution and appointed himself as the undisputed leader of Syria.

The 6-Day War of 1967 was fought between Israel and the neighboring states of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. Relations between Israel and its neighbors had never fully normalized following the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. In 1956 Israel invaded the Egyptian Sinai, with one of its objectives being the reopening of the Straits of Tiran where the Dead Sea enters the Red Sea, which Egypt had blocked to Israeli shipping since 1950. Israel was subsequently forced to withdraw, but won a guarantee that the Straits of Tiran would remain open. In 1967 Nasser announced the straits would be closed to Israeli vessels. Egypt then mobilized its forces along its border with Israel, and Israel launched airstrikes against Egyptian airfields. The Egyptians were caught by surprise, and nearly the entire Egyptian air force was destroyed with few Israeli losses, giving the Israelis air supremacy. Simultaneously, the Israelis launched a ground offensive into the Gaza Strip and the Sinai, which again caught the Egyptians by surprise. After some initial resistance, Nasser ordered the evacuation of the Sinai. Israeli forces rushed westward in pursuit of the Egyptians, inflicted heavy losses, and conquered the Sinai.

Nasser induced Syria and Jordan to begin attacks on Israel by using the initially confused situation to claim that Egypt had defeated the Israeli air strike. Israeli counterattacks resulted in the seizure of East Jerusalem as well as the West Bank from the Jordanians, while Israel's retaliation against Syria resulted in its occupation of the Golan Heights.

Arab casualties were far heavier than those of Israel: fewer than 1,000 Israelis had been killed compared to over 20,000 from the Arab forces. Israel's military success was attributed to the element of surprise, an innovative and well-executed battle plan, and the poor quality and leadership of the Arab forces. Israel seized control of the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. Israeli morale and international prestige were greatly increased by the outcome of the war and the area under Israeli control tripled. The displacement of civilian populations resulting from the war would have long-term consequences, as 300,000 Palestinians fled the West Bank and about 100,000 Syrians left the Golan to become refugees. Across the Arab world, Jewish minority communities were expelled, with refugees going to Israel or Europe.

Assad de-radicalized the Ba'ath government when he took power by giving more space to private property and strengthening the country's foreign relations with countries which his predecessor had deemed reactionary. He sided with the Soviet Union during the Cold War in turn for support against Israel. When he came to power, Assad organized state services along sectarian lines. The Sunnis became the heads of political institutions, while the Alawites took control of the military, intelligence, and security apparatuses. The Syrian government turned into a one-party state with a strong presidency. To maintain this system, a cult of personality centered on Assad and his family was created.

The Islamic uprising began in the 1970s, with attacks on prominent members of the Ba'ath Alawite elite. The party leadership, with the exception of Assad and his protégés, were criticized severely by party delegates, who called for an anti-corruption campaign, a new, clean government, curtailing the powers of the military-security apparatus and political liberalization. With Assad's consent, a new government was established with new, young technocrats. The new government failed to appease critics and the Sunni middle class and the radical left believing that Ba'athist rule could be overthrown with an uprising began collaborating with the Islamists. 

Assad believed that the only way to get Israel to negotiate with the Arabs was thru war. While he understood that the Soviet relationship with the Arabs would never be as deep as the United States' relationship with Israel, he needed its weapons. Unlike his predecessors who tried to win Soviet support with socialist policies, he was willing to give the Soviets a stable presence in the Middle East through Syria, access to Syrian naval bases and help in curtailing American influence in the region. Assad met several times with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. The Soviets responded by sending arms to Syria. 

Assad believed that Syria would have no chance in a war against Israel without Egyptian participation. Planning for war began in 1971 with an agreement between Assad and Anwar Sadat. Egypt went to war for a different reason than Syria did. While Assad wanted to regain lost Arab territory, Sadat wished to strengthen Egypt's position in its peace policy toward Israel.

In 1973, Assad implemented a new constitution, which led to a national crisis. Unlike previous constitutions, this one did not require that the President of Syria be a Muslim, leading to fierce demonstrations in Hama, Homs and Aleppo organized by the Muslim Brotherhood. They labeled Assad the "enemy of Allah" and called for a jihad or holy war against his rule.  

In the same year, Egyptian forces attacked through the Sinai desert and Syrian forces attacked the Golan Heights. The Yom Kippur War, also known as the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, was a war fought by a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria against Israel. The fighting mostly took place in the Sinai and the Golan Heights, territories that had been occupied by Israel since the Six-Day War of 1967. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat wanted also to reopen the Suez Canal. Neither specifically planned to destroy Israel, although the Israeli leaders could not be sure of that. They managed to cross the border into Israel and penetrated the Israeli defense lines. The Syrian forces on the Golan Heights met with more intense fighting than their Egyptian counterparts, but was able to break thru the Israeli defenses. With the help of Russian weapons, Egypt and Syria defeated Israel's armor and air supremacy. The main reason for the reversal of fortune was that after capturing parts of the Sinai, the Egyptian campaign halted and the Syrians were left fighting the Israelis alone. The Egyptian leaders, believing their war aims accomplished, dug in. In Syria, Assad and his generals waited for the Egyptians to move. When the Israeli government learned of Egypt's modest war strategy, it ordered an immediate continuous action against the Syrian military. For 3 days, Syrian troops on the Golan faced the full fury of the Israeli air force as, from first light to nightfall, wave after wave of aircraft swooped down to bomb, strafe and napalm them into retreat and defeat.

Sadat called for a ceasefire without telling Assad. The ceasefire resolution did not call for Israeli withdrawal from its occupied territories. Assad was annoyed, since he had not been informed beforehand of Sadat's change in policy. Syrian government accepted the ceasefire, spelling out its understanding of UN Resolution for the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the occupied territories and the safeguarding of Palestinian rights. Assad later learned that Sadat was in contact with American National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger almost daily during the war. Under Kissinger's tenure the United States had become a staunch supporter of Israel.

Assad called his domestic reforms a corrective movement, and it achieved some results. He tried to modernize Syria's agricultural and industrial sectors. One of his main achievements was the completion of the Tabqa Dam on the Euphrates River in 1974. One of the world's largest dams, its reservoir was called Lake Assad. The reservoir increased irrigation of arable land, provided electricity, and encouraged industrial and technical development in Syria. Many peasants and workers received increased income, social security, and better health and educational services. 

In 1976, Syria intervened in Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War. The war lasted 15 years from 1975 to 1990. It was a multifaceted civil war that resulted in an estimated 120,000 fatalities. Approximately 76,000 people were permanently displaced within Lebanon. 1,000,000 fled Lebanon as a result of the war. Before the war, Lebanon was multi-sectarian, with Sunni Muslims and Christians being the majorities on the coastal cities. Shia Muslims were mainly based in the south and the east. The government of Lebanon had been run under a significant influence of the elites among the Christians. The link between politics and religion had been reinforced under the mandate of the French colonial powers from 1920 to 1943, and the parliamentary structure favored a leading position for the Christians. However, the country had a large Muslim population and many pan-Arabist and left-wing groups opposed the pro-western government. 

The establishment of the state of Israel and the displacement of 100,000 Palestinian refugees to Lebanon during the 1948 and 1967 exoduses contributed to shifting the demographic balance in favor of the Muslim population. The Cold War polarized the country into Christians who sided with the West and the leftist and pan-Arab groups who sided with Soviet-aligned Arab countries. Fighting between Christians and Palestinian forces mainly from the PLO began in 1975. Leftist, pan-Arabist and Muslim Lebanese groups formed an alliance with the Palestinians. During the course of the fighting, alliances shifted rapidly and unpredictably. Foreign powers, such as Israel and Syria, became involved in the war and fought alongside different factions.

In 1976 Assad was approached by Lebanese politicians for help in forcing the resignation of the Christian President of Lebanon. Although Assad was open to change, he resisted attempts by some Lebanese politicians to enlist him in the ouster. When a general attempted to seize power, Syrian troops stopped him. In the meantime, radical Lebanese leftists were gaining the upper hand in the military conflict. Assad did not wish a leftist victory in Lebanon which would strengthen the position of the Palestinians. He did not want a rightist victory either, instead seeking a middle-ground solution which would safeguard Lebanon and the region. Assad believed that a ceasefire should be in effect to ensure the 1976 presidential elections. One-third of the Lebanese members of parliament boycotted the election to protest American and Syrian interference. On Assad's orders Syria sent troops into Lebanon without international approval. 

Syria began a full-scale intervention in Lebanon to end bombardment of the Christian cities. Syria received approval for the intervention from the United States and Israel to help them defeat Palestinian forces in Lebanon. Within a week of the Syrian intervention, Christian leaders issued a statement of support and regarded Assad as the latest incarnation of the Crusaders and defenders of Christianity. Assad's actions angered much of the Arab world and the sight of Syria trying to eliminate the PLO brought criticism upon him. There was considerable hostility to Assad's alliance with the Christians in Syria. 

By 1977 it was apparent that despite some success, Assad's political reforms had largely failed. This was partly due to Assad's foreign policy, failed policies, natural phenomena and corruption. Chronic socio-economic difficulties remained, and new ones appeared. Inefficiency, mismanagement, and corruption in the government, public, and private sectors, illiteracy, poor education, particularly in rural areas, increasing emigration by professionals, inflation, a growing trade deficit, a high cost of living and shortages of consumer goods were among problems faced by the country. The financial burden of Syria's involvement in Lebanon since 1976 contributed to worsening economic problems, encouraging corruption and a black market. The emerging class of entrepreneurs and brokers became involved with senior military officers, including Assad's brother Rifaat, in smuggling from Lebanon, which affected government revenue and encouraged corruption among senior governmental officials. 

In 1980, believing they had the upper hand in the conflict; the Islamists began a series of campaigns against government installations in Aleppo. The attacks became urban guerilla warfare. The government began to lose control in the city and, inspired by events, similar disturbances spread to other cities. Those affected by Ba'athist repression began to rally behind the insurgents.

Security forces began to purge all state, party and social institutions in Syria, and were sent to the Northern provinces to quell the uprising. When this failed, the hard-liners began accusing the United States of fomenting the uprising and called for the reinstatement of revolutionary vigilance. After a failed attempt on Assad's life, Assad began responding to the uprising with state terrorism.

Prisoners were massacred and membership in the Muslim Brotherhood became a capital offense. The final showdown, the 1982 Hamas massacre of about 40,000 civilians when the government crushed the uprising. Hamas was besieged for 27 days in order to quell an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood. The massacre effectively ended the campaign begun in 1976 by Sunni Muslim groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood, against the government. Assad claimed that anti-government rebels initiated the fighting, who 
"pounced on our comrades while sleeping in their homes and killed whomever they could kill of women and children, mutilating the bodies of the martyrs in the streets, driven, like mad dogs, by their black hatred." Security forces then "rose to confront these crimes" and "taught the murderers a lesson that has snuffed out their breath".

Throughout the uprising, the Sunni middle class continued to support the Ba'ath Party because of its dislike of political Islam. After the uprising the government resumed its version of militaristic Leninism, reverting the liberalization introduced when Assad came to power. The uprising made Syria more totalitarian than ever, and strengthened Assad's position as undisputed leader of Syria.

During the early 1980s, Syria's economy worsened. In 1984, the food crisis was severe, and the press was full of complaints. Assad's government unsuccessfully sought a solution, arguing that food shortages could be avoided with careful economic planning. Syria lacked sugar, bread, flour, wood, iron and construction equipment. This resulted in soaring prices, long queues and rampant black marketeering. Smuggling goods from Lebanon became common. Assad's government tried to combat the smuggling, encountering difficulties due to the involvement of his brother Rifaat in the corruption. In 1984, the government formed an effective anti-smuggling squad to control the Lebanon–Syria borders. The Defense Detachment commanded by Rifaat played a leading role in the smuggling. 

The Syrian economy grew 5-7% during the early 1990s. Exports increased, the balance of trade improved, inflation remained moderate and oil exports increased. In 1991 Assad's government liberalized the Syrian economy, which stimulated domestic and foreign private investment. Most foreign investors were Arab states around the Persian Gulf, since Western countries still had political and economic issues with the country. The Gulf states invested in infrastructure and development projects. Because of the Ba'ath Party's socialist ideology, Assad's government did not privatize state-owned companies. 

Syria fell into recession during the mid-1990s along with recession in world markets.. In 1999, one of the worst droughts in a century caused a drop of 25–30% in crop yields compared with the previous year. Assad's government implemented emergency measures, including loans and compensation to farmers and the distribution of free fodder to save sheep and cattle. 

In 1983 Assad, a diabetic, had a major heart attack triggering a succession crisis. Having become the main source of initiative inside the Syrian government, Assad began looking for a successor. His brother Rifaat was considered the face of corruption by the Syrian people. Although highly paid as Commander of Defense Companies, he accumulated unexplained wealth. Most top officials did not support Rifaat. He lacked his brother's stature and charisma, and was vulnerable to charges of corruption. His 50,000-strong Defense Companies were viewed with suspicion by the upper leadership and throughout society. They were considered corrupt, poorly disciplined and indifferent to human suffering. Officers and soldiers resented the Defense Companies' monopoly of Damascus' security, their separate intelligence services and prisons and their higher pay. Personnel from the Defense Companies replaced posters of Assad in Damascus with those of Rifaat. The security service, still loyal to Assad, responded by replacing Rifaat's posters with Assad's. Shortly after, all Rifaat's protégés were removed from positions of power. Rifaat ordered Defense Company loyalists to seal Damascus off and advance to the city. The attempted coup failed and Assad punished his brother with exile, allowing him to return in later years without a political role. He gave a larger role to his son Bassel, who was rumored to be his father's planned successor.

In 1986, Bassel became a security officer at the Presidential Palace, and a year later he was appointed Commander of the Defense Companies. Bassel continued his climb to the top. Vehicles belonging to the military and the secret police began bearing images of Bassel. In 1994, he died in a car accident. Bassel, in death, played as great a role in his country's life as he did alive. His picture appeared on walls, cars, stores, dishes, clothing and watches. Almost immediately after Bassel's death, Assad began to groom his 29-year-old son Bashar for succession. Several Assad protégés, who had served since 1970 or earlier, were dismissed from office between 1998 and 2000. They were sacked not because of disloyalty to Assad, but because Assad thought they would not fully support Bashar's succession.

In 1989, a committee appointed by the Arab League began to formulate solutions to the conflict brewing in Lebanon. The Arab League was a regional organization of Arab countries in and around North Africa, the Horn of Africa and Arabia. It was formed in 1945 with 6 members: Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. 2 rival administrations were formed in Lebanon. A military one in East Beirut, and a civilian one based in West Beirut which gained the support of the Syrians. In 1991, a treaty of "Brotherhood, Cooperation, and Coordination", was signed between Lebanon and Syria, legitimized the Syrian military presence in Lebanon. It stipulated that Lebanon would not be made a threat to Syria's security and that Syria was responsible for protecting Lebanon from external threats. In the same year a Defense and Security Pact was enacted between the two countries. Parliament passed an amnesty law that pardoned all political crimes prior to its enactment. The militias were dissolved, with the exception of Hezbollah, a Shi'a Islamist militant group and political party based in Lebanon and backed by Iran. Religious tensions between Sunnis and Shias remained after the war.

Following the assassination of the Lebanese ex-premier in which Syria was implicated, the UN adopted a Security Council Resolution that forced Syria to announce its full withdrawal from Lebanon in 2005. The United States was very happy with Assad until he refused to modernize the bank system, permit private banks and open a stock exchange. By the late 1990s, Assad's health had deteriorated.He was incapable of functioning for more than 2 hours a day. Assad died of a heart attack at the age of 69 and was succeeded by his son Bashar as President.

Bashar Assad was born and raised in Damascus. He graduated from the medical school and worked as an eye doctor in the Syrian Army. 4 years later, he attended postgraduate studies in London, specializing in ophthalmology. In 1994, after his elder brother Bassel died in a car crash, Bashar was recalled to Syria to take over Bassel's role as heir apparent. He entered the military academy, taking charge of the Syrian military presence in Lebanon in 1998. In 2000, Bashar was elected as President, succeeding his father, who died in office a month prior. In the 2000 and subsequent 2007 election, he received 99.7% and 97.6% support, respectively, in uncontested referendums on his leadership. 

Once seen by the international community as a potential reformer, the United States, the European Union, and the majority of the Arab League called for Assad's resignation from the presidency after he allegedly ordered crackdowns and military sieges on Arab Spring protesters, which led to the Syrian Civil War. 

The Syrian Civil War was a multi-sided armed conflict in Syria fought primarily between the government of President Bashar al-Assad, along with its allies, and various forces opposing the government. It grew out of discontent with the government and escalated to an armed conflict after protests calling for his removal were violently suppressed. The war was fought between several factions: the Syrian government and its allies, a loose alliance of Sunni Arab rebel groups including the Free Syrian Army, the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces, and Salafi jihadist groups including al-Nusra Front and ISIS who follow a fundamentalist, Wahhabi doctrine of Sunni Islam.

Wahhabism is an Salafi Islamic doctrine and religious movement described as ultraconservative, austere, fundamentalist, and puritanical. It is an Islamic reform movement to restore pure monotheistic worship. By its opponents, it is described as a distortion of Islam. Salafism is an ultra-conservative reform branch or movement within Sunni Islam that developed in Arabia in the first half of the 18th century advocating a return to the traditions of the forefathers.

ISIS originated in 1999, and pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda and participated in the Iraqi insurgency following the 2003 invasion of Iraq by Western forces. ISIS gained global prominence in early 2014 when it drove Iraqi government forces out of key cities. The group proclaimed itself a worldwide Sunni based caliphate and began referring to itself as Islamic State. As a caliphate, it claims religious, political, and military authority over all Muslims worldwide. In Syria, the group conducted ground attacks on both government forces and opposition factions, and by 2015 it held a large area in western Iraq and eastern Syria containing 8 million people, where it enforced its interpretation of sharia law, the religious law forming part of the Islamic tradition.

Syrian opposition groups formed the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and seized control of the area surrounding Aleppo and parts of southern Syria. Over time, some factions of the Syrian opposition split from their original moderate position to pursue an Islamist vision for Syria, joining groups such as al-Nusra Front and ISIS. Russia and Hezbollah as well as Iran support the Syrian government militarily. In 2014, a coalition of NATO countries began launching airstrikes against ISIS. International organizations have accused the Syrian government, ISIS and rebel groups of severe human rights violations and of many massacres. The conflict has caused a major refugee crisis. 

In 2001 Bashar arrested and imprisoned 10 leading activists who had called for democratic elections and a campaign of civil disobedience because Bashar failed to deliver on promised reforms. Bashar maintained that no 'moderate opposition' to his rule exists, and that all opposition forces are jihadists intent on destroying his secular leadership. He claims that terrorist groups operating in Syria are linked to the agendas of foreign countries.

The 5 years between 2006-2011 suffered the most intense drought ever recorded in Syria resulting in widespread crop failure, an increase in food prices and a mass migration of farming families to urban centers. This migration strained infrastructure already burdened by the influx of some 1.5 million refugees from the Iraq War. The rights of free expression, association and assembly were strictly controlled in Syria even before the uprising. The country was under emergency rule from 1963-2011 and public gatherings of more than 5 people were banned. Security forces had sweeping powers of arrest and detention.

The protests began in 2011, when protesters marched in the capital of Damascus, demanding democratic reforms, release of political prisoners, an increase in freedoms, abolition of the emergency law and an end to corruption. Security forces retaliated by opening fire on the protesters. The protest was triggered by the arrest of a boy and his friends by the government for writing in graffiti, "The people want the fall of the government". The 13-year-old boy was tortured and killed. The protesters burned down a Ba'ath Party headquarters and other buildings and started to demand the overthrow the Assad government. Protests spread to many cities. Thousands of civilians and 150 soldiers and policemen were killed. Thousands were detained; among the arrested were many students, liberal activists and human rights advocates. Significant armed resistance against the state security took place with some security forces defecting after secret police and intelligence officers executed soldiers who had refused to fire on civilians. Later, more protesters in Syria took up arms, and more soldiers defected to protect protesters. Estimated death toll reached 470,000, with 1.9 million wounded. 11.5% of the entire population was either wounded or killed. 

In 2014, Bashar was sworn in for another seven-year term after receiving 88.7% of votes in the first contested presidential election in Ba'athist Syria's history. The election was dismissed as a "sham" by the Syrian opposition and its Western allies, while an international delegation who observed the election issued a statement asserting that the election was "free and fair". The Assad government describes itself as secular, but some claim that the government exploits sectarian tensions in the country and relies upon the Alawite minority to remain in power. 

Back to INDEX


Boris Yeltsin (1931- 2007)
Boris Yeltsin was a Soviet and Russian politician and the first President of the Russian Federation, serving for 8 years from 1991-1999. Originally a supporter of Mikhail Gorbachev, Yeltsin emerged under the perestroika reforms as one of Gorbachev's most powerful political opponents. During the late 1980s, Yeltsin had been a member of the Politburo, and in late 1987 tendered a letter of resignation in protest. No one had resigned from the Politburo before. This act branded Yeltsin as a rebel and led to his rise in popularity as an anti-establishment figure. 

In 1991 he was elected by popular vote to the newly created post of President of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) at that time one of the 15 constituent republics of the Soviet Union. Upon the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev and the final dissolution of the Soviet Union, the RSFSR became the sovereign state of the Russian Federation and Yeltsin remained in office as president. He was reelected in the 1996 election but never recovered his early popularity after a series of economic and political crises in Russia in the 1990s. 

He vowed to transform Russia's socialist economy into a capitalist market economy and implemented economic shock therapy, price liberalization, and nationwide privatization. Due to the sudden total economic shift, a majority of the national property and wealth fell into the hands of a small number of oligarchs. The well-off millionaire and billionaire oligarchs were likened to 19th century robber barons who used unscrupulous methods to get rich. Rather than creating new enterprises, Yeltsin's democratization led to international monopolies hijacking the former Soviet markets, arbitraging the huge difference between old domestic prices for Russian commodities and the prices prevailing on the world market. 

Much of the Yeltsin era was marked by widespread corruption, and as a result of persistent low oil and commodity prices during the 1990s, Russia suffered inflation, economic collapse, and enormous political and social problems that affected Russia and the other former states of the USSR. Ongoing confrontations with the Supreme Soviet climaxed in the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis in which Yeltsin illegally ordered the dissolution of the Supreme Soviet parliament, which as a result attempted to remove him from office. Troops loyal to Yeltsin stopped an armed uprising outside of the parliament building, leading to a number of deaths. Yeltsin then scrapped the existing Russian constitution, banned political opposition, and deepened his efforts to transform the economy. In 1999, under enormous internal pressure, Yeltsin announced his resignation, leaving the presidency in the hands of his chosen successor, then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Yeltsin left office widely unpopular with the Russian population. Yeltsin kept a low profile after his resignation, though he did occasionally publicly criticize his successor. 

Boris was 1 year old when the state took away the entire harvest from the recently collectivized peasants. The Yeltsin family moved as far away as they could, to Kazan, more than 1,100 km away. His father found work on a construction site. When Boris was 3, his father was convicted of anti-Soviet agitation and sentenced to hard labor in a gulag for 3 years. Following his release the family moved. Boris`s uncle was a blacksmith who had been exiled the year before for failing to deliver his grain quota. Boris`s mother worked as a seamstress. Boris lost the thumb and index finger of his left hand when he and some friends furtively entered a Red Army supply depot, stole several grenades, and tried to disassemble them. 

In 1949, when Boris was 18 years old, he was admitted to study civil engineering. In 1961, when he was 30 years old, he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). In 1976 when he was 45 years old, he was promoted to the post of the first secretary of the CPSU and remained in this position until 1985. In 1977, as a party official, Yeltsin was ordered by Moscow to demolish the house where the last Russian tzar Nicholas II had been killed by Bolshevik troops. During this time, Yeltsin developed connections with key people in the Soviet power structure. In 1981, when he was 50 years old, Yeltsin was elected as a full member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the CPSU by the Politburo. Gorbachev's primary goal was to revive the Soviet economy; however, he came to believe that fixing the Soviet economy would be nearly impossible without reforming the political and social structure of the USSR. To begin these reforms he immediately began gathering in Moscow a younger and more energetic governing team of Communist Party members. Yeltsin received a call from Gorbachev summoning him to Moscow and was promoted to be Secretary for Construction of the Central Committee. 

Mikhail Gorbachev appointed Yeltsin mayor of Moscow. He was given a country house (dacha) which was previously occupied by Gorbachev, who now moved to a much bigger and more luxurious purpose-built dacha nearby. During this period, Yeltsin portrayed himself as a reformer and populist, firing and reshuffling his staff several times and using a public trolleybus to go to work. He became popular among Moscow residents for firing corrupt Moscow party officials. In 1987, after a complaint from a hard-liner at the Politburo for allowing 2 small unsanctioned demonstrations on Moscow streets, Yeltsin wrote a letter of resignation to Gorbachev who was holidaying on the Black Sea. When Gorbachev received the letter he was stunned. Nobody in Soviet history had voluntarily resigned from the ranks of the Politburo. Gorbachev phoned Yeltsin and asked him to reconsider. 

At the plenary meeting of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Yeltsin, frustrated that Gorbachev had not addressed any of the issues outlined in his resignation letter asked to speak. He expressed his discontent with both the slow pace of reform in society, the servility shown to the general secretary, and opposition to him from hard-liners that made his position untenable. He requested to resign from the Politburo. Aside from the fact that no one had ever before quit the Politburo, no one in the party had ever addressed a leader of the party in such a manner in front of the Central Committee since Leon Trotsky in the 1920s. In his reply, Gorbachev accused Yeltsin of "political immaturity" and "absolute irresponsibility". Nobody in the Central Committee backed Yeltsin.  Within days, news of Yeltsin's actions leaked and rumors of his speech at the Central Committee spread throughout Moscow. Soon fabricated versions began to circulate – this was the beginning of Yeltsin's rise as a rebel and growth in popularity as an anti-establishment figure. Gorbachev called a meeting of the Moscow City Party Committee to launch another crushing attack on Yeltsin and confirm his dismissal. Yeltsin tried to kill himself and was rushed to hospital bleeding profusely from self-inflicted cuts to his chest. Gorbachev ordered the injured Yeltsin from his hospital bed to the Moscow party plenum 2 days later where he was ritually denounced by the party faithful in what was reminiscent of a Stalinist show trial before he was fired from the post of First Secretary of the Moscow Communist Party. Yeltsin said he would never forgive Gorbachev for this "immoral and inhuman" treatment.  

Yeltsin was demoted to the position of First Deputy Commissioner for the State Committee for Construction. At the next meeting of the Central Committee in 1988, Yeltsin was removed from his position as a candidate member of the Politburo. He was perturbed and humiliated but began plotting his revenge. He started intensively criticizing Gorbachev, highlighting the slow pace of reform in the Soviet Union as his major argument. Yeltsin's criticism of the Politburo and Gorbachev led to a smear campaign against him, in which examples of Yeltsin's awkward behavior were used against him. An article in Pravda described Yeltsin as drunk at a lecture during a visit to the United States, an allegation which appeared to be confirmed by a TV account of his speech. However, popular dissatisfaction with the regime was very strong, and these attempts to smear Yeltsin only added to his popularity.  

After having toured a medium-sized grocery store in Texas he stated:
“What have they done to our poor people?” Yeltsin confessed the pain he had felt after the Houston excursion. “I feel pain for all of us, for our country so rich, so talented and so exhausted by incessant experiments. I think we have committed a crime against our people by making their standard of living so incomparably lower than that of the Americans.” 

In 1989, Yeltsin was elected to the Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union as the delegate from Moscow district with a hugely decisive 92% of the vote and was elected by the Congress of People's Deputies to a seat on the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. In 1990, Yeltsin was elected to the Congress of People's Deputies of Russia with 72% of the vote. He was elected chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), in spite of the fact that Gorbachev personally pleaded with the Russian deputies not to select Yeltsin. He was supported by both democratic and conservative members of the Supreme Soviet, which sought power in the developing political situation in the country.

A part of this power struggle was the opposition between power structures of the Soviet Union and the RSFSR. In 1990 in an attempt to gain more power, the Congress of People's Deputies of the RSFSR adopted a declaration of sovereignty. Yeltsin resigned from the CPSU in a dramatic speech before party members, some of whom responded by shouting "Shame!" In 1991, Yeltsin won 57% of the popular vote in the democratic presidential elections for the Russian republic, defeating Gorbachev's preferred candidate. In his election campaign, Yeltsin criticized the "dictatorship of the center", but did not suggest the introduction of a market economy. A coup against Gorbachev was launched by the government members opposed to perestroika. Gorbachev was held in Crimea while Yeltsin defied the coup, making a memorable speech from atop the turret of a tank onto which he had climbed. The troops defected in the face of mass popular demonstrations and most of the coup leaders fled Moscow. 

Although restored to his position, Gorbachev had been destroyed politically. Neither union nor Russian power structures heeded his commands as support had swung over to Yeltsin. Taking advantage of the situation, Yeltsin began taking what remained of the Soviet government, ministry by ministry, including the Kremlin. Yeltsin issued a decree banning all Communist Party activities on Russian soil. In 1991 Ukraine voted for independence from the Soviet Union. A week later, Yeltsin met Ukrainian president and the leader of Belarus and the 3 presidents announced the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the formation of a voluntary Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in its place. The main goal of the dissolution of the Soviet Union was to get rid of Gorbachev, who by that time had started to recover his position. Gorbachev has also accused Yeltsin of violating the people's will expressed in the referendum in which the majority voted to keep the Soviet Union united. Gorbachev accepted the fait accompli and agreed to dissolve the Soviet Union. 

The Russian Federation, by mutual agreement of the other CIS states took the Soviet Union's seat in the United Nations. The next day, Gorbachev resigned and the Soviet Union ceased to exist, thereby ending the world's oldest, largest and most powerful Communist state. Economic relations between the former Soviet republics were severely compromised. Millions of ethnic Russians found themselves in the newly formed foreign countries. Just days after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin resolved to embark on a program of radical economic reform. Unlike Gorbachev's reforms, which sought to expand democracy in the socialist system, the new regime aimed to completely dismantle socialism and fully implement capitalism, converting the world's largest command economy into a free-market one. 

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Yeltsin promoted privatization as a way of spreading ownership of shares in former state enterprises as widely as possible to create political support for his economic reforms. In the West, privatization was viewed as the key to the transition from Communism in Eastern Europe, ensuring a quick dismantling of the Soviet-era command economy to make way for free market reforms.

In 1992, Yeltsin, acting as his own prime minister, ordered the liberalization of foreign trade, prices, and currency. At the same time, Yeltsin followed a policy of 'macroeconomic stabilization,' a harsh austerity regime designed to control inflation. Under Yeltsin's stabilization program, interest rates were raised to extremely high levels to tighten money and restrict credit. To bring state spending and revenues into balance, Yeltsin raised new taxes heavily, cut back sharply on government subsidies to industry and construction, and made steep cuts to state welfare spending.


Yeltsin launched a program of free vouchers as a way to give mass privatization a jump-start. Under the program, all Russian citizens were issued vouchers for purchase of shares of select state enterprises. Although each citizen initially received a voucher of equal face value, within months most of them converged in the hands of intermediaries who were ready to buy them for cash right away. The deals were effectively giveaways of valuable state assets to a small group of tycoons in finance, industry, energy, telecommunications, and the media who came to be known as "oligarchs". By mid-1996, substantial ownership shares over major firms were acquired at very low prices by a handful of people. 

Prices skyrocketed throughout Russia, and a deep credit crunch shut down many industries and brought about a protracted depression. The reforms devastated the living standards of much of the population, especially the groups dependent on Soviet-era state subsidies and welfare entitlement programs. Through the 1990s, Russia's GDP fell by 50%, vast sectors of the economy were wiped out, inequality and unemployment grew dramatically, while incomes fell. Hyperinflation wiped out a lot of personal savings, and tens of millions of Russians were plunged into poverty.

In the 1990s Russia suffered an economic downturn more severe than the United States or Germany had undergone 6 decades earlier in the Great Depression. Yeltsin was widely blamed for the country's disastrous economic performance. Many politicians began to quickly distance themselves from the program. By 1993 conflict over the reform direction escalated between Yeltsin on the one side, and the opposition to radical economic reform in Russia's parliament on the other. 

Yeltsin wrestled with the Supreme Soviet of Russia and the Congress of People's Deputies for control over government, government policy, government banking and property. Yeltsin announced in a televised address to the nation that he was going to assume certain "special powers" in order to implement his program of reforms. In response an attempt to remove Yeltsin from presidency through impeachment was initiated. Yeltsin's opponents gathered more than 600 votes for impeachment, but fell 72 votes short of the required two-thirds majority.

In 1993 Yeltsin, in breach of the constitution, announced in a televised address his decision to disband the Supreme Soviet and Congress of People's Deputies by decree. Yeltsin declared his intent to rule by decree until the election of the new parliament and a referendum on a new constitution. The Supreme Soviet declared Yeltsin removed from presidency, by virtue of his breaching the constitution, and the Vice-President was sworn in as the acting president. 

Yeltsin was confronted by popular unrest. The demonstrators were protesting the new and terrible living conditions under Yeltsin. Since 1989 GDP had declined by half. Corruption was rampant, violent crime was skyrocketing, medical services were collapsing, food and fuel were increasingly scarce and life expectancy was falling for all but a tiny handful of the population. Yeltsin was increasingly getting the blame. He secured the support of Russia's army and ministry of interior forces and in a massive show of force, Yeltsin called up tanks to shell the Russian White House, Russia's parliament building. 

In 1993 the Supreme Soviet was dissolved and elections to the newly established parliament, the State Duma, were held. Candidates associated with Yeltsin's economic policies were overwhelmed by a huge anti-Yeltsin vote, the bulk of which was divided between the Communist Party and ultra-nationalists. The referendum, however, held at the same time, approved the new constitution, which significantly expanded the powers of the president, giving Yeltsin a right to appoint the members of the government, to dismiss the Prime Minister and, in some cases, to dissolve the Duma. In 1994, Yeltsin ordered the military invasion of Chechnya in an attempt to restore Moscow's control over the republic. Nearly 2 years later Yeltsin withdrew federal forces from the devastated Chechnya under a 1996 peace agreement. The peace deal allowed Chechnya greater autonomy but not full independence. 

In 1995, as Yeltsin struggled to finance Russia's growing foreign debt and gain support from the Russian business elite for his bid in the early-1996 presidential elections, the Russian president prepared for a new wave of privatization offering stock shares in some of Russia's most valuable state enterprises in exchange for bank loans. The program was promoted as a way of simultaneously speeding up privatization and ensuring the government a cash infusion to cover its operating needs.' The following year Yeltsin announced that he would seek a second term.

Yeltsin recruited a team of a handful of financial and media oligarchs to bankroll his campaign and guarantee favorable media coverage on national television and in leading newspapers. In return, well-connected Russian business leaders were allowed to acquire majority stakes in some of Russia's most valuable state-owned assets. The media painted a picture of a fateful choice for Russia, between Yeltsin and a "return to totalitarianism." The oligarchs even played up the threat of civil war if a Communist were elected president.

Yeltsin campaigned energetically, dispelling concerns about his health, and maintained a high media profile. To boost his popularity, Yeltsin promised to abandon some of his more unpopular economic reforms, boost welfare spending, end the war in Chechnya, and pay wage and pension arrears. Yeltsin's campaign also got a boost from the announcement of a loan to the Russian government from the International Monetary Fund. During his presidency, Russia received funds from the International Monetary Fund and other international lending organizations; however most of these funds were stolen by people from Yeltsin's circle and placed in foreign banks. With a turnout of 68.9%, Yeltsin won 53.8% of the vote which was widely accused of being fraudulent.

In 1998, a political and economic crisis emerged when Yeltsin's government defaulted on its debts, causing financial markets to panic and the ruble to collapse. During the 1999 Kosovo war, Yeltsin strongly opposed the NATO military campaign against Yugoslavia, and warned of possible Russian intervention if NATO deployed ground troops to Kosovo. In televised comments he stated: "I told NATO, the Americans, the Germans: Don't push us toward military action. Otherwise there will be a European war for sure and possibly world war." 

In 1999 Yeltsin fired his prime minister and for the fourth time, fired his entire cabinet. He appointed Vladimir Putin as his prime minister. Putin was relatively unknown at that time, and Yeltsin announced his wish to see Putin as his successor. While visiting China to seek support on Chechnya, Yeltsin replied to US president Clinton's criticism. Yeltsin bluntly pronounced: "Yesterday, Clinton permitted himself to put pressure on Russia. It seems he has for a minute, for a second, for half a minute, forgotten that Russia has a full arsenal of nuclear weapons." It fell to Putin to downplay Yeltsin's comments and present reassurances about U.S. and Russian relations.

Yeltsin survived another attempt of impeachment, this time by the Democratic and communist opposition in the State Duma. None of the charges received the two-thirds majority of the Duma which was required to initiate the process of impeachment of the president. A Swiss construction firm was awarded contracts to reconstruct, renovate and refurbish the former Russian Federation Parliament, the Russian Opera House, State Duma and the Moscow Kremlin. A bribery investigation against the Swiss construction company was initiated claiming that the company bribed Yeltsin and his family members. Admitting publicly that bribery was usual business practice in Russia, the company confirmed that it had guaranteed 5 credit cards for Mr Yeltsin's wife and 2 daughters. Yeltsin resigned a few weeks later appointing Vladimir Putin to be his successor. President Putin's first decree as president was lifelong immunity from prosecution for Mr. Yeltsin. Yeltsin asked for forgiveness for what he acknowledged were errors of his rule, and said Russia needed to enter the new century with new political leaders. Yeltsin said:
“I want to ask for your forgiveness, that many of our dreams didn't come true. That what seemed to us to be simple turned out painfully difficult. I ask forgiveness for the fact that I didn't justify some of the hopes of those people who believed that with one stroke, one burst, one sign we could jump from the gray, stagnant, totalitarian past to a bright, rich, civilized future. I myself believed this. One burst was not enough... but I want you to know – I've never said this, today it's important for me to tell you: the pain of every one of you, I feel in myself, in my heart... in saying farewell, I want to say to every one of you: be happy. You deserve happiness. You deserve happiness, and peace.” 

His approval ratings when leaving office were as low as 2%. Yeltsin maintained a low profile after his resignation, making almost no public statements or appearances. Putin launched an initiative to replace the election of regional governors with a system whereby they would be directly appointed by the president and approved by regional legislatures. Yeltsin, together with Gorbachev, publicly criticized Putin's plan as a step away from democracy in Russia and a return to the centrally-run political apparatus of the Soviet era. 

Boris Yeltsin died of congestive heart failure, aged 76. President Putin declared the day of his funeral a national day of mourning. Putin stated:
“A new democratic Russia was born during his time: a free, open and peaceful country. Thanks to the will and direct initiative of President Boris Yeltsin a new constitution, one which declared human rights a supreme value, was adopted. It gave people the opportunity to freely express their thoughts, to freely choose power in Russia, to realize their creative and entrepreneurial plans. Yeltsin was always very honest and frank while defending his position. He assumed full responsibility for everything he called for, for everything he aspired to.”

Back to INDEX


Václav Havel (1936 - 2011)
Václav Havel was a Czech writer and former dissident. He served as the last president of Czechoslovakia for 3 years from 1989 until its dissolution in 1992. He served as the first President of the Czech Republic for 10 years from 1993 to 2003. He is known for his plays, essays, and memoirs. He is considered to be one of the most important intellectuals of the 20th century. His most important accomplishment as President was the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. It took 2 years for Soviet troops to fully withdraw from Czechoslovakia.

Havel was born in Prague and grew up in a well-known, wealthy entrepreneurial and intellectual family, which was closely linked to the cultural and political events in Czechoslovakia from the 1920s to the 1940s. His father was a distinguished movie producer and his mother came from an influential family. In the early 1950s, the young Havel entered into a 4 year apprenticeship as a chemical laboratory assistant and simultaneously took evening classes. He completed his secondary education in 1954. For political reasons, he was not accepted into any post-secondary school with a humanities program. In 1964, Havel married. The intellectual tradition of his family was essential for Havel's lifetime adherence to the humanitarian values of the Czech culture. After finishing his military service, Havel had to bring his intellectual ambitions in line with the given circumstances, especially with the restrictions imposed on him as a descendant of former middle-class family. He found employment in Prague's theater world as a stagehand. He started writing plays which became famous world wide. After 1968, Havel's plays were banned and he was unable to leave Czechoslovakia to see any foreign performances of his works. 

His educational opportunities limited by his bourgeois background, Havel first rose to prominence within the Prague theater world as a playwright. Havel used the absurdist style to critique communism. He participated in the Prague Spring, a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia during the era of its domination by Russia after WWII. It began in 1968, when reformist Alexander Dubček was elected First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and continued for 8 months when the Soviet Union and other members of the Warsaw Pact invaded the country to halt the reforms. The Prague Spring reforms were a strong attempt by Dubček to grant additional rights to the citizens of Czechoslovakia in an act of partial decentralization of the economy and democratization. The freedoms granted included a loosening of restrictions on the media, speech and travel. He was blacklisted after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, he became more politically active and helped found several dissident initiatives. His political activities brought him under the surveillance of the secret police and he spent multiple stints in prison, the longest being nearly 4 years, between 1979 and 1983.

Havel assumed the presidency shortly thereafter, and was reelected in a landslide the following year and after Slovak independence in 1993. He was instrumental in dismantling the Warsaw Pact and expanding NATO membership eastward. Many of his stances and policies, such as his opposition to Slovak independence, condemnation of the Czechoslovak treatment of Germans after WWII and granting of general amnesty to all those imprisoned under communism, were very controversial domestically. As such, at the end of his presidency, he enjoyed greater popularity abroad than at home. Havel continued his life as a public intellectual after his presidency, launching several initiatives. Havel's political philosophy was one of anti-consumerism, humanitarianism, environmentalism, civil activism, and direct democracy. He supported the Czech Green Party from 2004 until his death. 

During the first week of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Havel assisted the resistance by providing an on-air narrative via Radio Free Czechoslovakia station. Following the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, he was banned from the theater and became more politically active. Short of money, he took a job in a brewery. Havel co-founded the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted in 1979. His political activities resulted in multiple stays in prison, and constant government surveillance and questioning by the secret police. His longest stay in prison was nearly 4 years. He was known for his essays, most particularly The Power of the Powerless, in which he described a societal paradigm in which citizens were forced to "live within a lie" under the communist regime. In describing his role as a dissident, Havel wrote in 1979: 
"...we never decided to become dissidents. We have been transformed into them, without quite knowing how, sometimes we have ended up in prison without precisely knowing how. We simply went ahead and did certain things that we felt we ought to do, and that seemed to us decent to do, nothing more nor less." 

Havel's Civic Forum party played a major role in the Velvet Revolution that toppled communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989. The Velvet Revolution was a non-violent transition of power lasting 6 weeks in 1989. Popular demonstrations against the one-party government of the Communist Party combined students and older dissidents. The result was the end of 41 years of one-party rule, and the subsequent dismantling of the planned economy and conversion to a parliamentary republic.

In 1989, while he was leader of the Civic Forum, Havel became President of Czechoslovakia by a unanimous vote of the Federal Assembly. He had long insisted that he was not interested in politics and had argued that political change in the country should be induced through autonomous civic initiatives rather than through the official institutions. In 1990, soon after his election, Havel was awarded the Prize For Freedom of the Liberal International. 

In 1990, Czechoslovakia held its first free elections in 44 years, resulting in a sweeping victory for Civic Forum and its Slovak counterpart, Public Against Violence. Between them, they commanded strong majorities in both houses of the legislature, and tallied the highest popular vote share recorded for a free election in the country. Havel retained his presidency. Despite increasing political tensions between the Czechs and the Slovaks in 1992, Havel supported the retention of the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic prior to the dissolution of the country. Havel sought reelection in 1992. Although no other candidate filed, he failed to get a majority due to a lack of support from Slovak deputies. After the Slovaks issued their Declaration of Independence, he resigned as President saying that he would not preside over the country's breakup. However, when the Czech Republic was created as one of 2 successor states, he stood for election as its first president in 1993, and won. He did not have nearly the power that he had as president of Czechoslovakia. Although he was nominally the new country's chief executive, the Constitution of the Czech Republic intended to vest most of the real power in the prime minister. However, owing to his prestige, he still commanded a good deal of moral authority, and the presidency acquired a greater role than the framers intended. For instance, largely due to his influence, the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia was kept on the margins for most of his presidency, as Havel suspected it was still an unreformed Stalinist party. 

Havel's popularity abroad surpassed his popularity at home, and he was often the object of controversy and criticism. During his time in office, Havel stated that the expulsion of the indigenous German population after WWII was immoral, causing a great controversy at home. He also extended general amnesty as one of his first acts as President, in an attempt to lessen the pressure in overcrowded prisons as well as to release political prisoners and persons who may have been falsely imprisoned during the Communist era. Havel felt that many of the decisions of the previous regime's courts should not be trusted, and that most of those in prison had not received fair trials. This amnesty led to a significant increase in the crime rate. Several of the worst crimes in the history of the Czech criminology were committed by criminals released on this amnesty. Within 4 years after the Velvet revolution and following other amnesties declared by Havel, the criminality more than tripled in comparison with 1989. Havel's dedication to democracy and his steadfast opposition to the Communist ideology earned him admiration. 

Havel died at age 75. 

Back to INDEX


Saddam Hussein (1937 – 2006)
Saddam Hussein was the fifth President of Iraq, serving in this capacity for 24 years, from 1979-2003. He was a leading member of the revolutionary Iraqi Ba'ath Party which espoused Ba'athism, a mix of Arab nationalism and socialism. Saddam played a key role in the 1968 coup that brought the party to power in Iraq.

The region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, historically known as Mesopotamia, is often referred to as the cradle of civilization. It was here that mankind first began to read, write, create laws, and live in cities under an organized government. The area has been home to successive civilizations since the 6th millennium BC. Iraq was the center of the Akkadian, Sumerian, Assyrian, and Babylonian empires as well as the Persian, Greek, Roman, and Ottoman Empires that followed. 

Iraq's modern borders were mostly demarcated in 1920 by the League of Nations when the Ottoman Empire was divided. Iraq was placed under the Mandate of the United Kingdom. A monarchy was established in 1921 and the Kingdom of Iraq gained independence from Britain in 1932. 

In 1958, the monarchy was overthrown and the Iraqi Republic created. Iraq was controlled by the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party from 1968 until 2003. After an invasion by the United States and its allies in 2003, Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party was removed from power and multi-party parliamentary elections were held in 2005. The American presence in Iraq ended in 2011, but the Iraqi insurgency continued and intensified as fighters from the Syrian Civil War spilled into the country. 

Saddam Hussein was born to a family of shepherds. He never knew his father who disappeared 6 months before Saddam was born. Shortly afterward, Saddam's 13-year-old brother died of cancer. The infant Saddam was sent to the family of his maternal uncle until he was 3. His mother remarried and his stepfather treated him harshly. At age 10, Saddam fled the family and returned to live in Baghdad with his uncle who was a devout Sunni Muslim and a veteran of the 1941 Anglo-Iraqi War between Iraqi nationalists and the United Kingdom.

Later in his life, relatives became some of his closest advisers and supporters. Under the guidance of his uncle he attended a nationalistic high school in Baghdad. After secondary school Saddam studied at an Iraqi law school for 3 years, dropping out at the age of 20 to join the revolutionary pan-Arab Ba'ath Party, of which his uncle was a supporter. During this time, Saddam supported himself as a secondary school teacher. 

Revolutionary sentiment was characteristic of the era in Iraq and throughout the Middle East. In Iraq, progressives and socialists assailed traditional political elites who were colonial era bureaucrats and landowners, wealthy merchants and tribal chiefs, and monarchists. Moreover, the pan-Arab nationalism of Nasser in Egypt profoundly influenced young Ba'athists like Saddam. The rise of Nasser foreshadowed a wave of revolutions throughout the Middle East with the collapse of the monarchies of Iraq, Egypt, and Libya. Nasser inspired nationalists throughout the Middle East by fighting the British and the French during the Suez Crisis of 1956, modernizing Egypt, and uniting the Arab world politically. 

In 1958, a year after Saddam had joined the Ba'ath party, army officers led by general Qasim overthrew King Faisal II of Iraq. Of the 16 members of Qasim's cabinet, 12 were Ba'ath Party members. The party turned against Qasim due to his refusal to join Nasser's United Arab Republic. To strengthen his own position within the government, Qasim created an alliance with the Iraqi Communist Party, which was opposed to any notion of pan-Arabism. A year later, the Ba'ath Party leadership unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate Qasim and Saddam was a leading member of the operation. At the time, the Ba'ath Party was more of an ideological experiment than a strong anti-government fighting machine. The majority of its members were either educated professionals or students. Saddam fled to Egypt and he continued to live there until 1963.

In 1963, army officers with ties to the Ba'ath Party overthrew Qasim. Saddam returned to Iraq, but was imprisoned. In 1964. 3 years later he escaped to organize and revitalize the party. In 1968, Saddam participated in a bloodless coup and within a year, as second-in-command, he had become the moving force behind the party. Saddam strengthened and unified the Ba'ath party and took a leading role in addressing the country's major domestic problems and expanding the party's following. Saddam focused on attaining stability in a nation riddled with profound tensions. Long before Saddam, Iraq had been split along social, ethnic, religious, and economic fault lines. Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs, Kurds, tribal chiefs, urban merchants, nomads and peasants were all fighting for their own different interests. The desire for stable rule in a country rife with factionalism led Saddam to pursue both massive repression and massive improvement of living standards. 

Saddam actively fostered the modernization of the Iraqi economy along with the creation of a strong security apparatus to prevent coups within the power structure and insurrections apart from it. Ever concerned with broadening his base of support among the diverse elements of Iraqi society and mobilizing mass support, he closely followed the administration of state welfare and development programs. In the early 1970s, Saddam nationalized oil and other industries. The state-owned banks were put under his control.

Through the 1970s, Saddam cemented his authority over the apparatus of government as oil money helped Iraq's economy to grow at a rapid pace. Positions of power in the country were mostly filled with Sunni Arabs, a minority that made up of about a third of the population.  Saddam formally rose to power in 1979, although he had already been the de facto head of Iraq for several years. He suppressed several movements, particularly Shi'a and Kurdish movements, which sought to overthrow the government or gain independence, and maintained power during the Iran–Iraq War and the Gulf War. Whereas some in the Arab world lauded Saddam for opposing the United States and attacking Israel, he was widely condemned for the brutality of his dictatorship. The total number of Iraqis killed by the security services of Saddam's government in various purges and genocides are as high as 250,000. Saddam's invasions of Iran and Kuwait also resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

At the center of this strategy was Iraq's oil. In 1972, Saddam oversaw the seizure of international oil interests, which, at the time, dominated the country's oil sector. A year later, world oil prices rose dramatically as a result of the 1973 energy crisis, and skyrocketing revenues enabled Saddam to expand his agenda. Within just a few years, Iraq was providing social services that were unprecedented among Middle Eastern countries. Saddam established and controlled the "National Campaign for the Eradication of Illiteracy" and the campaign for "Compulsory Free Education in Iraq," and largely under his auspices, the government established universal free schooling up to the highest education levels. Hundreds of thousands learned to read in the years following the initiation of the program. The government also supported families of soldiers, granted free hospitalization to everyone, and gave subsidies to farmers. Iraq created one of the most modernized public-health systems in the Middle East, earning Saddam an award from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). 

With the help of increasing oil revenues, Saddam diversified the largely oil-based Iraqi economy. Saddam implemented a national infrastructure campaign that made great progress in building roads, promoting mining, and developing other industries. The campaign helped Iraq's energy industries. Electricity was brought to nearly every city in Iraq, and many outlying areas. Before the 1970s, most of Iraq's people lived in the countryside and roughly two-thirds were peasants. This number decreased quickly during the 1970s as global oil prices helped revenues to rise by 20 times. The country invested into industrial expansion. The oil revenue benefited Saddam politically. Much as Adolf Hitler won early praise for galvanizing German industry, ending mass unemployment and building autobahns, Saddam earned admiration abroad for his deeds. Saddam posed as the defender of Arabism against Jewish or Persian intruders. His secret police put dozens of Arab news editors, writers and artists on the payroll for his propaganda that highlighted Israel's 6-day victory in the 1967 war, the death of the pan-Arabist hero Nasser in 1970, and the traitorous successor, Sadat, who sold out to the Jewish state. 

In 1972, Saddam signed a 15-year Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union. The treaty upset the U.S.-sponsored security system established as part of the Cold War in the Middle East. In response, the U.S. covertly financed Kurdish rebels during the Second Iraqi–Kurdish War; the Kurds were defeated in 1975, leading to the forcible relocation of hundreds of thousands of Kurdish civilians. The Iraqi government used Russian military vehicles to return 57 boxes to the Kurds. Each box contained a dead child, eyes gouged out and ashen white, apparently drained of blood. The families were not given their children, but were forced to accept a communal grave, and then had to pay for the burial.  

Saddam focused on fostering loyalty to the Ba'athists in the rural areas. After nationalizing foreign oil interests, Saddam supervised the modernization of the countryside, mechanizing agriculture on a large scale, and distributing land to peasant farmers. The Ba'athists established farm cooperatives and the government also doubled expenditures for agricultural development. Saddam's welfare programs were part of a combination of "carrot and stick" tactics to enhance support for Saddam. The state-owned banks were put under his thumb. Lending was based on cronyism. Development went forward at such a fevered pitch that 2 million people from other Arab countries worked in Iraq to meet the growing demand for labor. 

In 1976, Saddam rose to the position of general in the Iraqi armed forces, and rapidly became the strongman of the government. He soon became the architect of Iraq's foreign policy and represented the nation in all diplomatic situations. He was the de facto leader of Iraq some years before he formally came to power in 1979. He slowly began to consolidate his power over Iraq's government and the Ba'ath party. Relationships with fellow party members were carefully cultivated, and Saddam soon accumulated a powerful circle of support within the party. 

In 1979 Iraq started to make treaties with Syria, also under Ba'athist leadership, that would lead to unification between the 2 countries. Syrian President Hafez al-Assad became deputy leader in a union, and this drove Saddam to obscurity. Saddam acted to secure his grip on power. He formally assumed the presidency. Saddam claimed to have found a group of conspirators within the party. 68 co-conspirators were labeled disloyal and found guilty of treason. Other high-ranking members of the party formed the firing squad. Within less than a year, hundreds of high-ranking Ba'ath party members were executed. 

The 1979 Iranian Revolution was a relatively non-violent uprising that replaced a pro-Western 2,000 year old monarchy with an Islamic Republic that was an anti-Western authoritarian theocracy based on the concept of Guardianship of the Islamic Jurists - a theory in Shia Islam which gives a Islamic jurist custodianship over people. The Shah of Iran was exiled, and the Grand Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the revolution, supported by various leftist and Islamist organizations and student movements was welcomed back from his exile to replace him. Khomeini returned to Tehran to a greeting by several million Iranians. Iran voted by national referendum to become an Islamic Republic and to approve a new theocratic-republican constitution whereby Khomeini became Supreme Leader of the country. 

The Iran-Iraq War was an armed conflict between Iran and Iraq lasting 8 years, from 1980, when Iraq invaded Iran, to 1988. The war followed a long history of border disputes. Iraq wanted to annex oil-rich areas. The invasion was also motivated by fears that the Iranian Revolution in 1979 would inspire insurgency among Iraq's Shi'ite majority, as well as Iraq's desire to replace Iran as the dominant Persian Gulf state. Although Iraq hoped to take advantage of Iran's revolutionary chaos and attacked without formal warning, it made only limited progress into Iran and was quickly repelled. Iran regained virtually all lost territory by 1982. For the next 6 years, Iran was on the offensive. 

The conflict has been compared to WWI in terms of the tactics used, including large-scale trench warfare with barbed wire stretched across trenches, manned machine gun posts, bayonet charges, human wave attacks, extensive use of chemical weapons by Iraq, and later deliberate attacks on civilian targets. The world powers United States and the Soviet Union, together with France and most Arab countries provided support for Iraq, while Iran as a Persian country was largely isolated. After 8 years of war, war-weariness, lack of international sympathy as Iraq was targeting Iranian civilians with weapons of mass destruction, and increasing direct military tension between Iran and the United States eventually led to a UN-brokered ceasefire.

500,000 Iraqi and Iranian soldiers, with an equivalent number of civilians died, with many more injured. The war brought neither reparations nor changes in borders. A number of proxy forces participated in the war, most notably the Iranian People's Mujahedin siding with Ba'athist Iraq and Iraqi Kurdish militias of the Kurdistan Democratic Party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan siding with Iran. All suffered a major blow by the end of the conflict. In an effort to recoup following damage caused by the war, Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, only to be repulsed by a US-led coalition in the Persian Gulf War.

A separate threat to Iraq came from parts of the ethnic Kurdish population of northern Iraq which opposed being part of an Iraqi state and favored independence. To alleviate the threat of revolution, Saddam afforded certain benefits to the potentially hostile population. Membership in the Ba'ath Party remained open to all Iraqi citizens regardless of background. However, repressive measures were taken against its opponents. Saddam was notable for using terror against his own people. His regime brought about the deaths of at least 250,000 Iraqis and committed war crimes in Iran, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. 

As a sign of his consolidation of power, Saddam's personality cult pervaded Iraqi society. He had thousands of portraits, posters, statues and murals erected in his honor all over Iraq. His face could be seen on the sides of office buildings, schools, airports, and shops, as well as on Iraqi currency. Saddam's personality cult reflected his efforts to appeal to the various elements in Iraqi society. This was seen in his variety of apparel: he appeared in the costumes of the Bedouin, the traditional clothes of the Iraqi peasant which he essentially wore during his childhood, and even Kurdish clothing, but also appeared in Western suits fitted by his favorite tailor, projecting the image of an urbane and modern leader. Sometimes he would also be portrayed as a devout Muslim, wearing full headdress and robe, praying toward Mecca.

He also conducted 2 show elections, in 1995 and 2002. In the 1995 referendum, he received 99.96% of the votes in a 99.47% turnout, getting only 3052 negative votes among an electorate of 8.4 million. In the 2002 referendum, he officially achieved 100% of approval votes and 100% turnout. He erected statues around the country, which Iraqis toppled after his fall. 

Relations between Iraq and Egypt violently ruptured in 1977, when the 2 nations broke relations with each other following Iraq's criticism of Egyptian President Sadat's peace initiatives with Israel. In 1978, Baghdad hosted an Arab League summit that condemned and ostracized Egypt for accepting the Camp David Accords. However, Egypt's strong material and diplomatic support for Iraq in the war with Iran led to warmer relations.

After the oil crisis, the Arab oil embargo that ended up quadrupling oil prices in 1973, France had changed to a more pro-Arab policy and was accordingly rewarded by Saddam with closer ties. 2 years later, Saddam negotiated an accord with Iran that contained Iraqi concessions on border disputes. In return, Iran agreed to stop supporting opposition Kurds in Iraq. Nearly from its founding as a modern state in 1920, Iraq has had to deal with Kurdish separatists in the northern part of the country. Saddam did negotiate an agreement in 1970 with separatist Kurdish leaders, giving them autonomy, but the agreement broke down. The result was brutal fighting between the government and Kurdish groups and even Iraqi bombing of Kurdish villages in Iran, which caused Iraqi relations with Iran to deteriorate. 

In early 1979, Iran's Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was overthrown by the Islamic Revolution, thus giving way to an Islamic republic led by the Ayatollah Khomeini. The influence of revolutionary Shi'ite Islam grew apace in the region, particularly in countries with large Shi'ite populations, especially Iraq. Saddam feared that radical Islamic ideas hostile to his secular rule were rapidly spreading inside his country among the majority Shi'ite population. There had been bitter enmity between Saddam and Khomeini since the 1970s. Khomeini, having been exiled from Iran in 1964, took up residence in Iraq, at the Shi'ite holy city of An Najaf. There he involved himself with Iraqi Shi'ites and developed a strong, worldwide religious and political following against the Iranian Government, which Saddam tolerated. However, when Khomeini began to urge the Shi'ites there to overthrow Saddam and under pressure from the Shah, who had agreed to a rapprochement between Iraq and Iran in 1975, Saddam agreed to expel Khomeini in 1978 to France. After Khomeini gained power, skirmishes between Iraq and revolutionary Iran occurred for 10 months over the sovereignty of the disputed waterway which divides the 2 countries. During this period, Saddam publicly maintained that it was in Iraq's interest not to engage with Iran, and that it was in the interests of both nations to maintain peaceful relations. However he intended to invade and occupy a large part of Iran. Later to appeal for support from the United States and most Western nations, he made toppling the Islamic government one of his intentions as well. 

In 1980, Iraq invaded Iran, first attacking the airport of Tehran and then entering the oil-rich Iranian land of Khuzestan, which also has a sizable Arab minority and declared it a new province of Iraq. With the support of the Arab states, the United States, and Europe, and heavily financed by the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, Saddam had become "the defender of the Arab world" against a revolutionary Persian Iran. The blatant disregard of international law and violations of international borders were ignored. Instead Iraq received economic and military support from its allies, who conveniently overlooked Saddam's use of chemical warfare against the Kurds and the Iranians and Iraq's efforts to develop nuclear weapons. Saddam initiated Iraq's nuclear enrichment project in the 1980s, with French assistance. The first Iraqi nuclear reactor was destroyed in 1981 by an Israeli air strike.

In the first days of the war, there was heavy ground fighting around strategic ports as Iraq launched an attack on oil-rich Khuzestan. After making some initial gains, Iraq's troops began to suffer losses from human wave attacks by Iran. Iraq quickly found itself bogged down in one of the longest and most destructive wars of attrition of the 20th century. During the war, Iraq used chemical weapons against Iranian forces fighting on the southern front and Kurdish separatists who were attempting to open up a northern front in Iraq with the help of Iran. These chemical weapons were developed by Iraq from materials and technology supplied primarily by West German companies as well as using dual-use technology imported following the Reagan administration's lifting of export restrictions. The United States also supplied Iraq with satellite photos showing Iranian deployments. In a US bid to open full diplomatic relations with Iraq, the country was removed from the US list of State Sponsors of Terrorism. The real reason was to help them succeed in the war against Iran. The Soviet Union, France, and China together accounted for over 90% of the value of Iraq's arms imports between 1980-1988. 

Saddam reached out to other Arab governments for cash and political support during the war, particularly after Iraq's oil industry severely suffered at the hands of the Iranian navy in the Persian Gulf. Iraq successfully gained some military and financial aid, as well as diplomatic and moral support, from the Soviet Union, China, France, and the United States, which together feared the prospects of the expansion of revolutionary Iran's influence in the region. The Iranians, demanding that the international community should force Iraq to pay war reparations to Iran, refused any suggestions for a cease-fire. In 1988, a Kurdish town was attacked with a mix of mustard gas and nerve agents, killing 5,000 civilians, and maiming, disfiguring, or seriously debilitating 10,000 more. Saddam ordered the attack to terrorize the Kurdish population in northern Iraq.

The bloody 8-year war ended in a stalemate. There were hundreds of thousands of casualties with estimates of up to one million dead. Neither side had achieved what they had originally desired and at the borders were left nearly unchanged. The southern, oil rich and prosperous Khuzestan and Basra area, the main focus of the war and the primary source of their economies were almost completely destroyed and were left at the pre-1979 border, while Iran managed to make some small gains on its borders in the Northern Kurdish area. Both economies, previously healthy and expanding, were left in ruins.

Saddam borrowed tens of billions of dollars from other Arab states and a few billions from elsewhere during the 1980s to fight Iran, mainly to prevent the expansion of Shiite radicalism. However, this had proven to completely backfire both on Iraq and on the part of the Arab states. Khomeini was widely perceived as a hero for managing to defend Iran and maintain the war with little foreign support against the heavily backed Iraq and only managed to boost Islamic radicalism not only within the Arab states, but within Iraq itself, creating new tensions between the Sunni Ba'ath Party and the majority Shiite population. Faced with rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure and internal resistance, Saddam desperately re-sought cash, this time for postwar reconstruction.

Between 1986-1989, Saddam Hussein and headed the campaign which was a genocidal campaign against the Kurdish people and many others in Kurdish regions of Iraq. Many villages belonging to these ethnic groups were destroyed and over 182,000 Kurds were killed. The end of the war with Iran served to deepen latent tensions between Iraq and its wealthy neighbor Kuwait. Saddam urged the Kuwaitis to waive the Iraqi debt accumulated in the war but they refused. 

Saddam pushed oil-exporting countries to raise oil prices by cutting back production. Kuwait refused and pumped large amounts of oil keeping prices low, when Iraq needed to sell high-priced oil from its wells to pay off a huge debt. Saddam had always argued that Kuwait was historically an integral part of Iraq, and that Kuwait had only come into being through the maneuverings of British imperialism; this echoed a belief that Iraqi nationalists had voiced for the past 50 years. The extent of Kuwaiti oil reserves also intensified tensions in the region. The oil reserves of Kuwait with a population of 2 million next to Iraq's 25 were roughly equal to those of Iraq. Taken together, Iraq and Kuwait sat on top of some 20% of the world's known oil reserves and Saudi Arabia held 25%. Saddam complained that Kuwait had slant drilled oil out of wells that Iraq considered to be within its disputed border with Kuwait and ordered troops to the Iraq–Kuwait border. 

Saddam's officers looted Kuwait, stripping even the marble from its palaces to move it to Saddam's own palace. Saddam promised to withdraw his forces from Kuwait if Israel would relinquish the occupied territories in the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Gaza Strip. Saddam's proposal further split the Arab world, pitting U.S.- and Western-supported Arab states against the Palestinians.  Washington had been taking measures to cultivate a constructive relationship with Iraq for roughly a decade and the Reagan administration gave Iraq huge agricultural credits to bolster it against Iran. Saddam's Iraq became the third-largest recipient of U.S. assistance. Reacting to Western criticism in 1990 Saddam threatened to destroy half of Israel with chemical weapons if it moved against Iraq. He criticized U.S. support for Israel warning that the United States cannot maintain such a policy while professing friendship towards the Arabs. Later, Iraq and Kuwait met for a final negotiation session, which failed. Saddam then sent his troops into Kuwait. As tensions between Washington and Saddam began to escalate, the Soviet Union, under Mikhail Gorbachev, strengthened its military relationship with the Iraqi leader, providing him military advisers, arms and aid. 

The 1990 Persian Gulf War was a war waged by coalition forces from 35 nations led by the United States against Iraq in response to Iraq's invasion and annexation of Kuwait. The Iraqi Army's occupation of Kuwait was met with international condemnation and brought immediate economic sanctions against Iraq by members of the UN Security Council. US President George H. W. Bush deployed US forces into Saudi Arabia, and urged other countries to send their own forces to the scene. An array of nations joined the coalition, the largest military alliance since WWII. The great majority of the coalition's military forces were from the US, with Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom and Egypt as leading contributors. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia paid around half of the cost of the war.

The war was marked by the introduction of live news broadcasts from the front lines of the battle, principally by the US network CNN. The war has also earned the nickname Video Game War after the daily broadcast of images from cameras on board US bombers.  The initial conflict to expel Iraqi troops from Kuwait began with an aerial and naval bombardment continuing for 5 weeks. This was followed by a ground assault. The coalition ceased its advance, and declared a ceasefire 100 hours after the ground campaign started. Iraq launched Scud missiles against coalition military targets in Saudi Arabia and against Israel.

A UN coalition led by the United States drove Iraq's troops from Kuwait a year later. U.S. President George H. W. Bush responded cautiously for the first several days. On one hand, Kuwait, prior to this point, had been a virulent enemy of Israel and was the monarchy that had the friendliest relations with the Soviets. On the other hand, Washington foreign policymakers, along with Middle East experts, military critics, and firms heavily invested in the region, were extremely concerned with stability in this region. The invasion immediately triggered fears that the world's price of oil, and therefore control of the world economy, was at stake. 

Cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union made possible the passage of resolutions in the United Nations Security Council giving Iraq a deadline to leave Kuwait and approving the use of force if Saddam did not comply with the timetable. The Saudis' opposed the invasion of Kuwait and U.S. feared Iraqi retaliation against oil-rich Saudi Arabia, a close ally of Washington since the 1940s. Accordingly, the U.S. and a group of allies, including countries as diverse as Egypt, Syria and Czechoslovakia, deployed a massive amount of troops along the Saudi border with Kuwait and Iraq in order to encircle the Iraqi army, the largest in the Middle East.

When Saddam ignored the Security Council deadline for him to withdraw, a U.S.-led coalition launched round-the-clock missile and aerial attacks on Iraq in 1991. A ground force consisting largely of U.S. and British armored and infantry divisions ejected Saddam's army from Kuwait in about a month and occupied the southern portion of Iraq as far as the Euphrates. US President Bush announced "What is at stake is more than one small country, it is a big idea - a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind: peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law. 175,000 Iraqis were taken prisoner and there were 85,000 casualties. As part of the cease-fire agreement, Iraq agreed to scrap all poison gas and germ weapons and allow UN observers to inspect the sites. Saddam publicly claimed victory at the end of the war.

Iraq's ethnic and religious divisions, together with the brutality of the conflict that this had engendered, laid the groundwork for postwar rebellions. In the aftermath of the fighting, social and ethnic unrest among Shi'ite Muslims, Kurds, and dissident military units threatened the stability of Saddam's government. Uprisings erupted in the Kurdish north and Shi'a southern and central parts of Iraq, but were ruthlessly repressed. The United States, which had urged Iraqis to rise up against Saddam, did nothing to assist the rebellions. The Iranians, despite the widespread Shi'ite rebellions, had no interest in provoking another war, while Turkey opposed any prospect of Kurdish independence, and the Saudis and other conservative Arab states feared an Iran-style Shi'ite revolution. Saddam, having survived the immediate crisis in the wake of defeat, was left firmly in control of Iraq, although the country never recovered either economically or militarily from the Gulf War. 

Saddam routinely cited his survival as proof that Iraq had in fact won the war against the U.S. This message earned Saddam a great deal of popularity in many sectors of the Arab world. Arabs and Muslims were pulled in 2 directions. That they rallied not so much to Saddam Hussein as to the bipolar nature of the confrontation between the West versus the Arab Muslim world and to the issues of Arab unity, self-sufficiency, and social justice that Saddam proclaimed. As a result, Saddam appealed to many people for the same reasons that attracted more and more followers to Islamic revivalism and also for the same reasons that fueled anti-Western feelings. 

Relations between the United States and Iraq remained tense following the Gulf War. In 1993, the U.S. launched a missile attack aimed at Iraq's intelligence headquarters in Baghdad, citing evidence of repeated Iraqi violations of the "no fly zones" imposed after the Gulf War and for incursions into Kuwait. U.S. officials continued to accuse Saddam of violating the terms of the Gulf War's cease fire, by developing weapons of mass destruction and other banned weaponry, and violating the UN-imposed sanctions. 

During the 1990s, President Clinton maintained sanctions and ordered air strikes in the Iraqi no-fly zones in the hope that Saddam would be overthrown by political enemies inside Iraq. Western charges of Iraqi resistance to UN access to suspected weapons were the pretext for crises in 1997 culminating in intensive U.S. and British missile strikes on Iraq a year later in 1998. After 2 years of intermittent activity, U.S. and British warplanes struck harder at sites near Baghdad in 2001. 

In 2002, a resolution sponsored by the European Union was adopted by the Commission for Human Rights, which stated that there had been no improvement in the human rights crisis in Iraq. The statement condemned President Saddam's government for its systematic, widespread and extremely grave violations of human rights and international humanitarian law. The resolution demanded that Iraq immediately put an end to its summary and arbitrary executions and the use of rape as a political tool.

The international community, especially the U.S., continued to view Saddam as a bellicose tyrant who was a threat to the stability of the region. President George W. Bush spoke of an "axis of evil" consisting of Iran, North Korea, and Iraq. Moreover, Bush announced that he would possibly take action to topple the Iraqi government, because of the threat of its weapons of mass destruction. Bush stated that the Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade.

In 2003, a coalition led by the U.S. invaded Iraq and deposed Saddam. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair falsely accused him of possessing weapons of mass destruction and having ties to al-Qaeda. The invasion occupied much of Iraq and the government and the military collapsed within 3 weeks. The resistance of the much-weakened Iraqi Army either crumbled or shifted to guerrilla tactics, and it appeared that Saddam had lost control of Iraq. He was nowhere to be found. Saddam's Ba'ath party was disbanded and elections were held. Saddam was captured after being found hiding in a hole near a farmhouse near the town he was born. In 2006, Saddam Hussein was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death by hanging. 

Not long before the execution, Saddam's lawyers released his last letter. The following includes several excerpts:

"To the great nation, to the people of our country, and humanity. Many of you have known the writer of this letter to be faithful, honest, caring for others, wise, of sound judgment, just, decisive, careful with the wealth of the people and the state... and that his heart is big enough to embrace all without discrimination. You have known your brother and leader very well and he never bowed to the despots and, in accordance with the wishes of those who loved him, remained a sword and a banner. This is how you want your brother, son or leader to be... and those who will lead you (in the future) should have the same qualifications. Here, I offer my soul to God as a sacrifice, and if He wants, He will send it to heaven with the martyrs, or, He will postpone that... so let us be patient and depend on Him against the unjust nations. Remember that God has enabled you to become an example of love, forgiveness and brotherly coexistence". 



"I call on you not to hate, because hate does not leave a space for a person to be fair and it makes you blind and closes all doors of thinking and keeps away one from balanced thinking and making the right choice. I also call on you not to hate the peoples of the other countries that attacked us and differentiate between the decision-makers and peoples. Anyone who repents whether in Iraq or abroad, you must forgive him. You should know that among the aggressors, there are people who support your struggle against the invaders, and some of them volunteered for the legal defense of prisoners, including Saddam Hussein... some of these people wept profusely when they said goodbye to me." 

"Dear faithful people, I say goodbye to you, but I will be with the merciful God who helps those who take refuge in him and who will never disappoint any faithful, honest believer... God is Great... God is great... Long live our nation... Long live our great struggling people... Long live Iraq, long live Iraq... Long live Palestine... Long live jihad and the mujahedeen. I have written this letter, because the lawyers told me that the so-called criminal court established and named by the invaders will allow the so-called defendants the chance for a last word. But that court and its chief judge did not give us the chance to say a word, and issued its verdict without explanation and read out the sentence dictated by the invaders without presenting the evidence. I wanted the people to know this." 

Saddam`s marriage was arranged when he was 5 years old. The couple had 5 children, 2 sons and 3 daughters. Saddam's oldest son ran the Iraqi Football Association and several media corporations in Iraq including Iraqi TV and newspapers. While originally Saddam's favorite son eventually fell out of favor with his father due to his erratic behavior. He was responsible for many car crashes and rapes around Baghdad, constant feuds with other members of his family, and killing his father's favorite valet and food taster. He became well known in the west for his involvement in looting Kuwait during the Gulf War, allegedly taking millions of dollars of gold, cars, and medical supplies, which were in short supply at the time for himself and close supporters. He was widely known for his paranoia and his obsession with torturing people who disappointed him in any way, which included tardy girlfriends, friends who disagreed with him and, most notoriously, Iraqi athletes who performed poorly. 

Saddam`s second son was less erratic than his older brother and kept a low profile. He was second in command of the military next to his father, and ran the elite Iraqi Republican Guard and the SSO. The Iraqi Special Security Organization (SSO) was the most powerful Iraqi security agency under Saddam and was responsible for personal security of high-ranking government officials and presidential facilities.. He was believed to have ordered the army to kill thousands of rebelling Arabs. 

Saddam's 3 daughters all fled to Jordan. They claim that "he was a very good father, loving, has a big heart….he had so many feelings and he was very tender with all of us." 

Back to INDEX


Kim Jong-il (1941 - 2011)

Kim Jong-il was the supreme leader of North Korea for 17 years from 1994 to 2011. He succeeded his father Kim Il-sung in 1994. Kim Jong-il`s leadership is thought to have been even more authoritarian than his father's. During his regime, the country suffered from famine, partially due to economic mismanagement, and had a poor human rights record. Kim Jong-il instituted a policy of "military first". Restrictions on travel were tightened and the state security apparatus was strengthened. North Korean efforts to build nuclear weapons were halted under the agreement negotiated with U.S. president Clinton in 1994.



Flooding in the mid-1990s exacerbated the economic crisis, severely damaging crops and infrastructure and led to widespread famine which the government proved incapable of curtailing. In 2001, when U.S President George W. Bush got elected, his administration rejected the agreement Clinton negotiated and considered North Korea to be a rogue state. North Korea subsequently redoubled their efforts to acquire nuclear weapons in order to avoid the fate of Iraq. In 2006, North Korea announced it had conducted its first nuclear weapons test. 

Kim Jong-il died from a heart attack and his youngest son Kim Jong-un was announced as his successor. Over the following years, North Korea continued to develop its nuclear arsenal despite international condemnation. Kim Jong-un born in 1982 has a life shrouded in secrecy. Many of his and his government's activities remain unknown. Before taking power, he had barely been seen in public. He attended a great deal of his schooling in Switzerland. In 2017, North Korea successfully conducted its first test of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

Back to INDEX


Muammar Gaddafi (1942 – 2011)
Muammar Gaddafi was a Libyan revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He governed Libya as Revolutionary Chairman of the Libyan Arab Republic for 42 years, from 1969 till his death. His ideological worldview was molded by his environment, namely his Islamic faith, his Bedouin upbringing, and his disgust at the actions of European colonialists in Libya. He was initially ideologically committed to Arab nationalism and Arab socialism, but later came to rule under his own Third International Theory, a style of government as an alternative to capitalism and communism for Third World countries in the early 1970s. It was partly inspired by Islamic socialism, Arab nationalism, African nationalism, and partly by the principles of direct democracy. It has similarities with the system Tito implemented in ruling Yugoslav.

Libya has been inhabited by Berbers since the late Bronze Age 5,000 years ago. There are 30 million Berbers in North Africa and the majority are Sunni Muslim. The Phoenicians established trading posts in western Libya, and ancient Greek colonists established city-states in eastern Libya. Libya was variously ruled by Carthaginians, Persians, Egyptians and Greeks before becoming a part of the Roman Empire. Libya was an early center of Christianity. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the area of Libya was mostly occupied by the Vandals until the 7th century, when invasions brought Islam and Arab colonization. In the 16th century, the Spanish Empire occupied Tripoli, until Ottoman rule began in 1551. Ottoman rule continued until the Italian occupation of Libya resulted in the temporary Italian Libya colony from 1911-1943. Libya became independent as a kingdom in 1951. In 1969, a military coup led by Gaddafi overthrew King Idris I. 

Gaddafi was born to a family from a small, relatively uninfluential Berber tribal group. His father, an illiterate Nomadic Bedouin earned a meager subsistence as a goat and camel herder. His upbringing in Bedouin culture influenced his personal tastes for the rest of his life. He preferred the desert over the city and would retreat there to meditate. 

From childhood, he was aware of the involvement of European colonialists in Libya. His nation was occupied by Italy, and during WWII it witnessed conflict between Italian and British troops. At the end of WWII in 1945, Libya was occupied by British and French forces. Although Britain and France intended on dividing the nation between their empires, the United Nations declared that the country be granted political independence. In 1951, when Gaddafi was only 9 years old, the UN created the United Kingdom of Libya, a federal state under the leadership of a pro-Western monarch, Idris, who banned political parties and centralized power in his monarchy. 

Gaddafi's earliest education was of a religious nature, imparted by a local Islamic teacher. When he attended elementary school, he progressed through 6 grades in 4 years. Education in Libya was not free, but his father thought it would greatly benefit his son despite the financial strain. During the week he slept in a mosque, and at weekends walked more than 30 km to visit his parents. At school, he was bullied for being a Bedouin, but was proud of his identity and encouraged pride in other Bedouin classmates. For his secondary schooling, his family moved to south-central Libya, where his father worked as a caretaker for a tribal leader.

Many teachers were Egyptian, and for the first time Gaddafi had access to pan-Arab newspapers and radio broadcasts. Growing up, he witnessed significant events rock the Arab world, including the 1948 Arab–Israeli War when he was 6 years old, the 1952 Egyptian Revolution, the 1956 Suez Crisis, and the short-lived existence of the United Arab Republic between 1958 and 1961. He admired the political changes implemented in Egypt under his hero, President Nasser, who argued for Arab nationalism, the rejection of colonialism and Zionism and a transition from capitalism to socialism. He was influenced by Nasser's book, Philosophy of the Revolution, which outlined how to initiate a coup. 

Gaddafi was popular at this school and he made some friends who received significant jobs in his later administration. He organized demonstrations and distributed posters criticizing the monarchy. In 1961, he led a demonstration protesting against Syria's secession from the United Arab Republic. During this they broke windows in a local hotel that was accused of serving alcohol. To punish him, the family was forced to move. 

Maintaining his interest in Arab nationalist activism, he refused to join any of the banned political parties active in the city such as the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party and the Muslim Brotherhood, claiming that he rejected factionalism. He read voraciously on the subjects of Nasser and the French Revolution of 1789, as well biographies of Abraham Lincoln,Sun Yat-sen, and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. 

Gaddafi briefly studied history at the University before dropping out to join the military. The armed forces offered the only opportunity for upward social mobility for underprivileged Libyans, and he recognized it as a potential instrument of political change. Under Idris, Libya's armed forces were trained by the British military. This angered Gaddafi, who viewed the British as imperialists, and accordingly he refused to learn English and was rude to the British officers, ultimately failing his exams. British trainers reported him for insubordination and abusive behavior, stating their suspicion that he was involved in the assassination of the military academy's commander. Denying the allegations which could not be proved, he quickly progressed through the course. 

In 1964, with a group of loyal cadres, Gaddafi founded the Central Committee of the Free Officers Movement. Led by Gaddafi, they met clandestinely and were organized into a clandestine cell system, offering their salaries into a single fund. He traveled around Libya gathering intelligence and developing connections with sympathizers. He graduated in 1965 and a year later, he was assigned to the United Kingdom for further training. Gaddafi disliked England, claiming British Army officers racially insulted him and found it difficult adjusting to the country's culture. Asserting his Arab identity in London, he walked around wearing traditional Libyan robes. He later related that while he traveled to England believing it more advanced than Libya, he returned home more confident and proud of Libya`s values, ideals and social character. 

Idris' government was increasingly unpopular by the latter 1960s; it had exacerbated Libya's traditional regional and tribal divisions by centralizing the country's federal system in order to take advantage of the country's oil wealth. Corruption and entrenched systems of patronage were widespread throughout the oil industry. Arab nationalism was increasingly popular, and protests flared up following Egypt's 1967 defeat in the Six-Day War with Israel. Allied to the Western powers, Idris' administration was seen as pro-Israeli. Anti-Western riots broke out and Libyan workers shut down oil terminals in solidarity with Egypt.

In 1969, while Idris was abroad to spend the summer in Turkey and Greece. Gaddafi's Free Officers recognized this as their chance to overthrow the monarchy. They occupied airports, police depots, radio stations and government offices. They met no serious resistance, and wielded little violence against the monarchists. Once Gaddafi removed the monarchical government, he announced the foundation of the Libyan Arab Republic. Addressing the populace by radio, he proclaimed an end to the reactionary and corrupt regime. He insisted that the coup represented a revolution, marking the start of widespread change in the socio-economic and political nature of Libya. He proclaimed that the revolution meant "freedom, socialism, and unity", and over the coming years implemented measures to achieve this. 
"People of Libya! In response to your own will, fulfilling your most heartfelt wishes, answering your most incessant demands for change and regeneration, and your longing to strive towards these ends: listening to your incitement to rebel, your armed forces have undertaken the overthrow of the corrupt regime, the stench of which has sickened and horrified us all. A single blow our gallant army has toppled these idols and has destroyed their images. By a single stroke it has lightened the long dark night in which the Turkish domination was followed first by Italian rule, then by this reactionary and decadent regime which was no more than a hotbed of extortion, faction, treachery and treason."

A 12 member central committee of the Free Officers proclaimed themselves the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), the government of the new republic. Lieutenant Gaddafi became RCC Chairman, and therefore the de facto head of state. He appointed himself commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Although theoretically a collegial body operating through consensus building, he dominated the RCC. The Free Officers were young men from typically rural working and middle-class backgrounds, and none had university degrees. They were the ones who replaced the wealthy, highly educated conservatives who previously governed the country. 

After the 1969 coup, representatives of the Four Powers - France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union - were called to meet RCC representatives. The U.K. and the U.S. quickly extended diplomatic recognition, hoping to secure the position of their military bases in Libya and fearing further instability. Such attempts to form a working relationship with the RCC failed as Gaddafi was determined to reassert national sovereignty and expunge what he described as foreign colonial and imperialist influences. His administration insisted that the U.S. and the U.K. remove their military bases from Libya, proclaiming that the armed forces which rose to express the people's revolution will not tolerate living in their shacks while the bases of imperialism exist in Libyan territory. Moving to reduce Italian influence, all Italian-owned assets were expropriated and the 12,000-strong Italian community was expelled from Libya alongside the smaller community of Libyan Jews. 

The RCC proceeded with their intentions of consolidating the revolutionary government and modernizing the country. They purged monarchists and members of Idris' clan from Libya's political world and armed forces. Gaddafi believed this elite were opposed to the will of the Libyan people and had to be expunged. "People's Courts" were founded to try various monarchist politicians and journalists, many of whom were imprisoned, although none were executed. Idris was sentenced to execution in absentia. 

The RCC's early economic policy has been characterized as being state capitalist in orientation. A number of schemes were established to aid entrepreneurs and develop a Libyan bourgeoisie. Seeking to expand the cultivatable acreage in Libya, the government launched a "Green Revolution" to raise agricultural productivity so that Libya could rely less on imported food. All land that had either been expropriated from Italian settlers or which was not in use was expropriated and redistributed. Irrigation systems were established along the northern coastline and around various inland oases. Production costs often outstripped the value of the produce and thus Libyan agricultural production remained in deficit, relying heavily on state subsidies. 

With crude oil as the country's primary export, Gaddafi sought to improve Libya's oil sector. He proclaimed the current trade terms unfair, benefiting foreign corporations more than the Libyan state, and by threatening to reduce production, he successfully increased the price of Libyan oil. A year later, other OPEC states followed suit, leading to a global increase in the price of crude oil. The RCC secured income tax, back-payments and better pricing from the oil corporations. These measures greatly increased Libya`s revenues in its first year. Increasing state control over the oil sector, the RCC began a program of nationalization, starting with the British company British Petroleum. In 1970 Gaddafi introduced sharia into the legal system and maintained the monarchy's ban on political parties. He banned trade unions, and 2 years later, he outlawed workers' strikes and suspended newspapers. 

Gaddafi's regime opened up a wide range of educational and employment opportunities for women, although these primarily benefited a minority in the urban middle-classes. He introduced a law affirming equality of the sexes and insisting on wage parity, and sponsored the creation of a Libyan General Women's Federation. A law was passed criminalizing the marriage of any females under the age of 16 and ensuring that a woman's consent was a necessary prerequisite for a marriage.

Orchestrating a military build-up, Gaddafi began purchasing weapons from France and the Soviet Union. The commercial relationship with the latter led to an increasingly strained relationship with the U.S., which was then engaged in the Cold War with the Soviets. He was especially critical of the U.S. due to its support of Israel, and supported the Palestinians in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, viewing the 1948 creation of the State of Israel as a Western colonial occupation which was forced upon the Arab world. He believed that Palestinian violence against Israeli and Western targets was the justified response of an oppressed people who were fighting against the colonization of their homeland. Calling on the Arab states to wage "continuous war" against Israel, he initiated a Jihad Fund to finance anti-Israeli militants. 

Like Nasser, Gaddafi favored the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and his group, Fatah, over more militant and Marxist Palestinian groups. As the years progressed however, Gaddafi's relationship with Arafat became strained, considering him too moderate and calling for more violent action. He financially supported many militant groups across the world, including the Black Panther Party, the Nation of Islam, militant liberation movements in South and Central America as well the ANC in its fight against Apartheid in South Africa, and the IRA in Ireland. He supported liberation movements in Europe, Armenia, Japan, and the Philippines. He came to be seen as a leader in the Third World's struggle against colonialism and neocolonialism. Though many of these groups were labeled "terrorists" by critics of their activities, he rejected this characterization. Instead he considered them to be revolutionaries engaged in liberation struggle. 

To combat the country's strong regional and tribal divisions, the RCC promoted the idea of a unified pan-Libyan identity. In doing so, they tried discrediting tribal leaders as agents of the old regime. A military court tried many of them for counter-revolutionary activity. Long-standing administrative boundaries were re-drawn, crossing tribal boundaries, while pro-revolutionary modernizers replaced traditional leaders. The communities they served often rejected them.

In 1973, Gaddafi initiated a "Popular Revolution" with the formation of General People's Committees, purported to be a system of direct democracy, but retained personal control over major decisions. The RCC implemented measures for social reform, adopting sharia as a basis. The consumption of alcohol was banned, night clubs and Christian churches were shut down, traditional Libyan dress was encouraged, and Arabic was decreed as the only language permitted in official communications and on road signs.

He announced that all foreign oil producers active in Libya were to see 51% of their operation nationalized. The RCC doubled the minimum wage, introduced statutory price controls, and implemented compulsory rent reductions of between 30 and 40%. For Gaddafi, this was an important step towards socialism. It proved an economic success. The gross domestic product increased by a factor of 8 in the 10 years between 1969-79. The Libyans' standard of life greatly improved over the first decade of his administration, and by 1979 the average per-capita income had increased 20 times what it was in 1951. This was above the average of many industrialized countries like Italy and the U.K.

From 1969 on, Gaddafi used oil money to fund social welfare programs, which led to house-building projects and improved health-care and education. House building became a major social priority, designed to eliminate homelessness and to replace the shanty towns created by Libya's growing urbanization. The health sector was also expanded. By 1978, Libya had 50% more hospitals than it had in 1968, while the number of doctors had grown from 700 to over 3000 in that decade. Malaria was eradicated, and tuberculosis greatly curtailed. Compulsory education was expanded from 6 to 9 years, while adult literacy programs and free university education were introduced.

The government helped to integrate the poorer strata of Libyan society into the education system. Through these measures, the RCC greatly expanded the public sector, providing employment for thousands. These early social programs proved popular within Libya. This popularity was due to Gaddafi's personal charisma, youth and underdog status as a Bedouin.

In 1973, Libya invaded Chad to annex an area rich in uranium. A strong relationship was also established between Gaddafi's Libya and Prime Minister Ali Bhutto's Pakistani government, with the 2 countries exchanging nuclear research and military assistance. The same year, he proclaimed the start of a "Popular Revolution". He initiated this with a 5-point plan:
  1. dissolve all existing laws, to be replaced by revolutionary enactments. 
  2. all opponents of the revolution had to be removed. 
  3. an administrative revolution that would remove all traces of bureaucracy and the bourgeoisie. 
  4. the population must form People's Committees as conduits for raising political consciousness and be armed to defend the revolution. 
  5. the beginning of a cultural revolution to expunge Libya of "poisonous" foreign influences. 
He began to lecture on this new phase of the revolution in Libya, Egypt, and France. As a process, it had many similarities with the Cultural Revolution implemented in China. Gaddafi claimed that the General People's Committees would offer a form of direct political participation that was more democratic than a traditional party-based representative system. 

The People's Committees led to a high percentage of public involvement in decision making, but exacerbated tribal divisions. They also served as a surveillance system, aiding the security services in locating individuals with views critical of the RCC, leading to the arrest of Ba'athists, Marxists, and Islamists. Operating in a pyramid structure, the base form of these Committees were local working groups, who sent elected representatives to the district level, and from there to the national level. Above these remained Gaddafi and the RCC, who remained responsible for all major decisions. 

In 1973, Gaddafi created a political ideology as a basis for the Popular Revolution called the Third International Theory. It is a combination of "utopian socialism, Arab nationalism, and the Third World revolutionary theory that was in vogue at the time. He regarded this system as a practical alternative to the then-dominant international models of Western capitalism and Marxism-Leninism. He laid out the principles of this theory in the 3 volumes of The Green Book, in which he sought to explain the structure of the ideal society. 
  1. The first volume was devoted to the issue of democracy, outlining the flaws of representative systems in favor of direct, participatory ones. 
  2. The second volume dealt with his beliefs regarding socialism, while 
  3. the third volume explored social issues regarding the family and the tribe. 
This approach regarded both the U.S. and the Soviet Union as imperialist and thus rejected Western capitalism as well as Eastern bloc communism's atheism. In this respect it was similar to the Three Worlds Theory developed by China's political leader Mao Zedong. As part of this theory, Gaddafi praised nationalism as a progressive force and advocated the creation of a pan-Arab state which would lead the Islamic and Third Worlds against imperialism. He saw Islam as having a key role in this ideology, calling for an Islamic revival that returned to the origins of the Qur'an, rejecting scholarly interpretations. In doing so, he angered many Libyan clerics. During 1973-74, his government deepened the legal reliance on sharia, for instance by introducing flogging as punishment for those convicted of adultery or homosexual activity. 

In 1975, Gaddafi's government declared a state monopoly on foreign trade. Its increasingly radical reforms, coupled with the large amount of oil revenue being spent on foreign causes, generated discontent in Libya, particularly among the country's merchant class. He purged the army, arresting around 200 senior officers, and founded the clandestine Office for the Security of the Revolution. A year later, he called upon his supporters in universities to establish revolutionary student councils and drive out reactionary elements. During that year, anti-Gaddafist student demonstrations broke out at the universities of Tripoli and Benghazi, resulting in clashes with both Gaddafist students and police. 


The RCC responded with mass arrests, and introduced compulsory national service for young people. A year after that, 2 dissenting students and a number of army officers were publicly hanged. That was the first time in Gaddafist Libya that dissenters had been executed for purely political crimes. Dissent also arose from conservative clerics and the Muslim Brotherhood, who accused Gaddafi of moving towards Marxism and criticized his abolition of private property as being anti-Islamic. These forces were then persecuted as anti-revolutionary and all privately owned Islamic colleges and universities were shut down. Gaddafi was later infuriated when Egypt and Syria planned the 1973 Yom Kippur War against Israel without consulting him, and was angered when Egypt conceded to peace talks rather than continuing the war. He became openly hostile to Egypt's leader, calling for Sadat's overthrow.
"I have created a Utopia here in Libya. Not an imaginary one that people write about in books, but a concrete Utopia."

In 1978, Libya began to turn towards socialism. The government issued guidelines for housing redistribution, attempting to ensure the population that every adult Libyan owned his own home and that nobody was enslaved to paying their rent. Most families were banned from owning more than one house, while former rental properties were expropriated by the state and sold to the tenants at a heavily subsidized price. Gaddafi called to eliminate the bureaucracy of the public sector and the dictatorship of the private sector. The People's Committees took control of several hundred companies, converting them into worker cooperatives run by elected representatives. 

Gaddafi discovered that his head of military intelligence was plotting to kill him. Many who had seen their wealth and property confiscated turned against the administration, and a number of Western-funded opposition groups were founded by exiles. Following his command to kill these "stray dogs", the Revolutionary Committees set up overseas branches to suppress counter-revolutionary activity, assassinating various dissidents. Although nearby nations like Syria and Israel also employed hit squads, Gaddafi was unusual in publicly bragging about his administration's use of them. He ordered all dissidents to return home or be "liquidated wherever you are." 

In 1979, the committees began the redistribution of land. Measures to redistribute and equalize wealth were implemented. Anyone with over 1000 dinar in their bank account saw that extra money expropriated. The following year, Gaddafi announced that the government would take control of all import, export and distribution functions, with state supermarkets replacing privately owned businesses. This led to a decline in the availability of consumer goods and the development of a thriving black market. The radical direction earned the government many enemies. Most internal opposition came from Islamic fundamentalists, who were inspired by the events of the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

The early and mid-1980s saw economic trouble for Libya. From 1982-1986, the country's annual oil revenues dropped to a quarter of what they were. The US placed Libya on its list of "State Sponsors of Terrorism". Relations were further damaged at the end of the year when a demonstration torched the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli in solidarity with the perpetrators of the Iran hostage crisis. The following year, Libyan fighters began intercepting U.S. fighter jets flying over the Mediterranean, signaling the collapse of relations between the 2 countries.

Focusing on irrigation projects, 1983 saw construction start on Libya's largest and most expensive infrastructure project, the Great Man-Made River. Although designed to be finished by the end of the decade, it remained incomplete at the start of the 21st century.

The Great Man-Made River is a network of pipes that supplies water to the Sahara in Libya, from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System fossil aquifer. It is the world's largest irrigation project. It is the largest underground network of pipes and aqueducts in the world. It is 2,820 km long and consists of more than 1,300 wells, most more than 500m deep It supplies 6,500,000 m3 of fresh water per day to the cities. In 2011 it was damaged by NATO, due to which Libya is still facing water shortages. In 1953, efforts to find oil in southern Libya led to the discovery of large quantities of fresh water underground. The Great Man-made River Project was conceived in the late 1960s and work on the project began in 1984. The fossil aquifer from which this water is being supplied accumulated during the last ice age and is not currently being replenished. If 2007 rates of retrieval are not increased, the water could last a thousand years. The costs of obtaining fresh water with the Great Man-made River project is about 10% of what it would cost with desalination projects. 

The late 1980s saw a series of liberalizing economic reforms within Libya designed to cope with the decline in oil revenues. In 1986, a particularly hostile relationship developed with the United States, United Kingdom, and Israel, resulting in U.S. bombing of Libya and United Nations-imposed economic sanctions. A year later, Gaddafi announced the start of the "Revolution within a Revolution", which began with reforms to industry and agriculture and saw the re-opening of small business. 



Libya began production of mustard gas and unsuccessfully attempted to develop nuclear weapons. The army was purged of perceived disloyal elements,and in 1988 announced the creation of a popular militia to replace the army and police. The period also saw a growth in domestic Islamist opposition, formulated into groups like the Muslim Brotherhood.

Frustrated by the failure of his Pan-Arab ideals, Gaddafi increasingly rejected Arab nationalism in favor of Pan-Africanism, emphasizing Libya's African identity. From 1997 to 2000, Libya initiated cooperative agreements or bilateral aid arrangements with 10 African states. From 1999, Gaddafi rejected Arab socialism and encouraged economic privatization, rapprochement with Western nations, and Pan-Africanism.

In 2001, Gaddafi condemned the September 11 attacks on the US by al-Qaeda, expressing sympathy with the victims and calling for Libyan involvement in the War on Terror against militant Islamism. He called for the wider application of sharia law. 



Influenced by the events of the Iraq War, in 2003, Libya renounced its possession of weapons of mass destruction, decommissioning its chemical and nuclear weapons programs. Relations with the U.S. and the U.K. and E.U. improved as a result. In 2003, he called for wide-scale privatization and Libya's economy witnessed increasing privatization. The oil industry was largely sold to private corporations, resulting in a 6-fold rise of foreign investments. 

In 2005, Gaddafi called for greater integration, advocating a single African Union passport, a common defense system, and a single currency, utilizing the slogan: "The United States of Africa is the hope." He also completed agreements with the Italian government that they would invest in various infrastructure projects as reparations for past Italian colonial policies in Libya. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi gave Libya an official apology in 2006, after which Gaddafi called him the "iron man" for his courage in doing so. Removed from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism in 2006, Gaddafi nevertheless continued his anti-Western rhetoric. In 2009, he called for a military alliance across Africa and Latin America to rival NATO. He proclaimed jihad- a holy war- against Switzerland after Swiss police accused 2 of his family members of criminal activity in the country, resulting in the breakdown of bilateral relations. Libya was a strategic player in Europe's attempts to stem illegal migration from Africa. In 2010, the EU paid Libya to stop African migrants passing into Europe. Gaddafi encouraged the move, saying that it was necessary to prevent the loss of European cultural identity to a new "Black Europe". 

Rising numbers of reformist technocrats attained positions in the country's governance; best known was Gaddafi's son and heir apparent Saif, who was openly critical of Libya's human rights record. He led a group who proposed the drafting of the new constitution, although it was never adopted. Involved in encouraging tourism, Saif founded several privately run media channels in 2008, but after criticizing the government they were nationalized in 2009. In 2010, he apologized to African leaders for the historical enslavement of Africans by the Arab slave trade.

The Arab slave trade was the practice of slavery in the Arab world. This barter occurred chiefly between the medieval era and the early 20th century. The trade was conducted through slave markets in these areas, with the slaves captured mostly from Africa's interior. The Arab slave trade, across the Sahara desert and across the Indian Ocean, began after Muslim Arab traders won control of the sea routes during the 9th century.

These traders captured peoples from the interior in present-day Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania and brought them to the coast. Between 1500 and 1900, 17 million people were sold into slavery on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and North Africa, and 5 million African slaves were bought by Muslim slave traders and taken from Africa across the Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and Sahara desert. The captives were sold throughout the Middle East. This trade accelerated as superior ships led to more trade and greater demand for labor on plantations in the region. As the plantation economy boomed and the Arabs became richer, agriculture and other manual labor work was thought to be demeaning. The resulting labor shortage led to an increased slave market.

2011 was the start of The Arab Spring, a revolutionary wave of both violent and non-violent demonstrations, protests, riots, coups and civil wars in North Africa and the Middle East. It began in Tunisia with the Tunisian Revolution. Protests against widespread corruption and unemployment broke out in eastern Libya. Fearing domestic protest, Gaddafi implemented preventative measures by reducing food prices, purging the army leadership of potential defectors and releasing several Islamist prisoners. They proved ineffective, and major protests broke out against Gaddafi's government. Unlike Tunisia or Egypt, Libya was largely religiously homogeneous and had no strong Islamist movement, but there was widespread dissatisfaction with the corruption and entrenched systems of patronage, while unemployment had reached around 30%.

Accusing the rebels of being "drugged" and linked to al-Qaeda, Gaddafi proclaimed that he would die a martyr rather than leave Libya. As he announced that the rebels would be "hunted down street by street, house by house and wardrobe by wardrobe", the army opened fire on protests in Benghazi, killing hundreds. Shocked at the government's response, a number of senior politicians resigned or defected to the protesters' side. The uprising spread quickly through Libya's less economically developed eastern half and eastern cities were controlled by rebels. In the conflict's early months it appeared that Gaddafi's government, with its greater fire-power, would be victorious. Both sides disregarded the laws of war, committing human rights abuses, including arbitrary arrests, torture, extrajudicial executions and revenge attacks.

The UN declared a no fly zone to protect the civilian population from aerial bombardment. It also specifically prohibited foreign occupation. Ignoring this, Qatar sent hundreds of troops to support the dissidents, and along with France and the United Arab Emirates provided the dissidents with weaponry and training. NATO announced that it would enforce the no-fly zone and a NATO air strike killed Gaddafi's sixth son and 3 of his grandsons in Tripoli. 

The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Gaddafi, his son Saif, and the head of state security, for charges concerning crimes against humanity. Amnesty International published their report, finding that while Gaddafi's forces were responsible for numerous war crimes, many other allegations of mass human rights abuses lacked credible evidence and were likely fabrications by rebel forces that had been promoted by Western media. The situation descended into civil war, in which NATO intervened militarily to depose him. The government was overthrown and Gaddafi retreated to the town where he was born only to be captured and killed.

Only a few towns in western Libya remained Gaddafist strongholds. Retreating to his home town after Tripoli's fall, Gaddafi announced his willingness to negotiate for a handover to a transitional government, a suggestion rejected by the rebels. Surrounding himself with bodyguards, he continually moved residences to escape shelling, devoting his days to prayer and reading the Qur'an. Fleeing to a construction site, he and his inner cohort hid inside drainage pipes while his bodyguards battled the rebels. The militia took him prisoner, causing serious injuries as they apprehend him. Pulled onto the front of a pick-up truck, he fell off as it drove away. His semi-naked, lifeless body was then placed into an ambulance and taken away. Around 140 Gaddafi loyalists were rounded up from the convoy, tied up and abused. 66 were executed. 

He was mourned as a hero by many across Sub-Saharan Africa. While undeniably a dictator, he was the most benevolent in a region that only knew dictatorship. He was a great man that looked out for his people and made them the envy of all of Africa.

Gaddafi, born to an impoverished Bedouin family, soon realized that the best way to get ahead was to be educated and trained by the military. When old enough, he enrolled in the Royal Military Academy in Benghazi and became an Arab nationalist. Within the military he founded a revolutionary cell which deposed the Western-backed monarchy in a 1969 coup. He was only 27 years old. Ruling by decree, he ejected both Italian colonists and Western military bases from Libya while strengthening ties to Arab nationalist governments, particularly Nasser's Egypt. An Islamic modernist, he introduced sharia as the basis for the legal system and promoted "Islamic socialism". He nationalized the oil industry and used the increasing state revenues to bolster the military, fund foreign revolutionaries, and implement social programs emphasizing house-building, health-care, and education projects. 

A highly divisive figure, Gaddafi dominated Libya's politics for 4 decades and was the subject of a pervasive cult of personality. He was lauded for his anti-imperialist stance, support for Arab and African unity, and for significant improvements that his government brought to the Libyan people's quality of life. Islamic fundamentalists strongly opposed his social and economic reforms. He was internationally condemned as a dictator whose authoritarian administration violated the human rights of Libyan citizens and financed global terrorism.

Along with Arab nationalism, anti-imperialism was also a defining feature of Gaddafi's regime during its early years. He believed in opposing Western imperialism and colonialism in the Arab world, including any Western expansionism through the form of Israel. For many years, anti-Zionism was a fundamental component of Gaddafi's ideology. He believed that the state of Israel should not exist, and that any Arab compromise with the Israeli government was a betrayal of the Arab people. In large part due to their support of Israel, he despised the United States, considering the country to be imperialist and lambasting it as the embodiment of evil. His views later shifted. In 2009, he stated that "the Jews have been held captive, massacred, disadvantaged in every possible fashion... [they] want and deserve their homeland." He called for both Jews and Palestinians to "move beyond old conflicts and look to a unified future based on shared culture and respect", forging a single-state.

Gaddafi rejected the secularist approach to Arab nationalism that had been pervasive in Syria. Instead, he deemed Arabism and Islam to be inseparable, referring to them as "one and indivisible", and called on the Arab world's Christian minority to convert to Islam. Gaddafi described his approach to economics as "Islamic socialism". For him, a socialist society could be defined as one in which men controlled their own needs, either through personal ownership or through a collective. Gaddafi was staunchly anti-Marxist, and in 1973 declared that it is the duty of every Muslim to combat Marxism because it promotes atheism. In his view, ideologies like Marxism and Zionism were alien to the Islamic world and were a threat to the global Islamic community.

A cult of personality devoted to Gaddafi existed in Libya. Depictions of his face could be found throughout the country, including on postage stamps, watches, and school class rooms. Quotations from The Green Book appeared on a wide variety of places, from street walls to airports and pens, and were put to pop music for public release. He claimed that he disliked this personality cult, but that he tolerated it because Libya's people adored him. The cult served a political purpose, with Gaddafi helping to provide a central identity for the Libyan state. In a country that formerly suffered foreign domination, His anti-imperialism was popular. He evoked the extremes of passion: supreme adoration from his following, bitter contempt from his opponents.

Gaddafi's domestic popularity stemmed from his overthrow of the monarchy, his removal of the Italian settlers and both American and British air bases from Libyan territory, and his redistribution of the country's land on a more equitable basis. Supporters praised his administration for the creation of an almost classless society through domestic reform. They stressed the regime's achievements in combating homelessness, ensuring access to food and safe drinking water, and to dramatic improvements in education. Under Gaddafi, the literacy rates rose significantly and all education to university level was free. Supporters have also applauded achievements in medical care, praising the universal free health care provided under the Gaddafist administration, with diseases like cholera and typhoid being contained and life expectancy raised. In the early years of Gaddafi`s administration, Libya's national wealth and international influence soared, and its national standard of living rose dramatically.

The Libyan anti-Gaddafist movement brought together a diverse array of groups, which had varied motives and objectives. It comprised monarchists and members of the old, pre-Gaddafist elite, conservative nationalists who backed his Arab nationalist agenda but opposed his left-wing economic reforms, technocrats who had their future prospects stunted by the coup, and Islamic fundamentalists who opposed his radical reforms. Gaddafi's critics regarded him as "despotic, cruel, arrogant, vain and stupid". He became a bogeyman for Western governments, who presented him as the "vicious dictator of an oppressed people". Reagan famously dubbed him the "mad dog of the Middle East". According to critics, the Libyan people lived in a climate of fear under Gaddafi's administration, due to his government's pervasive surveillance of civilians. Gaddafi's Libya was typically described by Western commentators as a police state. His administration has also been criticized by political opponents and groups like Amnesty International for the human rights abuses carried out by the country's security services. These abuses included the repression of dissent, public executions, and the arbitrary detention of hundreds of opponents, some of whom reported being tortured. In 1996, 1,270 prisoners were massacred. Dissidents abroad were labeled "stray dogs". They were publicly threatened with death and sometimes killed by government hit squads. Human rights groups also criticized the treatment of migrants, including asylum seekers, who passed through Gaddafi's Libya on their way to Europe. 

Following his defeat in the civil war, Gaddafi's system of governance was dismantled and replaced by the interim government of the rebels.

Back to INDEX


Osama bin Laden (1957- 2011) 
Osama bin Laden was the founder of al-Qaeda, the organization that was blamed for the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York, along with numerous other mass-casualty attacks worldwide. He was a Saudi Arabian and a member of a wealthy family. He studied at university until 1979, when he joined Mujahideen forces in Pakistan fighting against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. He helped to fund the Mujahideen by funneling arms, money and fighters from the Arab world into Afghanistan, and gained popularity among many Arabs. In 1988, he formed al-Qaeda. He was banished from Saudi Arabia in 1992, and shifted his base to Sudan, until U.S. pressure forced him to leave Sudan in 1996. After establishing a new base in Afghanistan, he declared a war against the US, initiating a series of bombings and attacks. Between 2001 to 2011, bin Laden was a major target of the War on Terror with a very large bounty for his capture.
Human habitation in Afghanistan dates back 300,000 to 30,000 years ago. It had a strategic location along the Silk Road connected it to the cultures of the Middle East and other parts of Asia. The land has historically been home to various peoples and has witnessed numerous military campaigns, including those by Alexander the Great, Muslim Arabs, Mongols, British, Soviet, and in the modern era by Western powers. It has been called by some as "unconquerable". The land also served as the source from which tribes have risen to form major empires. 


In the late 19th century, Afghanistan became a buffer state between British India and the Russian Empire. Following the Third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919 the country was free of foreign influence, eventually becoming a monarchy. A series of coups in the late 1970s was followed by a series of wars that devastated much of Afghanistan which began when the country became a socialist state under the influence of the Soviet Union during the Soviet–Afghan War. Following the departure of the Soviet forces, largely due to the US supported Taliban, much of its territory was taken over by the Taliban who ruled the country as a totalitarian regime for almost 5 years. The country became an Islamic state. Following the 2001 September 11 attacks in the United States, the Taliban was forcibly removed and Afghanistan's previous political structure was replaced with a more pro-Western, democratically-elected government.

Osama was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, a son of a billionaire construction magnate with close ties to the Saudi royal family. He was raised as a devout Sunni Muslim. At university, his main interest was religion, where he was involved in both interpreting the Quran and jihad and charitable work. At age 17 in 1974, bin Laden married his first of 6 wives. He fathered between 20 and 26 children. Many of his children fled to Iran following the September 11 attacks. He was a tall, thin, soft-spoken and mild-mannered man. He was a frugal and a strict father who enjoyed taking his large family on shooting trips and picnics in the desert. 

A major component of bin Laden's ideology was the concept that civilians from enemy countries, including women and children, were legitimate targets for jihadists to kill. He was motivated by a belief that US foreign policy has oppressed, killed, or otherwise harmed Muslims in the Middle East. He criticized the US for its secular form of governance, calling upon Americans to convert to Islam and reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and usury. He believed that the Islamic world was in crisis and that the complete restoration of Sharia law would be the only way to set things right in the Muslim world. He opposed such alternatives as secular government, as well as pan-Arabism, socialism, communism, and democracy. Bin Laden believed that Afghanistan, under the rule of the Taliban was the only Islamic country in the Muslim world. Bin Laden consistently dwelt on the need for violent jihad to right what he believed were injustices against Muslims perpetrated by the United States and sometimes by other non-Muslim states. He also called for the elimination of the Israeli state, and called upon the United States to withdraw all of its civilians and military personnel from the Middle East, as well as from every Islamic country of the world. His viewpoints and methods of achieving them had led to him being designated as a terrorist.

The Taliban refers to itself as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the Islamic state established in 1996 when they began their rule of Afghanistan after the fall of Kabul. It is a Sunni Islamic fundamentalist political movement waging an insurgency, or jihad - a holy war in Afghanistan. Shia Muslims have been listed along with America, and Israel as the principal enemies of Islam. At its peak, the Taliban established control over approximately 90% of the country, whereas parts of the northeast were held by the Northern Alliance, which became the widely recognized government of Afghanistan. The Taliban provided a safe haven for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda officials, allowing them to plot major terrorist acts.

From 1996 to 2001, the Taliban held power over roughly 75% of Afghanistan, and enforced a strict interpretation of Sharia, or Islamic law. The Taliban emerged in 1994 as one of the prominent factions in the Afghan Civil War, and largely consisted of students recently trained in madrasas - religious schools in Pakistan. Under the leadership of Mohammed Omar, the movement spread throughout most of Afghanistan, sequestering power from the warlords. At its peak, formal diplomatic recognition of the Taliban's government was acknowledged by only 3 nations: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The group later regrouped as an insurgency movement to fight the American-backed Karzai administration.

The Taliban have been condemned internationally for the harsh enforcement of their interpretation of Islamic Sharia law, which has resulted in the brutal treatment of many Afghans, especially women. During their rule from 1996 to 2001, the Taliban and their allies committed massacres against Afghan civilians, denied UN food supplies to 160,000 starving civilians and conducted a policy of scorched earth, burning vast areas of fertile land and destroying tens of thousands of homes. 

The Taliban's ideology is an innovative form of sharia Islamic law based on fundamentalism and the militant Islamism along with the Salafi jihadism of Osama bin Laden and the Pashtun social and cultural norms, as most Taliban are Pashtun tribesmen. 

Bin Laden was heavily anti-Semitic, stating that most of the negative events that occurred in the world were the direct result of Jewish actions. He claimed that Jews controlled the civilian media outlets, politics, and economic institutions of the United States and that the Israeli state's ultimate goal was to annex the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East into its territory and enslave its peoples, as part of what he called a "Greater Israel". He stated that Jews and Muslims could never get along and that war was "inevitable" between them, and further accused the U.S. of stirring up anti-Islamic sentiment. He claimed that the U.S. State Department and U.S. Department of Defense were controlled by Jews, for the sole purpose of serving the Israeli state's goals. 

Bin Laden's overall strategy for achieving his goals against much larger enemies such as the Soviet Union and United States was to lure them into a long war of attrition in Muslim countries, attracting large numbers of jihadists who would never surrender. He believed this would lead to economic collapse of the enemy countries, by "bleeding" them dry. 

Bin Laden also believed climate change to be a serious threat and penned a letter urging Americans to work with president Barack Obama to make "a rational decision to save humanity from the harmful gases that threaten its destiny". 

Large numbers of Shias were killed by Sunnis in a massacre that occurred in response to a massacre of Sunnis by Shias in 1988. Shia civilians were also subjected to rape. By 1988, bin Laden wanted a more military role and created al-Qaeda as organized Islamic faction with the goal "to lift the word of God, to make his religion victorious". Following the Soviet Union's withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, Osama bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia in 1990 as a hero of jihad. Along with his Arab legion, he was thought to have "brought down the mighty superpower" of the Soviet Union. He was angered by the internecine tribal fighting among the Afghans. 

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait under Saddam Hussein in 1990 put the Saudi kingdom and the royal family at risk. The Saudi monarchy invited the deployment of U.S. forces in Saudi territory. Bin Laden publicly denounced Saudi dependence on the U.S. military, arguing the 2 holiest shrines of Islam, Mecca and Medina, the cities in which the Prophet Mohamed received and recited Allah's message, should only be defended by Muslims. Bin Laden's criticism of the Saudi monarchy led them to try to silence him. Meanwhile, in 1990, the FBI discovered copious evidence of terrorist plots, including plans to blow up New York City skyscrapers. This marked the earliest discovery of al-Qaeda terrorist plans outside of Muslim countries and one of their leaders was eventually convicted in connection to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Bin Laden continued to speak publicly against the Saudi government, for which the Saudis banished him. In 1992 he went to live in exile in Sudan where he established a new base for Mujahideen operations in Khartoum. During this time, he heavily invested in the infrastructure, in agriculture and businesses and built roads. Many of his labourers were the same fighters who had been his comrades in the war against the Soviet Union. He was generous to the poor and popular with the people. He continued to criticize King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. In response, in 1994 Fahd stripped bin Laden of his Saudi citizenship and persuaded his family to cut off his $7 million a year stipend. By that time, bin Laden was being linked with Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), which made up the core of al-Qaeda. In 1995 the EIJ attempted to assassinate the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The attempt failed, and Sudan expelled the EIJ. 

The U.S. State Department accused Sudan of being a sponsor of international terrorism and bin Laden of operating terrorist training camps in the Sudanese desert. In 1995, when Bin Laden was still in Sudan, the State Department and the Sudanese officials were discussing with the Saudi government the possibility of expelling Bin Laden. In 1996, Sudanese officials began approaching officials from the United States and other governments, asking what actions of theirs might ease foreign pressure. Due to the increasing pressure on Sudan from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United States, bin Laden was permitted to leave for a country of his choice. He chose to return to Afghanistan. 

The expulsion from Sudan significantly weakened bin Laden and his organization. The expulsion left bin Laden without an option other than becoming a full-time radical, and that most of the 300 Afghan Arabs who left with him subsequently became terrorists. Bin Laden declared war against the United States. Despite the assurance of President George H. W. Bush to King Fahd in 1990, that all U.S. forces based in Saudi Arabia would be withdrawn once the Iraqi threat had been dealt with, by 1996 the Americans were still there. Bush cited the necessity of dealing with the remnants of Saddam's regime which Bush had chosen not to destroy. 



Bin Laden's view was that "the 'evils' of the Middle East arose from America's attempt to take over the region and from its support for Israel. Saudi Arabia had been turned into "an American colony". He issued a fatwā - an order by the Islamic clergy- against the United States. In Afghanistan, bin Laden and al-Qaeda raised money from donors from the days of the Soviet jihad and from Pakistan to establish more training camps for Mujahideen fighters. Bin Laden effectively took over Ariana Afghan Airlines, which ferried Islamic militants, arms, cash and opium through the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan, as well as provided false identifications to members of bin Laden's terrorist network, becoming a "terrorist taxi service".

Al-Qaeda justified the killing of innocent people. According to a fatwa issued by one cleric, the killing of someone standing near the enemy is justified because any innocent bystander will find a proper reward in death, going to Paradise if they were good Muslims and to hell if they were bad or non-believers. In the 1990s, bin Laden's al-Qaeda assisted jihadis financially and sometimes militarily in Algeria, Egypt and Afghanistan. In 1992 bin Laden sent an emissary to Algeria to aid the Islamists and urge war rather than negotiation with the government. Their advice was heeded. The war that followed caused the deaths of 150,000-200,000 Algerians and ended with the Islamist surrender to the government. 

Bin Laden funded the Luxor massacre of 1997 which killed 62 civilians, and outraged the Egyptian public. Another successful attack was carried out in Afghanistan. Bin Laden helped cement his alliance with the Taliban by sending several hundred Afghan Arab fighters along to help the Taliban kill 6,000. In 1998, a fatwa named “of the World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders” declared the killing of North Americans and their allies an "individual duty for every Muslim to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and the holy mosque in Mecca from their grip". At the public announcement of the fatwa bin Laden announced that North Americans are "very easy targets". He told the attending journalists, "You will see the results of this in a very short time." The 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings were a series of attacks that occurred in which hundreds of people were killed in simultaneous truck bomb explosions at the United States embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. Osama bin Laden was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. The director of the Central Intelligence Counterterrorist Center reported to President Bill Clinton that al-Qaeda was preparing for attacks in the United States of America, including the training of personnel to hijack aircraft. 

During his trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, former Serbian President Slobodan Milošević presented FBI documents that verified bin Laden's al-Qaeda had a presence in the Balkans and aided the Kosovo Liberation Army. The U.S. State Department had identified this as a terrorist organization shortly before the 1998 embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya. Milošević had argued that the United States aided the terrorists, which culminated in its backing of the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). The bombings continued until an agreement was reached that led to the withdrawal of Yugoslav armed forces from Kosovo. 

NATO claimed that the Albanian population in Kosovo were being persecuted by FRY forces, Serbian police, and Serb paramilitary forces, and that military action was needed to force the FRY to stop. This was opposed by China and Russia. NATO launched a campaign without UN authorization, which it described as a humanitarian intervention. The FRY described the NATO campaign as an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign country that was in violation of international law because it did not have UN Security Council support. The bombing killed over 500 civilians and destroyed bridges, industrial plants, public buildings, private businesses, as well as barracks and military installations. The NATO bombing marked the second major combat operation in its history, following the 1995 NATO bombing campaign in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was the first time that NATO had used military force without the approval of the UN Security Council.

“God knows it did not cross our minds to attack the towers, but after the situation became unbearable and we witnessed the injustice and tyranny of the American-Israeli alliance against our people, it occurred to me to punish the unjust by destroying the towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women”. 

In the wake of the attacks, bin Laden announced:

"What the United States is tasting today is nothing compared to what we have tasted for decades. Our umma has known this humiliation and contempt for over 80 years. Its sons are killed, its blood is spilled, its holy sites are attacked, and it is not governed according to Allah's command. Despite this, no one cares". 

In response to the attacks, the United States launched the War on Terror to depose the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and capture al-Qaeda operatives, and several countries strengthened their anti-terrorism legislation to preclude future attacks. 

In 1999 U.S. President Clinton convinced the United Nations to impose sanctions against Afghanistan in an attempt to force the Taliban to extradite Osama bin Laden. Despite the multiple indictments listed above and multiple requests, the Taliban refused. They did however offer to try him before an Islamic court if evidence of Osama bin Laden's involvement in the September 11 attacks was provided. It was not until 8 days after the bombing of Afghanistan began that the Taliban finally did offer to turn over Osama bin Laden to a third-party country for trial in return for the United States ending the bombing. This offer was rejected by President Bush stating that this was no longer negotiable.

Capturing Osama bin Laden had been an objective of the United States government since the presidency of Bill Clinton. Clinton had signed a directive authorizing the CIA to apprehend bin Laden and bring him to the United States to stand trial after the 1998 United States embassy bombings in Africa; if taking bin Laden alive was deemed impossible, then deadly force was authorized. 



In 2008, president Barack Obama pledged, "We will kill bin Laden. We will crush al-Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority." In 2011, President Obama ordered a covert operation to kill or capture bin Laden. Bin Laden was assassinated by a United States military special operations unit. After the raid, his body was buried at sea and the secret of who helped him and how he was helped died with him.

The top echelons of USA power needed a 9/11 attack to rally international support to effectively fight global terrorism. Saudi Arabia helped the suicide hijackers financially, bureaucratically and with suitable training to ensure that they could put the planes into an automatic flight mode to hit the 3 buildings. Knowing that flying planes into the 3 buildings, the buildings would have to be demolished afterwards, they equipped the buildings with explosives for a controlled demolition. 



Key individuals within the government had foreknowledge of the attacks and deliberately ignored it and actively weakened United States' defenses to ensure the hijacked flights were not intercepted. Similar allegations were made about Pearl Harbor. As a result of the attacks, many governments across the world passed legislation to combat terrorism.


In the United States, the Department of Homeland Security was created by the Homeland Security Act to coordinate domestic anti-terrorism efforts. The USA Patriot Act gave the federal government greater powers, including the authority to detain foreign terror suspects for a week without charge, to monitor telephone communications, e-mail, and Internet use by terror suspects, and to prosecute suspected terrorists without time restrictions. Thus they justified the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to advance their geostrategic interests, such as plans to construct a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan. 

Back to INDEX


Diana, Princess of Wales (1961 – 1997)
Diana, Princess of Wales was a member of the British royal family as the first wife of Charles, Prince of Wales, the heir apparent to the British throne. She was the mother of Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, and Prince Harry.

Diana was born into the Spencer family, a family of British nobility with royal ancestry and was the youngest daughter. She was educated in England and Switzerland. In 1975 after her father inherited the title of Earl, she became known as Lady Diana Spencer. She came to prominence in 1981 when her engagement to Prince Charles was announced to the world.

Diana's wedding to the Prince of Wales took place in 1981 and reached a global television audience of over 750 million people. The marriage produced 2 sons, the princes William and Harry, who were then respectively second and third in the line of succession to the British throne. As Princess of Wales, Diana undertook royal duties on behalf of the Queen and represented her at functions overseas. She was celebrated for her charity work and for her support of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. Diana was involved with dozens of charities including London's Great Ormond Street Hospital for children, of which she was president from 1989. She also raised awareness and advocated ways to help people affected with HIV/AIDS, cancer, and mental illness.

Diana remained the object of worldwide media scrutiny during and after her marriage, which ended in divorce in 1996. Media attention and public mourning were extensive after her death in a car crash in a Paris tunnel in 1997 and subsequent televised funeral.

Diana was the fourth of 5 children. The Spencer family has been closely allied with the British royal family for several generations. Diana was 7 when her parents divorced and she stayed with her father and her new step-mother. Diana's relationship with her stepmother was particularly bad. On one occasion Diana pushed her down the stairs. Her childhood was very unhappy and very unstable. Diana was initially home-schooled under the supervision of her governess. When she was 9, she was sent to an all-girls boarding school.

After attending a finishing school in Switzerland for one term in 1978, Diana returned to London, where she shared her mother's flat with 2 school friends. In London, she took an advanced cooking course, but seldom cooked for her roommates. She took a series of low-paying jobs. She worked as a dance instructor for youth until a skiing accident caused her to miss 3 months of work. She then found employment as a playgroup pre-school assistant, did some cleaning work for her sister Sarah and several of her friends, and acted as a hostess at parties. Diana spent time working as a nanny for an American family living in London, and worked as a nursery teacher's assistant. In 1979, her mother bought her a flat as an 18th birthday present. She lived there with 3 flatmates until 1981.

Diana first met Charles, Prince of Wales, when she was 16 in 1977. He was dating her older sister. They were guests in 1980 when she watched him play polo and he took a serious interest in Diana as a potential bride. The relationship progressed when he invited her aboard the royal yacht Britannia for a sailing weekend. This was followed by an invitation to meet his family. Lady Diana was well received by the Queen, the Queen Mother and the Duke of Edinburgh. Prince Charles subsequently courted Diana in London. The Prince proposed in 1981 and she accepted.

The wedding service was widely described as a "fairy-tale wedding" and was watched by a global television audience of 750 million people while 600,000 spectators lined the streets to catch a glimpse of the couple en route to the ceremony. She did not say that she would "obey" him; that traditional vow was left out at the couple's request, which caused some comment at the time.

Between 1981-1984, she gave birth to 2 princes. Diana gave her sons wider experiences than was usual for royal children. She rarely deferred to the Prince or to the Royal Family, and was often intransigent when it came to the children. She chose their first given names, dismissed a royal family nanny and engaged one of her own choosing, selected their schools and clothing, planned their outings, and took them to school herself as often as her schedule permitted. She also organized her public duties around their timetables.

Five years into the marriage, the couple's incompatibility and age difference of almost 13 years became visible and damaging. Diana's concern about Charles's relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles also had a negative impact. During the early 1990s, the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales fell apart, which was sensationalized by the world media. The Princess and Prince both spoke to the press through friends. Each blamed the other for the marriage's demise. 
The couple's marital difficulties were publicly reported as early as 1985. Prince Charles resumed his affair with Camilla and Diana later began one herself.

The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh hosted a meeting between Charles and Diana and unsuccessfully tried to effect a reconciliation. Philip wrote to Diana and expressed his disappointment at the extra-marital affairs of both Charles and Diana. He asked her to examine their behavior from the other's point of view. The Duke was direct and Diana was sensitive. She found the letters hard to take, but nevertheless, she appreciated that he was acting with good intent.

During 1992-93, leaked tapes of telephone conversations negatively reflected on both the royal antagonists. Tape recordings of the Princess and James Gilbey were made available by The Sun newspaper and intimate exchanges between the Prince of Wales and Camilla were published in the tabloids. 

Diana blamed Camilla for her marital troubles because Camilla had a previous relationship with the Prince; at some point, she began to believe that he had also been involved in other affairs. In 1993, the Princess wrote to her butler telling him that she believed her husband was planning to have her killed to make the path clear for him to marry Camilla. In the meantime, rumors had begun to surface about the Princess of Wales's relationship with Hewitt, who was the family's former riding instructor. 

Prince Charles sought public understanding via a televised interview where he confirmed his own extramarital affair with Camilla, saying that he had rekindled their association in 1986 only after his marriage to the Princess had "irretrievably broken down". Diana's in her interview admitted that she had suffered from depression, "rampant bulimia" and had engaged numerous times in the act of self mutilation. Some diagnosed her as having a borderline personality disorder. In 1995, Buckingham Palace publicly announced that the Queen had sent letters to the Prince and Princess of Wales, advising them to divorce. The Queen's move was backed by the Prime Minister. 

In 1996, the couple agreed on the terms of their divorce. The couple signed a confidentiality agreement that prohibited them from discussing the details of the divorce or of their married life. Buckingham Palace stated that the Princess of Wales was still a member of the Royal Family, because she was the mother of the second and third in line to the throne. After her 1996 divorce, Diana retained the double apartment that she had shared with the Prince of Wales since the first year of their marriage. The apartment remained her home until her death the following year and was allowed to use the air transport of the British royal family and government. Her brother, despite her request, refused to allow her to move into his domicile.

Diana dated the British-Pakistani heart surgeon who she called "the love of her life." Their relationship lasted 2 years. Within a month, Diana began a relationship with Dodi Fayed, In 1997, Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris. She was 36 years old. The accident also resulted in the deaths of her companion Dodi Fayed and the driver. The initial French judicial investigation concluded that the accident was caused by the driver's intoxication, reckless driving, speeding and effects of prescription drugs and to the pursuing paparazzi, who forced Paul to speed into the tunnel. In 1998, Fayed`s father, owner of the Paris Ritz, publicly stated that the crash had been planned and accused MI6 and the Duke of Edinburgh. 

The sudden and unexpected death of an extraordinarily popular royal figure brought statements from senior figures worldwide and many tributes by members of the public. People left public offerings of flowers, candles, cards, and personal messages outside Kensington Palace for many months. 

In 1999 it was revealed that Diana had been placed under surveillance until her death, and the organization kept a top secret file on her containing more than 1,000 pages. The contents of Diana's NSA file cannot be disclosed because of national security concerns. Diana herself believed that members of the royal family were all being monitored.

She was a devoted mother to her children, who are influenced by her personality and way of life. In the early years, Diana was often noted for her shy nature, as well as her shrewdness, funny character, and smartness. Those who communicated with her closely describe her as a person who was led by her heart. The Princess was also said to have a strong character, because she entered the Royal Family as an inexperienced girl with little education, but could handle their expectations, and overcome the difficulties and sufferings of her marital life.

Diana was widely known for her encounters with sick and dying patients, and the poor and unwanted whom she used to comfort, an action that earned her more popularity. She was mindful of people's thoughts and feelings, and later revealed her wish to become a beloved figure among the people, saying in her 1995 interview, that "She would like to be a queen of people's hearts, in people's hearts." 
Back to INDEX

THE END 
Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)