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ALBANIA (SOUTHERN EUROPE)          ^  top

Albania’s parliament declared it a separate kingdom under King Zogu, son of a Clan Shieftan, in 1928. Communist partisans, who fought Italian and German occupation forces as well as various nationalist partisans, emerged in the post-war years as victors under Enver Hoxha and Mehmet Shehu. To consolidate their rule they set out to liquidate their political adversaries, to discredit, exile, or execute clan chiefs and government officers as war criminals and send their families to work camps or state farms on reclaimed marshlands. As leader in 1955, the partly educated, Enver Hoxha, emulated Stalin by abolishing any private ownership of land. In 1967 he closed down all churches and mosques. In the 1970’s, he purged 25% of his own Party’s members and many officials, declaring Albania an atheist state, and turned for patronage and financial support from Russia to China.

The end of isolation began in the 1980’s as it turned to the west, and of oppressive socialist rule in 1998 with a new constitution. The socialist experiment had proved, as elsewhere, a dreadful failure. Albania, had not only become one of the poorest countries in Europe but one of the most corrupt. 23 of the public officials admitted to bribery. All levels of state administration – law, justice, police, health, construction.- were involved. Economic collapse led to a general strike in 1991. Riots ravaged the country in 1997 over the government’s pyramid scheme. 465,000 Kosovan refugees burdened it in 1999. However, Albania must be commended as the only country which had given forged documents of citizenship to all Jewish refugees from Hitler.

ALGERIA          ^  top

Independence from France in 1962 did not deliver peace or democracy to Algeria. Ahmed Ben Bella, leader of the FLN (Front of National Liberation), emerged from competing organisations, as Prime Minister of the National Assembly in 1962 with a policy of widespread involvement in the economy in the vacuum created by the flight of the French ruling class, ‘Algerian Socialism’. By the 1963 Marc h Decrees he nationalised all properties, previously occupied by Europeans and formalised ‘autogestion’ – self-management of factories and state farms. The same year Ben Bella became a powerful executive president and commander-in-chief under a new constitution with no effective restraint on his powers. A rebellion broke out against Ben Bella. Colonel Boumedienne, former chief of staff of the ALN (Amy of National Liberation) in June 1965, deposed him in a military coup, dissolved the National Assembly and suspended the 1963 constitution replacing it with a militaristic collegiate-style Council of the Revolution. In 1976 he was elected President under a new constitution, with 95% of the votes. After his death 3 years later, his successor Colonel Bendjedid liberalised the economy, broke up the state corporations, and began Arabisation of language (instead of Berber) in government and education.

After violent Muslim activism of the late 1970’s on university campuses led to the death of a student in 1982, the police arrested hundreds of Islamists including leaders. In 1884 the government introduced sharia law. Severe unemployment and shortage of goods in the 1980’s led Bendjedid to dismantle Algeria’s socialist system, and return all control and profits to private hands from 1985-8 and removed the word ‘socialist’ from official documents, and guaranteed freedom of speech and association. However this opened the door to such disorder due to the rise of Islamist power, Benndjedid declared martial law in 1991 and banned the Islamist parties. When the Armed Islamic Group launched terrorist campaigns against government figures and institutions, and  took to massacring civilians not involved in politics, more than 100,000 Algerians died.

ANGOLA          ^  top

The Portuguese had a presence in Angola for nearly 500 years. In 1951 Portugal declared Angola an overseas province. Three main guerrilla groups, formed in and supported by independent countries such as Cuba and Russia, fought for independence. Finally leftist military officers, who had seized government in Lisbon, brought all groups together to sign an agreement for independence from November 11, 1975. The achievement of independence proved catastrophic. One of the worst and most deadly Cold War conflicts, doomed to last 27 years, began at once. The three main factions, and several smaller ones, fought for supremacy, aided by foreign troops and arms from Cuba and Russia. Millions of Angolans were displaced or left the country. Over 500,000 lost their lives. When foreign troops withdrew an uneasy elective democracy, under an executive president, ensued. No elections were held between 1992 and 2008. Cabinda in the north, dubbed the Kuwait of Africa, remains home to a separatist guerrilla movement FLEC-FAC committed to a republic in which “freedom, opportunity, prosperity and civil society flourish.” Evidently they do not believe that these ideals flourish in the rest of Angola yet.

BURMA          ^  top

Burma’s independence from Britain in 1948 was based on a constitution negotiated by Aung Sang, leader of the socialist party, AFPFL. He was one of the Thirty Comrades directed overseas to Japan for military training by the famed poet and direct actionist for independence, Hmaing,. He had fought in turn with the Japanese, British and the Red Flag communist northern ethnics. He was assassinated in an AFPFL executive meeting a year later, shortly before independence was declared.  The civil war with the north, that wracked the country, continued despite General Ne Win’s campaigns. After an election which the socialist Aung San’s brother, Aung Theen, won by a majority, General Ne Win arrested him and suspended the Constitution for a new Military Revolutionary Council which suppressed all opposition parties.

Civil war and food shortages became endemic. Thousands were killed or arrested in a huge protest march in 1980. A further four day protest on General Ne Win’s retirement in 1988 became famous as the ‘Democracy Massacre’ after the military dispersed the crowds by force. Many fled north to join ethnic resistance. Millions fled the country. A National League for Democracy (NLD) led by Aung San’s daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi emerged. When it won 80% of the vote in the 1990 election she was put under house arrest, which has continued to this day with only one short period of release. The fact that 50 years of isolated totalitarian military rule has left isolationist Burma in economic and political ruin was obvious during the catastrophic floods of 2008.

CAMBODIA 1975 (SOUTH ASIA)          ^  top

On Pol Pot’s return from Paris in 1974, where he had been indoctrinated by communists, he swore to destroy the monarchy as ‘a vile pustule’ on the body politic. He transformed his tiny guerilla band of 5,000 into an army of 100,000 with the help of money and training from the North Vietnamese communist government. He began to seize control of the countryside, then the capital Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975 while the monarch, Prince Sihanouk, was abroad. A period of total social anarchy and brutality ensued in Phnom Penh. Its entire 2,000,000 population was forced to leave the city to relocate as peasants in agricultural collectives. They were marched out of the city at gunpoint into what became known as killing fields. Then it began the same policy of annihilation in other cities

Pol Pot began ‘purifying’ Cambodian society of capitalism and western culture for a totally self-sufficient agrarian state. Foreigners were expelled, embassies closed, currency abolished. Markets, schools, newspaper, religion and private property were outlawed. Members of the Lon Nol government, public servants, police, military officers, teachers, ethnic Vietnamese, Christian clergy, Muslim Leaders, members of the  middle class and educated people were identified and executed. An estimated 12.3 million died of overwork, starvation, disease, stole food, wore jewellery, engaged in sexual relations, grieved over the loss of relatives and friends, or exhibited anti-party elements. Families were separate, children were encouraged to spy on adults. The reign of terror reached a climax in 1077-8 when Pol Pot executed 200,000 of his own cadres. At least a quarter of Cambodia’s 7,000,000 population died in less than 4 years. Prince Sihanouk survived to resume his role in Cambodian society and restore its fortunes.

CHINA 1949          ^  top

The republic, instituted in 1911, suffered 38 years of civil war until the Communist Party, led by Mao Tse Tung, who had been trained and financed by Moscow. 11 years before Mao had declared ‘that the theories of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin can be applied to the whole universe as a guide to action’. In the class warfare that ensued from 1949-56 in order to mobilise peasant support, Mao instigated the beheading and beating to death of landlords and wealthy landowners in order to mobilise peasant support. Up to 28 million died in the famine of the ‘Great Leap Forward’ of 1955 caused by catastrophic experiments in collectivisation.

Up to 20,000,000 more were imprisoned, tortured, died or were forced to emigrate during the Cultural Revolution. China’s ancient social structure was destroyed. As Daniel Chiro has said in Modern Tyrants: ”With the full approval of the other Marxist leaders, the division of Chinese society into carefully defined class categories occurred. Those labelled as bad class elements, old members of the elite, landlords, bourgeois, former KMT officials and soldiers and rich peasants were permanently stigmatised and excluded from advancing in society. Their offspring were also labelled as bad elements, so that vast portions of the population were permanently relegated to inferior positions, thus stripping Chinese society of many of its most talented individuals.”

CUBA 1959 (WESTERN CARIBBEAN REGION)          ^  top

Fidel Castro, son of Galician immigrants, went to Havana University, married into the wealthy Cuban elite, and rode into power as Prime Minister when he fought in the guerrilla war against the pro-American Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, who had suspended the Constitution of 1940. After victory in January 1959, Castro promised to restore the Constitution. In March 1959 the Soviet Premier Khrushchev began to send Castro substantial economic and military aid, as well as 100 mostly Spanish-speaking advisors, to assist in nationalising Cuban industry and agriculture, expropriating US owned property, collectivising agriculture, building a pyramid of power that allowed no dissent, creating an army to fight with communist revolutionary dictators in Africa and a police force to crush any opposition, and building prisons for all dissenters found guilty of ‘counter-revolutionary crimes.’ As to his promise of democracy, he told a vast audience:  “The revolution has no time for elections. There is no more democratic government in Latin America. We do not like imperialism or capitalism.” However he was forced to like capitalism after the Soviet regime collapsed in 1991 precipitating a disastrous collapse in Cuba, and forcing him to seek aid from the west. Castro left a disastrous legacy of violence in Cuba, Latin American countries and in African countries where he sent Cuban troops – Angola, Ethiopia, Namibia, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Eritrea, Congo, Mozambique and Guinea. His brother succeeded him in 2006 as the 23rd President of Cuba. Apparently the revolution still ‘had no time for elections.’

CHILE 1970 (SOUTH-WESTERN LATIN AMERICA)          ^  top

Chile became a presidential republic in 1829.  After World War 2, the imperial ambitions of the Castro regime in Cuba, backed by the Russian bloc, drove it to provide arms, money and logistical advice to Socialist and Communist parties in Chile to impose communism in that country as in Cuba. For thirty years from 1964-1994, these parties conducted bombings, assassinations, and assaults on military installations and Chile’s infrastructure leaving many victims in their wake. The only pause in this war occurred when the communist Salvador Allende, became President with the backing of Christian Democrats, after he deceived them into back his 36.7% minority vote, by signing a ‘Statute of Constitutional Guarantees’. Once in power he rejected the Statute in favour of his ‘Chilean way to Socialism’. This was to nationalise certain large-scale key industries and large land holdings and centralise power by other measures.

As Chile sank into chaos from strikes and violence, due to runaway hyper-inflation and brutalities of the regime, until President “Allende’s admission that Chile only had flour to feed the nation for ‘at the most 3 or 4 days’ led the Christian Democrats top ally with the conservative National Party to remove him. On August 22, the Chamber of Deputies requested the Chilean army remove Allende’s government as guilty of  “a breakdown of the Rule of Law by the creation and development of government-protected armed groups which are headed towards a confrontation with the Armed Forces.” Allende committed suicide on September 11 as the military bombed the presidential palace. The military government, led by General Pinochet, became the most successful government Chile had ever known. It restored order and prosperity and drafted the 1980 Constitution, which organised its own departure and made it impossible for another dictator to arise.

CONGO 1964 (EASTERN CENTRAL AFRICA)          ^  top

The story of Congo’s progress from a colony under the Belgian monarchy to an independent republic is unique for two reasons. There were two phases of Belgian control. One, from 1877 to 1908  was absolute control by the Belgian monarch , King Leopold the 2nd of a virtual slave state the fearful cruelty of its rule caused arguably 10,000,000 Congolese deaths. The other was from 1908 until May 1960 as a colony of the Belgian government. On independence in 1964, its first Prime Minister, was dismissed from office by President Kasava. He was kidnapped and then executed by the chief of staff of the Congolese Army, Lieutenant General Motobu, aided by Belgian paratroops and abetted by foreign interests in Colongese mines, who dreaded the leftist ideology and communist forces rampant in Africa. After the ensuing chaos of several short governments in 5 years, Lieutenant General Motobu seized power as head of a one-party state in 1965. Although his repressive regime restored some stability, he ruined the country by stealing  $4 billion dollars of aid money. The 2 Congo wars, that began in 1996, fuelled by smugglers of diamonds and minerals and carried on by foreign troops, caused ‘unimaginable brutality, especially among women, and the deaths of over 5,000,000 people from famine, disease and  malnutrition among 2/3 of the population. Motobu fled in 1997.

Now, according to Peter Hitchens in London’s Mail Online under President Joseph Kabilia  “the country is selling itself  into a new era of corruption and virtual slavery as China seeks to buy up its metals and minerals” and, let it be said, bruality: this in return for 5 billion pounds worth of loans for roads, railways, hospitals and schools.

EGYPT 1953 (NORTH-EAST AFRICA)          ^  top

The reign of the 10th ruler of Muhammed Ali’s dynasty founded in 1805, King Farouk the 2nd of Egypt, Sudan, Kordofan and Darfur, was abolished in 1953 by the Society of Free Officers and Muslim Brotherhood (MB) after mass protests against his corruption and failures in the first Arab-Israeli war. In 1954 Colonel Nasser became the first head of a semi-presidential government over 80 million people, in that he was both head of state and head of the government. He presided over a regime protected by Emergency Laws which restricted freedom of the media and of speech and assembly, while civilian trials were still conducted in military state security courts. A ban on political activity by religious groups, like the Muslim Brotherhood, approved by 90% in a 2007 constitutional referendum, however, allowed Egypt to act as mediator in a delicate balance of power in the Middle East.  President Mubarak is now in his 5th term as President.

ETHIOPIA 1974 (NORTH AFRICA)          ^  top

Emperor Haile Selassie, the last of an unbroken line of Emperors from King Solomon who had introduced a number of reforms, was forcibly deposed in 1974 by a large radical military derg (committee) resourced and trained by the Russian KGB, the Chinese and Cuban military. He was personally strangled by Colonel Mengistu Mariam, the son of a former slave, who had emerged as the leader of a ‘gang of four’ in a revolutionary reign of terror, protected by security guards trained by those of Kim 11 sung of North Korea. This revolution killed many thousands in the capital of Addis Abbaba, many more in its torture centre, and massacred 150,000 in the provinces. A further 2 million died in the collectivisation of land which produced the terrible famine of 1984-5 in the provinces of Tgray and Eritrea. Even Colonel Mengistu’s own father  cursed him for his despotic reign of terror and hung the dead Emperor’s picture in the house his son had built for him. When Russia withdrew 5,000 resident staff during the period of Petroska , Mengistu fled to Zimbabwe.

GERMANY 1918          ^  top

During the closing days of World War 1 in 1918, the evangelistic US President Wilson forced the Kaiser (King) of Germany to abdicate, refusing to negotiate a peace treaty with the Allies otherwise. He wanted to abolish the German monarchy ‘with its little secret councils of men’ and so to make it impossible for Germany to break out again upon the world with a war of conquest . The Kaiser abdicated on November 9, 2 days before the Armistice that ended four years of war on French soil. Not even the Socialists in ‘Germany had wanted the monarchy abolished. Nor did  the German people blame the Kaiser for precipitating the war, believing they were justified as they were being encircled by the other Powers.

President Wilson’s failure to understand this encouraged Germany to conduct a defiant warfare over the terms of the ‘treaty of ‘Versailes, over occupation of the Rhine Land, reparation payments, and disarmament backed by propaganda to make the west believe that the Versailles Treaty had been too harsh – even to the point of bankrupting the country later aggravated by the world depression. So Hitler arose out of the ashes to become a new German ‘monarch’ and fulfil the prophecy of General Ludendorff that ‘this evil man will plunge our Reich into the abyss’, an abyss that cost 56,125,262 deaths in World War 2.

GUYANA 1966 (NORTH SOUTH AMERICA)          ^  top

From 1953-66, Guyana’s limited self-government was wracked by a long duel between the two  leaders of rival wings in the same party, the PPP – namely the British born Socialist-leaning, Forbes Burnham, and the Marxist anti-capitalist Indian of immigrant origin, Chedda Jaga. This left a legacy of racially  polarised politics in violent elections between the Afro-Guyanese faction of  the first and the Indian-Guyanese of the second. When Burnham emerged the victor in a fraudulent election in 1968 following the 1966 London Conference grant of full independence by the British government, he formed a separate National People’s Congress (NPC) and declared Guyana ‘a co-operative republic’ with a ceremonial president.

Burnham urged support for African liberation movements and allowed Cuban troops to transit in Guyana en route to the Angolan war. In 1974 he declared the ‘paramountcy’ of the ruling PNC over all government agencies. Jaga, who declared his admiration of Stalin, Mao and Castro, resorted to boycott, civil resistance and strikes. A year of escalating violence by the NPC against the opposition WPA party in 1979 followed the 1978 massive communal murder and suicide of the Jonestown cult followers. By the time Burnham died in Cuba in 1985 public services and the economy were in crisis only reversed when its international debts were cancelled.

LIBYA 1969 (NORTHERN AFRICA)          ^  top

On September 1, 1969, while King Idris was in Turkey for medical treatment, a 27 year old officer Mirammar al Gaddafi led a military coup against him as too closely identified with Western powers and culture. Deposing the Crown Prince shortly after, he declared himself leader of a Libyan Arab Republic with the title ‘Brother Leader and Guide of the Revolution’ and  instituted a regime, run by elective ‘revolutionary committees’ with himself as permanent unelected head. His regime permitted no political parties, no trade unions, rule of law, free speech, free assembly or free press.

Gaddafi closed down American and British bases in Libya, partly nationalised the oil fields, allied with anti-Israel forces in the Middle East, pursued weapons of mass destruction, and sponsored terrorism. When the US were able to sheet the blame for the horrifying attacks in 1988 on the Pan Am Flight 103, and in 1989 on the UTA Flight 772 on Libya, US bombers bombed Tripoli and Benghazi. In 2003, after a long wrangle with the US, Gaddafi payed 3 billion compensation in 2003; and renounced weapons of mass destruction. When asked why, he said ‘I saw what happened in Iraq.’

MOZAMBIQUE (EAST AFRICA) 1974          ^  top

When Frelimo (Mozambique National Liberation Front), dominated by Communists, took control of an independent Mozambique from Portugal on Christmas Day 1974, backed by military support from both China and the Soviet Union. Its founder, a doctor of anthropology Eduardo Mondlane, said shortly before his death in 1969: “With living conditions the way they are in Mozambique, our enemy leaves us no choice.”  In 1977 the Frelimo Party declared themselves a Bolshevik Party and proceeded to nationalise industry and collectivise farms (called villagization’ covering 80% of the population. The mass emigration of 1.700,000 and internal displacement of over 3,000,000 followed against the background of a severe drought and a civil war with the Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO), armed by neighbouring Rhodesia and South Africa that lasted until 1992 leaving another 1,000,000 dead. 

According to UNICEF 600,000 died of famine from 1975-85. In 1987 a further 3,500,000 were said by the U.S. Ambassador to be at risk from hunger. Corruption prevented more than 25% of massive international food aid reaching the desperate population at an agreed rate. The rest remained in the hands of the authorities, who sold it on the back market. The Frelimo formally abandoned Marxism in 1990 and established a new multi-party constitution in agreement with Renamo after the civil war ended in 1990.  Mozambique restored a sound economy by turning to the West and became the only country, that had not been part of the British Empire, to join the Commonwealth.

NIGERIA 1963 (WESTERN NORTHERN AFRICA)          ^  top

Two major kingdoms existed in the Nigerian region before the 20th century  – Benin in the south-west from the 15th century to the 19th century,  and  Niri in the south east  from the 10th century until 1911. The balance in northern and southern regions that existed, when Nigeria became a British protectorate in 1914, was lost when the British plebiscite in 1961 split Cameroon. The south joined the Republic of Cameroon when Nigeria became an independent republic in 1963, based on a federal representative constitution developed by Britain.

However any semblance of a western party-based democracy vanished after the 1965 election in 33 years of brutal civil war between rival military juntas marked by corruption, electoral fraud and two notorious bloodbaths in ethnic rivalries.  The first began in May 1967 after the Eastern Region declared itself independent as the Republic of Biafra. The response of the Nigerian Western and Northern alliance was to being a prolonged war by attacking Biafra on July 6, 1967 during which it committing wholesale murder of a grand scale, especially of those of Igbo origin. A second bloodbath followed the successful coup of General Abachi in 1993, who proved to be the most brutal ruler of all, employing violence on a wide scale to suppress unrest. He was found dead in dubious circumstances in 1998. Since then a presidential federation, brokered by the United Kingdom, has liberated Nigeria from the devastation that had proved so ruinous.

NORTH KOREA 1948 (NORTH-EASTERN ASIA)          ^  top

The country ‘Joseon’, ruled by the Joseon dynasty from 1392, became known as Korea in 1897 eight years before it became a Japanese protectorate in 1905, which lasted until the Japanese surrender in 1945. Emperor Gojoing remained sovereign until he died, possibly by poison in 1919. The Japanese occupation suppressed the Korean language, religion, history and land or property ownership. During World War 2 they enslaved 200,000 Koreans, many as sex slaves. In 1948, Korea was divided into North and South Korea along the 38th parallel when Russia and the USA found it impossible to work as joint trustees.in a post 1945 world ordere.

Korea was divided into two. The north became an impoverished communist dictatorship under  Kim Il Sung, while the south became a modern capitalist country guided by the US under the UN’s watch.  An  invasion by a North Korean army, backed by China and Russia, in 1950 lasted 3 years before it was repelled by a combined Korean and UN force. Kim Il Sung died in 1994 after 45 years of absolute rule - continued by his son - so cruel, as devoid of any pity or freedom, as the worst of other communist regimes in modern times. As the aid worker, Norbert Vollertsen, reported (Wall Street Journal February 5, 2003):  “The famine in North Korea is not a natural disaster but a man-made one. The North Korean dictator uses food as a weapon against his own people, keeping them weak and dependent on the state. From 1994 to 1998 at least two million North Koreans have perished from starvation and related diseases. Nearly 50% of all  North Korean children are malnourished to the point that it threatens their physical and mental health.”

PORTUGAL (WESTERN EUROPE)          ^  top

In 1910, the oldest monarchy in Europe became a French-executive style republic after a revolt against King Manoel 2 aimed at removing the privileged rule of the church and governing class. 8 presidents and 44 governments ensued until a military junta established a dictatorial rule in 1926. This led to Antonio de Salazar’s unbroken dictatorship until 1968, which left Portugal in disastrous stagnation compared with the rest of Europe. A further revolt by a leftist military in 1975 led to the ruinous social, economic and political upheavals over the next 10 years resulting from the nationalisation of banking, transport, heavy industry and landholdings. Salazar’s  communist regime had turned Portugal into the poorest country in Europe unable to cope with the rebellions, so costly in money and lives, that had been festering in its African colonies since the 1960's. Portugal is now gradually moving to denationalise institutions and liberalise  government.

ROMANIA          ^  top

General Ion Antonescu joined the German Wehrmacht when it invaded southern Russia in June 1941. King Carol the 2nd of Romania abdicated. His son King Michael the 1st succeeded him. During the next three years over 300,000 Romanians were casualties of war, and between 280,000 and 350,000 Jews were delivered to Hitler’s extermination camps. With the Germans in retreat, General Antonescu lost power. Romania joined the Allies and fought with the Red Army against the Nazis in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. When peace came the Red Army remained, declaring Romania a republic under a communist government. The King went into exile in 1947. A Communist dominated government under Gheorghe Georghiu Dej, leader of the Romanian Workers Party, from 1947-65 impoverished the country by nationalising industry, transport and agriculture; and inflicted  imprisonment, torture and death to all opposition. .

On Gheorghe’s death, Nicolae Ceausescu rose in his wake, seizing dictatorial power.  After a prosperous start, aided by the World Bank and the IMF in the 1970’s; Ceausescu’s rule slipped into the draconian tyranny of a police state with a megolomaniac cult of personality reflected in grandiose building. 2 million became victims with 60,000 to 80,000 in pyschiatric institutions, other displaced and vast numbers emigrating from the country. When faced with mass revolt, he was captured by the military while escaping in a helicopter with his wife, tried for genocide and executed. A former oofficial of the FSN (the National Salvation Front) Ion Iliescu has been president for 3 terms in a  Coalition government still of socialist persuasion.

RWANDA 1962 (EASTERN CENTRAL AFRICA)          ^  top

Rwanda was a trust territory under the Belgian Crown for 40 years until its independence in 1962. At the time the country was divided economically between the agricultural Hutus and the cattle-owning Tutsi. It was also divided politically with the Hutus dominating as the ruling class with the Tutsi enjoying fewer opportunities for advancement. However this division had not occurred because the Hutu and Tutsi were two separate groups as they shared the same language and culture but because of Belgian policy which had preferenced the advancement of the Hutus into professions and managements while enhancing the division between the two groups by its policy of required identity cards.  

Efforts to create a coalition government in 1993 were destroyed when President Habyarimana died in a plane accident and the Hutus blamed the Tutsi opposition leaders. The presidential guard began murdering Tutsi these leaders first. It they formed a 30,000 member militia group, which began a vengeful slaughter of the entire Tutsi population. This guard was joined by ordinary Hutus goaded by radio propaganda to join in the massacre. Between them they murdered 800,000 Tutsi and smy moderate Hutu sympathisers trying to halt the dreadful slaughter. The leader of a Tutsi rebel force, Paul Kagame, put an end to the genocide when he seized Rwands’s capital. He became the first Tutsi President in the year 2000. Endless fighting across the Congo border ended in 2002. Rwanda adopted a constitution based on a balance of power between Hutu and Tutsi in 2003, and outlawed incitement of ethnic hatred.

SOMALILAND 1991 (NORTH-EAST AFRICA)          ^  top

The British protectorate in the Horn of Africa, known as British Somaliland, gained independence as the State of Somaliland on June 26, 1960. Days later, as a referendum indicated support for unification with the Italian-administered Trust Territory of Somalia (formerly Italian Somaliland), the two combined to form the Somali Republic with Mogadishu as the capital. But  agreeing to create a unified state was one thing, but doing so with a society in a civil war between the warlords of rival nomad clans was another. The Army chief, Major General Mohamed Siyad Barre, armed by Soviet Russia, seized dictatorial power in 1969. His rule from 1978 to 1989 was notorious for a failed invasion of Ethopia in 1977, driven back by Cuban troops wielding Soviet weapons, at great cost; for profiteering in international food aid intended for the drought-stricken inland provinces; and for political and revenge acts of torture, imprisonment and murder. Many more were murdered in Siyard Barre’s battles with rebels in Mogadishu in 1988 and a disastrous US-United Nations handicapped by its mission as ‘peace-keepers’ when faced with militant opposition .

Siyard barre came to the end of his 21 year dictatorship in 1991 after 2 years of a man-made famine. The chaos and fighting over relief supplies only came to an end when the United Nations  brokered a cease fire in Somaliland a year later.  During ‘Basrre’s ‘reign’ 500,000 Somalis were said to have died in the deserts of Ethiopia and 50,000 clan members. .The major task was to replace the military and economic infrastructure which had been largely destroyed by civil war. A Boorama Grand  Conference of National Reconciliation in 1993,  following a series of inter-clan conferences,  produced a unique parliamentary system which was a power-sharing coalition of its main clans combining tribal and western traditions.. It led to far greater stability and security and to the first free fair election of  President Kahin.

SUDAN 1956 (EASTERN NORTHERN AFRICA)          ^  top

After an agreement established Anglo-Egyptian rule in Sudan 1899, following Lord Kitchener’s victory in the Battle of Omdurman, Sudan was run by a governor-general appointed by Egypt with British consent. From 1924, the British solved the intractable conflict between the Muslim north, and the Christian and anamist south, by ruling them as two separate territories and forbidding northerners to migrate south beyond the 10th parallel, or southerners north of the 8th parallel.  After the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, Egypt’s new leader Naguib, whose mother was Sudanese, withdrew its sovereignty from Sudan, obliging Britain to do the same. A civil war began even before both signed a treaty of independence in 1956 which lasted until 1972.

A second war broke out with the Marxist Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in 1983, backed by Russia and the Ethiopian Marxist President Mengistu, which used Russian combat helicopters and military cargo planes to bomb villages and tribal rebels alike for 20 years. An estimated 2,000,000 people were killed and 4.000,000 displaced. In the western region of Darfur neighbouring Chad occurred what the US Secretary of State Colin Powell described on September 9, 2004 as a savage  ‘genocide’ with 2.3 million people displaced and up to 500,000  victims of ethnic murder, rape, theft of land, goods and herds of livestock. Similar mayhem  was also rife on the east border with Eritrea. Reports indicate that such mayhem still continues.

UGANDA 1962 (EASTERN AFRICA)          ^  top

Uganda was governed as a federal system of four independent monarchies under a British protectorate. However in the years after World War 2 younger educated Africans in the northern regions challenged the hegemony of the most powerful of these monarchies, Buganda, in the southern region. When Uganda became a republic in 1962, a northerner, Milton Obote, was elected Prime Minister. He rapidly became unpopular by abolishing these kingdoms, and installing himself as an executive president under a new constitution in 1966. In 1971 his Muslim army chief, Idi Amin, seized power from Obote in 1971 while he was abroad. Idi Amin failed to keep his promise to hand over to a freely elected government in a few months’ time. Instead, during the next seven years, armed by Soviet Russia and aided by his inner circle of Kakwa Muslims, he turned Uganda into a brutal, mindless ‘killing field’ wherein between 100,000 and 500,000 Ugandans were tortured or murdered from the other three tribes than his own. Uganda, once one of the most prosperous African countries, lay in ruins. Its professional and middle class was decimated, and its trading Asian community driven into exile before Idi Amin himself fled into exile himself in Saudi Arabia. President Museveni restored Uganda’s four kings to their inheritance in the 1990’s, and Uganda to prosperity in a government of national unity thereafter.

USSR          ^  top

In 1917 the Russian republic began when the its government forced Tsar Nicholas the 2nd to accept responsibility for the army’s disastrous losses on the western front against the Germans in 1917 by abdicating from his ancient throne. Germany, aware of the dangerous mood of rebellion in the armed forces, forthwith sent the communist revolutionary, Lenin, in a sealed train to St. Petersburg to foment it.  Once there, he joined forces with Trotsky to seize power on the back of a naval mutiny and to close the Dumas (the parliament) down by force as both Cromwell and Napoleon had done in their day. The two revolutionaries rapidly gained popular support by promising bread, land and peace. The reality was Trosky’s promise: “Let there be floods of blood of the bourgeoisie.”

That flood of bourgeois and peasant blood, according to a recent Russian parliamentary Commission, cost 21,000,000 lives from 1929-1952 alone – one third of them shot or dying in the prison camps known as gulags. Once Lenin had become the new communist ‘Tsar’, exercising his supreme power, he alone ordered the imprisonment, degredation and execution of the Tsar and his family. Fifty years later many Russians, according to Solnyetskin, came to look back on the Tsarist regime as a ‘lost golden age’ when they had enjoyed a Parliament, the rule of law, freedom of speech and prosperity.

ZIMBABWE          ^  top

In 1965 Ian Smith, the prime minister of Southern Rhodesia announced a Unilateral Declared of Independence from the United Kingdom.  The UK government refused to recognise it, requesting economic sanctions against Rhodesia. After negotiations broke down during the next five years. In 1970, Ian Smith declared Rhodesia a republic, dropping ‘southern’ from its name, and claimed nation status. For the next 8 years Ian Smith defended his regime against rival Patriotic Front groups – ZANU led by Robert Mugabe and ZAPU led by Joshua Nkomo. On December 1, 1979. Delegations from the British and Rhodesian government and the Patriotic Front signed the Lancaster House Agreement, ending the civil war. Mugabe and his ZANU Party won a landslide victory in the election 2 months later. 2 years later  Mugabe ousted Joshua Nkomo from his cabinet. In 1988 their two parties merged as the NAZU-PF. Mugabe began a compulsory, often violent, and-redistribution to blacks in the year 2000 which led to a shortage of exports, food for locals, capital, currency, expertise in farming, and homes for dispossessed farm hands.  Such is the degredation of a once wealthy, thriving country that life expectancy for males has dropped from 60 in 1990 to 37, the lowest in the world; and for females to 34 years.  Infantile mortality has risen and 1.8 million live with HIV. The country has literally gone to wrack and ruin under Mugabe who, in 2008, still refuses to concede defeat in the 2008 election, or accept the contempt of the world. for his murderous, vicious megalomaniac regime.

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