10 events that defined the world in 2000

Old hostilities returned in the biblical land to wake the world from its post-Millennium celebrations, the United States plunged into a leadership paralysis and Sydney put on the greatest show on earth.

A WEAKENED PRESIDENCY


The 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush, limped to victory a month after the November 7 election, with public confidence in both the presidency and the Judiciary seriously weakened.

The presidency is weakened because Mr Bush is seen to have won through the courts, and through an archaic electoral college system, when he actually won 320,000 fewer votes than his opponent, Al Gore. Ballot papers, at least in Palm Beach County, were misleading and seem to have been counted arbitrarily.

The Judiciary is weakened because it is seen to have been partisan. The highest courts of both Florida and the United States split along party-political lines.

Despite small Republican majorities in both Houses of Congress, the close result will make it hard for Mr Bush to push through his programme, including a $US483 billion ($1043 billion) tax cut, privatisation of pensions, and vouchers for students in failing schools to buy their education elsewhere.

Ironically, Mr Gore lost after serving as Vice-President through what may turn out to be the final stages of America's longest economic boom of the 20th century. US economic growth has exceeded that of the European Union in all but three of the past 20 years, and surpassed Japan's in all but three of the past 10.

In 2000 the value of Nasdaq "new economy" shares more than halved from a peak of 5049 to under 2500 by December, as investors finally realised that many of the new internet-based trading companies were still making losses.

But as the economy slowed, the Federal Reserve's Alan Greenspan was expected to cut interest rates early next year to stimulate output. Economics may not prove as easy for Mr Bush as it was for President Clinton and Mr Gore, but for business what really matters may be that Mr Greenspan is still there.

PEACE CHANCE LOST


Hopes for Middle East peace were shattered by the biggest Palestinian uprising since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

The year began optimistically, with American-brokered peace talks between Israel and Syria over the possible return to Syria of the Golan Heights, taken by Israel in 1967. But these talks came to nothing.

And in May, Israel's Labour Prime Minister Ehud Barak honoured his 1999 election promise to withdraw Israeli troops from southern Lebanon, where they had been since 1982.

In July, Mr Barak met Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and President Clinton to discuss creating a separate Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. The talks collapsed.

Two months later, a visit by MP Ariel Sharon to the sacred Temple Mount, site of the al-Aqsa mosque, in east Jerusalem, sparked a brawl between Palestinians and Israeli forces the next day, leaving four Palestinians dead and 200 wounded.

Violence spread quickly through the Palestinian population of almost 3 million, crammed into tiny enclaves in the West Bank and Gaza with few jobs and less political power. In Ramallah in mid-October, two Israeli soldiers were stabbed to death, then thrown from a window to be beaten by an angry crowd.

Mr Barak's forces hit back. Troops fired into crowds of protesters and bombed Palestinian facilities. By Christmas, the Palestinian death toll since September was nudging 350.

The concessions Mr Barak had been prepared to make in July cost him his majority in Parliament. With new elections due, Mr Sharon's Likud Party, which opposes any treaty ceding east Jerusalem to Palestine, holds a clear poll lead. Peace's best chance in years appears to have passed.

PACIFIC UNREST


For the second time in 13 years, a Fiji Government elected with majority ethnic Indian support was toppled by a coup.

The rebels who captured Fiji's Parliament at gunpoint on May 19 were a ragtag band led by a disgruntled timber executive, George Speight.

By holding Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry and his cabinet captive for 56 days, they effectively scrapped Fiji's 1997 constitution.

Rebels took over five police stations, a hotel and a fishing company, cut Fiji's power supply and went on strike at Fijian Telecom demanding the sacking of seven ethnic Indian managers.

In isolated villages such as Vunikasi, in the highlands of Viti Levu, ethnic Indians' homes were burned and looted and women were threatened with rape.

Two weeks after releasing his hostages, Mr Speight and some of his key supporters were arrested and charged with treason. The new military-backed Government led by Laisenia Qarase excluded Speight supporters, but pledged to increase the places reserved for ethnic Fijians in Parliament and help Fijians reclaim land leased to Indian farmers.

An attempted mutiny by Speight supporters in November was quelled. But the exodus of ethnic Indians - a net outflow between 1986 and 1996 of 58,300, or one-sixth of the Indian population - is likely to accelerate.

And in June, the elected Government in the Solomon Islands, led by Bartholomew Ulufa'alu, was overthrown by rebels from the island of Malaita, climaxing conflict between Malaitans and people from neighbouring Guadalcanal which cost 60 lives in the previous 18 months. The Solomons Parliament chose a new Prime Minister on June 30, and the two groups signed a ceasefire in October.

MILOSEVIC TOPPLED


People power toppled one of the world's last communist Governments, led by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, in October.

Milosevic, who fought wars in Bosnia and Kosovo in a doomed bid to keep a Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia together, claimed to have won an election on September 24. But polls suggested that the election was won by the Democratic Party leader, Vojislav Kostunica.

Within days, protests broke out against Milosevic all over Yugoslavia, targeting local media stations. About 10,000 demonstrators rallied in the capital, Belgrade.

A crucial turning point came when miners at the country's biggest coal mine, Kolubara, went on strike. Police sent to break the strike backed away when confronted by thousands of miners and their supporters.

Thousands of workers from Kolubara and other towns south of Belgrade poured into the capital in response to an Opposition call to gather outside Parliament.

Police fired teargas as the crowd swelled to several hundred thousand. Led by football fans of Partisan Belgrade, the crowd stormed Parliament crying "Serbia, Serbia!"

Mr Milosevic's power base melted away. Riot police took off their helmets and danced with the jubilant people. The state news agency, Tanjug, announced: "From this moment, Tanjug informs the Yugoslav public that it is with the people of its country."

After Mr Kostunica took office, a temporary all-party Government was formed in the major remaining Yugoslav republic, Serbia, until Serbian elections on December 23, which confirmed the end of Mr Milosevic's power.

KOREAN THAW


Almost 50 years after the end of the Korean War, the Presidents of North and South Korea met for the first time in the northern capital, Pyongyang, in June.

The historic summit sped the thaw begun in one of the last Cold War standoffs between a communist country and the West. Encouraged by the new liberal Government of former dissident Kim Dae-jung, who became South Korean President in 1998, Italy re-established diplomatic relations with the North in January, and Australia followed in May.

At the summit, Kim Dae-jung and North Korea's Kim Jong-il agreed to "resolve the issues of reunification independently and through the joint efforts of the Korean people."

The two parts of the country, divided by occupying Russian and Western troops after the Second World War, are not expected to reunite quickly. Having seen the cost of reunifying Germany in the 1990s, South Korea is wary of taking on the burden of the much poorer North overnight.

But in August, the first 100 people from each of North and South Korea were allowed brief reunions with their families across the border, and the two Governments agreed to reopen the North-South rail link, which has been closed since 1945.

EUROPE'S BAD YEAR


European truck drivers demonstrated another kind of people power when they blockaded roads and forced Governments in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Norway to cut petrol taxes in September. Britain followed with a tax cut in its November budget.

Sky-high petrol prices, caused by a worldwide price rise by oil exporters, were just part of a bad year for Europe. The new Euro currency slid for most of the year against the strong US dollar, and the continent was ravaged by storms and a new round of worries about bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or mad cow disease).

The storms in November caused the worst flooding in parts of Britain for 40 years, with the River Ouse at York rising 2.5cm above the record high set in 1625. Road and rail services were disrupted and over 5000 properties were flooded.

A 4000-page report on BSE by Britain's Master of the Rolls, Lord Phillips, found that the Government should have acted sooner after the disease infected cattle in 1986.

Feeding cattle with meal made from the meat and bones of dead cattle and other animals, it said, "turned grass-eaters into cannibals" and "tampered with nature."

Even after sales of meat and bone meal for livestock were banned in Britain in 1988, exports of the meal to other countries continued. This was believed to account for BSE cases during 2000 in France, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, Spain and Portugal.

In December the EU imposed a six-month ban on the meat and bone meal, with an estimated cost of 3 billion Euros ($6.3 billion). It also decided to take 2 million older cattle "out of the food chain."

AUSTRALIA AT CROSSROADS


In his campaign to become Prime Minister, John Howard promised formal "reconciliation" with the nation's 430,000 Aboriginal people by the centenary of Australian federation: January 1, 2001.

Last February he acknowledged that the deadline was a mistake.

Australians remain divided.

The centrepiece of reconciliation was to have been Corroboree 2000, the biggest assembly of Australian leaders ever, held at the Sydney Opera House in May.

There, the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation recommended new strategies to lift Aboriginal people above the bottom rung of the economic ladder, outlaw racial discrimination and incorporate Aboriginal protocols at official events.

But Mr Howard rejected key elements of the report, and refused to join 200,000 people who walked across the Sydney Harbour Bridge the next day to say "sorry" for the way Aboriginals have been treated.

His Aboriginal Affairs Minister, John Herron, rejected the claim of a "stolen generation" by stating that fewer than 10 per cent of all Aboriginal children were taken from their parents between the 1920s and the 1960s to be placed in white families or institutions.

Both men rejected proposed reserved seats for Aboriginals in Parliament and a treaty, similar to the Treaty of Waitangi, to record the terms of the Aboriginal relationship with the Federal Government.

Angry Aboriginals predicted violent clashes at the Sydney Olympics in September. But the Olympics were not disrupted by the few hundred peaceful Aboriginal protesters. Instead, they marked a kind of symbolic reconciliation when all Australians shared the joy of the first individual Aboriginal gold medal - sprinter Cathy Freeman's prize for the 400 metres.

Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation chairwoman Dr Evelyn Stokes said she felt "quite emotional" after the Games' opening ceremony acknowledged Aboriginals as the first people of Australia and gave Cathy Freeman the role of lighting the Olympic flame.

"I believe reconciliation will go ahead," Dr Stokes said.

"It will be a slow process but let me hand it to the younger generation, because I believe they will deliver."

CONCORDE GROUNDED


Supersonic Concorde aircraft were grounded by Air France and British Airways after the loss of all 109 people on board a plane bound for New York which crashed at Paris on July 25.

It was the only fatal accident since the Concorde first took off in 1969.

Witnesses said one of the plane's four engines was on fire when it took off, after a minor fault was hurriedly repaired.

By the time the fire started, it was too late for the pilot to pull out of takeoff, and the aircraft crashed into a nearby hotel.

It was the most dramatic of a series of transport disasters during the year.

On August 24, 143 people died when a Gulf Air Airbus crashed into the sea off Bahrain, and on November 1, 78 people died as a Singapore Airlines plane took off into a typhoon at Taipei.

The Singapore Airlines crash broke that airline's perfect safety record, and was believed to be caused by a tyre or similar object on the runway.

In Austria, 155 skiers died when a train powered by a cable car caught fire in a tunnel at the ski resort of Kaprun.

There were no fire extinguishers on the train, and passengers tried desperately to open doors or smash windows to get out - only to die in the deadly fumes which were sucked up in a chimney effect through the tunnel.

ELIAN'S TRAUMA


When federal agents seized 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez at gunpoint at 5 am on Easter Saturday, it was a traumatic moment not just for Elian but for millions of Americans.

For five months after being plucked from the sea after his mother and stepfather drowned trying to get to America, the Cuban boy's destiny was a cause celebre.

His father, now remarried and working at a hotel in Cuba, went on Cuban television to appeal for custody of the boy.

Two thousand Cubans marched on the US mission in Havana demanding his return.

In January, Elian's two Cuban grandmothers flew to Miami to try to get him back. Although they returned without him, thousands of flag-waving Cubans lined the streets to give them a hero's welcome home.

By April, 100,000 Cubans were rallying in Havana for daily "Free Elian" protests.

At the same time, 500 Cuban-Americans maintained a constant vigil of support outside the Miami home of the relatives who took in the boy after his shipwreck. At times, the crowds swelled to more than 10,000.

Celebrities such as actor Andy Garcia and singer Gloria Estefan joined the protesters to demand that Elian should be allowed to stay in "the land of the free."

In the end, American courts granted custody to his father, and Elian went back to Cuba. The Cuban-Americans' intransigence cost them support among the wider US public, and in June the US Congress ended its 40-year embargo on sales of food and medicines to Cuba.

TIGER'S YEAR


American golfer Tiger Woods wrote himself into the history books this year: only the fifth person to win the world's top four golf championships; the first since 1953 to win three of the four in a single year; the first for 63 years to win two successive US PGA championships; and the only person ever to have won one of the four majors with a margin as wide as 15 strokes.

"It looks as if somebody out there is playing golf on a different planet to us," said Danish golfer Thomas Bjorn in July.

A month later, Independent journalist James Lawton wrote: "At only 24, Tiger Woods may already be the most phenomenal sportsman of all time."

In social terms, he has achieved superstar status, helped by his mix of African-American, Thai, Chinese, European and Native American heritage. He was the first black and the youngest player to win the US Masters back in 1997, transforming what had been one of the world's most exclusive sports.

But Woods has a long way to go to match Jack Nicklaus' record of 18 major championships. But he's now well on his way.

Herald Online features:

2000 - Year in Review

2000 - Month by month

2000 - The obituaries