Violent century ends in fitting fashion

By David Crary

NEW YORK (AP): History's bloodiest century ended in grimly fitting fashion: a year of brutish ethnic conflicts and staggering natural disasters that kept the world's luckier nations improvising awkwardly with attempts to help.

Uprooted civilians streamed by the hundreds of thousands from Kosovo, East Timor and Chechnya, fleeing from modern weaponry and old-fashioned hatreds.

Earthquakes killed some 18,000 people in Turkey, and more than 3,600 in Taiwan, Colombia and Greece. A cyclone killed 10,000 people and left 2.5 million homeless on India's densely populated east coast.

It was, in sum, an appropriate year for a motivated and mobile humanitarian agency -- Doctors Without Borders -- to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

For the West, Kosovo was the biggest trauma. Once again,a single defiant leader -- in this case Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic -- was able to create havoc and orchestrate oppression in the face of widespread foreign condemnation.

Milosevic became the first sitting head of state indicted by an international court for war crimes. But like Saddam Hussein after the Gulf War, he retained power despite a 78-day bombing campaign that battered Yugoslavia and tested NATO's solidarity.

Most of the 850,000 ethnic Albanians chased from Kosovo by the Serb crackdown returned to their homeland. But so were 45,000 foreign peacekeepers, struggling to protect the dwindling clusters of remaining Serbs.

As with Kosovo, the international community initially groped for a response to rampages in East Timor by pro-Indonesian militias enraged by a vote for independence. By the time an Australian-led peacekeeping force was approved and deployed, hundreds of thousands of people had fled their homes.

In Chechnya, throngs of civilians were displaced by intensive Russian attacks ostensibly aimed at Islamic rebels. Western leaders decried the bombardments and pushed to provide humanitarian aid, but in this crisis there was no serious talk of a foreign intervention force.

"What Chechnya teaches us is -- if you're a big country, with nuclear weapons, you can get away with it," said Michael Mandelbaum, an expert on East-West relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Across Africa, less-publicized wars dragged on in Angola, Congo, Sudan and along the Ethiopia-Eritrea border. Nelson Mandela stepped down as South Africa's president, leaving his successor, Thabo Mbeki, with formidable economic and political challenges.

In the Middle East, Israeli voters ousted hawkish Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and new government of Ehud Barak reopened peace talks with Syria while inching toward a settlement with the Palestinians.

Two of the region's long-reigning, moderate monarchs died, Jordan's King Hussein and Morocco's King Hassan, each succeeded by a son who moved quickly to win popular affection.

The Asian subcontinent was uneasy, with a military coup in Pakistan and fighting along the Pakistan-India border in Kashmir.

Peace and democracy made a few notable advances. A barbaric civil war ended in Sierra Leone. Nigeria emerged from 15 years of military rule. Indonesia had its first truly free election in 30 years, and Northern Ireland's rival parties formed a Protestant- Catholic government requiring them to share power for the first time.

Even the natural disasters had some hopeful consequences. Greece put aside longtime enmity to offer help after the devastating earthquake in Turkey on Aug. 17; Turkey reciprocated after a quake hit Athens on Sept. 6.

Kathleen Newland, an expert on refugees with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said nations and relief agencies were becoming increasingly skillful with the logistical responses to far-flung crises. But the political aspects of humanitarian intervention remains complex.

"There has been a lot of learning over the course of the 1990s. But a lot of the lessons have been negative," Newland said. "We're condemned to a certain amount of experimentation."

Mandelbaum, of Johns Hopkins, said future variations of the ethnic conflicts in Kosovo, Bosnia or Rwanda will be difficult to prevent as long as the United States and other leading nations remain wary of dispatching ground troops.

"That means the next best thing you can do is cobble together an inadequate volunteer fire department through the auspices of the United Nations, since that's all we have," he said.

The United States was at odds throughout the year with China, arguing over alleged Chinese nuclear spying and the accidental U.S. bombing of China's embassy in Belgrade. One major strain finally eased when the two countries agreed on terms for China's entry into the World Trade Organization.

China was among many nations upset when the U.S. Senate failed to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and Beijing joined Moscow in assailing a U.S. plan to create a protective shield against nuclear missiles.

Russia's often-ailing president, Boris Yeltsin, fired two more prime ministers but won widespread backing for the war in Chechnya. His government blamed Chechen rebels for cross-border skirmishes and for apartment-building bombings that killed about 300 Russians in September.

Disasters struck elsewhere in many forms: the EgyptAir jet crash off the Massachusetts coast that killed 217 people; train crashes in India, Kenya and Britain that killed about 350. The Alps seemed strangely cursed: Avalanches killed 50 in France and Austria; a cable-car plunge killed 20 in France, and a huge fire in the Mont Blanc tunnel between France and Italy killed 45.

Two intrepid travelers embarking from the Swiss Alps were blessed by good luck. Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones become the first aviators to fly a hot-air balloon around world nonstop.

"Below us it wasn't paradise. Below us there were wars, suffering of all sorts, and we had to ask why we had the right to be so happy," Piccard said afterwards. "There is plenty of room on this earth to realize a more harmonious destiny."