In Review : THE YEAR GONE BY : U.S.-led forces came to the aid of starving Somalis; Bosnia was racked by ‘ethnic cleansing’; Russia’s Yeltsin rode out a rocky year of change, and North America took a big step toward a single market . . .

SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

Yanks to the Rescue: Images out of Somalia of stick-thin victims of starvation--many of them children--tore at America’s and the world’s conscience even as food convoys were hijacked by clan militiamen and aid shipments bottled up in port out of fear of violent marauders. In August, a U.S. aid official warned that the famine brought on by civil war and drought could kill 75% of Somali children under 5 within six months and asserted that fully one-third of the country’s 6 million people were at imminent risk of dying. On Thanksgiving Day, President Bush offered to dispatch 28,000 American troops to the Horn of Africa country to protect the distribuiton of emergency food relief. The United Nations quickly authorized the action, and early Dec. 9 the first U.S. Marines clambered ashore at Mogadishu amid the flashes of assembled media cameramen. American and other forces encountered little or no resistance as they methodically took one key town after another in the worst-hit southern third of the country. Despite pressure from U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to disarm the gun-toting, truck-riding “technicals” who had made life miserable for other Somalis, U.S. troops refrained from doing so unless threatened, and it remained to be seen what would happen once U.S. troops withdrew. On New Year’s Eve, Bush paid a visit on the American forces and the relief workers whose job of sustaining the lives and restoring the livelihoods of thousands upon thousands of suffering Somalis was made easier by Washington’s year-end intervention.

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Post-Apartheid Depression: Violence both derailed the continuing search for a new, post-apartheid political order in South Africa and then seemed to get it back on track. Reform-minded President Frederik W. de Klerk, worried by signs of eroding support, called--and won--a whites-only referendum in March on his government’s policy of conducting power-sharing talks with the black majority.

After 39 people were killed in June by machete- and gun-wielding attackers in the black township of Boipatong, near Johannesburg, the African National Congress, led by Nelson Mandela broke off talks with De Klerk. The ANC charged that police had assisted the killers, identified as supporters of the ANC’s chief rival, the Zulu-dominated Inkatha Freedom Party. The further killing in September of 28 ANC supporters by troops of the black homeland of Ciskei finally spurred a De Klerk-Mandela summit. But the accords they reached on stemming violence were angrily criticized by Inkatha leader Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, who withdrew from constitutional talks.

As the year drew to a close, De Klerk acknowledged for the first time that senior members of the country’s security forces had engaged in illegal activities--probably including assassination--against political targets. Declaring himself “shocked and disappointed” by the findings of an internal probe he ordered, the president announced that he was either suspending or forcibly retiring 23 officers.

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Bullets and Ballots: Pope John Paul II, on a June visit, brought “the good news of reconciliation” to war-shattered Angola as scheduled multi-party elections and a U.N.-supervised demilitarization made it appear that the former Portuguese colony was finally emerging from 16 years of civil war. But there were charges of vote tampering in the September balloting in which President Jose Eduardo dos Santos was initially thought to have defeated rebel chief Jonas Savimbi. Tensions between the two sides led to fighting in the capital, Luanda, that cost at least 1,000 lives. In Liberia, a joint military force from other West African nations defended an interim government in the capital, Monrovia, from rebel attacks. At the time of a powerful rebel push in October, five Illinois-based nuns--and, reportedly, four Liberian novices--were slain. In December, Kenya’s first multi-party elections in 26 years were won by President Daniel Arap Moi; voting was marred by irregularities.

EASTERN EUROPE

Hate Thy Neighbor: Neither U.N. peacekeepers, nor an arms embargo, nor threats of foreign military intervention, nor an election could end the ethnic bloodletting in the former Yugoslav federation. Beginning in April, the arrival of 14,000 blue-helmeted U.N. troops in Croatia finally led to a meaningful cease-fire in that newly independent nation, but not before about 10,000 had died. Serbs, meanwhile, maintained control over large swaths of Croatian territory even as the former Yugoslav republics of Serbia and Montenegro officially joined to form a new, rump Yugoslavia.

When Bosnia-Herzegovina opted for independence in February--in a vote boycotted by Serbian residents, who had already declared their own state--it opened a new front in the war. Sarajevo was soon under unprecedented attack by troops of the Serb-led federal army. In May, inter-ethnic fighting continued in Bosnia as the Belgrade regime said it was relinquishing control of federal troops to local Serbian leaders--a move regarded as a fig leaf for continued federal military involvement in wresting territory in the breakaway republic for Bosnian Serbs. “Ethnic cleansing”--meant to drive non-Serbs from captured territory--was pursued. First, the European CommunitY and then the U.N. Security Council imposed a trade embargo on the rump Yugoslavia. U.N. efforts to open Serb-held Sarajevo airport for relief flights for the city’s besieged population were stymied until the end of June.

Serbian-born Southern California pharmaceuticals magnate Milan Panic was named prime minister of the downsized Yugoslavia in July. Panic quickly ran afoul of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, who is generally held responsible for aiding and abetting violence and land grabs by Serbian militiamen in neighboring Croatia and Bosnia. By the end of the year, Panic had mounted--and lost--a campaign to oust the Serbian strongman, promising during a presidential election contest to return Belgrade to the community of nations. Amid reports that the disappointed Panic would resign his premiership, the Serbian Parliament ousted him in a no-confidence vote.

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Going Their Ways: The “velvet revolution” became the “velvet divorce.” In June elections, the wealthier Czechs turned right and the unempoyment-plagued Slovaks turned left. Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel gave Finance Minister Vaclav Klaus, leader of the dominant Czech political coalition, the nod to form a government. Klaus immediately entered into talks with Slovak populist Vladimir Meciar. In October, Klaus and Meciar signed a pact affirming their commitment to create two independent states as of Jan. 1, 1993--even though polls showed that most Slovaks opposed separation.

SOVIET AFTERMATH

On the Capitalist Road: Somehow, only a country as vast as Russia could withstand the titanic pressures it was under in 1992, its first year of post-Soviet independence. Whether it was seeing industrial production in free fall, the social chaos of a forced march to a market economy, strident dissension within and between the executive and legislative arms of government, the bubbling over into violence of ethnic rivalries just beyond and within its borders--wherever Russians turned, there was confusion, disagreement, disappointment or worse.

Yeltsin began the year by lifting state controls on most prices, thereby implementing a primary element of his government’s economic reform program. Prices for most consumer items jumped two to four times. He then lifted restrictions on retail and wholesale trade, giving Russians the right to buy and sell virtually anything, anywhere. As economic conditions worsened and the public temper grew short, the government retreated somewhat from its headlong march toward a free market, lending money to prop up floundering firms. Worsening economic conditions made some ordinary citizens question whether democracy and the free market were a boon or a bust.

While there were no coups, there was plenty of political conflict. The disparate leadership of the Yeltsin team’s political enemies--unrepentant Communists and right-wing nationalists--rallie din 60 cities and formed the National Salvation Front. Three days later, Yeltsin banned the grouping. In the runup to a Dec. 1 Parliament session, at which it was feared Yeltsin might be voted out of office, he called for a cease-fire with lawmakers and a key Yeltsin aide resigned, hoping to insulate his boss from further attack. But the president’s outspoken acting prime minister, Yegor T. Gaidar, the driving force behind the government’s painful free-market reforms, declared the president’s team would forge ahead, defying pressure from a powerful centrist bloc of industrialists and managers. In the end, Yeltsin was forced to accept a new prime minister--Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, a former Communist apparaatchik and industrialist who headed the oil and gas industry. But he saved the jobs of several other prominent reformers, and Gaidar became a special aide.

Ethnic and national conflicts of differing severity raged throughout the year. First it was Russia and the Ukraine arguing over disposition of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, military loyalty oaths and the future of the Crimea, a Russian-majority peninsula with strategic port facilities that was transferred to Ukraine in 1954. Armenia and Azerbaijan continued to fight over the status of the Armenian-populated Azerbaijani enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh; early in the year, the Moldovan government found itself battling ethnic Russians and Ukrainians who set up the so-called Trans-Dniester Republic out of fear that Moldova was intent on union with Romania. In May, prolonged demonstrations in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, led to the ouster of President Rakhman Nabiyev, an old-style Communist boss. At year’s end, inter-clan and sectarian battling continued to disrupt life in the republic’s capital and elsewhere. In Georgia, troops fought South Ossetians who agitated for union with their northern brethren across the border in Russia and separatist Abkhazians along the country’s Black Seaa coast. Meanwhile, Moscow complained that the newly independent Baltic nations of Latvia and Estonia were discriminating against their Russian minorities through exclusionary language and citizenship laws. The various disputes tore at the Commonwealth of Independent States, the successor organization to the Soviet Union that grouped 11 of its republics but showed few signs of life.

As the year ended, Moscow was preparing to receive Bush, who was coming for a last summit meeting with Yeltsin. The centerpiece was the signing on Sunday of a historic strategic arms reduction treaty that will cut the nuclear arsenals of the former rivals by two-thirds by early next century.

LATIN AMERICA

Northern Exposure: The Mexico of reform-minded President Carlos Salinas de Gortari seemed genuinely on the move. Salinas pushed ahead with his effort to transform the traditionally protected Mexican economy into a free market able to compete under the rules of the North American Free Trade Agreement that Salinas considers vital to his country’s future. The NAFTA treaty was signed in December by Canada and the United States and awaits final legislative approval. The pact would eliminate tariffs and other restrictions on trade and investment among the three countries over 15 years, to create a huge free-trade bloc.

A conservative opposition party gubernatorial candidate was declared the winner in Chihuahua state elections in July--only the ruling Institutional Revolutionary party’s second defeat in 63 years. Mexican-U.S. relations were rocked in June, when the U.S. Supreme Court, ruling in the case of a seized Mexican physician suspected of involvement in the slaying of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent, said that Washington was entitled to kidnap criminal suspects from foreign countries. The ruling drew an incensed outcry in Mexico and throughout the hemisphere. The case against the doctor was dismissed in December.

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WAR No More: As the year began, right-wing Salvadoran President Alfredo Cristiani held out his hand to Shafik Handal, a leader of the Marxist-inspired guerrilla group that had fought the government for more than a decade. The gesture, made at a Mexico City treaty-signing ceremony in January, signaled the start of reconciliation after a war that killed an estimated 75,000 people. When two army officers received maximum, 30-year sentences later that month for the murder of six Jesuit priests, it appeared that Salvadoran justice too had turned a corner. Under terms of the peace settlement, a three-member commission investigated the military and in September submitted a report to Cristiani, listing dozens of officers whom the panel determined should be removed from duty because of corruption and abuses, including killing suspected rebel sympathizers. After Cristiani pledged to U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali that he would indeed carry out a far-reaching purge of the armed forces, the former guerrillas moved ahead in December with their treaty commitment to begin demobilizing. But as the year ended, the hard-line military blocked the purge, forcing Cristiani to violate a key element of the peace accord.

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Twice-Told Tale: First there was the coup attempt and then there was the I-told-you-so coup attempt. Despite sturdy economic growth, the year in Venezuela was bracketed by two failed efforts by elements of the armed forces to topple President Carlos Andres Perez, whose radical economic program is popularly considered to have widened the gap between wealthy and poor and who is held responsible for rampant government corruption. A thwarted insurrection in February cost 80 lives. Lack of popular support helped doom the second try as well. The late-November attempt, in which at least 170 people were killed, was put down 12 hours after warplanes believed commandeered by the rebels attacked the presidential palace and an air force facility in Caracas.

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Trickle-Down Revolt: The year in Peru gave political science a new term: the “self-coup.” That’s what President Alberto Fujimori pulled off in April when he installed an “emergency” government backed by armed forces and police commanders. Fujimori accused Congress of blocking his “goals of national reconstruction and development.” In the early hours of the takeover, congressional leaders were arrested, the news media were censored and tanks surrounded key locations. Although these measures were rescinded, the United States continued to suspend military and economic aid in protest. In September, Abimael Guzman, the deadly Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) rebel group’s shadowy mastermind, was captured in a raid on a suburban Lima apartment and later sentenced to life in prison. In November voting for a new, Democratic Constituent Congress, Fujimora’s supporters won a majority.

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Throw the Bum Out: After his brother fingered him in May as having profited from a multimillion-dollar corruption racket run by former and current aides, President Fernando Collor de Mello became the talk of Brazil--unfortunately for him. As calls for impeachment grew, Collor, in a table-thumping TV address in September, countered that his “mission” required him to see a series of economic and political reform bills through Congress. But by then Collor himself was the only item on the political agenda of Latin America’s behemoth, where hundreds of thousands took to the streets to protest the 43-year-old president’s continued tenure. At the end of the month, the country’s lower house voted overwhelmingly to impeach Collor--a first for Latin America. As the year ended, Collor resigned just before a Senate trial was set to begin, and former vice president Itamar Franco was sworn in to replace him.

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Traffic Cops: Former Panamanian strongman Gen. Manuel A. Noriega was convicted in April in Miami on eight counts of racketeering, drug trafficking and money laundering and in July was sentenced to 40 years in prison. Also in July, Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, onetime chief of the notorious Medellin cocaine cartel, escaped from his luxurious mountainside prison--reportedly disguised as a woman. Escobar was still at large at year’s end.

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Return to Sender: For an already grindingly poor Haiti further hobbled by an international embargo, the year began with a glimmer of hope that was immediately snuffed out. Ousted democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and lawmakers sympathetic to the army officers who toppled him signed a tentative accord in January to pave the way for Aristide’s return. But the pact was stillborn after opposition mounted to its designation of a moderate Communist as prime minister. In May, after a record number of fleeing Haitians were picked up, Bush signed an executive order directing the U.S. Coast Guard to halt all boats carrying refugees to the United States. The order was blocked by a lower court but later upheld by the Supreme Court.

NORTH AMERICA

Canada Try: It was deja vu all over again in Ottawa in August as federal, provincial, territorial and native officials signed off on the latest document aimed at preserving Canada’s unity. The package of constitutional reforms gave French-speaking Quebec the authority it had long sought to protect its distinctive language and culture, granted self-government to native peoples--in May, voters in the Northwest Territories approved the eventual creation of Nunavut, a self-governning homeland for the Inuit, or Eskimos--overhauled the discredited Senate and surrendered a number of federal powers to the 10 provinces. But in October, the pact was resoundingly defeated in a referendum when 54% of Canadians voted against it.

MIDEAST

One Yitzhak for Another: The Arab-Israeli peace talks, which went on fitfully through the year, stirred the Israeli political pot. In January, two far-right parties withdrew from former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s Likud Party-led coalition because they feared talking about peace with the Arabs would lead to the breakup of “Greater Israel.” New elections were called. A leadership struggle in the opposition Labor Party left Yitzhak Rabin on top, and infighting in Likud left Shamir at the helm of a weakened party going in to the June vote. Meanwhile, the Bush Administration refused to guarantee $10 billion in loans for the absorption of Russian immigrants absent a freeze on Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Labor won a striking victory at the polls and looked both to its right and left to form a coalition that promptly ordered a partial freeze on so-called “political” settlements. After an August meeting with Bush in Maine, Rabin, who had also loosened the ban on Israeli contacts with Palestine Liberation Organization officials, got the crucial loan guarantees.

At the peace talks, new Israeli negotiators proposed elections for a Palestinian administrative council and the relinquishing of part of the Golan Heights. The Palestinians countered that they wanted a legislative council--tantamount to independence in Israeli eyes--and the Syrians said it was all the Golan or nothing. The Mideast chemistry worsened at year’s end with the kidnap-killing of an Israeli border policeman and the ambush slaying of three soldiers by the Muslim fundamentalist movement Hamas--a rival to the PLO and an opponent of peace talks. The Rabin government deported 415 suspected Islamic activists from the occupied territories to Lebanon, where they remained in a no-man’s-land, refused entry to the Lebanese government and unable to return.

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Squeeze Play: The year was dominated by Iraqi confrontations with U.N. inspectors intent on monitoring Baghdad’s weapons programs, reports of CIA plots to depose President Saddam Hussein, and revelations of Bush Administration efforts to support and placate the Iraqi dictator extending to within weeks of his 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Despite U.S. efforts to squeeze “the butcher of Baghdad” in the year following the allies’ crushing Desert Storm victory, it was Hussein who celebrated in November when Bush, his nemesis, was defeated at the polls. In August, the allies declared a no-fly zone in southern Iraq that would afford protection to the rebellious Shiite Muslims there. At year’s end, a U.S. fighter jet shot down an Iraqi warplane inside the no-fly zone, prompting Baghdad to threaten to respond.

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Loser Takes All: With the Muslim fundamentalist National Salvation Front having scored a crushing victory in the first round of Algeria’s first democratic parliamentary elections, the architect of the country’s political reforms, President Chadi Bendjedid, resigned in January amid protests by middle-class Algerians fearful of an Islamic takeover. Then, an interim government cancelled the second round of voting, prompting deadly clashes between fundamentalists and security forces. The government declared a yearlong state of emergency and in March banned the Front. In June, a week shy of Algeria’s 30th year of independence from France, Mohammed Boudiaf, a hero of the independence struggle who was called back after 28 years in exile to head the military-installed state council, was assassinated at a rally.

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The Mosque Militant: Algeria was not the only Arab country wrestling with an upsurge in Muslim fundamentalism. In Egypt (whose capital, Cairo, was hit in October by a magnitude 5.9 earthquake that claimed about 400 lives), Islamic militants attacked Coptic Christians, assassinated a prominent anti-fundamentalist author and, after issuing a warning against tourism, launched attacks on foreign sightseers that left one dead. In Lebanon, fundamentalist Shiite Muslims won 12 out of 128 seats in that country’s first parliamentary elections in 20 years.

ASIA

A Market Man: In January, China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiapong, urged an acceleration of the Communist giant’s market-oriented economic reforms, setting the party line. In February, the Bush Administration lifted sanctions against high-technology exports to China in return for assurances Beijing would honor international curbs on missile and missile-technology sales, but allegations of continuing Chinese sales to Syria, Pakistan and Iran still cropped up. The U.S. move drew criticism from congressional Democrats, whose efforts during the year to deprive Beijing of most-favored-nation status again fell victim to a Bush veto. In October, the Communist Party’s 14th national congress endorsed Deng’s line of developing a socialist market economy while maintaining strict political controls. Several hard-liners holding ideological and cultural posts were dropped from the party’s new Central Committee. In Taiwan, democratic parliamentary elections at year’s end were a first for Taipei.

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Trade Winds Blow: Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa began the year playing host to an indisposed Bush. By the end of a rough 1992, Miyazawa may have been feeling, politically speaking, a little under the weather himself. Japan was buffeted by insistent American assertions that Tokyo has failed to open its markets to U.S. goods and services. In April, Tokyo offered to make a “flexible response” in its bitter quarrel with Moscow over control of four islands in the southern Kurils. In return for Russian acknowledgment of Japan’s sovereignty, Tokyo would sign a peace treaty formally ending World War II hostilities and provide economic aid. But that gambit came a cropper in September when Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, hemmed in by nationalist critics, called off a state visit to Tokyo at the last minute. In a landmark postwar action, Japan’s Diet, or Parliament, approved the foreign deployment of Japanese troops to aid U.N. peacekeepers in Cambodia. A bribery scandal felled legendary political kingmaker Shin Kanemaru from his Diet seat and his post as Liberal Democratic Party vice president. The Diet adopted an $85-billion stimulus package for an economy badly weakened after land and stock “bubbles” burst. And Miyazawa, whose approval rating had sunk to 16%, reshuffled his Cabinet.

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Finding Seoul Mates: A North Korean cargo ship believed carrying advanced Scud missiles to Iran and Syria slipped through a U.S. dragnet in March and docked in Iran. The South Koreans were hoping strengthened diplomatic ties with North Korea’s historic patrons, Russia and China, would help steer the hard-line Communist regime in Pyongyang toward a lessening of tensions on the Korean Peninsula. A sign that Seoul’s aggressive search for regional relationships was paying off was the agreement reached with Moscow on a natural-gas pipeline linking the two countries--and passing through China and North Korea. South Koreans finished out the year by electing as president Kim Young Sam, the onetime opposition leader.

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A Manila Cigar: Former Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos declared for her late husband’s former job in January, but when the dust cleared in the country’s general elections, it was outgoing President Corazon Aquino’s handpicked successor and defense minister, Fidel V. Ramos, who took the oath of office in July. It was the island nation’s first peaceful transfer of power since 1965. Ramos took measures to open the stricken Philippine economy to foreign investment, legalized the Communist Party and opened negotiations with leftist rebels. The Stars and Stripes came down at Subic Bay for the last time in November, the result of the Philippine Senate’s rejection the year before of a treaty governing the presence of the American forces.

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Power to the People: After the United States declared that Thailand’s leading candidate for prime minister was a suspected drug trafficker, the pro-military majority in Bangkok’s Parliament quickly opted in April for supreme military commander Suchinda Kraprayoon. After deputies appeared to backpedal on promises to enact measures curtailing the military, anti-government protesters clashed with security forces in May; the violence intensified and one hundred or more demonstrators may have been killed. Within a few days, Suchinda resigned--but only after Thailand’s king had signed a royal amnesty protecting the military from prosecution in the brutal suppression of demonstrators. Under an interim prime minister, the Parliament passed a number of bills lessening the traditionally strong influence of the military and requiring the premiership to go to an elected politician. In September, new elections were held, and pro-democracy activist Chuan Leekpai became prime minister.

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A Full-Service U.N.: In February, U.N. leader Boutros-Ghali proposed that the world body virtually colonize war-torn Cambodia to ensure its transition to democracy. The Security Council approved his ambitious, $2-billion program, and March 15 was the start date for the process that was to have 22,000 U.N. personnel supervise elections, disarm soldiers, manage the police, run much of the government and care for more than 300,000 returning refugees. As the operation’s Japanese civilian chief arrived, the notorious Communist Khmer Rouge rebels broke a 1991 peace accord by launching a series of attacks evidently aimed at consolidating territory before the arrival of U.N. peacekeepers. Friction between the communist guerrillas and U.N. personnel continued through the rest of the year. A November conference of Cambodian factions in Beijing ended in deadlock.

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A Fight After the Finish: Bold rebel advances and key defections drove Afghan strongman-President Najibullah from office in April and left a painstakingly crafted U.N. peace accord in tatters. Kabul fell with few shots being fired as many soldiers of the disintegrating regime welcomed the rebels with whom they’d been locked in a 13-year war that cost 2 million lives and made refugees of another 6 million people. A broad grouping of rebels under moderate leader Ahmed Shah Masoud took over Kabul but were almost immediately locked in a battle for the city with Islamic fundamentalist forces led by Guibuddin Hekmatyar. A religious scholar was sworn in as interim president later in the month, and in June guerrilla leader Burhanuddun Rabani became president amid continued fierce battles.

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War Wounds: U.S.-Vietnamese relations--if they can be called that--continued to be defined by U.S. perceptions of Hanoi’s forthcomingness in clearing up the cases of thousands of American MIAs. But there were signs of a warming trend during the year. In April, in recognition of Vietnamese cooperation on the servicemen issue, the 17-year U.S. embargo was lifted to allow sales of food, medicine and agricultural supplies. After an October visit to Vietnam by a delegation that included several senators, Bush said Hanoi had promised to turn over all of the documents, photographs and personal effects in its possession related to U.S. personnel in the Vietnam War. A few days earlier, Hanoi had handed over about 4,800 photographs of American servicemen killed in action or held as POWs. The President immediately reciprocated by making a modest donation for flood relief and offering aid for disabled Vietnamese veterans and then, in December, he allowed U.S. firms to scout business opportunities.

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Religious Conflict: A January “unity march” by supporters of the Hindu chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party up the length of India with the goal of planting the nation’s flag in the heart of Muslim-dominated Kashmir got the nation’s year off to a tense start. Billed as an attempt to end deadly sectarian fighting, the march was marred by violence along its way. After months of threats by Hindu zealots, a mob of up to 300,000 in December razed a 16th-Century Muslim mosque in the northern city of Ayodhya--once the site, the radical Hindus say, of a Hindu temple marking the demigod Rama’s birthplace. The attack in Ayodhya set off riots across the subcontinent. More than 1,100 Muslims and Hindus were killed in India, and in neighboring Muslim Pakistan and Bangladesh scores of Hindu temples were demolished. The New Delhi government arrested key Hindu nationalist leaders, including the leader of the BJP, and late said it would buy the site of the former Ayodhya mosque and build a new mosque and a Hindu temple there.

EUROPE

At Grips With Hatred: United Germany the vaunted engine of European economic growth and a longtime proponent of close continental relations, was looking more and more like a stumbling giant as it reeled from economic and social problems. A public service strike washed over the western part of the country in April after the Bonn government, buffeted by the escalating costs of reunification, inflationary pressures and other budgetary constraints, balked at an arbitrated wage settlement. Then the Bundesbank lifted the discount rate to 8.75%--the highest in the postwar era--in hopes of cutting inflation. The move was a blow to the Bush Administration, which had lobbied for lower German rates to spur U.S. exports.

In late August, rioting neo-Nazis and skinheads in the eastern German port city of Rostock, encouraged by shouting local residents, chased asylum seekers from a hostel for foreign refugees and burned the building. A week later, 15,000 counterdemonstrators chanting “Shame on you!” marched through the same neighborhood. So it has gone since: thousands of anti-foreigner and anti-Semitic incidents countered by mass demonstrations. In late November, an arson attack for which right-wing extremists took responsibility claimed the lives of three Turkish residents of the west German town of Moelln, near Hamburg. Before the week was out, the Bonn government moved forcefully, banning a small neo-Nazi party and raiding the homes of dozens of right-wing extremists.

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A Tory Story: For the first time in nearly two centuries, a British political party won a fourth straight election. Prime Minister John Major’s Conservatives lost ground amid a recession but held on to their absolute majority, inflicting a devastating defeat on Labor Party leader Neil Kinock, who resigned and was succeeded in July by Scotsman John Smith, 53. Major, a protege of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, immediately revamped his Cabinet, moving away from the right-wing era symbolized by the “Iron Lady.” But Major’s new team ran into one minefield after another. Under pressure from high German Bundesbank rats, Britain was forced to decouple the pound from the European Monetary System’s linked exchange rates. Then a Draconian plan to close three-quarters of the country’s remaining coal mines and eliminate 30,000 jobs brought such a clamor that Major had to backtrack. The Royal Family also had a troubled year. Prince Charles, heir to the throne, and Princess Diana separated, as did Prince Andrew and the Duchess of York. In November, a fire did about $100 million worth of damage to Windsor Castle, the queen’s retreat west of London.

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Not-So-Common Market: Living up to its geography, Denmark stuck out like a sore thumb on the map of European Community unification plans. In a June referendum, a bare majority of Danes (50.75) turned down the much-ballyhooed Maastricht Treaty for European integration--which must gain the unanimous support of the 12 EC member states to go into effect. Nearly seven out of 10 Irish voters later approved the treaty, as did a bare majority of the French. A December EC meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland, hammered out a possible solution to the Danish problem. Economic union went better. By the end of the year, the 12 EC nations, for most purposes, had become a true common market, with most barriers to the movement of goods, money, services and people demolished. In November, the Bush Administration threatened to add a 200% tariff to $300 million worth of EC goods, including white wine, in retaliation for the EC’s refusal to further cut agricultural subsidies. That seemed to jar things loose--two weeks later, the two sides agreed on a plan to reduce EC subsidies to oilseed producers.

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Navigating a Remembrance: It was the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ bumping into the New World. Spain, the sponsor of the Italian navigator’s famous three-ship voyage in 1492, hosted a highly successful world’s fair (Expo ‘92) in Seville. Spain was also the site of Barcelona’s Summer Olympics. The choice in October of Rigoberta Menchu, a Quiche Indian from Guatemala, for the Nobel Peace Prize was seen as an acknowledgement of the suffering of native peoples at the hands of Columbus and later European settlers.

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A European Tour: In Ireland, the initially frustrated effort of a 14-year-old girl, pregnant after an alleged rape, to go to Britain in February for an abortion precipitated a social and religious debate. In a November referendum, Irish voters approved measures allowing Irish women to travel abroad for abortions and permitting circulation of abortion information, but they rejected a measure allowing abortion to save a mother’s life.

In Italy, April elections saw the rise of Lega Nord, a chauvinist North Italian party that advocates the country’s partition--and the drubbing of the nation’s two traditional political heavyweights, the Christian Democrats and (former) Communists. The coalition government that emerged in June with Socialist Ghiuliano Amato at its helm pushed through Draconian measures aimed at coming to grips with Italy’s budget deficit. A deadlier menace the government faced off against, the Mafia, was blamed for killing two prosecutors associated with the government’s war on the mob.

At the Vatican, Pope John Paul II underwent surgery in July for what was described as a benign colon tumor. In November, the Holy See admitted it erred in condemning the famous 17th-Century scientist Galileo Galilei, and later that month it unveiled its first reworked catechism since the 16th Century.

In France, soon after a March election in which the right posted significant gains against the ruling Socialists, Edith Cresson, the country’s first female prime minister, resigned. In October, President Francois Mitterand’s government suffered another blow when three government doctors were convicted of knowingly distributing AIDS-infected blood products to hemophiliacs, causing at least 256 deaths.