Spirit of Celebration Unites Divided Globe

From Tonga in the South Pacific to Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, from wintry Sweden to sun-scorched South Africa, humanity bid goodbye Friday to the 1900s, a century of extremes that included the horrors of two world wars and the miracles of penicillin and space travel.

Millions of people turned out for the largest and most heavily policed party in the universe, flocking to waterfronts, central plazas and national monuments as the clock progressively struck midnight across vast expanses of Asia, Africa and Europe.

Joined together by giant television screens--quintessential 20th century technology--revelers in Mexico City’s Zocalo cheered celebrants along the Thames River in London who toasted party-goers in New York City’s Times Square. The world celebrated with song and dazzling explosions of fire and light--beacons to the next millennium.

But the global village remained an archipelago of ancient civilizations and separate nation-states asserting their diverse cultures:

* While honoring the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan, Egyptians heralded the Christian New Year with an all-night musical extravaganza at the 5,000-year-old Pyramids of Giza. Palestinians released a flock of doves into the floodlit sky over Bethlehem’s Manger Square, where Jesus Christ was born two millenniums ago.

* After a century of wars against China, Japan, France and the United States, Hanoi welcomed the new year at its 1,000-year-old Temple of Literature--Vietnam’s first university--with 300 drummers in Nguyen Dynasty costumes performing a traditional dragon dance; Bangkok listened to a jazz composition by Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the world’s longest-serving monarch.

* One of the most celebrated heroes of the 20th century, former South African President Nelson Mandela, led his country’s festivities from Robben Island, where he spent 18 of his 27 years in prison. In his old cell, he lighted a candle, a symbol of hope that the next century will bring peace and greater prosperity to the world’s poorest continent.

* Residents of Berlin, center stage for two world wars and the finale of the Cold War, gathered for fireworks at the Brandenburg Gate. Across the border in France--Germany’s historic rival and now staunch ally in the European Union--Parisians defied a week of deadly storms, quaffed champagne and surrounded the Eiffel Tower, ablaze in the light of 80,000 camera flashes.

* Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Tony Blair led Britain’s celebration at the Millennium Dome in Greenwich, where the world’s time has been kept at the Prime Meridian since the British empire dominated the seas in the 19th century.

* And at the Vatican, Christian pilgrims from around the world thronged to St. Peter’s Square for an all-night observance of 2,000 years of Christianity and prayers for peace on Earth.

“The clock of history strikes an important hour. At this moment, the year 2000 begins,” Pope John Paul II told the crowd of tens of thousands of people from his balcony at St. Peter’s Basilica.

“I would like to knock at the door of every home, to bring to each of you my cordial good wishes,” he said. “May you always be certain of God’s love for us. As he did 2,000 years ago, Christ comes today with his saving gospel to guide the uncertain and faltering steps of peoples and nations, leading them toward a future of true hope.”

Fears of Violence Are Not Borne Out

Fortunately, fears of a New Year’s Eve terrorist attack, nuclear meltdown, worldwide computer collapse or global Armageddon did not bear fruit in the first hours of the new year. Time did not stand still. There were a few minor glitches, but life did not come to a crashing halt on the cusp of a new century any more than it did in the autumn of the last one.

Instead, most people would awake to the same problems and promises, comedies and tragedies that they took to bed with them.

For that reason, many people felt the event was unimportant, as trivial as watching the odometer register 2,000 miles on a new car. There is nothing biologically significant about the changeover. Muslims and devout Jews live by other calendars. China, the world’s most populous nation, will observe the Lunar New Year in February.

“It’s a record of the birth of Jesus. That means nothing to me, I’m a Buddhist,” said Hong Kong novelist Louis Cha.

Even followers of the dominant Christian calendar dispute the date of the millennium. The first millennium ended on the last day of the year 1000, and the second should end on New Year’s Eve 2000, historians argue. This is because a 6th century Roman monk and mathematician named Dionysus Exiguus established the modern calendar before Christians were introduced to the concept of zero, jumping the date from 1 BC to AD 1 with no year 0 in between.

Furthermore, many historians now believe that Christ was born at least four years before then--that the 2,000th anniversary of his birth actually passed unnoticed about 1996.

And yet, while purists argued, the public will prevailed, and Friday was treated around the world as the start of a new millennium. For millions of people in scores of countries, the appearance of all those zeros in the date signified a fresh start and cause to celebrate. If not a clean slate, it was at least a time to take stock of a century that was both the most brutal and most advanced, and to take a philosophical peek into the future.

Perhaps all centuries have looked the same at the beginning, but the 20th century in particular seemed to have been drawn by a pendulum of extremes, swinging wildly between the scarcity of the Great Depression and periods of immense wealth such as were symbolized by industrial baron J. P. Morgan at the beginning of the century and information baron Bill Gates at the end.

The 1900s were defined by the depravity of Nazi Germany and the wonders of computers--smaller and more powerful in children’s toys today than those American astronaut Neil Armstrong took on the first moon landing in 1969.

One of the greatest scientific achievements of the century was also the darkest--the splitting of the atom, which led to the use of two nuclear bombs against Japan.

It was, said Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, a century of Albert Einstein and Adolf Hitler, of James Joyce and Picasso, but also of Auschwitz and the gulag.

“Never in human history was there such a gap between technological and scientific development, and political and moral barbarism. Will the 21st century bring us something better? “ Fuentes asked. “We have a right to be skeptical.”

Some people would agree with British historian Eric Hobsbawm that it was a “short century” whose boundaries were the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and the end of the Cold War in 1989, the latter accompanied by the tearing down of the Berlin Wall that divided East and West. Certainly the great ideological battle of the century--between market capitalism and state-controlled socialism, liberal democracy and communism--ended in that moment of liberation.

But the triumphant Western model has so far failed to deliver on its promises of a kinder, gentler world order. The gap between rich and poor is widening, and children, in particular, are suffering: 600 million survive on less than a dollar a day, 250 million are forced to work, often in appalling conditions, according to the United Nations.

These economic injustices were apparent in cities such as Rio de Janeiro, where the well-to-do turned out on Copacabana Beach for a New Year’s Eve fireworks display that also illuminated the bullet-scarred, hilltop slums just above.

East-West Battle Is Replaced

The 20th century’s East-West battle has been replaced by ethnic and religious conflicts that are just as violent: Tens of thousands of people have died in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, Kosovo, East Timor and Chechnya in the last decade alone. Many political observers take these tribal wars as evidence that the human race is just as cruel today as it was in the previous millennium.

But Jonathan Glover, director of the Center of Medical Law and Ethics at Kings College, London, believes humanity has advanced.

“There has been a moral change this century toward greater revulsion against atrocities. The task for the next century is for implementing that moral change,” Glover said.

In his New Year’s message, Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, urged the world to embrace the concept of nonviolence in order to make the third millennium more peaceful than the preceding one.

Already during World War II, Time Magazine founder Henry Luce called this the “American Century.” Since then, the United States has extended its influence across the planet, rebuilding Japan and Germany after World War II ended in 1945, surviving the Soviet Union as the world’s only superpower and building fast-food restaurants to the ends of the Earth. U.S. companies took the lead in computer technology and have made English the language of the future through the Internet.

But across the globe, Americans were warned not to confuse modernization with Americanization. The world wants progress on its own cultural terms; the West faces formidable challenges from Asia and Islamic countries.

In Beijing, President Jiang Zemin greeted the New Year by lighting an “eternal flame” and promising that China, which he called the most advanced civilization at the dawn of the year 1000, would regain some of its lost glory in the next millennium.

The spread of American technology across the planet had led to fears that New Year’s Eve would end in a global disaster, crashing electrical, water, transportation, banking and other key systems. It did not. There were minor and manageable glitches, including a malfunctioning monitoring system at a nuclear power station in Japan that reportedly was not dangerous.

Concerns about attacks by terrorists or Christian fundamentalists trying to hasten the Second Coming also proved groundless, perhaps in part because of the heavy security deployed across the globe.

While generals and admirals kept an eye on the world from North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters in Brussels, all of France’s 97,000 gendarmes were on the streets or on call. About 20,000 police supervised carnivals in Hong Kong, and in New York’s Times Square, police had sealed off sewer covers to keep the drains bomb-free.

In Jerusalem, officials fearing that the convergence of the Christian New Year, Muslim holy month and Jewish Sabbath could spark violence left nothing to chance. Police wearing riot gear and carrying automatic rifles stood guard above the ancient Damascus Gate, on ramparts near the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa mosques, and at every major junction or potential trouble spot.

An estimated 400,000 Muslims thronged the narrow alleyways of the Old City to pray at the mosques. Afterward, the worshipers mingled with ultra-Orthodox Jews and Christian tourists and returned home without incident.

In the last days of 1999, police arrested a handful of doomsday Christians who they feared might try to hasten the Second Coming of Christ by committing mass suicide or launching an attack in the Old City to mark the New Year.

Reports of accidents and rowdy disturbances were limited. The first casualties of millennium celebrations were in the Philippines, where three people were killed and about 200 injured by stray bullets and firecrackers that exploded in celebration.

Local Rains Dampen Anticipation

In Los Angeles, anticipation was dampened by brief but hard rains that snarled traffic, dampened the petals of Rose Parade floats and diminished public turnout at daytime celebrations. Forecasters predicted cloudy but dry skies for New Year’s Day. No rain had fallen on a Rose Parade since 1955.

In Las Vegas, anxious celebrants prepared for the new year by making a run on two emergency commodities: guns and water. As the last hours of 1999 ticked away, gun salesmen said that common calibers of ammunition, such as 12-gauge shotgun shells and .38-caliber revolver rounds, were nearly impossible to find. Bottled water beat out champagne as the drink of choice as people stocked up, leaving store shelves in many markets nearly empty.

But by and large, the global night was marked by peaceful celebrations.

“Many people thought this moment would never come, with all the wars and problems in the world,” Rene Perez, 30, said at Mexico City’s main celebration. “But today everything seems peaceful.”

While crowds crammed the shores of the Thames and the Seine, many other people escaped to the quiet of the countryside, or ate, drank and conversed with friends and family in the comfort of their homes.

Aware that they can expect to live 30 years longer than they would have if they had been born at the beginning of the 20th century, many people also came to realize that they had suddenly become that much older in the year 2000, which effectively relegated them to the role of citizens of a century past. Anyone born before today is destined to become a curiosity for the next generations, just as those born in the 19th century were for them.

Celebrants greeted the coming millennium with a mixture of joy, apprehension and awe. Few would make predictions for future generations with any certainty.

“You can only predict that the sun will rise, and even that may be wrong eventually,” science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke asserted to a British newspaper.

Asked his hopes for the next century, French television comic Jean-Yves Lafesse said only, “That it won’t be the last.”

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Times staff writers Henry Chu in Beijing, Ching-Ching Ni in Hong Kong, David Lamb in Hanoi, Mary Beth Sheridan in Mexico City, Sebastian Rotella in Buenos Aires, John-Thor Dahlburg in Paris, Carol J. Williams in Berlin, Richard Boudreaux in Rome, David Holley in Warsaw, Maggie Farley at the United Nations, Dean E. Murphy on Robben Island, Richard C. Paddock in Moscow, Sonni Efron in Tokyo, John M. Glionna in Las Vegas and Karima A. Haynes in Los Angeles contributed to this report.