ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 31, 1995 TAG: 9512290095
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHARLES J. HANLEY ASSOCIATED PRESS
An American steps in. Serb and Muslim stand down. And Bosnia's sorrowful people look ahead to a new year of peace.
The mediator was Jimmy Carter, the peace was doomed, the new year was 1995 - the year that made a difference.
Not only did 1995 make a difference in Bosnia, where U.S. diplomats finally produced, 11 months later, a peace with a more lasting look. It also made a difference in Israel, in Northern Ireland and in a handful of other lands too long steeped in ``the tears of this century,'' in Pope John Paul II's melancholy words.
But in 1995 the tears, like the century, had not yet run their course.
Not in Israel, where a fallen leader's grandchild cried, ``How can you console a whole nation when grandmother cannot stop weeping?'' Not in Japan, where doomsday terror struck down thousands making the daily rounds of innocent lives. Not in countless hamlets, refugee camps, front lines across the Third World where the murderous mayhem of ``us'' against ``them'' ruled.
But if the blood and tears still flowed in 1995, the world somehow looked different, a shade less tolerant of man's intolerance, a bit more ready to act in the name of peace.
``The times call for thinking afresh,'' U.N. chief Boutros Boutros-Ghali said early in the year, ``for creating new ways to overcome crises.''
In Bosnia, above all, the world found a new way, with an old weapon called NATO.
The year dawned full of hope in the former Yugoslavia, where Carter, the ex-president and itinerant peacemaker, helped fashion a New Year's cease-fire in the war between rebel Serbs and the Bosnian government. But the peace of 1995 lasted mere weeks.
Bosnia slid back into its nightmare of siege and massacre. Then, in midsummer, a government blitzkrieg routed Serb rebels in Croatia, and NATO air strikes humbled their brothers in Bosnia. By late autumn, the Serbs were finally swallowing a peace plan, to be supervised by 60,000 troops of the rejuvenated Atlantic alliance.
``This came too late for 200,000 Bosnians,'' a soldier said of the dead. ``But better late than never. The peace agreement will save many lives.''
In the Middle East, peace always seems late. Its newest installment, a detailed Israeli-Palestinian agreement, was signed Sept. 28 in Washington, where the PLO's Yasser Arafat turned to Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin and pledged, ``We will protect this peace with our souls and our lives.''
Rabin's life lasted barely a month, until a bright evening of celebration in Tel Aviv became a black night of assassination. But as the year wore on, so did the peace.
In Northern Ireland, the difference came with the first formal talks in a generation between Britain and Sinn Fein, political arm of the guerrilla IRA. A cease-fire stuck, and a visiting American president beheld the born-again joy of Belfast.
``Your day is over,'' Bill Clinton said of the gunmen on the old Catholic-Protestant divide.
But in two dozen or so other unhappy lands - in the war-scarred mountains of Afghanistan, the villages of Sri Lanka, the terrorized streets of Algiers - the tears still flowed. And beneath the streets of one city, a city unaccustomed to fear, terror took on a frightening new look in 1995.
On a morning in March, saboteurs spread death through the Tokyo subway, unleashing nerve gas that killed 12 people and sickened 5,500. Members of an apocalyptic cult later confessed to the attack, a chilling reminder to the world that terrorists, too, can boost productivity through technology.
And technology, the Japanese will tell you, does not always protect.
In a few horrifying moments in 1995, the earth shook beneath Kobe, reducing much of that Japanese city to a landscape of ruin. More than 6,000 people were killed and almost 100,000 buildings destroyed, along with Japan's faith in the ability of modern engineering to cope with earthquakes.
Teeming African towns and fragile Caribbean islands also suffered from nature's power and unpredictability in 1995.
A devastating virus dubbed Ebola panicked the people of Zaire, killing more than 200 before subsiding, a mystery waiting to strike again. In the Caribbean, a one-two punch of vicious September hurricanes flattened a half-dozen islands.
Along with episodes of terror and tragedy, the year had its inevitable moments of triumph.
Twenty years after the war, Vietnam was a winner, getting a U.S. Embassy. Canada also won, keeping Quebec in its heartland in a narrow vote on secession. At the polls in Ireland, divorce triumphed, in France it was Chirac, and in Iraq, who else? - Saddam by a ``landslide'' in a presidential ``election.''
The heroes and the haughty of an earlier day helped fill the ranks of the losers in 1995.
Lech Walesa, shipyard rebel, fumbled away Poland's presidency to a slick ex-Communist; South Africa's Winnie Mandela, black icon of the '80s, was dumped from Nelson Mandela's Cabinet of the '90s; Giulio Andreotti, godfather of Italian politics, went on trial, accused of being the politician of Mafia godfathers; and a cocky young trader named Leeson crashed in Singapore, taking a grand old bank named Barings with him.
If a year, like a bank, had a balance sheet, debits and credits would abound:
In 1995, we poured 6 billion more tons of carbon into the atmosphere. We traded $20 billion worth of arms on the world market. We added 90 million to the human population. We lost almost a million to AIDS.
We also reduced fluorocarbon emissions by thousands of tons, dismantled 3,000 nuclear warheads, and probably added a few weeks to man's average life expectancy.
Those are the numbers. But when history turns its rear-view mirror on 1995, it will also see extraordinary people at work: biologists mapping human genes; scientists exploring Jupiter from afar; Russian and American astronauts tending to celestial chores together, in a new era of teamwork.
It will also see millions logging onto a planetary party line called the Internet, a web weaving ``us'' and ``them'' together in ways no one can foretell.
And in Sarajevo, in Jenin, in Londonderry, it will see ordinary men and women able for once to look past the tears toward a new and better year, after an old one that, in a few places at least, made a difference.
LENGTH: Long : 113 lines KEYWORDS: YEAR 1995by CNB