1.
US, UK Wage War on Iraq
The top story of the year was the US-led invasion of Iraq. Despite worldwide opposition to the campaign and doubts about the sincerity of the coalition's stated goals, as well as the accuracy of its intelligence, the war in Iraq began on March 20 with a "decapitation strike," which failed to achieve the goal of eliminating Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
PHOTO: AFP
The mostly US and British forces swiftly made their way into the heart of Baghdad in an offensive that lasted only 21 days. The Iraqi army disintegrated before the onslaught, offering only token resistance.
Although the "liberators" were welcomed in some quarters with jubilation and flowers, the celebrations quickly turned to chaos as the country's infrastructure disappeared in a wave of looting, vandalism and violence.
US President George W. Bush declared on May 1 that major combat operations were concluded, but the coalition quickly found itself struggling to maintain order and provide basic necessities to the people of Iraq.
PHOTO: AP
Insurgents, variously described as Iraqi nationalists, former Baath party loyalists, foreign terrorists, or plain criminals, began daily attacks upon coalition forces as well as foreign aid workers and Iraqi civilians. As the year ends, more US soldiers have been killed in combat after Bush declared an end to combat operations than were killed in the invasion.
One bright spot amidst the gloom surrounding the morass in Iraq came when Saddam was captured by US soldiers on Dec. 14. His fate remains unclear, as does the fate of Iraq.
-- Mac William Bishop
PHOTO: AP
2.
The SARS Epidemic
The coronavirus causing SARS is thought to have originated in China's Guangdong Province. It spread to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and other Asian countries and Canada, killing nearly 800 people before being contained. Many of these were health professionals, amplifying the mystery and fear surrounding the outbreak. A global alert was first issued by the World Health Organization (WHO) in mid-March, and on July 5 it reported that transmission chains had been severed.
PHOTO: EPA
The disease, with an intimidating fatality rate of 11 percent, caused considerable economic disruption to East Asia, particularly Hong Kong and China.
Taiwan handled the outbreak with reasonable proficiency, though officials at first boasted that SARS would not pose a threat to the country. Taiwan suffered the fourth-largest number of fatalities, after China, Hong Kong and Canada, though the present WHO figure (37) is now significantly smaller after removing incorrect diagnoses. Taiwan's airports and government facilities, including offices and schools, are now manned by staff taking temperatures of people on entry.
China's initial response to the spread of SARS was lax and clumsy, but pressure from the WHO eventually elicited a rare expression of Chinese contrition: laws punishing officials who try to cover up the disease. Their efforts have provided little reassurance, however. Health authorities worldwide remain on alert for a resurgence.
PHOTO: AP
This week, an isolated case of SARS in Taiwan was resolved when a military researcher was released from hospital after apparently contracting the disease in a laboratory. Just before Christmas, China recorded another suspect case, now confirmed as SARS, prompting speculation that another wave of infection might be on the way.
-- Martin Williams
3.
PHOTO: AP
N Korea's Nuclear Charade
The diplomatic circus surrounding North Korea's illicit nuclear weapons program continued through 2003, a constant static in the background of world events. On Jan. 10, North Korea formally withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Shortly thereafter, on Jan. 31, US spy satellites reportedly detected activity at the Yongbyon nuclear facility, indicating that North Korea was going ahead with the plutonium reprocessing that was necessary to make the weapons.
The Hermit Kingdom's reclusive and platform-shoe shod leader, Kim Jong-il, disappeared from public view for three months after the war in Iraq commenced with no explanation, although some observers believed it was because of his fear of meeting the same fate as Saddam Hussein.
PHOTO: EPA
Talks aimed at resolving the crisis continued. And continued. Hardly a month went by without a new round of talks falling apart and a new initiative being pursued.
On April 24, during direct talks between the US and North Korea in Beijing, North Korea admitted that it possessed nuclear weapons. The talks ended early.
A new round of six-nation talks, including the US, China, Japan, South and North Korea and Russia, began on Aug. 27. New rounds of talks have been continuing in an on-again, off-again fashion, having stopped and restarted several times over the past four months.
PHOTO: AP
As the year comes to a close, the situation in North Korea is more or less the same as when the year began, and no major progress appears likely in the near future.
North Korea has variously threatened to turn the US into a "sea of fire," made gestures of peace, fired missiles into the Sea of Japan, declared its willingness to cooperate, and said it would never back down.
The US responded by showing its willingness to cooperate and also refusing to back down. China played the middleman, eager to assume the role of regional heavyweight and looking for some way of capitalizing on the situation. South Korea begged for peace, and Japan decided to beef up its military's capabilities.
And Russia stood on the sidelines, offering the odd demarche from time to time to keep the drama moving along.
-- Mac William Bishop
4.
War on terror Continues
The war on terror rolled on but whether it was making progress seemed doubtful even to its leaders. Major arrests included senior al-Qaeda leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in March, Ali Abdul Rahman al-Ghamdi, suspected of arranging a number of bombings in Riyadh this year, and Hambali, the alleged leader of the al-Qaeda-linked Southeast Asian militant group Jemaah Islamiah, in August.
Major attacks linked to al-Qaeda included one on a housing compound in the Saudi Arabian capital Riyadh in May, which killed 34, bombs in Casablanca the same month which killed 41, and another bomb in Riyadh which killed 17 in November. The same month two bomb attacks on synagogues in Istanbul killed 23 and further attacks on the British consulate and a British bank in that city later in the month killed 27.
But al-Qaeda wasn't the only game in town.
The Chechnya and Palestine issues continued to fester, with suicide bombers taking a deadly toll. One-hundred-and-eighteen people died when Russian special forces stormed a theater to release 700 hostages held by Chechen rebels. The invasion of Iraq and the subsequent power vacuum the US was unable to fill turned that country into a playground for foreign terrorist groups. Attacks on the UN and Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad drove most international organizations out of Iraq. Rounding out the year were two attempts on the life of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.
For every genuine incident of terrorism, however, there were dozens of warnings that came to nothing. Heightened vigilance in the developed West may account for why so many of 2003's attacks occurred in fewer countries. Whether the endless list of seemingly empty alerts and warnings is producing "vigilance fatigue" is another question. In November, the hawkish US defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld admitted to his staff that the US might not be fighting the war on terror in the right way and that it was hard to tell if they were winning or not.
-- Laurence Eyton
5.
Hong Kong on the March
On July 1, 500,000 Hong Kong residents took to the streets to show their opposition to anti-subversion legislation, plunging the administration of Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa (
Protesters feared the legislation would curtail their civil liberties and usher in an era of repression.
The demonstration was the largest in the territory since a million people protested following the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.
Tung insisted the bill, required under Article 23 of Hong Kong's mini-Constitution, would safeguard local freedoms, but democracy activists saw it as a violation of the "one country, two systems" formula promised by Beijing.
The bill, designed to ban treason, sedition, subversion and the theft of state secrets, had proposed life sentences for certain offenses and giving police more powers.
In the weeks following the protest, Tung said the bill had to go through, denying it was a threat to freedom.
The crisis prompted calls for Tung to resign and saw Hong Kong's security and financial secretaries step down.
Despite widespread criticism of Tung, China's central government backed their hand-picked leader of the territory.
On Sept. 6, it was clear the public's message had gotten through, however, with the hugely unpopular Tung withdrawing the legislation.
-- Stephen Graham
6.
Space Shuttle Explodes
In January, seven American astronauts died as the space shuttle Columbia broke apart 63km above Texas. At the time of the disaster, Columbia was just 16 minutes away from its destination in Florida. Afterwards, wreckage from the spacecraft was scattered over an area of Texas and Louisiana measuring 160km by 16km. Authorities and local residents fanned out through woods and fields in search of pieces of debris.
Columbia broke up almost 17 years to the day after the explosion of the shuttle Challenger.
Initial speculation about the cause of the disaster centered on a piece of foam insulation that had fallen off during the spacecraft's liftoff. Though NASA discouraged such speculation, a later report by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board concluded that the piece of foam had torn a hole in the spacecraft's left wing, allowing into the wing's interior superheated gases that had melted the wing's frame. NASA officials knew from the beginning of Columbia's 16-day mission that the foam had fallen off, and some NASA scientists expressed concern that the fallen foam could lead to problems.
Top management, however, concluded that no danger existed, thus missing any opportunity to send another shuttle into space to attempt a rescue mission.
-- Lucien Crowder
7.
China Puts Man in Space
Had Colonel Yang Liwei (
But China has moved on from the famines of the "Great Leap Forward" and purges of capitalists, so although Yang was only the 431st person to go into space, it wasn't long before his face began showing up on calendars and playing cards.
Even so, it wasn't the money-making opportunities that drove the Chinese into space, but rather rabid nationalism which the government hopes will hold the country together as it experiences severe dislocation as its economy develops.
The decision to delay television coverage of the take-off and landing belied the pre-launch bravado, and Yang had apparently been armed with guns and knives should his capsule land off-target.
Much to the government's relief, however, Yang returned a national hero on Oct. 16 after spending 21 hours orbiting the earth 14 times in the Shenzhou V.
Within two weeks, the government had already begun harnessing the patriotic value of Yang, who was dispatched to Hong Kong, scene of a 500,000-person march in July against new anti-subversion legislation.
-- Graham Norris
8.
WTO Talks Collapse
September's meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Cancun, Mexico was accompanied by violent clashes between police and protesters, but the big story was the collapse of the talks themselves. Negotiations on loosening trade barriers ended in frustration as rich and developing countries failed to reach a compromise on the contentious question of agricultural subsidies.
Crops like cotton in the US and sugar beet in Europe are heavily subsidized, and less-developed nations wanted to see these subsidies reduced or eliminated. When the wealthy nations balked, the talks fell apart.
Out of the wreckage emerged a powerful new trading bloc -- the G21 -- that provides the developing world with a counterforce to the developed world's bargaining strength. The G21's members include rising economic powers such as China and India.
In the talks' aftermath, some believed that the developing countries, though they had flexed their muscle in Cancun, had disadvantaged themselves by weakening the WTO and bringing about a trade environment in which negotiations will be carried out mostly between individual nations. Others believed that the developed world had emerged the loser by missing an opportunity to import cheap goods and to free themselves from making expensive payments to farmers.
-- Lucien Crowder
9.
Schwarzenegger Wins California Governorship
The Democrats were outraged, the Republicans willing to play along, while the rest of the US raised their eyebrows and sighed "Only in California."
On Oct. 7, the people of the world's sixth largest economy, fed up with a ballooning budget deficit, "recalled" Democrat governor Gray Davis just 11 months into his second term and replaced him with Arnold Schwarzenegger, a champion-body-builder-turned-actor best known for his role as a monosyllabic killer android from the future.
But before Schwarzenegger could get his hands on the keys to the governor's mansion, the Terminator star found himself fighting off accusations of sexual assault ("I have behaved badly sometimes," he admitted), allegations over his father's Nazi past as well as numerous challenges from the 134 other candidates contesting the Sunshine State's top job.
And despite winning the election with a generous 48 percent of the vote, Schwarzenegger's new role as the "Governator" may prove to be his most difficult yet, with the US$24 billion budget crisis that brought down his predecessor refusing to be "terminated" as easily as Davis was.
-- Andy Morton
10.
Blaster Virus Sweeps World
The potential army of zombies is still out there, waiting to get hold of your computer. In August the "blaster" worm infected more than 500,000 computers worldwide, and apparently it is still wiggling its way through the Internet.
Although anti-virus vendors have downgraded its threat level to medium, the creator of the virus is still on the loose, despite the US$500,000 reward offered by the FBI and Microsoft.
The virus targeted computers running Microsoft XP and 2000 and spread quickly across the Internet by exploiting a flaw in the operating system. It was programmed to turn infected computers into a legion of zombies that would launch an attack on Microsoft's Web site on Aug. 16. Microsoft succeeded in averting the attack, but the virus nonetheless slowed down Internet traffic, shut down systems at hospitals and airlines, and caused millions of dollars in damage.
On Aug. 28 the FBI arrested a 18-year-old from Minnesota who had created a copycat version, and experts say the code, which has been circulating among programmers since 1996, can easily be adapted to attack patched versions of Windows.
Computers infected by the "blaster" worm displayed the message "I just want to say LOVE YOU SAN!" Hidden in the program's code was a message for Microsoft founder Bill Gates: "billy gates why do you make this possible? Stop making money and fix your software!"
Ironically, another version of the worm circulating at the time acted as an antidote to "blaster" by downloading the fix from Microsoft's Web site.
-- Cobus du Plessis
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