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Nelson Mandela
Born
Nelson Mandela's release from prison, February 11, 1990
Arrested in August 1962, Mandela walked out of the gates of Victor Verster Prison more than 27 years later. His release signaled that apartheid would end through negotiation rather than all-out war, and it opened four tense years of talks, a Nobel Peace Prize shared with President F.W. de Klerk in 1993, and the election that made Mandela president. Few single moments of the decade carried as much hope.
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Gulf War
Iraq invades Kuwait, August 2, 1990; coalition war, January to February 1991
A force of 100,000 Iraqi troops overran Kuwait in a matter of hours, and forces from 34 countries, led by the United States, assembled to push them out. The air war began in January 1991, and the ground campaign that started on February 24 lasted just four days. The coalition stopped once Kuwait was freed, leaving Saddam Hussein in power in Baghdad, and US troops stayed based in Saudi Arabia, a presence Osama bin Laden attacked in his 1996 declaration of war against the United States.
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German reunification
German reunification, October 3, 1990
Eleven months after the Berlin Wall opened, East Germany ceased to exist: its territory joined the Federal Republic as five new states, and East and West Berlin became one city again. The speed stunned Europe. A Cold War front line disappeared almost overnight, and a larger Germany sat at the center of the European integration that the rest of the decade would build.
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Dissolution of the Soviet Union
The Soviet Union dissolves, December 1991
A failed hard-line coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991 sealed the country's fate. On December 8 the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus met at a state dacha near Viskuli, in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha forest of Belarus, to form the Commonwealth of Independent States, and on December 25 Gorbachev resigned as Soviet president. A superpower that had shaped most of the century broke into independent republics, ending the Cold War and leaving questions about borders, nuclear weapons and Russian power that still drive the news.
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1992 Los Angeles riots
Los Angeles riots, April 29 to early May 1992
Within hours of a jury acquitting four Los Angeles police officers in the beating of Rodney King, violence erupted at Florence and Normandie and spread across the city over the following days. More than 50 people died, more than 2,000 were injured, and property damage was estimated at up to $1 billion. The unrest forced a national argument about policing and race, and a federal civil rights trial in 1993 convicted two of the officers.
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Bosnian War
Bosnian War, 1992 to 1995
As Yugoslavia broke apart, Bosnia and Herzegovina became the scene of three and a half years of war, with sieges and ethnic cleansing on the evening news. In July 1995 Bosnian Serb forces captured Srebrenica, which the UN had declared a safe area, and up to 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed or went missing; two international courts later ruled it genocide. Talks in Dayton, Ohio, produced the peace accords signed in Paris on December 14, 1995, and the constitution written into them is still the one Bosnia and Herzegovina uses.
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Waco siege
Waco siege, February 28 to April 19, 1993
A federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, left four ATF agents and six Davidians dead and began a 51-day standoff with David Koresh's followers. It ended when the compound burned after the FBI sent in tear gas, and 76 Davidians, Koresh and children among them, died. Justice Department reports concluded the Davidians started the fire, a finding some survivors still dispute, and anger over the siege drove the Oklahoma City bombing on the second anniversary of its end.
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Oslo I Accord
Oslo Accords signing, September 13, 1993
At the White House, with Bill Clinton, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat looking on, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed a Declaration of Principles. Israel accepted the PLO as the Palestinians' representative, the PLO recognized Israel's right to exist and renounced terrorism, and a Palestinian Authority was to govern parts of the West Bank and Gaza while talks on a permanent settlement followed. The hardest questions were postponed rather than settled, and they still define the conflict.
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Battle of Mogadishu (1993)
Battle of Mogadishu, October 1993
A US raid in the Somali capital turned into a street battle after militia fighters loyal to Mohamed Farrah Aidid shot down two Black Hawk helicopters, and 18 American soldiers were killed. The deaths turned American opinion against the mission. President Clinton pulled troops out of combat four days later, the last left in March 1994, and a more cautious policy on peacekeeping followed in May 1994, weeks into the genocide in Rwanda.
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Rwandan genocide
Rwandan genocide, April to July 1994
The killing began after an April 6 plane crash killed the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi: members of the presidential guard started murdering Tutsi civilians, along with moderate Hutu leaders, and the slaughter spread until the Rwandan Patriotic Front took control in July. The UN estimates more than one million people died. As it happened, the UN peacekeeping force was cut from 2,165 troops to 270, and that failure to act became the reference point for every later debate about intervention.
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1994 South African general election
South Africa's first democratic election, April 1994
For the first time, South Africans of every race could vote, and the result ended nearly half a century of white minority rule under apartheid. Nelson Mandela cast the first vote of his life on April 27 and was inaugurated on May 10 as the country's first democratically elected president. A transition that had seemed impossible a few years earlier happened at the ballot box, and it gave the decade one of its few unambiguous happy endings.
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Murder trial of O. J. Simpson
O.J. Simpson murder trial, verdict October 3, 1995
It began with a slow-speed police chase on June 17, 1994, that television networks carried live, cutting away from the NBA Finals, and it ended with an acquittal that an estimated 100 million people stopped to watch or hear. The televised trial of the football star, charged with killing Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, turned courtroom coverage into daily entertainment, and polls found reactions to the verdict split sharply along racial lines.
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Oklahoma City bombing
Oklahoma City bombing, April 19, 1995
A rented truck packed with explosives blew apart the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, killing 168 people, 19 of them children. The bomber, Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh, timed the attack for the second anniversary of the end of the Waco siege. It remains the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in US history, and it made Americans confront an enemy raised inside the country rather than abroad.
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Dot-com bubble
The dot-com boom, from Netscape's IPO on August 9, 1995
Netscape, maker of the Navigator web browser, went public at $28 a share and closed its first day at $58.25. That debut helped kick off the frenzy that followed, as internet startups became front-page news and ordinary investors piled in: in 1999 alone, 117 IPOs doubled on their first day of trading, against 39 in the previous 24 years combined. The bubble burst in 2000, but the web habits it spread into homes and offices stayed.
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Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin
Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, November 4, 1995
As he left a peace rally in Tel Aviv attended by more than 100,000 people, the Israeli prime minister was shot by Yigal Amir, a far-right Israeli law student who opposed the Oslo Accords. Rabin died in a hospital later that evening. Two years after the White House signing, the man who had staked his career on the peace process was killed by one of his own citizens, and the process lost its most important Israeli champion.
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Dolly (sheep)
Dolly the sheep announced, February 22, 1997
Born on July 5, 1996, at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, Dolly was the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, taken from the mammary gland of a Finn Dorset ewe. Starting from an ordinary adult cell is what changed the conversation. Her unveiling made front pages around the world and moved the idea of cloning a human being from science fiction into a live question for lawmakers and ethicists.
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Handover of Hong Kong
Hong Kong handover, July 1, 1997
At midnight, sovereignty over Hong Kong passed from Britain to China, ending 156 years of British rule in a ceremony broadcast around the world. Under "one country, two systems," China pledged that Hong Kong's way of life would stay unchanged for 50 years. That promise became the yardstick for every Hong Kong story since, and after Beijing's 2020 national security law the British government declared China in a state of ongoing non-compliance with the handover treaty.
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1997 Asian financial crisis
Asian financial crisis, from July 2, 1997
Lacking the foreign reserves to defend its dollar peg, Thailand's government let the baht float, and within months the crisis had spread to Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines as investors pulled their money out. The IMF led rescue packages worth tens of billions of dollars, and Indonesia's economy shrank by more than 13 percent in 1998. The crisis showed how quickly money could flee a booming region, and it shaped the debates about globalization for years.
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Death of Diana, Princess of Wales
Death of Diana, Princess of Wales, August 31, 1997
Diana died after a car crash in the tunnel beneath the Pont de l'Alma in Paris, with photographers on motorcycles chasing her car. Her funeral at Westminster Abbey on September 6 drew a worldwide television audience estimated at between two and two and a half billion, and more than a million people lined the London streets. Few deaths in modern times have been mourned so publicly: the royal family was criticized for a rigid response to the national grief, her brother blamed the tabloid press, and a 2008 inquest found she had been unlawfully killed by the driving of Henri Paul, at the wheel, and of the pursuing photographers.
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Good Friday Agreement
Good Friday Agreement, April 10, 1998
Signed in Belfast, the deal set up power sharing in Northern Ireland between unionists and nationalists and, together with a British-Irish treaty, largely brought the Troubles to an end after a conflict that had killed more than 3,500 people. On May 22, 1998, voters on both sides of the border approved it, with about 71 percent in favor in Northern Ireland and 94 percent in the Republic of Ireland. It remains the foundation of the peace, and keeping its open Irish border shaped the Brexit arrangements for Northern Ireland two decades later.
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Pokhran-II
India's nuclear tests and Pakistan's reply, May 1998
India set off a series of nuclear tests at Pokhran in Rajasthan on May 11 and 13, and Pakistan, whose prime minister later said public pressure left him no choice, answered with five underground tests in the Chagai district of Balochistan on May 28 and another on May 30. Within three weeks, two neighbors who had already fought more than one war over Kashmir had openly declared themselves nuclear powers, and every crisis between them since has carried that risk.
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1998 United States embassy bombings
US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, August 7, 1998
Al-Qaeda truck bombs struck the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam within minutes of each other, killing 224 people, the great majority of them Kenyans and Tanzanians. The date marked eight years since US troops arrived in Saudi Arabia for the Gulf War. President Clinton ordered retaliatory missile strikes on Sudan and Afghanistan on August 20, and that November a US indictment charged Osama bin Laden over the bombings. Three years later, the same network attacked New York and Washington.
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Impeachment of Bill Clinton
Impeachment of Bill Clinton, December 19, 1998 to February 12, 1999
A scandal over Clinton's relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky ended with the House impeaching him for lying under oath to a federal grand jury and obstruction of justice. He became only the second president impeached, after Andrew Johnson in 1868. The Senate trial opened on January 7 and ended in acquittal on February 12, 1999: 45 senators voted to convict on perjury and 50 on obstruction, well short of the 67 needed. For more than a year the saga dominated cable news, talk radio and the young political web.
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Euro
The euro launches, January 1, 1999
Overnight the euro became the currency of more than 300 million people in Europe. Notes and coins did not arrive until January 1, 2002, so the 1999 launch happened mostly on screens and in bank ledgers, but it was the boldest step in the decade's push toward European integration: countries with centuries of separate money gave up their own currencies for a shared one, a bet whose strains and strengths have been tested in every European crisis since.
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