Buthelezi, Mangosuthu G.

born August 27, 1928, Mahlabatini, Natal, South Africa

in full Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi Zulu chief, head (1972–94) of the nonindependent black state of KwaZulu, and leader of the Inkatha Freedom Party.

Buthelezi was descended from the Zulu royal line through the legendary King Cetshwayo. He attended South African Native College (now University of Fort Hare) and was a member of the Youth League of the African National Congress (ANC). His political activities brought about his expulsion from school, but he completed his degree in history and Bantu administration at the University of Natal. He assumed his role as the hereditary chief of the Buthelezi clan of Zulus in 1953 and was accepted in that role by white authorities about four years later.

Though he initially opposed the creation of black homelands (then called Bantustans), Buthelezi won election as chief minister of KwaZulu in 1972. In 1975, having broken with the African National Congress over (among other things) its espousal of violence and economic sanctions to end the government's policy of apartheid, Buthelezi revived Inkatha yeNkululeko yeSizwe (National Cultural Liberation Movement), founded in 1924 by his grandfather, King Dinizulu, as a Zulu cultural movement. Buthelezi rejected full independence for KwaZulu and continued to work within the white establishment to end apartheid.

After the South African government lifted its ban on the ANC in 1990 and began signaling its willingness to disband the apartheid system, Buthelezi became engaged in a fierce struggle for political leadership with the ANC and its allies for the allegiance of black South Africans. As a result, thousands were killed in clashes between Inkatha and ANC supporters in Natal province in the years 1990–94. Meanwhile, Buthelezi converted his cultural movement into a political party, the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), in order to compete in South Africa's first inclusive parliamentary elections, which were held in 1994. His party received about 10 percent of the total vote, and Buthelezi was appointed minister of home affairs in a coalition government formed by ANC leader Nelson Mandela, South Africa's first black president. After Mandela left office in 1999, Buthelezi continued to hold the post in President Thabo Mbeki's government until 2004.

Caetano, Marcello José das Neves Alves

born Aug. 17, 1906, Lisbon, Port.

died Oct. 26, 1980, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

premier of Portugal from September 1968, when he succeeded António de Oliveira Salazar, until the revolution of April 1974.

Trained as a lawyer, Caetano served with Salazar (then the finance minister) in 1929 and helped to draft the Constitution of 1933 and other legal documents of the New State. He was minister of the colonies (1944–49) and deputy prime minister (1955–59) before leaving political life to become rector of the University of Lisbon.

When Salazar suffered a stroke in 1968, Caetano was appointed prime minister. He admitted an opposition and rectified the Constitution but was unable to curb inflation or appease his critics. Foreign criticism of his African policy and dissatisfaction in the army led to the “Revolution of the Flowers,” which in 1974 overthrew the New State and drove Caetano into exile. He settled in Brazil and served as head of the Institute of Comparative Law, Gama Filho University, Rio de Janeiro, until his death.

Callaghan (of Cardiff), James Callaghan, Baron

born March 27, 1912, Portsmouth, Hampshire, England

died March 26, 2005, Ringmer, East Sussex

original name in full Leonard James Callaghan British Labour Party politician, who was prime minister from 1976 to 1979.

Callaghan entered the civil service at age 17 as a tax officer. By 1936 he had become a full-time trade-union official. After serving as a lieutenant in naval intelligence during World War II, he entered Parliament in 1945, representing the Welsh constituency of Cardiff South. Between 1947 and 1951 Callaghan held junior posts at the Ministry of Transport and at the Admiralty. When Harold Wilson's Labour government was formed in 1964, Callaghan was named chancellor of the Exchequer. In this capacity he helped secure in 1966–67 international agreement to a system called Special Drawing Rights, which in effect created a new kind of international money. He resigned from the Exchequer in 1967, when he was forced to devalue the pound sterling. He then served as home secretary until 1970. In Wilson's second government in 1974, Callaghan was named foreign secretary; and in 1976, upon Wilson's resignation, Callaghan succeeded him as prime minister, largely because the Parliamentary Labour Party considered him the least divisive candidate.

Throughout his ministry (1976–79), Callaghan, a moderate within the Labour Party, tried to stem the increasingly vociferous demands of Britain's trade unions. He also had to secure the passage of unpopular cuts in government spending early in his ministry. His reassuring public manner came to be criticized as complacency when a series of labour strikes in 1978–79 paralyzed hospital care, refuse collection, and other essential services. In March 1979 his government was brought down by a vote of no confidence passed in the House of Commons, the first such occurrence since 1924. At the subsequent general election, Callaghan's party was defeated. On October 15, 1980, he resigned as leader of the Labour Party, to be succeeded by Michael Foot. He was created a life peer in 1987 and published an autobiography, Time and Chance, the same year.

Campbell, Kim

born March 10, 1947, Port Alberni, B.C., Can.

byname of Avril Phaedra Campbell Canadian politician, prime minister from June to November 1993.

Campbell was educated at the University of British Columbia (B.A., 1969) and at the London School of Economics. She taught political science for six years before returning to the University of British Columbia to pursue a law degree; upon graduation in 1983 she practiced law in Vancouver for two years before devoting herself full-time to a political career.

Campbell ran unsuccessfully as a candidate of the Social Credit Party for the British Columbia provincial legislature in 1983 and in May 1986 was defeated in a bid for the Social Credit provincial leadership. In October 1986, however, she won a seat in the provincial legislature as the Social Credit member for a Vancouver riding. Two years later, she switched parties and was elected to the federal parliament as a Progressive Conservative. Then-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney appointed her minister for Indian Affairs and Northern Development in 1989. In 1990 she became justice minister and attorney general; her tenure was marked by several legislative successes, including strengthening Canada's gun-control laws and passing a tough rape law. Her appointment as defense minister in January 1993 was seen as a signal of Mulroney's confidence in her political future, especially when he announced his own retirement shortly thereafter. Campbell was selected by a party convention to replace Mulroney and became Canada's first woman and first West Coast prime minister, in June 1993. She left office in November of that year, after the Progressive Conservative Party suffered a major electoral defeat. In December 1993 she resigned as party leader.

Carl XVI Gustaf

born April 30, 1946, Stockholm, Sweden

In full Carl Gustaf Folke Hubertus king of Sweden from 1973.

The only son of King Gustav VI Adolf's eldest son, Prince Gustav Adolf (who died in an air crash in 1947), Carl Gustaf became crown prince in 1950, when his grandfather acceded to the throne. He studied at military cadet schools, at the University of Uppsala, and in France and was commissioned as a naval officer in 1968. He married Silvia Sommerlath in 1976, three years after his accession. The royal couple had three children, Crown Princess Victoria (b. July 14, 1977), Prince Carl Philip (b. May 13, 1979), and Princess Madeleine (b. June 10, 1982).

Carl Gustaf's accession occurred when the role of the Swedish monarchy was being radically altered. Under the constitution prior to 1975, the king played a formal role in the administration of the country; for example, he presided over councils of state, signed government decisions, commanded the armed forces, and appointed someone to form a new government upon the resignation of the current administration. The new constitutional laws, enacted in 1973 and made effective on Jan. 1, 1975, relieved the king of all these duties, leaving him with a solely symbolic function.

Carter, Jimmy

born October 1, 1924, Plains, Georgia, U.S.

in full James Earl Carter, Jr. 39th president of the United States (1977–81), who served as the nation's chief executive during a time of serious problems at home and abroad. His perceived inability to deal successfully with those problems led to an overwhelming defeat in his bid for reelection. After leaving office he embarked on a career of diplomacy and advocacy, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2002. (For a discussion of the history and nature of the presidency, see presidency of the United States of America. See also Cabinet of President Jimmy Carter.)

The son of Earl Carter, a peanut warehouser who had served in the Georgia state legislature, and Lillian Gordy Carter, a registered nurse who went to India as a Peace Corps volunteer at age 68, Carter attended Georgia Southwestern College and the Georgia Institute of Technology before graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, in 1946. After marrying Rosalynn Smith (Rosalynn Carter)—who came from Carter's small hometown, Plains, Georgia—he embarked on a seven-year career in the U.S. Navy, serving submarine duty for five years. He was preparing to become an engineering officer for the submarine Seawolf in 1953 when his father died. Carter resigned his commission and returned to Georgia to manage the family peanut farm operations.

Beginning his political career by serving on the local board of education, Carter won election as a Democrat to the Georgia State Senate in 1962 and was reelected in 1964. In 1966 he failed in a bid for the governorship and, depressed by this experience, found solace in evangelical Christianity, becoming a born-again Baptist. Prior to running again for governor and winning in 1970, Carter at least tacitly adhered to a segregationist approach; however, in his inaugural address he announced that “the time for racial discrimination is over” and proceeded to open Georgia's government offices to blacks—and to women. As governor he reorganized the existing maze of state agencies and consolidated them into larger units while introducing stricter budgeting procedures for them. In the process he came to national attention, finding his way onto the cover of Time magazine as a symbol of both good government and the “New South.”

In 1974, just before his term as governor ended, Carter announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president. Although lacking a national political base or major backing, he managed through tireless and systematic campaigning to assemble a broad constituency. In the aftermath of the Watergate Scandal, which had raised widespread concern about the power of the presidency and the integrity of the executive branch, Carter styled himself as an outsider to Washington, D.C., a man of strong principles who could restore the faith of the American people in their leaders. Ironically, Carter's moral stance and candour caused a small stir when, during the campaign, he admitted in an interview with Playboy magazine that he had “committed adultery in [his] heart many times.”

Winning the Democratic nomination in July 1976, Carter chose the liberal U.S. Senator Walter F. Mondale of Minnesota as his running mate. Carter's opponent was the unelected incumbent Republican president, Gerald R. Ford, who had come into office in 1974 when Richard Nixon resigned in the wake of Watergate. Many believed that the close race tipped in Carter's favour after Ford stumbled in a televised debate by saying that eastern Europe was not dominated by the Soviet Union. In November 1976 the Carter-Mondale ticket won the election, capturing 51 percent of the popular vote and garnering 297 electoral votes to Ford's 240.

Beginning with his inaugural walk with Rosalynn down Pennsylvania Avenue, Carter tried to reinforce his image as a man of the people. (See primary source document: Inaugural Address.) He adopted an informal style of dress and speech in public appearances, held frequent press conferences, and reduced the pomp of the presidency. Early on in his administration, Carter introduced a dizzying array of ambitious programs for social, administrative, and economic reform. Most of those programs, however, met with opposition in Congress despite the Democratic majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. On one hand, Congress, in the post-Watergate environment, was more willing to challenge the executive branch; on the other, Carter the populist was quick to criticize Congress and to take his agenda to the American people. In either case, Carter's difficulties with Congress undermined the success of his administration, and by 1978 his initial popularity had dissipated in the face of his inability to convert his ideas into legislative realities.

Two scandals also damaged Carter's credibility. In summer 1977 Bert Lance, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and one of Carter's closest friends, was accused of financial improprieties as a Georgia banker. When Carter stood by Lance (whom he eventually asked to resign and who later was acquitted of all charges), many questioned the president's vaunted scruples. Carter's image suffered again—though less—in summer 1980 when his younger brother, Billy (widely perceived as a buffoon), was accused of acting as an influence peddler for the Libyan government of Muammar al-Qaddafi. Senate investigators concluded that, while Billy had acted improperly, he had no real influence on the president.

In foreign affairs, Carter received accolades for championing international human rights, though his critics charged that his vision of the world was naive. Carter's idealism notwithstanding, his major achievements were on the more pragmatic level of patient diplomacy. In 1977 he obtained two treaties between the United States and Panama that gave the latter control over the Panama Canal at the end of 1999 and guaranteed the neutrality of that waterway thereafter. In 1978 Carter brought together Egyptian President Anwar el-Sādāt and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at the presidential retreat in Camp David, Maryland, and secured their agreement to the Camp David Accords, which ended the state of war that had existed between the two countries since Israel's founding in 1948. The difficult negotiations—which lasted 13 days and were salvaged only by Carter's tenacious intervention—provided for the establishment of full diplomatic and economic relations on condition that Israel return the occupied Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. On January 1, 1979, Carter established full diplomatic relations between the United States and China and simultaneously broke official ties with Taiwan. Also in 1979, in Vienna, Carterand Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev signed a new bilateral strategic arms limitation treaty (SALT II) intended to establish parity in strategic nuclear weapons delivery systems between the two superpowers on terms that could be adequately verified. Carter removed the treaty from consideration by the Senate in January 1980, however, after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. He also placed an embargo on the shipment of American grain to the Soviet Union and pressed for a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics due to be held in Moscow.

Carter's substantial foreign policy successes were overshadowed by a serious crisis in foreign affairs and by a groundswell of popular discontent over his economic policies. On November 4, 1979, a mob of Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehrān and took the diplomatic staff there hostage. Their actions, in response to the arrival of the deposed shah (Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi) in the United States for medical treatment, were sanctioned by Iran's revolutionary government, led by Shīʿite cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. A standoff developed between the United States and Iran over the issue of the captive diplomats. Carter responded by trying to negotiate the hostages' release while avoiding a direct confrontation with the Iranian government, but, as the crisis wore on (documented nightly on American television by a special news program that would become the influential Nightline), his inability to obtain the release of the hostages became a major political liability. The failure of a secret U.S. military mission to rescue the hostages (which ended almost before it began with a crash in the desert of a plane and helicopter) in April 1980 seemed to typify the inefficacy and misfortune of the Carter administration.

On the home front, Carter's management of the economy aroused widespread concern. The inflation rate climbed higher each year he was in office, rising from 6 percent in 1976 to more than 12 percent by 1980; unemployment remained high at 7.5 percent; and volatile interest rates reached a high of 20 percent or more twice during 1980. Both business leaders and the public at large blamed Carter for the nation's economic woes, charging that the president lacked a coherent strategy for taming inflation without causing a painful increase in unemployment.

The faltering economy was due in part to the energy crisis that had originated in the early 1970s as a result of overdependence on foreign oil. In 1977 the president, whose mistrust of special interest groups such as the oil companies was well known, proposed an energy program that included an oil tax, conservation, and the use of alternative sources of energy. The House supported the program but the Senate quashed it. Moreover, one of those alternative sources, nuclear power, seemed much less viable after the disastrous meltdown of the core reactor at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, in March 1979.

In July 1979 Carter canceled a major policy speech and instead met with a wide cross section of American leaders at Camp David. In the nationally televised speech that followed that meeting, Carter spoke of a “crisis of spirit” in the country, but most Americans were ultimately no more interested in rising to the challenge of a national “malaise” than they were in Carter's suggestion that they needed to lower some of their expectations. (See primary source document: A National Malaise.) Still, Carter was able to fend off the challenge of Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy to win the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980. However, the public's confidence in Carter's executive abilities had fallen to an irretrievable low. Above all else, he was generally seen as indecisive. In the elections held that November, Carter was overwhelmingly defeated by the Republican nominee, a former actor and governor of California, Ronald W. Reagan, who pointed to what he called Carter's “misery index”—the inflation rate plus the unemployment rate, whose sum was over 20—and asked two poignant questions that the public took to heart: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” and “Is America as respected throughout the world?” In the landslide, Carter won only 41 percent of the popular vote and 49 votes in the electoral college (third-party candidate John Anderson captured 7 percent of the vote). In the late 1980s, allegations surfaced that the Reagan campaign had made a secret agreement with the government of Iran to ensure that the hostages were not released before the election (thus preventing an “October Surprise” that might boost Carter's election chances); however, in 1993 a congressional subcommittee found the evidence inconclusive. Moreover, Reagan invited Carter to greet the hostages in Germany after their release on January 21, 1981, the day after Reagan's inauguration.

In his final months in office, Carter was able to push through important legislation that created a “superfund” to address environmental disasters and that set aside some 100 million acres (40 million hectares) of land in Alaska to protect it from development. Carter would also be remembered for his inclusion of women and minorities in his cabinet, including Andrew Young, the African American former mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, who played a prominent though controversial role as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

At the conclusion of the president's term, the Carters returned to their hometown. Rosalynn, who had taken an active role as first lady—not only acting as an adviser to the president but also attending cabinet meetings when the subjects under consideration were of interest to her—joined her husband in establishing the Carter Presidential Center in Atlanta, which included a presidential library and museum. Carter served as a sort of diplomat without portfolio in various conflicts in a number of countries—including Nicaragua (where he successfully promoted the return of the Miskito Indians to their homeland), Panama (where he observed and reported illegal voting procedures), and Ethiopia (where he attempted to mediate a settlement with the Eritrean People's Liberation Force). He was particularly active in this role in 1994, negotiating with North Korea to end nuclear weapons development there, with Haiti to effect a peaceful transfer of power, and with Bosnian Serbs and Muslims to broker a short-lived cease-fire. His efforts on behalf of international peace and his highly visible participation in building homes for the poor through Habitat for Humanity established in the public mind a much more favourable image of Carter than had been the case during his presidency. After leaving office, Carter also became a prolific author, writing on a variety of topics, including his presidency, the Middle East, and his Christian faith. He also wrote a collection of poetry.

Castro, Fidel

born August 13, 1926/27, near Birán, Cuba

in full Fidel Castro Ruz political leader of Cuba (from 1959) who transformed his country into the first communist state in the Western Hemisphere. Castro became a symbol of communist revolution in Latin America. He held the title of premier until 1976, when he became president of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers.

Castro was born in the Mayarí municipality of what was then Oriente province, the easternmost in Cuba. His father, Angel Castro y Argiz, an immigrant from Spain, was a fairly prosperous sugarcane farmer in a locality that had long been dominated by estates of the American-owned United Fruit Company. Angel Castro had two children by his first wife and five more children by his cook, Lina Ruz González. Fidel was one of these five children, and Raúl, who later became his brother's chief associate in Cuban affairs, was another.

Fidel Castro attended Roman Catholic boarding schools in Santiago de Cuba, Oriente province, and then the Catholic high school Belén in Havana, where he proved an outstanding athlete. In 1945 he entered the School of Law of the University of Havana, where organized violent gangs sought to advance a mixture of romantic goals, political aims, and personal careers. Castro's main activity at the university was politics, and in 1947 he joined an abortive attempt by Dominican exiles and Cubans to invade the Dominican Republic and overthrow Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo. He then took part in urban riots that broke out in Bogotá, Colombia, in April 1948.

After his graduation in 1950, Castro began to practice law and became a member of the reformist Cuban People's Party (called Ortodoxos). He became their candidate for a seat in the House of Representatives from a Havana district in the elections scheduled for June 1952. In March of that year, however, the former Cuban president, General Fulgencio Batista, overthrew the government of President Carlos Prío Socarrás and canceled the elections.

After legal means failed to dislodge Batista's new dictatorship, Castro began to organize a rebel force for the task in 1953. On July 26, 1953, he led about 160 men in a suicidal attack on the Moncada military barracks in Santiago de Cuba in hopes of sparking a popular uprising. Most of the men were killed, and Castro himself was arrested. After a trial in which he conducted an impassioned defense, he was sentenced by the government to 15 years' imprisonment. He and his brother Raúl were released in a political amnesty in 1955, and they went to Mexico to continue their campaign against the Batista regime. There Castro organized Cuban exiles into a revolutionary group called the 26th of July movement.

On December 2, 1956, Castro and an armed expedition of 81 men landed on the coast of Oriente province, Cuba, from the yacht Granma. All of them were killed or captured except for Castro, Raúl, Ernesto (“Che”) Guevara, and nine others, who retreated into the Sierra Maestra of southwestern Oriente province to wage guerrilla warfare against the Batista forces. With the help of growing numbers of revolutionary volunteers throughout the island, Castro's forces won a string of victories over the Batista government's demoralized and poorly led armed forces. Castro's propaganda efforts proved particularly effective, and as internal political support waned and military defeats multiplied, Batista fled the country early on January 1, 1959. Castro's force of 800 guerrillas had defeated the Cuban government's 30,000-man professional army.

As the undisputed revolutionary leader, Castro became commander in chief of the armed forces in Cuba's new provisional government, which had Manuel Urrutia, a moderate liberal, as its president. In February 1959 Castro became premier and thus head of the government. By the time Urrutia was forced to resign in July 1959, Castro had taken effective political power into his own hands.

Castro had come to power with the support of most Cuban city dwellers on the basis of his promises to restore the 1940 constitution, create an honest administration, reinstate full civil and political liberties, and undertake moderate reforms. But once established as Cuba's leader he began to pursue more radical policies: Cuba's private commerce and industry were nationalized; sweeping land reforms were instituted; and American businesses and agricultural estates were expropriated. The United States was alienated by these policies and offended by Castro's fiery new anti-American rhetoric. His trade agreement with the Soviet Union in February 1960 further deepened American distrust. In 1960 most economic ties between Cuba and the United States were severed, and the United States broke diplomatic relations with the island nation in January 1961. In April of that year the U.S. government secretly equipped thousands of Cuban exiles to overthrow Castro's government; their landing at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, however, was crushed by Castro's armed forces.

Cuba also began acquiring weapons from the Soviet Union, which soon became the island nation's chief supporter and trade partner. In 1962 the Soviet Union secretly stationed ballistic missiles in Cuba that could deliver nuclear warheads to American cities, and in the ensuing confrontation with the United States, the world came close to a nuclear war. The Cuban Missile Crisis ended when the Soviet Union agreed to withdraw its nuclear weapons from Cuba in exchange for a pledge that the United States would withdraw the nuclear-armed missiles it had stationed in Turkey and no longer seek to overthrow Castro's regime.

In the meantime Castro created a one-party government to exercise dictatorial control over all aspects of Cuba's political, economic, and cultural life. All political dissent and opposition were ruthlessly suppressed. Many members of the Cuban upper and middle classes felt betrayed by these measures and chose to immigrate to the United States. At the same time, Castro vastly expanded the country's social services, extending them to all classes of society on an equal basis. Educational and health services were made available to Cubans free of charge, and every citizen was guaranteed employment. The Cuban economy, however, failed to achieve significant growth or to reduce its dependence on the country's chief export, cane sugar. Economic decision-making power was concentrated in a centralized bureaucracy headed by Castro, who proved to be an inept economic manager. With inefficient industries and a stagnant agriculture, Cuba became increasingly dependent on favourable Soviet trade policies to maintain its modest standard of living in the face of the United States' continuing trade embargo.

Castro remained premier until 1976, when a new constitution created a National Assembly and Castro became president of that body's State Council. He retained the posts of commander in chief of the armed forces and secretary-general of the Communist Party of Cuba—the only legal political party—and he continued to exercise unquestioned and total control over the government. Castro's brother Raúl, minister of the armed forces, ranked second to him in all government and party posts.

Castro's early attempts to foment Marxist revolutions elsewhere in Latin America foundered, but Cuban troops did eventually serve as proxies for the Soviet Union in various Third World conflicts. From 1975 to 1989 Cuban expeditionary forces fought in the Angolan civil war on the side of the communistic Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola. In 1978 Cuban troops assisted Ethiopia in defeating an invasion by Somalia. In the 1980s Castro emerged as one of the leaders of the Third World and the nonaligned nations, despite his obvious ties to the Soviet Union. He continued to signify his willingness to renew diplomatic relations with the United States if that nation would end its trade embargo against Cuba. In 1980 Castro released a flood of immigrants to the United States when he opened the port of Mariel for five months. The 125,000 immigrants, including some criminals, strained the capacity of U.S. immigration and resettlement facilities.

In the late 1980s, when the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev began to undertake democratic reforms and eastern European countries were allowed to slip out of the Soviet orbit, Castro retained a hard-line stance, espousing the discipline of communism. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 took him by surprise and meant the end of generous Soviet subsidies to Cuba. Castro countered the resulting economic decline and shortages of consumer goods by allowing some economic liberalization and free-market activities while retaining tight controls over the country's political life.

In late 1993 Castro's daughter sought asylum in the United States, where she openly criticized her father's rule. The following year, economic and social unrest led to antigovernment demonstrations, the size of which had not been seen in Cuba in some 35 years. Shortly thereafter Castro lifted restrictions on those wanting to leave the country, and thousands headed for the United States in the largest exodus since the 1980 Mariel “freedom flotilla.” In 1998 Castro allowed Pope John Paul II to visit the island nation for the first time.

Ceaușescu, Nicolae

born January 26, 1918, Scornicești, Romania

died December 25, 1989, near Bucharest

Communist official who was leader of Romania from 1965 until he was overthrown and killed in a revolution in 1989.

A prominent member of the Romanian Communist youth movement during the early 1930s, Ceaușescu was imprisoned in 1936 and again in 1940 for his Communist Party activities. In 1939 he married Elena Petrescu (b. Jan. 7, 1919, Oltenia region, Rom.—d. Dec. 25, 1989, near Bucharest), a devout Communist. While in prison Ceaușescu became a protégé of his cell mate, the Communist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, who would become the Communist leader of Romania beginning in 1952. Escaping prison in August 1944 shortly before the Soviet occupation of Romania, Ceaușescu subsequently served as secretary of the Union of Communist Youth (1944–45). After the Communists' full accession to power in Romania in 1947, he first headed the nation's ministry of agriculture (1948–50), and from 1950 to 1954 he served as deputy minister of the armed forces with the rank of major general. Under Gheorghiu-Dej, Ceaușescu eventually came to occupy the second highest position in the party hierarchy, holding important posts in the Politburo and Secretariat.

With the death of Gheorghiu-Dej in March 1965, Ceaușescu succeeded to the leadership of Romania's Communist Party as first secretary (general secretary from July 1965); and with his assumption of the presidency of the State Council (December 1967), he became head of state as well. He soon won popular support for his independent, nationalistic political course, which openly challenged the dominance of the Soviet Union over Romania. In the 1960s Ceaușescu virtually ended Romania's active participation in the Warsaw Pact military alliance, and he condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces (1968) and the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union (1979). Ceaușescu was elected to the newly created post of president of Romania in 1974.

While following an independent policy in foreign relations, Ceaușescu adhered ever more closely to the communist orthodoxy of centralized administration at home. His secret police maintained rigid controls over free speech and the media and tolerated no internal dissent or opposition. In an effort to pay off the large foreign debt that his government had accumulated through its mismanaged industrial ventures in the 1970s, Ceaușescu in 1982 ordered the export of much of the country's agricultural and industrial production. The resulting drastic shortages of food, fuel, energy, medicines, and other basic necessities drove Romania from a state of relative economic well-being to near starvation. Ceaușescu also instituted an extensive personality cult and appointed his wife, Elena, and many members of his extended family to high posts in the goverment and party. Among his grandiose and impractical schemes was a plan to bulldoze thousands of Romania's villages and move their residents into new apartment buildings.

Ceaușescu's regime collapsed after he ordered his security forces to fire on antigovernment demonstrators in the city of Timisoara on Dec. 17, 1989. The demonstrations spread to Bucharest, and on December 22 the Romanian army defected to the demonstrators. That same day Ceaușescu and his wife fled the capital in a helicopter but were captured and taken into custody by the armed forces. On December 25 the couple were hurriedly tried and convicted by a special military tribunal on charges of mass murder and other crimes. Ceaușescu and his wife were then shot by a firing squad.

Chamorro, Violeta Barrios de

born October 18, 1929, Rivas, Nicaragua

née Violeta Barrios newspaper publisher and politician who served as president of Nicaragua from 1990 to 1997.

Chamorro, who was born into a wealthy Nicaraguan family (her father was a cattle rancher), received much of her early education in the U.S. states of Texas and Virginia. In 1950, shortly after the death of her father, she returned to Nicaragua, where she married Pedro Joaquim Chamorro Cardenal, editor of the newspaper La Prensa, which was often critical of the Somoza family dictatorship. The Chamorros were forced into exile in 1957 and lived in Costa Rica for several years before returning to Nicaragua after the Somoza government declared an amnesty.

On January 10, 1978, Pedro Chamorro, who had continued to criticize the Somozas and had been imprisoned several times during the 1960s and '70s, was assassinated. His death helped to spark a revolution, led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front, which toppled the government of Anastasio Somoza Debayle in July 1979. A member of the Sandinista ruling junta in 1979–80, Violeta Chamorro soon became disillusioned with the Sandinistas' Marxist policies, and later she became an outspoken foe. She took over La Prensa, which was frequently shut down during the 1980s and was banned completely for a period in 1986–87. During the 1980s she was accused by the Sandinistas of accepting money from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, which was then providing support to opposition groups and directing the Contra rebels in their guerrilla war against the Sandinista government.

An end to the guerrilla war was negotiated in the late 1980s, and free elections were scheduled for 1990. Chamorro, drafted as the presidential candidate of the 14-party National Opposition Union (Unión Nacional Opositor; UNO) alliance, won a surprisingly easy victory over President Daniel Ortega Saavedra, head of the Sandinistas. She was inaugurated on April 25, 1990, becoming Central America's first woman president.

During her presidency Chamorro reversed a number of Sandinista policies. Several state-owned industries were privatized, censorship was lifted, and the size of the army was reduced. At the same time, she retained a number of Sandinistas in the government and attempted to reconcile the country's various political factions. Many credit her conciliatory policies with helping to maintain the fragile peace that had been negotiated. Barred from running for a second term, she retired from politics after her term ended in January 1997.

Chamoun, Camille (Nimer)

born April 3, 1900, Dayr al-Qamar, Lebanon

died Aug. 7, 1987, Beirut

Chamoun also spelled Shamʿun political leader who served as president of Lebanon in 1952–58.

Chamoun spent his early political years as a member of a political faction known as the Constitutional Bloc, a predominantly Christian group that emphasized its Arabic heritage in an attempt to establish a rapport with the Muslim groups. By the late 1940s Chamoun had emerged as one of the bloc's most prominent members. When his expectations of succeeding Bishara al-Khuri as president of Lebanon were denied in 1948 by a renewal of Khuri's term, Chamoun began to organize a parliamentary opposition. By the summer of 1952 he had made an alliance with Kamal Jumblatt, leader of the Progressive Socialist Party, and had won extensive support throughout the country. That September a general strike forced Khuri's resignation, and Chamoun was elected president. Although Jumblatt had helped secure his election, Chamoun ignored him when it came to formulating government policies.

As president, Chamoun reorganized governmental departments in an attempt to realize a more efficient administration. In some respects his regime was thoroughly democratic; the press and rival political parties, for example, enjoyed full freedom. But Lebanese political life remained geared to serving special interests, and Chamoun's reforms bore little fruit.

Chamoun faced a crisis in 1956 when Muslim leaders demanded that he break relations with Britain and France, which had just attacked Egypt over rights to the Suez Canal. Chamoun not only refused to do this but also named a pro-Western minister of foreign affairs. In May 1958 armed rebellion broke out in Beirut, supported mostly by Muslim elements. The Lebanese army commander, refusing to quell the rebellion, acted only to prevent its spread to other areas. Chamoun appealed to the United States for aid, and U.S. marines landed near Beirut in July, ending the military threat to the government. Demands persisted that Chamoun resign; he refused but did not seek a second term. After a brief retirement he was elected to Parliament in 1960. When civil war erupted in 1975, he became involved in defending Lebanon against Syrian intervention and held a succession of ministerial posts, including minister of finance in 1984–85. He supported a plan for the creation of provinces along religious lines.

He published several autobiographical works, including Crise au Leban (1977; “Crisis in Lebanon”) and Mémoires et souvenirs (1979; “Memories and Remembrances”).

Chandra Shekhar

born 1927, Ibrahimpatti, India

politician and legislator who served as prime minister of India from November 1990 to June 1991.

Shekhar was a leading member of the Socialist Party before he joined the ruling Congress Party in 1964. He was a member of India's upper legislative chamber, the Rajya Sabha, from 1962 to 1967, and he held a seat in the lower chamber, the Lok Sabha, in 1977–79, 1980–84, and from 1989 until he became prime minister. Shekhar split with the leader of the Congress Party, Indira Gandhi, in 1975 and spent time in prison during the national emergency she subsequently declared.

In 1977 Shekhar became president of the Janata Party, which headed a coalition government under Prime Minister Morarji Desai from 1977 to 1979. In 1988 Shekhar's Janata Party merged with several other opposition parties to form the Janata Dal Party under the leadership of V.P. Singh, who subsequently became prime minister. After leading an internal rebellion against Singh, Shekhar broke with the Janata Dal Party on Nov. 5, 1990, and quickly formed the Janata Dal–Socialist faction. With the support of Rajiv Gandhi's Congress (I) Party, he replaced Singh as India's prime minister on Nov. 10, 1990, as head of a weak minority government. He resigned the office on March 6, 1991, after the Congress (I) Party withdrew its support, but he remained in office as a caretaker until national legislative elections could be held in May and June.

Chávez, Hugo

born July 28, 1954, Sabaneta, Venezuela

in full Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías Venezuelan politician, who became president of Venezuela in 1999.

After graduating from a Venezuelan military academy in 1975, Chávez entered the army. He became increasingly critical of the government, which he viewed as corrupt, and in 1992 he helped stage an unsuccessful coup against President Carlos Andrés Pérez. He was imprisoned and exiled from political life until 1994, when President Rafael Caldera pardoned him. An admirer of Simón Bolívar (“the Liberator”), Chávez subsequently cofounded the left-wing Movement for the Fifth Republic. In 1998 he ran for president, promising to end political corruption, revive the stagnating economy, and make sweeping constitutional changes to bring “true democracy” to the country. His platform proved popular with the poor, who accounted for some 80 percent of the population, and Chávez won a landslide victory.

After taking office in 1999, Chávez oversaw the passage of a new constitution that greatly expanded his powers, reorganized the judiciary, and replaced the existing legislature with the National Assembly. He also increased control of the oil industry, using its revenues to fund his “Bolivarian Revolution,” which included free education, low-cost housing, and health care. The creation of a new legislature led to another round of national elections in 2000, and Chávez won a landslide victory amid charges of electoral fraud. Critics accused him of assuming dictatorial powers, and a series of antigovernment strikes culminated in a military coup on April 12, 2002, in which Chávez was ousted. Two days later, however, he was returned to power. Unrest with his government continued, and opponents forced a recall election in August 2004. Backed by the urban poor and rural peasants, Chávez easily won the election.

Much of Chávez's foreign policy centred on strengthening ties with other Latin American countries, especially Cuba. Following the 2002 coup, which he claimed was supported by the U.S. government, Chávez's relationship with the United States grew highly contentious.

Chen Shui-bian

born February 18, 1951, Tainan county, Taiwan

Wade-Giles romanization Ch'en Shui-pian lawyer and politician who served as president of the Republic of China (Taiwan) from 2000. He was a prominent leader of the proindependence movement that sought to establish statehood for Taiwan.

Born into a poor farming family, Chen won a scholarship to National Taiwan University and graduated with highest honours from its law faculty. He entered private practice and soon became one of Taiwan's leading attorneys. His first encounter with politics came when he defended eight protesters who opposed the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang; KMT), the island's ruling party and onetime champion of Taiwan's eventual reunification with the mainland. Chen lost the case but thereafter was associated with the opposition movement.

Chen first ran for public office in 1981 and won a seat on the Taipei City Council. In the mid-1980s he spent eight months in prison on charges of libeling a KMT official. He subsequently joined the proindependence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Chen later served in Taiwan's legislature (1989–94) before being elected mayor of Taipei in 1994. He was defeated in his bid for reelection in 1998, but the loss freed him to pursue the DPP's presidential nomination in 2000. His campaign stressed the importance of Taiwan's national identity, and, while the more strident members of his party called for strict independence, Chen himself chose his words carefully, trying to assuage China's concerns. Chen was well-received by voters, who elected him and ended the KMT's 55-year rule of Taiwan.

In October 2000 Chen halted construction of a nuclear power plant, angering members of the KMT-controlled legislature. In the ensuing political crisis, the country's economy faltered as investor confidence waned. Chen relented in February 2001, and work resumed on the power plant. His decision was unpopular with members of the DPP, who also disapproved of his vow not to seek independence as long as China did not threaten to attack the island.

By 2002 the relationship between Chen's government and China had soured over Chen's reluctance to develop closer economic ties with China and his return to proindependence rhetoric. As he prepared to run for reelection in 2004, Chen made further moves toward independence, including a redesign of the country's passport that used the word Taiwan on its cover. He was narrowly reelected in March 2004, the vote coming one day after he and his running mate, Vice President Annette Lu (Lu Hsiu-lien), were shot and slightly wounded while campaigning in Tainan.

Chernenko, Konstantin Ustinovich

born Sept. 11 [Sept. 24, New Style], 1911, Bolshaya Tes, Yeniseysk, Russian Empire [now in Krasnoyarsk kray, Russia]

died March 10, 1985, Moscow

chief political leader of the Soviet Union from February 1984 until his death in 1985.

Born to a Russian peasant family in the Yeniseysk region of Siberia, Chernenko joined the Communist Party in 1931. Trained as a party propagandist, he held several administrative posts before becoming head of agitation and propaganda (agitprop) in Moldavia (1948–56), where he was first noticed by Leonid Brezhnev and brought to Moscow to head a similar department for the party's Central Committee (1956–60). When Brezhnev took over the party in 1964, he made Chernenko his chief of staff. Chernenko was a full member of the Central Committee from 1971 and of the Politburo from 1977.

An old-line conservative, Chernenko traveled extensively with Brezhnev and was considered his aide, confidant, and, by some observers, his heir apparent. After Brezhnev's death, however, he was unable to rally a majority of the party factions behind his candidacy to be head of the party and lost out to Yury V. Andropov, the former KGB chief, who became general secretary on Nov. 12, 1982. However, Andropov had become mortally ill by the following August, and after his death six months later, Chernenko succeeded him as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on Feb. 13, 1984. On April 12 he became chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.

Like his predecessor, Chernenko began showing signs of deteriorating health shortly after taking office. His frequent absences from official functions because of illness left little doubt that his election had been an interim measure, and upon his death he was succeeded by Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Chiang Ching-kuo

born March 18, 1910, Ch'i-k'ou, Chekiang province, China

died Jan. 13, 1988, Taipei, Taiwan

son of Chiang Kai-shek, and his successor as leader of the Republic of China (Taiwan). His father's death in 1975 was followed by a caretaker presidency until March 21, 1978, when Chiang Ching-kuo was formally elected by the National Assembly to a six-year presidential term; he was reelected to a second term in 1984.

The son of Chiang Kai-shek and his first wife (whom Chiang Kai-shek subsequently divorced), Chiang Ching-kuo attended primary school in China and was arrested several times during his youth for involvement with revolutionary activities. In 1925 he went to Moscow, where he studied at Sun Yat-sen University. At that time his father was one of the leaders of the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang), which included many Communists, but in 1927 Chiang Kai-shek dissolved the Nationalist–Communist alliance. Chiang Ching-kuo denounced his father's actions and soon was selected for advanced studies at the Central Tolmachev Military and Political Institute in Leningrad, from which he graduated. While employed in one of a number of minor jobs that he held in the Soviet Union, he met the Russian woman whom he married in 1935.

Chiang Ching-kuo again denounced his father's policies in 1936, but he later claimed that he was forced to do so and also to remain in the Soviet Union. When, early in 1937, Chiang Kai-shek formed a new United Front with the Chinese Communist Party, father and son were reunited in China.

During the war with the Japanese that followed the formation of the second United Front, Chiang Ching-kuo held various military and administrative posts in the Nationalist government. After 1941 his father came to rely increasingly on his advice, and when the Communists gained control of mainland China in 1949, father and son moved to Taiwan (Formosa), where they reestablished the headquarters of the Nationalist government, continuing to style it the Republic of China (according to the 1946 constitution). There Chiang Ching-kuo was given control of the military and security agencies of the Nationalist government, and in 1965 he became Minister of National Defense, with command of the army. In 1972 he was appointed prime minister by his father.

During his father's illness (1973–75) and after his own election to the presidency in 1978, Chiang moved to eliminate governmental corruption and favouritism and to broaden the government's base by bringing more native-born Taiwanese into the legislative and executive branches, which were dominated by former mainland Chinese officials of the Nationalist Party. Chiang tried to maintain Taiwan's vital foreign-trade relationships as well as its political independence, since many members of the international community, including the United States, broke diplomatic relations with his country in the 1970s in order to establish ties with China. In the 1980s Chiang remained opposed both to Taiwanese recognition of the Chinese Communist regime and to negotiations for his country's reunification with the mainland.

Chiang Kai-shek

born October 31, 1887, Chekiang province, China

died April 5, 1975, Taipei, Taiwan

Wade-Giles romanization Chiang Chieh-shih , official name Chiang Chung-cheng soldier and statesman, head of the Nationalist government in China from 1928 to 1949, and subsequently head of the Chinese Nationalist government in exile on Taiwan.

Chiang was born into a moderately prosperous merchant and farmer family in the coastal province of Chekiang. He prepared for a military career first (1906) at the Paoting Military Academy in North China and subsequently (1907–11) in Japan. From 1909 to 1911 he served in the Japanese army, whose Spartan ideals he admired and adopted. More influential were the youthful compatriots he met in Tokyo; plotting to rid China of the Qing (Manchu) dynasty, they converted Chiang to republicanism and made him a revolutionary.

In 1911, upon hearing of revolutionary outbreaks in China, Chiang returned home and helped in the sporadic fighting that led to the overthrow of the Manchus. He then participated in the struggles of China's republican and other revolutionaries in 1913–16 against China's new president and would-be emperor, Yuan Shikai.

After these excursions into public life, Chiang lapsed into obscurity. For two years (1916–17) he lived in Shanghai, where he apparently belonged to the Green Gang (Qing Bang), a secret society involved in financial manipulations. In 1918 he reentered public life by joining Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang. Thus began the close association with Sun on which Chiang was to build his power. Sun's chief concern was to reunify China, which the downfall of Yuan had left divided among warring military satraps. Having wrested power from the Qing, the revolutionists had lost it to indigenous warlords; unless they could defeat these warlords, they would have struggled for nothing.

Shortly after Sun Yat-sen had begun to reorganize the Nationalist Party along Soviet lines, Chiang visited the Soviet Union in 1923 to study Soviet institutions, especially the Red Army. Back in China after four months, he became commandant of a military academy, established on the Soviet model, at Whampoa near Canton. Soviet advisers poured into Canton, and at this time the Chinese communists were admitted into the Nationalist Party. The Chinese communists quickly gained strength, especially after Sun's death in 1925, and tensions developed between them and the more conservative elements among the Nationalists. Chiang, who, with the Whampoa army behind him, was the strongest of Sun's heirs, met this threat with consummate shrewdness. By alternate shows of force and of leniency, he attempted to stem the communists' growing influence without losing Soviet support. Moscow supported him until 1927, when, in a bloody coup of his own, he finally broke with the communists, expelling them from the Nationalist Party and suppressing the labour unions they had organized.

Meanwhile, Chiang had gone far toward reunifying the country. Commander in chief of the revolutionary army since 1925, he had launched a massive Nationalist campaign against the northern warlords in the following year. This drive ended only in 1928, when his forces entered Beijing, the capital. A new central government under the Nationalists, with Chiang at its head, was then established at Nanking, farther south. In October 1930 Chiang became Christian, apparently at the instance of the powerful westernized Soong family, whose youngest daughter, Mei-ling, had become his second wife. As head of the new Nationalist government, Chiang stood committed to a program of social reform, but most of it remained on paper, partly because his control of the country remained precarious. In the first place, the provincial warlords, whom he had neutralized rather than crushed, still disputed his authority. The communists posed another threat, having withdrawn to rural strongholds and formed their own army and government. In addition, Chiang faced certain war with Japan, which, after seizing Manchuria (Northeast Provinces) in 1931, showed designs upon China proper. Chiang decided not to resist the coming Japanese invasion until after he had crushed the communists—a decision that aroused many protests, especially since a complete victory over the communists continued to elude him. To give the nation more moral cohesion, Chiang revived the state cult of Confucius and in 1934 launched a campaign, the so-called New Life Movement, to inculcate Confucian morals.

In December 1936 Chiang was seized by one of his generals who believed that Chinese forces should concentrate on fighting the Japanese instead of the communists. Chiang was held captive for some two weeks, and the Sian (Xian) Incident, as it became known, ended after he agreed to form an alliance with the communists against the Japanese invaders. In 1937 the mounting conflict between the two countries erupted into war (see Sino-Japanese War). For more than four years China fought alone until it was joined by the Allies, who with the exception of the Soviet Union declared war on Japan in 1941. China's reward was an honoured place among the victors as one of the Big Four. But internally Chiang's government showed signs of decay, which multiplied as it resumed the struggle against the communists after the Japanese surrendered to the United States in 1945. Civil war recommenced in 1946; by 1949 Chiang had lost continental China to the communists, and the People's Republic of China was established. Chiang moved to Taiwan with the remnants of his Nationalist forces, established a relatively benign dictatorship over the island with other Nationalist leaders, and attempted to harass the communists across the Formosa Strait. The chastened Chiang reformed the ranks of the once-corrupt Nationalist Party, and with the help of generous American aid he succeeded in the next two decades in setting Taiwan on the road to modern economic development. In 1955 the United States signed an agreement with Chiang's Nationalist government on Taiwan guaranteeing its defense. Beginning in 1972, however, the value of this agreement and the future of Chiang's government were seriously called in question by the growing rapprochement between the United States and the People's Republic of China. Chiang did not live to see the United States finally break diplomatic relations with Taiwan in 1979 in order to establish full relations with the People's Republic of China. After his death in 1975 he was succeeded temporarily by Yen Chia-kan (C.K. Yen), who was in 1978 replaced by Chiang's son Chiang Ching-kuo.

Among the reasons for Chiang's overthrow by the communists, one frequently cited is the corruption that he countenanced in his government; another was his loss of flexibility in dealing with changing conditions. Growing more rigid in his leadership over the years, he became less responsive to popular sentiment and to new ideas. He came to prize loyalty more than competence and to rely more on personal ties than on ties of organization. His dependence on a trusted clique also showed in his army, in which he favoured narrow traditionalists over many abler officers. Chiang initially maintained his position as republican China's paramount leader by shrewdly playing off provincial warlords and possible Nationalist rivals against each other and later by his adroit cultivation of American military, diplomatic, and financial support for his regime. His overthrow by the communists can perhaps be traced to his strategy during World War II; he generally refused to use his U.S.-equipped armies to actively resist China's Japanese occupiers and counted instead on the United States to eventually defeat Japan on its own. He chose rather to preserve his military machine until the time came to unleash it on the communists at the war's end and then crush them once and for all. But by that point Chiang's strategy had backfired; his passive stance against the Japanese had lost him the prestige and support among the Chinese populace that the communists ultimately gained by their fierce anti-Japanese resistance. The morale and effectiveness of his armies had decayed during their enforced passivity in southwestern China, while the communists had built up large, battle-hardened armies on the strength of their appeal to Chinese nationalist sentiment. Finally, it can be said that Chiang “lost China” because he had no higher vision or coherent plan for making the deep social and economic changes needed to bring Chinese society into the 20th century. From his purge of the Nationalists' communist partners in 1927 and his subsequent alliance with the landowning and mercantile classes, Chiang inexorably followed an increasingly conservative path that virtually ignored the plight of China's oppressed and impoverished peasantry. The peasants formed almost 90 percent of China's population, though, and it was their support, as demonstrated by the communist victory, which proved crucial in once more establishing a strong central government that could achieve the modern unification of China.

Chirac, Jacques

born November 29, 1932, Paris, France

in full Jacques René Chirac French politician who was twice elected as the country's president (1995, 2002) and twice served as prime minister (1974–76, 1986–88).

Chirac, the son of a bank employee, graduated from the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris in 1954, served as an officer in the French army in Algeria (1956–57), and earned a graduate degree from the École Nationale d'Administration in 1959. He then became a civil servant and rose rapidly through the ranks, serving as a department head and a secretary of state before becoming minister for parliamentary relations in 1971–72 under President Georges Pompidou. He was first elected to the National Assembly as a Gaullist in 1967. After serving as minister for agriculture (1972–74) and of the interior (1974), Chirac was appointed prime minister by newly elected President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in 1974. Citing personal and professional differences with Giscard, Chirac resigned from that office in 1976 and set about reconstituting the Gaullist Union of Democrats for the Republic into a neo-Gaullist group, the Rally for the Republic (RPR). With the party firmly under his control, he was elected mayor of Paris in 1977 and continued to build his political base among the several conservative parties of France.

Chirac's first campaign for the presidency in 1981 split the conservative vote with Giscard and thereby allowed the Socialist Party candidate, François Mitterrand, to win. In parliamentary elections held in 1986, the coalition of right-wing parties won a slim majority of seats in the National Assembly, and Chirac was appointed prime minister by Mitterrand. This power-sharing arrangement between the two posts was the first of its kind in the history of the Fifth Republic, in which previously the president and the prime minister had always belonged to the same party or the same electoral coalition.

In this arrangement, known as cohabitation, Chirac, as prime minister, was responsible for domestic affairs, while Mitterrand retained responsibility for foreign policy. Chirac's most important achievement during his second term was his administration's privatization of many major corporations that had been nationalized under Mitterrand. He also reduced payroll and other taxes in an effort to stimulate job creation in the private sector. As the candidate of the centre-right RPR, Chirac ran for the presidency against Mitterrand and was defeated in runoff elections in May 1988, whereupon he resigned the post of prime minister. Remaining mayor of Paris, he made his third run for the presidency in May 1995 and this time defeated the Socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin.

As president, Chirac tried to cut spending and thereby reduce the government's budget deficits so that France could qualify to participate in a single common European currency, the euro, which replaced the franc as France's sole currency in 2002. His proposed austerity measures, which included freezing the wages of public-sector employees and reducing some social welfare programs, provoked a massive general strike in late 1995. Nonetheless, Chirac continued to pursue policies of fiscal austerity despite unemployment that had reached record levels by early 1997. Hoping to win a mandate for his program, Chirac called for parliamentary elections in May 1997, but voters overwhelmingly cast their ballots for the left. His conservative coalition lost its majority in the parliament, and the Socialists were able to form a new coalition government with their leader, Jospin, as prime minister. Chirac also drew protests after authorizing nuclear tests in the South Pacific in 1995 and 1996. Despite presiding over a party accused of illegal fund-raising and being criticized for various ethical lapses, he won the first round of France's presidential balloting in 2002 over nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen and over Jospin, whose third-place showing eliminated him from the second round. With near-universal support from the political establishment in the second round—including from the French Communist Party and Jospin's Socialist Party—Chirac was easily reelected president, winning 82 percent of the vote to Le Pen's 18 percent—the largest margin of victory in any French presidential election.

The early part of Chirac's second term was dominated by U.S.- and British-led efforts to force the government of Ṣaddām Ḥussein in Iraq to comply fully with United Nations Security Council resolutions requiring it to abandon any weapons of mass destruction. In November 2002 France backed a U.S.-sponsored resolution mandating the return to Iraq of weapons inspectors, who had been withdrawn in 1998. In early 2003, after U.S. President George W. Bush declared that Iraq was in breach of its obligations under the resolution, Chirac, along with the governments of Germany and Russia, offered a proposal to toughen the inspections regime, a plan that was rejected by the United States as ineffective, given Iraq's earlier lack of cooperation with weapons inspectors. Despite this and later efforts by Chirac to prevent a war with Iraq, a U.S.-led coalition attacked the country in March 2003. In 2004 Chirac signed into law a controversial measure that prohibited head scarves and other religious symbols in state schools.

Chrétien, Jean

born January 11, 1934, Shawinigan, Quebec, Canada

in full Joseph-Jacques-Jean Chrétien Canadian lawyer and Liberal Party politician, who served as prime minister of Canada from 1993 to 2003.

The 18th of 19 children of a working-class family, Chrétien studied law at Laval University and was called to the bar in Quebec in 1958. Long interested in politics, he was first elected to the House of Commons in 1963 and was reelected thereafter through 1984. In the successive administrations of Lester B. Pearson and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Chrétien became a parliamentary secretary to the prime minister in 1965, a minister of state in 1967, and minister of national revenue in 1968. He served as minister of Indian affairs and northern development from 1968 to 1974 and in 1977 became the first French Canadian to hold the post of minister of finance. Known as an incisive and shrewd administrator, he went on to serve as minister of justice and attorney general (1980–82), minister of energy (1982–84), and deputy prime minister (1984).

After losing to John Turner in a contest to succeed Trudeau as head of the Liberal Party, Chrétien resigned his seat in the House of Commons in 1986. He was reelected to Parliament in 1990 and took over the leadership of the Liberals that same year. Chrétien led his party to a landslide victory over the governing Progressive Conservative Party in national elections on October 25, 1993, and became prime minister of Canada on November 4. In 1995 he weathered a major crisis as voters in Quebec, a predominantly French-speaking province, narrowly rejected secession. Quebec independence remained a central concern, though the movement had weakened by the end of the 20th century. Chrétien's government focused on reducing the budget deficit, and in 1998 it passed Canada's first balanced budget since 1970. Chrétien was reelected in 2000, the first Canadian prime minister since 1945 to win three consecutive majorities. His relationship with the United States was sometimes tense, underscored by his refusal to commit Canadian troops to the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 2003. In social policy, he pursued progressive reforms, drafting a law in 2003 that would recognize same-sex marriages. Chrétien retired as prime minister in December 2003.

Chun Doo Hwan

born Jan. 18, 1931, Naechonri, Korea [now in South Korea]

Korean soldier and politician who was president of South Korea from 1980 to 1988.

Born into a peasant family, Chun entered the Korean Military Academy in 1951. Following his graduation in 1955, he became an infantry officer and in 1958 married Lee Soon Ja, daughter of Brigadier General Lee Kyu Dong. Chun commanded a South Korean division in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War and rose rapidly through the ranks. After Park Chung Hee seized power in 1961, Chun served as domestic-affairs secretary for the junta (1961–62) and, with the nominal restoration of civilian government, as chief of personnel of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA; 1963). He served in various other official posts and was made a general in 1978.

After the assassination of President Park in 1979, Chun took charge of the investigation of his death. He arrested several suspects, including his rival, the army chief of staff, General Chung Sŭng-hwa (December 1979), and he purged many of Chung's supporters in a virtual coup by one military faction against another. Although the official president was Choi Kyu-hah, Chun emerged as the real authority, and in April 1980 Chun became head of the KCIA. In May the military, under Chun's leadership, dropped all pretense of civilian rule, declared martial law, and brutally suppressed democratic civilian opposition in the city of Kwangju.

After President Choi resigned on August 16, Chun resigned from the army and on August 27 became president. With the country still under martial law, Chun pushed through a new constitution in late 1980 that allowed him to rule with a firm hand.

Chun's rule was punctuated by several crises, notably a financial scandal in 1982 that forced him to replace half his Cabinet and an assassination attempt in Myanmar (Burma) by North Korean agents in 1983 that resulted in the deaths of several other top aides and ministers. As president, Chun devoted his efforts to maintaining economic growth and political stability. South Korea continued its export-led economic growth under Chun, and the nation industrialized rapidly.

Chun was unable to serve more than one seven-year term as president under his 1980 constitution, and in 1987 he picked Roh Tae Woo to be the candidate of the ruling Democratic Justice Party. He retired from politics after being succeeded by Roh in 1988. Despite public gestures of atonement for abuses of power during his presidency, Chun could not distance himself from the lingering public memory of his actions. In December 1995 both he and Roh were indicted on charges related to their involvement in the 1979 coup and the uprising in Kwangju in 1980 and for accepting bribes while each was president. Both were found guilty and sentenced to death in August 1996. Chun's sentence was later reduced to life imprisonment, and he received a presidential pardon in December 1997.

Ciller, Tansu

born 1946, Istanbul, Turkey

Turkish economist and politician, who was Turkey's first woman prime minister (1993–96) and the first female to head a Middle Eastern Muslim country.

Ciller was born to an affluent family in Istanbul. After graduating from the University of the Bosporus with a degree in economics, she continued her studies in the United States, where she earned graduate degrees from the Universities of New Hampshire and Connecticut and attended Yale University. Ciller returned to Turkey to teach and, at age 36, became the nation's youngest full professor. Together with her husband, she amassed some $60 million through real estate speculation.

Ciller joined the ruling True Path Party (Doǧru Yol Partisi; DYP) in 1990. The following year she was elected to parliament and was named economics minister in Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel's coalition government. Although she advocated greater privatization of state-owned firms and a balanced budget, it was during her tenure as economics minister that government debt soared and the country suffered a downgrading of its international credit rating. Despite these woes, Ciller was selected to replace Demirel as prime minister in 1993.

As she assumed power, Ciller faced the growing violence of Kurds in southeastern Turkey and the pressing need to reduce government spending. In 1995 the DYP's coalition collapsed, but Ciller stayed on as caretaker prime minister until 1996, when her party and the Motherland Party formed a coalition that promptly fell apart. Ciller was reelected as the DYP's leader in 1999, but, after the party fared poorly in the 2002 elections, she stepped down.

Clark, Helen

born February 26, 1950, Hamilton, New Zealand

New Zealand politician who became prime minister in 1999. She was the first woman in New Zealand to hold the office of prime minister immediately following an election.

Clark, the oldest of four children of George and Margaret Clark, was raised on a sheep and cattle farm in Te Pahu, west of Hamilton. She left home at age 12 to attend Epsom Girls Grammar School in Auckland. After graduation, she enrolled in the University of Auckland, where she received bachelor's (1971) and master's (1974) degrees in political science and taught from 1973 to 1981.

Clark joined the Labour Party in 1971 and during the following decade held a variety of positions within the party. In parliamentary elections in 1975, she was selected as the Labour candidate for a seat that was considered safe for the conservative National Party. Although she lost that election, she was elected to Parliament from a different constituency in 1981. As chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defence Select Committee (1984–87), she played a major role in the country's adoption of an antinuclear policy, which effectively ended the ANZUS Pact and led to reduced military ties between New Zealand and the United States. In 1987 Clark became a member of the cabinet, holding at various times the portfolios of housing, conservation, labour, and health. In 1989–90 she served as deputy prime minister, and in 1990 she was appointed to the Privy Council, becoming the first woman in New Zealand to hold those offices.

After the National Party's return to power in 1990, Clark became deputy leader of the opposition in Parliament. In 1993 she was elected head of the Labour Party—becoming the first woman in New Zealand to head a major party—and thus served as leader of the opposition. In 1999, when the Labour Party was able to form a governing coalition, Clark was elected prime minister. Holding the portfolio of arts and culture herself, she appointed an extraordinarily diverse cabinet, including 11 women and 4 Maori. As prime minister, Clark addressed many controversial issues, including Maori rights, same-sex civil unions, and prostitution, which was legalized in 2003. Her government also opposed the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq in the Second Persian Gulf War. She was reelected prime minister in both 2002 and 2005, the first New Zealand prime minister to secure three consecutive terms in office.

Throughout her career, Clark enjoyed a reputation as a skillful politician and a capable advocate of nuclear disarmament and public health policy. For her work on peace and disarmament, she was awarded the Peace Prize from the Danish Peace Foundation in 1986.

Clark, Joe

born June 5, 1939, High River, Alberta, Canada

byname of Charles Joseph Clark prime minister of Canada from June 1979 to March 1980, the youngest person ever to win the post.

Clark obtained a B.A. in history (1960) and an M.A. in political science (1973) from the University of Alberta and taught political science there from 1965 to 1967. He had been active in politics since 1957 in support of the Progressive Conservative Party; from 1962 to 1965 he was national president of the Progressive Conservative Student Federation. In 1967 he directed the campaign organization that brought Peter Lougheed to power as premier of Alberta, and from 1967 to 1970 he served as executive assistant to Robert Stanfield, then the Conservative leader in the House of Commons. Clark himself was first elected to Parliament in 1972, and he was elected leader of his party in 1976.

In 1979 the Progressive Conservatives won a plurality of seats in Parliament, and Clark became head of a minority government. Only six months after he took office, however, his government fell on a budget question; in the subsequent general elections in February-March 1980, his party was defeated by the Liberals headed by Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Clark served as the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party until 1983. That year he held a formal leadership-selection meeting and was defeated by Brian Mulroney. Clark served in Mulroney's government as secretary of state for external affairs (1984–91) and president of the Queen's Privy Council (1991–93). He also served briefly (1993) as United Nations special representative to Cyprus. In 1998 Clark was again elected leader of the Progressive Conservatives, and in 2000 he won a seat in the House of Commons.

Clinton, Bill

Introduction

born August 19, 1946, Hope, Arkansas, U.S.

by name of William Jefferson Clinton , original name William Jefferson Blythe III 42nd president of the United States (1993–2001), who oversaw the country's longest peacetime economic expansion. In 1998 he became only the second U.S. president to be impeached; he was acquitted by the Senate in 1999. (For a discussion of the history and nature of the presidency, see presidency of the United States of America. See also Cabinet of President Bill Clinton.)

Early life

Bill Clinton's father, William Jefferson Blythe III, was a traveling salesman who died in an automobile accident three months before his son was born. His widow, Virginia Dell Blythe, married Roger Clinton, and, despite their unstable union (they divorced and then remarried) and her husband's alcoholism, her son eventually took his stepfather's name. Reared in part by his maternal grandmother, Bill Clinton developed political aspirations at an early age; they were solidified (by his own account) in July 1963, when he met and shook hands with President John F. Kennedy.

Clinton enrolled at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., in 1964 and graduated in 1968 with a degree in international affairs. During his freshman and sophomore years he was elected student president, and during his junior and senior years he worked as an intern for Senator J. William Fulbright, the Arkansas Democrat who chaired the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Fulbright was a vocal critic of the Vietnam War, and Clinton, like many young men of his generation, opposed the war as well. He received a draft deferment for the first year of his studies as a Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford in 1968 and later attempted to extend the deferment by applying to the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) program at the University of Arkansas School of Law. Although he soon changed his plans and returned to Oxford, thus making himself eligible for the draft, he was not chosen. While at Oxford, Clinton wrote a letter to the director of the Arkansas ROTC program thanking the director for “saving” him from the draft and explaining his concern that his opposition to the war could ruin his future “political viability.” During this period Clinton also experimented with marijuana; his later claim that he “didn't inhale” would become the subject of much ridicule.

After graduating from Yale University Law School in 1973, Clinton joined the faculty of the University of Arkansas School of Law, where he taught until 1976. In 1974 he ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1975 he married a fellow Yale Law graduate, attorney Hillary Rodham (Hillary Clinton), who thereafter took an active role in his political career. In the following year he was elected attorney general of Arkansas, and in 1978 he won the governorship, becoming the youngest governor the country had seen in 40 years.

Governor of Arkansas

After an eventful two-year term as governor, Clinton failed in his reelection bid in 1980, the year his daughter and only child, Chelsea, was born. After apologizing to voters for unpopular decisions he had made as governor (such as highway-improvement projects funded by increases in the state gasoline tax and automobile licensing fees), he regained the governor's office in 1982 and was successively reelected three more times by substantial margins. A pragmatic, centrist Democrat, he imposed mandatory competency testing for teachers and students and encouraged investment in the state by granting tax breaks to industries. He became a prominent member of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group that sought to recast the party's agenda away from its traditional liberalism and move it closer to the centre of American political life.

Clinton declared his candidacy for president while still governor of Arkansas. Just before the New Hampshire presidential primary, his campaign was nearly derailed by widespread press coverage of his alleged 12-year affair with an Arkansas woman, Gennifer Flowers. In an interview watched by millions of viewers on the television news program 60 Minutes, Clinton and his wife subsequently admitted to having marital problems. Clinton's popularity soon rebounded, and he scored a strong second-place showing in New Hampshire—a performance for which he labeled himself the “Comeback Kid.” On the strength of his middle-of-the-road approach, his apparent sympathy for the concerns of ordinary Americans (his statement “I feel your pain” was an often-mocked phrase), and his personal warmth, he eventually won the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992. Facing incumbent President George Bush, Clinton and his running mate, Tennessee Senator Al Gore, argued that 12 years of Republican leadership had led to political and economic stagnation. In November the Clinton-Gore ticket defeated both Bush and independent candidate Ross Perot with 43 percent of the popular vote to 37 percent for Bush and 19 percent for Perot; Clinton defeated Bush in the electoral college by a vote of 370 to 168. (See primary source document: First Inaugural Address.)

Presidency

The Clinton administration got off to a shaky start, the victim of what some critics called ineptitude and bad judgment. His attempt to fulfill a campaign promise to end discrimination against gay men and lesbians in the military was met with criticism from conservatives and some military leaders—including General Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In response, Clinton proposed a compromise policy—summed up by the phrase “Don't ask, don't tell”—that failed to satisfy either side of the issue. Clinton's first two nominees for attorney general withdrew after questions were raised about domestic workers they had hired. Clinton's efforts to sign campaign-finance-reform legislation were quashed by a Republican filibuster in the Senate, as was his economic-stimulus package.

Clinton had promised during the campaign to institute a system of universal health insurance. His appointment of his wife to chair the Task Force on National Health Care Reform, a novel role for the country's first lady, was criticized by conservatives, who objected both to the propriety of the arrangement and to Hillary Rodham Clinton's feminist views. They joined lobbyists for the insurance industry, small-business organizations, and the American Medical Association to campaign vehemently against the task force's eventual proposal, the Health Security Act. Despite protracted negotiations with Congress, all efforts to pass compromise legislation failed.

Despite these early missteps, Clinton's first term was marked by numerous successes, including the passage by Congress of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which created a free-trade zone for the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Clinton also appointed several women and minorities to significant government posts throughout his administration, including Janet Reno as attorney general, Donna Shalala as secretary of Health and Human Services, Joycelyn Elders as surgeon general, Madeleine Albright as the first woman secretary of state, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the second woman justice on the United States Supreme Court. During Clinton's first term, Congress enacted a deficit-reduction package—which passed the Senate with a tie-breaking vote from Gore—and some 30 major bills related to education, crime prevention, the environment, and women and family issues, including the Violence Against Women Act and the Family and Medical Leave Act.

In January 1994 Attorney General Reno approved an investigation into business dealings by Clinton and his wife with an Arkansas housing development corporation known as Whitewater. Led from August by independent counsel Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater inquiry consumed several years and more than $50 million but did not turn up conclusive evidence of wrongdoing by the Clintons.

The renewal of the Whitewater investigation under Starr, the continuing rancorous debate in Congress over Clinton's health care initiative, and the liberal character of some of Clinton's policies—which alienated significant numbers of mainstream American voters—all contributed to Republican electoral victories in November 1994, when the party gained a majority in both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. A chastened Clinton subsequently tempered some of his policies and accommodated some Republican proposals, eventually embracing a more aggressive deficit-reduction plan and a massive overhaul of the country's welfare system while continuing to oppose Republican efforts to slow the growth of government spending on social programs. Ultimately, mainstream American voters found themselves more alienated by the uncompromising and confrontational behaviour of the new Republicans in Congress than they had been by Clinton, who won considerable public sympathy for his more moderate approach.

Clinton's initiatives in foreign policy during his first term included a successful effort in September–October 1994 to reinstate Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had been ousted by a military coup in 1991; the sponsorship of peace talks and the eventual Dayton Accords (1995) aimed at ending the ethnic conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina; and a leading role in the ongoing attempt to bring about a permanent resolution of the dispute between Palestinians and Israelis. In 1993 he invited Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yāsir ʿArafāt to Washington to sign a historic agreement that granted limited Palestinian self-rule in the Gaza Strip and Jericho. (See primary source document: The Oklahoma City Bombing.)

Although scandal was never far from the White House—a fellow Arkansan who had been part of the administration committed suicide; there were rumours of financial irregularities that had occurred in Little Rock; former associates were indicted and convicted of crimes; and rumours of sexual impropriety involving the president persisted—Clinton was handily reelected in 1996, buoyed by a recovering and increasingly strong economy. He captured 49 percent of the popular vote to Republican Bob Dole's 41 percent and Perot's 8 percent; the electoral vote was 379 to 159. Strong economic growth continued during Clinton's second term, eventually setting a record for the country's longest peacetime expansion. By 1998 the Clinton administration was overseeing the first balanced budget since 1969 and the largest budget surpluses in the country's history. The vibrant economy also produced historically high levels of home ownership and the lowest unemployment rate in nearly 30 years.

In 1998 Starr was granted permission to expand the scope of his investigation to determine whether Clinton had encouraged a 24-year-old White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, to state falsely under oath that she and Clinton had not had an affair. Clinton repeatedly and publicly denied that the affair had taken place. His compelled testimony, which appeared evasive and disingenuous even to Clinton's supporters (he responded to one question by stating, “It depends on what the meaning of the word is is”), prompted renewed criticism of Clinton's character from conservatives and liberals alike. After conclusive evidence of the affair came to light, Clinton apologized to his family and to the American public. On the basis of Starr's 445-page report and supporting evidence, the House of Representatives in 1998 approved two articles of impeachment, for perjury and obstruction of justice. Clinton was acquitted of the charges by the Senate in 1999. Despite his impeachment, Clinton's job-approval rating remained high.

In foreign affairs, Clinton ordered a four-day bombing campaign against Iraq in December 1998 in response to Iraq's failure to cooperate fully with United Nations weapons inspectors (the bombing coincided with the start of full congressional debate on Clinton's impeachment). In 1999 U.S.-led forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) conducted a successful three-month bombing campaign against Yugoslavia designed to end Serbian attacks on ethnic Albanians in the province of Kosovo. In 1998 and 2000 Clinton was hailed as a peacemaker in visits to Ireland and Northern Ireland, and in 2000 he became the first U.S. president to visit Vietnam since the end of the Vietnam War. He spent the last weeks of his presidency in an unsuccessful effort to broker a final peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Shortly before he left office, Clinton was roundly criticized by Democrats as well as Republicans for having issued a number of questionable pardons, including one to the former spouse of a major Democratic Party contributor. In subsequent years Clinton remained active in political affairs and was a popular speaker on the lecture circuit. His autobiography, My Life, was published in 2004. Later that year the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum opened in Little Rock. In 2005, after a tsunami in the Indian Ocean had caused widespread death and devastation, Clinton was appointed by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan to serve as a special envoy for relief efforts.

In 1999 Hillary Rodham Clinton launched her candidacy for the New York Senate seat being vacated by Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan. After a hard-fought race, she defeated Republican Representative Rick Lazio to become the first wife of a U.S. president to win elected office.