Thanks to the benefit of hindsight, it’s pretty easy to distill any given year into
a single, world-changing headline.
With that in mind, here are the biggest news stories from the year in which you were born.
While war and chaos spiraled out of control around the globe, most folks back home in
America weren't paying much attention, because 1983 was also the year that Michael Jackson
finally debuted the video for his 1982 single “Thriller”.
“Thriller” was the first music video to get a budget of $1 million.
It was also the first to be directed by a bona fide movie director, namely, John Landis.
When it premiered in December, the world went nuts, and we're still talking about it today.
"Come on, I’ll take you home."
In a year filled with sectarian strife, assassination and murder, India’s worst disaster came
when an industrial accident in the town of Bhopal killed more civilians than 9/11.
The Bhopal chemical disaster remains the worst industrial accident in history.
A screw up at the U.S.-owned Union Carbide pesticide plant resulted in a cloud of toxic
gas escaping into the city, where it killed somewhere between 3,800 and 16,000 people,
and left hundreds of thousands permanently disabled.
Most of them are still fighting for compensation.
By the 1980s, Soviet premiers were dropping like flies.
Konstantin Chernenko’s death in 1985 came only 13 months since the passing of the last
leader, Yuri Andropov.
The ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev may not have seemed all that exciting at the time,
then, but its importance cannot be understated in hindsight.
Gorbachev's reforms opened up Soviet politics to a range of new and radical ideas, while
simultaneously crashing the economy, a combination which, historically, is almost guaranteed
to lead to revolution.
Hang on for a few more years if you want to see the payoff.
In the early hours of April 26th, 1986, reactor No. 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded.
It was the worst nuclear accident in history.
"We were recently stricken by a disaster.
The Chernobyl nuclear power accident.
It deeply affected the Soviet people and disturbed the world opinion."
49 people were killed during the event itself, while somewhere around 4,000 deaths are attributable
to radioactive fallout.
340,000 were permanently evacuated from their homes.
Vast swathes of Ukraine and Belarus are still uninhabitable today.
The Iran-Contra story goes something like this: after the Iranian-linked group Hezbollah
took a number of Americans hostage in the mid-’80s, President Reagan secretly agreed
to trade arms with Iran in exchange for their freedom.
Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver North, however, used a portion of the proceeds from the weapons
sales to fund right-wing Contra rebels fighting against the Nicaraguan government.
Obviously, this isn’t exactly legal.
The story broke in November '86, but it was in '87 that it really exploded.
Fourteen Reagan staffers were eventually charged, although George H.W. Bush later pardoned six
of them.
As Pan-Am Flight 103 passed over the small Scottish town of Lockerbie on December 21st
1988, a bomb smuggled aboard by a Libyan terrorist exploded.
The aircraft blew apart, killing all 259 onboard and raining fiery wreckage onto the town,
leading to the deaths of 11 more people.
To this day, it remains the deadliest terror attack on EU soil.
But it wasn't until July 1990 that anyone admitted Pan-Am 103 had been brought down
deliberately, and Libya wasn't named as the culprit until 1991.
The fall of the Berlin Wall on the night of November 9th turned out to be the death knell
for the Soviet Union.
After the wall came down, revolutions sprung up in communist Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and
Romania.
In 1990, Ukraine and Estonia followed suit.
By 1991, the Soviet Union had been consigned to history, Yugoslavia was disintegrating,
West and East Germany had been reunited, and democracy had taken hold from the Baltic to
the Adriatic.
"Your government seems to be changing everyday.
Where do you think it's going?...
'That's the government's problem', he says.”
All in all, it was one of the most important events of the 20th century.
Nelson Mandela wasn’t informed about his own impending release until the night before
it took place.
According to NPR, he was so taken aback by the news that he asked to stay for another
week.
But the government refused and Mandela, after 27 years in prison, found himself with fewer
than 24 hours to prepare for the biggest moment of his life.
Mandela's walk to freedom has become nothing short of iconic.
"Mr. Mandela, who has walked his first steps to freedom into a new South Africa, now on
his way to Cape Town."
It was the event that sparked the beginning of the end of 300 years of white minority
rule in South Africa, and gave the ‘90s a hell of a kickstart.
In 1990, Saddam Hussein sent his troops across Iraq's southern border and annexed Kuwait.
For the next half a year, U.S.-led coalition troops massed along Kuwait's border.
On January 16th 1991, the Gulf War kicked off.
"Just two hours ago, allied air forces began an attack on military targets in Iraq and
Kuwait."
Over the next six weeks, Iraq’s armed forces were obliterated by the Allies.
Iraq lost somewhere between 8,000 and 100,000 troops, while the Coalition lost only 300.
Perhaps even more significantly, it was this conflict which convinced Washington that invading
Iraq in 2004 would be a cakewalk.
In March 1991, Rodney King was dragged from his car by a group of LAPD officers and beaten
for 15 minutes straight.
A video of the beating went public shortly after, and the cops involved were put on trial.
When the jury acquitted them in late April ‘92, Los Angeles exploded.
Within three hours of the reading of the verdict, the city was engulfed by rioting and looting.
The LAPD, woefully unprepared for the backlash, effectively abandoned the streets.
Five days of carnage followed, which saw saw thousands of businesses trashed, a thousand
buildings destroyed, 50 people killed, 2,000 injured, and 6,000 arrested.
On February 28th 1993, ATF agents raided the compound of the Branch Davidians religious
sect outside Waco, Texas.
The raid soon became a standoff and turned into a full-blown siege when the FBI got involved.
For the next 51 days, the world watched as the Davidians tried to keep the Feds at bay.
"How many gunshots did you hear?"
"It was quite a few, I couldn't really say how many it was, but it we knew it was something
that wasn't normal."
At 6 a.m. on April 19th, FBI agents fired tear gas into the compound, intending to storm
it.
Instead, however, the whole compound went up in flames.
By the time the smoke cleared, at least 75 Davidians, including 25 children, were dead.
Waco became a defining moment for the FBI and changed the public’s perception of the
federal government forever.
On April 6th 1994, a plane carrying the Hutu president of Rwanda was shot down over the
country’s capital.
Hutu extremists blamed the Tutsi ethnic group, and instigated a genocide as revenge.
In 100 days, over 800,000 people were killed in a series of systematic and efficient reprisals
against the Tutsis.
The names of those who were to be killed were read out on the radio, while lists and weapons
were handed out to gangs.
Since the government logged everyone's location, the militias tracked down their targets with
ease.
The Rwandan Genocide finally ended on July 4th, when the Uganda backed Tutsi RPF army
captured Kigali.
They subsequently invaded what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, sparking another
major war that would end up killing 5 million people.
Exactly two years to the day of the Waco fire, far-right extremist Timothy McVeigh enacted
a vicious attack against the government by parking a truck filled with explosives outside
a federal building in Oklahoma City.
At 09:02 a.m., it exploded.
The resulting death toll of 168, with several hundred wounded, remains by far the highest
of any domestic terrorist attack in U.S. history.
McVeigh was apprehended 90 minutes after the explosion on a lonely highway south of Oklahoma
City.
His execution in 2001 was the first to be enacted by the federal government in nearly
40 years.
On February 29th 1996, Bosnian-Serb forces finally lifted their siege of Sarajevo.
At 1,425 days, it still remains modern warfare’s longest siege.
By this time, just under 120,000 people had been killed in the breakup of Yugoslavia.
The lifting of the siege of Sarajevo, which came when Bosnia’s Serbs finally abandoned
the city, marked the beginning of the end of the conflict.
1997 was the year in which the world was stunned by the death of Princess Diana.
On August 31st, she left the Ritz Hotel in Paris with her lover, Dodi Fayed.
Pursued along the streets of Paris by a gang of photographers, her car lost control and
slammed into a concrete pillar.
Diana, Fayed, and their driver Henri Paul were all killed.
"Diana, Princess of Wales, has in fact been killed in that car accident in Paris just
a few hours ago."
Diana's death caused Britain to collapse in grief.
It also nearly toppled the royal family, who were criticized heavily for their perceived
indifference to her passing.
Vigils took place across the world, from South Africa to Israel to Russia and pretty much
everywhere in between.
It's estimated that 2.5 billion people, almost half of the world’s population, watched
her funeral.
By the time the Good Friday Agreement was signed on April 10th, the Troubles in Northern
Ireland had killed over 3,600 people and left another 50,000 injured.
The 30-year conflict had seen massacres in Northern Ireland and led to a number of terrorist
attacks across England, including one, in 1984, which nearly killed Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher.
To end all that and create a stable, power-sharing government in Belfast was arguably one of
the most remarkable political achievements of all time.