Chronicle 2004: The unreported year - North America and Europe

January
UNITED STATES To prevent soldiers from leaving or retiring from service in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan, the Government offers an extra $10,000 for a further three years’ service. President Bush announces plans to spend $1.5 billion persuading Americans to get married.

FEBRUARY
BRITAIN 20 migrant Chinese workers die in Morecambe Bay, caught by dangerous tides while working in an illegal gang picking cockles (see East Asia & Pacific).
NETHERLANDS Law is passed allowing for the expulsion of 26,000 failed asylum seekers.
SLOVAKIA Violent protest – especially by the Roma minority – meets the Government’s cut in social welfare payments, part of the country’s attempt to squeeze itself into the straitjacket of EU financial orthodoxy.

MARCH
GREECE Conservatives sweep aside the scandal-tainted Socialist Government in the general election.
SWITZERLAND/CANADA Zürich and Geneva top a survey of the best places to live in the world; Calgary in Canada is the healthiest.
SPAIN Socialist José Zapatero, promising to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq, wins the election following bomb attacks on Madrid commuter trains that kill 200 and injure 1,500.

APRIL
CYPRUS UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan revises the reunification peace plan. It is accepted by Turkish Cypriots but later rejected by a Greek-sector referendum.
EUROPEAN UNION Software giant Microsoft is fined $600 million for the abuse of its monopoly.
UNITED STATES A government report finds that 60 per cent of US companies paid no tax between 1996 and 2000. Over a million people march in Washington DC demanding pro-choice policies in the largest-ever women’s rights demonstration.

MAy
EUROPEAN UNION Ten new members – mostly in the east – join, while up to 10,000 people protest in Brussels as part of the global justice demonstrations traditionally held on May Day.
UNITED STATES Monsanto abandons plans to introduce GM wheat into the world market.

JUNE
BRITAIN Human rights groups seek urgent clarification of an ‘unannounced policy change’ that returned failed Somali asylum seekers to the war zone of Mogadishu.
ITALY 29 police, including the country’s anti-terror chief, go on trial for attacking protesters at the 2001 G8 summit and plotting to fabricate evidence.
CANADA Paul Martin retains power in federal elections but is forced to lead the country’s first minority government in 25 years as voters punish the Liberals for waste/corruption scandals.
SPAIN More than 2,000 sin papeles (immigrants without papers) occupy Barcelona Cathedral and the church of Santa Maria del Pie. Similar protests take place in France and Belgium.

JULY
UNITED STATES The Government has spent just two per cent of the $18.4 billion obtained from Congress for the reconstruction of Iraq, but nearly all the $20 billion of Iraq’s own oil money.
FRANCE 1,500 protesters tear up a field of experimental maize. Anti-GM leader José Bové says it begins a new wave of action against GM trials.

AUGUST
CANADA Workers at a Wal-Mart store in Quebec win the right to unionize – a first for the world’s largest retail trader.
GERMANY Government apologizes – but refuses to pay reparations – for a 1904 genocide in which 65,000 Herero people were killed in what is now Namibia after an uprising against German rule.
GREECE Protests in Athens commemorate the 14 workers who died during construction work for the Olympic Games.
SCOTLAND Green and Native American groups protest at the HQ of Scottish Power, which is responsible for dams on the Klamath River.

SEPTEMBER
GERMANY ‘Monday demonstrations’ against welfare benefit cuts, which started in the east, spread to more than 200 towns. Neo-Nazis of the National Democratic Party (NPD) take 12 seats in Saxony's state parliament.
UNITED STATES Ryan Matthews, aged 17 when condemned to death in Louisiana, is released aged 24. In all, 155 people have now been exonerated since the introduction of the death penalty.
BRITAIN Company directors’ pay has risen three times faster than average earnings during the previous year, bringing the average pay packet of a chief executive to $3 million.
ESTONIA The Government removes a monument recently erected in the town of Lihula in honour of Estonians who fought with the Nazis in World War Two.

OCTOBER
SWITZERLAND A referendum rejects giving citizenship to Swiss-born grandchildren of migrants.
UNITED STATES The combined wealth of the 400 richest Americans reaches over a trillion dollars for the first time, according to Forbes – you need $752 million to be included.

NOVEMBER
UNITED STATES As George W Bush wins a second term as US President, voters in 11 states approve the banning of gay marriages in ballots alongside the presidential election.
NETHERLANDS Filmmaker Theo van Gogh is murdered two months after the broadcast of his controversial film Submission about the abuse of Muslim women. In the period after his murder there are at least 20 attacks on mosques and Islamic schools.

DECEMBER
BRITAIN After scandal about a visa for his ex-lover’s nanny, Home Secretary David Blunkett resigns – a day before Britain’s highest court condemns the indefinite detention without charge of nine foreign ‘terror suspects’.

Sealed in protest (accompanying photo not available for on-line publishing). Dutch Iranian immigrant Mehdy Kavousi protests against proposed new asylum laws in Zaandijk, Netherlands, by having his lips and eyes sewn together. On 17 February the Dutch Parliament approved plans by the Christian Democrat Government to expel up to 26,000 failed asylum seekers, despite objections from former Dutch premier Ruud Lubbers, now head of UNHCR. The potential deportees include Somalis, Afghans and Chechens who may be sent back to countries without a functioning government that are still affected by violence. Human Rights Watch condemned the decision as ‘violating international standards’; legal wrangles and protests have continued throughout 2004, effectively postponing the deportations. A mass expulsion on this scale would be unprecedented in Europe but reflects the trend towards much tougher policies on asylum and immigration which has been increasingly marked throughout a European Union (EU) where rightist parties have been allowed to set the agenda.

FORGOTTEN FINGERS (accompanying photo not available for on-line publishing). The plight of the 600 or so prisoners in Camp Delta, part of the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, was not exactly unreported during the year. But it is still all too easy to continue normal life in the US and allied countries while forgetting people like these who have, supposedly in our name, been kept in inhumane conditions without recourse to any due process recognized by international law – many of them for as long as three years. The re-election of George W Bush in November appeared to endorse the Washington view that human rights are whatever the US wants them to be.