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12028 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History%20of%20Gabon | History of Gabon | Little is known of the history of Gabon prior to European contact. Bantu migrants settled the area beginning in the 14th century. Portuguese explorers and traders arrived in the area in the late 15th century. The coast subsequently became a center of the transatlantic slave trade with European slave traders arriving to the region in the 16th century. In 1839 and 1841, France established a protectorate over the coast. In 1849, captives released from a captured slave ship founded Libreville. In 1862–1887, France expanded its control including the interior of the state, and took full sovereignty. In 1910 Gabon became part of French Equatorial Africa and in 1960, Gabon became independent.
At the time of Gabon's independence, two principal political parties existed: the Gabonese Democratic Bloc (BDG), led by Léon M'Ba, and the Gabonese Democratic and Social Union (UDSG), led by Jean-Hilaire Aubame. In the first post-independence election, held under a parliamentary system, neither party was able to win a majority; the leaders subsequently agreed against a two-party system and ran with a single list of candidates. In the February 1961 election, held under the new presidential system, M'Ba became president and Aubame became foreign minister. The single-party solution disintegrated in 1963, and there was a single-day bloodless coup in 1964. In March 1967, Leon M'Ba and Omar Bongo were elected president and vice president. M'Ba died later that year. Bongo declared Gabon a one-party state, dissolved the BDG and established the Gabonese Democratic Party (PDG). Sweeping political reforms in 1990 led to a new constitution, and the PDG garnered a large majority in the country's first multi-party elections in 30 years. Despite discontent from opposition parties, Bongo remained president until his death in 2009.
Early history
The societies of the indigenous Pygmies were largely displaced from about AD 1000 onwards by migrating Bantu peoples from the north, such as the Fang. Little is known of tribal life before European contact, but tribal art suggests a rich cultural heritage.
Gabon's first confirmed European visitors were Portuguese explorers and traders who arrived in the late 15th century. At this time, the southern coast was controlled by the Kingdom of Loango. The Portuguese settled on the offshore islands of São Tomé, Príncipe, and Fernando Pó, but were regular visitors to the coast.
They named the Gabon region after the Portuguese word gabão — a coat with sleeve and hood resembling the shape of the Komo River estuary. More European merchants came to the region in the 16th century, trading for slaves, ivory and tropical woods.
French colonial period
In 1838 and 1841, France established a protectorate over the coastal regions of Gabon by treaties with Gabonese coastal chiefs.
American missionaries from New England established a mission at the mouth of the Komo River in 1842. In 1849, the French authorities captured an illegal slave ship and freed the captives on board. The captives were released near the mission station, where they founded a settlement which was called Libreville (French for "free town")
French explorers penetrated Gabon's dense jungles between 1862 and 1887. The most famous, Savorgnan de Brazza, used Gabonese bearers and guides in his search for the headwaters of the Congo river. France occupied Gabon in 1885, but did not administer it until 1903. Gabon's first political party, the Jeunesse Gabonais, was founded around 1922.
In 1910 Gabon became one of the four territories of French Equatorial Africa. On 15 July 1960 France agreed to Gabon becoming fully independent. On 17 August 1960 Gabon became an independent country.
Independence
At the time of Gabon's independence in 1960, two principal political parties existed: the Gabonese Democratic Bloc (BDG), led by Léon M'Ba, and the Gabonese Democratic and Social Union (UDSG), led by Jean-Hilaire Aubame. In the first post-independence election, held under a parliamentary system, neither party was able to win a majority. The BDG obtained support from three of the four independent legislative deputies, and M'Ba was named Prime Minister. Soon after concluding that Gabon had an insufficient number of people for a two-party system, the two party leaders agreed on a single list of candidates. In the February 1961 election, held under the new presidential system, M'Ba became president and Aubame became foreign minister.
This one-party system appeared to work until February 1963, when the larger BDG element forced the UDSG members to choose between a merger of the parties or resignation. The UDSG cabinet ministers resigned, and M'Ba called an election for February 1964 and a reduced number of National Assembly deputies (from 67 to 47). The UDSG failed to muster a list of candidates able to meet the requirements of the electoral decrees. When the BDG appeared likely to win the election by default, the Gabonese military toppled M'Ba in a bloodless coup on 18 February 1964. French troops re-established his government the next day. Elections were held in April 1964 with many opposition participants. BDG-supported candidates won 31 seats and the opposition 16. Late in 1966, the constitution was revised to provide for automatic succession of the vice president should the president die in office. In March 1967, Leon M'Ba and Omar Bongo (then known as Albert Bongo) were elected President and Vice President, with the BDG winning all 47 seats in the National Assembly. M'Ba died later that year, and Omar Bongo became president.
In March 1968 Bongo declared Gabon a one-party state by dissolving the BDG and establishing a new party: the Gabonese Democratic Party (Parti Démocratique Gabonais) (PDG). He invited all Gabonese, regardless of previous political affiliation, to participate. Bongo was elected President in February 1973; in April 1975, the office of vice president was abolished and replaced by the office of prime minister, who had no right to automatic succession. Bongo was re-elected president in December 1979 and November 1986 to 7-year terms. Using the PDG as a tool to submerge the regional and tribal rivalries that divided Gabonese politics in the past, Bongo sought to forge a single national movement in support of the government's development policies.
Economic discontent and a desire for political liberalization provoked violent demonstrations and strikes by students and workers in early 1990. In response to worker grievances, Bongo negotiated on a sector-by-sector basis, making significant wage concessions. In addition, he promised to open up the PDG and to organize a national political conference in March–April 1990 to discuss Gabon's future political system. The PDG and 74 political organizations attended the conference. Participants essentially divided into two loose coalitions, the ruling PDG and its allies, and the United Front of Opposition Associations and Parties, consisting of the breakaway Morena Fundamental and the Gabonese Progress Party.
The April 1990 conference approved sweeping political reforms, including creation of a national Senate, decentralization of the budgetary process, freedom of assembly and press, and cancellation of the exit visa requirement. In an attempt to guide the political system's transformation to multiparty democracy, Bongo resigned as PDG chairman and created a transitional government headed by a new Prime Minister, Casimir Oyé-Mba. The Gabonese Social Democratic Grouping (RSDG), as the resulting government was called, was smaller than the previous government and included representatives from several opposition parties in its cabinet. The RSDG drafted a provisional constitution in May 1990 that provided a basic bill of rights and an independent judiciary but retained strong executive powers for the president. After further review by a constitutional committee and the National Assembly, this document came into force in March 1991. Under the 1991 constitution, in the event of the president's death, the Prime Minister, the National Assembly president, and the defense minister were to share power until a new election could be held.
Opposition to the PDG continued, however, and in September 1990, two coup d'état attempts were uncovered and aborted. Despite anti-government demonstrations after the untimely death of an opposition leader, the first multiparty National Assembly elections in almost 30 years took place in September–October 1990, with the PDG garnering a large majority.
Following President Bongo's re-election in December 1993 with 51% of the vote, opposition candidates refused to validate the election results. Serious civil disturbances led to an agreement between the government and opposition factions to work toward a political settlement. These talks led to the Paris Accords in November 1994, under which several opposition figures were included in a government of national unity, and constitutional reforms were approved in a referendum in 1995. This arrangement soon broke down, however, and the 1996 and 1997 legislative and municipal elections provided the background for renewed partisan politics. The PDG won a landslide victory in the legislative election, but several major cities, including Libreville, elected opposition mayors during the 1997 local election.
Modern times
President Bongo coasted to easy re-elections in December 1998 and November 2005, with large majorities of the vote against a divided opposition. While Bongo's major opponents rejected the outcome as fraudulent, some international observers characterized the results as representative despite any perceived irregularities. Legislative elections held in 2001–2002, which were boycotted by a number of smaller opposition parties and were widely criticized for their administrative weaknesses, produced a National Assembly almost completely dominated by the PDG and allied independents.
Omar Bongo died at a Spanish hospital on 8 June 2009.
His son Ali Bongo Ondimba was elected president in the August 2009 presidential election. He was re-elected in August 2016, in elections marred by numerous irregularities, arrests, human rights violations and post-election violence.
On 24 October 2018, Ali Bongo Ondimbao was hospitalized in Riyadh for an undisclosed illness. On 29 November 2018 Bongo was transferred to a military hospital in Rabat to continue recovery. On 9 December 2018 it was reported by Gabon's Vice President Moussavou that Bongo suffered a stroke in Riyadh and has since left the hospital in Rabat and is currently recovering at a private residence in Rabat. Since 24 October 2018 Bongo has not been seen in public and due to lack of evidence that he is either alive or dead many have speculated if he is truly alive or not. On 1 January 2019 Bongo gave his first public address via a video posted to social media since falling ill in October 2018 putting to rest any rumors he was dead.
On 7 January 2019, soldiers in Gabon launched an unsuccessful coup d’etat attempt.
On May 11, 2021, a Commonwealth delegation visited Gabon as Ali Bongo visited London to meet with the secretary general of the organization, which brings together 54 English-speaking countries. President Bongo expressed Gabon's willingness to join the Commonwealth.
See also
History of Africa
List of heads of government of Gabon
List of heads of state of Gabon
Politics of Gabon
Libreville history and timeline
References
Petringa, Maria (2006), Brazza, A Life for Africa.
Schilling, Heinar (1937), Germanisches Leben, Koehler and Amelang, Leipzig, Germany.
Bibliography
External links
WWW-VL History Index of Gabon
A detailed history
Background Note: Gabon
Gabon
French Equatorial Africa | [
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12029 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography%20of%20Gabon | Geography of Gabon | Gabon is a country in Central Africa, lying along the Atlantic Ocean, just south of the Bight of Biafra.
Borders
Gabon has a total of 3,261 km of international boundaries. It borders Equatorial Guinea (335 km) and Cameroon (349 km) to the north and the Republic of the Congo (2,567 km) to the east and south. Gabon lies on the equator.
Maritime claims
Territorial sea:
Contiguous zone:
Exclusive economic zone:
Terrain
Narrow coastal plain with patches of Central African mangroves; hilly interior; savanna in east and south. A recent global remote sensing analysis suggested that there were 420km² of tidal flats in Gabon, making it the 50th ranked country in terms of tidal flat area.
Irrigated land: 44.5 km2 (2003)
Total renewable water resources: 164 km3 (2011)
Environment
International agreements:
Party to: Biodiversity, Climate Change, Desertification, Endangered Species, Hazardous Wastes, Law of the Sea, Marine Dumping, Ozone Layer Protection, Ship Pollution, Tropical Timber 83, Tropical Timber 94, Wetlands, Whaling
Extreme points
Northernmost point - unnamed location on the border with Cameroon on the Ntem River, Woleu-Ntem province
Easternmost point - the unnamed location on the border with the Republic of Congo immediately south-west of the Congolese village of Mbeyi-Mbola, Haut-Ogooué province
Southernmost point - the point at which the border with the Republic of Congo enters the Atlantic Ocean, Nyanga Province
Westernmost point - the north-west point of Cape Lopez, Ogooué Maritime province
See also
Bam Bam Amphitheaters
References
External links | [
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12030 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics%20of%20Gabon | Demographics of Gabon | The Demographics of Gabon is the makeup of the population of Gabon. As of 2020, Gabon has a population of 2,225,287. Gabon's population is relatively young with 35.5% of its population under 15 years of age and only 4.3% of its population over 65 years old. Gabon has a nearly even split between males and females with 0.99 males for every female in the population. In the age range of 15–65, the ration is exactly 1 male to 1 female. The life expectancy of Gabon is lower than the world average. Gabon's population's life expectancy at birth is 53.11 years while the world average is 67.2 years as of 2010. Ethnically, the biggest group in Gabon are the Fang people with over 500,000 people, or about a third of Gabon's population, belonging to this ethnic group. The biggest religion in Gabon is Christianity, with between 55–75% of the population of Gabon being Christian.
Population
According to the total population was in , compared to only 469,000 in 1950. The proportion of children below the age of 15 in 2010 was 35.5%, 60.2% was between 15 and 65 years of age, while 4.3% was 65 years or older
.
Structure of the population (DHS 2012; males 19,318, females 20,636, total 39,955):
Vital statistics
Registration of vital events is in Gabon not complete. The Population Department of the United Nations prepared the following estimates.
Fertility and births
Total Fertility Rate (TFR) (Wanted Fertility Rate) and Crude Birth Rate (CBR):
Fertility data as of 2012 (DHS Program):
Life expectancy
Other demographics statistics
Demographic statistics according to the World Population Review in 2019.
One birth every 9 minutes
One death every 35 minutes
One net migrant every 480 minutes
Net gain of one person every 12 minutes
The following demographic statistics are from the CIA World Factbook.
Population
2,119,036 (July 2018 est.)
Age structure
0-14 years: 37.45% (male 405,676 /female 387,900)
15-24 years: 22.08% (male 245,490 /female 222,343)
25-54 years: 31.6% (male 355,348 /female 314,344)
55-64 years: 4.96% (male 54,679 /female 50,356)
65 years and over: 3.91% (male 40,721 /female 42,179) (2018 est.)
Median age
total: 20.5 years. Country comparison to the world: 187th
male: 20.8 years
female: 20.2 years (2018 est.)
Birth rate
26.5 births/1,000 population (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 46th
Death rate
6.2 deaths/1,000 population (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 157th
Total fertility rate
3.52 children born/woman (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 42nd
Population growth rate
2.73% (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 15th
Mother's mean age at first birth
20.3 years (2012 est.)
note: median age at first birth among women 25-29
Contraceptive prevalence rate
31.1% (2012)
Net migration rate
-2 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2017 est.) Country comparison to the world: 161st
Dependency ratios
total dependency ratio: 67.4 (2015 est.)
youth dependency ratio: 59.9 (2015 est.)
elderly dependency ratio: 7.6 (2015 est.)
potential support ratio: 13.2 (2015 est.)
Religions
Roman Catholic 42.3%, Protestant 12.3%, other Christian 27.4%, Muslim 9.8%, animist 0.6%, other 0.5%, none/no answer 7.1% (2012 est.)
Urbanization
urban population: 89.4% of total population (2018)
rate of urbanization: 2.61% annual rate of change (2015-20 est.)
Life expectancy at birth
total population: 68.1346 years (2018 est.)
male: 66.3 years (2018 est.)
female: 69.6 years (2018 est.)
Literacy
definition: age 15 and over can read and write (2015 est.)
total population: 83.2% (2015 est.)
male: 85.3% (2015 est.)
female: 81% (2015 est.)
Unemployment, youth ages 15-24
total: 35.7% (2010 est.)
male: 30.5% (2010 est.)
female: 41.9% (2010 est.)
Ethnic groups
Broad ethnic groups in Gabon are:
Bantu groups including four major groupings (Fang, Eshira, Punu, Teke)
Other Africans, notably 'forest people' (pygmy, now sedentary) such as the Babongo tribe
Europeans, including 10,700 French and 11,000 persons of dual nationality
2012 Census
Language and religion
Religions:
Roman Catholic 41.9%, Protestant 13.7%, other Christian 32.4%, Islam 6.4%, Animist 0.3%, other 0.3%, None/No Answer 5% (2012 est.)
Languages:
French (official since colonial rule), Fang, Myene, Bateke, Bapounou/Eschira, Bandjabi
Literacy:
definition:
age 15 and over can read and write
total population:
83.2%
male:
85.3%
female:
81% (2015 est.)
References
Gabonese society | [
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12031 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics%20of%20Gabon | Politics of Gabon | Politics of Gabon takes place in a framework of a republic whereby the President of Gabon is head of state and in effect, also the head of government, since he appoints the prime minister and his cabinet. The government is divided into three branches: the Executive headed by the prime minister (although previously grabbed by the president), the legislative that is formed by the two chambers of parliament. The judicial branch, like other two branches, is technically independent and equal to other three branches, although in practice, since its judges are appointed by the president, it is beholden to the same president. Since independence the party system is dominated by the conservative Gabonese Democratic Party.
In March 1991 a new constitution was adopted. Among its provisions are a Western-style bill of rights, the creation of the National Council of Democracy that also oversees the guarantee of those rights and a governmental advisory board which deals with economic and social issues. Multi-party legislative elections were held in 1990-91 even though opposition parties had not been declared formally legal.
Political developments
Under the 1961 constitution (revised in 1975 and rewritten in 1991), Gabon became a republic with a presidential form of government. The National Assembly of Gabon has 120 deputies elected for a five-year term. The president is elected by universal suffrage for a seven-year term. The president appoints the prime minister, the cabinet, and judges of the independent Supreme Court. The government in 1990 made major changes in the political system. A transitional constitution was drafted in May as an outgrowth of a national political conference in March–April and later revised by a constitutional committee. Among its provisions were a Western-style bill of rights; creation of a National Council of Democracy, which oversees the guarantee of those rights; a governmental advisory board on economic and social issues; and an independent judiciary. After approval by the National Assembly, the PDG Central Committee, and the president, the Assembly unanimously adopted the constitution in March 1991. Multi-party legislative elections were held in 1990-91 although opposition parties had not been declared formally legal.
After a peaceful transition, the elections produced the first representative, multi-party, National Assembly. In January 1991, the Assembly passed by unanimous vote a law governing the legalization of opposition parties. The president was re-elected in a disputed election in 1993 with 51% of votes cast. Social and political disturbances led to the 1994 Paris Conference and Accords, which provided a framework for the next elections. Local and legislative elections were delayed until 1996-1997. In 1997, constitutional amendments were adopted to create an appointed Senate, the position of Vice President, and to extend the president's term to seven years. Facing a divided opposition, President Omar Bongo was re-elected in December 1998, with 66% of the votes cast. Although the main opposition parties claimed the elections had been manipulated, there was none of the civil disturbance that followed the 1993 election. The president retains strong powers, such as authority to dissolve the National Assembly, declare a state of siege, delay legislation, conduct referendums, and appoint and dismiss the prime minister and cabinet members. For administrative purposes, Gabon is divided into nine provinces, which are further divided into 36 prefectures and eight separate subprefectures. The president appoints the provincial governors, the prefects, and the subprefects.
Political conditions
At the time of Gabon's independence in 1960, two principal political parties existed: the Bloc Democratique Gabonais (BDG), led by Leon M'Ba, and the Union Démocratique et Sociale Gabonaise (UDSG), led by Jean-Hilaire Aubame. In the first post-independence election, held under a parliamentary system, neither party was able to win a majority. The BDG obtained support from three of the four independent legislative deputies, and M'Ba was named prime minister. Soon after concluding that Gabon had an insufficient number of people for a two-party system, the two party leaders agreed on a single list of candidates. In the February 1961 election, held under the new presidential system, M'Ba became president and Aubame foreign minister.
This coalition appeared to work until February 1963, when the larger BDG forced the UDSG members to choose between a merger of the parties or resignation. The UDSG cabinet ministers resigned, and M'Ba called an election for February 1964 and a reduced number of National Assembly deputies (from 67 to 47). The UDSG failed to muster a list of candidates able to meet the requirements of the electoral decrees. When the BDG appeared likely to win the election by default, the Gabonese military toppled M'Ba in a bloodless coup on February 18, 1964. French troops re-established his government the next day. Elections were held in April with many opposition participants. BDG-supported candidates won 31 seats and the opposition 16. Late in 1966, the constitution was revised to provide for automatic succession of the vice president should the president die in office. In March 1967, Leon M'Ba and Omar Bongo (then Albert Bongo) were elected president and vice president. M'Ba died later that year, and Omar Bongo became president.
In March 1968, Bongo declared Gabon a one-party state by dissolving the BDG and establishing a new party—the Gabonese Democratic Party. He invited all Gabonese, regardless of previous political affiliation, to participate. Bongo was elected president in February 1975 and re-elected in December 1979 and November 1986 to seven-year terms. In April 1975, the office of vice president was abolished and replaced by the office of prime minister, who has no right to automatic succession. Under the 1991 constitution, in the event of the president's death, the prime minister, the National Assembly president, and the defense minister share power until a new election is held. Using the PDG as a tool to submerge the regional and tribal rivalries that have divided Gabonese politics in the past, Bongo sought to forge a single national movement in support of the government's development policies.
Opposition to the PDG continued, however, and in September 1990, two coup attempts were uncovered and aborted. Economic discontent and a desire for political liberalization provoked violent demonstrations and strikes by students and workers in early 1990. In response to grievances by workers, Bongo negotiated with them on a sector-by-sector basis, making significant wage concessions. In addition, he promised to open up the PDG and to organize a national political conference in March–April 1990 to discuss Gabon's future political system. The PDG and 74 political organizations attended the conference. Participants essentially divided into two loose coalitions, the ruling PDG and its allies and the United Front of Opposition Associations and Parties, consisting of the breakaway Morena Fundamental and the Gabonese Progress Party.
The April conference approved sweeping political reforms, including creation of a national senate, decentralization of the budgetary process, freedom of assembly and press, and cancellation of the exit visa requirement. In an attempt to guide the political system's transformation to multi-party democracy, Bongo resigned as PDG chairman and created a transitional government headed by a new Prime Minister, Casimir Oye-Mba. The Gabonese Social Democratic Grouping (RSDG), as the resulting government was called, was smaller than the previous government and included representatives from several opposition parties in its cabinet. The RSDG drafted a provisional constitution that provided a basic bill of rights and an independent judiciary but retained strong executive powers for the president. After further review by a constitutional committee and the National Assembly, this document came into force in March 1991.
Despite further anti-government demonstrations after the untimely death of an opposition leader, the first multi-party National Assembly elections in almost 30 years took place in September–October 1990, with the PDG garnering a large majority. Following President Bongo's re-election in December 1993 with 51% of the vote, opposition candidates refused to validate the election results. Serious civil disturbances, which were heavily repressed by the presidential guard, led to an agreement between the government and opposition factions to work toward a political settlement. These talks led to the Paris Accords in November 1994 in which several opposition figures were included in a government of national unity. This arrangement soon broke down, and the 1996 and 1997 legislative and municipal elections provided the background for renewed partisan politics. The PDG won a landslide victory in the legislative election, but several major cities, including Libreville, elected opposition mayors during the 1997 local election. President Bongo coasted to an easy re-election in December 1998 with 66% of the vote against a divided opposition. While Bongo's major opponents rejected the outcome as fraudulent, international observers characterized the result as representative even if the election suffered from serious administrative problems. There was no serious civil disorder or protests following the election in contrast to the 1993 election.
President Omar Ali Bongo narrowly beat rival Jean Ping in the official results of the Presidential election in 2016. With results showing a trend of success for Ping, the final province's results were released after significant delays, showing a remarkable 99.5% support for President Bongo in Haut-Ogooue. This was conveniently just enough to push Ali Bongo into first place. An EU Election Observation Mission present in the country declared that observers had incurred problems accessing the process of vote counting. The right to demonstrate or express oneself was described by the mission as 'restrictive'. The electoral regulations benefitted President Bongo, according to the Mission's report.
Executive branch
|President
|Ali Bongo Ondimba
|Democratic Party
|16 October 2009
|-
|Prime Minister
|Rose Christiane Raponda
|Democratic Party
|16 July 2020
|}
The president is elected by popular vote for a seven-year term. He appoints the prime minister. The Council of Ministers is appointed by the prime minister in consultation with the president.
President El Hadj Omar Bongo Ondimba, in power since 1967 and the longest-serving African head of state, was re-elected to another seven-year term according to poll results returned from elections held on November 27, 2005. According to figures provided by Gabon's Interior Ministry, this was achieved with 79.1% of the votes cast. In 2003 the President amended the Constitution of Gabon to remove any restrictions on the number of terms a president is allowed to serve. The president retains strong powers, such as authority to dissolve the National Assembly, declare a state of siege, delay legislation, conduct referendums, and appoint and dismiss the prime minister and cabinet members.
President of Gabon is Ali Ben Bongo Ondimba after taking over from his late father Omar, who ruled Gabon for 41 years until his death in 2009.
Legislative branch
The Parliament (Parlement) has two chambers. The National Assembly (Assemblée Nationale) has 120 members, 111 members elected for a five-year term in single-seat constituencies and nine members appointed by a head of state - the president. The Senate (Sénat) has 91 members, elected for a six-year term in single-seat constituencies by local and departmental councillors.
Political parties and elections
Judicial branch
Gabon's Supreme Court or Cour Supreme consists of three chambers - Judicial, Administrative, and Accounts; Constitutional Court; Courts of Appeal; Court of State Security; County Courts
Administrative divisions
There are nine provincial administrations. These are headquartered in Estuaire, Haut-Ogooue, Moyen-Ogooue, Ngounie, Nyanga, Ogooué-Ivindo, Ogooué-Lolo, Ogooue-Maritime and Woleu-Ntem.
International organization participation
ACCT, ACP, AfDB, BDEAC, CCC, CEEAC, ECA, FAO, FZ, G-24, G-77, IAEA, IBRD, ICAO, ICC, IDA, IDB, IFAD, IFC, IFRCS (associate), ILO, IMF, IMO, Inmarsat, Intelsat, Interpol, IOC, ITU, ITUC, NAM, OAU, OIC, OPCW, UDEAC, UN, UNCTAD, UNESCO, UNIDO, UPU, WHO, WIPO, WMO, WToO, WTrO
See also
Gabon
Original text of this article from Central Intelligence Agency World Factbook at https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/gabon/
References | [
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12032 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy%20of%20Gabon | Economy of Gabon | The economy of Gabon is characterized by strong links with France, large foreign investments, dependence on skilled foreign labor, and decline of agriculture. Gabon enjoys a per capita income four times that of most nations of sub-Saharan Africa, its reliance on resource extraction industry releasing much of the population from extreme poverty.
Resources
The oil sector now accounts for 50% of GDP and 80% of exports. Although there have been recent offshore finds, oil production is now declining from its peak of in 1997, and periods of low oil prices have had a negative impact on government revenues and the economy. In 2012 there were six active oil rigs in Gabon.
The government announced in 2012 that it would reassess exactly how much iron ore the Belinga site contains before awarding the concession to a mining company, most likely to be China's CMEC, which temporarily secured the rights to the ore in 2007.
Statistics
The following table shows the main economic indicators in 1980–2017.
GDP - composition by sector:
agriculture:
5.7%
industry:
57.2%
services:
37% (2008 est.)
Population below poverty line:
NA%
Household income or consumption by percentage share:
lowest 10%:
NA%
highest 10%:
NA%
Inflation rate (consumer prices):
5% (2008 est.)
Labour force:
592,000 (2008 est.)
Labour force - by occupation:
agriculture 60%, services and government 25%, industry and commerce 15% (2000 est.)
Unemployment rate:
21% (2006 est.)
Budget:
revenues:
$4.46 billion
expenditures:
$2.75 billion (2008 est.)
Industries:
food and beverage; textile; lumbering and plywood; cement; petroleum extraction and refining; manganese, uranium, and gold mining; chemical production; ship repair
Industrial production growth rate:
1.5% (2008)
Oil - production
(2007 est.)
Oil - consumption
(2007 est.)
Oil - exports
(2005 est.)
Oil - imports
(2005 est.)
Oil - proven reserves
(1 January 2008 est.)
Natural gas - production
100 million cu m (2006 est.)
Natural gas - consumption
100 million cu m (2006 est.)
Natural gas - exports
0 cu m (2007 est.)
Natural gas - imports
0 cu m (2007 est.)
Natural gas - proven reserves
28.32 billion cu m (1 January 2008 est.)
Electricity - production:
1.671 TWh (2006 est.)
Electricity - production by source:
fossil fuel:
27.8%
hydro:
72.2%
nuclear:
0%
other:
0% (1998)
Electricity - consumption:
1.365 GWh (2006 est.)
Electricity - exports:
0 kWh (2006 est.)
Electricity - imports:
0 kWh (1998)
Agriculture - products:
cocoa, coffee, sugar, palm oil, rubber; cattle; okoume (a tropical hardwood); fish
Current account - balance
$591 million (2010 est.)
Currency:
1 Communauté financière africaine franc (CFAF) = 100 centimes
Exchange rates:
Communauté financière africaine francs (CFAF) per US$1 – 507.71 (2010), 472.19 (2009), 447.81 (2008), 481.83 (2007), 522.89 (2006), 647.25 (January 2000), 615.70 (1999), 589.95 (1998), 583.67 (1997), 511.55 (1996), 499.15 (1995)
note:
since 1 January 1999, the CFAF is pegged to the euro at a rate of 655.957 CFA francs per euro
See also
Agriculture in Gabon
Economy of Africa
Forestry in Gabon
List of companies based in Gabon
Mining in Gabon
Transport in Gabon
Chronology of Gabon
United Nations Economic Commission for Africa
References
External links
Gabon latest trade data on ITC Trade Map
MBendi Gabon overview
The Quicker Ticker- Gabon (in french)
Legabon.org
Gaboneco.com
Gabon
Gabon
Gabon | [
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12033 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications%20in%20Gabon | Telecommunications in Gabon | Telecommunications in Gabon include radio, television, fixed and mobile telephones, and the Internet.
Radio and television
Radio stations:
state owns and operates 2 radio stations; a private radio station; transmissions of at least 2 international broadcasters are accessible (2007);
6 AM, 7 FM, and 4 shortwave stations (2001).
Radios:
208,000 (1997).
Television stations:
state owns and operates 2 TV stations; a private TV station; satellite service subscriptions are available (2007);
4 stations plus 4 low-power repeaters (2001).
Television sets:
63,000 (1997).
There are two main broadcasters in Gabon. The state broadcaster, Radiodiffusion Télévision Gabonaise (RTG), operates two main networks - a national network in French and a provincial network in French and vernacular languages. There is also a special programme on RTG's FM frequencies.
Perhaps the most important station in Gabon and one that many shortwave radio listeners are familiar with is the privately owned Afrique Numero Un (Africa Number One) which operates on FM in the capital, Libreville, area and also broadcasts via shortwave. Afrique Numero Un also has relay stations in mostly French-speaking African countries.
Radio France Internationale (RFI) has relay stations throughout Gabon. Other privately owned stations also operate in Gabon, though concentrated mostly in the Libreville area.
Like many former French colonies, Gabon uses the SECAM-K television standard. Two television channels, 4 and 8, are found in the Libreville area. All other channels and repeaters relay channel 4.
The constitution and law provide for freedom of speech and press, and the government generally respects these rights, although the government has suspended newspapers and television stations for disrupting public order or libel.
Telephones
Calling code: +241
International call prefix: 00<ref>[http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-t/opb/sp/T-SP-E.164C-2011-PDF-E.pdf Dialing Procedures (International Prefix, National (Trunk) Prefix and National (Significant) Number) (in Accordance with ITY-T Recommendation E.164 (11/2010))], Annex to ITU Operational Bulletin No. 994-15.XII.2011, International Telecommunication Union (ITU, Geneva), 15 December 2011. Retrieved 2 January 2014.</ref>
Main lines:
17,000 lines in use, 194th in the world (2012);
26,500 lines in use, 182nd in the world (2007);
39,100 lines in use, 169th in the world (2005).
Mobile cellular:
2.9 million lines, 133rd in the world (2012);
1.2 million lines, 129th in the world (2007);
649,800 lines, 125th in the world (2005).
Telephone system: adequate system of cable, microwave radio relay, tropospheric scatter, radiotelephone communication stations, and a domestic satellite system with 12 earth stations; a growing mobile-cellular network with multiple providers is making telephone service more widely available with mobile-cellular teledensity exceeding 100 per 100 persons.
Satellite earth stations: 3 Intelsat (Atlantic Ocean) (2011).
Communications cables: South Atlantic 3/West Africa Submarine Cable (SAT-3/WASC) fiber-optic cable system provides connectivity to Europe and Asia; Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), cable system connecting countries along the west coast of Africa to each other and to Portugal and France.
Internet
Top-level domain: .ga
Internet users:
138,584 users, 166th in the world; 8.6% of the population, 175th in the world (2012)."Percentage of Individuals using the Internet 2000-2012", International Telecommunications Union (Geneva), June 2013, retrieved 22 June 2013
98,800 users, 160th in the world (2009);
67,000 users, 144th in the world (2005).
Fixed broadband:
In 2013, Government signs with the World Bank to develop the Central African Backbone. Over 1200 km of fiber optic is deployed around the country. In 2017, over 20 cities and villages are serviced by this new network operated by Axione (Bouygues French company). 70% of the gabonese population can access mobile broadband services.
5,147 subscriptions, 160th in the world; 0.3% of the population, 154th in the world (2012)."Fixed (wired)-broadband subscriptions per 100 inhabitants 2012", Dynamic Report, ITU ITC EYE, International Telecommunication Union. Retrieved on 29 June 2013.
Wireless broadband:
Introducing 3G/4G licences in 2014
Unknown (2012).
Internet hosts:
127 hosts, 205th in the world (2012);
88 hosts, 192nd in the world (2008).
IPv4: 169,472 addresses allocated, less than 0.05% of the world total, 105.4 addresses per 1000 people (2012).Population, The World Factbook, United States Central Intelligence Agency. Accessed on 2 April 2012. Note: Data are mostly for 1 July 2012.
Internet Service Providers (ISPs):
Solsi Gabon, TLDC offer a WiMax network all over Libreville and Port-Gentil.
ICTS IN SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AWARDS 2015
Through his leadership of the Gabonese Republic, President Ali Bongo Ondimba has led his nation to receive much international recognition for its commitment to progress in the field of ICT in the Central and Francophone Africa region as well as on the African continent.
President Ali Bongo Ondimba has stressed the necessity of establishing infrastructure, access to ICTs, as well as ameliorating broadband connections in both the public and private sectors, especially within households. President Ondimba has affirmed his position on the importance of ICTs in the development of Gabon, stating during the 2011 Broadband Leadership Summit at ITU Telecom World in Geneva that he promised to make high-speed Internet access an irrevocable right for all Gabonese citizens.
Internet censorship and surveillance
There are no government restrictions on access to the Internet or credible reports the government monitors e-mail or Internet chat rooms without appropriate legal authority.
The constitution and law provide for freedom of speech and press, and the government generally respects these rights. Libel can be either a criminal offense or a civil matter. Editors and authors of libelous material may be jailed for two to six months and fined 500,000 to five million CFA francs ($1,008 to $10,080). Penalties for libel, disrupting public order, and other offenses also include a one- to three-month publishing suspension for a first offense and a three- to six-month suspension for repeat offenses.
Although the constitution and law prohibit arbitrary interference with privacy, family, home, or correspondence, the government does not always respect these prohibitions in practice. As part of criminal investigations, police request and easily obtain search warrants from judges, sometimes after the fact. Authorities reportedly monitor private telephone conversations, personal mail, and the movement of citizens.
See also
Gabon Telecom, largest telecommunications company in Gabon, jointly owned by the Gabon government (49%) and Maroc Telecom (51%) since 2007.
List of terrestrial fibre optic cable projects in Africa
Media of Gabon
Economy of Gabon
Gabon
References
External links
My GA, website of the Agence Nationale des Infrastructures Numériques et des Fréquences'' (ANINF, National Agency for Digital Infrastructure and Frequencies), the registrar for the .ga domain. | [
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12034 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport%20in%20Gabon | Transport in Gabon | Modes of transport in Gabon include rail, road, water, and air. The one rail link, the Trans-Gabon Railway, connects the port of Owendo with the inland town of Franceville. Most but not all of the country is connected to the road network, much of which is unpaved, and which centres on seven "national routes" identified as N1 to N7. The largest seaports are Port-Gentil and the newer Owendo, and 1,600 km of inland waterways are navigable. There are three international airports, eight other paved airports, and over 40 with unpaved runways. Nearly 300 km of pipelines carry petroleum products, mainly crude oil.
Rail transport
Until the 1970s Gabon had no permanent railroads, though temporary Decauville rail tracks were in use in the logging industry as early as 1913 (Gray and Ngolet, 1999, pp.102).
In 2003, the railway began the process of installing a satellite based telecommunications system. As of 2004, Gabon State Railways totalled 814 km of standard-gauge track.
total: 814 km (Gabon State Railways or OCTRA)standard gauge: 814 km 1.435-m gauge; single track (1994)
Maps
UN Map - shows line to Franceville
UNHCR map - does not show line to Franceville
TravelPortal map - shows major rivers
UNJLC Rail map of Southern Africa - does not show line to Franceville
Cities served by rail
Existing
Libreville - capital
Owendo - port
Sahoué - port
Franceville - railhead
Ndjolé
Lopé
Booué - likely junction for branchline to Makokou
Lastoursville
Moanda
Ntoum - proposed junction for iron ore traffic to Santa Clara
Kango
Four-Place
Mounana - ?
Proposed
Makokou - iron ore
Cape Santa Clara - proposed deep water port for Makokou iron ore.
Bélinga - possible iron ore mine.
2006
China signs a deal for an iron ore mine with associated rail and port upgrades from Belinga to Santa Clara
2007
New rail line from Belinga will go 450 km all the way to the coast, rather than to be a branch off an existing line.
Pan-African issues
Road transport
total:
7,670 km
paved:
629 km (including 30 km of expressways)
unpaved:
7,041 km (1996 est.)
Roads in Gabon link most areas of the country, and many of the main roads are of a reasonable standard. However, remoter areas along the coast and in the east are often not connected to the road network. Major roads are denoted national routes and numbered, with a prefix "N" (sometimes "RN"):
N1 road: Libreville – Kougouleu – Bifoun – Lambaréné – Mouila – Ndendé – Tchibanga - (Republic of Congo)
N2 road: Bifoun – Alembe – Viate – Mitzic – Bibasse – Oyem – Bitam – Éboro – (Cameroon)
N3 road: Alembe – Kazamabika – Lastoursville – Moanda – Franceville
N4 road: Viate – Ekonlong – Makokou – Mékambo
N5 road: Kougouleu – Bibasse
N6 road: Mayumba – Tchibanga – Ndendé – Lébamba - Koulamoutou – Lastoursville
N7 road: Makokou – Bakwaka – Okondja – Lékori - Akiéni – Ngouoni – Franceville
Water transport
Merchant marine
As of 2002, there was one merchant marine vessel, with a gross tonnage of 2,419/.
Waterways
Gabon has 1,600 km of perennially navigable waterways, including 310 km on the Ogooué River.
Air transport
There are three international airports: Libreville, Port-Gentil, and Franceville.
Airports - with paved runways
total:
11
over 3,047 m:
1
2,438 to 3,047 m:
1
1,524 to 2,437 m:
8
914 to 1,523 m:
1 (1999 est.)
Airports - with unpaved runways
total:
45
1,524 to 2,437 m:
9
914 to 1,523 m:
16
under 914 m:
25 (1999 est.)
Pipelines
Crude oil 270 km; petroleum products 14 km
See also
COMILOG Cableway
References
External links | [
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12035 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed%20Forces%20of%20Gabon | Armed Forces of Gabon | The Armed Forces of Gabon () or the Gabonese Defense and Security Forces () is the national professional military of the Republic of Gabon, divided into the Army, Air Force, Navy, and a National Gendarmerie, consisting of about 5,000 personnel. The armed forces includes a well-trained, well-equipped 1,800-member guard that provides security for the President of Gabon.
Organizational structure
Army
The Gabonese Army () is the land component of the armed forces, specializing in infantry and mechanized reconnaissance. It was created on December 6, 1960 by decree of president Leon Mba from non-commissioned officers who served in the French colonial army, mainly the 2nd company of the 21st BIMA. Following independence, Gabon signed defense agreements with France, mainly on technical assistance and training. Until June 1964, the title of Chief of Staff of the Gabonese Armed Forces was held by a senior French Army officer. In 1962 a detachment of the Auxiliary Women of the Gabonese Armed Forces (AFFAG), commanded by Lieutenant Ba Oumar at the military camp of Owendo, was created. President Mba promoted the initiative following a visit to Tel Aviv, Israel, where he met female staff in its Defense Forces.
Order of battle
Republican Guard Battalion (Libreville)
1 Light Armoured recon unit
3 Infantry companies
1 Artillery battery
1 Air Defence battery
Airborne Regiment
1 Command company
1 Recon & Support company
3 Airborne companies
1 Light Armoured Recon Battalion
2 Armoured squads
1 Command & Logistics company
Support Command Regiment
1 Artillery battery
1 Mortar battery
1 MRLS battery (8 Teruel MRL)
1 Engineer company
Logistic units
7 Military Regions
7 Motorised infantry battalions (1 battalion for each region)
Air Force
Order of battle
Fighter Squadron 1-02 Leyou at BA02 Franceville with:
Mirage F-1AZ
MB-326M Impala I
Heavy Transport Squadron at BA01 Libreville with:
C-130 Hercules
CN-235
Ministerial Air Liaison Group ( or GLAM) at BA01 Libreville with:
1 Falcon-900EX
1 Gulfstream-III
Facilities
BA01 Libreville
BA02 Franceville
Tchibanga
Navy
The Gabonese Navy () is the official maritime branch of the armed forces. It was created in December 1960 as part of the army, and only became an independent entity in 1983. The navy's core purpose is to monitor the country's coastal waters, including 800 km of coastline.
Headquarters Staff (Libreville)
Port-Gentil Naval Base
Mayumba Naval Base
Port-Gentil Aviation Base
Marine Rifle Battalion (since 1984)
Other security forces
National Gendarmerie
The National Gendarmerie of Gabon (Gendarmerie nationale gabonaise) is the national police force of Gabon responsible for law enforcement in the country. It was formed on March 10, 1960 when Gabon, formerly French Equatorial Africa, gained its independence from France. It originated from Libreville Gendarmerie Detachment 1929, which was commanded by Governor General of French Equatorial Africa, Félix Eboue. The main tasks of the gendarmerie are to defend the country's borders, ensure public safety, and to enforce actions taken by judicial and government authorities. The National Gendarmerie is under the direct command of the President of Gabon.
Republican Guard
The Gendarmerie is also in charge of the Republican Guard (). It is viewed as the most powerful and sophisticated of the security forces. It is primarily tasked with protecting the president and ensures regime stability.
Equipment
Small arms
Armour
Artillery
Air defense
Current inventory
Retired aircraft
Previous aircraft operated by the Air Force consisted of the CM.170 Magister, C-130H Hercules, Embraer EMB 110, Fokker F28, Aérospatiale N 262, Reims C.337, and the Alouette II helicopter.
Naval Equipment
Ceremonial traditions
In April 2001, then-Defense Minister Bongo visited China, during which he reviewed the PLA honor guard upon arrival, and proposed to his Chinese counterpart Chi Haotian that members of the battalion will go to Gabon to help set up and train professional ceremonial units in the Gabonese military. In March 2003, after just under three years, the Chinese Ministry of National Defense sent four officers led by Lieutenant Colonel Wang Yuanjing to Libreville by the end of November of that year, after which they stayed to train the Gabonese guard of honour for more than six months.
The Principal Music Band of the Gabonese Defense Forces was created in 2010. It brings together elements of the Band of the National Gendarmerie, the Armed Forces and the Prytanée militaire de Libreville. It has a staff of 50 professional currently directed by Captain Jean-Baptiste Rabimbinongo. Its conductor, Lieutenant Léa Nzoufa Nze, was the first woman to conduct a military band to the Saumur International Festival of Military Bands. It takes part in many official ceremonies such as National Flag Day and the military parade marking the country's independence.
References
Government of Gabon
Military of Gabon | [
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12036 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign%20relations%20of%20Gabon | Foreign relations of Gabon | Gabon has followed a non-aligned policy, advocating dialogue in international affairs and recognizing both parts of divided countries. Since 1973, the number of countries establishing diplomatic relations with Gabon has doubled. In inter-African affairs, Gabon espouses development by evolution rather than revolution and favors regulated free enterprise as the system most likely to promote rapid economic growth. Concerned about stability in Central Africa and the potential for intervention, Gabon has been directly involved with mediation efforts in Chad, Central African Republic, Republic of Congo, Angola, and former Zaire. In December 1999, through the mediation efforts of President Bongo, a peace accord was signed in the Republic of Congo between the government and most leaders of an armed rebellion. President Bongo has remained involved in the continuing Congolese peace process. Gabon has been a strong proponent of regional stability, and Gabonese armed forces played an important role in the UN Peacekeeping Mission to the Central African Republic (MINURCA).
Gabon is a member of the UN and some of its specialized and related agencies, including the World Bank; Organisation of African Unity (OAU); Central African Customs Union (UDEAC/CEMAC); EC association under Lome Convention; Communaute Financiere Africaine (CFA); Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC); Non-Aligned Movement; Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).
Gabon is also a member of the International Criminal Court with a Bilateral Immunity Agreement of protection for the US-military (as covered under Article 98).
Bilateral relations
See also
List of diplomatic missions in Gabon
List of diplomatic missions of Gabon
References
Government of Gabon
Politics of Gabon | [
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12047 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza%20Strip | Gaza Strip | The Gaza Strip (; ), or simply Gaza, is a Palestinian enclave on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. It borders Egypt on the southwest for and Israel on the east and north along a border. The Gaza Strip and the West Bank are claimed by the de jure sovereign State of Palestine.
The territories of Gaza and the West Bank are separated from each other by Israeli territory. Both fell under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority, but the Strip has, since the Battle of Gaza in June 2007, been governed by Hamas, a militant, Palestinian, fundamentalist Islamic organization, which came to power in the last-held elections in 2006. It has been placed under an Israeli and US-led international economic and political boycott from that time onwards.
The territory is long, from wide, and has a total area of . With around 1.85 million Palestinians on some 362 square kilometers, Gaza, if considered a top-level political unit, ranks as the 3rd most densely populated in the world. An extensive Israeli buffer zone within the Strip renders much land off-limits to Gaza's Palestinians. Gaza has an annual population growth rate of 2.91% (2014 est.), the 13th highest in the world, and is often referred to as overcrowded. The population is expected to increase to 2.1 million in 2020. In 2012, the United Nations Country Team (UNCT) in the occupied Palestinian territory warned that the Gaza Strip might not be a "liveable place" by 2020; as of 2020, Gaza had suffered shortages of water, medicine and power, a situation exacerbated by the coronavirus crisis. According to Al Jazeera, "19 human rights groups urged Israel to lift its siege on Gaza". The UN has also urged the lifting of the blockade, while a report by UNCTAD, prepared for the UN General Assembly and released on 25 November 2020, said that Gaza's economy was on the verge of collapse and that it was essential to lift the blockade. Due to the Israeli and Egyptian border closures and the Israeli sea and air blockade, the population is not free to leave or enter the Gaza Strip, nor is it allowed to freely import or export goods. Sunni Muslims make up the predominant part of the population in the Gaza Strip.
Despite the 2005 Israeli disengagement from Gaza, the United Nations, international human rights organisations, and the majority of governments and legal commentators consider the territory to be still occupied by Israel, supported by additional restrictions placed on Gaza by Egypt. Israel maintains direct external control over Gaza and indirect control over life within Gaza: it controls Gaza's air and maritime space, as well as six of Gaza's seven land crossings. It reserves the right to enter Gaza at will with its military and maintains a no-go buffer zone within the Gaza territory. Gaza is dependent on Israel for water, electricity, telecommunications, and other utilities. The system of control imposed by Israel was described by Jerome Slater in the Fall 2012 edition of International Security as an "indirect occupation". Some Israeli analysts have disputed the idea that Israel still occupies Gaza, and have depicted the territory as a de facto independent state.
When Hamas won a majority in the 2006 Palestinian legislative election, the opposing political party, Fatah, refused to join the proposed coalition, until a short-lived unity government agreement was brokered by Saudi Arabia. When this collapsed under pressure from Israel and the United States, the Palestinian Authority instituted a non-Hamas government in the West Bank while Hamas formed a government on its own in Gaza. Further economic sanctions were imposed by Israel and the European Quartet against Hamas. A brief civil war between the two Palestinian groups had broken out in Gaza when, apparently under a US-backed plan, Fatah contested Hamas's administration. Hamas emerged the victor and expelled Fatah-allied officials and members of the PA's security apparatus from the strip, and has remained the sole governing power in Gaza since that date.
History
Gaza was part of the Ottoman Empire, before it was occupied by the United Kingdom (1918–1948), Egypt (1948–1967), and then Israel, which in 1993 granted the Palestinian Authority in Gaza limited self-governance through the Oslo Accords. Since 2007, the Gaza Strip has been de facto governed by Hamas, which claims to represent the Palestinian National Authority and the Palestinian people.
The territory is still considered to be occupied by Israel by the United Nations, International human rights organisations, and the majority of governments and legal commentators, despite the 2005 Israeli disengagement from Gaza. Israel maintains direct external control over Gaza and indirect control over life within Gaza: it controls Gaza's air and maritime space, and six of Gaza's seven land crossings. It reserves the right to enter Gaza at will with its military and maintains a no-go buffer zone within the Gaza territory. Gaza is dependent on Israel for its water, electricity, telecommunications, and other utilities.
The Gaza Strip acquired its current northern and eastern boundaries at the cessation of fighting in the 1948 war, confirmed by the Israel–Egypt Armistice Agreement on 24 February 1949. Article V of the Agreement declared that the demarcation line was not to be an international border. At first the Gaza Strip was officially administered by the All-Palestine Government, established by the Arab League in September 1948. All-Palestine in the Gaza Strip was managed under the military authority of Egypt, functioning as a puppet state, until it officially merged into the United Arab Republic and dissolved in 1959. From the time of the dissolution of the All-Palestine Government until 1967, the Gaza Strip was directly administered by an Egyptian military governor.
Israel captured the Gaza Strip from Egypt in the Six-Day War in 1967. Pursuant to the Oslo Accords signed in 1993, the Palestinian Authority became the administrative body that governed Palestinian population centers while Israel maintained control of the airspace, territorial waters and border crossings with the exception of the land border with Egypt which is controlled by Egypt. In 2005, Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip under their unilateral disengagement plan.
In July 2007, after winning the 2006 Palestinian legislative election, Hamas became the elected government. In 2007, Hamas expelled the rival party Fatah from Gaza. This broke the Unity Government between Gaza Strip and the West Bank, creating two separate governments for the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
In 2014, following reconciliation talks, Hamas and Fatah formed a Palestinian unity government within the West Bank and Gaza. Rami Hamdallah became the coalition's Prime Minister and has planned for elections in Gaza and the West Bank. In July 2014, a set of lethal incidents between Hamas and Israel led to the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict. The Unity Government dissolved on 17 June 2015 after President Abbas said it was unable to operate in the Gaza Strip.
Following the takeover of Gaza by Hamas, the territory has been subjected to a blockade, maintained by Israel and Egypt. Israel maintains that this is necessary: to impede Hamas from rearming and to restrict Palestinian rocket attacks; Egypt maintains that it prevents Gaza residents from entering Egypt. The blockades by Israel and Egypt extended to drastic reductions in the availability of necessary construction materials, medical supplies, and foodstuffs following intensive airstrikes on Gaza City in December 2008. A leaked UN report in 2009 warned that the blockade was "devastating livelihoods" and causing gradual "de-development". It pointed out that glass was prohibited by the blockade. Under the blockade, Gaza is viewed by some critics as an "open-air prison", although the claim is contested. In a report submitted to the UN in 2013, the chairperson of Al Athar Global Consulting in Gaza, Reham el Wehaidy, encouraged the repair of basic infrastructure by 2020, in the light of projected demographic increase of 500,000 by 2020 and intensified housing problems.
Prior to 1923
The earliest major settlement in the area was at Tell El Sakan and Tall al-Ajjul, two Bronze Age settlements that served as administrative outposts for Ancient Egyptian governance. The Philistines, mentioned frequently in The Bible, were located in the region, and the early city of Gaza was captured by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE during his Egyptian campaign. Following the death of Alexander, Gaza, along with Egypt, fell under the administration of the Ptolemaic dynasty, before passing to the Seleucid dynasty after about 200 BCE. The city of Gaza was destroyed by the Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus in 96 BCE, and re-established under Roman administration during the 1st century CE. The Gaza region was moved between different Roman provinces over time, from Judea to Syria Palaestina to Palaestina Prima. During the 7th century the territory was passed back and forth between the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire and the Persian (Sasanian) Empires before the Rashidun Caliphate was established during the great Islamic expansions of the 7th century.
During the Crusades, the city of Gaza was reported to be mostly abandoned and in ruins; the region was placed under the direct administration of the Knights Templar during the Kingdom of Jerusalem; it was traded back and forth several times between Christian and Muslim rule during the 12th century, before the Crusader-founded kingdom lost control permanently and the land became part of the Ayyubid dynasty's lands for a century until the Mongol ruler Hulagu Khan destroyed the city. In the wake of the Mongols, the Mamluk Sultanate established control over Egypt and the eastern Levant, and would control Gaza until the 16th century, when the Ottoman Empire absorbed the Mamluk territories. Ottoman rule continued until the years following World War I, when the Ottoman Empire collapsed and Gaza formed part of the League of Nations British Mandate of Palestine.
1923–1948 British Mandate
The British Mandate for Palestine was based on the principles contained in Article 22 of the draft Covenant of the League of Nations and the San Remo Resolution of 25 April 1920 by the principal Allied and associated powers after the First World War. The mandate formalized British rule in the southern part of Ottoman Syria from 1923–1948.
1948 All-Palestine government
On 22 September 1948, towards the end of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the All-Palestine Government was proclaimed in the Egyptian-occupied Gaza City by the Arab League. It was conceived partly as an Arab League attempt to limit the influence of Transjordan in Palestine. The All-Palestine Government was quickly recognized by six of the then seven members of the Arab League: Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, but not by Transjordan. It was not recognized by any country outside the Arab League.
After the cessation of hostilities, the Israel–Egypt Armistice Agreement of 24 February 1949 established the separation line between Egyptian and Israeli forces, and set what became the present boundary between the Gaza Strip and Israel. Both sides declared that the boundary was not an international border. The southern border with Egypt continued to be the international border drawn in 1906 between the Ottoman Empire and the British Empire.
Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip or Egypt were issued All-Palestine passports. Egypt did not offer them citizenship. From the end of 1949, they received aid directly from UNRWA. During the Suez Crisis (1956), the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula were occupied by Israeli troops, who withdrew under international pressure. The government was accused of being little more than a façade for Egyptian control, with negligible independent funding or influence. It subsequently moved to Cairo and dissolved in 1959 by decree of Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser.
1959–1967 Egyptian occupation
After the dissolution of the All-Palestine Government in 1959, under the excuse of pan-Arabism, Egypt continued to occupy the Gaza Strip until 1967. Egypt never annexed the Gaza Strip, but instead treated it as a controlled territory and administered it through a military governor. The influx of over 200,000 refugees from former Mandatory Palestine, roughly a quarter of those who fled or were expelled from their homes during, and in the aftermath of, the 1948 Arab–Israeli War into Gaza resulted in a dramatic decrease in the standard of living. Because the Egyptian government restricted movement to and from the Gaza Strip, its inhabitants could not look elsewhere for gainful employment.
1967 Israeli occupation
In June 1967, during the Six-Day War, Israel Defense Forces captured the Gaza Strip.
According to Tom Segev, moving the Palestinians out of the country had been a persistent element of Zionist thinking from early times. In December 1967, during a meeting at which the Security Cabinet brainstormed about what to do with the Arab population of the newly occupied territories, one of the suggestions Prime Minister Levi Eshkol proffered regarding Gaza was that the people might leave if Israel restricted their access to water supplies, stating: "Perhaps if we don't give them enough water they won't have a choice, because the orchards will yellow and wither." A number of measures, including financial incentives, were taken shortly afterwards to begin to encourage Gazans to emigrate elsewhere.
Subsequent to this military victory, Israel created the first settlement bloc in the Strip, Gush Katif, in the southwest corner near Rafah and the Egyptian border on a spot where a small kibbutz had previously existed for 18 months between 1946–48. In total, between 1967 and 2005, Israel established 21 settlements in Gaza, comprising 20% of the total territory.
The economic growth rate from 1967 to 1982 averaged roughly 9.7 percent per annum, due in good part to expanded income from work opportunities inside Israel, which had a major utility for the latter by supplying the country with a large unskilled and semi-skilled workforce. Gaza's agricultural sector was adversely affected as one-third of the Strip was appropriated by Israel, competition for scarce water resources stiffened, and the lucrative cultivation of citrus declined with the advent of Israeli policies, such as prohibitions on planting new trees and taxation that gave breaks to Israeli producers, factors which militated against growth. Gaza's direct exports of these products to Western markets, as opposed to Arab markets, was prohibited except through Israeli marketing vehicles, in order to assist Israeli citrus exports to the same markets. The overall result was that large numbers of farmers were forced out of the agricultural sector. Israel placed quotas on all goods exported from Gaza, while abolishing restrictions on the flow of Israeli goods into the Strip. Sara Roy characterised the pattern as one of structural de-development
1979 Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty
On 26 March 1979, Israel and Egypt signed the Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty. Among other things, the treaty provided for the withdrawal by Israel of its armed forces and civilians from the Sinai Peninsula, which Israel had captured during the Six-Day War. The Egyptians agreed to keep the Sinai Peninsula demilitarized. The final status of the Gaza Strip, and other relations between Israel and Palestinians, was not dealt with in the treaty. Egypt renounced all territorial claims to territory north of the international border. The Gaza Strip remained under Israeli military administration until 1994. During that time, the military was responsible for the maintenance of civil facilities and services.
After the Egyptian–Israeli Peace Treaty 1979, a 100-meter-wide buffer zone between Gaza and Egypt known as the Philadelphi Route was established. The international border along the Philadelphi corridor between Egypt and the Gaza Strip is long.
1994: Gaza under Palestinian Authority
In September 1992, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin told a delegation from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy "I would like Gaza to sink into the sea, but that won't happen, and a solution must be found."
In May 1994, following the Palestinian-Israeli agreements known as the Oslo Accords, a phased transfer of governmental authority to the Palestinians took place. Much of the Strip (except for the settlement blocs and military areas) came under Palestinian control. The Israeli forces left Gaza City and other urban areas, leaving the new Palestinian Authority to administer and police those areas. The Palestinian Authority, led by Yasser Arafat, chose Gaza City as its first provincial headquarters. In September 1995, Israel and the PLO signed a second peace agreement, extending the Palestinian Authority to most West Bank towns.
Between 1994 and 1996, Israel built the Israeli Gaza Strip barrier to improve security in Israel. The barrier was largely torn down by Palestinians at the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in September 2000.
2000 Second Intifada
The Second Intifada broke out in September 2000 with waves of protest, civil unrest and bombings against Israeli military and civilians, many of them perpetrated by suicide bombers. The Second Intifada also marked the beginning of rocket attacks and bombings of Israeli border localities by Palestinian guerrillas from the Gaza Strip, especially by the Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad movements.
Between December 2000 and June 2001, the barrier between Gaza and Israel was reconstructed. A barrier on the Gaza Strip-Egypt border was constructed starting in 2004. The main crossing points are the northern Erez Crossing into Israel and the southern Rafah Crossing into Egypt. The eastern Karni Crossing used for cargo, closed down in 2011. Israel controls the Gaza Strip's northern borders, as well as its territorial waters and airspace. Egypt controls Gaza Strip's southern border, under an agreement between it and Israel. Neither Israel or Egypt permits free travel from Gaza as both borders are heavily militarily fortified. "Egypt maintains a strict blockade on Gaza in order to isolate Hamas from Islamist insurgents in the Sinai."
2005 Israel's unilateral disengagement
In February 2005, the Knesset approved a unilateral disengagement plan and began removing Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005. All Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip and the joint Israeli-Palestinian Erez Industrial Zone were dismantled, and 9,000 Israelis, most living in Gush Katif, were forcibly evicted.
On 12 September 2005, the Israeli cabinet formally declared an end to Israeli military occupation of the Gaza Strip.
"The Oslo Agreements gave Israel full control over Gaza's airspace, but established that the Palestinians could build an airport in the area..." and the disengagement plan states that: "Israel will hold sole control of Gaza airspace and will continue to carry out military activity in the waters of the Gaza Strip." "Therefore, Israel continues to maintain exclusive control of Gaza's airspace and the territorial waters, just as it has since it occupied the Gaza Strip in 1967." Human Rights Watch has advised the UN Human Rights Council that it (and others) consider Israel to be the occupying power of the Gaza Strip because Israel controls Gaza Strip's airspace, territorial waters and controls the movement of people or goods in or out of Gaza by air or sea. The EU considers Gaza to be occupied. Israel also withdrew from the Philadelphi Route, a narrow strip of land adjacent to the border with Egypt, after Egypt agreed to secure its side of the border. Under the Oslo Accords, the Philadelphi Route was to remain under Israeli control to prevent the smuggling of weapons and people across the Egyptian border, but Egypt (under EU supervision) committed itself to patrolling the area and preventing such incidents. With the Agreement on Movement and Access, known as the Rafah Agreement in the same year Israel ended its presence in the Philadelphi Route and transferred responsibility for security arrangements to Egypt and the PA under the supervision of the EU.
The Israel Defense Forces left the Gaza Strip on 1 September 2005 as part of Israel's unilateral disengagement plan and all Israeli citizens were evicted from the area. In November 2005, an "Agreement on Movement and Access" between Israel and the Palestinian Authority was brokered by then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to improve Palestinian freedom of movement and economic activity in the Gaza Strip. Under its terms, the Rafah crossing with Egypt was to be reopened, with transits monitored by the Palestinian National Authority and the European Union. Only people with Palestinian ID, or foreign nationals, by exception, in certain categories, subject to Israeli oversight, were permitted to cross in and out. All goods, vehicles and trucks to and from Egypt passed through the Kerem Shalom Crossing, under full Israeli supervision. Goods were also permitted transit at the Karni crossing in the north.
After the Israeli withdrawal in 2005 the Oslo Accords give the Palestinian Authority administrative authority in the Gaza Strip. The Rafah Border Crossing has been supervised by EU Border Assistance Mission Rafah under an agreement finalized in November 2005. The Oslo Accord permits Israel to control the airspace and sea space.
Post-2006 elections violence
In the Palestinian parliamentary elections held on 25 January 2006, Hamas won a plurality of 42.9% of the total vote and 74 out of 132 total seats (56%). When Hamas assumed power the next month, Israel, the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations demanded that Hamas accept all previous agreements, recognize Israel's right to exist, and renounce violence; when Hamas refused, they cut off direct aid to the Palestinian Authority, although some aid money was redirected to humanitarian organizations not affiliated with the government. The resulting political disorder and economic stagnation led to many Palestinians emigrating from the Gaza Strip.
In January 2007, fighting erupted between Hamas and Fatah. The deadliest clashes occurred in the northern Gaza Strip, where General Muhammed Gharib, a senior commander of the Fatah-dominated Preventive Security Force, died when a rocket hit his home.
On 30 January 2007, a truce was negotiated between Fatah and Hamas. However, after a few days, new fighting broke out. On 1 February, Hamas killed 6 people in an ambush on a Gaza convoy which delivered equipment for Abbas' Palestinian Presidential Guard, according to diplomats, meant to counter smuggling of more powerful weapons into Gaza by Hamas for its fast-growing "Executive Force". According to Hamas, the deliveries to the Presidential Guard were intended to instigate sedition (against Hamas), while withholding money and assistance from the Palestinian people. Fatah fighters stormed a Hamas-affiliated university in the Gaza Strip. Officers from Abbas' presidential guard battled Hamas gunmen guarding the Hamas-led Interior Ministry.
In May 2007, new fighting broke out between the factions. Interior Minister Hani Qawasmi, who had been considered a moderate civil servant acceptable to both factions, resigned due to what he termed harmful behavior by both sides.
Fighting spread in the Gaza Strip, with both factions attacking vehicles and facilities of the other side. Following a breakdown in an Egyptian-brokered truce, Israel launched an air strike which destroyed a building used by Hamas. Ongoing violence prompted fear that it could bring the end of the Fatah-Hamas coalition government, and possibly the end of the Palestinian authority.
Hamas spokesman Moussa Abu Marzouk blamed the conflict between Hamas and Fatah on Israel, stating that the constant pressure of economic sanctions resulted in the "real explosion." Associated Press reporter Ibrahim Barzak wrote an eyewitness account stating: "Today I have seen people shot before my eyes, I heard the screams of terrified women and children in a burning building, and I argued with gunmen who wanted to take over my home. I have seen a lot in my years as a journalist in Gaza, but this is the worst it's been."
From 2006–2007 more than 600 Palestinians were killed in fighting between Hamas and Fatah. 349 Palestinians were killed in fighting between factions in 2007. 160 Palestinians killed each other in June alone.
2007 Hamas takeover
Following the victory of Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian legislative election, Hamas and Fatah formed the Palestinian authority national unity government headed by Ismail Haniya. Shortly after, Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in the course of the Battle of Gaza, seizing government institutions and replacing Fatah and other government officials with its own. By 14 June, Hamas fully controlled the Gaza Strip. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas responded by declaring a state of emergency, dissolving the unity government and forming a new government without Hamas participation. PNA security forces in the West Bank arrested a number of Hamas members.
In late June 2008, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan declared the West Bank-based cabinet formed by Abbas as "the sole legitimate Palestinian government". Egypt moved its embassy from Gaza to the West Bank.
Saudi Arabia and Egypt supported reconciliation and a new unity government and pressed Abbas to start talks with Hamas. Abbas had always conditioned this on Hamas returning control of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian Authority. Hamas visited a number of countries, including Russia, and the EU member states. Opposition parties and politicians called for a dialogue with Hamas as well as an end to the economic sanctions.
After the takeover, Israel and Egypt closed their border crossings with Gaza. Palestinian sources reported that European Union monitors fled the Rafah Border Crossing, on the Gaza–Egypt border for fear of being kidnapped or harmed. Arab foreign ministers and Palestinian officials presented a united front against control of the border by Hamas.
Meanwhile, Israeli and Egyptian security reports said that Hamas continued smuggling in large quantities of explosives and arms from Egypt through tunnels. Egyptian security forces uncovered 60 tunnels in 2007.
Egyptian border barrier breach
On 23 January 2008, after months of preparation during which the steel reinforcement of the border barrier was weakened, Hamas destroyed several parts of the wall dividing Gaza and Egypt in the town of Rafah. Hundreds of thousands of Gazans crossed the border into Egypt seeking food and supplies. Due to the crisis, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak ordered his troops to allow the Palestinians in but to verify that they did not bring weapons back across the border. Egypt arrested and later released several armed Hamas militants in the Sinai who presumably wanted to infiltrate into Israel. At the same time, Israel increased its state of alert along the length of the Israel-Egypt Sinai border, and warned its citizens to leave Sinai "without delay."
The EU Border Monitors initially monitored the border because Hamas guaranteed their safety, but they later fled. The Palestinian Authority demanded that Egypt deal only with the Authority in negotiations relating to borders. Israel eased restrictions on the delivery of goods and medical supplies but curtailed electricity by 5% in one of its ten lines. The Rafah crossing remained closed into mid-February.
In February 2008, 2008 Israel-Gaza conflict intensified, with rockets launched at Israeli cities. Aggression by Hamas led to Israeli military action on 1 March 2008, resulting in over 110 Palestinians being killed according to BBC News, as well as 2 Israeli soldiers. Israeli human rights group B'Tselem estimated that 45 of those killed were not involved in hostilities, and 15 were minors.
After a round of tit-for-tat arrests between Fatah and Hamas in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, the Hilles clan from Gaza were relocated to Jericho on 4 August 2008. Retiring Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on 11 November 2008, "The question is not whether there will be a confrontation, but when it will take place, under what circumstances, and who will control these circumstances, who will dictate them, and who will know to exploit the time from the beginning of the ceasefire until the moment of confrontation in the best possible way." On 14 November 2008, Israel blockaded its border with Gaza after a five-month ceasefire broke down. In 2013 Israel and Qatar brought Gaza's lone power plant back to life for the first time in seven weeks, bringing relief to the Palestinian coastal enclave where a lack of cheap fuel has contributed to the overflow of raw sewage, 21-hour blackouts and flooding after a ferocious winter storm. "Palestinian officials said that a $10 million grant from Qatar was covering the cost of two weeks' worth of industrial diesel that started entering Gaza by truckload from Israel."
On 25 November 2008, Israel closed its cargo crossing with Gaza after Qassam rockets were fired into its territory. On 28 November, after a 24-hour period of quiet, the IDF facilitated the transfer of over thirty truckloads of food, basic supplies and medicine into Gaza and transferred fuel to the area's main power plant.
2008 Gaza War
On 27 December 2008, Israeli F-16 fighters launched a series of air strikes against targets in Gaza following the breakdown of a temporary truce between Israel and Hamas. Israeli defense sources said that Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the IDF to prepare for the operation six months before it began, using long-term planning and intelligence-gathering.
Various sites that Israel claimed were being used as weapons depots were struck: police stations, schools, hospitals, UN warehouses, mosques, various Hamas government buildings and other buildings. Israel said that the attack was a response to Hamas rocket attacks on southern Israel, which totaled over 3,000 in 2008, and which intensified during the few weeks preceding the operation. Israel advised people near military targets to leave before the attacks. Palestinian medical staff claimed at least 434 Palestinians were killed, and at least 2,800 wounded, consisting of many civilians and an unknown number of Hamas members, in the first five days of Israeli strikes on Gaza. The IDF denied that the majority of the dead were civilian. Israel began a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip on 3 January 2009. Israel rebuffed many cease-fire calls but later declared a cease fire although Hamas vowed to fight on.
A total of 1,100–1,400 Palestinians (295–926 civilians) and 13 Israelis were killed in the 22-day war.
The conflict damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of homes, 15 of Gaza's 27 hospitals and 43 of its 110 primary health care facilities, 800 water wells, 186 greenhouses, and nearly all of its 10,000 family farms; leaving 50,000 homeless, 400,000–500,000 without running water, one million without electricity, and resulting in acute food shortages. The people of Gaza still suffer from the loss of these facilities and homes, especially since they have great challenges to rebuild them.
By February 2009, food availability returned to pre-war levels but a shortage of fresh produce was forecast due to damage sustained by the agricultural sector.
In the immediate aftermath of the Gaza War, Hamas executed 19 Palestinian Fatah members, on charges that they had collaborated with Israel. Many had been recaptured after escaping prison which had been bombed during the war. The executions followed an Israeli strike which killed 3 top Hamas officials, including Said Seyam, with Hamas charging that information on where Hamas leaders lived and where arms were stocked had been passed to Fatah in the West Bank, and via the PA to Israel, with whom the PA shares security intrelligence. Many suspected were tortured or shot in the legs. Hamas thereafter pursued a course of trying collaborators in courts, rather than executing them in the street.
A 2014 unity government with Fatah
On 5 June 2014, Fatah signed a unity agreement with the Hamas political party.
2014 Gaza War
Connections to Sinai insurgency
Egypt's Sinai Peninsula borders the Gaza Strip and Israel. Its vast and desolate terrain has transformed it into a hotbed of illicit and militant activity. Although most of the area's inhabitants are tribal Bedouins, there has been a recent increase in al-Qaeda inspired global jihadi militant groups operating in the region. Out of the approximately 15 main militant groups operating in the Sinai desert, the most dominant and active militant groups have close relations with the Gaza Strip.
According to Egyptian authorities, the Army of Islam, a U.S. designated "terrorist organization" based in the Gaza Strip, is responsible for training and supplying many militant organizations and jihadist members in Sinai. Mohammed Dormosh, the Army of Islam's leader, is known for his close relationships to the Hamas leadership. Army of Islam smuggles members into the Gaza Strip for training, then returns them to the Sinai Peninsula to engage in militant and jihadist activities.
2018 Israel–Gaza conflict
2021 Israel–Gaza crisis
Before the crisis, Gaza had 48% unemployment and half of the population lived in poverty. During the crisis, 66 children died (551 children in the previous conflict). On June 13, 2021, a high level World Bank delegation visited Gaza to witness the damage. Mobilization with UN and EU partners is ongoing to finalize a needs assessment in support of Gaza’s reconstruction and recovery.
Geography, geology and climate
The Gaza Strip is located in the Middle East (at ). It has a border with Israel, and an border with Egypt, near the city of Rafah. Khan Yunis is located northeast of Rafah, and several towns around Deir el-Balah are located along the coast between it and Gaza City. Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun are located to the north and northeast of Gaza City, respectively. The Gush Katif bloc of Israeli settlements used to exist on the sand dunes adjacent to Rafah and Khan Yunis, along the southwestern edge of the Mediterranean coastline. Al Deira beach is a popular venue for surfers.
The topography of the Gaza Strip is dominated by three ridges parallel to the coastline, which consist of Pleistocene-Holocene aged calcareous aeolian (wind deposited) sandstones, locally referred to as "kurkar", intercalated with red-coloured fine grained paleosols, referred to as "hamra". The three ridges are separated by wadis, which are filled with alluvial deposits. The terrain is flat or rolling, with dunes near the coast. The highest point is Abu 'Awdah (Joz Abu 'Auda), at above sea level.
The Gaza Strip has a hot semi-arid climate (Köppen BSh), with warm winters during which practically all the annual rainfall occurs, and dry, hot summers. Despite the dryness, humidity is high throughout the year. Annual rainfall is higher than in any part of Egypt at between in the south and in the north, but almost all of this falls between November and February. Environmental problems include desertification; salination of fresh water; sewage treatment; water-borne diseases; soil degradation; and depletion and contamination of underground water resources.
Natural resources
Natural resources of Gaza include arable land—about a third of the strip is irrigated. Recently, natural gas was discovered. The Gaza Strip is largely dependent on water from Wadi Gaza, which also supplies Israel.
Gaza's marine gas reserves extend 32 kilometres from the Gaza Strip's coastline and were calculated at 35 BCM.
Economy
The economy of the Gaza Strip is severely hampered by Egypt and Israel's almost total blockade, the high population density, limited land access, strict internal and external security controls, the effects of Israeli military operations, and restrictions on labor and trade access across the border. Per capita income (PPP) was estimated at US$3,100 in 2009, a position of 164th in the world. Seventy percent of the population is below the poverty line according to a 2009 estimate. Gaza Strip industries are generally small family businesses that produce textiles, soap, olive-wood carvings, and mother-of-pearl souvenirs.
The main agricultural products are olives, citrus, vegetables, Halal beef, and dairy products. Primary exports are citrus and cut flowers, while primary imports are food, consumer goods, and construction materials. The main trade partners of the Gaza Strip are Israel and Egypt.
The EU described the Gaza economy as follows: "Since Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007 and following the closure imposed by Israel, the situation in the Strip has been one of chronic need, de-development and donor dependency, despite a temporary relaxation on restrictions in movement of people and goods following a flotilla raid in 2010. The closure has effectively cut off access for exports to traditional markets in Israel, transfers to the West Bank and has severely restricted imports. Exports are now down to 2% of 2007 levels."
According to Sara Roy, one senior IDF officer told an UNWRA official in 2015 that Israel's policy towards the Gaza Strip consisted of: "No development, no prosperity, no humanitarian crisis."
After Oslo (1994–2007)
Economic output in the Gaza Strip declined by about one-third between 1992 and 1996. This downturn was attributed to Israeli closure policies and, to a lesser extent, corruption and mismanagement by Yasser Arafat. Economic development has been hindered by Israel refusing to allow the operation of a sea harbour. A seaport was planned to be built in Gaza with help from France and The Netherlands, but the project was bombed by Israel in 2001. Israel said that the reason for bombing was that Israeli settlements were being shot at from the construction site at the harbour. As a result, international transports (both trade and aid) had to go through Israel, which was hindered by the imposition of generalized border closures. These also disrupted previously established labor and commodity market relationships between Israel and the Strip. A serious negative social effect of this downturn was the emergence of high unemployment.
For its energy, Gaza is largely dependent on Israel either for import of electricity or fuel for its sole power plant. The Oslo Accords set limits for the Palestinian production and importation of energy. Pursuant to the Accords, the Israel Electric Corporation exclusively supplies the electricity (63% of the total consumption in 2013). The amount of electricity has consistently been limited to 120 megawatts, which is the amount Israel undertook to sell to Gaza pursuant to the Oslo Accords.
Israel's use of comprehensive closures decreased over the next few years. In 1998, Israel implemented new policies to ease security procedures and allow somewhat freer movement of Gazan goods and labor into Israel. These changes led to three years of economic recovery in the Gaza Strip, disrupted by the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada in the last quarter of 2000. Before the second Palestinian uprising in September 2000, around 25,000 workers from the Gaza Strip (about 2% of the population) worked in Israel on a daily basis.
The Second Intifada led to a steep decline in the economy of Gaza, which was heavily reliant upon external markets. Israel—which had begun its occupation by helping Gazans to plant approximately 618,000 trees in 1968, and to improve seed selection—over the first 3-year period of the second intifada, destroyed 10 percent of Gazan agricultural land, and uprooted 226,000 trees. The population became largely dependent on humanitarian assistance, primarily from UN agencies.
The al-Aqsa Intifada triggered tight IDF closures of the border with Israel, as well as frequent curbs on traffic in Palestinian self-rule areas, severely disrupting trade and labor movements. In 2001, and even more so in early 2002, internal turmoil and Israeli military measures led to widespread business closures and a sharp drop in GDP. Civilian infrastructure, such as the Palestine airport, was destroyed by Israel. Another major factor was a drop in income due to reduction in the number of Gazans permitted entry to work in Israel. After the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, the flow of a limited number of workers into Israel resumed, although Israel said it would reduce or end such permits due to the victory of Hamas in the 2006 parliamentary elections.
The Israeli settlers of Gush Katif built greenhouses and experimented with new forms of agriculture. These greenhouses provided employment for hundreds of Gazans. When Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2005, more than 3,000 (about half) of the greenhouses were purchased with $14 million raised by former World Bank president James Wolfensohn, and given to Palestinians to jump-start their economy. The rest were demolished by the departing settlers before there were offered a compensation as an inducement to leave them behind. The farming effort faltered due to limited water supply, Palestinian looting, restrictions on exports, and corruption in the Palestinian Authority. Many Palestinian companies repaired the greenhouses damaged and looted by the Palestinians after the Israeli withdrawal.
In 2005, after the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, Gaza businessmen envisaged a "magnificent future". $1.1 million was invested in an upscale restaurant, Roots, and plans were made to turn one of the Israeli settlements into a family resort.
Following Hamas takeover (2007–present)
The European Union states: "Gaza has experienced continuous economic decline since the imposition of a closure policy by Israel in 2007. This has had serious social and humanitarian consequences for many of its 1.7 million inhabitants. The situation has deteriorated further in recent months as a result of the geo-political changes which took place in the region during the course of 2013, particularly in Egypt and its closure of the majority of smuggling tunnels between Egypt and Gaza as well as increased restrictions at Rafah." Israel, the United States, Canada, and the European Union have frozen all funds to the Palestinian government after the formation of a Hamas-controlled government after its democratic victory in the 2006 Palestinian legislative election. They view the group as a terrorist organization, and have pressured Hamas to recognize Israel, renounce violence, and make good on past agreements. Prior to disengagement, 120,000 Palestinians from Gaza had been employed in Israel or in joint projects. After the Israeli withdrawal, the gross domestic product of the Gaza Strip declined. Jewish enterprises shut down, work relationships were severed, and job opportunities in Israel dried up. After the 2006 elections, fighting broke out between Fatah and Hamas, which Hamas won in the Gaza Strip on 14 June 2007. Israel imposed a blockade, and the only goods permitted into the Strip through the land crossings were goods of a humanitarian nature, and these were permitted in limited quantities.
An easing of Israel's closure policy in 2010 resulted in an improvement in some economic indicators, although exports were still restricted. According to the Israeli Defense Forces and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the economy of the Gaza Strip improved in 2011, with a drop in unemployment and an increase in GDP. New malls opened and local industry began to develop. This economic upswing has led to the construction of hotels and a rise in the import of cars. Wide-scale development has been made possible by the unhindered movement of goods into Gaza through the Kerem Shalom Crossing and tunnels between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. The current rate of trucks entering Gaza through Kerem Shalom is 250 trucks per day. The increase in building activity has led to a shortage of construction workers. To make up for the deficit, young people are being sent to learn the trade in Turkey.
In 2012, Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar said that Gaza's economic situation has improved and Gaza has become self-reliant "in several aspects except petroleum and electricity" despite Israel's blockade. Zahar said that Gaza's economic conditions are better than those in the West Bank. In 2014, the EU's opinion was: "Today, Gaza is facing a dangerous and pressing humanitarian and economic situation with power outages across Gaza for up to 16 hours a day and, as a consequence, the closure of sewage pumping operations, reduced access to clean water; a reduction in medical supplies and equipment; the cessation of imports of construction materials; rising unemployment, rising prices and increased food insecurity. If left unaddressed, the situation could have serious consequences for stability in Gaza, for security more widely in the region as well as for the peace process itself."
2012 fuel crisis
Usually, diesel for Gaza came from Israel, but in 2011, Hamas started to buy cheaper fuel from Egypt, bringing it via a network of tunnels, and refused to allow it from Israel.
In early 2012, due to internal economic disagreement between the Palestinian Authority and the Hamas Government in Gaza, decreased supplies from Egypt and through tunnel smuggling, and Hamas's refusal to ship fuel via Israel, the Gaza Strip plunged into a fuel crisis, bringing increasingly long electricity shut downs and disruption of transportation. Egypt had attempted for a while to stop the use of tunnels for delivery of Egyptian fuel purchased by Palestinian authorities, and had severely reduced supply through the tunnel network. As the crisis broke out, Hamas sought to equip the Rafah terminal between Egypt and Gaza for fuel transfer, and refused to accept fuel to be delivered via the Kerem Shalom crossing between Israel and Gaza.
In mid-February 2012, as the crisis escalated, Hamas rejected an Egyptian proposal to bring in fuel via the Kerem Shalom Crossing between Israel and Gaza to reactivate Gaza's only power plant. Ahmed Abu Al-Amreen of the Hamas-run Energy Authority refused it on the grounds that the crossing is operated by Israel and Hamas' fierce opposition to the existence of Israel. Egypt cannot ship diesel fuel to Gaza directly through the Rafah crossing point, because it is limited to the movement of individuals.
In early March 2012, the head of Gaza's energy authority stated that Egypt wanted to transfer energy via the Kerem Shalom Crossing, but he personally refused it to go through the "Zionist entity" (Israel) and insisted that Egypt transfer the fuel through the Rafah Crossing, although this crossing is not equipped to handle the half-million liters needed each day.
In late March 2012, Hamas began offering carpools for people to use Hamas state vehicles to get to work. Many Gazans began to wonder how these vehicles have fuel themselves, as diesel was completely unavailable in Gaza, ambulances could no longer be used, but Hamas government officials still had fuel for their own cars. Many Gazans said that Hamas confiscated the fuel it needed from petrol stations and used it exclusively for their own purposes.
Egypt agreed to provide 600,000 liters of fuel to Gaza daily, but it had no way of delivering it that Hamas would agree to.
In addition, Israel introduced a number of goods and vehicles into the Gaza Strip via the Kerem Shalom Crossing, as well as the normal diesel for hospitals. Israel also shipped 150,000 liters of diesel through the crossing, which was paid for by the Red Cross.
In April 2012, the issue was resolved as certain amounts of fuel were supplied with the involvement of the Red Cross, after the Palestinian Authority and Hamas reached a deal. Fuel was finally transferred via the Israeli Kerem Shalom Crossing, which Hamas previously refused to transfer fuel from.
Current budget
Most of the Gaza Strip administration funding comes from outside as an aid, with large portion delivered by UN organizations directly to education and food supply. Most of the Gaza GDP comes as foreign humanitarian and direct economic support. Of those funds, the major part is supported by the U.S. and the European Union. Portions of the direct economic support have been provided by the Arab League, though it largely has not provided funds according to schedule. Among other alleged sources of Gaza administration budget is Iran.
A diplomatic source told Reuters that Iran had funded Hamas in the past with up to $300 million per year, but the flow of money had not been regular in 2011. "Payment has been in suspension since August," said the source.
In January 2012, some diplomatic sources said that Turkey promised to provide Haniyeh's Gaza Strip administration with $300 million to support its annual budget.
In April 2012, the Hamas government in Gaza approved its budget for 2012, which was up 25 percent year-on-year over 2011 budget, indicating that donors, including Iran, benefactors in the Islamic world, and Palestinian expatriates, are still heavily funding the movement. Chief of Gaza's parliament's budget committee Jamal Nassar said the 2012 budget is $769 million, compared to $630 million in 2011.
Demographics
In 2010 approximately 1.6 million Palestinians lived in the Gaza Strip, almost 1.0 million of them UN-registered refugees. The majority of the Palestinians descend from refugees who were driven from or left their homes during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The Strip's population has continued to increase since that time, one of the main reasons being a total fertility rate which peaked at 8.3 children per woman in 1991 and fell to 4.4 children per woman in 2013 which was still among the highest worldwide. In a ranking by total fertility rate, this places Gaza 34th of 224 regions. The high total fertility rate also leads to the Gaza Strip having an unusually high proportion of children in the population, with 43.5% of the population being 14 or younger and in 2014 the median age was 18, compared to a world average of 28 and 30 in Israel. The only countries with a lower median age are countries in Africa such as Uganda where it was 15.
Sunni Muslims make up the predominant part of the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip. Most of the inhabitants are Sunni Muslims, with an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 Arab Christians, making the region 99.8 percent Sunni Muslim and 0.2 percent Christian.
Religion and culture
Religious compliance of population to Islam
Islamic law in Gaza
From 1987 to 1991, during the First Intifada, Hamas campaigned for the wearing of the hijab head-cover and for other measures (such as the promotion of polygamy, segregating women from men and insisting they stay at home). In the course of this campaign, women who chose not to wear the hijab were verbally and physically harassed by Hamas activists, leading to hijabs being worn "just to avoid problems on the streets".
In October 2000, Islamic extremists burned down the Windmill Hotel, owned by Basil Eleiwa, when they learned it had served alcohol.
Since Hamas took over in 2007, attempts have been made by Islamist activists to impose "Islamic dress" and to require women to wear the hijab. The government's "Islamic Endowment Ministry" has deployed Virtue Committee members to warn citizens of the dangers of immodest dress, card playing and dating. However, there are no government laws imposing dress and other moral standards, and the Hamas education ministry reversed one effort to impose Islamic dress on students. There has also been successful resistance to attempts by local Hamas officials to impose Islamic dress on women.
According to Human Rights Watch, the Hamas-controlled government stepped up its efforts to "Islamize" Gaza in 2010, efforts it says included the "repression of civil society" and "severe violations of personal freedom."
Palestinian researcher Khaled Al-Hroub has criticized what he called the "Taliban-like steps" Hamas has taken: "The Islamization that has been forced upon the Gaza Strip—the suppression of social, cultural, and press freedoms that do not suit Hamas's view[s]—is an egregious deed that must be opposed. It is the reenactment, under a religious guise, of the experience of [other] totalitarian regimes and dictatorships." Hamas officials denied having any plans to impose Islamic law. One legislator stated that "[w]hat you are seeing are incidents, not policy" and that "we believe in persuasion".
In October 2012 Gaza youth complained that security officers had obstructed their freedom to wear saggy pants and to have haircuts of their own choosing, and that they faced being arrested. Youth in Gaza are also arrested by security officers for wearing shorts and for showing their legs, which have been described by youth as embarrassing incidents, and one youth explained that "My saggy pants did not harm anyone." However, a spokesman for Gaza's Ministry of Interior denied such a campaign, and denied interfering in the lives of Gaza citizens, but explained that "maintaining the morals and values of the Palestinian society is highly required".
Islamic politics
Iran was the largest state supporter of Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood also gave support, but these political relationships have recently been disrupted following the Arab Spring by Iranian support for and the position of Hamas has declined as support diminishes.
Salafism
In addition to Hamas, a Salafist movement began to appear about 2005 in Gaza, characterized by "a strict lifestyle based on that of the earliest followers of Islam". , there are estimated to be only "hundreds or perhaps a few thousand" Salafists in Gaza. However, the failure of Hamas to lift the Israeli blockade of Gaza despite thousands of casualties and much destruction during 2008-9 and 2014 wars has weakened Hamas's support and led some in Hamas to be concerned about the possibility of defections to the Salafist "Islamic State".
The movement has clashed with Hamas on a number of occasions. In 2009, a Salafist leader, Abdul Latif Moussa, declared an Islamic emirate in the town of Rafah, on Gaza's southern border. Moussa and nineteen other people were killed when Hamas forces stormed his mosque and house. In 2011, Salafists abducted and murdered a pro-Palestinian Italian activist, Vittorio Arrigoni. Following this Hamas again took action to crush the Salafist groups.
Violence against Christians
Violence against Christians has been recorded. The owner of a Christian bookshop was abducted and murdered and, on 15 February 2008, the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) library in Gaza City was bombed.
Governance
Hamas government
Since its takeover of Gaza, Hamas has exercised executive authority over the Gaza Strip, and it governs the territory through its own ad hoc executive, legislative, and judicial bodies. The Hamas government of 2012 was the second Palestinian Hamas-dominated government, ruling over the Gaza Strip, since the split of the Palestinian National Authority in 2007. It was announced in early September 2012. The reshuffle of the previous government was approved by Gaza-based Hamas MPs from the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) or parliament.
The legal code Hamas applies in Gaza is based on Ottoman laws, the British Mandate's 1936 legal code, Palestinian Authority law, Sharia law, and Israeli military orders. Hamas maintains a judicial system with civilian and military courts and a public prosecution service.
Security
The Gaza Strip's security is mainly handled by Hamas through its military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, internal security service, and civil police force. The Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades have an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 operatives. However, other Palestinian militant factions operate in the Gaza Strip alongside, and sometimes opposed to Hamas. The Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine, also known as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) is the second largest militant faction operating in the Gaza Strip. Its military wing, the Al-Quds Brigades, has an estimated 8,000 fighters. In June 2013, the Islamic Jihad broke ties with Hamas leaders after Hamas police fatally shot the commander of Islamic Jihad's military wing. The third largest faction is the Popular Resistance Committees. Its military wing is known as the Al-Nasser Salah al-Deen Brigades.
Other factions include the Army of Islam (an Islamist faction of the Doghmush clan), the Nidal Al-Amoudi Battalion (an offshoot of the West Bank-based Fatah-linked al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades), the Abu Ali Mustapha Brigades (armed wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), the Sheikh Omar Hadid Brigade (ISIL offshoot), Humat al-Aqsa, Jaysh al-Ummah, Katibat al-Sheikh al-Emireen, the Mujahideen Brigades, and the Abdul al-Qadir al-Husseini Brigades.
Status
Legality of Hamas rule
After Hamas' June 2007 takeover, it ousted Fatah-linked officials from positions of power and authority (such as government positions, security services, universities, newspapers, etc.) and strove to enforce law by progressively removing guns from the hands of peripheral militias, clans, and criminal groups, and gaining control of supply tunnels. According to Amnesty International, under Hamas rule, newspapers were closed down and journalists were harassed. Fatah demonstrations were forbidden or suppressed, as in the case of a large demonstration on the anniversary of Yasser Arafat's death, which resulted in the deaths of seven people, after protesters hurled stones at Hamas security forces.
Hamas and other militant groups continued to fire Qassam rockets across the border into Israel. According to Israel, between the Hamas takeover and the end of January 2008, 697 rockets and 822 mortar bombs were fired at Israeli towns. In response, Israel targeted Qassam launchers and military targets and declared the Gaza Strip a hostile entity. In January 2008, Israel curtailed travel from Gaza, the entry of goods, and cut fuel supplies, resulting in power shortages. This brought charges that Israel was inflicting collective punishment on the Gaza population, leading to international condemnation. Despite multiple reports from within the Strip that food and other essentials were in short supply, Israel said that Gaza had enough food and energy supplies for weeks.
The Israeli government uses economic means to pressure Hamas. Among other things, it caused Israeli commercial enterprises like banks and fuel companies to stop doing business with the Gaza Strip. The role of private corporations in the relationship between Israel and the Gaza Strip is an issue that has not been extensively studied.
Due to continued rocket attacks including 50 in one day, in March 2008, air strikes and ground incursions by the IDF led to the deaths of over 110 Palestinians and extensive damage to Jabalia.
Occupation
The international community regards all of the Palestinian territories including Gaza as occupied. Human Rights Watch has declared at the UN Human Rights Council that it views Israel as a de facto occupying power in the Gaza Strip, even though Israel has no military or other presence, because the Oslo Accords authorize Israel to control the airspace and the territorial sea.
In his statement on the 2008–2009 Israel–Gaza conflict, Richard Falk, United Nations Special Rapporteur wrote that international humanitarian law applied to Israel "in regard to the obligations of an Occupying Power and in the requirements of the laws of war." Amnesty International, the World Health Organization, Oxfam, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the United Nations, the United Nations General Assembly, the UN Fact Finding Mission to Gaza, international human rights organizations, US government websites, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and a significant number of legal commentators (Geoffrey Aronson, Meron Benvenisti, Claude Bruderlein, Sari Bashi, Kenneth Mann, Shane Darcy, John Reynolds, Yoram Dinstein, John Dugard, Marc S. Kaliser, Mustafa Mari, and Iain Scobbie) maintain that Israel's extensive direct external control over Gaza, and indirect control over the lives of its internal population mean that Gaza remained occupied. In spite of Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, the Hamas government in Gaza considers Gaza as occupied territory.
Israel states that it does not exercise effective control or authority over any land or institutions in the Gaza Strip and thus the Gaza Strip is no longer subject to the former military occupation. Foreign Affairs Minister of Israel Tzipi Livni stated in January 2008: "Israel got out of Gaza. It dismantled its settlements there. No Israeli soldiers were left there after the disengagement." On 30 January 2008, the Supreme Court of Israel ruled that the Gaza Strip was not occupied by Israel in a decision on a petition against Israeli restrictions against the Gaza Strip which argued that it remained occupied. The Supreme Court ruled that Israel has not exercised effective control over the Gaza Strip since 2005, and accordingly, it was no longer occupied.
In a legal analysis Hanne Cuyckens agrees with the Israeli position that Gaza is no longer occupied - "Gaza is not technically occupied, given that there is no longer any effective control in the sense of Article 42 of the Hague Regulations. ... Even though the majority argues that the Gaza Strip is still occupied, the effective control test at the core of the law of occupation is no longer met and hence Gaza is no longer occupied." She disagrees that Israel cannot therefore be held responsible for the situation in Gaza because: "Nonetheless Israel continues to exercise an important level of control over the Gaza Strip and its population, making it difficult to accept that it would no longer have any obligations with regard to the Strip. ... the absence of occupation does not mean the absence of accountability. This responsibility is however not founded on the law of occupation but on general international humanitarian law, potentially complemented by international human rights law".
Avi Bell argues that Israel does not control the Gaza Strip for the purposes of the law of belligerent occupation or human rights duties: "The Naletilic decision of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia recited several factors indicating an occupier’s effective control, including that the local authorities must be incapable of functioning publicly, the occupier must have force present on the ground (or at least capable of being projected in a reasonable time to make authority felt) and the occupier must enforce directions to the civilian population. Similarly, as the Nuremberg Tribunal ruled in the case of Wilhelm List and others (the Hostages Case), "an occupation indicates the exercise of governmental authority to the exclusion of the established government", meaning that the local "civil government [should be] eliminated". These factors demonstrate that Israel does not have control over Gaza. There is a local independent administration in the Gaza Strip that does not answer to Israel (and in fact, openly and repeatedly carries out belligerent attacks against Israel). Israel does not have troops regularly deployed in Gaza, and it can only deploy such troops through heavy and difficult fighting. The local civilian population does not answer to Israel. Israel has no local administration... It is simply not plausible to argue that Israel exercises effective control over the Gaza Strip."
Likewise, Alex Stein argued in 2014 that Gaza was not occupied by Israel, and thus Israel's only obligation under international law towards Gaza was to minimize harm to civilians during military operations. In particular, he wrote that Israel was under no legal obligation to provide it with electricity, though it may choose to do so for humanitarian reasons. Yuval Shany also argues that Israel is probably not an occupying power in Gaza under international law, writing that "it is difficult to continue and regard Israel as the occupying power in Gaza under the traditional law of occupation," but that some legal theories might downplay the significance of the lack of an Israeli presence on the ground, and that Israel still continues to exercise some control over Gaza in parallel with the Palestinian Authority. Shany wrote that "in order to identify the ultimate power of government in Gaza one should engage in a comparative analysis of the degree of effective control exercised by the two competing sources of authority."
Statehood
Some Israeli analysts have argued that the Gaza Strip can be considered a de facto independent state, even if not internationally recognized as such. Israeli Major General Giora Eiland, who headed Israel's National Security Council, has argued that after the disengagement and Hamas takeover, the Gaza Strip became a de facto state for all intents and purposes, writing that "It has clear borders, an effective government, an independent foreign policy and an army. These are the exact characteristics of a state." Dr. Yagil Levy, a Professor of Political Sociology and Public Policy at the Open University of Israel, wrote in a Haaretz column that "Gaza is a state in every respect, at least as social scientists understand the term. It has a central government with an army that’s subordinate to it and that protects a population living in a defined territory. Nevertheless, Gaza is a castrated state. Israel and Egypt control its borders. The Palestinian Authority pays for the salaries of some of its civil servants. And the army doesn’t have a monopoly on armed force, because there are independent militias operating alongside it." Moshe Arens, a former Israeli diplomat who served as Foreign Minister and Defense Minister, likewise wrote that Gaza is a state as "it has a government, an army, a police force and courts that dispense justice of sorts." In November 2018, Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked asserted that Gaza is an independent state, stating that Palestinians "already have a state" in Gaza.
Geoffrey Aronson has likewise argued that the Gaza Strip can be considered a proto-state with some aspects of sovereignty, writing that "a proto-state already exists in the Gaza Strip, with objective attributes of sovereignty the Ramallah-based Mahmoud Abbas can only dream about. Gaza is a single, contiguous territory with de facto borders, recognised, if not always respected, by friend and foe alike. There are no permanently stationed foreign occupiers and, most importantly, no civilian Israeli settlements." Writing in Newsweek, journalist Marc Schulman referred to Gaza as "an impoverished proto-state that lives off aid."
Control over airspace
As agreed between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in the Oslo Accords, Israel has exclusive control over the airspace. It can interfere with radio and TV transmissions, and the Palestinian Authority cannot engage in independent initiatives for operating a seaport or airport. The Accords also permitted Palestinians to construct an airport, which was duly built and opened in 1998. Israel destroyed Gaza's only airport in 2001 and 2002, during the Second Intifada.
The Israeli army makes use of drones, which can launch precise missiles. They are equipped with high-resolution cameras and other sensors. In addition, the missile fired from a drone has its own cameras that allow the operator to observe the target from the moment of firing. After a missile has been launched, the drone operator can remotely divert it elsewhere. Drone operators can view objects on the ground in detail during both day and night. Israeli drones routinely patrol over Gaza.
Buffer zone
Part of the territory is depopulated because of the imposition of buffer zones on both the Israeli and Egyptian borders.
Initially, Israel imposed a 50-meter buffer zone in Gaza. In 2000, it was expanded to 150 meters. Following the 2005 Israeli disengagement from Gaza, an undefined buffer zone was maintained, including a no-fishing zone along the coast.
In 2009/2010, Israel expanded the buffer zone to 300 meters. In 2010, the UN estimated that 30 percent of the arable land in Gaza had been lost to the buffer zone.
On 25 February 2013, pursuant to a November 2012 ceasefire, Israel declared a buffer zone of 100 meters on land and 6 nautical miles offshore. In the following month, the zone was changed to 300 meters and 3 nautical miles. The 1994 Gaza Jericho Agreement allows 20 nautical miles, and the 2002 Bertini Commitment allows 12 nautical miles.
In August 2015, the IDF confirmed a buffer zone of 300 meters for residents and 100 meters for farmers, but without explaining how to distinguish between the two. , on a third of Gaza's agricultural land, residents risk Israeli attacks. According to PCHR, Israeli attacks take place up to approximately from the border, making 17% of Gaza's total territory a risk zone.
Israel says the buffer zone is needed to protect Israeli communities just over the border from sniper fire and rocket attacks. In the 18 months until November 2010, one Thai farm worker in Israel was killed by a rocket fired from Gaza, and in 2010, according to IDF figures, 180 rockets and mortars had been fired into Israel by militants. In 6 months, however, 11 Palestinians civilians, including four children, had been killed by Israeli fire and at least 70 Palestinian civilians were injured in the same period, including at least 49 who were working collecting rubble and scrap metal.
A buffer zone was also created on the Egyptian side of the Gaza–Egypt border. In 2014, scores of homes in Rafah were destroyed for the buffer zone. According to Amnesty International, more than 800 homes had been destroyed and more than 1,000 families evicted. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas agreed with the destruction of smuggling tunnels by flooding them, and then punishing the owners of the houses that contained entrances to the tunnels, including demolishing their houses, arguing that the tunnels had produced 1,800 millionaires, and were used for smuggling weapons, drugs, cash, and equipment for forging documents.
Gaza blockade
Israel and Egypt maintain a blockade of the Gaza Strip, although Israel allows in limited quantities of medical humanitarian aid. The Red Cross claimed that the blockade harms the economy and causes a shortage of basic medicines and equipment such as painkillers and x-ray film.
Israel claims the blockade is necessary to prevent the smuggling of weapons into Gaza. For example, in 2014, a Panamanian-flagged ship claiming to be carrying construction materials was boarded by the IDF and was found to contain Syrian produced rockets.
Israel maintains that the blockade is legal and necessary to limit Palestinian rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip on its cities and to prevent Hamas from obtaining other weapons.
Director of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) Yuval Diskin did not oppose easing trade restrictions, but said that smuggling tunnels in Sinai and an open seaport in the Gaza Strip endangered Israel's security. According to Diskin, Hamas and Islamic Jihad had smuggled in over "5,000 rockets with ranges up to ." Some of the rockets could reach as far as the Tel Aviv Metropolitan Area.
Israeli spokesman Mark Regev described Israel's actions as "sanctions," not a blockade, but a Gazan legal consultant for UNRWA called the blockade "an action outside of international law."
In July 2010, British Prime Minister David Cameron said, "humanitarian goods and people must flow in both directions. Gaza cannot and must not be allowed to remain a prison camp." In response, the spokesman for the Israeli embassy in London said, "The people of Gaza are the prisoners of the terrorist organization Hamas. The situation in Gaza is the direct result of Hamas' rule and priorities."
The Arab League accused Israel of waging a financial war. The IDF strictly controlled travel within the area of the crossing points between Israel and the Gaza Strip, and sealed its border with Gaza. U.S. government travel guides warned tourists that the region was dangerous.
Facing mounting international pressure, Egypt and Israel lessened the restrictions starting in June 2010, when the Rafah border crossing from Egypt to Gaza was partially opened by Egypt. Egypt's foreign ministry said that the crossing would remain open mainly for people, but not for supplies. Israel announced that it would allow the passage of civilian goods but not weapons and items that could be used for dual purposes. In December 2015, Egypt asked Israel not to allow Turkish aid to get through to the Gaza Strip. Benjamin Netanyahu said that it is impossible to lift the siege on Gaza and that the security of Israel is the primary issue for him. He confirmed "that Israel is the only country that currently sends supplies to the coastal enclave".
In January and February 2011, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) assessed measures taken to ease the blockade and concluded that they were helpful but not sufficient to improve the lives of the local inhabitants. UNOCHA called on Israel to reduce restrictions on exports and the import of construction materials, and to lift the general ban on movement between Gaza and the West Bank via Israel. After Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak resigned on 28 May 2011, Egypt permanently opened its border with the Gaza Strip to students, medical patients, and foreign passport holders.
Following the 2013 Egyptian coup d'état, Egypt's military has destroyed most of the 1,200 tunnels which are used for smuggling food, weapons, and other goods to Gaza. After the August 2013 Rabaa Massacre in Egypt, the border crossing was closed 'indefinitely.'
Israel has alternately restricted or allowed goods and people to cross the terrestrial border and handles vicariously the movement of goods into and out of Gaza by air and sea. Israel largely provides for Gaza's water supply, electricity, and communications infrastructure. While the import of food is restricted through the Gaza blockade, the Israeli military destroys agricultural crops by spraying toxic chemicals over the Gazan lands, using aircraft flying over the border zone. According to the IDF, the spraying is intended "to prevent the concealment of IED's [Improvised Explosive Devices], and to disrupt and prevent the use of the area for destructive purposes." Also Gaza's agricultural research and development station was destroyed in 2014 and again in January 2016, while import of new equipment is obstructed.
Movement of people
Because of the Israeli–Egyptian blockade, the population is not free to leave or enter the Gaza Strip. Only in exceptional cases are people allowed to pass through the Erez Crossing or the Rafah Border Crossing. In 2015, a Gazan woman was not allowed to travel through Israel to Jordan on her way to her own wedding. The Israeli authorities found she did not meet the criteria for travel, namely only in exceptional humanitarian cases.
Under the long-term blockade, the Gaza Strip is often described as a "prison-camp or open air prison for its collective denizens". The comparison is done by observers, ranging from Roger Cohen and Lawrence Weschler to NGOs, such as B'tselem, and politicians and diplomats, such as David Cameron, Noam Chomsky, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, David Shoebridge and Sir John Holmes
In 2014 French President François Hollande called for the demilitarization of Gaza and a lifting of the blockade, saying "Gaza must neither be an open prison nor a military base."
An anonymous Israeli analyst has called it "Israel's Alcatraz". While Lauren Booth, Philip Slater, Giorgio Agamben compare it to a "concentration camp". For Robert S. Wistrich, and Philip Mendes, such analogies are designed to offend Jews, while Philip Seib dismisses the comparison as absurd, and claims that it arises from sources like Al Jazeera and statements by Arab leaders.
Israel also restricts movement of Palestinian residents between the West Bank and Gaza. Israel has implemented a policy of allowing Palestinian movement from the West Bank to Gaza, but making it quite difficult for Gaza residents to move to the West Bank. Israel typically refuses to allow Gaza residents to leave for the West Bank, even when the Gaza resident is originally a West Bank resident. The Israeli human rights organization Gisha has helped Gaza residents who had moved from the West Bank to Gaza return to the West Bank arguing that extremely pressing personal circumstances provide humanitarian grounds for relief.
Archaeology
The Gaza Museum of Archaeology was established by Jawdat N. Khoudary in 2008.
Education
In 2010, illiteracy among Gazan youth was less than 1%. According to UNRWA figures, there are 640 schools in Gaza: 383 government schools, 221 UNRWA schools and 36 private schools, serving a total of 441,452 students.
In 2010, Al Zahara, a private school in central Gaza introduced a special program for mental development based on math computations. The program was created in Malaysia in 1993, according to the school principal, Majed al-Bari.
In June 2011, some Gazans, upset that UNRWA did not rebuild their homes that were lost in the Second Intifada, blocked UNRWA from performing its services and shut down UNRWA's summer camps. Gaza residents also closed UNRWA's emergency department, social services office and ration stores.
In 2012, there were five universities in the Gaza Strip and eight new schools were under construction. By 2018, nine universities were open.
The Community College of Applied Science and Technology (CCAST) was established in 1998 in Gaza City. In 2003, the college moved into its new campus and established the Gaza Polytechnic Institute (GPI) in 2006 in southern Gaza. In 2007, the college received accreditation to award BA degrees as the University College of Applied Sciences (UCAS). In 2010, the college had a student population of 6,000 in eight departments offering over 40 majors.
Health
Statistics
In Gaza, there are hospitals and additional healthcare facilities. Because of the high number of young people the mortality rate is one of the lowest in the world, at 0.315% per year. The infant mortality rate is ranked 105th highest out of 224 countries and territories, at 16.55 deaths per 1,000 births. The Gaza Strip places 24th out of 135 countries according to Human Poverty Index.
A study carried out by Johns Hopkins University (U.S.) and Al-Quds University (in Abu Dis) for CARE International in late 2002 revealed very high levels of dietary deficiency among the Palestinian population. The study found that 17.5% of children aged 6–59 months suffered from chronic malnutrition. 53% of women of reproductive age and 44% of children were found to be anemic. Insecurity in obtaining sufficient food as of 2016 affects roughly 70% of Gaza households, as the number of people requiring assistance from UN agencies has risen from 72,000 in 2000, to 800,000 in 2014
After the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip health conditions in Gaza Strip faced new challenges. World Health Organization (WHO) expressed its concerns about the consequences of the Palestinian internal political fragmentation; the socioeconomic decline; military actions; and the physical, psychological and economic isolation on the health of the population in Gaza. In a 2012 study of the occupied territories, the WHO reported that roughly 50% of the young children and infants under two years old and 39.1% of pregnant women receiving antenatal services care in Gaza suffer from iron-deficiency anemia. The organization also observed chronic malnutrition in children under five "is not improving and may be deteriorating."
Healthcare availability
According to Palestinian leaders in the Gaza Strip, the majority of medical aid delivered are "past their expiration date." Mounir el-Barash, the director of donations in Gaza's health department, claims 30% of aid sent to Gaza is used.
Gazans who desire medical care in Israeli hospitals must apply for a medical visa permit. In 2007, State of Israel granted 7,176 permits and denied 1,627.
In 2012, two hospitals funded by Turkey and Saudi Arabia were under construction.
Culture and sports
Fine arts
The Gaza Strip has been home to a significant branch of the contemporary Palestinian art movement since the mid 20th century. Notable artists include painters Ismail Ashour, Shafiq Redwan, Bashir Senwar, Majed Shalla, Fayez Sersawi, Abdul Rahman al Muzayan and Ismail Shammout, and media artists Taysir Batniji (who lives in France) and Laila al Shawa (who lives in London). An emerging generation of artists is also active in nonprofit art organizations such as Windows From Gaza and Eltiqa Group, which regularly host exhibitions and events open to the public.
Athletics
In 2010, Gaza inaugurated its first Olympic-size swimming pool at the As-Sadaka club. The opening ceremony was held by the Islamic Society. The swimming team of as-Sadaka holds several gold and silver medals from Palestinian swimming competitions.
Transport and communications
Transport
The Oslo Accords ceded control of the airspace and territorial waters to Israel. Any external travel from Gaza requires cooperation from either Egypt or Israel.
Highways
Salah al-Din Road (also known as the Salah ad-Deen Highway) is the main highway of the Gaza Strip and extends over , spanning the entire length of the territory from the Rafah Crossing in the south to the Erez Crossing in the north. The road is named after the 12th-century Ayyubid general Salah al-Din.
Rail transport
From 1920 to 1948, the Gaza Strip hosted sections of the Palestine Railways, connecting the region with Egypt.
Marine transport
The Port of Gaza has been an important and active port since antiquity. Despite plans under the Oslo Peace Accords to expand the port, it has been under a blockade since Hamas was elected as a majority party in the 2006 elections. Both the Israeli Navy and Egypt enforce the blockade, which continues currently and has limited many aspects of life in Gaza, especially, according to Human Rights Watch, the movement of people and commerce, with exports being most affected. The improvement and rebuilding of infrastructure is also negatively impacted by these sanctions. Plans to expand the port were halted after the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada.
Air transport
The Yasser Arafat International Airport opened on 24 November 1998 after the signing of the Oslo II Accord and the Wye River Memorandum. It was closed by Israel in October 2000. Its radar station and control tower were destroyed by Israel Defense Forces aircraft in 2001 during the al-Aqsa Intifada, and bulldozers razed the runway in January 2002. The only remaining runway in the strip, at the Gush Katif Airport, fell into disuse following Israeli disengagement. The airspace over Gaza may be restricted by the Israeli Air Force as the Oslo Accords authorized.
Telecommunications
Telephone service
The Gaza Strip has rudimentary land line telephone service provided by an open-wire system, as well as extensive mobile telephone services provided by PalTel (Jawwal) and Israeli providers such as Cellcom. Gaza is serviced by four internet service providers that now compete for ADSL and dial-up customers.
Television and radio
In 2004, most Gaza households had a radio and a TV (70%+), and approximately 20% had a personal computer. People living in Gaza have access to FTA satellite programs, broadcast TV from the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation, the Israel Broadcasting Authority, and the Second Israeli Broadcasting Authority.
Notable people
Al-Shafiʽi
Mohammed Assaf
Dorotheus of Gaza
Mustafa Hassona
Hilarion
Nathan of Gaza
Porphyry of Gaza
Procopius
Sozomen
See also
Al-Bustan resort
Enclave and exclave
Gaza Security Force
Hamastan
Human rights in the Palestinian territories
International recognition of the State of Palestine
Israeli-occupied territories
Israeli settlement
Military equipment of Israel
Palestinian Declaration of Independence
Palestinian National Security Forces
Philistia
Southern District (Israel)
Notes and references
Bibliography
Books
Bregman, Ahron (2002). Israel's Wars: A History Since 1947. London: Routledge. .
External links
Statistical Atlas of Palestine at the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.
Gaza Strip. The World Factbook. Central Intelligence Agency.
Palestinian Territories at the United States Department of State.
Map of Palestinian Refugee Camps 1993 (UNRWA / CIA / University of Texas, Austin).
Ramattan Live Stream of Gaza City via UStream.
Gaza Strip at Google Maps
1991 Map of the Gaza Strip, showing roads and Israeli towns.
1999 Map of the Gaza Strip (annotated photo).
2005 Map of the Gaza Strip (CIA / University of Texas, Austin). | [
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12059 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography%20of%20Georgia%20%28country%29 | Geography of Georgia (country) | Georgia is a country in the Caucasus region, at the intersection of Eastern Europe and Western Asia. It lies on the coast of the Black Sea and is bordered to the north and northeast by Russia, to the south by Turkey and Armenia, and to the southeast by Azerbaijan.
Location
Georgia is largely surrounded by the Greater Caucasus and Lesser Caucasus mountains, which form part of a natural boundary between Eastern Europe and Western Asia. Because the Europe–Asia boundary is essentially a “historical and cultural construct”, Georgia's continental placement has varied greatly. Anaximander placed the boundary between Europe and Asia along the Phasis River (the modern Rioni River), which effectively located northern parts of Georgia in Europe and the south in Asia, a convention also followed by Herodotus.According to one 18th century definition, which set the Kuma–Manych Depression as the continental boundary, Georgia and the entire Caucasus fell into Asia. However, yet other definition drew the line at Aras River, effectively placing all of Georgia in Europe.
Notwithstanding variations in geographic placement, Georgia’s proximity to the bulk of Europe, combined with various historical, cultural and political forces, has led increasingly to its inclusion in Europe. The country has joined European organizations, such as the Council of Europe and Eurocontrol, and has been deemed eligible to apply for membership of the European Union if it so wishes in the future.
Topography
Despite its small area, Georgia has one of the most varied topographies of the former Soviet republics. Georgia lies mostly in the Caucasus Mountains, and its northern boundary is partly defined by the Greater Caucasus range. The Lesser Caucasus range, which runs parallel to the Turkish and Armenian borders, and the Surami and Imereti ranges, which connect the Greater Caucasus and the Lesser Caucasus, create natural barriers that are partly responsible for cultural and linguistic differences among regions. Because of their elevation and a poorly developed transportation infrastructure, many mountain villages are virtually isolated from the outside world during the winter. Earthquakes and landslides in mountainous areas present a significant threat to life and property. Among the most recent natural disasters were massive rock- and mudslides in Ajaria in 1989 that displaced thousands in southwestern Georgia, and two earthquakes in 1991 that destroyed several villages in Racha, Upper Imereti and Tskhinvali Region (South Ossetia).
Georgia has about 25,000 rivers, many of which power small hydroelectric stations. Drainage is into the Black Sea to the west and through Azerbaijan to the Caspian Sea to the east. The largest river is the Kura River, which flows 1,364 km from northeast Turkey across the plains of eastern Georgia, through the capital, Tbilisi, and into the Caspian Sea. The Rioni River, the largest river in western Georgia, rises in the Greater Caucasus and empties into the Black Sea at the port of Poti. Soviet engineers turned the river lowlands along the Black Sea coast into prime subtropical agricultural land, embanked and straightened many stretches of river, and built an extensive system of canals. Deep mountain gorges form topographical belts within the Greater Caucasus.
Coastline
The coastline of Georgia is 310 km long. Out of the Georgian coastline, 57 km is the coastline of Ajaria (Ajara), and 200 km is the coastline of Abkhazia. The Encyclopedia of the Nations lists the total length of the coastline as 315 km long. Georgia has an Exclusive Economic Zone of in the Black Sea.
Climate
Georgia's climate is affected by temperate humid influences from the west and continental influences from the east. The Greater Caucasus range moderates local climate by serving as a barrier against cold air from the north. Warm, moist air from the Black Sea moves easily into the coastal lowlands from the west. Climatic zones are determined by distance from the Black Sea and by altitude. Along the Black Sea coast, from Abkhazia to the Turkish border, and in the region known as the Colchis Lowland inland from the coast, the dominant subtropical climate features high humidity and heavy precipitation ( per year; the Black Sea port of Batumi receives per year). Several varieties of palm trees grow in these regions, where the midwinter average temperature is and the midsummer average is .
The plains of eastern Georgia are shielded from the influence of the Black Sea by mountains that provide a more continental climate. Summer temperatures average to , winter temperatures to . Humidity is lower, and rainfall averages per year. Alpine and highland regions in the east and west, as well as a semi-arid region on the Iori Plateau to the southeast, have distinct microclimates.
At higher elevations, precipitation is sometimes twice as heavy as in the eastern plains. In the west, the climate is subtropical to about ; above that altitude (and to the north and east) is a band of moist and moderately warm weather, then a band of cool and wet conditions. Alpine conditions begin at about , and above snow and ice are present year-round.
Environmental issues
Beginning in the 1980s, Black Sea pollution has greatly harmed Georgia's tourist industry. Inadequate sewage treatment is the main cause of that condition. In Batumi, for example, only 18 percent of wastewater was treated before release into the sea as of the early 1990s. As of the early 1990s, an estimated 70 percent of surface water contained health-endangering bacteria to which Georgia's high rate of intestinal disease was attributed.
The war in Abkhazia did substantial damage to the ecological habitats unique to that region. In other respects, experts considered Georgia's environmental problems less serious than those of more industrialized former Soviet republics. Solving Georgia's environmental problems was not a high priority of the national government in the post-Soviet years, however; in 1993 the minister for protection of the environment resigned to protest this inactivity. In January 1994, the Cabinet of Ministers announced a new, interdepartmental environmental monitoring system to centralize separate programs under the direction of the Ministry of Protection of the Environment. The system would include a central environmental and information and research agency. The Green Party used its small contingent in the parliament to press environmental issues in 1993.
Georgia participates in a number of international environmental agreements. It is a party to: Air Pollution, Biodiversity, Climate Change, Climate Change-Kyoto Protocol, Desertification, Endangered Species, Hazardous Wastes, Law of the Sea, Ozone Layer Protection, Ship Pollution, and Wetlands.
Extreme points
Northernmost point: (de jure): Abkhazia
Northernmost point (de facto): Mestia Municipality, Samegrelo-Zemo Svaneti
Southernmost point: Dedoplistsqaro Municipality, Kakheti
Westernmost point (de jure): Abkhazia
Westernmost point (de facto): Adjara
Easternmost point: Dedoplistsqaro Municipality, Kakheti (border with Azerbaijan)
See also
Glaciers of Georgia
List of earthquakes in Georgia (country)
References
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12060 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics%20of%20Georgia%20%28country%29 | Demographics of Georgia (country) | The demographic features of the population of Georgia include population growth, population density, ethnicity, education level, health, economic status, religious affiliations, and other aspects of the population.
Demographic trends
The demographic situation in Georgia, like that of some other former Soviet republics (especially Estonia and Latvia), has been characterized by two prominent features since independence: decline in total population and significant "Georgianization" of the ethnic composition. The proportion of ethnic Georgians increased by full 10 percentage points between 1989 and 2002, rising from 73.7% to 83.7% of the population. This occurred due to two migratory movements: Georgians living and working in other Soviet republics returned to their homeland, while other nationalities left Georgia.
While Georgia was part of the Soviet Union the population grew steadily, rising from less than 4 million in the 1950s to a peak of 5.5 million in 1992. From 1992 the population began to decline sharply due to civil war and economic crisis driven mass migration throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s. By 2013, the population has stabilized around 3.7 million (excluding Abkhazia and South Ossetia/Tskhinvali Region). The 2002 population census in Georgia revealed a net migration loss of more than one million persons, or 20% of the population, since the early 1990s, confirmed by other studies. Other factors of the population decline include nett birth-death deficits in the period 1995-2010 and the exclusion of Abkhazia and South Ossetia/Tskhinvali Region from the statistics since 1994, which population was estimated in 2005 at 178,000 and 49,200, respectively.
Georgia was named among the highest-emigration countries in the world (relative to its population size) in a 2007 World Bank report. Russia received by far most migrants from Georgia. According to United Nations data this totalled to 625 thousand by 2000, which has declined to 450 thousand by 2019. Initially the out-migration was driven by non-Georgian ethnicities, but due to the war and crisis ridden 1990s, and the subsequent bad economic outlook, increasing numbers of Georgians emigrated as well. The 1989 census recorded 341,000 ethnic Russians, or 6.3 per cent of the population, which declined to 26,453 (0,7%) by 2014. The 2010 Russian census recorded about 158,000 ethnic Georgians living in Russia,
The figure below shows the demographic trend in Georgia since 1950.
Note: 1993-1994 drop is exclusion of Abkhazia and South Ossetia from population statistics.
Data correction
The 2014 census, executed in collaboration with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), found a population gap of approximately 700,000 compared to the 2014 data from the National Statistical Office of Georgia, Geostat, which was cumulatively built on the 2002 census. Consecutive research estimated the 2002 census to be inflated by 8 to 9 percent, which affected the annually updated population estimates in subsequent years. One explanation put forward by UNFPA is that families of emigrants continued to list them in 2002 as residents for fear of losing certain rights or benefits. Other factors that distorted the demographic data included a lack of quality in the registration system of migration, birth, deaths and marriages. It was not until around 2010 that parts of the system became reliable again. With the support of the UNFPA, the demographic data of the period 1994-2014 has been retro-projected. The results of the project were presented and publisched in 2018. On the basis of this back-projection Geostat has corrected its data for these years, both in its annual publications starting from 2018, and its public access database.
Vital statistics
Sources: United Nations, Demoscope, GeoStat
Total population from 1994: excluding Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Corrected as per retro-projection and as published in public access database.
Births and deaths
Total area
1Births and deaths until 1959 are estimates.
Excluding Abkhazia and Tskhinvali Region
Source: Geostat public database, Geostat website, section Population and Demography.
Current vital statistics
Source:
Life expectancy
Structure of the population
Structure of the population (01.01.2019) :
Ethnic groups
Georgians are the predominant ethnic group in Georgia, according to the 2014 census 86.83% of the population. The proportion in 2014 was much higher than in preceding censuses as in 2014 Abkhazia and Tskhinvali Region were not under government control and therefore not included. As a result of this the proportion of Ossetians and Abkhazians was very low (0.39% and 0.02%, respectively).
Languages
The most widespread language group is the Kartvelian family, which includes Georgian, Svan, Mingrelian and Laz. The official languages of Georgia are Georgian, with Abkhaz having official status within the autonomous region of Abkhazia. Georgian is the primary language of 87.7 percent of the population, followed by 6.2 percent speaking Azerbaijani, 3.9 percent Armenian, 1.2 percent Russian, and 1 percent other languages. In the 2010, the United States federal government began the Teach and Learn English with Georgia program of promoting English literacy in elementary school. The goal was to import English speakers from across the world to ensure that all children in Georgia spoke English in four years and replace Russian as a second language.
Religion
Population growth rate by province
Source: Statistics Georgia: Population by region
See also
Georgia
Azerbaijanis in Georgia
Armenians in Georgia
Russians in Georgia
Greeks in Georgia
Caucasus Greeks
Assyrians in Georgia
Notes
References
External links
Zhvania, Irakli: "Housing in Georgia" in the Caucasus Analytical Digest No. 23 | [
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12061 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics%20of%20Georgia%20%28country%29 | Politics of Georgia (country) | Politics in Georgia involve a parliamentary representative democratic republic with a multi-party system. The President of Georgia is the ceremonial head of state and the Prime Minister of Georgia is the head of government. The Prime Minister and the Government wield executive power. Legislative power is vested in both the Government and the unicameral Parliament of Georgia.
After the Rose Revolution of 2003, the National Movement – Democrats dominated the party system. Georgia became a democratic republic following the first multiparty, democratic parliamentary elections of October 28, 1990. The Georgian state is highly centralized, except for the autonomous regions of Abkhazia and Adjara and the former autonomous region of South Ossetia. Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which had autonomy within the Georgian SSR during Soviet rule, unilaterally seceded from Georgia in the 1990s. While, , the Georgian government recognizes Abkhazia as autonomous within Georgia, it does not recognize South Ossetia as having any special status.
Consideration of replacing Georgia's republic with some form of constitutional monarchy has become part of Georgian political debate since the Georgian Orthodox primate and other leading Georgians suggested the idea in 2007.
Developments in 2003-2008
Following a crisis involving allegations of ballot fraud in the 2003 parliamentary elections, Eduard Shevardnadze resigned as president on November 23, 2003, in the bloodless Rose Revolution. The interim president was the speaker of the outgoing parliament (whose replacement was annulled), Nino Burjanadze. On January 4, 2004 Mikheil Saakashvili, leader of the United National Movement won the country's presidential election and was inaugurated on January 25.
Fresh parliamentary elections were held on March 28, 2004, where the United National Movement's parliamentary faction, the National Movement - Democrats (NMD), secured the vast majority of the seats (with ca. 75% of the votes). Only one other party reached the 7% threshold: the Rightist Opposition with ca. 7.5%. The vote is believed to have been one of the freest ever held in independent Georgia although an upsurge of tension between the central government and the Ajarian leader Aslan Abashidze affected the elections in this region. Despite recognizing progress the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe noted the tendency to misuse state administration resources in favor of the ruling party.
Tensions between Georgia and separatist authorities in Ajaria increased after the elections, climaxing on May 1, 2004 when Abashidze responded to military maneuvers held by Georgia near the region by having the three bridges connecting Ajaria and the rest of Georgia over the Choloki River blown up. On May 5, Abashidze was forced to flee Georgia as mass demonstrations in Batumi called for his resignation and Russia increased their pressure by deploying Security Council secretary Igor Ivanov.
On February 3, 2005, Prime Minister Zurab Zhvania died of carbon monoxide poisoning in an apparent gas leak at the home of Raul Usupov, deputy governor of Kvemo Kartli region. Later, Zhvania's close friend and a long-time ally, Finance Minister Zurab Nogaideli was appointed for the post by President Saakashvili.
Under the Saakasvili administration Georgia has achieved considerable progress in eradicating corruption. In 2008 Transparency International ranked Georgia 67th in its Corruption Perceptions Index, with a score of 3.9 points out of 10 possible. This represents the best result among the CIS countries and a dramatic improvement on Georgia's score in 2004, when the country was ranked 133rd with 2.0 points.
Georgia also strengthened fight against the thieves-in-law. In December 2005 Georgian criminal code was reorganized to charge the criminal authorities with aggravating circumstances. Abuses of human rights were revealed in Georgian prisons after the 2012 Gldani prison scandal as prisoners had been permanently tortured and beaten by the penal servants. The further investigation revealed the head of Penitentiary Department of Ministry of Justice of Georgia Bachana Akhalaia was the one who had been managing the process of torturing the prisoners.
In June 2004 the prominent Georgian tycoon Kakha Bendukidze was called by the president Mikheil Saakashvili to hold position of Minister of Economy. Kakha Bendukidze was known as a committed right-wing libertarian, who supported the Laissez-faire, deregulation of market and low taxes. Under his terms of ministerial office the thoroughgoing reformation was onset. The taxes were significantly lowered and privatisation was restarted. As a result, Georgia became one of the most favourable country in the world to start investing in. It resulted in the high growth of GDP. Nevertheless, economic growth was not able to fully settle the problems of unemployment and one-fourth of the nation living under the poverty rate.
In January 2006 a new party, Georgia's Way, was created. The movement is led by former Foreign Minister Salome Zourabichvili, and appears to be relatively popular. An opinion poll conducted by the Georgian weekly Kviris Palitra and published on April 10, 2006 suggested that Salome Zourabichvili would garner 23.1% of votes if a presidential election were held today. President Saakashvili ranked first with 33% - an all-time low for the Georgian President - whilst no other individual managed to surpass double-digit levels of support. Georgia's Way has said it intends to have candidates for all the seats in Georgia's upcoming local elections, with Zourabichvili hoping to become Tbilisi Mayor.
On November 7, 2007, during a period of mass protests, President Saakashvili declared Tbilisi to be in a state of emergency. There were massive demonstrations and protests by the civil opposition, demanding the resignation of President Saakashvili. The Georgian police used teargas, batons, water cannons and high tech acoustic weapons in the streets of Tbilisi. Later that day, the President declared a state of emergency in the whole country of Georgia. The Russian government denied accusations of being involved or of interfering in the situation. President Saakashvili rejected all demands that he resign his position, but announced early presidential elections to be held in January 2008, effectively cutting his term in office by a year.
On November 16, 2007, Prime Minister of Georgia Zurab Noghaideli announced his resignation due to poor health conditions. Noghaideli underwent heart operation in April 2007 at St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital in Houston, Texas, which was led by the leading U.S. surgeon Dr. Charles Frazier.
President Saakashvili invited Vladimer ("Lado") Gurgenidze, MBA holder from Emory University, United States and former business executive, to succeed Noghaideli on the position of the PM on the same day. Gurgenidze was formally approved on the position and granted the trust of the Parliament of Georgia on November 22, 2007. Gurgenidze implemented only two changes in the Cabinet of Georgia so far, replacing Alexandre Lomaia, the former Minister for Education and Science and new Secretary of National Security Council with Maia Miminoshvili, former Head of the National Assessment and Examination Centre (NAEC). Prime Minister also invited Koba Subeliani, former Head of Municipal Accomplishment Service to succeed Giorgi Kheviashvili, former Minister for Refugees and Accommodation. New Prime Minister and two Ministers Koba Subeliani and Maia Miminoshvili were approved on their positions on November 22, 2007 by a confidence vote of the Parliament of Georgia.
Mikheil Saakashvili resigned from the position of the President on November 25, 2007 as the Constitution of Georgia requires the president stands down at least 45 days before the next election to be eligible for retaking part him/herself. The Speaker of the Parliament of Georgia Mrs. Nino Burjanadze took over the position until the results were announced on January 5, 2008.
Twenty-two people registered for the presidential elections, including the most recent president Mikheil Saakashvili, approved candidate of the united opposition Levan Gachechiladze, influential businessman Badri Patarkatsishvili, Leader of the New Right Party David Gamkrelidze, the Leader of the Georgian Labour Party Shalva Natelashvili, the Leader of Hope Party Irina Sarishvili-Chanturia and Giorgi Maisashvili.
Since 2012
On 26 May 2012, Saakashvili inaugurated a new Parliament building in the western city of Kutaisi, in an effort to decentralize power and shift some political control closer to Abkhazia. The elections in October 2012 resulted in the victory for the opposition "Georgian Dream – Democratic Georgia" coalition, which President Saakashvili acknowledged on the following day.
In preparation for 2012 parliamentary elections, Parliament adopted a new electoral code on 27 December 2011 that incorporated many recommendations from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the Venice Commission. However, the new code failed to address the Venice Commission's primary recommendation to strengthen the equality of the vote by reconstituting single-mandate election districts to be comparable in size. On 28 December, Parliament amended the Law on Political Unions to regulate campaign and political party financing. Local and international observers raised concerns about several amendments, including the vagueness of the criteria for determining political bribery and which individuals and organizations would be subject to the law. , Parliament was discussing further amendments to address these concerns.
In October 2013, Giorgi Margvelashvili, a member Georgian Dream party, won presidential election, ushering in the former Soviet republic's first legal transfer of power. He succeeded President Mikheil Saakashvili, who had served the maximum two terms since coming to power in the bloodless 2003 "Rose Revolution"
In October 2016, the ruling party, Georgian Dream, won the parliamentary election with 48.61 percent of the vote and the opposition United National Movement (UNM) 27.04 percent. Georgian Dream came to power in 2012, ending UNM’s nine-year rule. It was funded by tycoon Bidzina Ivanishvili, the country’s richest man and party chief, while the opposition UNM was founded by former president Mikheil Saakashvili.
In November 2018, Salome Zurabishvili won Georgia's presidential election, becoming the first woman to hold the office. She was backed by the ruling Georgian Dream party. However, the new constitution made the role of president largely ceremonial. It was the last direct election of a Georgian president, as the country switched to a parliamentary system.
On 31 October 2020, the ruling Georgian Dream, led by Bidzina Ivanishvili, secured over 48% of votes in the parliamentary election. It gave the party the right to form the country's next government and continue governing alone. The opposition made accusations of fraud, which the Georgian Dream denied. Thousands of people gathered outside the Central Election Commission to demand a new vote.
In February 2021, Irakli Garibashvili became Prime Minister of Georgia, following the resignation of Prime Minister Giorgi Gakharia. Prime Minister Irakli Garibashviliis, who had an earlier term as prime minister in 2013-15, is a close ally of the powerful founder of the ruling Georgian Dream party, Bidzina Ivanishvili.
On 1 October 2021, former President Mikheil Saakashvili was arrested on his return from exile. Saakashvili led the country from 2004 to 2013 but was later convicted in absentia on corruption charges, which he denied.
Monarchist option
Debate on the possible installation of a constitutional monarchy in Georgia was revitalized following the 7 October 2007 sermon of Catholicos-Patriarch Ilia II, the popular head of the Georgian Orthodox Church. The patriarch said, during his Sunday service at the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, that restoration of the Bagrationi royal family was a "desirable dream of the Georgian people". He also emphasized that if the people of Georgia chose this model of governance, "a candidate to the crown should be selected among representatives of the royal dynasty, and he should be suitably raised to be king from childhood."
Competition arose among the old dynasty's princes and supporters, as historians and jurists debated which Bagrationi has the strongest hereditary right to a throne that has been vacant for two centuries. Although some Georgian monarchists support the Gruzinsky branch's claim, others support that of the re-patriated Mukhrani branch. Both branches descend in unbroken, legitimate male line from the medieval kings of Georgia down to Constantine II of Georgia who died in 1505.
David Bagration of Mukhrani, married Ana Bagration-Gruzinsky on 8 February 2009 at the Tbilisi Sameba Cathedral. The marriage united the Gruzinsky and Mukhrani branches of the former Georgian royal family, and drew a crowd of 3,000 spectators, officials, and foreign diplomats, as well as extensive coverage by the Georgian media.
Euro-Atlantic Integration
After the Rose Revolution Georgia started looking westwards. The government aims at EU and NATO membership, and has created a Ministry for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration, which was dissolved on 22 December 2017 after passing constitutional amendments by Georgian Parliament. Within NATO, Georgia is currently in Intensified Dialogue; membership in the EU is a more distant project.
On 5 January 2008 alongside Georgian presidential elections was held non-binding referendum on joining NATO. 77% of total number of voters supported integration of Georgia into NATO.
Political conditions
The Abkhaz separatist dispute absorbs much of the government's attention. While a cease-fire is in effect about 250,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) who were driven from their homes during the conflict, constitute a vocal lobby. The government has offered the region considerable autonomy to encourage a settlement that would allow the IDPs (mainly ethnic Georgians from the Gali district) to return home, however the Abkhaz side refused to accept it.
Currently, Russian peacekeepers are stationed in Abkhazia under the authority of the Commonwealth of Independent States, along with United Nations observers but both groups have recently had to restrict their activities due to increased mining and guerrilla . So far (by 2007) the negotiations have not resulted in any settlement. France, United Kingdom, Germany, Russia and the United States (who act as the members of the United Nations and the OSCE) continue to encourage a comprehensive settlement consistent with Georgian independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity. The UN observer force and other organizations are quietly encouraging grassroots cooperative and confidence-building measures in the region.
The parliament has instituted wide-ranging political reforms supportive of higher human rights standards, because between 1992 and 2003 (before the Rose Revolution of November 23, 2003) the Georgian human rights situation had been complicated. Despite the reforms by the new government, there are still numerous problems concerning respect for human rights in the country. Prisoners are frequently maltreated, journalists are intimidated by the authorities and much of the mainstream media is owned by government supporters. The police are often accused of planting evidence, beatings and the unnecessary killing of suspects.
Executive branch
The President is a ceremonial head of state and exercises no executive powers. The country’s supreme executive body is the Government, which is led by the Prime Minister. The government and prime minister are appointed by and answer only to the Parliament. The President is appointed indirectly by a parliamentary electoral college, consisting of Members of Parliament and local regional legislators.
|President
|Salome Zourabichvili
| -
|16 December 2018
|-
|Prime Minister
|Irakli Garibashvili
|Georgian Dream
|22 February 2021
|}
Legislative branch
The Parliament of Georgia (Sak'art'velos Parlamenti) has 150 members, elected for a four-year term - 120 seats by proportional representation, 30 in single-seat constituencies.
Current Speaker of Parliament is Kakha Kuchava.
Political parties and elections
Latest elections
Parliamentary elections
Presidential elections
Judicial branch
Georgia has a Supreme Court, with judges elected by the Parliament on the president's recommendation, and a Constitutional Court.
Administrative divisions
Georgia is divided into 2 autonomous republics (avtonomiuri respublika), 9 region (mkhare), and a capital territory.
Autonomous republics: Abkhazia, Ajaria.
Mkhares: Guria, Imereti, Kakheti, Kvemo Kartli, Mtskheta-Mtianeti, Racha-Lechkhumi and Kvemo Svaneti, Samegrelo-Zemo Svaneti, Samtskhe-Javakheti, Shida Kartli.
Capital city: Tbilisi
The regions and autonomous republics are subdivided into 67 municipalities (Georgian: მუნიციპალიტეტი; before 2006 - raioni, Georgian: რაიონი) and cities with local government:
Cities: Batumi, Kutaisi, Poti, Rustavi, Tbilisi, Tskhinvali.
Districts: Abasha, Adigeni, Akhalgori, Akhalkalaki, Akhaltsikhe, Akhmeta, Ambrolauri, Aspindza, Baghdati, Bolnisi, Borjomi, Chiatura, Chkhorotsku, Chokhatauri, Dedoplistsqaro, Dmanisi, Dusheti, Gagra, Gali, Gardabani, Gori, Gudauta, Gulripshi, Gurjaani, Java, Kareli, Kaspi, Kazbegi, Keda, Kharagauli, Khashuri, Khelvachauri, Khobi, Khoni, Khulo, Kobuleti, Lagodekhi, Lanchkhuti, Lentekhi, Marneuli, Martvili, Mestia, Mtskheta, Ninotsminda, Ochamchire, Oni, Ozurgeti, Qvareli, Sachkhere, Sagarejo, Samtredia, Senaki, Shuakhevi, Sighnaghi, Sukhumi, Telavi, Terjola, Tetritsqaro, Tianeti, Tkibuli, Tsageri, Tsalenjikha, Tsalka, Tskaltubo, Vani, Zestaponi, Zugdidi
note: administrative divisions have the same names as their administrative centers (exceptions have the administrative center name following in parentheses)
Local government
Tbilisi City Assembly
Kutaisi City Assembly
Batumi City Assembly
Poti City Assembly
International organization participation
BSEC, Council of Europe, EAPC, EBRD, ECE, FAO, GUAM, IAEA, IBRD, ICAO, International Chamber of Commerce, International Criminal Court (ICC), ITUC, IDA, IFAD, IFC, IFRCS, ILO, IMF, International Maritime Organization, Inmarsat, Interpol, IOC, IOM, ISO (correspondent), ITU, OAS (observer), OPCW, OSCE, PFP, United Nations, UNCTAD, UNESCO, UNIDO, UPU, WCO, WHO, WIPO, WMO, WTO
See also
Human rights in Georgia (country)
Rose Revolution
Monarchy in Georgia
State Procurement Agency (Georgia)
References
Further reading
Mataradze, Teona; Mühlfried, Florian: "Leaving and Being Left Behind: Labor Migration in Georgia" in the Caucasus Analytical Digeast No. 4
Organized Crime and Illegal Trafficking in the Caucasus. Articles in the Caucasus Analytical Digest No. 9
Cooley, Alexander; Mitchell, Lincoln: "Georgia: The Interconnections between Democracy and Security" in the Caucasus Analytical Digest No. 17
Anti-Corruption Reforms in Georgia. Articles in the Caucasus Analytical Digest No. 26
External links
Erik Herron's Guide to Politics of East Central Europe and Eurasia | [
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12062 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy%20of%20Georgia%20%28country%29 | Economy of Georgia (country) | The economy of Georgia is an emerging free market economy. Its gross domestic product fell sharply following the dissolution of the Soviet Union but recovered in the mid-2000s, growing in double digits thanks to the economic and democratic reforms brought by the peaceful Rose Revolution. Georgia continued its economic progress since, "moving from a near-failed state in 2003 to a relatively well-functioning market economy in 2014". In 2007, the World Bank named Georgia the World's number one economic reformer, and has consistently ranked the country at the top of its ease of doing business index.
Georgia's economy is supported by a relatively free and transparent atmosphere in the country. According to Transparency International's 2018 report, Georgia is the least corrupt nation in the Black Sea region, outperforming all of its immediate neighbors, as well as nearby European Union states. With a mixed news media environment, Georgia is also the only country in its immediate neighborhood where the press is not deemed unfree.
Since 2014, Georgia is part of the European Union's Free Trade Area, with the EU continuing to be the country's largest trading partner, accounting for over a quarter of Georgia's total trade turnover. Following the EU trade pact, 2015 was marked by further increase in bilateral trade, whereas trade with the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) decreased precipitously.
History
Before the 20th century Georgia had a largely agrarian economy.
Georgia's modern economy has traditionally revolved around Black Sea tourism, cultivation of citrus fruits, tea and grapes; mining of manganese and copper; and the output of a large industrial sector producing wine, metals, machinery, chemicals, and textiles.
Like many post-Soviet countries, Georgia went through a period of sharp economic decline during the 1990s, with high inflation and large budget-deficits, due to persistent tax evasion. In 1996 Georgia's budget deficit rose to as much as 6.2%. During that period international financial institutions played a critical role in Georgia's budgetary calculations. Multilateral and bilateral grants and loans totaled 116.4 million lari in 1997; they totaled 182.8 million lari in 1998.
Economic recovery had been hampered by the separatist disputes in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, resistance to reform on the part of some corrupt and reactionary factions, and the Asian financial crisis of 1997. Under the leadership of President Shevardnadze (in office 1995–2003), the government nonetheless made some progress on basic market reforms: it liberalized all prices and most trade, introduced a stable national currency (the lari), and massively downsized government.
During the late 1990s more than 10,500 small enterprises had been privatized, and although privatization of medium- and large-sized firms had been slow, more than 1,200 medium – and large-sized companies had been set up as joint stock companies. A law and a decree establishing the legal basis and procedures for state property privatization reduced the number of companies controlled by the state.
The United States began assisting Georgia in the process of reform soon after the country gained independence from Soviet Union. Gradually, the focus shifted from humanitarian to technical and institution-building programs. Provision of legal and technical advisors was complemented by training opportunities for parliamentarians, law enforcement officials, and economic advisers.
Recent macroeconomic performance
Over the last few years Georgian economy has been one of the fastest in the FSU. Since 2003's Rose Revolution, the new Government of Georgia implemented broad and comprehensive reforms, that touched every aspect of the country's life. Economic reforms were addressed to liberalization of the economy and provision of sustainable economic growth, based on the private sector development. Establishment of an attractive business environment led to significant inflow of Foreign Direct Investment in the country, facilitating high economic growth rates.
In 2013, Georgia ranked in the top ten countries in the Emerging Market Energy Security Growth Prosperity Index, according to an article published by CISTRAN Finance news. The index identifies emerging nations that have strong growth potential based on energy reserves and GDP.
Following reforms, Georgia's economy successfully diversified and began showing rapid upward growth, averaging over 10% annual real GDP growth from 2004–2007, peaking at 12.3 percent in 2007. Overall, from 2004-2007, the economy of Georgia expanded by 35%.
Georgia's economic liberalization policy demonstrated some resilience to external shocks – war with Russia in 2008 and the global financial crisis. Despite this, in 2008 Georgia economy grew by 2.3%. After contracting in 2009 (−3.8%), the economy recovered soon after, growing 6.3% in 2010 and 7.0% in 2011. The unemployment rate shrunk from 16.9% to 16.3% between 2009 and 2010.
In 2013 the annual inflation rate in Georgia equaled 2.4%. It has been decreased significantly after 11.2% in 2010. Growth of inflation rate was the result of increasing food prices in the world and essential share of the inflation fluctuations came on variability of food prices, as far as the share of food is relatively high in consumer basket of Georgia.
In 2011, IMF estimated current account balance of Georgia was −1.489 BN USD. Georgia has moderate deficits among the European and Transcaucasian Post-Soviet states. The trade with Georgia's major partners continued growing. As an example, in 2016, Georgia exported $87,263.53 worth of products to Armenia, and imported $144,931.92 worth of products from Armenia. Deficits in current account have been more than offset by strong foreign capital inflows, allowing the Georgian currency to appreciate.
The government has managed to preserve financial stability thanks to the considerable aid provided by the US and international institutions. EBRD analysts believe that substantial international financial support and remittances from workers living abroad will cover the current account deficit in the medium term. IMF positively evaluated government's economic policy.
Foreign direct investment in Georgia
Large inflows of Foreign direct investment (FDI) have been a driving factor behind a rapid economic growth in Georgia since 2003.
An attractive and liberal investment environment and equal approach to local and foreign investors makes the country an attractive destination for FDI.
Stable economic development, liberal and free market oriented economic policy, 6 taxes only and reduced tax rates, reduced number of licenses and permissions, dramatically simplified administrative procedures, preferential trade regimes with foreign countries, advantageous geographic location, well developed, integrated and multimodal transport infrastructure, educated, skilled and competitive workforce presents a solid ground for successful business in Georgia. In addition to other advantages, Georgia has Free Industrial Zones, where companies are exempt from all the corporate taxes.
From 2003 to 2011, FDI in Georgia amounted to US$8511.5 million. The highest volume of FDI – 2,015.0 million USD was reached in 2007, with 69.3% yearly growth. High rate of investment was maintained until 2008. In 2007, the EC27 accounted for over 56% of FDI inflows and in 2008 the EC, UAE, and Turkey accounted for nearly 60%. In 2009, FDI inflows were characterized by decreasing trend. The main reasons of decreasing were external shocks – Russian-Georgian war and the influences of global financial crisis.
• In 2009–2011 the largest share of FDI felt on Industry sector (31.2) amounted to US$765 million, real estate sector (15.8%) amounting to US$389 million.
The table below shows FDI stock as a percentage of GDP in selected FSU countries. For statistical purposes, FDI is defined as a foreign company owning 10% or more of the ordinary shares of an incorporated firm or its equivalent for an unincorporated firm.
Foreign direct investment in the country of Georgia by year.
Trade
Since 2014, Georgia is part of the European Union's Free Trade Area, with the EU continuing to be the country's largest trading partner, accounting for over a quarter of Georgia's total trade turnover. Following the EU trade pact, 2015 was marked by further increase in bilateral trade, whereas trade with the Russian-led Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) decreased by 22%.
As of 2015, in the order of magnitude, Georgia's main exports were: copper ores and concentrates, ferroalloys, hazelnut, medications, nitrogen fertilizers, wine, crude oil, mineral water, non-denatured ethanol and spirits.
In 2015, Georgia's main imports, in the order of magnitude, were: oil products, vehicles, hydrocarbons, copper ores and concentrates, mobile phones and other wireless phones, wheat, cigarettes, iron tubes and pipes, structures and parts of structures of iron.
In 2019, Georgian exports to Armenia grew by 2% compared to previous year, while imports decreased by 7%. Georgia exported 98.3 million $ worth of products to Armenia (4% of total exports), and imported 46.9 million $ (1% of total imports) in 2019.
International money transfers
Money transferred from abroad to Georgia in 2019 amounted to USD 1.73 billion, according to figures released by Georgia's central bank. Money transfers from Russia, which has been the largest source of remittances for Georgia for many years already, stood at USD 428.89 million in 2019.
Among other largest sources of remittances for Georgia are: Greece with USD 192.56 million in 2019, Italy – USD 239.17 million; the United States – USD 178.41 million; Ukraine – USD 47.3 million; Spain – USD 30.9 million; Turkey – USD 94.85 million; Kazakhstan – USD 26.63 million; the UK – USD 16.89 million; Israel – USD 162.55 million; Azerbaijan – USD 22.17 million; Germany – USD 49.81 million; France – USD 26.37 million; Canada – USD 14.21 million.
Institutional reforms
Under the Saakashvili administration, Georgia undertook a number of profound institutional reforms aimed at modernizing the economy and improving business climate. Kakha Bendukidze (1956–2014) was one of the most notable team members during his governance, coordinating the Ministry of Economical Reforms of Georgia. Implemented institutional reforms created an effective, professional and transparent public sector, motivated to protect the principles of democracy. Due to the economic deregulation policy, number of state regulated spheres sharply decreased, as well as regulation procedures were simplified.
Georgia succeeded in fighting against corruption, that was the one of the main obstacles for development. Success of Georgia is recognized by different rating agencies. According to the Transparency International, Georgia is the top country in the post-Soviet region in terms of fighting corruption. According to the Corruption Perception Index published by Transparency International, Georgia ranked 50th in 2014 (up from 113rd in 2004). "Global Corruption Barometer 2010" ranks Georgia the first among world countries in the term of decrease corruption level. According to International Finance Corporation Business Perception Survey 2012 only 0.11% of surveyed (1 respondent out of 920) named corruption as a problem in relations with public organizations.
Georgia has the most liberal tax jurisdiction in Europe. The number of taxes is decreased from 21 to only 6, tax rates were reduced also. In addition, significant procedural and institutional reforms was implemented – simplified system of tax disputes was established, tax administration system was streamlined and most of taxes currently are paid on-line.
Due to the customs reform customs procedures were dramatically simplified. Customs tariffs reform significantly simplified and sharply reduced the costs connected to the foreign trade. Number of import tariffs was abolished on approximately 90% of products and only 3 tariff rates exist instead of previous 16. Currently 86% of tariff lines are duty-free compared to 26% in 2005. Modern Customs Clearance Zones were established and customs clearness procedures could be made starting from 15 minutes only.
Modernization of system of licenses and permits resulted in decrease of number of licenses and permits and simplification of related administrative procedures.
Privatization of state property – Starting from 2004, provision of transparent privatization policy was one of the important reforms of the Government of Georgia, that was addressed to denationalization of the remained state property in order to attract foreign investments, increase and develop the private sector and effective use of country's resources.
Liberal labour legislation simplified the relations between employers and employees. As a result of the reform, ”Heritage Foundation” and other analytical centers named Georgian Labour Code as one of the most liberal in the world, because it significantly reduced hiring and firing expenses.
Georgia offers the most simplified procedures for registration of business, property, for getting different documentations via “One-Stop-Shops”, where the most procedures could be done on-line. Doing Business 2012 report (WB) places Georgia 16th in terms of Ease of Doing Business index (up from 112 in 2006), naming Georgia as the top reformer amongst the 174 countries over the last 5 years. Georgia is amongst the leaders in other ratings, namely, registering property – first place; Dealing Construction Permits – 4th place, Starting a Business – 7th place; Getting Credits – 8th place.
Licensing regulation
Due to the reform of the system of licenses and permits, the number licenses and permits was reduced by 90%. Currently, licenses and permits are only used in the production of highly risky goods and services; also usage of natural resources and specific activities. The procedures of issuing licenses and permits were significantly simplified, the “One-Stop Shop” and “Silence is Consent” principles were introduced which implies that if person is not notified with argumentation rejection about issuance of license in limited framework, the license is considered as issued from the relevant body.
The procedures for getting a construction permits was dramatically simplified and it requires just 3 procedures. The time for getting the construction permits was sharply reduced. According to Doing Business 2012 (WB) Georgia is the best performer in the Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECA) region and places on 4-th position in the world. The number of procedures and days, the cost (% of income per capita) is much more lower, than in ECA region and OECD countries.
Things have changed after new Law on Issuance of Licenses and Permits was introduced in 2005. The approval process for building a warehouse in Georgia is now more efficient than in all EU countries except Denmark.
Tax collection
Since January, 2011 the new Tax Code came into force. It unifies the old Tax and Customs Codes. The new Tax Code increased confidence towards the Georgian tax system and enhanced trust in the Georgian tax authorities, by improving communication between taxpayers and the tax authorities, by protecting the taxpayers’ rights, by making administration more efficient, and by harmonizing the Georgian laws with the best international tax practices and EU directives.
Only 6 taxes exist in Georgia with law tax rates: Income Tax (personal income tax) 20%; Profit Tax (corporate tax) – 15%; Value Added Tax – 18%; Excise – varies; Property Tax up to 1% of the self-assessed value of property; Customs Tax – 0%; 5%; 12%. In addition, significant procedural and institutional reforms were performed, simplified tax dispute settlement, streamlined tax administration decreased the time and cost of paying taxes. Georgia made paying taxes easier for firms by simplifying the reporting for value added tax and introducing electronic filling and payment of taxes.
Number of import tariffs was abolished on approximately 90% of products and only 3 tariff rates (0%, 5%, 12%) exist instead of previous 16. Georgia sets Import Taxes on only several kinds of agricultural and manufactured goods . In addition, there are no quantitative restrictions (quotas) on imports and exports.
Labour regulation
With unemployment around 16% and many jobs in the informal sector, Georgia undertook a far-reaching reform of labour regulation. The new Labour Code was adopted on 17 December 2010. The new law eases restrictions on the duration of term contracts and the number of overtime hours and discards the premium required for overtime work. It also eliminates the requirement to notify and get permission from the labour union to fire a redundant worker. The new law provides for 1 month's severance pay at least, replacing complex rules under which required notice periods depended on seniority and the manager had to write long explanations to labor unions and the relevant ministry. In general, new regulation makes Georgian labor market much more flexible.
Coupled with the fact that Georgia also reduced the social security contributions paid on wages by businesses from 31% to 20% in 2005, and abolished them entirely starting January 2008, these changes make Georgia the sixth easiest place to employ workers globally.
Judicial procedure
Reducing corruption in courts was one of the chief priorities of the new government. Since 2004, when the Saakashvili administration came in, seven judges have been detained for taking bribes and 15 brought before the criminal courts. In 2005 alone the judicial disciplinary council reviewed cases against 99 judges, about 40% of the judiciary, and 12 judges were dismissed. At the same time judges’ salaries were increased fourfold, to reduce dependence on bribe money.
According to Global Property Guide index, Georgia currently holds 40 points out of 100. That stands for "The court system is highly inefficient, and delays are so long that they deter the use of the court system. Corruption is present, and the judiciary is influenced by other branches of government. Expropriation is possible."
Some unsatisfied responses concerning the judiciary system may be found among Georgian websites, though its genuineness is controversial.
Unemployment
Unemployment has been a persistent problem in Georgia ever since the country gained independence in 1991. According to National Statistics Office (Georgia) unemployment rate stood at 16.9% in 2013 and it has been decreased at 11.6% in 2019.
Nearly a half of Georgia's population lives in rural areas, where low-intensity self-sufficient farming provides the principal source of livelihood. Georgian statistics service puts individual persons into the category of self-employed workers. As of 2007 416,900 persons were listed as self-employed in agriculture. For large families, heads of households are typically described as "individual entrepreneurs", members of the family that help to cultivate land are classified as "unpaid family business workers". The use of this methodology produces relatively low unemployment rates for rural areas rather in urban areas and in Tbilisi.
Neighbouring countries show somewhat similar results. For example, Armenia in 2015 had 18.26% unemployment rate, which is 532.644 people.
Structure of the economy
Energy
In recent years Georgia has fully deregulated its electricity sector, and now there is free and open access to the market.
Georgia has a sizable hydroelectric capacity, a factor that has become an increasingly important component of its energy supplies and policies. The country's topography and abundance of hydro resources give it serious potential to dominate hydroelectric markets in the Caucasus region. The Georgian Ministry of Energy estimates that there are around 26,000 rivers within Georgian territory, with approximately 300 of those rivers being significant in terms of energy production. The Ministry also claims that current projects for hydroelectric power plants total around US$2.4 billion. Alexander Khetaguri, the former Georgian Minister of Energy, proposed new hydroelectric projects worth well over 22,000 megawatts of capacity, which would cost over US$40 billion and would be privately funded. These projects alone would transform Georgia into the world's second-largest hydropower producer.
In 2007, Georgia generated 8.34 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity while consuming 8.15 billion kWh. Most of Georgia's electricity generation comes from hydroelectric facilities. In 2005, the country generated 6.17 billion kWh of hydropower, or 86% of total electricity generation. In 2006 rapid growth in hydroelectricity output (by 27%) was matched by equally strong growth in thermal electricity (by 28%). Since then the share of hydropower has grown even bigger, when Inguri power plant reached full capacity in November 2007. In addition to state-owned Inguri, which has an installed capacity of 1,300 megawatts, Georgia's hydroelectric infrastructure consists of many small private plants.
In recent years, Georgia became a major exporter of electricity in the region, exporting 1.3 billion KWh in 2010. Hydropower stations of Georgia produce 80-85% of the electricity utilized within the country, the remaining 15-20% is produced by thermal power stations. According to Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources, so far Georgia has been exploiting only 18% of its hydro resource potential.
Georgia's reliance on hydropower leaves the country vulnerable to climatic fluctuations, which requires imports to meet seasonal shortages, but also opens the possibility of exports during wetter conditions. Georgia still has the potential to increase hydro-generated power, through refurbishing existing facilities, as well as constructing new hydropower plants.
One of the more difficult realities facing many of the former Soviet republics was the loss of Soviet-subsidized fuel and utility transfers. Prior to 2004, Georgia's transmission network was in critical condition, with electricity blackouts being common throughout the country. In response to mounting pressures, the Georgian government initiated a series of legislative reforms in 1998 and 1999 to begin to develop the power sector and electricity markets. While measures were taken to unbundle and liberalize the energy sector, a new law was drafted and Georgia's independent regulatory authority, the Georgian National Energy Regulatory Commission (GNERC), was formed. In addition to providing government subsidies, the GNERC was able to increase the prices of electricity and natural gas in Georgia to buffer the costs of recovery from the state's reform process. Following these reforms, distribution has been increasingly more reliable, approaching consistent 24-hour-a-day services. Investments in infrastructure have been made as well.
Currently, a privately owned Energo-Pro Georgia controls 62.5% of the electricity distribution market.
Georgia has transmission lines that connect its power grid to Russia, Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan. In July 2008 Georgia began exporting electricity to Russia through the Kavkasioni power line. Later in 2009, Georgian Energy Minister Alexander Khetaguri incited scandal for a business deal struck with the Russian energy company, Inter RAO, to jointly manage the Georgian Inguri hydropower plant for 10 years. Khetaguri's proposal would entail a cash flow of around US$9 million into Georgia for use of the plant. Tensions ran high, however, as the Inguri hydropower plant provides nearly 40 to 50 percent of the country's electricity and is located at the administrative border of the secessionist Abkhazia region.
Georgian Natural gas consumption stood at 1.8 billion cubic meters in 2007. Natural gas used to be supplied to Georgia by Russia. In recent years, however, Georgia has been able to eliminate its dependency on imports from Russia, thanks to increased hydroelectricity production, and the availability of natural gas sources from Azerbaijan. In addition, all Russian gas exports to Armenia pass through the Georgian pipeline system. Georgia takes 10% of that gas as a transit fee.
Georgia is a partner country of the EU INOGATE energy programme, which has four key topics: enhancing energy security,
convergence of member state energy markets on the basis of EU internal energy market principles,
supporting sustainable energy development, and attracting investment for energy projects of common and regional interest.
Agriculture
Currently, about 55% of the total labor force is employed in agriculture, though much of this is subsistence farming.
Georgian agricultural production is beginning to recover following the devastation caused by the civil unrest and the necessary restructuring following the breakup of the Soviet Union. Livestock production is beginning to rebound, although it continues to be confronted by minor and sporadic disease outbreaks. Domestic grain production is increasing, and government invests in improvement of infrastructure improvements to ensure appropriate distribution and revenues to farmers. Tea, hazelnut and citrus production have suffered greatly as a result of the conflict in Abkhazia, a crucial area for planting the latter crops.
Approximately 7% of the Georgian GDP (2011) is generated by the agrarian sector.
Viticulture and winemaking are the most important fields of Georgia's agriculture. Over 450 species of local vine are bred in Georgia, and the country is considered as one of the oldest places of producing top-quality wines in the world. Russia was traditionally the biggest export market for Georgian wine. This, however, changed in 2006, when Russia banned imports of wine and mineral water from Georgia, preceded by statements of Georgian governmental officials about low quality requirements of the Russian market. Since then Georgian wine producers have struggled to maintain output and break into new markets.
In 2011 Georgia sold wine in total amount of 54 mln USD in 48 countries and alcoholic beverages in total amount of 68 mln USD in 32 countries. Vines and alcoholic beverages are in the top 10 export commodity's list with 2,5% and 3.1% share respectively.
According to National Wine Agency of Georgia export of Georgian wine is increasing. 2011 wine export is 109% higher than 2007 exports. According to 2012 information, Georgia trades wine with 43 countries, selling over 23 million bottles. Biggest export partners for Georgia in wine industry are Ukraine (47.3% of wine export), Kazakhstan (18.9%) and Belarus (6.9%).
In 2011 export of vines, mineral waters and alcoholic beverages exceeded export of all years after 2006.
Georgia is rich with spring waters and production of mineral waters is one of the main spheres of industry. Export of mineral waters in 2011 amounted to 48 mln USD in 35 countries. Share of mineral water in total export is 2.1%.
Food processing industry is developing align with the primary agricultural production and export of processed products is increasing year by year. Export of nuts constituted about 6% of Georgian export (2011) and is among 10 top export commodity list with total amount of 130 mln USD. Nuts was exported in 53 countries.
Rural population as a percentage of total population in Georgia was 48.2% in 2011 and decreased to 46.3% in 2014.
Georgia produced in 2018:
259 thousand tons of grape;
237 thousand tons of potato;
194 thousand tons of maize;
107 thousand tons of wheat;
82 thousand tons of apple;
62 thousand tons of tangerine;
57 thousand tons of barley;
57 thousand tons of watermelon;
51 thousand tons of tomato;
33 thousand tons of cucumber;
27 thousand tons of peach;
In addition to smaller productions of other agricultural products.
Tourism
Tourism in Georgia (country) is one of the fastest growing sectors of the local economy, which has high potential for further development. During recent years the number of visitors to Georgia increased significantly contributing to the growth of other tourism related sectors. In 2011, more, about 3 million visitors visited Georgia 40 percent more, than in 2010. To foster the development of the tourism sector the Government of Georgia invests heavily in the development of the transportation and basic infrastructure, renovation and development of tourism destinations, which is a stimulus for the private investment generation. In 2011, total output of tourism related services production increased by 77% compared to 2006 and constituted 7.1% of total output of economy. In 2018 tourism generated 3.4 billion dollars in tax revenue for Georgia.
The following table shows the monthly average for incoming tourists in Georgia by citizenship and number of visits (in thousands).
Logistics
Georgia is one of the key members in international TRACECA programme due to its important geographical and political location. Since it is situated right in between of Europe and Asia, the country is supposed to become a busy transitional hub of a modern Silk Road in the near future. On March 11 of 2015, Georgian media declared that the Chinese and Georgian companies have reached an agreement in Beijing concerning the developing of the deep-water port at Anaklia, which existence is crucial for the TRACECA route. The port will be constructed on a plot of over 1,000 hectares and have access to a deep sea canyon. US-Based SSA Marine was later finally chosen to Invest in and Operate Container Terminal of Anaklia Deep Sea Port in Georgia by signing an agreement with Anaklia Development Consortium on 1 August 2017.
First train containing 82 containers and 41 platforms came from China to Baku, Azerbaijan on July 28. It is planned to launch a first carriage using this way through Georgia to Istanbul in September 2015. Baku–Tbilisi–Kars railway became operational on October 30, 2017.
Re-exportation of vehicles which is one of the income sources for Georgia has lowered much during 2014–2015 stagnation, most noticeably to Azerbaijan: it became 5.1 times less (on 10 337 cars) comparing to the previous year.
Finance
Like most other post-soviet countries, Georgia's finance sector is dominated by banks. As of 2015, there were 21 commercial banks, of which 5 large banks controlled most of financial assets. There are some major challenges facing the banking sector. For instance, banks play a limited role in financing the real economy and in investing in activities that are required to stabilize the country's persistent trade.
Human Development Index of Georgia
Human Development Index is a composite statistic of life expectancy, education, and income indices used to rank countries into four tiers of human development.
Georgia's HDI value for 2017 is 0.780— in the high human development category—positioning it at 70 out of 189 countries and territories. The rank is shared with Antigua and Barbuda. Between 2000 and 2017, Georgia's HDI value increased from 0.673 to 0.780, an increase of 15.9 percent or average annual increase of about 0.9 percent. Between 1990 and 2017, Georgia's life expectancy at birth increased by 3.1 years, mean years of schooling increased by 1.1 years and expected years of schooling increased by 2.6 years, also Georgia's GNI per capita increased by about 21.0%. However, it is misleading to compare values and rankings with those of previously published reports, because the underlying data and methods have changed over time.
See also
List of Georgian companies
List of countries by received FDI
Kulevi Oil Terminal
Further reading
Gugushvili, Alexi: "Understanding Poverty in Georgia" in the Caucasus Analytical Digerst No.34
Notes
References
Government press release on unemployment in 2007
How to register company in Georgia?
External links
Official site of American Chamber of Commerce in Georgia
Sakartvelos Ekonomika , an online monthly on Georgia's economy.
online English language business magazine in Georgia
Georgia
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12063 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications%20in%20Georgia%20%28country%29 | Telecommunications in Georgia (country) | Telecommunications in Georgia include radio, television, fixed and mobile telephones, and the Internet.
Radio and television
Radio broadcast stations: AM 7, FM 12, shortwave 4 (1998). There are 35 FM stations in the country, as of 2021.
Radios: 3.02 million (1997).
Television broadcast stations: 25 (plus repeaters) (2011).
Televisions: 2.57 million (1997).
Cellular Networks
Calling code: +995
Mobile Phone subscribers: 4,955,272 million lines (April 2021)
There are three cellular telephone networks: MagtiCom LTD, Silknet JSC, and Mobitel Georgia (Russian Beeline group). The cellular network market counts more than 4,955,272 active customers in total.
Coverage extends to over 98% of the populated territory as of 2010; In urban areas there are 20 telephones per 100 people and in rural areas 4 telephones per 100 people.
In 2020, the Georgian National Communications Commission announced its plans to introduce Mobile virtual network operators in 2021. There are no active MVNOs in the country as of yet, however, Tele 1 (also marketed as Tele One) is going to launch soon. It is not yet clear which operator’s infrastructure the company will use. Tele 1 has already started operating in the country partially, but it’s services (video and audio calling) are available only through their apps as of now.
Fixed Telephony, Internet and IP Television
Internet Service Providers: at least 10 ISPs.
Fixed Internet Subscribers: 977,6 thousand lines (April 2021)
Internet Protocol television Subscribers: 551 thousand lines (April 2021)
Fixed Phone Subscribers: 830,222 lines in use (2009), 366,250 lines in use (April 2021)
Top-level domain: .ge
The fixed telephony, internet and IP television in Georgia is mainly operated by MAGTICOM, Silknet and New Net, all of which controlled 90% of the market in 2018. By the end of 2008, there were 618,000 fixed telephone users in Georgia. In urban areas there are 20 telephones per 100 people, and in rural areas there are four telephones per 100 people.
Fiber-optic lines connect the major cities and Georgia and Bulgaria are connected with fiber-optic line between Poti and Varna (Bulgaria). The home internet provider industry in Georgia is heavily monopolized by 2 major competitors: Silknet and MAGTICOM. There are other smaller, more obscure providers as well, but these two are the most popular and have the biggest nationwide coverage. Both companies offer TV and mobile packages that can be combined with home internet as well.
Internet censorship and surveillance
Listed as engaged in selective Internet filtering in the political and conflict/security areas and as no evidence of filtering in the social and Internet tools areas by the OpenNet Initiative (ONI) in November 2010.
Access to Internet content in Georgia is largely unrestricted as the legal constitutional framework, developed after the 2003 Rose Revolution, established a series of provisions that should, in theory, curtail any attempts by the state to censor the Internet. At the same time, these legal instruments have not been sufficient to prevent limited filtering on corporate and educational networks. Georgia's dependence on international connectivity makes it vulnerable to upstream filtering, evident in the March 2008 blocking of YouTube by Turk Telecom.
On March 14, 2016, access to YouTube was restricted nationwide. This restriction of access was to presumably prevent Georgian citizens from accessing a video which threatened a number of journalists and opposition figures with the exposure of covertly recorded video tapes of sex acts. YouTube access went down throughout Georgia until the threatening video was removed from the internet.
See also
Georgian National Communications Commission
References
External links
Georgian National Communications Commission, website.
Sidorenko, Alexey, "Internet, Society and Democracy in Georgia", in Caucasus Analytical Digest No. 15.
Robakidze, Nino, "Georgia: Immature Media", in Caucasus Analytical Digest No. 25.
.
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12064 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport%20in%20Georgia%20%28country%29 | Transport in Georgia (country) | For Soviet transportation, see Transport in the Soviet Union.
Railways
total:
1,683 km in common carrier service; does not include industrial lines
broad gauge:
1,583 km of gauge (1993)
narrow gauge:
100 km of gauge.
City with metro system: Tbilisi (see Tbilisi Metro).
In April 2005, an agreement was signed to build a railway from Turkey through Georgia to Azerbaijan (see Kars Baku Tbilisi railway line). The line under construction is using Standard gauge until Akhalkalaki. There will be axle change station for wagons to proceed with broad gauge to Baku.
In August 2007, Georgia handed over the management rights of the state-owned Georgian Railway company to the U.K.-based company Parkfield Investment for 89 years.
Railway links with adjacent countries
Russia - yes - - via the breakaway Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia - closed for political reasons.
Azerbaijan - yes - .
Armenia - yes
Turkey - yes - break-of-gauge with through (Standard Gauge).
2007
February 7 - agreement signed for Kars-Tbilisi-Baku railway
Towns served by rail
Poti - port
Batumi - port
Kutaisi
Akhaltsike
Highways
The total length of the road network is approximately kilometers (2020), divided over roughly of international trunk roads, of domestic main roads and some local roads. Only a limited number of kilometers are express roads or motorways which are in good condition. The quality of the other roads varies greatly.
Motorways
Georgia has a limited multilane expressroad/motorway system, that is under development. In 2021 these sections are:
S1 highway Mukhatgverdi (Tbilisi West) - Surami
S1 highway Argveta - Samtredia
S4 highway Ponichala (Tbilisi) - Rustavi
S12 highway Japana - Lanchkhuti
Additionally, the S2 highway has limited access two-lane freeway (Kobuleti Bypass).
Pipelines
Crude oil 370 km; refined products 300 km; natural gas 440 km (1992)
Black Sea Ports and harbors
Batumi, Poti, Sokhumi, Kulevi Oil Terminal
Merchant marine
total:
17 ships (with a volume of or over) totaling /
ships by type:
cargo ship 10, chemical tanker 1, petroleum tanker 6 (1999 est.)
Airports
28 (1994 est.)
In February 2007 a brand new, modern and fully equipped international Airport was inaugurated in Tbilisi.
Tbilisi - Shota Rustaveli Airport
Batumi - Alexander Kartveli Airport
Kutaisi - David The Builder Airport
Mestia - Queen Tamar Airport
Ambrolauri - Ambrolauri Airport
Poti - Poti International Airport
Airports - with paved runways
total:
14
over 3,047 m:
1
2,438 to 3,047 m:
7
1,524 to 2,437 m:
4
914 to 1,523 m:
1
under 914 m:
1 (1994 est.)
Airports - with unpaved runways
total:
14
over 3,047 m:
1
2,438 to 3,047 m:
1
1,524 to 2,437 m:
1
914 to 1,523 m:
5
under 914 m:
6 (1994 est.)
See also
Georgia
List of Tbilisi metro stations
Transport in Armenia
External links
Roads Department of Georgia (ENG)
United Transport Administration (ENG)
Notes | [
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12065 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense%20Forces%20of%20Georgia | Defense Forces of Georgia | The Defense Forces of Georgia (), or Georgian Defense Forces (GDF), are the combined military forces of Georgia, tasked with the defense of the nation's independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity. They consist of the Land Force, Air Force, National Guard, and Special Operations Forces. The Defense Forces are under overall leadership of the Minister of Defense of Georgia and directly headed by the Chief of Defense Forces.
The first regular military was established in the first Georgian Republic in 1918 and was in existence until after the republic's overthrow by the invading Soviet Russian forces in 1921. The modern Georgian military were founded in accordance with the government decree of 24 April 1991. 30 April, the day when the first conscripts were called up for military service in 1991, has been celebrated as the day of the Georgian military forces.
The Georgian military have fought in the civil war and separatist conflicts in the 1990s and the Russo-Georgian War of 2008 as well as major international military missions such as in Iraq and Afghanistan. Georgia was one of the first former Soviet republics to join the NATO Partnership for Peace program in 1994 and Individual Partnership Action Plan (IPAP) in 2004 and has sought to bring its military in line with the NATO standards.
History
Establishment and early years
On December 20, 1990, President Zviad Gamsakhurdia ordered the creation of what is now the Defense Forces. In January 1991, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Supreme Soviet Chairman Anatoly Lukyanov, demanded that Gamsakhurdia to stop the creation of the National Guard. The first military parade of the National Guard was held at Boris Paichadze Stadium on 30 April 1991, where for the first time in 70 years, Georgians swore allegiance to the Georgian people. This day is today commemorated as Defense Forces Day.
The new military was mainly manned by volunteers as well as ethnically Georgian officers who were serving in Soviet Army at the time. The transfer of former Transcaucasian Military District facilities, weapons and formations located in Georgia, which began in early 1992, lasted until 1997. On April 30, 1992, an agreement was signed on the transfer of military units and facilities by the heads of the defense ministries of the Russian Federation and Georgia. According to it, Georgia received the following formations:
10th Armoured Division (without 403rd Motorized Rifle Regiment) - Akhaltsikhe
6th Fortified Area - Akhaltsikhe
8th Fortified Area
During the Georgian Civil War, units waged war with supporters of the ousted Gamsakhurdia. The Georgian Armed Forces also took part in the 1991–1992 South Ossetia War and the War in Abkhazia (1992–1993), losing both, after which Georgia lost control over most of the territory of these republics.
21st century
The Georgia Train and Equip Program (GTEP) training was conducted using U.S. Special Operations Forces and U.S. Marine Corps forces from May 2002 to May 2004. During this time approximately 2,600 Georgian soldiers, including a headquarters staff element and 5 tactical units, received training. Another assistance program, the Georgia Security and Stability Operations Program (Georgia SSOP), was launched in January 2005 as a continuation of the (GTEP) of 2002-2004. Georgian contingents were involved in the Kosovo Force and continue to participate in the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The DFG have been extensively reformed in the recent years to meet Georgia's aspirations to join NATO and for better response to the existing challenges such as the ongoing tensions in the unresolved separatist conflict areas in Abkhazia and South Ossetia as well as to the threats of global terrorism. Georgia also views a large-scale foreign invasion and the spillover of conflicts from Russia's North Caucasus as the worst potential near- and long-term scenarios, respectively.
On August 8, 2008 the Georgian military conducted an operation in Georgia's breakaway region South Ossetia (see 2008 South Ossetia War) in response to separatist attacks. The operation led to an armed conflict with forces from the Russian Federation and resulted in the defeat and expulsion of Georgian forces from South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Following the military operations, Russia recognized independence of the regions.
The military budget of Georgia increased more than 50 times over the period from 2002 (US$18 mln.) to 2007 (US$780 mln.), reaching over 7% of Georgia's GDP. Currently the budget is 272mln USD (900mln GEL).
Russo-Georgian War
In August 2008, following a series of fierce clashes in South Ossetia, Georgia attempted to re-take the separatist territory by force. In the resulting military conflict with Russia, Georgia was driven out of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and lost parts of its military capabilities. Russian forces sank four Georgian naval vessels in the port of Poti and hauled away nine rigid-hull inflatable boats. Georgia Land Forces lost approximately 30 T-72's, 6 BMP's, 2 BTR's and around 10 artillery pieces of all types in combat. The Russians also captured 5 intact BMP's, approximately 5 artillery pieces, BUK SAM system and OSA SAM system. The Georgian Air Force lost three AN-2's, 2 Mi-24's and 1 Mi-14 on the ground. Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia lost 2 Hermes 450 reconnaissance drones and 1 Otokar Cobra APC. The Russian military lost more military equipment in combat than Georgia.
Reconstruction
Georgia immediately began a process of re-armament after the war. The conflict was immediately followed by a replenishment program of the gaps in the single GAF arms components with an additional massive re-equipment and modernization program. Two Georgian naval vessels sunk in Poti were raised and returned to service. The Georgian Navy's remaining operational units were merged into the Coast Guard, which received training in search and seizure tactics from the United States. Ukraine supplied Georgia with 30 BTR-70 armored personnel carriers, 2 BUK SAM system batteries and 6 OSA mobile SAM systems. Israel supplied Georgia with 13 Wolf APC's and SPYDER-SR SAM systems and many types of firearms. The U.S. supplied Georgia with many types of infantry equipment to Georgia such as infantry personal protection equipment, firearms, APC's and anti tank missiles. Georgia has also received MANPADs and radars from France. NATO militaries also often train with Georgian military and have annual military drills in Georgia. Georgia also rebuilt its damaged military bases and constructed more military barracks. By late 2010 the Georgian military had reached a strength greater than pre-war levels and, after completing the reforms, decisively reduced military spending. Beginning in 2010, Georgia started to produce its own line of APC's, IFV's, infantry personal protection equipment, small arms and mortars.
Structure
The Defense Forces of Georgia consist of four branches: Land Forces, Air Force, National Guard, and Special Operations Forces.
The overall command is exercised by the Chief of Defense Forces, who is aided by the General Staff of the Defense Forces. The Defense Forces are further organized into several structural units:
Eastern Command
Western Command
Air and Air Defense Command
Special Operations Forces
Military Training and Education Command
Army Logistics Command
National Guard
Military Police
Department of Military Intelligence
In wartime, several other bodies fall under the control of the Defense Forces additionally. These are:
Border Police of Georgia, a subordinate agency of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia
Department of Special Operations - Public Security Forces, a subunit of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia
Department for Protection of Strategic Pipelines, a subunit of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia
Department for Protection of Strategic Infrastructure, a subunit of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia
National Defense Academy of Georgia, a legal entity under the Ministry of Defense
Military Hospital of the Ministry of Defense
Cybersecurity Bureau, a legal entity under the Ministry of Defense
Data Exchange Agency, a legal entity under the Ministry of Justice of Georgia.
The Eastern Command and its Western counterpart are two main regional operational groupings, respectively, for eastern and western Georgia. They were created in the 2010s in order to have two autonomous territorial commands, with their own military staffs, logistical and administrative resources.
Branches
The Land Forces form the largest component of the DFG responsible for providing land defence against any threat to the nation's sovereignty and territorial integrity, supporting Border Police in border protection and civil authorities in counter-terrorist operations as well as providing units for NATO-led and coalition operations abroad. They are organized into infantry brigades, artillery and other supporting capacities operating at a battalion level.
The Special Operations Forces are responsible for conducting special reconnaissance, unconventional warfare and counter-terrorism operations. The Georgian National Guard organizes and trains reservists in the peacetime and mobilizes them during a crisis or wartime.
Ground arms
The structure of the Georgian Land Forces is based on brigade and battalion-sized military units. The main force consists of four infantry, two artillery, one air defence brigades and several independent battalions. Georgian brigades have a total manpower of 3,000 each excluding non-combat personnel. The overall strength of the land forces in 2013 was 37,825 (excluding active reserve), from which 21 were high-ranking officers, 6,166 officers and sergeants, 28,477 corporals and privates, 125 cadets and 388 civilians. Accordingly, to NATO structures and higher standards reached the brigades were downsized to optimal as well as the 5th brigade disbanded, also to increase the percentage of spending on arms acquirement, which was previously 2%, to 6% of the military budget. The goal is to reach at least 15% until 2020. The ground forces are equipped with a variety of weapons and vehicles. Special forces operate independently under MOD direction.
The Georgian Land Force consists of following primary combat formations (incomplete):
Force composition
HQ, Land Forces Command (Tbilisi)
Central Command Point
Operational Command East
1st Infantry Brigade (Tbilisi)
11th Light Infantry Battalion
12th Light Infantry Battalion - NRF
13th Light Infantry Battalion
4th Mechanized Infantry Brigade (Vaziani)
41st Mechanized Infantry Battalion
42nd Mechanized Infantry Battalion
43rd Mechanized Infantry Battalion
5th Artillery Brigade (Vaziani)
Special Operations Battalion
Ranger Battalion
Combat Engineer Battalion
Operational Command West
2nd Infantry Brigade (Senaki)
21st Light Infantry Battalion
22nd Light Infantry Battalion
23rd Light Infantry Battalion
3rd Infantry Brigade (The Mamelukes) (Kutaisi)
31st Light Infantry Battalion
32nd Light Infantry Battalion
33rd Light Infantry Battalion
6th Artillery Brigade (Khoni)
Naval Special Operations Company
Combat Engineer Battalion
Medical Company
Separate Communications Company
Separate Elements
Aviation and Air-Defense Command
Army Logistics Command
Training and Education Command
Engineer Brigade
Separate Reconnaissance Battalion (Kobuleti)
Separate Medical Battalion (Saguramo)
Separate Signal Battalion
Separate Logistics Battalion
In 2011 the Georgian high command decided to divide its military forces into two main operational units; the Eastern and Western Operational Groups. The aim was to create two independently acting military districts which would consist of forces in accordance to the strategic value of their deployment areas yet being balanced in their type of equipment. In case of war each group will be able to coordinate its operations independently from high command, having its own logistical and administrative reserves.
Special Operations Forces
The Special Operations Forces of the Defence Forces of Georgia were established to conduct unconventional warfare and the full spectrum of special operation missions. They also serve in supporting capacity for regular military forces, primarily in the areas of education and training.
Georgian special forces became first active in 1999 as part of KFOR. Georgian commandos participated in the Iraq War from 2003 until the complete withdrawal of the Georgian contingent in 2008 due to an escalation of hostilities in South Ossetia. According to independent accounts, a number of Georgian operatives were also deployed prior in Afghanistan to aide US Special Forces in hunting down Taliban leaders. Georgian officials have stated that a group of servicemen were deployed in Afghanistan for medical purposes.
Air Force
The Georgian Air Force (Georgian: საქართველოს საჰაერო ძალები, sak’art’velos sahaero dzalebi) is the air force of the Defense Forces of Georgia. It was established as part of the Georgian Armed Forces in 1992 and merged into Army Air Section in 2010. As part of reforms in the Georgian military, the Air Force was reestablished as a separate branch of the Defense Forces in 2016. Under the leadership of Georgian Minister of Defense Irakli Garibashvili the Air Force was re-prioritized and aircraft owned by the Georgian Air Force are being modernized and re-serviced after they were left abandoned for 4 years. The Minister of Defense also announced plans to acquire strike drones to increase Georgia's combat readiness.
Georgian Coast Guard (Former Naval Force)
The Georgian Navy was abolished in 2009 and was incorporated into the Coast Guard, which is not structurally part of the Defense Forces, but rather it is a subunit of the Border Guard of Georgia, which is under the control of Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia. The Coast Guard of Georgia is responsible for maintenance of the sovereignty of the country and for protection of internal territorial waters and economic zones. The headquarters and a principal Coast Guard base are located at the Black Sea port of Poti.
The other, smaller Coast Guard base is in Batumi. Besides the naval force, the navy also includes a Special Counter-terrorist Detachment force. Georgia is also one of the founding members and a participant of the Black Sea Naval Co-operation Task Group. Before the war with Russia, the Georgian navy had 19 naval vessels. Four of them were sunk during the conflict, and nine rigid-hull inflatables were captured by Russia. The Georgians raised and returned to service two of the sunken vessels, and partially replaced their losses with Turkish-built patrol/fast attack boats.
National Guard of Georgia
The National Guard of Georgia was established on December 20, 1990 and was manned mainly by volunteers. It represents the first Georgian armed formation, which became the base of the foundation for modern Defense Forces of Georgia. The Guard actively participated in the conflicts that occurred in Georgian territory (Samachablo, Abkhazia).
The National Guard used to consist of 20,554 personnel, but has now been reduced to 550.
Support civil government in crisis situations (natural, technological, ecological);
Register mobilization resources, study and deliver;
Convene, select and man of citizens on the basis of the agreement, for the units, subunits and bases of the Defense Forces;
Provide ceremonial activity support;
Assisting in training the Reserve Forces.
Army Reserve and Territorial Defence Forces
The Army Reserve is a professional reserve force consisting of former regular army personnel only. Due to the amount of experience, the Reserve personnel would be set-in for replacement of losses in the ranks of regular formations and will if needed also operate in the vanguard of a combined mechanized group or an infantry assault.
The Territorial Defence Forces were established for immediate readiness of the population in crisis events, such as war. Its main goals would be the fortification and defence of all populated and strategically important areas as well as providing quick aid or security for evacuation operations in case of natural catastrophes.
Other than the active army reserve which consists of only ex military personnel, the Territorial Defence Forces are rather sparsely prepared for complex military operations. It instead provides more comfort for the regular forces in case of war. By acting as additional logistical arm and leaving the actual combat to them. With the land forces and reserve army engaged in direct action the Defence Force's most important task would be to construct trenches, bunkers and obstacles around strategically important areas and position themselves on systematically formed defensive lines. Mobilization capacity is around 140,000 troops and is reasonably large.
The TDF reservist is comparably poorly equipped for modern warfare. It is rumored that Georgia possess thousands of firearms of all types and infantry personal protection equipment inherited from the Soviet Union which could be used by reservists. Georgia also possess few hundred T-55 tanks that are in storage that could be used by the reservist forces.
Commissioned officers
International cooperation
The Georgian Defense Forces frequently have large scale military drills involving heavy armor and parachute units with their NATO counterparts on Georgian soil to increase interoperability.
Peacekeeping missions
About 200 Georgian troops were deployed in the Kosovo (KFOR) in 1999–2008, 70 were deployed in Iraq (OIF) in 2003 and 50 in Afghanistan in 2004 (ISAF). From 2004 in Iraq were 300 Georgian troops. From 2005 approximately 850 troops were serving under Coalition Command (OIF and UNAMI). In July 2007 Georgia sent an extra 1,400 troops to Iraq; that brought the total number of troops in Iraq to 2,000. About 300 of these troops were assigned to Taskforce Petro and stationed at COP Cleary outside the town of Wahida near Salman Pak, Iraq. On August 8, 2008 Georgia announced it will withdraw 1,000 troops from Iraq due to rising hostilities with Russia. Their preparedness and training skills are evaluated on highest level by international experts. The entire Iraq contingent has been airlifted back to Georgia.
Hence, owing to participation in international peacekeeping missions the military members are able to obtain practical experience and to show readiness to cooperate with NATO and with other partner countries' forces.
Currently there are more than 1,570 Georgian combat troops deployed in Helmand, Afghanistan where Georgia has thus far suffered 22 deaths and over a hundred injuries. In September 2012, Georgia stated that it would continue its contributions in Afghanistan following the 2014 NATO withdrawal.
In November 2012, Georgia had doubled the number of troops deployed to fight with Nato-led forces in Afghanistan to over 1,500. Georgia has 1,570 troops serving there, making the small Caucasus country of 4.5 million people the largest non-Nato contributor to the Afghanistan mission.
Since 2014 Georgia has contributed 140 troops to the EUFOR RCA peacekeeping mission in the Central African Republic, Georgia also contributes its military units to Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan.
Commanders
The Chief of General Staff is the highest-ranking officer in the military, heading the General Staff and being the ex officio Deputy Chief of the Defense Forces, who is the commander of the Defense Forces, being appointed by the Minister of Defense. The senior enlisted advisor of the Georigan military is the Sergeant Major of the Georgian Defense Forces (), currently Sergeant Major Koba Tsirekidze (appointed on 11 April 2016).
Military industry
Georgia has a long history of weapon production tracing back to ancient times. The modern arms industry began during the Soviet era. In 1941 Georgia became one of the most important Soviet weapon manufacturing states during the Second World War. It was responsible for providing the Soviet Army with all types of aircraft and ammunition. Tbilisi Aircraft Manufacturing's role didn't change after the war. Up until 1990 Georgia was producing various types of fighter aircraft, most notably the Su-25 since it was produced almost exclusively in Georgia, unmanned areal vehicles, missiles, satellite components and orbital satellites. The company lost most of its functionality and production capability when the Soviet Union dissolved, yet was not abandoned. In the late 1990s Georgia's JSC RMP and later the newly established Ministry of Defence section "Delta" started to work on the development of ballistic equipment using their own ingredients. The advanced research unit had successfully developed a variety of personal protection gear, such as bomb disposal suits and level I-IV body armour using classified mixtures of domestic resource. These projects never went beyond some prototypes, mainly due to poor attention and financing from the government.
With foreign support primarily from the United States since 2005, Georgia became able to start building a solid industrial base for the military. From 2001 to 2007, Delta experimented with unmanned aerial vehicles and modified parts for helicopters and Su-25 aircraft until it got involved in the modification of Georgia's T-72 tank fleet. In 2009-10, with enough experience and expertise and the assistance of designer Zviad Tsikolia, Delta created its first prototype of an armored personnel carrier, the Didgori. Early tests were highly successful so that its first production line started already in 2011. Two versions would initially serve in the armed forces in 2012, followed by different modifications from 2013 on. The Lazika is Delta's attempt to manufacture a suitable modular infantry fighting vehicle created for multiple tasks. Delta considers the Lazika as one of the best vehicles of its class bearing armour technology similar to that of Israel. The remotely operated systems are locally produced as well. Due to "misdirected financing" and heavy interfering of former government officials, project Lazika was temporarily cancelled in late 2012, also due to "sabotage" and shortcomings in its armour research, but then later continued in early 2013 when a newly elected government took charge.
As of 2007 Georgia has been domestically producing uniforms for its military personnel. Other main production lines include various types of artillery systems such as MLRS, mortars and corresponding ammunition, anti-tank weapons and devices, full uniform sets for ceremonies and for all service branches, including boots, hats, assault vests, pouches, and backpacks. New kind of ballistic vests and helmets have been developed and produced for military service since 2013. The Georgian production uses techniques based on know-how from aerospace research whose methods differ slightly yet significantly from foreign ones. In 2018 plans were announced for decisive expansions in manufacturing capabilities. With assistance from the United States and Israel, a weapon manufacturing plant was established for the development and production of AR-15 based firearms.
Bases
See also
Georgia and NATO
List of equipment of the Defense Forces of Georgia
References
2005
Further reading
Denise Hammick, Country Briefing: Georgia On the Cusp, Jane's Defence Weekly, 2 January 2008
External links
geo-army.ge, an information website
Ministry of Defence of Georgia: The Strategic Defence Review 2007. mod.gov.ge. Accessed on May 7, 2008.
GlobalSecurity.org on Georgia's military
Ministry of the defence of Georgia: Armed Forces of Georgia. Accessed on March 6, 2009.
Military Heraldry of Georgian Armed Forces. | [
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12066 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign%20relations%20of%20Georgia%20%28country%29 | Foreign relations of Georgia (country) | Georgia's location, nestled between the Black Sea, Russia, and Turkey, renders it strategically important. It is developing as the gateway from the Black Sea to the Caucasus and the larger Caspian region, but also serves as a buffer between Russia and Turkey. Georgia has a long and tumultuous relationship with Russia, but it is reaching out to its other neighbours and looking to the West in search of alternatives and opportunities. It signed a partnership and cooperation agreement with the European Union, participates in the Partnership for Peace, and encourages foreign investment. France, Germany, South Korea the United Kingdom and the United States all have embassies in Tbilisi. Georgia in 2004-2008 sought to become a member of NATO, but did not succeed in the face of strong Russian opposition.
Georgia is a member of the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and the OSCE.
Because of its strategic location, Georgia is in both the Russian and American spheres of influence, however Georgia's relationship with Russia is at its lowest point since 1921 due to controversies regarding espionage and the Russo-Georgian War. As a result, Georgia broke off diplomatic relations with Russia and has left the Commonwealth of Independent States. From 2008 until 2012, Georgia established diplomatic relations with about 50 states.
Relations by country
Multilateral
Africa
Americas
Asia
Europe
Oceania
Overview
Georgia has established relations with 185 countries and the Order of Malta.
Georgia has terminated its diplomatic relations with Russia, Nicaragua and Syria.
Georgia has not yet established diplomatic relations with:
Venezuela, Nauru
Bhutan, Cook Islands, Niue, Tonga
Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic and the rest of states with limited recognition.
See also
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia
List of diplomatic missions in Georgia (country)
List of diplomatic missions of Georgia (country)
Georgia – European Union relations
EU Neighbourhood Info Centre: Country profile of Georgia
Further reading
NATO and the South Caucasus. Analyses, Chronicles, Opinion Polls in the Caucasus Analytical Digest No. 5
Edilashvili, Maia: "Foreign Direct Investment Declines in Georgia" in the Caucasus Analytical Digest No. 28
References
External links
MFA of Georgia - Bilateral relations
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia
The Permanent Mission of Georgia to the United Nations
United Nations Observer Mission in Georgia
Georgia v. Russia Provisional Measures Order and President Rosalyn Higgins concurring and Joint Dissenting Opinion and ASIL
Government of Georgia (country)
Politics of Georgia (country) | [
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12067 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghana | Ghana | Ghana (), officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country in West Africa. It spans the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, sharing borders with the Ivory Coast in the west, Burkina Faso in the north, and Togo in the east. Ghana covers an area of , spanning diverse biomes that range from coastal savannas to tropical rain forests. With over 31 million people, Ghana is the second-most populous country in West Africa, after Nigeria. The capital and largest city is Accra; other major cities are Kumasi, Tamale, and Sekondi-Takoradi.
The first permanent state in present-day Ghana was the Bono state of the 11th century. Numerous kingdoms and empires emerged over the centuries, of which the most powerful were the Kingdom of Dagbon in the north and the Ashanti Empire in the south. Beginning in the 15th century, the Portuguese Empire, followed by numerous other European powers, contested the area for trading rights, until the British ultimately established control of the coast by the late 19th century. Following over a century of colonization, Ghana's current borders took shape, encompassing four separate British colonial territories: Gold Coast, Ashanti, the Northern Territories and British Togoland. These were unified as an independent dominion within the Commonwealth of Nations on 6 March 1957, becoming the first colony in sub-Saharan Africa to achieve sovereignty. Ghana subsequently became influential in decolonisation efforts and the Pan-African movement.
Ghana is a multinational state, home to a variety of ethnic, linguistic and religious groups; while the Akan are the largest ethnic group, they constitute only a plurality. The vast majority of Ghanaians are Christian (71.3%), with close to a fifth being Muslim and a tenth practising traditional faiths or reporting no religion. Ghana is a unitary constitutional democracy led by a president who is both head of state and head of government. Since 1993, it has maintained one of the freest and most stable governments on the continent, and performs relatively well in metrics of healthcare, economic growth, and human development. Ghana consequently enjoys significant influence in West Africa, and is highly integrated in international affairs, being a member of the Non-Aligned Movement, the African Union, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the Group of 24 (G24) and the Commonwealth of Nations.
Etymology
The etymology of the name Ghana means "Strong Warrior King" and was the title accorded to the kings of the medieval "Ghana" Empire in West Africa, not to be confused with today's Ghana, as the empire was further north in modern-day Republic of Mali, Senegal, southern Mauritania, as well as in the region of Guinea. Ghana was known for its large Gold usage, and hence was named the Land of Gold by the Arabs during the Trans-Saharan trades.
History
Medieval kingdoms
Most of what is now Ghana was inhabited in the Middle Ages and the Age of Discovery by different ethnic groups.
The earliest known kingdoms to emerge in modern Ghana were the Mole-Dagbani states. The Mole-Dagomba came on horseback from present-day Burkina Faso under a single leader, Naa Gbewaa. With their advanced weapons and based on a central authority, they easily invaded and occupied the lands of the local people ruled by the Tendamba (land god priests), established themselves as the rulers over the locals, and made Gambaga their capital. The death of Naa Gbewaa caused civil war among his children, some of whom broke off and founded separate states including Dagbon, Mamprugu, Mossi, Nanumba and Wala.
Although the area of present-day Ghana in West Africa has experienced many population movements, the Akan speaking peoples began to move into it toward the end of the 15th Century. By the early sixteenth century, the Akans were firmly established in the Akan state called Bonoman, for which the Brong-Ahafo Region is named.
From the 13th century, Akans emerged from what is believed to have been the Bonoman area, to create several Akan states, mainly based on gold trading. These states included Bonoman (Brong-Ahafo Region), Ashanti (Ashanti Region), Denkyira (Western North region), Mankessim Kingdom (Central region), and Akwamu (Eastern region). By the 19th century, the territory of the southern part of Ghana was included in the Kingdom of Ashanti, one of the influential states in sub-saharan Africa prior to the onset of colonialism.
The government of the Ashanti Empire operated first as a loose network, and eventually as a centralised kingdom with an advanced, highly specialised bureaucracy centred in the capital city of Kumasi. Prior to Akan contact with Europeans, the Akan people created an advanced economy based on principally gold and gold bar commodities then traded with the states of Africa.
European contact (15th century)
Akan trade with European states began after contact with the Portuguese in the 15th century. Early European contact by the Portuguese people, who came to the Gold Coast region in the 15th century to trade and then established the Portuguese Gold Coast (Costa do Ouro), focused on the extensive availability of gold. The Portuguese built a trading lodge at a coastal settlement called Anomansah (the perpetual drink) which they renamed São Jorge da Mina.
In 1481, King John II of Portugal commissioned Diogo de Azambuja to build the Elmina Castle, which was completed in three years. By 1598, the Dutch had joined the Portuguese in the gold trade, establishing the Dutch Gold Coast (Nederlandse Bezittingen ter Kuste van Guinea) and building forts at Fort Komenda and Kormantsi. In 1617, the Dutch captured the Olnini Castle from the Portuguese, and Axim in 1642 (Fort St Anthony).
Other European traders had joined in gold trading by the mid-17th century, most notably the Swedes, establishing the Swedish Gold Coast (Svenska Guldkusten), and Denmark-Norway, establishing the Danish Gold Coast (Danske Guldkyst or Dansk Guinea). Portuguese merchants, impressed with the gold resources in the area, named it Costa do Ouro or Gold Coast. Also beginning in the 17th century – in addition to the gold trade – Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French traders also participated in the Atlantic slave trade in this area.
More than thirty forts and castles were built by the Portuguese, Swedish, Dano-Norwegians, Dutch and German merchants; the latter Germans establishing the German Gold Coast (Brandenburger Gold Coast or Groß Friedrichsburg). In 1874 Great Britain established control over some parts of the country, assigning these areas the status of British Gold Coast. Many military engagements occurred between the British colonial powers and the various Akan nation-states. The Akan Kingdom of Ashanti defeated the British a few times in the 100-year-long Anglo-Ashanti wars but eventually lost with the War of the Golden Stool in the early 1900s.
Transition to independence
In 1947, the newly formed United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) led by "The Big Six" called for "self-government within the shortest possible time" following the Gold Coast legislative election, 1946. Kwame Nkrumah, a Ghanaian nationalist who led Ghana from 1957 to 1966 as the country's first Prime Minister and President, formed the Convention People's Party (CPP) in 1949 with the motto "self-government now". The party initiated a "positive action" campaign involving non-violent protests, strikes and non-cooperation with the British authorities. Nkrumah was arrested and sentenced to one year imprisonment during this time. In the Gold Coast's February 1951 general election, he was elected to Parliament and released from prison to become leader of government business. He became Prime Minister of the Gold Coast in 1952. He improved the infrastructure of the country and his Africanisation policies created better career opportunities for Ghanaians.
On 6 March 1957 at midnight, the Gold Coast, Ashanti, the Northern Territories and British Togoland were unified as one single independent dominion within the British Commonwealth under the name Ghana. This was done under the Ghana Independence Act 1957. The current flag of Ghana, consisting of the colours red, gold, green, and a black star, dates back to this unification. It was designed by Theodosia Salome Okoh; the red represents the blood that was shed towards independence, the gold represents the industrial minerals wealth of Ghana, the green symbolises the rich grasslands of Ghana, and the black star is the symbol of the Ghanaian people and African emancipation.
On 1 July 1960, following the Ghanaian constitutional referendum and Ghanaian presidential election, Nkrumah declared Ghana as a republic and assumed the presidency. 6 March is the nation's Independence Day and 1 July is now celebrated as Republic Day.
At the time of independence Nkrumah declared, "My first objective is to abolish from Ghana poverty, ignorance, and disease. We shall measure our progress by the improvement in the health of our people; by the number of children in school, and by the quality of their education; by the availability of water and electricity in our towns and villages; and by the happiness which our people take in being able to manage their own affairs. The welfare of our people is our chief pride, and it is by this that my government will ask to be judged.".
Nkrumah was the first African head of state to promote the concept of Pan-Africanism, which he had been introduced to during his studies at Lincoln University, Pennsylvania in the United States, at the time when Marcus Garvey was becoming famous for his "Back to Africa Movement". Nkrumah merged the teachings of Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr. and the naturalised Ghanaian scholar W. E. B. Du Bois into the formation of 1960s Ghana.
Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, as he became known, played an instrumental part in the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement, and in establishing the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute to teach his ideologies of communism and socialism. His life achievements were recognised by Ghanaians during his centenary birthday celebration, and the day was instituted as a public holiday in Ghana (Founder's Day).
Operation Cold Chop and aftermath
The government of Nkrumah was subsequently overthrown by a coup by the Ghana Armed Forces codenamed "Operation Cold Chop". This occurred while Nkrumah was abroad with Zhou Enlai in the People's Republic of China, on a fruitless mission to Hanoi in Vietnam to help end the Vietnam War. The coup took place on 24 February 1966, led by Col. Emmanuel Kwasi Kotoka. The National Liberation Council (NLC) was formed, chaired by Lt. General Joseph A. Ankrah.
A series of alternating military and civilian governments, often affected by economic instabilities, ruled Ghana from 1966 to 1981, ending with the ascension to power of Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings of the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) in 1981. These changes resulted in the suspension of the Constitution of Ghana in 1981, and the banning of political parties in Ghana. The economy soon declined, so Rawlings negotiated a structural adjustment plan changing many old economic policies, and economic growth soon recovered during the mid-1980s. A new Constitution of Ghana restoring multi-party system politics was promulgated in the Ghanaian presidential election of 1992; Rawlings was elected as president of Ghana then, and again in the general election of 1996.
At least 1,000 and as many as 2,000 people were killed during the conflict between Konkomba and other ethnic groups such as the Nanumba, Dagomba and Gonja, while 150,000 people were displaced as part of the tribal war in Northern Ghana in 1994.
21st century
Winning the 2000 Ghanaian elections, John Agyekum Kufuor of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) was sworn into office as president of Ghana on 7 January 2001, and attained the presidency again in the 2004 Ghanaian elections, thus also serving two terms (the term limit) as president of Ghana and thus marking the first time under the fourth republic that power was transferred from one legitimately elected head of state and head of government to another.
Nana Akufo-Addo, the ruling party candidate, was defeated in a very close election by John Atta Mills of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) following the Ghanaian presidential election, 2008. Mills died of natural causes and was succeeded by vice-president John Dramani Mahama on 24 July 2012.
Following the Ghanaian presidential election, 2012, John Dramani Mahama became President-elect and was inaugurated on 7 January 2013. Ghana was a stable democracy.
As a result of the Ghanaian presidential election, 2016, Nana Akufo-Addo became President-elect and was inaugurated as the fifth President of the Fourth Republic of Ghana and eighth President of Ghana on 7 January 2017. In December 2020, President Nana Akufo-Addo was re-elected after a tightly contested election.
On 11 June 2021, Ghana inaugurated Green Ghana Day in an aim of planting 5 million trees in a concentrating effort to preserve the country's cover of rainforest to combat deforestation.
Geography and geology
Ghana is located on the Gulf of Guinea, only a few degrees north of the Equator, therefore giving it a warm climate. Ghana spans an area of , and has an Atlantic coastline that stretches on the Gulf of Guinea in Atlantic Ocean to its south. It lies between latitudes 4°45'N and 11°N, and longitudes 1°15'E and 3°15'W. The Prime Meridian passes through Ghana, specifically through the industrial port town of Tema.
Ghana is geographically closer to the "centre" of the Earth geographical coordinates than any other country; even though the notional centre, (0°, 0°) is located in the Atlantic Ocean approximately off the south-east coast of Ghana on the Gulf of Guinea.
Grasslands mixed with south coastal shrublands and forests dominate Ghana, with forest extending northward from the south-west coast of Ghana on the Gulf of Guinea in the Atlantic Ocean and eastward for a maximum of about with the Kingdom of Ashanti or the southern part of Ghana being a primary location for mining of industrial minerals and timber. Ghana is home to five terrestrial ecoregions: Eastern Guinean forests, Guinean forest-savanna mosaic, West Sudanian savanna, Central African mangroves, and Guinean mangroves. It had a 2018 Forest Landscape Integrity Index mean score of 4.53/10, ranking it 112th globally out of 172 countries.
Ghana encompasses plains, waterfalls, low hills, rivers, Dodi Island and Bobowasi Island on the south Atlantic Ocean coast. The White Volta River and its tributary Black Volta, flow south through Ghana to Lake Volta, the world's third largest reservoir by volume and largest by surface area, formed by the hydroelectric Akosombo Dam, completed in 1965. Flowing out of Lake Volta into the Atlantic Ocean at the Gulf of Guinea is the Volta River.
The northernmost part of Ghana is Pulmakong and the southernmost part of Ghana is Cape Three Points.
Climate
The climate of Ghana is tropical, and there are two main seasons: the wet season and the dry season.
Government and politics
Ghana is a unitary presidential constitutional democracy with a parliamentary multi-party system that is dominated by two parties – the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP). Ghana alternated between civilian and military governments until January 1993, when the military government gave way to the Fourth Republic of Ghana after presidential and parliamentary elections in late 1992. The 1992 constitution of Ghana divides powers among a Commander-in-Chief of the Ghana Armed Forces (President of Ghana), parliament (Parliament of Ghana), cabinet (Cabinet of Ghana), council of state (Ghanaian Council of State), and an independent judiciary (Judiciary of Ghana). The Government of Ghana is elected by universal suffrage after every four years.
Nana Akufo-Addo won the Presidency in the Ghanaian general election held on 7 December 2016, defeating incumbent John Mahama. He was sworn in on 7 January 2017. He also won the 2020 election and was subsequently sworn in on 7 January 2021.
Presidents are limited to two four-year terms in office. The president can serve a second term only upon re-election. Ghana has never had a female president.
The 2012 Fragile States Index indicated that Ghana is ranked the 67th least fragile state in the world and the 5th least fragile state in Africa after Mauritius, 2nd Seychelles, 3rd Botswana, and 4th South Africa. Ghana ranked 112th out of 177 countries on the index. Ghana ranked as the 64th least corrupt and politically corrupt country in the world out of all 174 countries ranked and Ghana ranked as the 5th least corrupt and politically corrupt country in Africa out of 53 countries in the 2012 Transparency International Corruption Perception Index. Ghana was ranked 7th in Africa out of 53 countries in the 2012 Ibrahim Index of African Governance. The Ibrahim Index is a comprehensive measure of African government, based on a number of different variables which reflect the success with which governments deliver essential political goods to its citizens.
Foreign relations
Since independence, Ghana has been devoted to ideals of nonalignment and is a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement. Ghana favours international and regional political and economic co-operation, and is an active member of the United Nations and the African Union.
Ghana has a strong relationship with the United States. Three recent US presidents--Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—made diplomatic trips to Ghana. Many Ghanaian diplomats and politicians hold positions in international organisations, including Ghanaian diplomat and former Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan, International Criminal Court Judge Akua Kuenyehia, and former President Jerry John Rawlings and former President John Agyekum Kufuor, who both served as diplomats of the United Nations.
In September 2010, Ghana's former President John Atta Mills visited China on an official visit. Mills and China's former President Hu Jintao, marked the 50th anniversary of diplomatic ties between the two nations, at the Great Hall of the People on 20 September 2010. China reciprocated with an official visit in November 2011, by the vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress of China, Zhou Tienong who visited Ghana and met with Ghana's President John Dramani Mahama.
The Islamic Republic of Iran and the 6th President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad met with the 12th President of Ghana, John Dramani Mahama on 16 April 2013 to hold discussions with President John Dramani Mahama on strengthening the Non-Aligned Movement and also co–chair a bilateral meeting between Ghana and Iran at the Ghanaian presidential palace Flagstaff House.
The Sustainable Development Goals in Ghana were integrated into Ghana's development agenda and the budget. The SDGs were said to have been implemented through the decentralized planning system. This allows stakeholders participations such as UN Agencies, traditional leaders, civil society organizations, academia, and others. The SDGs are a global call to action to end poverty among others. The goals are 17 in number and the UN and its partners in the country are working towards achieving them. According to the president Nana Akufo-Addo of Ghana, Ghana was "the first sub-Saharan African country to achieve the goal of halving poverty, as contained in Goal 1 of the Millennium Development Goals"
There are a number of UN Entities in the country such as the FAO, IFAD, ILO, IMO, IOM, UN-HABITAT, UNAIDS, UNCDF, UNDP, UNESCO, UNFPA, UNHCR, UNIC, UNICEF, UNIDO, UNODC, UNOPS, WFP and WHO.
Military
In 1957, the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) consisted of its headquarters, support services, three battalions of infantry and a reconnaissance squadron with armoured vehicles. Ghanaian Prime Minister and President Kwame Nkrumah aimed at rapidly expanding the GAF to support the United States of Africa ambitions. Thus in 1961, 4th and 5th Battalions were established, and in 1964 6th Battalion was established, from a parachute airborne unit originally raised in 1963.
Today, Ghana is a regional power and regional hegemon. In his book Shake Hands with the Devil, Canadian Forces commander Roméo Dallaire highly rated the GAF soldiers and military personnel.
The military operations and military doctrine of the GAF are conceptualised on the Constitution of Ghana, Ghana's Law on Armed Force Military Strategy, and Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre (KAIPTC) agreements to which GAF is attestator. GAF military operations are executed under the auspices and imperium of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) Minister for Defence.
Although Ghana is relatively peaceful and is often considered to be one of the least violent countries in the region, Ghana has experienced political violence in the past and 2017 has thus far seen an upward trend in incidents motivated by political grievances.
In 2017, Ghana signed the UN treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Law enforcement and police
The Ghana Police Service (GPS) and the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) are the main law enforcement agencies of the Republic of Ghana, and are responsible for the detection of crime, maintenance of law and order and the maintenance of internal peace and security. The Ghana Police Service has eleven specialised police units including a Militarized police Rapid deployment force (RDF) and Marine Police Unit (MPU). The Ghana Police Service operates in 12 divisions: ten covering the ten regions of Ghana, one assigned specifically to the seaport and industrial hub of Tema, and the twelfth being the Railways, Ports and Harbours Division. The Ghana Police Service's Marine Police Unit and Division handles issues that arise from the country's offshore oil and gas industry.
The Ghana Prisons Service and the sub-division Borstal Institute for Juveniles administers incarceration in Ghana. Ghana retains and exercises the death penalty for treason, corruption, robbery, piracy, drug trafficking, rape, and homicide. 27 convicts (all men) were sentenced to death in Ghana in 2012 and the Ghana Prisons Service statistics of the total number of convicts sentenced to death in Ghana was 162 men and 4 women, with a total prison inmate population of 13,983 convicts . "The new sustainable development goals adopted by the United Nations call for the international community to come together to promote the rule of law; support equal access to justice for all; reduce corruption; and develop effective, accountable, and transparent institutions at all levels."
Ghanaian drug war and the Narcotics Control Board
Ghana is used as a key narcotics industry transshipment point by traffickers, usually from South America as well as some from other African nations. In 2013, the UN chief of the Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) stated that "West Africa is completely weak in terms of border control and the big drug cartels from Colombia and Latin America have chosen Africa as a way to reach Europe."
There is not a wide or popular knowledge about the narcotics industry and intercepted narcotics within Ghana itself, due to the industry's operations and involvement in the underground economy. The social context within which narcotic trafficking, storage, transportation, and repacking systems exist in Ghana and the state's location along the Gulf of Guinea within the Atlantic Oceanonly a few degrees north of the Equatormakes Ghana an attractive country for the narcotics business.
The Narcotics Control Board (NACOB) has impounded container ships at the Sekondi Naval Base in the Takoradi Harbour. These ships were carrying thousands of kilograms of cocaine, with a street value running into billions of Ghana cedis. However, drug seizures saw a decline in 2011.
Drug cartels are using new methods in narcotics production and narcotics exportation, to avoid Ghanaian security agencies. Underdeveloped institutions, porous open borders, and the existence of established smuggling organisations contribute to Ghana's position in the narcotics industry. John Atta Mills, president between 2009 and 2012, initiated ongoing efforts to reduce the role of airports in Ghana's drug trade.
Administrative divisions
Ghana is divided into 16 administrative regions, sub-divided into 275 districts:
Human rights
Homosexual acts are prohibited by law in Ghana. According to 2013 survey by the Pew Research Center, 96% of Ghanaians believe that homosexuality should not be accepted by society. Sometimes old women in Ghana are accused of witchcraft, particularly in rural Ghana. Issues of witchcraft mainly remain as speculations based on superstitions within families. In some parts of northern Ghana, there exists what are called witch camps. This is said to house a total of around 1,000 people accused of witchcraft. The Ghanaian government has announced that it intends to close the camps.
While women in Ghana are given equal rights under the constitution of Ghana, disparities in education, employment, and healthcare for women remain prevalent.
Economy
Key sectors
Ghana is an average natural resource enriched country possessing industrial minerals, hydrocarbons and precious metals. It is an emerging designated digital economy with mixed economy hybridisation and an emerging market. It has an economic plan target known as the "Ghana Vision 2020". This plan envisions Ghana as the first African country to become a developed country between 2020 and 2029 and a newly industrialised country between 2030 and 2039. This excludes fellow Group of 24 member and Sub-Saharan African country South Africa, which is a newly industrialised country. Ghana's economy also has ties to the Chinese yuan renminbi along with Ghana's vast gold reserves. In 2013, the Bank of Ghana began circulating the renminbi throughout Ghanaian state-owned banks and to the Ghana public as hard currency along with the national Ghana cedi for second national trade currency.
Between 2012 and 2013, 37.9 percent of rural dwellers were experiencing poverty whereas only 10.6 percent of urban dwellers were. Urban areas hold greater opportunity for employment, particularly in informal trade, while nearly all (94 percent) of rural poor households participate in the agricultural sector.
The state-owned Volta River Authority and Ghana National Petroleum Corporation are the two major electricity producers. The Akosombo Dam, built on the Volta River in 1965, along with Bui Dam, Kpong Dam, and several other hydroelectric dams provide hydropower. In addition, the Government of Ghana has sought to build the second nuclear power plant in Africa.
The Ghana Stock Exchange is the 5th largest on continental Africa and 3rd largest in sub-saharan Africa with a market capitalisation of GH¢ 57.2 billion or CN¥ 180.4 billion in 2012 with the South Africa JSE Limited as first. The Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE) was the 2nd best performing stock exchange in sub-saharan Africa in 2013.
Ghana also produces high-quality cocoa. It is the 2nd largest producer of cocoa globally, and was projected to become the world's largest producer of cocoa in 2015.
Ghana is classified as a middle income country. Services account for 50% of GDP, followed by manufacturing (24.1%), extractive industries (5%), and taxes (20.9%).
Ghana announced plans to issue government debt by way of social and green bonds in Autumn 2021, making it the first African country to do so. The country, which is planning to borrow up to $5 billion on international markets this year, would use the proceeds from these sustainable bonds to refinance debt used for social and environmental projects and pay for educational or health. Only a few other nations have sold them so far, including Chile and Ecuador. The country will use the proceeds to forge ahead with a free secondary-school initiative started in 2017 among other programs, despite having recorded its lowest economic growth rate in 37 years in 2020.
Manufacturing
The Ghana economy is an emerging digital-based mixed economy hybrid with an increasing primary manufacturing and export of digital technology goods along with assembling and exporting automobiles and ships, diverse resource rich exportation of industrial minerals, agricultural products primarily cocoa, petroleum and natural gas, and industries such as information and communications technology primarily via Ghana's state digital technology corporation Rlg Communications which manufactures tablet computers with smartphones and various consumer electronics.
Urban electric cars have been manufactured in Ghana since 2014.
Petroleum and natural gas production
Ghana produces and exports an abundance of hydrocarbons such as sweet crude oil and natural gas. The 100% state-owned filling station company of Ghana, Ghana Oil Company (GOIL) is the number 1 petroleum and gas filling station of Ghana and the 100% state-owned state oil company Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) oversees hydrocarbon exploration and production of Ghana's entire petroleum and natural gas reserves. Ghana aims to further increase output of oil to per day and gas to per day.
Ghana's Jubilee Oilfield which contains up to of sweet crude oil was discovered in 2007, among the many other offshore and inland oilfields in Ghana. Ghana is believed to have up to to of petroleum in reserves, which is the fifth largest in Africa and the 21st to 25th largest proven reserves in the world. It also has up to of natural gas in reserves, which is the sixth largest in Africa and the 49th largest natural gas proven reserves in the world. Oil and gas exploration off Ghana's eastern coast on the Gulf of Guinea is ongoing, and the amount of both crude oil and natural gas continues to increase. The Government of Ghana has drawn up plans to nationalise Ghana's entire petroleum and natural gas reserves to increase government revenue.
Industrial minerals mining
As of 2019, Ghana was the 7th largest producer of gold in the world, producing ~140 tonnes that year. This record saw Ghana surpass South Africa in output for the first time, making Ghana the largest gold producer in Africa. In addition to gold, Ghana also exports silver, timber, diamonds, bauxite, and manganese, and has numerous other not-yet-fully-exploited mineral deposits. Ghana ranks 9th in the world in both diamond export and reserve size.
The Government of Ghana has drawn up plans to nationalize Ghana's mining industry to increase government revenue.
Tourism
In 2011, 1,087,000 tourists visited Ghana. Tourist arrivals to Ghana include South Americans, Asians, Europeans, and North Americans. The attractions and major tourist destinations of Ghana include a warm, tropical climate year-round, diverse wildlife, waterfalls such as Kintampo waterfalls and the largest waterfall in west Africa, Wli waterfalls, Ghana's coastal palm-lined sandy beaches, caves, mountains, rivers, and reservoirs and lakes such as Lake Bosumtwi and the largest man-made lake in the world by surface area, Lake Volta, dozens of forts and castles, World Heritage Sites, nature reserves and national parks. In addition to the beautiful natural reserves which serve as tourist sites, there are some castles in Ghana that serve as tourist sites and attract many tourists from all over the world. Some of the notable castles are Cape Coast Castle and the Elmina Castle all in the Central region of Ghana. Not only are the castles important for tourism, they also mark where blood was shed in the slave trade and preserve and promote the African heritage stolen and destroyed through the slave trade. As a result of this, the World Heritage Convention of UNESCO named Ghana's castles and forts as World Heritage Monuments.
The World Economic Forum statistics in 2010 showed that out of the world's favourite tourist destinations, Ghana was ranked 108th out of 139 countries. The country had moved two places up from the 2009 rankings. In 2011, Forbes magazine, published that Ghana was ranked the eleventh most friendly country in the world. The assertion was based on a survey in 2010 of a cross-section of travellers. Of all the African countries that were included in the survey, Ghana ranked highest. Tourism is the fourth highest earner of foreign exchange for the country. In 2017, Ghana ranks as the 43rd–most peaceful country in the world.
A growing tourist attraction in Ghana is surfing. Up and down the coastline, several spots have been identified and cultivated by locals and internationals alike. Renowned surfers have made trips to the country to sample the waves. Suitable for beginners and seasoned surfers alike, there is a quality and consistency to the waves to suit all levels of skill. It is not unusual now to see surfers carrying their boards amid traditional Ghanaian fishing vessels. Busua, Kokrobite, and Muuston boast some of the country's best surf in warm, tropical waters.
To enter Ghana, it is necessary to have a visa authorized by the Government of Ghana. Travellers must apply for this visa at a Ghanaian embassy; this process can take approximately two weeks. By law, visitors entering Ghana must be able to produce a yellow fever vaccination certificate.
According to Destination Pride – a data-driven search platform used to visualize the world's LGBTQ+ laws, rights and social sentiment – Ghana's Pride score is 22 (out of 100).
Real estate
The real estate and housing market of Ghana has become an important and strategic economic sector, particularly in the urban centres of south Ghana such as Accra, Kumasi, Sekondi-Takoradi and Tema. However, many of its citizens particularly those in Accra cannot afford the housing prices which is a trait of most major cities globally particularly in the West. Kumasi is growing at a faster rate than Accra, and there is less competition in its real estate market. The gross rental income tax of Ghana is withheld at 10%, capital gains are taxed at 15% with a 5% gift tax imposed on the transfer of properties and Ghana's real estate market is divided into 3 areas: public sector real estate development, emerging private sector real estate development, and private individuals. The activities of these 3 groups are facilitated by the Ghanaian banks and the primary mortgage market which has demonstrated enormous growth potential. Recent developments in the Ghanaian economy has given birth to a boom in the construction sector, including the housing and public housing sector generating and injecting billions of dollars annually into the Ghanaian economy. The real estate market investment perspective and attraction comes from Ghana's tropical location and robust political stability. An increasing number of the Ghanaian populace are investing in properties and the Ghana government is empowering the private sector in
the real estate direction.
Trade and exports
In July 2013, International Enterprise Singapore opened its 38th global office in Accra, to develop trade and investment on logistics, oil and gas, aviation, transportation and consumer sectors. Singapore and Ghana also signed four bilateral agreements to promote public sector and private sector collaboration, as Ghana aims to predominantly shift its economic trade partnership to East Asia and Southeast Asia. The economic centre is IE Singapore's second office in Africa, coming six months after opening in Johannesburg, South Africa in January 2013. Ghana's labour force in 2008 totalled 11.5 million Ghanaian citizens. Tema Harbour is Africa's largest harbour and Takoradi Harbour along with Tema harbour in Ghana handles goods and exports for Ghana. They are also traffic junctions where goods are transhipped; the Tema harbour handles the majority of the nation's export cargo and most of the country's chief exports is shipped from Takoradi harbour. The Takoradi harbour and Tema harbour are operated by the state-owned Ghana Ports and Harbours Authority.
Electricity generation sector
Severe shortages of electricity in 2015 & 2016 led to dumsor (persistent, irregular and unpredictable electric power outages), increasing the interest in renewables. As of 2019, there is now a surplus of electricity which now presents a new set of financial challenges.
Economic transparency
According to Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index of 2018, out of 180 countries, Ghana was ranked 78th, with a score of 41 on a scale where a 0–9 score means highly corrupt, and a 90–100 score means very clean. This was based on perceived levels of public sector corruption.
In 2013, out of 177 countries, Ghana was ranked 63rd with Cuba and Saudi Arabia with a score of 46. Previously in 2012, the country ranked 64 and scored 45. Thus, Ghana's public sector scored lower in 2013 than in 2012, according to CPI's scores.
Local reports have claimed that Ghana loses US$4.5 billion annually from nominal gross domestic product (Nominal GDP) growth as a result of economic corruption and economic crime by the incumbent National Democratic Congress (NDC) government of Ghana led by John Dramani Mahama. It is also said Ghana had lost an additional US$2.5 billion from nominal gross domestic product (Nominal GDP) growth between the months of January 2013 to October 2013 through economic corrupt practices under the Mahama administration.
The incumbent president is however seen to be fighting corruption by some government members, and a fellow politician of an opposition party, after ordering investigations into scandals. Nonetheless, others believe his actions are not sufficient in some cases.
John Addo Kufuor, son of former President John Agyekum Kufuor and Kojo Annan, son of former Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan, have been named in association with the Panama Papers.
Science and technology
Ghana was the first Southern-Saharan African country to launch a cellular mobile network (1992). It was one of the first countries in Africa to be connected to the internet and to introduce ADSL broadband services. Ghana was ranked 108th in the Global Innovation Index in 2020, down from 106th in 2019.
Space and satellite programmes
The Ghana Space Science and Technology Centre (GSSTC) and Ghana Space Agency (GhsA) oversee the space exploration and space programmes of Ghana. GSSTC and GhsA worked to have a national security observational satellite launched into orbit in 2015. The first practical step in its endeavor was a CanSat launched on 15 May 2013, a space programme spearheaded by the All Nations University College (ANUC) in Koforidua. The CanSat was deployed high from a helium-filled balloon and took some aerial images as well as temperature readings. As its next step in advancing space science and satellite technology in the sub-region, an amateur ground station has been designed and built by the university. It has successfully tracked and communicated with several (amateur) radio satellites in orbit including the International Space Station, receiving slow-scan TV images on 18 and 20 December 2014. The miniaturized earth observational satellite is to be launched into orbit in 2017.
Ghana's annual space exploration expenditure has been 1% of its gross domestic product (GDP), to support research in science and technology. In 2012, Ghana was elected to chair the Commission on Science and Technology for Sustainable Development in the South (Comsats); Ghana has a joint effort in space exploration with South Africa's South African National Space Agency (SANSA).
Cybernetics and cyberwarfare
The use of computer technology for teaching and learning began to receive government of Ghana's attention from the late 1990s. The information and communications technology in education policy of Ghana requires the use of information and communications technology for teaching and learning at all levels of the education of Ghana system. The Ministry of Education (MOE) supports institutions in teaching of information and communications technology literacy. The majority of secondary, and some basic schools of Ghana have computer laboratories.
Ghana's intention to become the information technology hub of West Africa has led the government of Ghana to enact cyber crime legislation and enhance cyber security practices. Acting on that goal, in 2008 Ghana passed the Electronic Communications Act and the Electronic Transactions Act, which established the legal framework for governing information technology. In November 2011, the Deputy Minister for Communications and Technology announced the development of a national cyber security strategy, aimed at combating cyber crime and securing critical infrastructure.
In June 2012, the National Information Technology Agency (NITA) announced a national computer emergency response team "strategy" designed to co-ordinate government response to cyber-attacks, both internal and external. The agency also established computer emergency response teams for each municipal, metropolitan, and district assembly to improve co-ordination and information-sharing on cyberspace threats. Ghana is ranked 2nd in Africa and 7th globally in cyber warfare, cyber-terrorism, cyber crime, and internet crime.
In 2018, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) was founded. It is the national agency responsible for cybersecurity. In November 2020, Parliament passed the Cybersecurity Act 2020. The Minister for Communications, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, indicated that, "a successful economy is hinged on a secured, safe and resilient national digital ecosystem. Cyber-security is, therefore, very critical to the economic development of the country and essential to the protection of the rights of individuals within the national digital ecosystem".
Health and biotechnology
The Centre for Scientific Research into Plant Medicine is an agency of the Ministry of Health that was set up in the 1970s for both R&D and as a practical resource (product production & distribution/provision) primarily in areas of biotechnology related to medicinal plants. This includes both herbal medicine and work on more advanced applications. It also has a secondary role as an educational resource for foreign students in health, biotechnology and related fields.
Education
Overview
Ghanaian education system is divided in three parts: Basic Education, secondary cycle, and tertiary education. "Basic Education" lasts 11 years (ages 4‒15). It is divided into Kindergarten (2 years), Primary School (2 modules of 3 years) and Junior High (3 years). Junior High School (JHS) ends with the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE). Once the BECE is achieved, the pupil can proceed to the secondary cycle. Hence, the pupil has the choice between general education (offered by the Senior High School) and vocational education (offered by the technical Senior High School or the Technical and Vocational Institutes). Senior High School lasts three years and leads to the West African Secondary School Certificate Examination (WASSCE), which is a prerequisite for enrollment in a university bachelor's degree programme. Polytechnics are open to vocational students, from SHS or TVI.
A Bachelor's degree usually requires four years of study. It can be followed by a one- or two-year master's degree programme, which can be followed by a PhD programme of at least three years. A polytechnic programme lasts two or three years. Ghana also possesses numerous colleges of education. Some of the notable universities in Ghana are The University of Ghana, Legon, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, and University of Cape Coast, just to mention a few. The Ghanaian education system from kindergarten up to an undergraduate degree level generally takes 20 years.
The academic year usually goes from August to May inclusive. The school year in primary education lasts 40 weeks in Primary School and SHS and 45 weeks in JHS.
Enrollment
With over 95% of its children in school, Ghana currently has one of the highest school enrollment rates in all of Africa. The ratio of females to males in the total education system was 0.98, in 2014.
Foreign students
Ghana's education system annually attracts a large number of foreign students particularly in the university sector.
Funding of education
The government largely funds basic education comprising public primary schools and public junior high schools. Senior high schools were subsidised by the government until September 2017/2018 academic year that senior high education became free. At the higher education level, the government funds more than 80% of resources provided to public universities, polytechnics and teacher training colleges.
As part of the Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education, Fcube, the government supplies all basic education schools with all their textbooks and other educational supplies like exercise books. Senior high schools are also provided with all their textbook requirement by the government. Private schools acquire their educational material from private suppliers.
Kindergarten and education structure
The female and male ages 15–24 years literacy rate in Ghana was 81% in 2010, with males at 82%, and females at 80%.
Ghanaian children begin their education at the age of three or four starting from kindergarten (nursery school and preschool), then to elementary school (primary school), high school (junior high school and senior high school) and finally university. The average age at which a Ghanaian child enters primary school is 6 years.
Ghana has a free education 6-year primary school education system beginning at age six, and, under the educational reforms implemented in 1988 and reformed in 2007, they pass on to a 3-year junior high school system. At the end of the third year of junior high, there is a mandatory "Basic Education Certificate Examination". Those continuing must complete the 4-year senior high school programme (which has been changed to three years) and take an admission exam to enter any university or tertiary programme. The Ghanaian education system from nursery school up to an undergraduate degree level takes 20 years.
In 2005, Ghana had 12,130 primary schools, 5,450 junior secondary schools, 503 senior secondary schools, 21 public training colleges, 18 technical institutions, two diploma-awarding institutions and 6 universities.
In 2010, there were relatively more females (53.0%) than males (40.5%) with primary school and JSS (junior secondary school) / JHS (junior high school) as their highest level of education.
Elementary
The Ghanaian Ministry of Education and the Ghanaian National Accreditation Board provide free education at the elementary school (primary school) level, and most Ghanaians have relatively easy access to high school education (junior high school and senior high school). These numbers can be contrasted with the single university and handful of secondary and primary schools that existed at the time of independence in 1957. Ghana's spending on education has varied between 28 and 40% of its annual budget in the past decade. All teaching is done in English, mostly by qualified Ghanaian educators.
The courses taught at the primary or basic school level include English, Ghanaian language and culture, mathematics, environmental studies, social studies, Mandarin and French as an OIF associated-member, integrated or general science, pre-vocational skills and pre-technical skills, religious and moral education, and physical activities such as Ghanaian music and dance, and physical education.
High school
The senior high level school curriculum has core subjects and elective subjects of which students must take four the core subjects of English language, mathematics, integrated science (including science, agriculture and environmental studies) and social studies (economics, geography, history and government).
High school students also choose four elective subjects from five available programmes: agriculture programme, general programme (arts or science option), business programme, vocational programme and technical programme. Apart from most primary and secondary schools which choose the Ghanaian system of schooling, there are also international schools such as the Takoradi International School, Tema International School, Galaxy International School, The Roman Ridge School, Lincoln Community School, Faith Montessori School, American International School, Alpha Beta Christian College, Ghana Christian International High School, Association International School, New Nation School, SOS Hermann Gmeiner International College, Vilac International School, Akosombo International School (which offers Cambridge O level certificate), North Legon Little Campus and International Community School, which offer the International Baccalaureat, Advanced Level General Certificate of Education and the International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE).
University
There are nine national public universities in Ghana: the University of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, University of Cape Coast, University of Education, University for Development Studies, University of Mines and Technology, University of Professional Studies, Accra, University of Energy and Natural Resources, and University of Health and Allied Sciences.
Ghana has a growing number of accredited private universities including Lancaster University, Ghana, Ghana Technology University College, Ashesi University College, Methodist University College Ghana, Central University College, Accra Institute of Technology, Regent University College of Science and Technology, Valley View University, Catholic University College, Presbyterian University College and Zenith University College.
The oldest university in Ghana, the University of Ghana, was founded in 1948. It had 29,754 students in 2008. It offers programmes in the arts, humanities, business, and the social sciences, as well as medicine. Many universities—including Harvard University, Cornell University, and Oxford University—have special study-abroad programmes with Ghanaian schools and provide their students the opportunity to study abroad at Ghanaian universities. New York University has a campus in Accra.
The University of Ghana has seen a shift of its traditionally best students to the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. Since Ghana's independence, the country has been one of the most educational in sub-Saharan Africa. Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was chancellor of the University of Ghana from 2008-2018.
Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, the second university to be established in the country, is the premier university of science and technology in Ghana and West Africa.
Demographics
Ghana is a multiethnic country. Ghana's territorial area within West Africa was unoccupied and uninhabited by humans until the 10th century BC. By the 10th century AD, the Guans were the first settlers in Ghana long before the other tribes came. Akans had established Bonoman (Brong Ahafo region) and were joined by the current settlers and inhabitants by the 16th century.
In 2010, the population of Ghana was 72.2% Christian (24.3% Pentecostal, 18.4% Protestant, 13.1% Catholic and 11.4% other). Approximately 18.6% of the population of Ghana are Muslim, (51% Sunni, 16% Ahmadiyya, and 8% Shia). Just over 10,000 Ghanaians practise Hinduism, with most of them being indigenous converts. Hinduism in Ghana was popularized by Swami Ghana Nanda ji, who opened several temples in the nation. The temple of Lord Shiva in Accra is one of the largest where there are celebrations to Ganesh Chaturthi, Rath Yatra, and other Hindu observations.
The Bahá’í religious community, established in Ghana in 1951, today includes more than 100 communities and over 50 local Bahá’í administrative councils, called Local Spiritual Assemblies.
, there are 375,000 registered legal skilled workers (permanent residents) or foreign workers/students (i.e. Ghana Card holders) inhabitants with an annually 1.5 million transited airport layovers. In its first post-colonial census in 1960, Ghana had a population of 6.7 million. The median age of Ghanaian citizens is 30 years old and the average household size is 3.6 persons. The Government of Ghana states that the official language of Ghana is English, and is spoken by 67.1% of the inhabiting population of Ghana.
Population
, Ghana has a population of 30,083,000. Around 29 percent of the population is under the age of 15, while persons aged 15–64 make up 57.8 percent of the population. The population distribution has 4.7 million in Ashanti, 2.3 million in Brong-Ahafo, 2.2 million in Central, 2.6 million in Eastern, 2.3 million in Western, and 4 million in the seat of government in Greater Accra geographically and legally part of Eastern then administered separately on 23 July 1982.
, 4.1 million persons reside in the Northern territories (2.4 million in Northern, 1 million in Upper East, and 0.7 million in Upper West).
, 2.1 million persons reside in Ewe territory Volta.
Immigration
Due to the recent legal immigration of skilled workers who possess Ghana Cards, there is a small population of Chinese, Malaysian, Indian, Middle Eastern and European nationals.
In 2010, the Ghana Immigration Service reported a large number of economic migrants and Illegal immigrants inhabiting Ghana: 14.6% (or 3.1 million) of Ghana's 2010 population (predominantly Nigerians, Burkinabe citizens, Togolese citizens, and Malian citizens). In 1969, under the "Ghana Aliens Compliance Order" (GACO) enacted by the Prime Minister of Ghana Kofi Abrefa Busia; Government of Ghana with BGU (Border Guard Unit) deported over 3,000,000 aliens and illegal immigrants in three months as they made up 20% of the population at the time. In 2013, there was a mass deportation of illegal miners, more than 4,000 of them Chinese nationals.
Languages
English is the official language.
Additionally, there are eleven languages that have the status of government-sponsored languages:
Akan languages (Asante Twi, Akuapem Twi, Fante which have a high degree of mutual intelligibility, and Nzema, which is less intelligible with the above)
Dangme
Ewe
Ga
Guan
Kasem
Mole-Dagbani languages (Dagaare and Dagbanli)
Of these, Asante Twi is the most widely spoken.
Because Ghana is surrounded by French-speaking countries, French is widely taught in schools and used for commercial and international economic exchanges. Since 2006, Ghana has been an associate member of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, the global organisation that unites French-speaking countries (84 nations on six continents). In 2005, more than 350,000 Ghanaian children studied French in schools. Since then, its status has been progressively updated to a mandatory language in every Junior High School and it is in the process of becoming an official language.
Ghanaian Pidgin English (GhPE), also known as Kru English (or in Akan, kroo brofo), is a variety of West African Pidgin English spoken mainly in Accra and in the southern towns. GhPE can be divided into two varieties, referred to as "uneducated" or "non-institutionalized" pidgin and "educated" or "institutionalized" pidgin, the former associated with uneducated or illiterate people and the latter acquired and used in institutions such as universities.
Religion
Ghana is a largely Christian country, although a sizable Muslim minority exists. Traditional (indigenous) beliefs are also practised.
The fertility rate of Ghana declined from 3.99 (2000) to 3.28 (2010) with 2.78 in urban region and 3.94 in rural region. The United Nations reports a fertility decline from 6.95 (1970) to 4.82 (2000) to 3.93 live births per woman in 2017.
Mortality
Life expectancy at birth in 2020 was 71 for a female and 65 for a male.
The top ten causes of death in Ghana in 2018 were:
Malaria
Lower respiratory infections
Neonatal disorders
Ischemic heart disease
Stroke
HIV/AIDS
Tuberculosis
Diarrheal diseases
Road injuries
Diabetes
Crime
Crime in Ghana is investigated by the Ghana Police Service. Ghana had a murder rate of 1.68 per 100,000 population in 2011.
Universal health care and life expectancy
Ghana has a universal health care system strictly designated for Ghanaian nationals, National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS). Health care is very variable throughout Ghana and in 2012, over 12 million Ghanaian nationals were covered by the National Health Insurance Scheme (Ghana) (NHIS). Urban centres are well served, and contain most of the hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies in Ghana. There are over 200 hospitals in Ghana and Ghana is a destination for medical tourism. In 2010, there were 0.1 physicians per 1,000 people and , 0.9 hospital beds per 1,000 people.
The 2014 estimate of life expectancy at birth had increased to an average of 65.75 years with males at 63.4 years and females at 68.2 years, and in 2013 infant mortality decreased to 39 per 1,000 live births. Sources vary on life expectancy at birth; the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated 62 years for men and 64 years for women born in 2016.
There was an estimation of 15 physicians and 93 nurses per 100,000 persons in 2010. 5.2% of Ghana's GDP was spent on health in 2010, and all Ghanaian citizens have the right to access primary health care. In May 2020, the WHO announced Ghana became the second country in the WHO African Region to attain regulatory system "maturity level 3", the second-highest in the four-tiered WHO classification of National medicines regulatory systems.
, the HIV/AIDS prevalence was estimated at 1.40% among adults aged 15–49.
Culture
Ghanaian culture is a diverse mixture of the practices and beliefs of many different Ghanaian ethnic groups. The 2010 census reported that the largest ethnic groups are the Akan (47.3 percent), the Mole-Dagbani (16.6 percent), the Ewe (13.9 percent), the Ga-Dangme (7.4 percent), the Gurma (5.7) and the Guan (3.7 percent). The Akan make up a majority of the population in the Central (81.7 percent), Western (78.2 percent), Ashanti (74.2 percent), Brong Ahafo (58.9 percent) and Eastern (51.1 percent) regions.
Food and drink
Ghanaian cuisine and gastronomy is diverse, and includes an assortment of soups and stews with varied seafoods and most Ghanaian soups are prepared with vegetables, meat, poultry or fish. Fish is important in the Ghanaian diet with tilapia, roasted and fried whitebait, smoked fish and crayfish all being common components of Ghanaian dishes.
Banku (akple) is a common Ghanaian starchy food made from ground corn (maize), and cornmeal based staples, kɔmi (kenkey) and banku (akple) are usually accompanied by some form of fried fish (chinam) or grilled tilapia and a very spicy condiment made from raw red and green chillies, onions and tomatoes (pepper sauce). Banku and tilapia is a combo served in most Ghanaian restaurants. Fufu is the most common exported Ghanaian dish, in that it is a delicacy across the African diaspora.
Rice is also an established staple meal of Ghanaians across the country, with various rice based dishes serving as breakfast, lunch and dinner, the main variants are Waakye, Plain Rice and Stew (eight Kontomire or Tomato Gravy ), Fried Rice and Ghana Jollof which is famous for the Ghana-Nigeria Jollof Battles.
Literature
The Ghanaian national literature radio programme and accompanying publication Voices of Ghana was one of the earliest on the African continent. The most prominent Ghanaian authors are novelists; J. E. Casely Hayford, Ayi Kwei Armah and Nii Ayikwei Parkes, who gained international acclaim with the books, Ethiopia Unbound (1911), The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) and Tail of the Blue Bird (2009), respectively. In addition to novels, other literature arts such as Ghanaian theatre and poetry have also had a very good development and support at the national level with prominent Ghanaian playwrights and poets Joe de Graft and Efua Sutherland.
Much of the 2016 novel Homegoing by Ghanaian-born American writer Yaa Gyasi takes place in Ghana.
Adinkra
During the 13th century, Ghanaians developed their unique art of adinkra printing. Hand-printed and hand-embroidered adinkra clothes were made and used exclusively by the then Ghanaian royalty for devotional ceremonies. Each of the motifs that make up the corpus of adinkra symbolism has a name and meaning derived from a proverb, a historical event, human attitude, ethology, plant life-form, or shapes of inanimate and man-made objects. These are graphically rendered in stylised geometric shapes. The meanings of the motifs may be categorised into aesthetics, ethics, human relations, and concepts.
The Adinkra symbols have a decorative function as tattoos but also represent objects that encapsulate evocative messages that convey traditional wisdom, aspects of life or the environment. There are many different symbols with distinct meanings, often linked with proverbs. In the words of Anthony Appiah, they were one of the means in a pre-literate society for "supporting the transmission of a complex and nuanced body of practice and belief".
Traditional clothing
Along with the Adinkra cloth Ghanaians use many different cloth fabrics for their traditional attire. The different ethnic groups have their own individual cloth. The most well known is the Kente cloth. Kente is a very important Ghanaian national costume and clothing and these cloths are used to make traditional and modern Ghanaian Kente attire.
Different symbols and different colours mean different things. Kente is the most famous of all the Ghanaian cloths. Kente is a ceremonial cloth hand-woven on a horizontal treadle loom and strips measuring about 4 inches wide are sewn together into larger pieces of cloths. Cloths come in various colours, sizes and designs and are worn during very important social and religious occasions.
In a cultural context, kente is more important than just a cloth and it is a visual representation of history and also a form of written language through weaving. The term kente has its roots in the Akan word kɛntɛn which means a basket and the first kente weavers used raffia fibres to weave cloths that looked like kenten (a basket); and thus were referred to as kenten ntoma; meaning basket cloth. The original Akan name of the cloth was nsaduaso or nwontoma, meaning "a cloth hand-woven on a loom"; however, "kente" is the most frequently used term today.
Modern clothing
Contemporary Ghanaian fashion includes traditional and modern styles and fabrics and has made its way into the African and global fashion scene. The cloth known as African print fabric was created out of Dutch wax textiles. It is believed that in the late 1800s, Dutch ships on their way to Asia stocked with machine-made textiles that mimicked Indonesian Batik stopped at many West African ports on the way. The fabrics did not do well in Asia. However, in West Africa – mainly Ghana where there was an already established market for cloths and textiles – the client base grew and it was changed to include local and traditional designs, colours and patterns to cater to the taste of the new consumers.
Today outside of Africa it is called "Ankara" and it has a client base well beyond Ghana and Africa as a whole. It is very popular among Caribbean peoples and African Americans; celebrities such as Solange Knowles and her sister Beyoncé have been seen wearing African print attire. Many designers from countries in North America and Europe are now using African prints and it has gained a global interest. British luxury fashion house Burberry created a collection around Ghanaian styles. American musician Gwen Stefani has repeatedly incorporated African prints into her clothing line and can often be seen wearing it. Internationally acclaimed Ghanaian-British designer Ozwald Boateng introduced African print suits in his 2012 collection.
Music and dance
The music of Ghana is diverse and varies between different ethnic groups and regions. Ghanaian music incorporates several distinct types of musical instruments such as the talking drum ensembles, Akan Drum, goje fiddle and koloko lute, court music, including the Akan Seperewa, the Akan atumpan, the Ga kpanlogo styles, and log xylophones used in asonko music. The most well known genres to have come from Ghana are African jazz, which was created by Ghanaian artist Kofi Ghanaba, and its earliest form of secular music, called highlife. Highlife originated in the late 19th century and early 20th century and spread throughout West Africa. In the 1990s a new genre of music was created by the youth incorporating the influences of highlife, Afro-reggae, dancehall and hip hop. This hybrid was called hiplife. Ghanaian artists such as "Afro Roots" singer, activist and songwriter Rocky Dawuni, R&B and soul singer Rhian Benson and Sarkodie have had international success. In December 2015, Rocky Dawuni became the first Ghanaian musician to be nominated for a Grammy award in the Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album category for his 6th studio album titled Branches of The Same Tree released 31 March 2015.
Ghanaian dance is as diverse as its music, and there are traditional dances and different dances for different occasions. The most known Ghanaian dances are those for celebrations. These dances include the Adowa, Kpanlogo, Azonto, Klama, Agbadza, Borborbor and Bamaya.
The Nana Otafrija Pallbearing Services, also known as the Dancing Pallbearers, come from the coastal town of Prampram in the Greater Accra Region of southern Ghana. The group of pallbearers were featured in a BBC feature story in 2017, and footage from the story became part of an Internet meme in the wake of the COVID-19 world pandemic.
Film
Ghana has a budding and thriving film industry. Ghana's film industry dates as far back as 1948 when the Gold Coast Film Unit was set up in the Information Services Department. Some internationally recognised films have come from Ghana. In 1970, I Told You So was one of the first Ghanaian films to receive international acknowledgement and received great reviews from The New York Times. It was followed by the 1973 Ghanaian and Italian production The African Deal also known as "Contratto carnale" featuring Bahamian American actor Calvin Lockhart. 1983's Kukurantumi: the Road to Accra, a Ghanaian and German production directed by King Ampaw, was written about by famous American film critic Vincent Canby. In 1987, Cobra Verde, another Ghanaian and German production directed by Werner Herzog, received international acclamation and in 1988, Heritage Africa won more than 12 film awards.
In recent times there have been collaborations between Ghanaian and Nigerian crew and cast and a number of productions turned out. Many Ghanaian films are co-produced with Nollywood, the Nigerian film industry, and some are distributed by Nigerian marketers. Also, Nigerian filmmakers often feature Ghanaian actors and actresses in their movies and Ghanaian filmmakers feature Nigerian actors and actresses in theirs. Nadia Buari, Yvonne Nelson, Lydia Forson and Jackie Appiah all popular Ghanaian actresses and Van Vicker and Majid Michel both popular Ghanaian actors, have starred in many Nigerian movies. As a result of these collaborations, Western viewers often confuse Ghanaian movies with Nollywood and count their sales as one; however, they are two independent industries that sometimes share Nollywood. In 2009, Unesco described Nollywood as the second-biggest film industry in the world after Bollywood.
Though The Ghana Film Industry had a downtrend for almost a decade mainly because of low input in production this scenario has drastically changed. New and emerging young film makers are adding spice to the already rich Ghana movie scene. Bliz Bazawule, Peter Sedufia, Joseph Clef and many others have shown the world the new age of filming in Ghana.
Media
The media of Ghana are amongst the most free in Africa. Chapter 12 of the 1992 Constitution of Ghana guarantees freedom of the press and independence of the media, while Chapter 2 prohibits censorship. Post-independence, the government and media often had a tense relationship, with private outlets closed during the military governments and strict media laws that prevented criticism of government.
Press freedoms were restored in 1992, and after the election in 2000 of John Agyekum Kufuor the tensions between the private media and government decreased. Kufuor supported press freedom and repealed a libel law, but maintained that the media had to act responsibly. The Ghanaian media has been described as "one of the most unfettered" in Africa, operating with little restriction. The private press often carries criticism of government policy.
Sports
Association football is the top spectator sport in Ghana and the national men's football team is known as the Black Stars, with the under-20 team known as the Black Satellites. Ghana has won the African Cup of Nations four times, the FIFA U-20 World Cup once, and has participated in three consecutive FIFA World Cups in 2006, 2010, and 2014. In the 2010 FIFA World Cup, Ghana became the third African country to reach the quarter-final stage of the World Cup after Cameroon in 1990 and Senegal in 2002. Ghana national U-20 football team, known as the Black Satellites, is considered to be the feeder team for the Ghana national football team. Ghana is the first and only country on the Africa continent to be crowned FIFA U-20 World Cup Champions, and two-time runners up in 1993 and 2001. The Ghana national U-17 football team known as the Black Starlets are two-time FIFA U-17 World Cup champions in 1991 and 1995, two-time runners up in 1993 and 1997.
Ghanaian football teams Asante Kotoko SC and Accra Hearts of Oak SC are the 5th and 9th best football teams on the Africa continent and have won a total of five Africa continental association football and Confederation of African Football trophies; Ghanaian football club Asante Kotoko SC has been crowned two-time CAF Champions League winners in 1970, 1983 and five-time CAF Champions League runners up, and Ghanaian football club Accra Hearts of Oak SC has been crowned 2000 CAF Champions League winner and two-time CAF Champions League runners up, 2001 CAF Super Cup champions and 2004 CAF Confederation Cup champions. The International Federation of Football History and Statistics crowned Asante Kotoko SC as the African club of the 20th century. There are several club football teams in Ghana that play in the Ghana Premier League and Division One League, both administered by the Ghana Football Association.
Ghana competed in the Winter Olympics in 2010 for the first time. Ghana qualified for the 2010 Winter Olympics, scoring 137.5 International Ski Federation points, within the qualifying range of 120–140 points.
Ghanaian skier, Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampong, nicknamed "The snow leopard", became the first Ghanaian to take part in the Winter Olympics, at the 2010 Winter Olympics held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, taking part in the slalom skiing. Ghana finished 47th out of 102 participating nations, of whom 54 finished in the Alpine skiing slalom. Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampong broke on the international skiing circuit, being the second black African skier to do so.
Ghana's last medal at the Summer Olympics dates back to 1992. Ghanaian athletes have won a total of four Olympics medals in thirteen appearances at the Summer Olympics, three in boxing, and a bronze medal in association football, and thus became the first country on the Africa continent to win a medal at association football.
Ghana competes in the Commonwealth Games, sending athletes in every edition since 1954 (except for the 1986 games). Ghana has won fifty-seven medals at the Commonwealth Games, including fifteen gold, with all but one of their medals coming in athletics and boxing.
The country has also produced a number of world class boxers, including Azumah Nelson a three-time world champion and considered as Africa's greatest boxer, Nana Yaw Konadu also a three-time world champion, Ike Quartey, and Joshua Clottey.
Ghana's women's football team won bronze at the Africa Women Cup of Nations 2016 edition in Yaoundé, Cameroon. The team beat South Africa 1–0.
Ghana featured a men's national team in beach volleyball that competed at the 2018–2020 CAVB Beach Volleyball Continental Cup.
Ghana will host the 2023 African Games in Accra.
Cultural heritage and architecture
There are two types of Ghanaian traditional construction: the series of adjacent buildings in an enclosure around a common are common and the traditional round huts with grass roof. The round huts with grass roof architecture are situated in the northern regions of Ghana (Northern, Upper East and Upper West regions), while the series of adjacent buildings are in the southern regions of Ghana (Ashanti, Brong-Ahafo, Central, Eastern, Greater Accra and Western regions).
Ghanaian postmodern architecture and high-tech architecture buildings are predominant in the Ghanaian southern regions, while the Ghanaian heritage sites are most evident by the more than thirty forts and castles built in Ghana. Some of these forts are Fort William and Fort Amsterdam. Ghana has museums that are situated inside castles, and two are situated inside a fort. The Military Museum and the National Museum organise temporary exhibitions.
Ghana has museums that show a in-depth look at specific Ghanaian regions, there are a number of museums that provide insight into the traditions and history of their own geographical area in Ghana. The Cape Coast Castle Museum and St. Georges Castle (Elmina Castle) Museum offer guided tours. The Museum of Science and Technology provides its visitors with a look into the domain of Ghanaian scientific development, through exhibits of objects of scientific and technological interest.
National symbols
The coat of arms depicts two animals: the tawny eagle (Aquila rapax, a very large bird that lives in the savannas and deserts; 35% of Ghana's landmass is desert, 35% is forest, 30% is savanna) and the lion (Panthera leo, a big cat); a ceremonial sword, a heraldic castle on a heraldic sea, a cocoa tree and a mine shaft representing the industrial mineral wealth of Ghana, and a five-pointed black star rimmed with gold representing the mineral gold wealth of Ghana and the lodestar of the Ghanaian people. It also has the legend Freedom and Justice.
The flag of Ghana consists of three horizontal bands (strips) of red (top), gold (middle) and green (bottom); the three bands are the same height and width; the middle band bears a five-pointed black star in the centre of the gold band, the colour red band stands for the blood spilled to achieve the nation's independence: gold stands for Ghana's industrial mineral wealth, and the colour green symbolises the rich tropical rainforests and natural resources of Ghana.
National landmarks
See also
Index of Ghana-related articles
Outline of Ghana
References
Further reading
Arhin, Kwame, The Life and Work of Kwame Nkrumah (Africa Research & Publications, 1995)
Babatope, Ebenezer, The Ghana Revolution: From Nkrumah to Jerry Rawlings (Fourth Dimension Publishing, 1982)
Birmingham, David, Kwame Nkrumah: Father Of African Nationalism (Ohio University Press, 1998)
Boafo-Arthur, Kwame, Ghana: One Decade of the Liberal State (Zed Books, 2007)
Briggs, Philip, Ghana (Bradt Travel Guide) (Bradt Travel Guides, 2010)
Clark, Gracia, African Market Women: Seven Life Stories from Ghana (Indiana University Press, 2010)
Davidson, Basil, Black Star: A View of the Life and Times of Kwame Nkrumah (James Currey, 2007)
Falola, Toyin, and Salm, Stephen J, Culture and Customs of Ghana (Greenwood, 2002)
Grant, Richard, Globalizing City: The Urban and Economic Transformation of Accra, Ghana (Syracuse University Press, 2008)
Hadjor, Kofi Buenor, Nkrumah and Ghana (Africa Research & Publications, 2003)
Hasty, Jennifer, The Press and Political Culture in Ghana (Indiana University Press, 2005)
James, C.L.R., Kwame Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (Allison & Busby, 1977)
Kuada, John, and Chachah Yao, Ghana. Understanding the People and their Culture (Woeli Publishing Services, 1999)
Miescher, Stephan F, Making Men in Ghana (Indiana University Press, 2005)
Milne, June, Kwame Nkrumah, A Biography (Panaf Books, 2006)
Nkrumah, Kwame, Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (International Publishers, 1971)
Utley, Ian, Ghana – Culture Smart!: the essential guide to customs & culture (Kuperard, 2009)
Various, Ghana: An African Portrait Revisited (Peter E. Randall Publisher, 2007)
Younge, Paschal Yao, Music and Dance Traditions of Ghana: History, Performance and Teaching (Mcfarland & Co Inc., 2011)
External links
Government
Ghana official website
The Parliament of Ghana official site
National Commission on Culture official site
General information
Country Profile from BBC News
Ghana from Encyclopædia Britannica
Ghana from UCB Libraries GovPubs
Ghana. The World Factbook. Central Intelligence Agency.
Ghana profile from Africa.com
The African Activist Archive Project website has photographs of the All Africa People's Conference held in Accra, Ghana, 5–13 December 1958 including Kwame Nkrumah, Prime Minister of Ghana, addressing the conference, the American Committee on Africa delegation meeting with Nkrumah, and of Patrick Duncan and Alfred Hutchinson of South Africa at the conference.
Key Development Forecasts for Ghana from International Futures
Trade
Ghana 2012 Summary Trade Statistics
Republics in the Commonwealth of Nations
Economic Community of West African States
English-speaking countries and territories
Member states of the African Union
Member states of the Commonwealth of Nations
Current member states of the United Nations
States and territories established in 1957
West African countries
Articles containing video clips
1957 establishments in Ghana
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12069 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography%20of%20Ghana | Geography of Ghana | Ghana is a West African country in Africa, along the Gulf of Guinea, just a few degrees north of the equator.
Ghana encompasses plains, low hills, rivers, Lake Volta, the world's largest artificial lake, Dodi Island and Bobowasi Island on the south Atlantic Ocean coast of Ghana. Ghana can be divided into four different geographical ecoregions. The coastline is mostly a low, sandy shore backed by plains and scrub and intersected by several rivers and streams. The northern part of Ghana features high plains. South-west and south-central Ghana is made up of a forested plateau region consisting of the Ashanti uplands and the Kwahu Plateau. The hilly Akwapim-Togo ranges are found along Ghana's eastern international border.
The Volta Basin takes up most of south-central Ghana and Ghana's highest point is Mount Afadja which is and is found in the Akwapim-Togo ranges. The climate is tropical and the eastern coastal belt is warm and comparatively dry, the south-west corner of Ghana is hot and humid, and the north of Ghana is warm and wet. Lake Volta, the world's largest artificial lake, extends through small portions of south-eastern Ghana and many tributary rivers such as the Oti and Afram rivers flow into it.
The northernmost part of Ghana is Pulmakong and the southernmost part of Ghana is Cape three points near Axim. Ghana lies between latitudes 4° and 12°N. South Ghana contains evergreen and semi-deciduous forests consisting of trees such as mahogany, odum, ebony and it also contains much of Ghana's oil palms and mangroves with shea trees, baobabs and acacias found in the northern part of Ghana.
Location and density
Ghana, which lies in the center of the Gulf of Guinea coast, 2,420 km of land borders with three countries: Burkina Faso (602 km) to the north, Ivory Coast (720 km) to the west, and Togo (1,098 km) to the east. To the south are the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean.
Its southernmost coast at Cape Three Points is 4° 30' north of the equator. From here, the country extends inland for some to about 11° north. The distance across the widest part, between longitude 1° 12' east and longitude 3° 15' west, measures about .
The Greenwich Meridian, which passes through London, also traverses the eastern part of Ghana at Tema.
With a total area of , Ghana is about the size of the United Kingdom.
Terrain of Ghana
The terrain consists of small desert mountains with the Kwahu Plateau in the south-central area. Half of Ghana lies less than above sea level, and the highest point is . The coastline is mostly a low, sandy shore backed by plains and scrub and intersected by several rivers and streams, most of which are navigable only by canoe.
A tropical rain forest belt, broken by heavily forested hills and many streams and rivers, extends northward from the shore, near the Ivory Coast frontier. This area, known as the "Ashanti," produces most of Ghana's cocoa, minerals, and timber. North of this belt, the elevation varies from above sea level and is covered by low bushes, park-like savanna, and grassy plains.
Irrigated land:
(2003)
Total renewable water resources:
(2011)
Geographical regions
Ghana is characterized in general by low physical relief. The Precambrian rock system that underlies most of the nation has been worn down by erosion almost to a plain. The highest elevation in Ghana, Mount Afadja in the Akwapim-Togo Ranges, rises above sea level.
There are four distinct geographical regions. Low plains stretch across the southern part of Ghana. To their north lie three regions—the Ashanti Uplands, the Akwapim-Togo Ranges, and the Volta Basin. The fourth region, the high plains, occupies the northern and northwestern sector of Ghana. Like most West African countries, Ghana has no natural harbors. Because strong surf pounds the shoreline, two artificial harbors were built at Takoradi and Tema (the latter completed in 1961) to accommodate Ghana's shipping needs.
Low plains
The low plains comprise the four subregions of the coastal savanna, the Volta Delta, the Accra Plains, and the Akan lowlands or peneplains. A narrow strip of grassy and scrubby coast runs from a point near Takoradi in the west to the Togo border in the east. This coastal savanna, only about in width at its western end, stretches eastward through the Accra Plains, where it widens to more than , and terminates at the southeastern corner of the country at the lower end of the Akwapim-Togo Ranges.
Almost flat and featureless, the Accra Plains descend gradually to the gulf from a height of about . The topography east of the city of Accra is marked by a succession of ridges and spoonshaped valleys. The hills and slopes in this area are the favored lands for cultivation. Shifting cultivation is the usual agricultural practice because of the swampy nature of the very lowlying areas during the rainy seasons and the periodic blocking of the rivers at the coast by sandbars that form lagoons. A plan to irrigate the Accra Plains was announced in 1984. Should this plan come to reality, much of the area could be opened to large-scale cultivation.
To the west of Accra, the low plains contain wider valleys and rounded low hills, with occasional rocky headlands. In general, however, the land is flat and covered with grass and scrub. Dense groves of coconut palms front the coastline. Several commercial centers, including Winneba, Saltpond, and Cape Coast are located here. Winneba has a small livestock industry and palm tree cultivation is expanding in the area away from the coast, with the predominant occupation of the coastal inhabitants being fishing via dug-out canoe.
The Volta Delta, which forms a distinct subregion of the low plains, extends into the Gulf of Guinea in the extreme southeast. The delta's rock formation—consisting of thick layers of sandstone, some limestone, and silt deposits—is flat, featureless, and relatively young. As the delta grew outward over the centuries, sandbars developed across the mouths of the Volta and smaller rivers that empty into the gulf in the same area, forming numerous lagoons, some quite large, making road construction difficult.
To avoid the lowest-lying areas the road between Accra and Keta makes a detour inland just before reaching Ada, and approaches Keta from the east along the narrow spit on which the town stands. Road links with Keta continue to be a problem. By 1989 it was estimated that more than 3,000 houses in the town had been swallowed by flooding from the lagoon. About 1,500 other houses were destroyed by erosion caused by the powerful waves of the sea.
This flat, silt-composed delta region with its abundance of water supports shallot, corn, and cassava cultivation in the region. The sandy soil of the delta gave rise to the copra industry. Salt-making, from the plentiful supply in the dried beds of the lagoons, provides additional employment. The main occupation of the delta people is fishing, an industry that supplies dried and salted fish to other parts of the country.
The largest part of the low plains is the Akan Lowlands. Some experts prefer to classify this region as a subdivision of the Ashanti Uplands because of the many characteristics they share. Unlike the uplands, the height of the Akan Lowlands is generally between sea level and . Some ranges and hills rise to about , but few exceed . The lowlands that lie to the south of the Ashanti Uplands receive the many rivers that make their way to the sea.
The Akan Lowlands contain the basins of the Densu River, the Pra River, the Ankobra River, and the Tano River, all of which play important roles in the economy of Ghana. The Densu River Basin, location of the important urban centers of Koforidua and Nsawam in the eastern lowlands, has an undulating topography. Many of the hills here have craggy summits, which give a striking appearance to the landscape. The upper section of the Pra River Basin, to the west of the Densu, is relatively flat. The topography of its lower reaches resembles that of the Densu Basin and is a rich cocoa and food-producing region. The valley of the Birim River, one of the main tributaries of the Pra, is Ghana's most important diamond-producing area.
The Ankobra River Basin and the middle and lower basins of the Tano River to the west of the lowlands form the largest subdivision of the Akan Lowlands. Here annual rainfall between helps assure a dense forest cover. In addition to timber, the area is rich in minerals. The Tarkwa goldfield, the diamond operations of the Bonsa Valley, and high-grade manganese deposits are all found in this area. The middle and lower Tano basins have been intensely explored for oil and natural gas since the mid-1980s. The lower basins of the Pra, Birim, Densu, and Ankobra rivers are also sites for palm tree cultivation.
Comprising the Southern Ashanti Uplands and the Kwahu Plateau, the Ashanti Uplands lie just north of the Akan Lowlands and stretch from the Ivory Coast border in the west to the elevated edge of the Volta Basin in the east. Stretching in a northwest-to-southeast direction, the Kwahu Plateau extends between Koforidua in the east and Wenchi in the northwest. The average elevation of the plateau is about , rising to a maximum of . The relatively cool temperatures of the plateau were attractive to Europeans, particularly missionaries, who founded many well-known schools and colleges in this region.
The plateau forms one of the important physical divides in Ghana. From its northeastern slopes, the Afram and Pru Rivers flow into the Volta River, while from the opposite side, the Pra, Birim, Ofin, Tano, and other rivers flow south toward the sea. The plateau also marks the northernmost limit of the forest zone. Although large areas of the forest cover have been destroyed through farming, enough deciduous forest remains to shade the head waters of the rivers that flow from the plateau.
The Southern Ashanti Uplands, extending from the foot of the Kwahu Plateau in the north to the lowlands in the south, slope gently from an elevation of about in the north to about in the south. The region contains several hills and ranges as well as several towns of historical and economic importance, including Kumasi, Ghana's second largest city and former capital of the Asante. Obuasi and Konongo, two of the country's gold-mining centers, are also located here. The region is Ghana's chief producer of cocoa, and its tropical forests continue to be a vital source of timber for the lumber industry.
Volta Basin
Taking the central part of Ghana, the Volta Basin covers about 45 percent of the nation's total land surface. Its northern section, which lies above the upper part of Lake Volta, rises to a height of above sea level. Elevations of the Konkori Scarp to the west and the Gambaga Scarp to the north reach from . To the south and the southwest, the basin is less than . The Kwahu Plateau marks the southern end of the basin, and forms a natural part of the Ashanti Uplands.
The basin is characterized by poor soil, generally of Voltaian sandstone. Annual rainfall averages between . The most widespread vegetation type is savanna, the woodlands of which, depending on local soil and climatic conditions, may contain such trees as red ironwood and shea.
The basin's population, principally farmers, is low in density, especially in the central and northwestern areas of the basin, where tsetse flies are common. Archeological finds indicate that the region was once more heavily populated. Periodic burning occurred over extensive areas for perhaps more than a millennium, exposing the soil to excessive drying and erosion, rendering the area less attractive to cultivators.
In contrast with the rest of the region are the Afram Plains, located in the southeastern corner of the basin. Here the terrain is low, averaging in elevation, and annual rainfall is between and about . Near the Afram River, much of the surrounding countryside is flooded or swampy during the rainy seasons. With the creation of Lake Volta ( in area) in the mid-1960s, much of the Afram Plains was submerged. Despite the construction of roads to connect communities displaced by the lake, road transportation in the region remains poor. Renewed efforts to improve communications, to enhance agricultural production, and to improve standards of living began in earnest in the mid-1980s.
High plains
The general terrain in the northern and northwestern part of Ghana outside the Volta Basin consists of a dissected plateau, which averages between in elevation and, in some places, is even higher. Rainfall averages between annually, although in the northwest it is closer to . Soils in the high plains are more arable than those in the Volta Basin, and the population density is considerably higher. Grain and cattle production are the major economic activities in the high plains of the northern region.
Since the mid-1980s, when former United States President Jimmy Carter's Global 2000 program adopted Ghana as one of a select number of African countries whose local farmers were to be educated and financially supported to improve agricultural production, there has been a dramatic increase in grain production in northern Ghana. The virtual absence of tsetse flies in the region has led to increased livestock raising as a major occupation in the north. The region is Ghana's largest producer of cattle.
Rivers and lakes
Ghana is drained by a large number of streams and rivers. In addition, there are a number of coastal lagoons, the huge man-made Lake Volta, and Lake Bosumtwi, southeast of Kumasi, which has no outlet to the sea. In the wetter south and southwest areas of Ghana, the river and stream pattern is denser, but in the area north of the Kwahu Plateau, the pattern is much more open, making access to water more difficult. Several streams and rivers also dry up or experience reduced flow during the dry seasons of the year, while flooding during the rainy seasons is common.
The major drainage divide runs from the southwest part of the Akwapim-Togo Ranges northwest through the Kwahu Plateau and then irregularly westward to the Ivory Coast border. Almost all the rivers and streams north of this divide form part of the Volta system. Extending about in length and draining an area of about , of which about lie within Ghana, the Volta and its tributaries, such as the Afram River and the Oti River, drain more than two thirds of Ghana. To the south of the divide are several smaller, independent rivers. The most important of these are the Pra River, the Tano River, the Ankobra River, the Birim River, and the Densu River. With the exception of smaller streams that dry up in the dry seasons or rivers that empty into inland lakes, all the major rivers in Ghana flow into the Gulf of Guinea directly or as tributaries to other major rivers. The Ankobra and Tano are navigable for considerable distances in their lower reaches.
Navigation on the Volta River has changed significantly since 1964. Construction of the dam at Akosombo, about upstream from the coast, created the vast Lake Volta and the associated hydroelectric project. Arms of the lake extended into the lower-lying areas, forcing the relocation of 78,000 people to newly created townships on the lake's higher banks. The Black Volta River and the White Volta River flow separately into the lake. Before their confluence was submerged, the rivers came together in the middle of Ghana to form the main Volta River.
The Oti River and the Daka River, the principal tributaries of the Volta in the eastern part of Ghana, and the Pru River, the Sene River, and the Afram River, major tributaries to the north of the Kawhu Plateau, also empty into flooded extensions of the lake in their river valleys. Lake Volta is a rich source of fish, and its potential as a source for irrigation is reflected in an agricultural mechanization agreement signed in the late 1980s to irrigate the Afram Plains. The lake is navigable from Akosombo through Yeji in the middle of Ghana. A pontoon was commissioned in 1989 to link the Afram Plains to the west of the lake with the lower Volta region to the east. Hydroelectricity generated from Akosombo supplies Ghana, Togo, and Benin.
On the other side of the Kwahu Plateau from Lake Volta are several river systems, including the Pra, Ankobra, Tano and Densu. The Pra is the easternmost and the largest of the three principal rivers that drain the area south of the Volta divide. Rising south of the Kwahu Plateau and flowing southward, the Pra enters the Gulf of Guinea east of Takoradi. In the early part of the twentieth century, the Pra was used extensively to float timber to the coast for export. This trade is now carried by road and rail transportation.
The Ankobra, which flows to the west of the Pra, has a relatively small drainage basin. It rises in the hilly region of Bibiani and flows in a southerly direction to enter the gulf just west of Axim. Small craft can navigate approximately inland from its mouth. At one time, the Ankobra helped transport machinery to the gold-mining areas in the vicinity of Tarkwa. The Tano, which is the westernmost of the three rivers, rises near Techiman in the center of the country. It also flows in a southerly direction, and it empties into a lagoon in the southeast corner of Ivory Coast. Navigation by steam launch is possible on the southern sector of the Tano for about .
A number of rivers are found to the east of the Pra. The two most important are the Densu and Ayensu, both of which rise in the Atewa Range, and which are important as sources of water for Accra and Winneba respectively. The country has one large natural lake, Lake Bosumtwi, located about southeast of Kumasi. It occupies the steep-sided meteoric crater and has an area of about . A number of small streams flow into Lake Bosumtwi, but there is no drainage from it. Apart from providing an opportunity for fishing for local inhabitants, the lake serves as a tourist attraction.
Climate
The country's warm, humid climate has an annual mean temperature between . Variations in the principal elements of temperature, rainfall, and humidity that govern the climate are influenced by the movement and interaction of the dry tropical continental air mass, or the harmattan, which blows from the northeast across the Sahara, and the opposing tropical maritime or moist equatorial system. The cycle of the seasons follows the apparent movement of the sun back and forth across the equator.
During summer in the northern hemisphere, a warm and moist maritime air mass intensifies and pushes northward across the country. A low-pressure belt, or intertropical front, in the airmass brings warm air, rain, and prevailing winds from the southwest. As the sun returns south across the equator, the dry, dusty, tropical continental front, or harmattan, prevails. Climatic conditions across the country are hardly uniform. The Kwahu Plateau, which marks the northernmost extent of the forest area, also serves as an important climatic divide. To its north, two distinct seasons occur. The harmattan season, with its dry, hot days and relatively cool nights from November to late March or April, is followed by a wet period that reaches its peak in late August or September. To the south and southwest of the Kwahu Plateau, where the annual mean rainfall from north to south ranges from , four separate seasons occur. Heavy rains fall from about April through late June. After a relatively short dry period in August, another rainy season begins in September and lasts through November, before the longer harmattan season sets in to complete the cycle.
The extent of drought and rainfall varies across the country. To the south of the Kwahu Plateau, the heaviest rains occur in the Axim area in the southwest corner of Ghana. Farther to the north, Kumasi receives an average annual rainfall of about , while Tamale in the drier northern savanna receives rainfall of per year. From Takoradi eastward to the Accra Plains, including the lower Volta region, rainfall averages only a year.
Temperatures are usually high at all times of the year throughout the country. At higher elevations, temperatures are more comfortable. In the far north, temperature highs of are common. The southern part of the country is characterized by generally humid conditions. This is particularly so during the night, when 95 to 100 percent humidity is possible. Humid conditions also prevail in the northern section of the country during the rainy season. During the harmattan season, however, humidity drops as low as 25 percent in the north.
Natural hazards
Dry, dusty, harmattan winds occur from January to March. Ghana is also prone to droughts, and was severely affected by floods in 2007 and 2009.
Environmental issues
Environmental issues include recurrent drought in the north, severely affecting agricultural activities, deforestation, overgrazing, soil erosion, poaching and habitat destruction threatens wildlife populations, water pollution, and inadequate supplies of potable water
International agreements (ratified):
Biodiversity, Climate Change, Desertification, Endangered Species, Environmental Modification, Law of the Sea, Ozone Layer Protection, Ship Pollution, Tropical Timber 83, Tropical Timber 94, Wetlands.
International agreements (signed, but not ratified)
Marine Life Conservation.
Other
Volta Lake, the largest artificial lake in the world, extends from the Akosombo Dam in southeastern Ghana to the town of Yapei, to the north. The lake generates electricity, provides inland transportation, and is a potentially valuable resource for irrigation and fish farming.
Ghana has a large and well-preserved national park system that includes Kakum National Park in the Central Region, Mole National Park in the Northern Region, Digya National Park along the western bank of the Volta Lake.
Extreme points
This is a list of the extreme points of Ghana, the points that are farther north, south, east or west than any other location.
Northernmost point – the point at which the border with Burkina Faso enters the Morbira river immediately south of the Burkinabè village of Kanhiré, Upper East Region
Easternmost point – the southernmost section of the border with Togo, Volta Region*
Southernmost point – Cape Three Points, Western Region
Westernmost point - the point where the border with Ivory Coast enters the Manzan river, Western Region
Note: Ghana does not have an easternmost point, the border at this section being defined along the line of longitude at 1°12'05.73"E
See also
Geology of Ghana
References | [
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12070 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics%20of%20Ghana | Demographics of Ghana | The Demography of Ghana describes the condition and overview of Ghana's population. This article is about the demographic features of the population of Ghana, including population density, ethnicity, education level, health of the populace, religious affiliations, and other aspects of the population.
Ghana's population is 30,832,019 (2021 census).
Languages
Ghana is a multilingual country in which about 80 languages are spoken. English is the official language and lingua franca. Of the languages indigenous to Ghana, Akan is the most widely spoken.
Ghana has more than seventy ethnic groups, each with its own distinct language. Languages that belong to the same ethnic group are usually mutually intelligible.
Eleven languages have the status of government-sponsored languages: four Akan ethnic languages (Akuapem Twi, Asante Twi, Fante and Nzema) and two Mole-Dagbani ethnic languages (Dagaare and Dagbanli). The rest are Ewe, Dangme, Ga, Gonja, and Kasem, Hausa.
Ethnic groups
Ghana has more than seventy ethnic groups. Major ethnic groups in Ghana include the Akan at 47.5% of the population, the Mole-Dagbon at 16.6%, the Ewe at 13.9%, the Ga-Dangme at 7.4%, the Gurma at 5.7%, the Guan at 3.7%, the Grusi at 2.5%, the Kusaasi at 1.2%, and the Bikpakpaam a.k.a. Konkomba people at 3.5%. 4.3% of the population is white. They are of British, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Scandinavian, American, Latin American or Australian descent. They live in Accra, Cape Coast, Elmina, Saltpond, Sekondi-Takoradi, and Tema as well as Kumasi, Koforidua, Sunyani and towns such as Ho and Nkawkaw. 2.4% of the population is Chinese.
Education
Primary and junior secondary school education is tuition-free and mandatory. Since 1987, the Government of Ghana has increased its education budget by 700%. Basic education's share has grown from 45% to 60% of that total.
Students begin their six-year primary education at the age of six. They pass into a junior secondary school system for 3 years of academic training combined with technical and vocational training. Those continuing move into the three-year senior secondary school program. Entrance to one of the best Ghanaian universities is by examination following completion of senior secondary school with a pass mark.
Demographic trends
Ghana's first post independence population census in 1961 counted about 6.7 million inhabitants. Between 1965 and 1989, a constant 45 percent of Ghana total female population was of childbearing age.
The crude death rate of 18 per 1,000 population in 1965 fell to 13 per 1,000 population in 1992. Life expectancy rose from a 1992 average of 42 years for men and 45 years for women to 52 and 56 years in 2002. The fertility rate averaged two children per adult female in 2013.
Fertility and births based on Demographics Health Survey
Total Fertility Rate (TFR) (Wanted Fertility Rate) and Crude Birth Rate (CBR) Demographics Health Survey:
Fertility and births (Census 2000 and 2010)
Total Fertility Rate (TFR) and Crude Birth Rate (CBR):
Births and deaths
Fertility data as of 2014 (DHS Program):
Life expectancy
Other demographic statistics
Demographic statistics according to the World Population Review in 2019.
One birth every 36 seconds
One death every 2 minutes
One net migrant every 26 minutes
Net gain of one person every 50 seconds
The following demographics are from the independent Ghana Statistical Service and from the CIA World Factbook unless otherwise indicated.
Population
30,802,793 (Feb 2020 )
25,009,153 (December 2013 est.) Females- 50.5% Male- 49.5%
Age structure
0–14 years: 37.83% (male 5,344,146 /female 5,286,383)
15–24 years: 18.61% (male 2,600,390 /female 2,629,660)
25–54 years: 34.21% (male 4,663,234 /female 4,950,888)
55–64 years: 5.05% (male 690,327 /female 727,957)
65 years and over: 4.3% (male 557,155 /female 652,331) (2018 est.)
Population growth rate
2.16% (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 40th
2.1% (2013 est.)
Birth rate
30.2 births/1,000 population (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 35th
16.03 births/1,000 population (2013 est.)
Death rate
6.8 deaths/1,000 population (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 134th
7.53 deaths/1,000 population (2013 est.)
Total fertility rate
3.96 children born/woman (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 34th
Fertility rate declined from 3.99 (2000) to 3.28 (2010) with 2.78 in Urban region and 3.94 in rural region.
Median age
total: 21.2 years. Country comparison to the world: 185th
male: 20.7 years
female: 21.7 years (2018 est.)
Mother's mean age at first birth
22.3 years (2017 est.)
note: median age at first birth among women 25–29
Contraceptive prevalence rate
33% (2017)
Net migration rate
-1.8 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2017 est.) Country comparison to the world: 154th
-1.85 migrant(s)/1,020 population (2013 est.)
Infant mortality rate
39.01 deaths/1,000 live births (2013 est.)
Dependency ratios
total dependency ratio: 73 (2015 est.)
youth dependency ratio: 67.1 (2015 est.)
elderly dependency ratio: 5.9 (2015 est.)
potential support ratio: 17.1 (2015 est.)
Urbanization
urban population: 56.1% of total population (2018)
rate of urbanization: 3.34% annual rate of change (2015–20 est.)
Life expectancy at birth
total population: 67.4 years (2018 est.)
male: 64.9 years (2018 est.)
female: 70 years (2018 est.)
total population: 65.46 years (2013 est.); 66 years
male: 64.48 years (2013 est.); 66 years
female: 66.48 years (2013 est.); 67 years (2013 est.)
Nationality
noun:
Ghanaian
adjective:
Ghanaian
Citizenship
Ghanaian citizens (20,000,000 million)
Ghanaian people
Religions
Religion in Ghana (2015)
Christian 59.6%
Protestantism 43.9%
Roman Catholic 12.9%
Eastern Orthodoxy 0.02%
Islam 19.9%
Traditional 15.5%
None 0.3%
Other 0.2%
Languages
Asante 16%, Ewe 14%, Fante 11.6%, Bono (Brong) 4.9%, Dagomba 4.4%, Dangme 4.2%, Dagarte (Dagaba) 3.9%, Likpakpaanl a.k.a. Konkomba language 3.5%, Akyem 3.2%, Ga 3.1%, Other 31.2%
Literacy
Definition: aged 15 and over can read and write (2015 est.)
total population: 76.6% (2015 est.)
male: 82% (2015 est.)
female: 71.4% (2015 est.)
School life expectancy (primary to tertiary education)
total: 12 years (2017)
male: 12 years (2017)
female: 11 years (2017)
total population: 71.5%
male: 78.3%
female: 65.3% (2010 census)
Unemployment, youth aged 15–24
total: 15.2% (2015 est.)
male: 15.8% (2015 est.)
female: 14.6% (2015 est.)
Demographic history
Historical population
Population distribution
Population density increased steadily from 36 per square kilometer in 1970 to 52 per square kilometer in 1984. In 1990 63 persons per square kilometer was the estimate for Ghana's overall population density. These averages did not reflect variations in population distribution. For example, while the Northern Region, one of ten administrative regions, showed a density of seventeen persons per square kilometer in 1984, in the same year Greater Accra Region recorded nine times the national average of 52 per square kilometer.
As was the case in the 1960 and 1970 figures, the greatest concentration of population in 1984 was to the south of the Kwahu Plateau. The highest concentration of habitation continued to be within the Accra-Kumasi-Takoradi triangle, largely because of the economic productivity of the region. All of Ghana's mining centres, timber-producing deciduous forests, and cocoa-growing lands lie to the south of the Kwahu Plateau. The Accra-Kumasi-Takoradi triangle is linked to the coast by rail and road systems—making this area an important magnet for investment and labor.
A large part of the Volta Basin is sparsely populated. The far north is heavily populated. The population density of the Upper East Region is well above the national average. This may be explained in part by the better soil found in some areas.
Urban–rural disparities
Localities of 5,000 persons and above have been classified as urban since 1960. The 1960 urban population totalled 1,551,174 persons, or 23.1 percent of total population. By 1970 the urban percentage had increased to 28 percent. That percentage rose to 32 in 1984 and was estimated at 33 percent for 1992.
Urban areas in Ghana have customarily been supplied with more amenities than rural locations. Consequently, Kumasi, Accra, and many settlements within the southern economic belt attracted more people than the savanna regions of the north; only Tamale in the north has been an exception. The linkage of the national electricity grid to the northern areas of the country in the late 1980s may help to stabilize the north-to-south flow of internal migration.
Ghana has a hugely rural population that is dependent on subsistence agriculture.
Ghana has continued to be a nation of rural communities. Rural residency was estimated to be 67 percent of the population in 1992. In the 1970s, 72 percent of Ghana's population lived in rural areas. The "Rural Manifesto," which assessed the causes of rural underdevelopment, was introduced in April 1984. Development strategies were evaluated, and some were implemented to make rural residency more attractive. The Bank of Ghana established more than 120 rural banks to support rural entrepreneurs, and the rural electrification program was intensified in the late 1980s. The government presented its plans for district assemblies as a component of its strategy for rural improvement through decentralized administration.
References
External links
Ghana Statistical Service | [
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12072 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy%20of%20Ghana | Economy of Ghana | The economy of Ghana has a diverse and rich resource base, including the manufacturing and exportation of digital technology goods, automotive and ship construction and exportation, and the exportation of diverse and rich resources such as hydrocarbons and industrial minerals. These have given Ghana one of the highest GDP per capita in West Africa. Owing to a GDP rebasement, in 2011 Ghana became the fastest-growing economy in the world.
The Ghanaian domestic economy in 2012 revolved around services, which accounted for 50% of GDP and employed 28% of the work force. Besides the industrialization associated with minerals and oil, industrial development in Ghana remains basic, often associated with plastics (such as for chairs, plastic bags, razors and pens). 53.6% of Ghana's workforce were employed in agriculture in 2013.
Ghana embarked on a currency re-denomination exercise, from Cedi (₵) to the new currency, the Ghana Cedi (GH₵) in July 2007. The transfer rate is 1 Ghana Cedi for every 10,000 Cedis.
Ghana is Africa's largest gold producer, after overtaking South Africa in 2019 and second-largest cocoa producer (after Ivory Coast). It is also rich in diamonds, manganese ore, bauxite, and oil. Most of its debt was canceled in 2005, but government spending was later allowed to balloon. Coupled with a plunge in oil prices, this led to an economic crisis that forced the government to negotiate a $920 million extended credit facility from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in April 2015.
Economic history
Taxation
Value-added tax is a consumption tax administered in Ghana. The tax regime which started in 1998 had a single rate but since September 2007 entered into a multiple rate regime. In 1998, the rate of tax was 10% and amended in 2000 to 12.5%. The top income tax and corporate tax rates are 25%. Other taxes included with value-added tax (VAT), are national health insurance levy, and a capital gains tax. The overall tax burden was 12.1% of Ghana's total domestic income in 2013. Ghana's national budget was the equivalent of 39.8% of GDP in 2013. Ghana is implementing the rent tax in 2021.
Manufacturing
Ghana's industrial base is relatively advanced. Import-substitution industries include electronics manufacturing. Rlg Communications is the first indigenous African company to assemble laptops, desktops, and mobile phones, and is West Africa's biggest information and communications technology (ICT) and mobile phone manufacturing company.
Ghana began its automotive industry with the construction of a prototype robust SUV, named the SMATI Turtle 1, intended for use in the rough African terrain. It was designed and manufactured by the Artisans of Suame Magazine Industrial Development Organization. Urban electric cars have been manufactured in Ghana since 2014.
As of 2012 there were four major companies in the textiles sector: Akosombo Textiles Limited, Tex Style Ghana Limited, Printex Ghana, and Ghana Textile Manufacturing Company.
Ghana National Petroleum Corporation and Ghana Oil Company deal with crude oil and gas exploration, exploitation, and refining.
Telecommunications
At the end of January 2020, total number of voice subscription in Ghana stood at 41,380,751.This represents a percentage increase of 1.28% over December 2019 figures of 40,857,007. The total penetration rate stands at 136.79%.
Competition among mobile-phone companies in Ghana is an important part of the telecommunications industry growth, Current market leader MTN with voice subscription of 23,150,485 representing 55.95% of the market is followed by Vodafone with voice subscription of 9,075,795 representing 21.93% market share, AirtelTigo voice subscription stands at 8,428,322 representing 20.69%, Glo's current voice subscription stands at 726,149 which represent a market share of 1.75%.
The mass media of Ghana is among the most liberal in Africa, with Ghana ranking as the third-freest in Africa and 30th-most free in the world on the worldwide press freedom index. Chapter 12 of the Constitution of Ghana guarantees freedom of the Ghanaian press and the independence of the mass media, and Chapter 2 prohibits censorship. Ghanaian press freedom was restored in 1992.
Ghana was one of the first countries in Africa to achieve the connection to the World Wide Web. In 2010, there were 165 licensed internet service providers in Ghana and they were running 29 of the fiber optic, and authorized networks VSAT operators were 176, of which 57 functioned, and 99 internet operators were authorized to the public, and private data and packet-switched network operators were 25.
Data
The following table shows the main economic indicators in 1980–2017. Inflation below 5% is in green.
Imports and Exports
Ghana's top export products in 2016 were crude petroleum ($2.66B), gold ($2.39B), cocoa beans ($2.27B), cocoa paste ($382M) and cocoa butter ($252M). Ghana's top export destinations in 2016 were Switzerland ($1.73B), China ($1.06B), France ($939M), India ($789M) and the Netherlands ($778M).
Ghana's top import categories in 2016 were refined petroleum ($2.18B), crude petroleum ($546M), gold ($428M), rice ($328M) and packaged medicaments ($297M). The nations with the highest value of imports to Ghana in 2016 were China ($4.1B), the Netherlands ($1.58B), the United States ($1.1B), Nigeria ($920M) and India ($668M).
Private banking
The financial services in Ghana have seen a lot of reforms in the past years. The Banking (Amendment) Act 2007 included the awarding of a general banking license to qualified banks, which allows only indigenous Ghana offshore banks to operate in country Ghana. Indigenous Ghana private bank Capital Bank was the first to be awarded the general banking license in Ghana as well as indigenous Ghana private banks UniBank, National Investment Bank and Prudential Bank Limited. It has therefore become possible for Ghanaian non-resident individuals or residents and foreign companies or indigenous Ghana companies to open indigenous Ghana offshore bank accounts in Ghana. Indigenous Ghana retail and savings banks include Agricultural Development Bank of Ghana, CAL Bank, GCB Bank Ltd, Home Finance Company and UT Bank as well as indigenous Ghana savings and loan institutions ABii National and Savings and Loans Company.
Stock exchange
The Stock Exchange of Ghana is one of the largest in Africa, with a market capitalization of GH¢57.2 billion or CN¥180.4 billion in 2012. South Africa's JSE Limited is the largest.
Energy
As of December 2012, Ghana gets 49.1% of its energy from renewable energy and exports some of this to neighboring countries.
Solar energy
Ghana has aggressively begun the construction of solar plants across its sun-rich land in an aim to become the first country to get 6% of its energy from solar energy generation.
Wind energy
Ghana has Class 4–6 wind resources and high-wind locations, such as Nkwanta, the Accra Plains, and Kwahu and Gambaga mountains. The maximum energy that could be tapped from Ghana's available wind resource for electricity is estimated to be about 500–600 GWh/year. To give perspective: in 2011, per the same Energy Commission, the largest Akosombo hydroelectric dam in Ghana alone produced 6,495 GWh of electric power and, counting all Ghana's geothermal energy production in addition, the total energy generated was 11,200 GWh in that year. These assessments do not take into consideration further limiting factors such as land-use restrictions, the existing grid (or how far the wind resource may be from the grid) and accessibility.
Bio-energy
Ghana has put in place mechanisms to attract investments into its biomass and bio-energy sectors to stimulate rural development, create jobs and save foreign exchange. Main investments in the bio-energy subsector existed in the areas of production, are transportation, storage, distribution, sale, marketing and exportation.
The goal of Ghana regarding bio-energy, as articulated by its energy sector policy, is to modernize and examine the benefits of bio-energy on a sustainable basis. Biomass is Ghana's dominant energy resource in terms of endowment and consumption, with the two primary bio-fuels consumed being ethanol and biodiesel. To that effect, the Ghana ministry of Energy in 2010 developed its energy sector strategy and development plan. Highlights of the strategy include sustaining the supply and efficient use of wood fuels while ensuring that their utilization does not lead to deforestation.
The plan would support private sector investments in the cultivation of bio-fuel feedstock, the extraction of bio-oil, and refining it into secondary products, thereby creating financial and tax incentives. The Ghana Renewal Energy Act provides the necessary fiscal incentives for renewable energy development by the private sector, and also details the control and management of bio-fuel and wood fuel projects in Ghana. The Ghana National Petroleum Authority (NPA) was tasked by the Renewable Energy Act 2011 to price Ghana's bio-fuel blend in accordance with the prescribed petroleum pricing formula.
The combined effects of climate change and global economic turbulence had triggered a sense of urgency among Ghanaian policymakers, industry and development practitioners to find sustainable and viable solutions in the area of bio-fuels.
Brazil, which makes ethanol from maize and sugarcane, is currently the world's largest bio-fuel market.
Energy consumption
Electricity generation is one of the key factors in achieving the development of the Ghanaian national economy, with aggressive and rapid industrialization; Ghana's national electric energy consumption was 265 kilowatts per capita in 2009. Shortages of electricity have led to dumsor (blackouts), increasing the interest in renewables.
Hydrocarbon and mining
Ghana has to of petroleum in reserves. A large oilfield which contains up to of sweet crude oil was discovered in 2007. Oil exploration is ongoing and the amount of oil continues to increase. Ghana produces crude oil, as of 15 December 2010, and until June 2011, Ghana exploited around 120,000 barrels per day and is expected to increase production up to 2.5 million barrels per day in 2014.
Ghana has vast natural gas reserves, which is used by many foreign multinational companies operating in Ghana. The hydrocarbon industry has had major implications for regional and urban development in Ghana and these are likely to substantially increase in the years to come
Mining has gained importance in the Ghanaian economy since the turn of the 21st century, with a growth of around 30% in 2007. The main mining extractions are bauxite, gold (Ghana is one of the largest gold producers in the world), and the phosphates.
Tourism
The Ministry of Tourism has placed great emphasis upon further tourism support and development. Tourism contributed to 4.9% of GDP in 2009, attracting around 500,000 visitors. Tourist destinations include Ghana's many castles and forts, national parks, beaches, nature reserves, landscapes and World Heritage buildings and sites.
In 2011, Forbes magazine ranked Ghana eleventh-friendliest country in the world. The assertion was based on a survey of a cross-section of travelers in 2010. Of all the countries on the African continent that were included in the survey, Ghana ranked highest.
To enter Ghana, it is necessary to have a visa authorized by the Government of Ghana, except for certain entrepreneurs on business trips.
Agriculture
In 2013 agriculture employed 53.6% of Ghana's total labor force. Agribusiness accounts for a small fraction of the gross domestic product. The main harvested crops are corn, plantain, rice, millet, sorghum, cassava and yam. Unlike the agricultural livestock, forestry and fishing sectors, the crop sector is key to the Ghanaian agricultural industry.
Ghana produced in 2018:
20.8 million tons of cassava (4th largest producer in the world, second only to Nigeria, Thailand and Congo);
7.8 million tonnes of yam (2nd largest producer in the world, second only to Nigeria);
4.1 million tons of plantain (2nd largest producer in the world, just behind Congo);
2.6 million tons of palm oil (8th largest producer in the world);
2.3 million tons of maize;
1.4 million tons of taro (4th largest producer in the world, second only to Nigeria, China and Cameroon);
947 thousand tons of cocoa (2nd largest producer in the world, second only to Ivory Coast);
769 thousand tons of rice;
753 thousand tons of orange (19th largest producer in the world);
713 thousand tons of pineapple (11th largest producer in the world);
521 thousand tons of peanut;
In addition to smaller productions of other agricultural products, like sweet potato (151 thousand tons), natural rubber (23 thousand tons) and tobacco (2.3 thousand tons).
Ghana: Vision 2020 and industrialization
With the economic program "Ghana: Vision 2020", Ghana intends to achieve its goals of accelerated economic growth and improved quality of life for all its citizens, by reducing poverty through private investment, rapid and aggressive industrialization, and direct and aggressive poverty-alleviation efforts. These plans were released in the 1995 government report, Ghana: Vision 2020. Nationalization of state-owned enterprises continues, with about two thirds of 300 parastatal enterprises owned by the government of Ghana. Other reforms adopted under the government's structural adjustment program include increasing exchange rate controls and increasing autarky and increasing restrictions on imports.
The Ghana: Vision 2020 forecast assumes political stability; successful economic stabilization; the implementation of Ghana: Vision 2020 policy agenda on private sector growth; and aggressive public spending on social services, infrastructure and industrialization. It projection states that Ghana's goals of reaching high-income economy status and newly industrialized country status will be easily realized between 2020 and 2039.
Economic transparency
The judicial system of Ghana deals with corruption, economic malpractice and lack of economic transparency. Despite significant economic progress, obstacles do remain. Particular institutions need reform, and property rights need improvement. The overall investment regime in Ghana lacks market transparency. Tackling these issues will be necessary if Ghana's rapid economic growth is to be maintained.
References
Notes
See also
United Nations Economic Commission for Africa
External links
Google Earth Map of the oil and gas infrastructure in Ghana
World Bank Trade Summary Statistics Ghana | [
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12073 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications%20in%20Ghana | Telecommunications in Ghana | Telecommunications in Ghana include radio, television, fixed and mobile telephones, and the Internet.
Telecommunications is the main economic sector of Ghana according to the statistics of the World Bank due to the Ghana liberal policy around Information and communications technology (ICT). Among the main sectors of investments, 65% is for ICT, 8% for communications and 27% is divided for public administration.
Radio and television
In 2007 Ghana was served by one state-owned TV station, two state-owned radio networks; several privately owned TV stations and a large number of privately owned radio stations. Multiple international broadcasters and several cable and satellite TV subscription services were also available. In 2010, there were 140 authorised radio stations with 84 in operation and 32 authorised television stations with approximately 26 in operation. Television broadcasters include First Digital TV (ATV, BTA, FAITH TV, CHANNEL D, STAR TV, FTV, SPORTS 24, CINIMAX, PLANET KIDZ) TV Africa, Metro TV, TV3, GTV, GH One TV and Viasat 1.
The Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC) founded by decree in 1968 is the state agency that provides civilian radio and television services. It was created for the development of the education and entertainment sectors and to enhance the knowledge of the people of Ghana.
Freedom of the press
After the overthrow of the elected government by Jerry Rawlings in December 1981 the Provisional National Defence Council repealed the liberal media reforms of previous governments, abolished the Third Constitution and the Press Commission, and passed laws that prevented criticism of the government or its policies, dismissed editors critical of Rawlings or the provisional council, the Preventive Custody and Newspaper Licensing Law which allowed indefinite detention of journalists without trial, and the Newspaper Licensing Law which stifled private media development. Ghanaian press freedom was restored with the promulgation of a new constitution in 1992, presidential and parliamentary elections in November and December 1992, and a return to multiparty democratic rule on 7 January 1993.
The mass media of Ghana today is among the most liberal in Africa, with Ghana ranking as the third freest in Africa and 30th in the world on the 2013 World Press Freedom Index from Reporters Without Borders. Article 21 of the Constitution of Ghana guarantees freedom of the press and other media, freedom of speech and expression, thought, and information.
Telephones
The prefix code of Ghana for international calls is +233.
As of 2012 there were 285,000 fixed telephone lines in use, 120th in the world, and 25.6 million mobile cellular lines, 42nd in the world.
The telephone system is outdated, with an unreliable fixed-line infrastructure heavily concentrated in Accra and some wireless local loop installed, domestic trunks primarily use microwave radio relay. There are 4 Intelsat (Atlantic Ocean) satellite earth stations. Microwave radio relay links Ghana to its neighbours (2009).
The SAT-3/WASC, Main One, GLO-1, and ACE international optical fibre submarine cables provide links to countries along the west coast of Africa and on to Europe and Asia.
In 2010 two fixed line and six mobile phone companies were authorised to operate in Ghana of which 5 were operating, 13 satellite providers were authorised of which 8 were operating, 176 VSAT providers were authorised of which 57 were operating, and 99 public and private network operators were authorised of which 25 were operating. Authorized telecommunications companies include Mobile Telecommunications Networks (MTN), Vodafone Ghana which purchased Telecom Ghana, Tigo which replaced Mobitel (Millicom International Cellular), Bharti Airtel and Zain which acquired Western Telesystems Ltd (Westel), Glo Mobile Ghana Limited, and Expresso Telecom which acquired Kasapa Telecom. In 2017, Tigo Ghana and Airtel Ghana merged to form AirtelTigo.
Competition among multiple mobile-cellular providers has spurred growth, with a mobile phone teledensity in 2009 of more than 80 per 100 persons and rising. The cost of mobile phones is increased by taxes of around 38%.
Internet
The top-level domain of Ghana is .gh.
Ghana was one of the first countries in Africa to connect to the Internet. With an average household download speed of 5.8 Mbit/s Ghana had the third fastest speed on the African continent and the 110th fastest out of 188 countries worldwide in February 2014.
In 2009 the number of Internet users stood at 1.3 million, 93rd in the world. In 2012 the number of Internet users reached 4.2 million (69th in the world) or 17.1% of the population (149th in the world).
In 2012 there were 62,124 fixed (109th in the world; 0.3% of the population, 156th in the world) and 8.2 million wireless (27th in the world; 33.3% of the population, 49th in the world) broadband subscriptions.
In 2012 there were 59,086 Internet hosts operating in Ghana, 93rd in the world, and Ghana had been allocated 332,544 IPv4 addresses, 102nd in the world, with less than 0.05% of the world total, and 13.2 addresses per 1000 people.
In 2010 there were 165 authorised Internet service providers of which 30 were operating.
Internet censorship and surveillance
There are no government restrictions on access to the Internet or reports that the government monitors e-mail or Internet chat rooms without judicial oversight. Individuals and groups engage in the peaceful expression of views via the Internet, including by e-mail.
Although the constitution and law provide for freedom of speech and press, the government sometimes restricts those rights. The police arbitrarily arrest and detain journalists. Some journalists practice self-censorship. The constitution prohibits arbitrary interference with privacy, family, home, or correspondence, and the government respects these prohibitions in practice.
In 2002 the government of Ghana censored Internet media coverage of tribal violence in Northern Ghana.
See also
Ghana Internet Exchange (GIX)
New media in Ghana
Media in Ghana
Terrestrial optical fibre cable projects in Ghana
Internet in Ghana
Africa Digital Awards
Further reading
References
External links
Ghana Internet Exchange (GIX), website.
Ghana Internet Service Providers Association (GISPA), website.
National Communications Authority (NCA), website. | [
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12074 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport%20in%20Ghana | Transport in Ghana | Transport in Ghana is accomplished by road, rail, air and water. Ghana's transportation and communications networks are centered in the southern regions, especially the areas in which gold, cocoa, and timber are produced. The northern and central areas are connected through a major road system.
Increased transport investment helped to increase the number of new vehicle registrations and transportation alternatives include rail, road, ferry, marine and air.
Railways
The railway system in Ghana has historically been confined to the plains south of the barrier range on mountains north of the city of Kumasi. However, the narrow gauge railway, totalling , is presently undergoing major rehabilitation and inroads to the interior are now being made. In Ghana, most of the lines are single tracked, and in 1997, it was estimated that were double tracked.
Rail expansion
In 2005, the Minister of Ports, Harbours and Railways announced plans to extend the railway system to facilitate economic development. To begin, $5 million was invested for feasibility studies. Possible projects at the time included extending a line from Ejisu to Nkoranza and Techiman; a line from Tamale to Bolgatanga and Paga to Burkina Faso; a line from Wenchi, Bole to Wa and Hamile and also to Burkina Faso, and a line to Yendi where there are iron ore deposits.
Over the next two years, there were various studies and in 2007, work began.
In March 2007, a Private Public Partnership was proposed to rehabilitate the Eastern Railway from Accra to Ejisu and Kumasi, with an extension from Ejisu via Mampong, Nkoranza, Tamale, Bolgatanga and Paga, with a branch from Tamale to Yendi and Sheini. The extension starts at Kumasi and will cost $1.6b.
There was another proposal in September 2007 to extend the Western Railway from Awaso via Techiman, Bole, Sawla, Wa to Hamile.
In February 2008, the Ghana General News reported that the Ministry of Harbours and Railways and the Ghana Railway Corporation (GRC) expected to complete a new commuter line linking Accra and Tema by June 2008. The formation was complete from Sakumono to the SSNIT flats near Tema. Diesel multiple-unit trainsets will be imported for use on the line. Construction of sleeper plant for the far north line was also initiated in 2008.
Rail transport
The Ghana railway network occupies a total rail route length and rail track length of 947 km and 1300 km, comprising national rail lines that do not go outside of Ghana and the Ghana national border. Ghana railway network is limited to south Ghana and the southern part of Ghana within the Greater Accra region, Central region, Western region, Eastern region and Ashanti region of south Ghana.
There are plans underway that revamp the operations of the Ghana Railway Corporation and Ghana Railway Company to make it more viable, and to attract private sector participation. Concession agreements have been signed by the Ghana Railway Corporation for the development and extension of the Ghana Eastern Rail Line and the rehabilitation of the Ghana Western Rail Line.
The major rail routes in Ghana are the Ghana Eastern Rail Line that connects Kumasi to Koforidua, and the Ghana Western Rail Line that connects Kumasi to Sekondi-Takoradi, Sunyani and Cape Coast. In 2010, Ghana Railway Corporation began a GH₵12.9 billion (US$6 billion) rail project at the construction of the Ghana rail infrastructure to Ghana High-Speed Rail (abbreviated GHSR or HSR) and to upgrade all of Ghana's railway line network has been planned and to be completed at the end of 2014 with construction managed by the China Railway High-Speed (CHR) and the Chinese National Machinery Import and Export Corporation (CMC).
Service pending
These towns are proposed to be served by rail:
Ejisu
Kintampo
Paga - near Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast borders.
Hamile - far northwest corner (Contracts were made for railway extensions in July 2007.)
Boankra Inland Port (under construction)
Gauge conversion
Korean engineers studying the building of new lines in February 2007 were also to consider conversion to .
Highways
Road transport is by far the dominant carrier of freight and passengers in Ghana's land transport system. It carries over 95% of all passenger and freight traffic and reaches most communities, and is classified under three categories of trunk roads, urban roads, and feeder roads. The Ghana Highway Authority, established in 1974 is tasked with developing and maintaining the country's trunk road network totaling 13,367 km, which makes up 33% of Ghana's total road network of 40,186 km.
Trunk roads in Ghana are classified as National roads, Regional roads, and Inter-regional roads, all of which form the Ghana road network. National roads, designated with the letter N, link all the major population centers in Ghana. Regional roads, designated with the letter R, are a mix of primary and secondary routes, which serve as feeder roads to National roads; while Inter-Regional roads, designated with the prefix IR, connect major settlements across regional borders.
With respect to this mode of transport, many people prefer to use the public means. Many of the town and cities in the country can be reached by the use of urban buses known as "trotro" or taxis. For inter-regional transport bigger buses are normally used.
The Ghana road network is 64,323 km and road transportation is the most dominant choice of transportation in Ghana. Road transport infrastructure in Ghana can be used throughout to facilitate the exchange of commodities and enable regular school attendance and fast access to health facilities in Ghana. There has been an increased investment and expansion in the road transportation of Ghana, GH₵1 billion (US$500 million) in 2012.
There is a Ghanaian Bus Rapid Transit, known as Metro mass Transit L.T.D, and a Taxicab system connecting the Ghanaian big cities among themselves, and a Minibuses system, known as Tro Tros, connecting big cities with the country's rural areas and small towns. The Ghana Police Service's Motor Transport and Traffic Unit (MTTU) and the Ghana Highways Authority is responsible for the maintenance of the Road Traffic Control of Ghana and the Ghana Road Network (Ghana national highways and motorways).
International highways
The Trans–West African Coastal Highway, part of the Trans-African Highway network crosses Ghana along the N1, connecting it to Abidjan, (Ivory Coast), Lomé, (Togo) and to Benin and Nigeria. Eventually the highway will connect to another seven Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) nations to the west. The N2, which connects Tema in the Greater Accra Region to Kulungugu in the Upper East Region; the N10, which connects Yamoransa in the Central Region to Paga in the Upper East Region; and the N12, which connects Elubo in the Western Region to Hamile in the Upper West Region; all connect Ghana to landlocked Burkina Faso, where it joins another highway in the Trans-African network, the Trans-Sahelian Highway.
Ferries and waterways
The Volta, Ankobra, and Tano rivers provide 168 km of perennial navigation for launches and lighters; Lake Volta provides 1,125 kilometres of arterial and feeder waterway.
There are ferries on Lake Volta at Yeji and Kwadjokrom.
Marine transport
Seaports and harbours
There are ports on the Atlantic Ocean at Takoradi and Tema. Tema Port in South Ghana, officially opened in 1962, is the bigger of the two seaports in Ghana, and is Africa's largest harbour. It has a water-enclosed area of and a total land area of . Apart from handling goods for Ghana, it is also a traffic junction, where goods are transhipped, and transit cargo destined for the landlocked countries to the north of Ghana.
The port of Tema handles the majority of the nation's import and export cargo and most of the country's chief exports is shipped from Sekondi-Takoradi and Tema. The port of Tema has of breakwaters, 12 deepwater berths, an outsize oil tanker berth, a dockyard, warehouses, and transit sheds. The port has open and covered areas for the storage of cargo, including a 77,200-m² (7.72-hectare) paved area for the storage of containers, steel products and other conventional cargo. The port's container yard is capable of holding over 8,000 TEUs at any given time. The closed storage area, which is about 25,049 m² (2.51 hectares) in area, consists of six sheds with a total storage capacity of 50,000 tonnes of cargo. The port also includes a 100,000 dwt dry dock and slipway facility. The Tema and Takoradi harbours in South Ghana are operated by the Ghana Ports and Harbours Authority.
Merchant marine
There are six ships (with a volume of or over) totaling /. This includes two petroleum tankers and four refrigerated cargo vessels (1999 estimates).
Ghana's Volta River, Ankobra River, and Tano River provide 168 km of perennial navigation for launches and lighters, and Volta Lake provides 1,125 kilometres of arterial and feeder waterway. There are two main seaports in Ghana which are located in the southern coastal cities of Sekondi-Takoradi and Tema (Takoradi Harbour and Tema Harbour). The strategic geographical location of Ghana to the Volta Lake and the many rivers of Ghana that provide inland transport make Ghana a very transited sovereign state for freighters.
Inland water transport in Ghana includes the movement of passengers by ferry or water taxis and cargo on rivers, lakes and other water bodies in Ghana and Ghana has a ferry transportation system on Volta Lake at Yeji and Kwadjokrom. The Volta Lake is the major inland water transport facility that is efficiently regulated to transport passengers and cargo. The main transport service provider on the Volta Lake is the Volta Lake Transport Company Limited (VLTC). The Ghana Ports and Harbours Authority and Ghana Railway Corporation and the Volta River Authority collectively have oversight responsibility over the Volta Lake and the Volta Lake Transport Company Limited (VLTC).
Aviation
On July 4, 1958, the Ghanaian government established Ghana Airways connecting Ghana with other countries. By the mid-1990s, Ghana Airways operated international scheduled passenger and cargo service to numerous European, Middle Eastern, and African destinations, including London, Düsseldorf, Rome, Abidjan, Dakar, Lagos, Lomé, and Johannesburg. As a result of persistent management and financial problems, Ghana Airways ceased all operations and entered into liquidation in 2004.<ref name=aviation>Clark, Nancy L. "Civil Aviation". A Country Study: Ghana (La Verle Berry, editor). Library of Congress Federal Research Division (November 1994). This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.</ref>
Ghana has twelve airports, six with hard surfaced runways. The most important are Kotoka International Airport at Accra and airports at Sekondi-Takoradi, Kumasi, and Tamale that serve domestic air traffic. In 1990, the government spent US$12 million to improve Accra's facilities. Workmen resurfaced the runway, upgraded the lighting system and built a new freight terminal. Construction crews also extended and upgraded the terminal building at Kumasi. In early 1991, the government announced further plans to improve Accra's international airport. The main runway was upgraded, improvements were made in freight landing and infrastructure, and the terminal building and the airport's navigational aids were upgraded.
The first Ghanaian flag carrier was the Ghana Airways which commenced operations in 1958; then ceased operations in 2005 and was succeeded by the Ghana International Airlines in 2005. Ghana has a vibrant airline industry and there are five main airports in Ghana: Kotoka International Airport in Greater Accra, Kumasi Airport in Kumasi, Sekondi-Takoradi Airport in Western Ghana, Sunyani Airport in Sunyani, and Tamale Airport in Tamale. In addition, Ghana has a total of 8 airports, of which the most transited is the Kotoka International Airport located in Accra, with a transit in 2009 of 1.2 million passengers.
In 2005, Ghana International Airlines (GIA) began services as the new national airline of Ghana. GIA operated Boeing 757 and Boeing 767 aircraft under wet lease arrangements with other airlines, and connected Kotoka International Airport in Accra with London Gatwick and Düsseldorf. After several years GIA also ceased operations. After the cessation of operations of Ghana International Airlines in 2010, major airlines of Ghana are Africa World Airlines, Antrak Air, CTK – CiTylinK and Starbow Airlines which fly to domestic destinations in Ghana, around the world and to main flight points of the Africa continent. There are also some commercial airlines running domestic flights between the major cities in Ghana. In 2010, Ghana planned for the revival of Ghana Airways to commence commercial aviation. At present there exists no Ghanaian airline providing long-haul international services.
Between 2009 and 2013, the number of air passengers in Ghana more than quadrupled.
Airports - with paved runways
Kotoka International Airporttotal:62,438 to 3,047 m:11,524 to 2,437 m:3914 to 1,523 m:2 (1999 est.)
Airports - with unpaved runways total:61,524 to 2,437 m:not true
1914 to 1,523 m:3under 914 m:''
2
See also
Ghana
List of airports in Ghana
References
External links
Railway News - Ghana | [
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12075 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghana%20Armed%20Forces | Ghana Armed Forces | The Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) is the unified armed force of Ghana, consisting of
the Army (GA), Navy (GN), and Ghana Air Force.
The Commander-in-Chief of the Ghana Armed Forces is the president of Ghana, who is also the supreme military commander of the Border Guard Unit (BGU). The armed forces are managed by the Minister of Defence and the Chief of Defence Staff.
History
In 1879 the Gold Coast Constabulary was established from personnel of the Hausa Constabulary of Southern Nigeria, to perform internal security and police duties in the British colony of the Gold Coast. In this guise, the regiment earned its first battle honour as part of the Ashanti campaign.
The Gold Coast Constabulary was renamed in 1901 as the Gold Coast Regiment, following the foundation of the West African Frontier Force, under the direction of the Colonial Office of the British Government. The regiment raised a total of five battalions for service during the First World War, all of which served during the East Africa campaign. During the Second World War, the regiment raised nine battalions, and saw action in Kenya's Northern Frontier District, Italian Somaliland, Abyssinia and Burma as part of the 2nd (West Africa) Infantry Brigade. Gold Coast soldiers returning from the Far East carried different perspectives from when they had departed.
Internal operations
The Ghana Armed Forces were formed in 1957. Major General Stephen Otu was appointed Chief of Defence Staff in September 1961. From 1966, the Armed Forces were extensively involved in politics, mounting several coups. Kwame Nkrumah had become Ghana's first prime minister when the country became independent in 1957. As Nkrumah's rule wore on, he began to take actions which disquieted the leadership of the armed forces, including the creation and expansion of the President's Own Guard Regiment (POGR).
As a result, on February 24, 1966, a small number of Army personnel and senior police officials, led by Colonel Emmanuel Kotoka, commander of the Second Brigade at Kumasi, Major Akwasi Afrifa, (staff officer in charge of army training and operations), Lieutenant General (retired) Joseph Ankrah, and J.W.K. Harlley, (the police inspector general), successfully launched "Operation Cold Chop", the 1966 Ghanaian coup d'état, against the Nkrumah regime. The group formed the National Liberation Council, which ruled Ghana from 1966 to 1969.
The Armed Forces seized power again in January 1972, after the reinstated civilian government cut military privileges and started changing the leadership of the army's combat units. Lieutenant Colonel Ignatius Kutu Acheampong (temporary commander of the First Brigade around Accra) led the bloodless 1972 Ghanaian coup d'état that ended the Second Republic. Thus the National Redemption Council was formed. Acheampong became head of state, and the NRC ruled from 1972 to 1975.
On October 9, 1975, the NRC was replaced by the Supreme Military Council (SMC). Council members were Colonel Acheampong, (chairman, who was also promoted straight from Colonel to General), Lt. Gen. Fred Akuffo, (the Chief of Defence Staff), and the army, navy, air force and Border Guard Unit commanders.
In July 1978, in a sudden move, the other SMC officers forced Acheampong to resign, replacing him with Lt. Gen. Akuffo. The SMC apparently acted in response to continuing pressure to find a solution to the country's economic dilemma; inflation was estimated to be as high as 300% that year. The council was also motivated by Acheampong's failure to dampen rising political pressure for changes. Akuffo, the new SMC chairman, promised publicly to hand over political power to a new government to be elected by 1 July 1979.
The decree lifting the ban on party politics went into effect on 1 January 1979, as planned. However in June, just before the scheduled resumption of civilian rule, a group of young armed forces officers, led by Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings, mounted the 1979 Ghanaian coup d'état. They put in place the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council, which governed until September 1979. However, in 1981, Rawlings deposed the new civilian government again, in the 1981 Ghanaian coup d'état. This time Rawlings established the Provisional National Defence Council. The PNDC remained in government until January 7, 1993. In the last years of the PNDC, Jerry Rawlings assumed civilian status; he was elected as a civilian President in 1993 and continued as President until 2001.
External operations
The Armed Forces' first external operation was the United Nations Operation in the Congo in the early 1960s. The GAF operated in the Balkans, including with UNMIK, with the GAF external operations within Africa including the Rwandan genocide (UNAMIR) which in his book Shake Hands with the Devil, Canadian Forces commander Romeo Dallaire gave the Ghanaian soldiers high praise for their work during the civil and conflict, and Liberia civil war paving way for the Accra Comprehensive Peace Agreement among others. Operations in Asia have included Iran and Iraq in the Iran–Iraq War, Kuwait and Lebanon civil war among others.
A total of 3,359 Ghana Army soldiers and 283 Ghana Military Police operated as part of UNTAC in Cambodia. The UNTAC operation lasted two years, 1992−1993. After the long running Cambodia civil war ignited by external interventions, a resolution was accepted by the four warring factional parties. Operation UNTAC was the largest Ghanaian external operation since Ghana's first external military operation, ONUC in the Congo in the 1960s. Operation UNTAC and its contingent UNAMIC had a combined budget of more than $1.6 billion.
In 2012, closer military cooperation was agreed with the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. In 2013, the Armed Forces agreed closer military cooperation with the China People's Liberation Army, and with the Armed Forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Ghana Army
The Ghana Army is structured as follows:
The Northern Command with headquarters in Tamale, Central Command with headquarters in Kumasi and the Southern Command with headquarters in Accra. In March 2000 Northern and Southern Commands were formed after the two infantry brigades were upgraded in status. Previously there were three brigades: 1st Infantry Brigade (HQ in Teshie), 2nd Infantry Brigade (HQ in Kumasi) and Support Services Brigade (HQ in Burma Camp).
6 Infantry Battalions of the Ghana Regiment. 3rd Battalion of Infantry, 4th Battalion of Infantry and 6th Battalion of Infantry in the Northern Command, 1st Battalion of Infantry, 2nd Battalion of Infantry and 5th Battalion of Infantry in the Southern Command.
two Airborne companies attached to Northern Command; Airborne Force
64 Infantry Regiment, a presidential guard force (formerly known as President's Own Guard Regiment)
1 Training Battalion
One Staff College
Reconnaissance Armoured Regiment (two armoured reconnaissance squadrons)
Defence Signal Regiment (Ghana)
Two Engineer Regiments (48 Engineer Regiment and 49 Engineer Regiment)
66 Artillery Regiment
In 1996, the Support Services Brigade was reorganized and transferred from the Army to be responsible to the Armed Forces GHQ.
From that point its units included 49 Engineer Regiment, the Ghana Military Police, Defence Signal Regiment (Ghana), FRO, Forces Pay Office, 37 Military Hospital, Defence Mechanical Transport Battalion (Def MT Bn), Base Ordnance Depot, Base Ammunition Depot, Base Supply Depot, Base Workshop, Armed Forces Printing Press (AFPP), Armed Forces Fire Service (AFFS), the Ghana Armed Forces Central Band, Ghana Armed Forces Institution (GAFI), 1 Forces Movement Unit (Tema Port), 5 Forces Movement Unit, Base Engineer Technical Services (BETS), 5 Garrison Education Centre (5 GEC), the Armed Forces Museum, Army Signals Training School, and the Armed Forces Secondary Technical School (AFSTS). By 2016 the Forces Pay Office had been upgraded to the Forces Pay Regiment.
The Armed Forces uses imported weaponry and locally manufactured secondary equipment. M16 rifles, AK-47s, Type 56 assault rifles, ballistic vests and personal armor are standard issue, while much of the secondary equipment used by the Army and Air Force are manufactured internally by the Defence Industries Holding Company (DIHOC). External suppliers include Russia, Iran, and the People's Republic of China.
Peacekeeping Operations
The Armed Forces are heavily committed to international peacekeeping operations. Ghana prefers to send its troops to operations in Africa. However the United Nations has used Ghanaian forces in countries as diverse as Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo, Georgia, Nepal, Cambodia and Lebanon. Currently, Ghanaian armed forces are posted to United Nations peacekeeping missions in:
MONUC (Democratic Republic of Congo) − 464
UNMIL (Liberia) − 852 (disestablished 2018)
UNAMSIL (Sierra Leone) − 782
UNIFIL (Lebanon) − 651
Ghana armed forces provided the first Force Commander of the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG), Lieutenant General Arnold Quainoo. Quainoo led the force from July 1990 to September 1990.
Ghana Armed Forces peacekeepers have many roles: patrolling, as military police, electoral observers, de-miners (bomb disposal units and clearance divers), ceasefire monitors, humanitarian aid workers, and even special forces or frogmen against insurgents.
Ghana Air Force
The Ghana Air Force is headquartered in Burma Camp in Accra, and operates from bases in Accra (main transport base), Tamale (combat and training base)and Sekondi-Takoradi (training base). The GHF military doctrine and stated mission is to perform counterinsurgency operations within Ghana or externally and to provide logistical support to the Ghana Army.
Ghana Navy
The Ghana Navy's mission is to provide defence of Ghana and its territorial waters, fishery protection, exclusive economic zone, and internal security on Lake Volta. It is also tasked with resupplying GA (Ghana Army) peacekeepers in Africa, fighting maritime criminal activities such as Piracy, disaster and humanitarian relief operations, and evacuation of Ghanaian citizens and other nationals from troubled spots. In 1994 the Navy was re-organized into an Eastern command, with headquarters at Tema, and a Western command, with headquarters at Sekondi-Takoradi.
GAF Business
GAF Military private bank
The Ghana Armed Forces, in addition to owning its own arms industry weapons and military technology and equipment manufacturer (DIHOC − Defence Industries Holding Company), operates its own private bank. The military private bank is sited at Burma Camp and serves Ghanaian military personnel and their civilian counterparts.
Military hospitals
The GAF has two hospitals, the 37 Military Hospital in Accra and the Kumasi Military Hospital in the north. The 37 Military Hospital has recently undergone expansion and its facilities include a twenty-four-hour Emergency Department (ED).
The GAF main military hospital has been organized into departments and divisions, which created structure within the establishment. The Divisions and Departments (the units) are developed and joined according to medical, paramedical and administrative lines and each of these units has its own departmental head. The GAF military hospital is staffed by GAF military personnel and also houses a medical education training facility. 37 Military Hospital is also accredited for post-graduate medical education teaching. Vyacheslav Lebedev, Chairman of the Supreme Court of Russia, expressed gratitude following his emergency treatment at the hospital.
Cadets and schools
The Ghana Army operates a Cadet Corps for GAF Cadets whom go on to Military Education and Training and Recruit Training graduation from the GAF Military Academy for Army Recruit and Seaman Recruit prior to enlistment into the Army, Navy or Air Force.
Training institutions include the Ghana Military Academy and the Ghana Army-sponsored Cadet Corps. Also located in Accra is the internationally-funded Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre, which is not part of the Armed Forces but provides a wide ranging of peace operations training, including to GAF personnel.
Defence budget
Salary Structure
The Single Spine Salary Structure (SSSS) is the payment made to the Ghana Arm Forces. The salary structure started in 2010 has increased the income of the military. Payment structure with the Single Spine differs from each officer depending on their ranking.
Military clothing and prohibition of photography
Ghanaian statutory law officially prohibits civilians and foreign nationals from wearing military apparel such as camouflage clothing, or clothing which resembles military dress. Officially, fines and/or short prison sentences can be passed against civilians seen in military dress in public. In addition, Ghanaian law prohibits the photographing of Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) Ghana Military Police (GMP) police or GAF military personnel and vehicles while on duty, strategic sites such as Kotoka International Airport when in use, and the seat of the Ghanaian government, Jubilee House.
See also
List of wars involving Ghana
References
Further reading
General History of the Ghana Armed Forces – a Reference Volume, (Professor) Stephen Addae, Ministry of Defence of Ghana Armed Forces (sic), Accra, 2005, . Nearly 700 pages but quite readable. Very poor bibliography.
External links
Ghana Armed Forces, Ghana armed forces official website
How to join the Ghana Armed Forces . | [
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12076 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign%20relations%20of%20Ghana | Foreign relations of Ghana | The foreign relations of Ghana are controlled by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ghana. Ghana is active in the United Nations and many of its specialised agencies, the World Trade Organization, the Non-Aligned Movement, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), the African Union (AU) and the Economic Community of West African States. Generally, it follows the consensus of the Non-aligned Movement and the OAU on economic and political issues not directly affecting its own interests. Ghana has been extremely active in international peacekeeping activities under UN auspices in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Rwanda, and the Balkans, in addition to an eight-year sub-regional initiative with its ECOWAS partners to develop and then enforce a cease-fire in Liberia. Ghana is also a member of the International Criminal Court.
Guiding principles and objectives
Ghana's foreign policy since independence has been characterised by a commitment to the principles and ideals of non-alignment and Pan-Africanism as first enunciated by Kwame Nkrumah in the early 1960s. For Nkrumah, non-alignment meant complete independence from the policies and alliances of both East and West and support for a worldwide union of so-called non-aligned nations as a counter to both East and West power blocs. Pan-Africanism, by contrast, was a specifically African policy that envisioned the independence of Africa from Western colonialism and the eventual economic and political unity of the African continent.[1]
The PNDC, like most of its predecessors, made serious and consistent attempts at the practical application of these ideals and principles, and its successor, the NDC government, promises to follow in the PNDC's footsteps. Under the NDC, Ghana remains committed to the principle of non-alignment in world politics. Ghana is also opposed to interference in the internal affairs of both small and large countries. This is a departure from Nkrumah's foreign policy approach; Nkrumah was frequently accused of subverting African regimes, such as Togo and Ivory Coast, which he considered ideologically conservative. The NDC government, like the PNDC before it, believes in the principle of self-determination, including the right to political independence and the right of people to pursue their economic and social development free from external interference. Another feature of NDC rule carried over from the PNDC era is faithfulness to what a leading scholar of Africa has called "one of the most successful neoclassical economic reform efforts supported by the IMF and the World Bank."
The broad objectives of Ghana's foreign policy thus include maintaining friendly relations and cooperation with all countries that desire such cooperation, irrespective of ideological considerations, on the basis of mutual respect and non-interference in each other's internal affairs. Africa and its liberation and unity are naturally the cornerstones of Ghana's foreign policy. As a founding member of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), NDC policy is to adhere faithfully to the OAU Charter.
Another important principle of Ghana's foreign policy involves the closest possible cooperation with neighbouring countries with which the people of Ghana share cultural history, ties of blood, and economics. The results have included various bilateral trade and economic agreements and permanent joint commissions involving Ghana and its immediate neighbours, sometimes in the face of latent ideological and political differences and mutual suspicion, as well as numerous reciprocal state visits by high-ranking officials. These measures have contributed significantly to subregional cooperation, development, and the reduction of tension.
As an example of Ghana's interest in regional cooperation, the country enthusiastically endorsed formation of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in 1975. This organisation was created specifically to foster inter-regional economic and political cooperation. It has served as a useful vehicle for contacts with neighbouring West African governments and for channelling increased Ghanaian exports to regional markets. Since 1990 ECOWAS has been engaged in a peacekeeping mission in Liberia to which Ghana has contributed a large contingent of troops. Ghana has participated in other international peacekeeping efforts as well, sending soldiers to operations of the United Nations (UN) in Cambodia in 1992-93 and Rwanda in 1993-94.
In August 1994, Rawlings became ECOWAS chairman, a post that had eluded him since the PNDC came to power. He immediately undertook several initiatives to reduce tensions and conflict in West Africa. Notable among them was the Akosombo Accord of September 12, designed to end civil war in Liberia.
Bilateral relations
Africa
Americas
Asia
Europe
Oceania
Ghana and the Commonwealth of Nations
Ghana has been a member state of the Commonwealth since independence in 1957, firstly as a Dominion, then as a republic in the Commonwealth of Nations.
See also
Visa policy of Ghana
Minister for Foreign Affairs (Ghana)
List of diplomatic missions in Ghana
List of diplomatic missions of Ghana
List of Ambassadors and High Commissioners of Ghana
References
Ghana and the Commonwealth of Nations | [
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12078 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline%20of%20the%20history%20of%20Gibraltar | Timeline of the history of Gibraltar | The history of Gibraltar portrays how The Rock gained an importance and a reputation far exceeding its size, influencing and shaping the people who came to reside here over the centuries.
Prehistoric
Evidence of hominid inhabitation of the Rock dates back to the Neanderthals. A Neanderthal skull was discovered in Forbes' Quarry in 1848, prior to the "original" discovery in the Neander Valley. In 1926, the skull of a Neanderthal child was found in Devil's Tower.
Mousterian deposits found at Gorham's Cave, which are associated with Neanderthals in Europe, have been dated to as recently as 28,000 to 24,000 BP, leading to suggestions that Gibraltar was one of the last places of Neanderthal habitation. Modern humans apparently visited the Gibraltar area in prehistoric times after the Neanderthal occupancy.
While the rest of Europe was cooling, the area around Gibraltar back then resembled a European Serengeti. Leopards, hyenas, lynxes, wolves and bears lived among wild cattle, horses, deer, ibexes, oryxes and rhinos – all surrounded by olive trees and stone pines, with partridges and ducks overhead, tortoises in the underbrush and mussels, limpets and other shellfish in the waters. Clive Finlayson, evolutionary biologist at the Gibraltar Museum said "this natural richness of wildlife and plants in the nearby sandy plains, woodlands, shrublands, wetlands, cliffs and coastline probably helped the Neanderthals to persist." Evidence at the cave shows the Neanderthals of Gibraltar likely used it as a shelter "for 100,000 years." Cro-Magnon man took over Gibraltar around 24,000 BCE.
Ancient
The Phoenicians are known to have visited the Rock circa 950 BC and named the Rock "Calpe". The Carthaginians also visited. However, neither group appears to have settled permanently. Plato refers to Gibraltar as one of the Pillars of Hercules along with Jebel Musa or Monte Hacho on the other side of the Strait.
The Romans visited Gibraltar, but no permanent settlement was established. Following the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Gibraltar was occupied by the Vandals and later the Goths kingdoms. The Vandals did not remain for long although the Visigoths remained on the Iberian peninsula from 414 to 711. The Gibraltar area and the rest of the South Iberian Peninsula was part of the Byzantine Empire during the second part of the 6th century, later reverting to the Visigoth Kingdom.
Muslim rule
711 30 April – The Umayyad general Tariq ibn Ziyad, leading a Berber-dominated army, sailed across the Strait from Ceuta. He first attempted to land on Algeciras but failed. Upon his failure, he landed undetected at the southern point of the Rock from present-day Morocco in his quest for Spain. It was here that Gibraltar was named. Coming from the Arabian words Gabal-Al-Tariq (the mountain of Tariq). Little was built during the first four centuries of Moorish control (see Reconquista).
1160 – The Almohad Sultan Abd al-Mu'min ordered that a permanent settlement, including a castle, be built. It received the name of Medinat al-Fath (City of the Victory). On completion of the works in the town, the Sultan crossed the Strait to inspect the works and stayed in Gibraltar for two months. The Tower of Homage of the castle remains standing today (Moorish Castle).
1231 – After the collapse of the Almohad Empire, Gibraltar was taken by Ibn Hud, Taifa emir of Murcia.
1237 – Following the death of Ibn Hud, his domains were handed over to Muhammad ibn al-Ahmar, the founder of the Nasrid Emirate of Granada. Therefore, Gibraltar changed hands again.
1274 – The second Nasrid king, Muhammed II al-Faqih, gave Gibraltar over to the Marinids, as payment for their help against the Christian kingdoms.
1309 – While the King Ferdinand IV of Castile laid siege on Algeciras, Alonso Pérez de Guzmán (known to the Spanish records as Guzmán el Bueno) was sent to capture the town. This was the First Siege of Gibraltar. The Castilians took the Upper Rock from where the town was bombarded. The garrison surrendered after one month. Gibraltar then had about 1,500 inhabitants.
1310 31 January – Gibraltar was granted its first Charter by the king Ferdinand IV of Castile. Being considered a high risk town, the charter included incentives to settle there such as the offering of freedom from justice to anyone who lived in Gibraltar for one year and one day.
This fact marked the establishment of the Gibraltar council.
1316 – Gibraltar was unsuccessfully besieged by the Azafid caid Yahya ibn Abi Talib (Second Siege of Gibraltar), an ally of the Emirate of Granada.
1333 June – A Marinid army, led by Abd al-Malik, the son of Abul Hassan, the Marinid sultan, recovered Gibraltar, after a five-month siege (Third Siege of Gibraltar).
King Alfonso XI of Castile attempted to retake Gibraltar aided by the fleet of the Castilian Admiral Alonso Jofre Tenorio. Even a ditch was dug across the isthmus. While laying the siege, the king was attacked by a Nasrid army from Granada. Therefore, the siege ended in a truce, allowing the Marinids to keep Gibraltar (Fourth Siege of Gibraltar).
1344 March – After the two-year Siege of Algeciras (1342-1344), Algeciras was taken over by the Castilian forces. Therefore, Gibraltar became the main Marinid port in the Iberian Peninsula. During the siege, Gibraltar played a key role as the supply base of the besieged.
1349 – Gibraltar was unsuccessfully besieged by the Castilian forces led by the king Alfonso XI.
1350 – The siege was resumed by Alfonso XI. It was again unsuccessful, mainly due to the arrival of the Black Death, which decimated the besiegers, causing the death of the king (Fifth Siege of Gibraltar).
1369 – As the Civil War in Castile came to an end, with the murder of king Peter I by the pretender Henry (to be known as Henry II), the Nasrid king of Granada, Muhammad V, former ally of Peter, took over Algeciras after the 3-day Siege of Algeciras (1369). Ten years later the city was razed out to the ground, and its harbour made unusable. This fact increased again the importance of Gibraltar, yet in Marinid hands, in the strait trade. A subsequent truce was signed between Muhammad and Henry, preventing the Christian kings from attempting to recover the city.
1374 – Following a period of internal instability in the Marinid Sultanate of Fez, Abu al-Abbas Ahmad of Fez, ask for Muhammad V of Granada help. Possibly as a condition of the alliance or as reward for Muhammad's successful expedition to Africa, Gibraltar was handed over to the Nasrids of Granada.
1410 – The garrison in Gibraltar mutinied against the king of Granada and declared for the king of Fez, Fayd. Fayd sent his brother Abu Said over to Gibraltar to take possession of the city. He also took over other Nasrid ports such as Marbella and Estepona.
1411 – The son of Yusuf III of Granada, Ahmad, recovered Marbella and Estepona. Next, it laid siege to Gibraltar (Sixth Siege of Gibraltar) and recovered the city for the kingdom of Granada.
1436 – Enrique de Guzmán, second Count of Niebla, with large estates in Southern Andalusia, assaulted Gibraltar. However, his attack was repelled and Castilian forces suffer heavy losses (Seventh Siege of Gibraltar).
Castilian/Spanish rule
1462 20 August – Castilian forces captured Gibraltar (Eighth Siege of Gibraltar). (See Reconquista). An immediate dispute broke out between the House of Medina Sidonia (the Guzmán family) and the House of Arcos (the Ponce de León family) about the possession of the town. Finally, the initiative of Juan Alonso de Guzmán, 1st Duke of Medina Sidonia, succeeded and he took possession of the town as personal property. However, the King of Castile, Henry IV, declared Gibraltar to be Crown property and not the personal property of the Guzman family. Henry IV restored the charter granted to Gibraltar in 1310 and took two additional measures: the lands previously belonging to Algeciras (destroyed in 1369) were granted to Gibraltar; and the status of collegiate church was solicited from the pope Pius II and granted to the parish church of Saint Mary the Crowned (), now the Cathedral of St. Mary the Crowned, on the site of the old main Moorish Mosque. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, whose feast falls on 20 August, became the Patron Saint of Gibraltar.
1463 – In a tour through Andalusia, Henry IV was the first Christian monarch to visit Gibraltar.
1467 July – In the midst of a nobility revolt against the King, the forces of the Duke of Medina Sidonia, after a 16-month siege, took Gibraltar. Alfonso of Castile, half-brother of Henry IV and puppet pretender handled by the nobility, granted him the Lordship of Gibraltar (Ninth Siege of Gibraltar).
1469 3 June – After the death of Alfonso de Castilla and the 1st Duke of Medina Sidonia, his son and heir Enrique de Guzman, 2nd Duke of Medina Sidonia changed side and in reward, saw the status of Gibraltar, as part of the domains of the Duke, confirmed by the Queen Isabella I of Castile.
1470 20 December – A new charter was granted to the town of Gibraltar, now a nobiliary town, based in the Antequera charter.
1478 30 September – The Catholic Monarchs granted the title of Marquis of Gibraltar to the Duke of Medina Sidonia.
1479 20 January – Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon – the Catholic Monarchs, jointly rule the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, including Gibraltar.
1492 31 March – After conquering Granada, the Catholic Monarchs sign the Alhambra Decree ordering the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, to take effect from 31 July 1492. Many passed through Gibraltar on their way into exile in North Africa.
1492 Summer – After the death of the former Duke, his son and heir, Juan Alfonso Perez de Guzman, 3rd Duke of Medina Sidonia saw his lordship over Gibraltar reluctantly renewed by the Catholic Monarchs.
1497 – Gibraltar became the main base in the conquest of Melilla by the troops of the Duke of Medina Sidonia.
1501 2 December – Acknowledging the importance of the town, the Catholic Monarchs asked the Duke of Medina Sidonia for the return of Gibraltar to the domains of the crown. The Duke accepted the Royal request and ceded the town to the monarchs.
1502 2 January – Garcilaso de la Vega took possession of the town on behalf of the Queen Isabella I of Castile.
1502 10 July – By a Royal Warrant passed in Toledo by Isabella I of Castile, Gibraltar was granted its coat of arms: "An escutcheon on which the upper two thirds shall be a white field and on the said field set a red castle, and below the said castle, on the other third of the escutcheon, which must be a red field in which there must be a white line between the castle and the said red field, there shall be a golden key which hangs by a chain from the said castle, as are here figured". The Castle and Key remain the Arms of Gibraltar to this day.
1506 – Alleging a false donation by the king Philip I of Castile, the Duke of Medina Sidonia attempted to recover Gibraltar by besieging the town. The siege was unsuccessful and the Duke was admonished by the Regency and forced to pay a fee to the town. The town received the title of "Most Loyal City" (Tenth Siege of Gibraltar). The Duke died in 1507.
1516 14 March – Spain becomes a united kingdom under Charles I.
1540 8 September – Corsairs from the Barbary Coast (ruled by Barbarossa) landed at Gibraltar in sixteen galleys, looting the town and taking away many captives.
1552 – After the requests from the inhabitants of the town, Charles I of Spain (the Emperor Charles V) sent the Italian engineer Giovanni Battista Calvi to strengthen the defences of the town. A wall was built (nowadays known as Charles V Wall); also a ditch by the wall of the town and a drawbridge at the Landport (Puerta de Tierra).
1567 – Juan Mateos turned his large house in the Upper Town into a hospital. It was Gibraltar's first hospital, and remained on the same site serving the people of Gibraltar for almost four and a half centuries.
1606 – The Moriscos (the descendants of the Muslim inhabitants in Spain) were expelled from Spain by King Philip III. Many passed through Gibraltar on their way into exile in North Africa.
1607 25 April – During the Eighty Years' War between the United Provinces and the King of Spain, a Dutch fleet surprised and engaged a Spanish fleet anchored at the Bay of Gibraltar (Battle of Gibraltar).
1621 – Second battle of Gibraltar on which a Spanish squadron crushed the VOC at the strait of Gibraltar – Battle of Gibraltar (1621)
1649 – Typhoid epidemic in the town.
1656 – In a letter to Councillor General Montagu (afterwards Earl of Sandwich), General-at-sea and one of the Protector's personal friends, Cromwell mentioned the necessity of securing a permanent base at the entry of the Mediterranean, preferably Gibraltar (the first suggestion for the occupation of Gibraltar as a naval base had been made at an English Council of War held at sea on 20 October 1625).
The War of the Spanish Succession
1700 1 November – King Charles II of Spain died leaving no descendants. In the autumn he had made a will bequeathing the whole of the Spanish possessions to Prince Philip of Bourbon, a grandson of Louis XIV backed by France. The other pretender, an Austrian Habsburg, Archduke Charles, supported by the Holy Roman Empire, England and the Netherlands did not accept Charles II's testament.
1701 September – England, the Netherlands and Austria signed the Treaty of The Hague. By this treaty, they accepted Philippe of Anjou as King of Spain, but allotted Austria the Spanish territories in Italy and the Spanish Netherlands. England and the Netherlands, meanwhile, were to retain their commercial rights in Spain. Later (in 1703), Portugal, Savoy and some German states joined the alliance.
1702 May – Formal beginning of the War of the Spanish Succession.
1703 12 February – The Archduke Charles was proclaimed king of Castile and Aragon in Vienna. He took the name of Charles III
The Gibraltar capture
(There is a common discrepancy in the chronology between Spanish and British sources, the reason being that England still used the Julian calendar. By 1704 the Julian calendar was eleven days behind the Gregorian, and the siege thus began on 21 July according to the Julian.)
1704 1 August(NS): (21 July(OS)) – During the War of the Spanish Succession, and when returning from a failed expedition to Barcelona, an Anglo-Dutch fleet, under the command of Sir George Rooke, chief commander of the Alliance Navy, began a new siege (the eleventh siege of the town). They demanded its unconditional surrender and an oath of loyalty to the Habsburg pretender to the Spanish throne, the Archduke Charles. The Governor of Gibraltar, Diego de Salinas, refused the ultimatum. A brigade of Dutch Royal Marines and Royal Marines, 1,800 strong, under the command of Prince George of Hesse-Darmstadt, chief commander of the Alliance Army in Spain, began to besiege Gibraltar, in the name of the Archduke Charles. A small group of Spaniards, mainly Catalans, were integrated in the troops of the Prince of Hesse.
1704 night of 3–4 August – Heavy shelling targeted the castle and the town.
1704 4 August – The Governor Diego de Salinas surrendered the town to Prince George of Hesse, who took it in the name of Archduke, as Charles III, king of Castile and Aragon. This was the end of the Eleventh Siege of Gibraltar (a map on the situation of attacking forces can be seen in)
The exact beginning of the English/British control of Gibraltar is hard to determine. From the eighteenth century, Spanish sources reported that immediately after the takeover of the city, Sir George Rooke, the British admiral, on his own initiative caused the British flag to be hoisted, and took possession of the Rock in name of Anne, Queen of Great Britain, whose government ratified the occupation. On the other hand, even the British or the Gibraltarians sometimes date the beginning of British sovereignty in 1704 (for instance, in its speech at the United Nations in 1994, the Gibraltar Chief Minister at the time, Joe Bossano, stated that Gibraltar has been a British colony ever since it was taken by Britain in 1704). Also, some British sources have accounted the flag story (He [Rooke] had the Spanish flag hauled down and the English flag hoisted in its stead; Rooke's men quickly raised the British flag ... and Rooke claimed the Rock in the name of Queen Anne; or Sir George Rooke, the British admiral, on his own responsibility caused the British flag to be hoisted, and took possession in name of Queen Anne, whose government ratified the occupation).
However, it is claimed by present-day historians, both Spanish and British, that this version is apocryphal since no contemporary source accounts it. Isidro Sepúlveda, William Jackson and George Hills explicitly refute it (Sepúlveda points out that if such a fact had actually happened, it would have caused a big crisis in the Alliance supporting the Archduke Charles; George Hills explains that the story was first accounted by the Marquis of San Felipe, who wrote his book "Comentarios de la guerra de España e historia de su rey Phelipe V el animoso" in 1725, more than twenty years after the fact; the marquis was not an eye-witness and cannot be considered as a reliable source for the events that took place in Gibraltar in 1704. As Hills concludes: "The flag myth ... may perhaps be allowed now to disappear from Anglo-Spanish polemics. On the one side it has been used to support a claim to the Rock 'by right of conquest'; on the other to ... pour on Britain obloquy for perfidy").
What does seem nowadays proved is that the British troops who had landed on the South Mole area raised their flag to signal their presence to the ships, and avoid being fired upon by their own side.
However, whatever the exact events of the time, Gibraltar ceased being under the rule of Philip V of Spain in 1704. A statue to Sir George Rooke was erected in 2004 as part of the tercentenary celebrations.
1704 4–7 August. Orders were issued to respect civilians as the Grand Alliance hoped to win over the population to their cause. Officers tried to maintain control but (as had happened two years previously in the raid on Cádiz) discipline broke down and the men ran amok. There were numerous incidents of rape, all Catholic churches but one (the Parish Church of St. Mary the Crowned, now the Cathedral) were desecrated or converted into military storehouses, and religious symbols such as the statue of Our Lady of Europe were damaged and destroyed. Angry Spanish inhabitants took violent reprisals against the occupiers. English and Dutch soldiers and sailors were attacked and killed, and their bodies were thrown into wells and cesspits. After order was restored, despite the surrender agreement promising property and religious rights, most of the population left with the garrison on 7 August citing loyalty to Philip. Several factors influenced the decision including the expectation of a counter attack and the violence during the capture, which ultimately proved disastrous for the Habsburg cause. The subsequent siege failed to dislodge the Habsburg forces and the refugees settled around Algeciras and the hermitage of San Roque. The Alliance's conduct aroused anger in Spain against the 'heretics', and once again the chance of winning over Andalusians to the Imperial cause was lost. Prince George was the first to complain, which was resented by Byng who had led the fighting and who in turn blamed the Prince and his few Spanish or Catalan supporters. Rooke complained in a letter home that the Spaniards were so exasperated against the Alliance that ‘they use the prisoners they take as barbarously as the Moors’. Spain attempted to retake Gibraltar in 1727 and most notably in 1779, when it entered the American Revolutionary War on the American side as an ally of France.
1704 7 August. A dejected procession, numbering some 4,000 according to most of the sources, such as Hills or Jackson filed out of the Land Port with Queen Isabella's banner at their head, and led by the Spanish Governor, Diego de Salinas, the Spanish garrison, with their three brass cannon, the religious orders, the city council and all those inhabitants who did not wish to take the oath of allegiance to Charles III as asked by the terms of surrender. They took with them the symbols and objects of Spanish Gibraltar's history: the council and ecclesiastical records, including the historical documents signed by the Spanish Catholic Monarchs in 1502, granting Gibraltar's coat of arms, and the statue of the Saint Mary the Crowned. Most of them took refuge in the proximity of the nearby Chapel of San Roque, possibly hoping for a rapid reconquest of Gibraltar, which never materialised. There, a new settlement was formed, being granted a council two years later (1706), with the name of San Roque, and being considered by the Spanish Crown as the heir to the lost town of Gibraltar (historical objects and records predating 1704 were subsequently taken to San Roque where they remain to this day.) King Philip V of Spain dubbed San Roque as My city of Gibraltar resident in its Campo. Others settled down in what today is Los Barrios or even further away, in the ruins of the abandoned city of Algeciras. Only about seventy people remained in the town, most of them religious, people without family or belonging to the Genoese trader colony (see list in).
1704 24 August – The Alliance fleet, under the command of Rooke, set sail from Gibraltar and intercepted a joint Spanish-French fleet that attempted to recover Gibraltar by the coast of Málaga (Battle of Vélez-Málaga). The result was uncertain, with heavy losses on both sides, but the Spanish-French fleet was stopped and prevented from arriving at Gibraltar.
The first Spanish siege (Twelfth Siege of Gibraltar)
1704 5 September – Troops of France and Spain under the marquis of Villadarias, General Captain of Andalusia, started to besiege Gibraltar to try to recover it (this one would be the Twelfth Siege of Gibraltar). In the town, the Marine brigade, still under the command of the British admiral Sir John Leake, and the governor, Prince George of Hesse-Darmstadt (who had commanded the land forces in August), and reinforced shortly before by a further 400 Royal Marines, held the fortress against repeated attacks.
1704 11 November – A notable incident during the siege: 500 Spanish volunteer grenadiers tried to surprise the garrison after being led up a concealed path to the top of The Rock by a Spanish goatherd from Gibraltar, Simón Susarte. Captain Fisher of the Marines with 17 of his men successfully defended the Round Tower against their assault. A contemporary report of this noted defence says, "Encouraged by the Prince of Hesse, the garrison did more than could humanly be expected, and the English Marines gained an immortal glory".
1705 January – Philip V replaced Villadarias with the Marshal of France de Tessé.
1705 7 February – The last assault before the arrival of de Tessé was executed. The Gibraltar wall was damaged, but French troops refused to go on until the arrival of de Tessé (who arrived the day after). The assault becomes unsuccessful.
1705 31 March – The Count de Tessé gave up the siege and retired.
During the rest of the war
Although nominally in the hands of the Archduke Charles, and garrisoned with both English and Dutch regiments, Britain began to monopolize the rule of the town. Even if the formal transfer of sovereignty would not take place until the signature of the Treaty of Utrecht, the British Governor and garrison become the de facto rulers of the town.
1705 2 August – The Archduke Charles stopped over in Gibraltar on his way to the territories of the Crown of Aragon. The Prince of Hesse joined him, thus leaving the town (he would die one month later in the siege of Barcelona). The English Major General John Shrimpton was left as governor (appointed by the Archduke Charles on the recommendation of Queen Anne).
1706 17 February – Queen Anne though not yet the legal ruler of the territory, declared Gibraltar a free port (upon request of the Sultan of Morocco, who wanted Gibraltar being given this status in return for supplying the town)
1707 24 December – The first British Governor directly appointed by Queen Anne, Roger Elliott, took up residence in the Convent of the Franciscan friars.
1711 – The British government, then in the hands of the Tories, covertly ordered the British Gibraltar governor, Thomas Stanwix, to expel any foreign (not British) troops (to foster Great Britain's sole right to Gibraltar in the negotiations running up between Britain and France). Although he answered positively, he allowed a Dutch regiment to stay. It remained there until March 1713.
British rule
Treaty of Utrecht
11 April 1713 – The territory was subsequently ceded to the Crown of Great Britain in perpetuity by Spain under article X of the Treaties of Utrecht. Despite some military attempts by the Spanish to retake it in the 18th century, most notably in the Great Siege of 1779–1783, the Rock has remained under British control ever since.
In that treaty, Spain ceded Great Britain "the full and entire propriety of the town and castle of Gibraltar, together with the port, fortifications, and forts thereunto belonging ... for ever, without any exception or impediment whatsoever."
The Treaty stipulated that no overland trade between Gibraltar and Spain was to take place, except for emergency provisions in the case that Gibraltar is unable to be supplied by sea. Another condition of the cession was that "no leave shall be given under any pretence whatsoever, either to Jews or Moors, to reside or have their dwellings in the said town of Gibraltar." This was not respected for long and Gibraltar has had for many years an established Jewish community, along with Muslims from North Africa.
Finally, under the Treaty, should the British crown wish to dispose of Gibraltar, that of Spain should be offered the territory first.
Until the Peninsular Wars
Between 1713 and 1728, there were seven occasions when British ministers was prepared to bargain Gibraltar away as part of his foreign policy. However, the Parliament frustrated always such attempts, echoing the public opinion in Britain.
1721 March – Philip V of Spain requested the restitution of Gibraltar to proceed to the renewal of the trade licences of Great Britain with the Spanish possessions in America.
1721 1 June – George I sent a letter to Philip V promising "to make use of the first favourable Opportunity to regulate this Article (the Demand touching the Restitution of Gibraltar), with the Consent of my Parliament". However, the British Parliament never endorsed such promise.
1727 February–June – Second of the sieges by Spain tried to recapture Gibraltar (Thirteenth Siege of Gibraltar). Depending on the sources, Spanish troops were between 12,000 and 25,000. British defenders were 1,500 at the beginning of the siege, increasing up to about 5,000. After a five-month siege with several unsuccessful and costly attempts, Spanish troops gave up and retired.
1729 – At the end of the Anglo-Spanish War of 1727–1729, the Treaty of Seville confirming all previous treaties (including the Treaty of Utrecht) allowed Great Britain to keep Menorca and Gibraltar.
1730 – A Belgian Engineer, the Marquis of Verboom, Chief Engineer of the Spanish Royal Engineer Corps, who had taken part in the 1727 siege, arrived in San Roque commissioned by the Spanish government to design a line of fortifications across the isthmus. Fort San Felipe and Fort Santa Barbara were built. The fortifications, known to the British as the Spanish Lines, and to Spain as La Línea de Contravalación were the origin of modern-day town of La Línea de la Concepción.
1749–1754 – Lieutenant General Humphrey Bland is the Governor of Gibraltar. He compiles the twelve "Articles" or regulations that ruled the administration of Gibraltar for over sixty years. First article, dealing with property, establishes that only Protestants may own property. In 1754 the population settled at around 6,000 people, with the garrison and their dependants constituting about three-quarters of it. The civilian population comprised mainly Genoese and Jews.
1776 23 February – One of the heaviest storms ever recorded in Gibraltar. The lower part of the town was flooded. Linewall was breached along 100 m.
1779 June – In the midst of the American Revolutionary War, Spain declared war against Great Britain (as France had done the year before)
1779 July – Start of the Great Siege of Gibraltar (fourteenth and most recent military siege). This was an action by French and Spanish forces to wrest control of Gibraltar from the established British Garrison. The garrison, led by George Augustus Eliott, later 1st Baron Heathfield of Gibraltar, survived all attacks and a blockade of supplies.
1782 13 September – Start of an assault involving 100,000 men, 48 ships and 450 cannon. The British garrison survived.
1783 February. By now the siege was over, and George Augustus Eliott was awarded the Knight of the Bath and was created 1st Baron Heathfield of Gibraltar. The Treaties of Versailles which ceded Menorca and Florida to Spain, reaffirmed previous treaties in the rest of issues, thus not affecting to Gibraltar.
In 1782, work on the Great Siege Tunnels started. The tunnels became a great and complex system of underground fortifications which nowadays criss-crosses the inside of the Rock. Once the Siege was over, the fortifications were rebuilt and, in the following century, the walls were lined with Portland limestone. Such stone gave the walls their present white appearance.
The successful resistance in the Great Siege is attributed to several factors: the improvement in fortifications by Colonel (later General Sir) William Green in 1769; the British naval supremacy, which translated into support of the Navy; the competent command by General George Augustus Elliot; and an appropriately sized garrison. As in the early years of the British period, during the Siege the British Government considered to exchange Gibraltar for some Spanish possession. However, by the end of the Siege the fortress and its heroic response to the siege was now acquiring a sort of cult status amongst the population in Britain and no exchange however attractive, was likely to be acceptable.
1800 – Malta is taken over by Great Britain. The possession of Malta (confirmed by the Treaty of Paris in 1814, increased the attractiveness of Gibraltar since controlling both Gibraltar and Malta meant the effective mastery of the Mediterranean Sea by the Royal Navy.
1802 – Several mutinies among some regiments garrisoned in Gibraltar.
1802 – The first merchant token to bear the name Gibraltar (albeit spelt Gibralter) was issued by Robert Keeling in order to alleviate a shortage of copper.
1803 June – Admiral Nelson arrived in Gibraltar as Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean.
1804 – Great epidemic of "Malignant Fever" broke out. Although traditionally labelled as "Yellow Fever" now it is thought to have been typhus. Nearly 5,000 people died.
1805 January – The great epidemic ended. Over a third of the civilian population (5,946 people) died.
1805 21 October – Battle of Trafalgar.
1805 28 October – was towed into Gibraltar bringing Nelson's body aboard. The Trafalgar Cemetery still exists today in Gibraltar.
1806 – Gibraltar was made a Catholic Apostolic Vicariate (until then Gibraltar belonged to the See of Cadiz). Since 1840 the vicar has always been the Bishop of Gibraltar.<ref>{{cite web |author=Catholic Encyclopedia |year=1913 |url=http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06550a.htm |title=Vicariate Apostolic of Gibraltar |publisher=New Advent |access-date=2 January 2006}}</ref>
1810 – Britain and Spain became allies against Napoleon.
1810 February – The Governor of Gibraltar removed the Spanish forts of San Felipe and Santa Barbara, located on the northern boundary of the neutral ground. Fearing that the forts might fall into French hands, Lieutenant General Sir Colin Campbell instructed Royal Engineers to blow the forts up. Such a task was carried out on 14 February together with the demolition of the rest of the fortifications of the Spanish Lines.
(According to George Hills, there are no primary sources that could explain whether such a demolition was requested or authorized by any Spanish or British authority. According to him, over time, three different theories have emerged: (a) Campbell ordered the demolition on his own authority (b) under instructions from the British Government (c) upon request of Spanish General Castaños, who was at the time in Cádiz. Spanish authors from 1840 have usually favoured theory (b) while British ones have supported (c). As long as there is no contemporary source or dispatch on the topic, Hills does not personally discard (a) considering it the most likely possibility).
During the Peninsular War, contingents from the Gibraltar Garrison were sent to aid Spanish resistance to the French at Cádiz and Tarifa. As William Jackson describes, Gradually Gibraltar changed from being the objective of the San Roque garrison into the supply base and refuge in time of trouble for the Spanish forces operating in Southern Andalusia.
Until the Second World War
1814 – Outbreak of malignant fever.
1815 – The civilian population of Gibraltar was about 10,000 people (two and a half times the size of the garrison). Genoese constituted about one-third of the civilian population (a large number of immigrants had arrived from Genoa at the beginning of the century). The rest were mainly Spaniards and Portuguese fled from the war, and Jews from Morocco.
1817 – The first civil judge was established.
1830 – The British government changes the status of Gibraltar from The town and garrison of Gibraltar to the Crown Colony of Gibraltar. Thus, the responsibility for its administration is transferred from the War Office to the new Colonial Office.
Legal institutions and the Gibraltar Police Force were established.
1832 – The Church of the Holy Trinity, built for the needs of Anglican worshippers among Gibraltar's civil population, is completed. (Ten years later it will become the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity).
1842 21 August – The Church of England Diocese of Gibraltar was founded by Letters Patent and took over the pastoral care of the chaplaincies and congregations from Portugal to the Caspian Sea. George Tomlinson is enthroned as the first Bishop of Gibraltar. The Church of the Holy Trinity, Gibraltar becomes Cathedral for the Diocese.
1842 – Official Coins of the Realm were struck for Gibraltar by the Royal Mint. Coins were issued in ½, 1 and 2 Quart denominations.
1869 – The Suez Canal was opened. It heavily increased the strategic value of the Rock in the route from the United Kingdom to India. Gibraltar economy, mainly based on commercial shipping and import-export trade, takes a new income source with the opening of a coaling station for the new steam ships.
1891 17 March – America-bound steamer Utopia slammed in heavy weather into the iron-plated British battleship HMS Anson and sank in the Bay of Gibraltar; 576 people died.
1894 – The construction of the dockyards started.
1908 5 August – The British Ambassador in Madrid informed the Spanish Minister of State 'as an act of courtesy', of the British Government's intention to build a fence along the line of British sentries on the isthmus to prevent smuggling and reduce sentry duty. According to the British government, the fence was erected 1 metre inside British territory. Spain currently does not recognize the fence as the valid border, since it claims the fence was built on Spanish soil. Even though Spain, the United Kingdom and Gibraltar are all part of the European Union, the border fence is still relevant today since Gibraltar is outside the customs union. The border crossing is open 24-hours a day as required by EU law.
1921 – Gibraltar was granted a City Council status in recognition for its contribution to the British war efforts in World War I. The council had a small minority of elected persons. First elections held in Gibraltar.
1936–1939 – After the United Kingdom recognised the Franco's regime in 1938, Gibraltar had two Spanish Consulates, a Republican one and a Nationalistic one. Several incidents took place during the Spanish Civil War which affected Gibraltar. In May 1937, HMS Arethusa had to tow HMS Hunter into port after Hunter hit a mine off Almeria that killed and wounded several British sailors. In June 1937, the German pocket battleship Deutschland arrived in Gibraltar with dead and wounded after Republican planes bombed it in Ibiza in retaliation for the Condor Legion's bombing of Guernica. In August 1938, the Republican destroyer Jose Luis Diez took refuge in Gibraltar after taking casualties from the guns of the National cruiser Canarias. The one incident that resulted in the death of Gibraltarians occurred on 31 January 1938 when the insurgent submarine General Sanjurjo sank the SS Endymion, a small Gibraltar-registered freighter taking a cargo of coal to Cartagena, which was chartered by the Republican government. Eleven members of her crew were killed.Heaton, Paul Michael (1985) Welsh Blockade Runners in the Spanish Civil War. Starling Press, p. 74.
Second World War and after
The history of Gibraltar from the Second World War is characterized by two main elements: the increasing autonomy and self-government achieved by Gibraltarians and the re-emergence of the Spanish claim, especially during the years of the Francoist dictatorship.
During World War II (1939–1945) the Rock was again turned into a fortress and the civilian residents of Gibraltar were evacuated. Initially, in May 1940, 16,700 people went to French Morocco. However, after the French-German Armistice and the subsequent destruction of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir, Algeria by the British Navy in July 1940, the French-Moroccan authorities asked all Gibraltarian evacuees to be removed. 12,000 went to Britain, while about 3,000 went to Madeira or Jamaica, with the rest moving to Spain or Tanger. Control of Gibraltar gave the Allied Powers control of the entry to the Mediterranean Sea (the other side of the Strait being Spanish territory, and thus non-belligerent). The Rock was a key part of the Allied supply lines to Malta and North Africa and base of the British Navy Force H, and prior to the war the racecourse on the isthmus was converted into an airbase and a concrete runway constructed (1938). The repatriation of the civilians started in 1944 and proceeded until 1951, causing considerable suffering and frustration. However, most of the population had returned by 1946.
1940 4 July – French bombers, based in French Morocco, carried out a retaliatory air raid over Gibraltar as a reprisal for the destruction of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir, Algeria, by the Force H (about 1,300 French sailors were killed and about 350 were wounded in the action against the French fleet).
1941 – Germany planned to occupy Gibraltar (and presumably hand it over to Spain) in "Operation Felix" which was due to start on 10 January 1941. It was cancelled because the Spanish government were reluctant to let the Wehrmacht enter Spain and then attack against the Rock, its civilians or the British Army from Spanish soil, because Franco feared that it may have been impossible to remove the Wehrmacht afterwards. In any case, Hitler was too busy elsewhere in Europe to give this much priority.
1940–1943 – Gibraltar harbour was attacked many times by Italian commando frogmen operating from Algeciras. Underwater warfare and countermeasures were developed by Lionel Crabb.
1942 September – A small group of Gibraltarians, who remained in the town serving in the British Army, joined a mechanic official, Albert Risso, to create 'The Gibraltarians Association', the starting point of what became the Association for the Advancement of Civil Rights (officially established in December that year), the first political party in Gibraltar. Joshua Hassan (a young lawyer then, later Sir and Chief Minister) was among the leading members of the association. The AACR was the dominant party in Gibraltar politics for the last third of the 20th century.
1942 8 November – Operation Torch launched with support from Gibraltar.
1944 April – The situation in Gibraltar is considered safe and the first of the evacuees return to Gibraltar.
1946 – The United Kingdom inscribed Gibraltar in the list of Non-Self-Governing Territories kept by the UN Special Committee on Decolonization.
1950 – Gibraltar's first Legislative Council was opened.
1951 – The return process of the evacuees finishes. It was delayed due to an initial shortage of shipping and then of housing. The evacuation was a key element in the creation of the national conscience of Gibraltarians. The experience of evacuation had bonded the Gibraltarian together as a nation.
1951 27 April – The RFA Bedenham explodes while docked in Gibraltar, killing 13, damaging many buildings in the town and delaying the housing program essential for repatriation.
1954 – This was the 250th anniversary of its capture. Queen Elizabeth II visited Gibraltar, which angered General Franco, who renewed its claim to sovereignty, which had not been actively pursued for over 150 years. This led to the closure of the Spanish consulate and to the imposition of restrictions on freedom of movement between Gibraltar and Spain. By the 1960s, motor vehicles were being restricted or banned from crossing the border, while only Spanish nationals employed on the Rock being allowed to enter Gibraltar.
1955 – At the United Nations, Spain, which had just been admitted to membership, initiated a claim to the territory, arguing that the principle of territorial integrity, not self-determination, applied in the case of the decolonization of Gibraltar, and that the United Kingdom should cede sovereignty of the Rock to Spain. Madrid gained diplomatic support from countries in Latin America, with the UN General Assembly passing resolutions (2231 (XXI), "Question of Gibraltar" and 2353 (XXII), "Question of Gibraltar").
1965 April – The British Government published a White Paper dealing with the question of Gibraltar and the Treaty of Utrecht.
1966 – In response, the Spanish Foreign Office Minister Fernando Castiella, published and presented to the Spanish Courts the "Spanish Red Book" (named so because of its cover; its reference is "Negociaciones sobre Gibraltar. Documentos presentados a las Cortes Españolas por el Ministro de Asuntos Exteriores", Madrid, 1967)
1967 – The first sovereignty referendum was held on 10 September, in which Gibraltar's voters were asked whether they wished to either pass under Spanish sovereignty, or remain under British sovereignty, with institutions of self-government. Over 99% voted in favour of remaining British.
1968 A group of six Gibraltarian lawyers and businessmen, calling themselves the palomos or 'doves', advocated a political settlement with Spain in a letter published in the Gibraltar Chronicle, and met with Spanish Foreign Office officials (a meeting was even held with the Spanish Foreign Office Minister) to try and bring this about. This provoked widespread public hostility in Gibraltar (with attacks on their homes and properties and civil unrest). Things quickly calmed down, although today the term retains a negative meaning in Gibraltar politics.
1969 30 May – A new constitution for Gibraltar was introduced by the United Kingdom Parliament, under the initiative of the British Government (Gibraltar Constitution Order 1969). Under it, Gibraltar attained full internal self-government, with an elected House of Assembly. The City Council and the Legislative Council disappeared. The preamble to the Constitution stated that:"Her Majesty's Government will never enter into arrangements under which the people of Gibraltar would pass under the sovereignty of another state against their freely and democratically expressed wishes."1969 8 June – In response, Spain closed the border with Gibraltar, and severed all communication links. For about 13 years, the land border was closed from the Spanish side, to try to isolate the territory. The closure affected both sides of the border. Gibraltarians with families in Spain had to go by ferry to Tangier, Morocco, and from there to the Spanish port of Algeciras, while many Spanish workers (by then about 4,800; sixteen years before, about 12,500 Spanish workmen entered Gibraltar every dayThe Rock of the Gibraltarians. A History of Gibraltar, p. 316.) lost their jobs in Gibraltar.
1969 – Major Robert (later Sir Robert) Peliza of the Integration with Britain Party (IWBP) was elected Chief Minister in alliance with the independent group led by Peter Isola.
1971 – The United Kingdom Government led by Heath considered the possibility of exchanging sovereignty for a 999-year lease on Gibraltar, as it was felt it had ceased to be of any military or economic value. The proposals remained secret until 2002.
1972 – Joshua Hassan of the Association for the Advancement of Civil Rights (AACR) was returned to power. AACR rebrands as GLP/AACR (Gibraltar Labour Party / AACR) in an attempt to develop a more clearly working class image.
1972 – Gibraltar TGWU hold a 6-day General Strike, pressing the Ministry of Defence, Gibraltar's largest employer, for better pay and conditions for workers. The strike ends successfully with a £1.85 increase in basic pay rates, and is seen as a catalyst for increased working class solidarity in the pursuit of social, economic and political change. TGWU claims a rise of overall union density within the labour market to around 55% following the strike.
1973 – Gibraltar joined the European Economic Community alongside the United Kingdom.
1975 – The British Foreign Office Minister Roy Hattersley ruled out integration with the UK, and stated that any constitutional change would have to involve a 'Spanish dimension'. This position was reaffirmed the following year when the British government rejected the House of Assembly's proposals for constitutional reform (Hattersley Memorandum). The IWBP broke up and was succeeded by the Democratic Party of British Gibraltar (DPBG), led first by Maurice Xiberras, formerly of the IWBP, and subsequently by Peter Isola.
1975 – Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco died, but nothing changed in relation to Gibraltar.
1980 10 April – The British and Spanish ministers of Foreign Affairs, Lord Carrington and Marcelino Oreja, signs the Lisbon Agreement regarding 'The Gibraltar Problem' stating that the communications between Gibraltar and Spain would be re-established, and restating both Governments positions. The measures agreed were not implemented.
1980 July – The Anglican Diocese of Gibraltar is amalgamated with the Jurisdiction of North and Central Europe to become the Diocese of Gibraltar in Europe. The Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, Gibraltar remains Anglican Cathedral for the Diocese.
1981 – The British Nationality Act 1981 effectively made Gibraltar a Dependent Territory and removed the right of entry into the UK of British Dependent Territory Citizens. After a short campaign Gibraltarians were offered full British citizenship (History of nationality in Gibraltar). The act was ratified in 1983.
1982 15 December – The re-opening of the border was initially delayed due to the war between the United Kingdom and Argentina over the Falkland Islands. Upon the change in the Spanish government, with the Socialist Party in power, the border was partially re-opened (only pedestrians, resident in Gibraltar or Spanish nationals were allowed to cross the border by Spain; only one crossing each way per day was allowed). Restrictions on the land border continued until 2006, Communique of the ministerial meeting of the forum of dialogue on Gibraltar 18 09 2006 "More fluid movement of people, vehicles and goods between Gibraltar and the surrounding area will improve the day to day lives of people in Gibraltar and the Campo de Gibraltar. The Spanish Government, through the Agencia Estatal de Administración Tributaria, is already investing close to one and a half million euros in substantial improvement works to its facilities and those of the Guardia Civil. The works will be completed this year, at which time the access will operate on a two lane basis in both directions and the red/green channels system, for both people and for vehicles, will be introduced. The Gibraltar Government has also invested substantial sums of money on the enhancement of its facilities. " although there are still occasionally issues related to the crossing. Border Crossings, Gibraltar
1984 – Spain applied to join the European Community, succeeding in 1986. Under the Brussels Agreement (27 November 1984) signed between the governments of the United Kingdom and Spain, the former agreed to enter into discussions with Spain over Gibraltar, including by first time the "issues" of sovereignty. The border was fully reopened.
1987 2 December – A proposal for joint control of Gibraltar Airport with Spain met with widespread local opposition which was expressed in a protest march to The Convent. Chief Minister Sir Joshua Hassan resigned at the end of the year and was succeeded by Adolfo Canepa.
1988 – Gibraltar Socialist Labour Party (GSLP) leader Joe Bossano was elected as Chief Minister, and firmly ruled out any discussions with Spain over sovereignty and shared use of the airport.
1988 7 March – The Special Air Service of the British Army shot dead three unarmed members of the Provisional IRA walking towards the frontier, claiming they were making "suspicious movements" (Operation Flavius). A subsequent search led to the discovery of a car containing a large amount of Semtex explosive in Spain, which they had planned to use to bomb the Changing of the Guard ceremony a few days later .
1991 – The British Army effectively withdrew from Gibraltar, leaving only the locally recruited Royal Gibraltar Regiment, although the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy remain. Spain made various proposals involving the sovereignty of Gibraltar, which were rejected by all parties in the Gibraltar House of Assembly.
1991 – The Spanish Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) government of Felipe González proposed joint sovereignty over Gibraltar with the United Kingdom. A similar proposal was advocated by Peter Cumming, formerly of the Gibraltar Social-Democrats (GSD), in which the Rock would become a self-governing condominium (or "Royal City"), with the British and Spanish monarchs as joint heads of state.
1995 – GSLP government lost popular support as a result of tobacco smuggling activity. To prevent this activity the fast launches were made illegal and confiscated. This resulted in a riot in July 1995.
1996 – In a general election, Joe Bossano was replaced by Peter Caruana of the GSD, who while favouring dialogue with Spain, also ruled out any deals on sovereignty.
1997 – The Partido Popular Spanish Foreign Minister, Abel Matutes made proposals under which Gibraltar would be under joint sovereignty for fifty years, before being fully incorporated into Spain, as an autonomous region, similar to Catalonia or the Basque Country, but these were rejected by the British Government.
2000 — An agreement was reached between the UK and Spain over recognition of 'competent authorities' in Gibraltar. Spain had a policy of non-recognition of the Government of Gibraltar as a 'competent authority', therefore refusing to recognise Gibraltar's courts, police and government departments, driving licences, and identity cards. Under the agreement, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London would act as a 'post box', through which Gibraltar's police and other government departments could communicate with their counterparts in Spain. In addition, identity documents issued by the Government of Gibraltar now featured the words 'United Kingdom'.
2000 May – 2001 May – Following an incident at sea the nuclear submarine HMS Tireless (S88) was repaired in Gibraltar causing diplomatic tension with Spain. Before consenting to the repair, the Government of Gibraltar insisted on a full safety assessment.Gibraltar threat to repair of Tireless. Telegraph.co.uk. By Isambard Wilkinson in Madrid. 16 Jan 2001.
Twenty-first century
2001 — The UK Government announced plans to reach a final agreement with Spain over the future of Gibraltar, which would involve shared sovereignty; however agreement was not reached due to the opposition of the Gibraltarians.
2002 — On 12 July the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, in a formal statement in the House of Commons, said that after twelve months of negotiation the British Government and Spain are in broad agreement on many of the principles that should underpin a lasting settlement of Spain's sovereignty claim, which included the principle that Britain and Spain should share sovereignty over Gibraltar. Political commentators saw this as an attempt by Britain to get Spain to help counterbalance France and Germany's domination of the European Union. Straw visited Gibraltar to explain his ideas and was left in no doubt they had no support.
2002 – In November the Government of Gibraltar called Gibraltar's second sovereignty referendum on the proposal, it achieved a turnout of 88% of which 98.97% of the electorate did not support the position taken by Mr Straw.
The actual voting was as follows: 18,176 voted representing 87.9% of the electorate. There were 89 papers spoilt of which 72 were blank 18,087 of which 187 Voted YES, and 17,900 voted NO.
The Referendum was supervised by a team of international observers headed by the Labour MP Gerald Kaufman, who certified that it had been held fairly, freely and democratically.
2002 – The British Overseas Territories Act 2002 made provision for the renaming of British Dependent Territories as British Overseas Territories, which changed the status of Gibraltar to an Overseas Territory. This act granted full British citizenship to British Overseas Territories, which was already available to Gibraltarians since 1983.
2004 August – Gibraltar celebrated 300 years of British rule. Spanish officials labelled this as the celebration of 300 years of British occupation.
Despite this, Gibraltar celebrated its tercentenary, with a number of events on 4 August, including the population encircling the rock holding hands, and granting the Freedom of the City to the Royal Navy.
2004 18 November – A joint commission (Comisión mixta de Cooperación y Colaboración) was established between the Mancomunidad de Municipios de la Comarca del Campo de Gibraltar'' (the Council Association of the Campo de Gibraltar, the historic Spanish county that surrounds Gibraltar) and the Government of Gibraltar.
2004 28 October – The governments of the United Kingdom and Spain agreed to allow the Government of Gibraltar equal representation in a new open agenda discussion forum (so called Tripartite Talks).
2005 July – First Tripartite Talks took place in Faro, Portugal.
2006 August – The following was announced:
2006 18 September Córdoba agreement – The British and Spanish foreign ministers and the Chief Minister of Gibraltar met at the Palacio de Viana, Córdoba and announced the following:
1. Spain agrees to recognise Gibraltar's international dialling code (350) and allow mobile roaming.
2. Spanish restrictions on civil flights at the airport will be removed. A new terminal building will also be constructed, allowing a direct passage to/from the north side of the fence/frontier (in order to overcome problems of terminology relating to references to the words “frontier” or “fence”, the phrase “fence/frontier” is used in the documents).
3. There will be normality of traffic flow at the fence/frontier.
4. Britain agrees to pay uprated pensions to those Spanish citizens who lost their livelihoods when the border was unilaterally closed by Francisco Franco in 1969.
5. A branch of the Instituto Cervantes will be opened in Gibraltar.
This agreement is seen as a major milestone in Gibraltar's history.
2006 November – The new constitution was drafted and later approved by the people of Gibraltar in a referendum. It was described as non-colonial in nature by Britain and Gibraltar. However, UK Europe Minister Jim Murphy, told the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons said that new Constitution but he stated that "he has never described it as an end to the colonial relationship." Although others have.
2006 16 December – The first passenger carrying Iberia aircraft landed in Gibraltar flying directly from Madrid, and a daily scheduled service started. The service was later reduced in frequency and terminated in September 2008.
2007 10 February — Spain lifted restrictions on Gibraltar's ability to expand and modernise its telecommunications infrastructure. These included a refusal to recognise International Direct Dialling (IDD) code which restricted the expansion of Gibraltar's telephone numbering plan, and the prevention of roaming arrangements for Gibraltar's GSM mobile phones in Spain.
2007 1 May GB Airways began scheduled flights between Madrid and Gibraltar which were later withdrawn in September.
2007 29 June – With a unanimous vote in the Gibraltar Parliament, local MPs approved new legislation that removes the phrases 'the Colony' and 'UK possession' from Gibraltar's laws.
2007 11 October The Gibraltar Social Democrats were returned to Government for a fourth term after a General Election.
2008 18 June – In the annual UN Special Committee on Decolonization meeting on the Gibraltar question, Peter Caruana, Chief Minister of Gibraltar stated that he would not attend future meetings as the Gibraltar Government is of the opinion that "there is no longer any need for us to look to the Committee to help us bring about our decolonisation". The Committee agreed that the Question of Gibraltar would be discussed again next year.
2008 22 September – It was announced that the remaining Iberia flights to Madrid would cease operation at the end of September 2008 due to "economic reasons", namely, lack of demand.
2008 10 October – The bulk carrier MV Fedra ran aground on rocks at Europa Point, and broke in two. The crew were safely rescued, but some of the fuel oil escaped in the very bad weather. The Captain was later arrested.
2009 – in May there were a number of Spanish incursions into British Waters around Gibraltar leading to intervention by the police and a diplomatic protest by the UK.
2009 – 7 December four armed Civil Guard officers are detained after three landed in Gibraltar in pursuit of two suspected smugglers, who were themselves arrested. The Spanish Interior Minister Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba personally telephoned Chief Minister Peter Caruana to apologise, stating that there were "no political intentions" behind the incident. The Chief Minister was prepared to accept it had not been a political act. Spanish officers were released by the Police the following day, who said that "Enquiries established that the Guardia Civil mistakenly entered Gibraltar Territorial Waters in hot pursuit and have since apologised for their actions"
2009 12 December Miss Gibraltar Kaiane Aldorino wins the title Miss World in Johannesburg. Her homecoming five days later is a major public event in Gibraltar.
2009 17 December A ferry service restarts between Gibraltar and Algeciras after a gap of 40 years.
2010 In order to overcome budget problems which follow the departure and arrest of the previous mayor, the mayor of La Linea de la Conception proposes to charge a toll for entry to Gibraltar and to tax telephone lines to Gibraltar. The proposals are opposed by the Spanish Government and the Gibraltar government has dismissed concerns.
2011 GSLP / Liberal Alliance returned to power in the 2011 General Election, bringing to an end 15 years of GSD Government. Fabian Picardo becomes Chief Minister.
2016 About 80 of the Gibraltar electorate favour remaining in EU
2020 British exit from the EU renders Gibraltar foreign territory, but Spain retains the 'status quo', pending further negotiations, A preliminary agreement avoids a hard border between Gibraltar and Spain
See also
History of Spain
History of the United Kingdom
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 2, "La lucha por Gibraltar" (The Struggle for Gibraltar) is available online (PDF)
External links
A Timeline of Gibraltar's History in Gibraltar for kids
History of Gibraltar (detailed) in discoverGibraltar.com
Government of Gibraltar website: History of Gibraltar
Writing the Rock of Gibraltar by M. G. Sanchez. An online anthology of historical texts dealing with Gibraltar from 1720 to 1890.
A history of the political evolution of Gibraltar from the 19th century to 2000.
'The mongrel race called rock scorpions': the negation of Gibraltarian identity and the politics of contempt. An essay by Dr. M. G. Sanchez
'Gibraltar Waters a Special Conservation' EuroWeeklyNews – English Language Newspaper in Spain
History of Gibraltar
Gibraltar
Spain history-related lists
British history timelines | [
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12080 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics%20of%20Gibraltar | Demographics of Gibraltar | This article is about the demographic features of the population of Gibraltar, including ethnicity, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects of the population.
Ethnic origins
One of the main features of Gibraltar's population is the diversity of their ethnic origins. The demographics of Gibraltar reflects Gibraltarians' racial and cultural fusion of the many European and non-European immigrants who came to the Rock over three hundred years. They are the descendants of economic migrants that came to Gibraltar after the majority of the Spanish population left in 1704.
Spanish
The majority of the Spanish population in Gibraltar (about 5000), with few exceptions, left Gibraltar when the Dutch and English took the city in 1704. The few Spaniards who remained in Gibraltar in August 1704 were augmented by others who arrived in the fleet with Prince George of Hesse-Darmstadt, possibly some two hundred in all, mostly Catalans.
Menorcans began migrating to Gibraltar at the beginning of the common British rule in 1713, thanks to the links between both British possessions during the 18th century. Initially, Menorcans came to Gibraltar looking for work in several trades, especially when Gibraltar was rebuilt after the 1783 Grand Siege. Immigration continued even after Menorca (the original English name was "Minorca") was returned to Spain in 1802 by the Treaty of Amiens.
Immigration from Spain (like the exiles from the Spanish Civil War) and intermarriage with Spaniards from the surrounding Spanish towns was a constant feature of Gibraltar's history until the then Spanish dictator, General Francisco Franco, closed the border with Gibraltar in 1969, cutting off many Gibraltarians from their relatives on the Spanish side of the frontier.
Together, Gibraltarians of Spanish origin are one of the bigger groups (more than 24% according to last names, even more taking into account the fact that many Spanish women married native Gibraltarians).
British
Britons have come and settled or gone since the first days of the conquest. One group of Britons have had temporary residence in Gibraltar (to work in the administration and the garrison). This group, who represented a larger proportion in the beginning of the British period, are nowadays only about 3% of the total population (around 1,000 persons).
A larger group is formed by the Britons who moved to Gibraltar and settled down. Some of them, since the beginning, moved to Gibraltar to earn a living as traders and workers. Others moved to Gibraltar on a temporary assignment and then married with local women. Major construction projects, such as the dockyard in the late 1890s and early 20th century brought large numbers of workers from Great Britain.
13% of Gibraltarian residents are from the United Kingdom proper and the electoral roll shows that 27% of Gibraltar's population has British surnames.
Genoese and other Italians
Genoese came during the 18th and 19th centuries, especially from the poorer parts of Liguria, some of them annually following fishing shoals, as repairmen for the British navy, or as successful traders and merchants; many others came during the Napoleonic period to avoid obligatory conscription to the French Army. Genoese formed the larger group of the new population in the 18th century and middle 19th century. Other Italians came from islands like Sardinia and Sicily. Nowadays, people with Genoese/Italian last names represent about 20% of the population.
Portuguese
Portuguese were one of the earliest groups to move to Gibraltar, especially from the Algarve region in the far south of Portugal. Most of them went to work as labourers and some as traders. Their number increased significantly during the 18th century, and again when many Spaniards left their jobs in Gibraltar after General Franco closed the border in 1969. About 10% of last names in Gibraltar have Portuguese origin.
Moroccans
Moroccans have always had a significant presence in Gibraltar. However, the modern community has more recent origins. Moroccans began arriving in Gibraltar soon after the Spanish government imposed the first restrictions on Spanish workers in Gibraltar in 1964. By the end of 1968 there were at least 1,300 Moroccan workers resident in Gibraltar and this more than doubled following the final closure of the frontier with Spain in June 1969.
There is also a significant number of Moroccan Jews in Gibraltar, representing Jews of both Sephardic origin and Arabic speaking Jews of Morocco (although almost no Gibraltarian Jews today speak Arabic as a first language). Most notably the Hassan family which runs Gibraltar's largest law firm Hassans International Law Firm and the late Sir Joshua Hassan who served four terms as Chief Minister for a total of 17 years.
Other groups
Other groups include:
Malta was in the same imperial route to the east as Gibraltar. Maltese people came to Gibraltar when jobs were scarce at home, or to escape the law in Malta.
Jews, most of them of Sephardi origin, were able to re-establish their rites, forbidden in Catholic Spain, right after the British occupation in 1704. Also a significant number of Jews from London settled in Gibraltar, especially since the Great Siege.
Indians, came as merchants after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1870; many others migrated as workers after the closure of the frontier with Spain in 1969 to replace Spanish ones.
French, many of whom came after the French Revolution in 1789, set up trade and commerce.
National censuses
2012 census
The composition of the population by nationality at the 2012 census was as follows:
2001 census
The composition of the population by nationality at the 2001 census was as follows:
Population overview
The population of Gibraltar was 29,752 in 2011.
Vital statistics
1During World War II a large part of the civilian population (including most women) was evacuated.
CIA World Factbook demographic statistics
The following demographic statistics are from the CIA World Factbook, unless otherwise indicated.
Population age
0-14 years:
17.2% (male 2,460; female 2,343)
15-64 years:
66.3% (male 9,470; female 9,070)
65 years and over:
16.5% (male 2,090; female 2,534) (2007 est.)
Sex ratio
At birth:
1.06 males/female
0-14 years:
1.05 males/female
15-64 years:
1.044 males/female
65 years and over:
0.825 males/female
total population:
1.005 males/female (2007 est.)
The median age is:
total: 40.3 years
male: 39.8 years
female: 40.7 years (2008 est.)
Life expectancy
total population:
79.93 years
male:
77.05 years
female:
82.96 years (2007 est.)
Fertility
1.95 children born/woman (2007 est.)
Infant mortality
total:
4.98 deaths/1,000 live births
male:
5.54 deaths/1,000 live births
female:
4.39 deaths/1,000 live births (2007 est.)
Nationality
noun:
Gibraltarian(s)
adjective:
Gibraltar
Religions
Roman Catholic 74.32%, Church of England 4.98%, Other Christian 1.21%, Muslim 2.01%, Jewish 2.12%, Hindu 4.76%, other or unspecified 0.94%, none 2.86% (2001 census)
Languages
English (used in schools and for official purposes), Spanish. Most Gibraltarians converse in Llanito, an Andalusian Spanish based vernacular. It consists of an eclectic mix of Andalusian Spanish and British English as well as languages such as Maltese, Portuguese, Italian of the Genoese variety and Haketia. Among more educated Gibraltarians, it also typically involves code-switching to English. Arabic is spoken by the Moroccan community, just like Hindi and Sindhi is spoken by the Indian community of Gibraltar. Maltese is still spoken by some families of Maltese descent.
Literacy
definition:
NA
total population:
above 80%
male:
NA%
female:
NA%
Educational attainment in Gibraltar
Crime rate
A total of 2,093 criminal offences were recorded in Gibraltar during 2005/2006.
Indians had a significantly lower crime rate in 2005/2006 than all other national origins in Gibraltar at 1.69 crimes per 100 Indian people. The crimes per 100 population in Gibraltar now stands at 6.3. The crime rate for Gibraltarians and Moroccans has risen from 6.1 and 9.36 per 100 people in 2004/2005 to its current levels.
Notes
References
Government of Gibraltar website
See also | [
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12081 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics%20of%20Gibraltar | Politics of Gibraltar | The politics of Gibraltar takes place within a framework of a parliamentary representative democratic British Overseas Territory, whereby the Monarch of the United Kingdom is the constitutional head of state represented by the Governor of Gibraltar. The Chief Minister of Gibraltar is the head of Government. As a British Overseas Territory, the Government of Gibraltar is not subordinate to the Government of the United Kingdom. The British Government, however, is responsible for defence and external affairs but Gibraltar has full internal self-government under its 2006 Constitution.
The government of Spain continues with an irredentist territorial claim to Gibraltar, which was ceded in perpetuity to the British Crown in 1713 by Article X of the Treaty of Utrecht. In a referendum held in 2002, a proposal for shared sovereignty was overwhelmingly rejected by the Gibraltar electorate with 98.97% voting against. The sovereignty issue remains an important factor in local politics.
Gibraltar has a number of political parties which have developed to address local issues. The preamble to the 2006 Constitution repeated from the 1969 Constitution states that "Her Majesty's Government will never enter into arrangements under which the people of Gibraltar would pass under the sovereignty of another state against their freely and democratically expressed wishes."
Executive branch
As an overseas territory of Britain, the head of state is Queen Elizabeth II, who is represented by the Governor of Gibraltar. Britain retains responsibility for defence, foreign relations, internal security and financial stability.
|Monarch
|Queen Elizabeth II
|N/A
|6 February 1952
|-
|Governor
|Sir David Steel
|N/A
|June 2020
|-
|Chief Minister
|Fabian Picardo
|GSLP/Liberals Alliance
|9 December 2011
|}
Government
The Government of Gibraltar is elected for a term of four years. The head of government is the chief minister, currently the Hon. Fabian Picardo of the Gibraltar Socialist Labour Party (GSLP), who has been in office since 9 December 2011, in alliance with the Liberal Party of Gibraltar (Liberals), following the 2011 General Election. The Leader of the Opposition is the Hon. Daniel Feetham of the Gibraltar Social Democrats (GSD) since 2013.
The composition of the Government of Gibraltar is the following:
Legislature
The Gibraltar Parliament (previously the House of Assembly) consists of seventeen elected members, and the Speaker. Under the electoral system of partial bloc voting used since 1969, voters (since 2007) could choose up to ten candidates, who do not necessarily need to be from the same party (but usually are). The winning candidates are then chosen by simple plurality; consequently, a party seeking to form a government stands ten candidates, and the party that forms the government is usually successful in having all ten of its candidates elected; the remaining seats are usually won by the 'best loser' which then forms the opposition. The last election was held on 26 November 2015.
Governor
Queen Elizabeth II is represented by the governor and commander-in-chief, presently Vice Admiral Sir David Steel (sworn in June 2020). After an election, the governor appoints the leader of the largest party in the unicameral parliament, as chief minister. The governor is not involved in the day-to-day administration of Gibraltar, and his role is largely as a ceremonial head of state. The governor is responsible for matters of defence and security only.
Political parties and general elections
There are three political parties currently represented in the Gibraltar Parliament: Gibraltar Social Democrats; Gibraltar Socialist Labour Party; and Liberal Party of Gibraltar. All parties support Gibraltar's right to self-determination, and reject any concessions on the issue of sovereignty.
European Parliament elections
Until the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union in January 2020, Gibraltar was part of the EU under the British Treaty of accession, but had not voted in elections for the European Parliament although its membership of the European Union meant it was affected by European Union law. A ten-year campaign to acquire the vote culminated in the case of Matthews v. United Kingdom. Denise Matthews, a British Citizen resident in Gibraltar, claimed that the exclusion of the Gibraltar electorate from enfranchisement in the European Parliamentary elections was a breach of human rights. The European Court of Human Rights decided in her favour, ruling that the European Parliament formed a part of Gibraltar's legislature and held that the UK was bound by its conventions to secure the right for the people of Gibraltar to elect the European Parliament. The UK Government passed the European Parliament (Representation) Act in 2003 in order to comply with the ruling. Gibraltar was included in the South West England Region for the purposes of European Parliament elections, and first voted in the 2004 election.
The 2004 European Election was the first UK election in which Gibraltar participated. The Conservative Party took 69.52% of the vote, which has generally been interpreted as a protest against the handling of Gibraltar by the Labour Party. The Conservatives also campaigned strongly, with the support of the Gibraltar branch of the party and a visit from the party leader Michael Howard.
In 2009, the Conservatives again topped the poll with 54% but in contrast to 2004 the turnout at 35% was much lower, being comparable to other EU states.
In 2014 the Liberal Democrat Party topped the poll, but the votes cast in South West England resulted in the none of the Liberal Democrat candidates becoming MEPs. Six MEPs were returned, two UKIP, two Conservative, one Labour and one Green.
Constitutional reform
Select Committee proposals
In 1999, the Government of Gibraltar established a Select Committee on Constitutional Reform, to consider how the 1969 Constitution should be reformed.
In March 2006, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw announced in the British House of Commons that the details of a new constitution had been agreed. There were some differences between the draft constitution and the one to which the UK agreed, namely that the Governor's title would remain unchanged, and that the Police Authority would remain independent of the Government of Gibraltar.
2006 Constitution
In December 2006 Gibraltar was granted a new constitution, providing a modern constitutional relationship between Gibraltar and the United Kingdom, not based on colonialism. The constitution does not in any way diminish British sovereignty of Gibraltar, and the United Kingdom retains its full internal responsibility for Gibraltar, including Gibraltar's external relations and defence, and the Member State responsible for Gibraltar in the European Union.
Writing to the Spanish Foreign Minister, Jack Straw stated:
"My own view [is] that the label "colonial" is misleading and anachronistic in this context; regardless of the United Nations dimension. As Peter Caruana and I said in our joint statement on Monday, the new Constitution provides for "a modern and mature" relationship between the UK and Gibraltar. I do not think that this description would apply to any relationship based on colonialism."
After several months of political wrangling, the Gibraltar Government published the draft Constitution Order, which includes the existing preamble promising that there would be no transfer of sovereignty against the wishes of the Gibraltarians and a new addition explaining the status.
"Whereas Gibraltar is part of Her Majesty’s dominions and Her Majesty’s Government have given assurances to the people of Gibraltar that Gibraltar will remain part of Her Majesty’s dominions unless and until an Act of Parliament otherwise provides, and furthermore that Her Majesty’s Government will never enter into arrangements under which the people of Gibraltar would pass under the sovereignty of another state against their freely and democratically expressed wishes:
"And whereas the people of Gibraltar have in a referendum held on [date] freely approved and accepted the Constitution annexed to this Order which gives the people of Gibraltar that degree of self-government which is compatible with British Sovereignty of Gibraltar and with the fact that the UK remains fully responsible for Gibraltar’s external relations.
The proposal was put to the people in a referendum and approved. The constitution took effect in 2007 and 29 January declared a public holiday in celebration.
Integration with the UK
Various groups in Gibraltar have campaigned in favour of a far closer relationship with Britain, in the form of devolved integration or incorporation into Britain itself. This is similar to the offer made to Malta in 1955, under which Malta would be represented in the British House of Commons and be placed under the Home Office, while retaining internal self-government. This would be a similar status to France's overseas departments and to Spain's North African enclaves, Ceuta and Melilla, claimed by Morocco. One of Spain's arguments in rejecting comparisons between Gibraltar and these territories is that they are part of Spain, whereas Gibraltar is a British overseas territory and not part of the UK.
However, the British Foreign Office rejected the idea in 1976, along with independence, on the grounds that any further constitutional reform or decolonisation would have to take into account the so-called "Spanish dimension". Similarly, this has also been opposed by governments in Gibraltar itself; in its election manifesto in 2003, the Gibraltar Social Democrats argued that integration would "necessarily involve the loss of a significant degree of this vital self-government" and "would simply hand power over our vital affairs (and therefore our ability to survive) to people in London."
While there is still attachment to the idea of Gibraltar being British, some, like leader of the Liberal Party, Joseph Garcia, see the Rock's future as being within a larger 'Europe of the Regions', rather than as part of one nation state or another.
Condominium
The idea of a condominium, with sovereignty over Gibraltar shared between the UK and Spain, has been proposed. In 1985, during talks with British Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe, Spanish Foreign Minister Fernando Morán proposed a condominium or leaseback period of between 15 and 20 years, before Spain regained full sovereignty, but this received no reply from the British government.
In 1991, the Spanish Prime Minister, Felipe Gonzalez, was reported to have proposed a plan for joint sovereignty, under which Gibraltar would become effectively autonomous, with the British and Spanish monarchs as joint heads of state, but this was rejected by the Government of Gibraltar in July of that year.
In 1997, the then Spanish Foreign Minister Abel Matutes put forward a proposal for joint sovereignty over Gibraltar, which also entailed full Spanish sovereignty after a transitional period, but his British counterpart, Robin Cook, stated that there was "no question of compromise on sovereignty".
Although the co-principality of Andorra, in which the president of France and the bishop of Urgell are joint heads of state, has been suggested as a model for Gibraltar, in 2010, its then chief minister, Peter Caruana, argued that this was not a case of joint sovereignty between Spain and France, as under Andorra's 1993 Constitution, neither country exercised sovereignty over the Principality.
United Nations
Gibraltar was caught unawares when the whole issue of the relationship between the territory and the UK, as well as the question of Spain was brought before the United Nations Committee on Decolonization, otherwise known as the Committee of 24, in 1963.
Resolution 2231 (XXI), which formed part of the Spanish claim, stated that "any colonial situation which partially or completely destroys the national unity and territorial integrity of a country is incompatible with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations."
Resolution 2353 (XXII) also urged the United Kingdom and Spain to overcome their differences, respecting the "interests" of the people of Gibraltar and declared the 1967 referendum to be a "contravention of the provisions of Resolution 2231.
It was supported by 73 countries (mainly Latin American, Arab, African and Eastern European countries), rejected by 19 (United Kingdom and the countries of the Commonwealth of Nations), while 27 countries abstained (Western Europe and the United States).
Since then and up to the present time, representatives of Gibraltar have regularly petitioned the UNC24 and the UNC4, although no progress has been achieved. The Committees regularly roll out their 'consensus resolution' which:
(a) Urges both Governments, while listening to the interests and aspirations of Gibraltar, to reach, in the spirit of the statement of 27 November 1984, a definitive solution to the question of Gibraltar, in the light of relevant resolutions of the General Assembly and applicable principles, and in the spirit of the Charter of the United Nations;
(b) Welcomes the ongoing successful implementation of the first package of measures concluded at the Tripartite Forum for Dialogue on Gibraltar.
The commitment of the British Government is not to hold the talks envisaged by the above resolution without the consent of the Gibraltarians.
The [British] Government will never – "never" is a seldom-used word in politics – enter into an agreement on sovereignty without the agreement of the Government of Gibraltar and their people. In fact, we will never even enter into a process without that agreement. The word "never" sends a substantial and clear commitment and has been used for a purpose. We have delivered that message with confidence to the peoples and the Governments of Gibraltar and Spain. It is a sign of the maturity of our relationship now that that is accepted as [Britain]'s position.
The effective stalemate has led Peter Caruana to conclude that attending future meetings of the Committee of 24 is a pointless exercise.
Relations with Spain
In a referendum on 10 September 1967, the people of Gibraltar voted by 12,138 to 44 to reject the transfer of sovereignty to Spain and to remain under British sovereignty. This day is now celebrated as Gibraltar's National Day. In a referendum organised by the Government of Gibraltar on 7 November 2002, voters overwhelmingly rejected the principle that Spain and the United Kingdom should share sovereignty over Gibraltar, by 17,900 votes to 187 on a turnout of almost 88%.
Unlike most other British territories, Gibraltar has not been offered independence by the UK. It has been suggested that this is on the grounds that the Treaty of Utrecht, under which Spain ceded the territory to the British Crown, states that, if the British Crown should ever wish to dispose of Gibraltar, it must first be offered to Spain. However, the Government of Gibraltar has pointed out at the UN that Article 103 of the UN Charter overrules and annuls this "reversionary clause".
Neither the United Kingdom nor Spain seem keen to test the legal status of Article X of the Treaty of Utrecht in court. The remaining parts of the treaty that regulated such things as the slave trade, and the transfer of Menorca to the British, have become obsolete.
Spain argues that Gibraltar's status is an anachronism, and that it should become an autonomous community of Spain, similar to Catalonia or the Basque Country. It also argues that the principle of territorial integrity, not self-determination applies, drawing parallels with the British handover of Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China in 1997. The Junta de Andalucia (Andalucia's elected regional government) believes that Gibraltar should be integrated into its regional autonomy.
At the same time, the British government continues to state that there can be no change in the status of Gibraltar without their democratic consent .
The Gibraltarian government has asked the UN Committee of 24 to refer the issues to the International Court of Justice for an advisory opinion, but Spain has lobbied against this. The government of Gibraltar has also invited the Committee to visit the territory, but so far, despite no objection from the United Kingdom, they have not done so.
The 2006 constitution further increases the level of self-government in the territory, and the colonial status of Gibraltar is now considered to be over. In a letter to the United Nations describing this, the British Foreign Secretary stated that "I do not think that this description would apply to any relationship based on colonialism."
Pressure groups
In addition to the parties there are a number of pressure groups active in Gibraltar, not aligned to any political party.
Gibraltar Women's Association
The Gibraltar Women's Association was founded on 16 February 1966, by Mrs Angela Smith.
It was originally known as the Gibraltar Housewives Association, and subsequently, in the early eighties it was changed to the Gibraltar Women's Association keeping in with more modern times that not all women were solely housewives.
Equality Rights Group GGR
Launched in September 2000 by Felix Alvarez, initially named GGR (Gib Gay Rights) now has a wider human rights platform in Gibraltar and is known as Equality Rights Group GGR .
Although it still defends sexual minorities it has also been active on issues regarding the disabled, and issues regarding the protection of children against sex abuse.
Environmental Safety Group
The Environmental Safety Group (ESG) is a non-governmental organisation that was formed in 2000. It is a registered charity and works to promote environmental issues within the community. Concerns of: air and water quality, pollution, preservation of our green areas, traffic, need for renewable energy, litter/recycling and climate change have been the focus of many ESG campaigns. The group is apolitical and enjoys widespread support from the community. Its membership runs into several hundred and many others are regularly invited to support or participate in local and global environmental campaigns.
Gibraltar Local Disability Movement
The Gibraltar Local Disability Movement (GLDM) was established in 1985 to improve the lives of disabled people in Gibraltar, promote equal opportunities and tackle discrimination. The movement ceased to be active for several years during the 1990s and early 2000s, but was reactivated in 2005 to address the situation for disabled people in Gibraltar, which did not see great improvement for several years. Although the 2006 Equal Opportunities Act protects disabled people in Gibraltar from discrimination, Gibraltar remains behind the UK and other countries on issues such as disability allowances and wheelchair access to both private and government buildings. www.disability.gi
Voice of Gibraltar Group
The Voice of Gibraltar Group was founded in 1996. In 1997 it organised a march attended by 10,000 people campaigning for Spanish recognition of Gibraltarians' rights within the EU for the support of the new British Labour Government in this matter. In 2001 it drew criticism from the Government of Gibraltar for pressuring the Select Committee of the House of Assembly to accelerate completion of its work and for introducing what the Government claimed were partisan politics into the matter of Gibraltar remaining British. The same year, in concert with the Self-Determination for Gibraltar Group, the VOGG organised a demonstration attended by an estimated 10,000 people. Joining a Government-sponsored initiative led by local musicians under the auspices of Rock on the Rock Club, a non-political organisation, the VOGG mounted protest in Neath, the constituency of Peter Hain the UK Minister for Europe.
It campaigned, with others, for a "no" vote in the 2002 referendum It has been described as "Gibraltar's most-hardline protest group".
Integration With Britain Movement
The Integration With Britain Movement (IWBM) is a pressure group advocating further integration with the United Kingdom. They aim for Gibraltar to attain a state of devolved integration similar to that pertaining in Scotland, Wales & Northern Ireland. They are led by Joe Caruana and are successors to the defunct Integration With Britain Party (IWBP).
See also
Judiciary of Gibraltar
References
External links
Gibraltar Government website
The Gibraltar Social Democrats
The Gibraltar Socialist Labour party
The Progressive Democrats
CityMayors article
The Conservative Party branch in Gibraltar
Friends of the Earth, Gibraltar
The Gibraltar Local Disability Movement
Environmental Safety Group
Equality Rights - GGR | [
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12082 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy%20of%20Gibraltar | Economy of Gibraltar | The economy of Gibraltar consists largely of the services sector. While part of the European Union until Brexit, the British overseas territory of Gibraltar has a separate legal jurisdiction from the United Kingdom and a different tax system.
The role of the UK Ministry of Defence, which at one time was Gibraltar's main source of income, has declined, with today's economy mainly based on shipping, tourism, financial services, and the Internet (mostly gambling).
As of 2020, Brexit represents a major uncertainty for the Gibraltar economy.
Shipping
Bunkering
Gibraltar is one of the largest bunkering ports in the Mediterranean Sea, with 4.3 million tonnes of bunkers delivered in 2007. This has become the main activity within the Port of Gibraltar.
Finance
Until Brexit Gibraltar was a constituent part of the European Union as a Special Member State territory, having joined the European Economic Community with the United Kingdom in 1973, under the provisions of the Treaty of Rome relating to European dependent territories. However, it is exempt from the Common external tariff, the Common Agricultural Policy and the requirement to levy Value added tax.
Financial institutions operating in Gibraltar are regulated by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission.
Gibraltar has a functioning stock exchange, the Gibraltar Stock Exchange.
Subject to notifying the EU Commissioner, who must be satisfied that they meet certain criteria in accordance with the relevant EU Directive, Gibraltar-licensed or -authorised financial institutions can provide services throughout the EU and European Economic Area without having to seek separate licences or authorisation in the host Member State. This is known as the passporting of financial services.
In December 2008 in a landmark decision the European Court of Justice ruled that:
This allowed the implementation of a new low tax system which took full effect in 2010.
Referred to as an International Finance Centre, Gibraltar was among 35 jurisdictions identified by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as a tax haven in June 2000. However, the list's disclaimer states:
As a result of having made a commitment in accordance with the OECD's 2001 Progress Report on the OECD's Project on Harmful Tax Practices, Gibraltar is not included in the OECD's list of uncooperative tax havens. It has also never been listed on the FATF Blacklist of uncooperative countries in the fight against money laundering. It may also be referred to as an offshore financial centre, by international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
However, in its April 2009 progress report, the OECD listed Gibraltar in the list of jurisdictions which, although committed, had not "substantially implemented" yet the internationally agreed tax standard. Following Gibraltar's signing of 12 additional Tax Information Exchange Agreements (TIEAs), as of October 2009, with jurisdictions including the UK, US and Germany, to sum 13, Gibraltar is currently listed in the OECD "white list", and is considered a jurisdiction that has substantially implemented the tax standard. It therefore shares the same status as OECD member states such as the UK, the US, Spain or Germany.
Fiscal advantages, including no tax on capital income, are offered to a maximum of 8,464 offshore qualified companies incorporated in Gibraltar. After an agreement with the European Union in 2005, this tax exempt regime is due to disappear on 31 December 2010.
A 2007 IMF report on the regulatory environment and anti-money laundering has once again endorsed Gibraltar's robust regulatory environment.
According to the report:
In 2008 Gibraltar was listed for the first time in the Global Financial Centres Index published by the City of London Corporation. The Rock was ranked 26th in a list of 69 leading finance centres around the world based on an online survey of 1,236 business professionals, who provided a total of 18,878 assessments. In the most recent GFCI report of 2011, Gibraltar was ranked 63rd in the world, and 8th of the leading offshore financial centres (OFCs).
The Tax Justice Network ranked Gibraltar at #43 out of 71 jurisdictions on its 2011 Financial Secrecy Index. Gibraltar's "secrecy score" was 78, equating to Switzerland in that category.
Gibraltar was also ranked in the top 20 centres for e-readiness, coming 20th after major capitals and leading offshore centres.
Tourism
Manufacturing
The territory also has a small manufacturing sector, with one company (Bassadone Automotive Group) supplying ambulances and other project vehicles converted locally from SUV vehicles to the United Nations and other agencies, employing some 320 staff across its range of activities.
Internet business
Gibraltar offers a favourable tax system, good internet connectivity along with a well-developed regulatory system. All gambling operations in Gibraltar require licensing under the Gambling Act 2005. The Gibraltar Regulatory Authority is the Gambling Commissioner under the Gambling Act 2005, and therefore the regulatory body. Good regulation, and being part of the EU is seen as a strong advantage by large legitimate operators. The UK has published plans to protect online gamblers from crime and exploitation by banning gambling adverts from poorly regulated countries which specifically mention Gibraltar as an approved location.
Defence spending
The UK's Ministry of Defence was originally the mainstay of Gibraltar's economy but this has greatly reduced to around 6% of the gross domestic product. In 2006 the Ministry of Defence announced that the provision of services to the military base would be contracted to make further cost savings. This was finalised in January 2007.
Economy in detail
Gibraltar benefits from an extensive shipping trade, a well regulated international finance center, tourism, and has become a global leader in the virtual gaming industry.
Self-sufficient Gibraltar benefits from an extensive shipping trade, offshore banking, and its position as an international conference center. The British military presence has been sharply reduced and now contributes about 7% to the local economy, compared with 60% in 1984. The financial sector, tourism (almost 5 million visitors in 1998), shipping services fees, and duties on consumer goods also generate revenue. The financial sector, the shipping sector, and tourism each contribute 25%-30% of GDP. Telecommunications accounts for another 10%. In recent years, Gibraltar has seen major structural change from a public to a private sector economy, but changes in government spending still have a major impact on the level of employment.
Figures from the CIA World Factbook show the main export markets in 2006 were United Kingdom 30.8%, Spain 22.7%, Germany 13.7%, Turkmenistan 10.4%, Switzerland 8.3%, Italy 6.7% while the corresponding figures for imports are Spain 23.4%, Russia 12.3%, Italy 12%, UK 9%, France 8.9%, Netherlands 6.8% and United States 4.7%.
The Gibraltar Government state that economy grew in 2004/2005 by 7% to a GDP of £599,180,000. Based on statistics in the 2006 surveys, the Government statisticians estimate it has grown by 8.5% in 2005/6 and by 10.8% in 2006/7 and that the GDP is probably now around 730 million. Inflation was running at 2.6% in 2006 and predicted to be 2% to 3% in 2007. Speaking at the 2007 budget session, Peter Caruana, the Chief Minister said "The scale of Gibraltar's economic success makes it one of the most affluent communities in the entire world."
Labour force:
12,690 (including non-Gibraltar labourers) (2001)
Labour force - by occupation:
services 60%, industry 40%, agriculture NEGL%
Unemployment rate
2% (2001)
Budget
revenues: $455.1 million
expenditures: $423.6 million (2005 est.)
Public debt
15.7% of GDP (2005 est.)
Industries
tourism, banking and finance, ship repairing, tobacco
Industrial production growth rate
NA%
Electricity - production
142 million kWh (2006 est.)
Electricity - production by source
fossil fuel
100%
hydro
0%
nuclear
0%
other
0%
Electricity - consumption
142 million kWh (2006 est.)
Electricity - exports
0 kWh (1998)
Electricity - imports
0 kWh (1998)
Oil - production
(2001 est.)
Oil - consumption
2001
Oil - exports
NA (2001)
Oil - imports
NA (2001)
Agriculture - products
none
Exports
$271 million (2004 est.)
Exports - commodities
(principally reexports) petroleum 51%, manufactured goods 41%, other 8%
Exports - partners
UK, Morocco, Portugal, Netherlands, Spain, US, Germany
Imports
$2.967 billion (2004 est.)
Imports - commodities
Fuels, manufactured goods, and foodstuffs
Imports - partners
UK, Spain, Japan, Netherlands
Fiscal year
1 July - 30 June
The above figures taken from the CIA World Factbook September 2009 edition.
Interaction with the nearby area
In September 2009 the Gibraltar Chamber of Commerce released an Economic impact study and analysis of the economies of Gibraltar and the Campo de Gibraltar produced by Professor John Fletcher of Bournemouth University. The report aimed at clarifying the effects of Gibraltar's economy on the Campo area. It demonstrated that Gibraltar's economy has a significant and very positive economic impact on the Campo de Gibraltar. It also noted that the Campo region played a "significant role [..] in Gibraltar's economic development as well", concluding that "[b]oth economies and societies would be the poorer without the other..."
Its conclusions were:
Taxation
Various economic indicators by national origin
The average annual earnings of Indo-Gibraltarians is nearly twice that of the rest of Gibraltarian people and approximately 1.5 times that of immigrants in the UK, thus making people of Indian descent by far the most economically affluent ethnic group in Gibraltar.
References
External links
The Gibraltar Government website
The Financial Services Commission
The Gibraltar regulatory authority
Government revenue and expenditure 2006 - pdf
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12083 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications%20in%20Gibraltar | Communications in Gibraltar | Communications in Gibraltar comprise a wide range of telephony systems (both fixed-line and mobile), Internet access, broadcasting (radio and television) and satellite control. There is also printed and online media. Regulation of telecommunications and broadcasting are the responsibility of the Gibraltar Regulatory Authority (GRA), established by means of the Gibraltar Regulatory Authority Act in 2000.
Telecommunications
History
The first submarine telegraph cable started its operation in Gibraltar in 1870. Gibraltar was a landing point of the long-range submarine cable that from Porthcurno, in the United Kingdom ran to Lisbon, Gibraltar, Malta, Alexandria, Suez, Aden, Bombay, over land to the east coast of India, then on to Penang, Malacca, Singapore, Batavia (current Jakarta), to finally reach Darwin, Australia. It was the first direct link between Australia and Great Britain. The company that laid the first part of the cable took the name of Falmouth, Gibraltar and Malta Telegraph Company and had been founded in 1869. This company later operated as the Eastern Telegraph Company from Mount Pleasant in Gibraltar and eventually became Cable & Wireless.
The first telephones were introduced to Gibraltar in 1886 by a private company which was later taken over by the colonial authorities. The first wireless message was transmitted to Gibraltar in 1903. Since 1926, the telephone service was operated by the City Council. An automatic exchange was installed in the last floor of the City Hall. On 4 April 1927, following an agreement signed between the Compañía Telefónica Nacional de España, the Spanish incumbent telecommunications operator, and the Gibraltar City Council, direct communications between Spain and Gibraltar were established.
Upon the approval of the 1969 Constitution and the dissolution of the City Council, the telephone service was transferred to the newly formed Government of Gibraltar. In the 1970s there were three generations of automatic telephone exchange equipment in use with four and five digit numbers. The volume of calls grew and a System X digital exchange was installed.
Until 1990, all telephone services were operated by the Gibraltar Government Telephone Department. International circuits were provided by Cable & Wireless, present in Gibraltar since 1870 as the Falmouth, Malta, Gibraltar Telegraph Company. However, Cable & Wireless left Gibraltar in 1987. On 1 January 1988, British Telecom (BT) and the Government of Gibraltar formed a joint venture company called Gibraltar Telecommunications International Ltd (known by its commercial brand Gibtel) to operate Gibraltar's international telecommunications services. Gibtel was subsequently granted a licence to offer mobile telephony introducing a GSM900 network.
In 1990, the Government decided to privatise its Telephone Department and therefore entered into a joint venture with Nynex of the United States. Gibraltar Nynex Communications Ltd (GNC) became responsible for fixed-line telephony. GNC was the first acquisition of Nynex outside the Americas. In 1997, GNC, through its wholly owned subsidiary, GNC Networks, commenced Internet services. GNC Networks was later renamed GibConnect. ADSL services were introduced in 2002.
In 2001, BT sold its 50% stake in Gibtel to GNC. Both companies subsequently merged to form Gibtelecom, a joint venture between the Government of Gibraltar and Nynex's successor company, Verizon. The name Gibtelecom begun to be used in July 2002, and as of 1 October 2003 this name was formally adopted by the company (which up until then was still Gibraltar Nynex Communications). In April 2007, Verizon sold its shares to Telekom Slovenije which is the incumbent telecommunications operator in Slovenia and is quoted on the Ljubljana Stock Exchange.
Infrastructure
Telephones – Numbers in use: 25,000 (2006)
Telephones – mobile cellular:
15,000 (2006)
The telecommunications infrastructure in Gibraltar is modelled on that of the UK; for example; the ringing tone of fixed telephone lines is identical to that of the UK, although that of mobile phones may resemble that of mainland Europe, with long tones. Telephone jacks are also British Standard BS 6312, as opposed to the RJ11 versions found in other parts of Europe and the world.
Numbering plan
Calling code: +350
Telecom dispute
Telecommunication services in Gibraltar were subject to Spanish restrictions until 10 February 2007. Subsequent to the resolution of the dispute, the Gibraltar telephone numbering plan has been increased to eight digits for land lines, adding a prefix of 200 to the existing Gibtelecom five digit numbers which is required to be dialled from October 2008.
Gibtelecom was also prevented from having roaming agreements with Spanish GSM networks so its mobile phones did not operate in Spain. Gibtelecom had roaming arrangements with local GSM networks in most other countries. After the Córdoba Agreement, Gibtel (Gibtelecom's mobile service) could roam on Spanish network Movistar (Telefónica). As of recent customers can now roam on Vodafone and Yoigo. Orange still (September 2008) identifies as AMENA and does not allow Gibraltar phones to register.
Fixed line services
In the 1980s there was a shortage of local line capacity on the existing crossbar exchange, which itself had replaced the relay and Strowger switch exchanges and a modern digital System/X switch was installed.
Cable and Wireless, who provided international circuits installed a satellite earth station which made International Subscriber Dialling possible.
When the frontier with Spain was re-opened, telephone and telex circuits cut by General Franco were re-established. Subsequently, fibre links into the FLAG cable system (which had a landing point in Estepona, about 50 km from Gibraltar) were established and along with microwave links to Morocco giving Gibraltar a resilient communications infrastructure. Gibtelecom is also a partner in the EIG cable system, which will have a landing point in Gibraltar.
Provision for Local Loop Unbundling was introduced in Gibraltar, under the 2006 Communications Act, similar to the UK's 2003 Communications Act. Earlier in December 2005, the European Commission initiated the second stage of infringement proceedings against the British Government relating to Gibraltar's failure to transpose five European Union directives on electronic communications, but these were closed after the relevant legislation was passed into law by the then House of Assembly in June 2006.
Fixed line numbers are now eight digits, with Gibtelecom numbers being prefixed with 200. A second operator, CTS Gibraltar Limited, provided fixed line services beginning with the prefix 216, but closed down in early 2013.
Mobile network
GSM Network Identifiers : GIBTEL
Gibraltar Telecommunications International Limited (Gibtel) (now Gibtelecom) introduced mobile phones in Gibraltar using a GSM900 network. The new GPRS network installed by the Scandinavian company allows faster and permanent connectivity for all mobile users, as well as providing high-speed picture and video messaging for owners of the new range of multi-purpose hand-sets.
Gibtelecom operates 3G & 4G networks.
CTS ceased providing 3G services in early 2013.
A new provider, Shine Mobile, launched on 23 September 2013. On 12 May 2016 the Company posted a notice on its website [www.shinemobile.gi] saying that "As from 18/05/2016, our services are going to be SUSPENDED; therefore your Shine line will NOT be operational." It was said that was to facilitate working on upgrading infrastructure, but as of 29 May 2016 the service is still down. Suspending service with less than a week's notice, suggests this may not have just been related to upgrading infrastructure which presumably would have been in the planning stage for more than six days. Shine Mobile will not be back.
Broadcasting
Television
Television stations:
1 (plus three low-power repeaters) (2002)
Television licences:
7,452 (2002)
Requirement abolished (2007).
GBC Television is operated by the Gibraltar Broadcasting Corporation (GBC) is transmitted on VHF Channel 12 with UHF repeaters on 56 and 53.
Until 1999, GBC retransmitted BBC Prime, but was relaunched as a community-based service focusing on local news and other items of local interest. GBC programming starts at around 19:30 and finishes before midnight with the most popular programme being the local news bulletin, News Watch at 20:30. During the day fillers and the sound of GBC radio are transmitted.
The station was funded by a mix of advertising, government funding, and an annual television licence fee. In June 2006, the licence was abolished by the Government. A new general manager was appointed in 2010 with a mandate to develop the station to meet future requirements of the community.
The majority of homes also have access to satellite television with mostly United Kingdom channels. Gibraltar also receives Spanish national digital television and radio stations, as well as Spanish digital regional (from Andalusia) and local stations (from the Campo de Gibraltar area).
Radio
Radio stations:
AM 1, FM 4, DAB+, Internet 2 (2019)
Radios:
37,000 (1997) – Radio licences now discontinued
The Gibraltar Broadcasting Corporation (GBC) operates Radio Gibraltar on both FM and AM, broadcasting a mix of local programming in English and Spanish, and retransmissions of the BBC World Service. In December 2005, GBC started internet streaming of its radio service, and in 2009 the daily Newswatch programme became available as video on demand. These services along with an up-to-date programme guide for GBC television and radio, can be found on the website.
The British Forces Broadcasting Service (BFBS) operates two radio stations on FM, BFBS1 and BFBS2 and a private cable television network. BFBS1 and 2 are also available on the Internet streamed from the UK.
On 1 October 2018, Rock Radio – Gibraltar's Hit Music Station was launched. Rock Radio is Gibraltar's first and only independent commercial radio station, the first to launch in over 50 years. The station transmits live from the top of the Rock on 99.2 FM, DAB+ and online.
Amateur radio
Callsigns:
ZB0x (VHF only), ZB2xx (Full), ZB3x (novice) + special event stations
Amateur radio started in Gibraltar shortly after the Second World War. The Gibraltar Amateur Radio Society (GARS) is a small but active society representing the interests of Amateur Radio both locally and internationally as a full International Amateur Radio Union (IARU) member society.
Each year for Gibraltar National Week amateur radio operators can use the ZG prefix instead of ZB. Special event stations are licensed by the GRA for example the Lighthouse Activity Weekend uses ZB2LGT.
Internet
Country code (top-level domain): .gi
Internet service providers (ISPs): 4
Gibnet Limited, a private company, began Internet services in January 1996, with a 64 kbit/s circuit to Spain. In 2005 it merged with Broadband Gibraltar Limited to form Sapphire Networks Limited. Sapphire have their own redundant fibre and microwave infrastructure into and around Gibraltar.
Sapphire uses the Gibtelecom ADSL concentrator to reach customers that are outside their own network, and sells high-bandwidth Internet services and Internet connectivity, competing directly with Gibtelecom.
GNC Networks, a wholly owned subsidiary of Gibraltar Nynex Communications, commenced services in 1997. GNC Networks was renamed Gibconnect and the parent company became Gibraltar Telecommunications International Limited, which is referred to as Gibtelecom, in 2002. ADSL services were introduced in 2002, by 2005, there were several thousand users. The company is co-owned by the Government of Gibraltar and Slovenia Telecom.
In 2000, the Gibraltar Regulatory Authority issued Ladbrokes, who then operated Gibraltar's biggest call centre, with a licence to establish their own internet services. Under this Advanced Business Communications (Europe) began operating on the rock. The company applied for a licence in their own right. The GRA eventually denied ABC (Europe) a licence. Ladbrokes scaled down their Gibraltar operations and their 'Internet permit' was not renewed. ABC ceased their Gibraltar operations in early 2002.
CTS Gibraltar Limited launched a WiMax service in 2008, competing against the established ADSL providers. It then expanded into ADSL for nearby housing estates, and set up a rival UTMS service. CTS was closed down in early 2013 due to significant debts owed to government authorities and other creditors.
Shine Mobile, launched in September 2013, has obtained a licence for broadband services, which it planned to introduce, but the company closed down.
In 2013, GibFibreSpeed Ltd, trading under A.J. Sheriff Electrical Ltd, obtained a broadband licence. GibFibreSpeed is Gibraltar's first communications provider to offer Fibre to the Home (FTTH) broadband services. Since 2013, GibFibreSpeed has been upgrading its own independent all-fibre network and preparing for the launch of broadband services, it has since opened its stores and has planned to begin offering broadband in early 2015.
Printed media
Newspapers
The largest and most frequently published newspaper is the Gibraltar Chronicle, Gibraltar's oldest established daily newspaper and the world's second oldest English language newspaper to have been in print continuously with daily editions six days a week. Panorama is published on weekdays, and 7 Days, The New People, and Gibsport are weekly. Other newspapers such as the weekly El Faro de Gibraltar, are published in Spanish.
Defunct newspapers include El Calpense, a Spanish-language newspaper that was published in Gibraltar between 1868 and 1982. In the 1960s it became a weekly newspaper. When the border between Spain and Gibraltar was eventually closed by the Spanish dictator in 1969, the newspaper changed its ownership and begun to be published in English. It later closed in 1982. Also, El Anunciador was a Spanish-language newspaper that was published between 1885 and 1940.
Magazines
Gibraltar has two prominent monthly magazines; Gibraltar Insight and the Gibraltar Magazine.
EuropeAxess Media, in liaison with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Gibraltar, also publishes a monthly magazine: Upon This Rock
Globe magazine also appears monthly, having first started as a bi-lingual publication which produced two versions of each of its articles – one in English and the other in Spanish. Over time, Globe phased out the Spanish language element and is now an English language monthly aimed at Gibraltar and the Campo de Gibraltar.
B magazine is Gibraltar's first locally produced magazine aimed at women. It appears monthly and its contents include fashion, advice, health, weddings and similar features geared at young women. The publication also features a Social spotlight section composed of photos depicting eventsand fundraisers.
Online Media
Various online news outlets covering general news exist such as online editions of the Gibraltar Broadcasting Corporation, and the Gibraltar Chronicle. Independent online media include Your Gibraltar TV and sports news outlets such as GibFootballTalk.
See also
Telecom dispute between Gibraltar and Spain
References
External links
Gibraltar Broadcasting Corporation (Internet-streamed radio)
BFBS Radio in Gibraltar
Gibraltar Regulatory Authority
Gibtelecom
Sapphire Networks
Amateur Radio in Gibraltar | [
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12084 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport%20in%20Gibraltar | Transport in Gibraltar | Gibraltar has a limited public transport system, due to the compact size of the territory.
Road
Private transport
Gibraltar has of highways, all of which are paved. It has one of the highest levels of per capita car ownership in the world, with as many motor vehicles as people. Unlike the United Kingdom, along with the British Overseas Territories, traffic in Gibraltar drives on the right, as it shares a land border with Spain. Traffic formerly drove on the left; the change to driving on the right was made at 5.00 a.m. on 16 June 1929.
Older roads in Gibraltar, primarily in the city centre, are fairly narrow with a typical speed limit of . Gibraltar has ten fuelling stations, and fuel prices are lower than in neighbouring Spain. Some people from Spain even enter Gibraltar for the sole purpose of filling their cars' fuel tanks.
Gibraltar's international vehicle registration is GBZ, and vehicle registration plates of Gibraltar consist of the letter 'G' followed by up to five digits (1-99999) or four digits (1000-9999) and a single letter. These are as standard, the same shape, type face and colours as those in the UK, however non-standard number plates have been permitted. The Chief Minister's official car has the registration number G1, while the Governor's car, following tradition, has a crown, in place of a number.
The two highways in Spain leading in the vicinity are the A-383 which ends in La Linea, and the CA-34, which leads to the border.
Public transport
There are a total of eight different bus routes in Gibraltar. There are two companies who provide stage-carriage bus services in Gibraltar: Gibraltar Bus Company and Calypso Transport.
The Government of Gibraltar owned Gibraltar Bus Company operates routes 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8 and 9 with a fleet of 21 buses, 18 of which are Dennis Dart low-floor midibus with Caetano Nimbus bodies and featuring 28 seats and three Mercedes-Benz Sprinter minibuses with Unvi bodies and catering for 15 seated passengers. The Darts entered service the day the company was officially formed, Saturday 10 April 2004, when it took over the operation of private company Rock City Services, who had been unwilling to invest in its fleet. The trio of Sprinters entered service during November 2010 and operate Service 1 to the Moorish Castle Estate in the Upper Town area of the city. This route is well worth travelling in order to see how narrow and winding the roads are in this part of town. The latest timetable is dated 1 September 2012.
Calypso Transport operates route 5 between the Frontier (the land border with Spain), the airport and the city centre and tickets between this route and those operated by the Gibraltar Bus Company are not inter-changeable. An adult single fare on either operators' services currently costs £1.00 and an all-day Hoppa ticket costs £1.50. A year-long trial period where free travel was permitted aboard the buses of the Gibraltar Bus Company ended in May 2012 and only qualifying residents, commuters and military personnel now qualify for free travel in the territory.
Bus Fares - Both Operators' Services
Calypso Transport uses a fleet of red double-decker buses.
Route 5 buses operate every 15 minutes Monday to Saturdays, and every 20 minutes on Sundays, this is a shuttle between Reclamation Road (British Steps) near John Macintosh Square and the Frontier/Airport terminus via the Market Place bus station Grand Casemates Square.
Gibraltar Bus Company increased the bus fares for all routes in Gibraltar in May 2013.
Taxis
Taxis are available from a number of taxi ranks around the Rock. Many taxis cater specifically for tours of the Upper Rock Nature Reserve and these can be picked up from the frontier or the city centre, however, taxi drivers are also obliged to take standard fares as well as tours.
Rail
Historical
There are no extant railways in Gibraltar. There was formerly an extensive railway within the Gibraltar Dockyard, and neighbouring works and storage facilities. It included tunnels, one of which went through the Rock of Gibraltar, and is still in use today as a road tunnel. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries there was also a temporary industrial railway in Gibraltar. At the period when both railways were operational, it was possible to travel right round the entire coastline of Gibraltar by train. The dockyard railway had a roster of 17 locomotives, distinguished by numbers, but four of which also carried names: Gibraltar, Catalan, Rosia, and Calpe.
Access to the rail system in Spain
Whilst railway track extends to the outskirts of La Linea from the aborted San Roque-La Línea railway line expansion project in the 1970s, the nearest actual railway station (in Spain) is "San Roque - La Línea" station on the ADIF Algeciras-Bobadilla railway line Junction via Ronda. In 2021, after details emerged about a possible accession agreement of Gibraltar into the Schengen Area, the Chief Minister Fabian Picardo commented on the potential of railway development upwards towards Europe.
Until 1969 a ferry from Gibraltar provided convenient access to Algeciras station, which along with the railway line to Ronda was built by a British company known as the Algeciras Gibraltar Railway Company.
Access to the rail system in Morocco
Ferries by FRS running twice a week from Gibraltar to Tanger-Med port provide access to the Moroccan railway system.
Sea
Being a peninsula, the sea has long been vital to Gibraltar's transport links. The Royal Navy Dockyard was formerly Gibraltar's major employer.
There is still a harbour on the west side of the territory. The Gibraltar-registered merchant marine consists of 26 ships of 1000 tonnes and above. There is an irregular direct regular fast ferry service to Tanger-Med port, Morocco but many passengers now travel from Algeciras or Tarifa due to a more regular service being present at those ports.
The ferry between Gibraltar and Algeciras, which existed until 1969, when communications with Spain were severed by the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, was reopened on 16 December 2009, served by the Spanish company Transcoma, which used a catamaran, Punta Europa Segundo in memory of the original ferry that served the cross-Bay route in the 1960s. The maritime operations of Transcoma were taken over by Grupo Medex on 10 November 2010, which announced a higher-capacity new ship for 2011. Freight ferries between Gibraltar and Algeciras for shipments of food goods were started after the UK's withdrawal from the EU.
Various cruise liners visit the Port of Gibraltar throughout the year, and dock at the Gibraltar Cruise Terminal on the Western Arm of the North Mole. This provides the means of transport for a significant proportion of day-tripper tourists arriving in the territory.
Air
During World War 1, the Royal Naval Air Service brought one of the first seaplanes to come to Gibraltar, a Wight Seaplane, to search for submarines.
In 1931 the seaplane Saro Windhover Captained by Edgar Percival for GB Airways was the first of regular passenger flights from Gibraltar to Morocco. If there was a levant wind, then the seaplane would land on an aerodrome in Morocco instead of Tangier harbour.
Work began in 1939 to build what is today Gibraltar Airport and is the territory's only airport. It is situated very close to the border with Spain. Winston Churchill Avenue the road which runs from the Gibraltar–Spain border, crosses the runway, requiring the road to be closed each time an aircraft lands or takes off. Scheduled civilian passenger flights are operated by EasyJet, British Airways and Royal Air Maroc.
Following an agreement signed in Córdoba between the Governments of the United Kingdom, Spain and Gibraltar in September 2006, the use of Gibraltar Airport by both Gibraltarian and Spanish services was agreed. Gibraltar Airport will be adapted to have an entrance from Spain (as well as Gibraltar), in a similar manner to Basel and Geneva airports (which are also adjacent to borders).
Iberia commenced direct flights between Madrid and Gibraltar on 16 December 2006 with GB Airways following on 1 May 2007. However, GB Airways discontinued its Madrid service on 30 September 2007 and Iberia subsequently considered using smaller aircraft, possibly from its Air Nostrum regional partner – indicating that neither operator may have been able to fill their planes with passengers. Iberia eventually withdrew its service in September 2008. In 2009 Ándalus Líneas Aéreas started flights between Gibraltar and Madrid. However, on 13 August 2010, the airline ceased operations because the Spanish aviation authorities withdrew their licence.
Following the takeover by EasyJet, GB Airways dropped its direct Gibraltar–London Heathrow service on 28 October 2006 despite apparently remaining popular. The reason cited by GB Airways was the "convenience of" concentrating all its London services onto a single hub at Gatwick. Later, a sale of several of GB Airways' Heathrow slots is believed to have netted GB Airways with up to £80m. In late 2007 GB Airways was bought by EasyJet (and thus ceased to be a British Airways franchise partner); all flights were rebranded as EasyJet in 2008.
Flights are available from Gibraltar to London Heathrow, London Gatwick, Luton, Bristol, Casablanca, Tangier and Manchester airports. During 2012 bmibaby offered a service to East Midlands Airport, but the airline ceased operations in September 2012.
Cable car
A cable car runs from just south of the city centre to the Ape's Den and the Top of the Rock, which despite its name is actually the second highest peak of the Rock.
Proposed tunnel
In January 2021, it was reported that the United Kingdom and Morocco would discuss building a Strait of Gibraltar crossing between Gibraltar and Tangiers.
Dispute with Spain
The road crossing into Spain was closed by the Spanish authorities in 1969 and only reopened for pedestrians in 1982 and for vehicles in 1985.
A ferry operated between Algeciras and Gibraltar until 1969. For a few months in 2004 Spain banned cruise ships which had visited Gibraltar from going to Spanish ports on the same journey. In 2003, the land frontier was closed for a day by Spain on the grounds that a visiting cruise liner, the MV Aurora, was affected by contagious food poisoning. No cases in Gibraltar were reported.
The airport is built on the isthmus which the Spanish Government claim not to have been ceded in the Treaty of Utrecht, thus the integration of Gibraltar Airport in the Single European Sky system has been blocked by Spain. The 1987 agreement for joint control of the airport with Spain was rejected by the then Government of Gibraltar. All successive Governments of Gibraltar have rejected it, although welcoming joint use of the airport (which being next to the border could operate in a similar manner to Geneva Airport or Basel Airport). Following the Cordoba Agreement (between the UK, Spain and Gibraltar) in 2006, the joint use of the airport was finally agreed.
The road crossing from Gibraltar into Spain can often be subject to long delays. A loop road is located next to the border to hold cars waiting in the queue to cross into Spain. Motorists (and sometimes pedestrians) crossing the border are randomly subjected to long delays and searches by the Spanish authorities.
References
External links
Gibraltar | [
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12087 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glorioso%20Islands | Glorioso Islands | The Glorieuses or Glorioso Islands ( or officially also ) are a group of French islands and rocks totaling . They are controlled by France as part of the Scattered Islands in the Indian Ocean in the French Southern and Antarctic Lands, a French overseas territory, but are also claimed by Comoros, Madagascar and formerly by Seychelles. They are geographically part of the Comoro Islands between the French overseas region of Mayotte and the nation of Madagascar.
Archipelago
The archipelago consists of two islands, Grande Glorieuse () and Île du Lys, as well as eight rock islets (Roches Vertes): Wreck Rock (), South Rock () and Verte Rocks () and three other rocks that are unnamed. They form part of a coral reef and lagoon. Grande Glorieuses is roughly circular and measures about across. It is thickly vegetated, mainly by the remains of a coconut plantation and casuarina trees.
Île du Lys, located at about northeast of Grande Glorieuses, is about long and consists of sand dunes and scrub with some mangroves. It was formerly quarried for phosphate (guano).
The Glorieuses have an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of . There are anchorages offshore, and Grande Glorieuse has a long airstrip.
Climate
The climate is tropical and the terrain is low and flat, varying in height from sea level to . Île de Lys in particular is a nesting ground for migratory seabirds, and turtles lay eggs on the beaches. In the ocean, migratory species such as humpback whales and whale sharks may appear.
History
While probably earlier known to Arab (perhaps especially Yemeni) navigators, the Glorieuses were named and settled in 1880 by a Frenchman, Hippolyte Caltaux, who established a coconut plantation on Grande Glorieuse. The archipelago became a French possession in 1892 when Captain Richard of the Primauget made a formal claim. In 1895, the Glorioso Island became a part of the colony of Mayotte and dependencies.
From 1914 to 1958, concessions to exploit the islands were given to Seychelles companies. The islands are today nature reserves with a meteorological station garrisoned by French troops (The French Foreign Legion). Despite the Glorioso Islands never having been a part of the Malagasy Protectorate but a part of the colony of Mayotte and dependencies, then a part of French Comoros, Madagascar has claimed sovereignty over the islands since 1972. The Comoros claims Mayotte and Glorioso Islands. The Seychelles claimed the islands too before the France–Seychelles Maritime Boundary Agreement in 2001.
In 2012, France founded Glorioso Islands Marine Natural Park, a marine protected area, to preserve the endangered flora and fauna of the islands.
Gallery
See also
France–Seychelles Maritime Boundary Agreement
Moheli Marine Park
Glorioso Islands Marine Natural Park
References
Indian Ocean atolls of France
Atolls of Seychelles
Atolls of the Comoros
Atolls of Madagascar
Disputed islands
Archipelagoes of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands
Territorial disputes of France
Territorial disputes of Madagascar
Territorial disputes of Seychelles
Territorial disputes of the Comoros
Comoros–France relations
France–Madagascar relations
France–Seychelles relations | [
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12098 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf%20of%20Finland | Gulf of Finland | The Gulf of Finland (; ; ; ) is the easternmost arm of the Baltic Sea. It extends between Finland to the north and Estonia to the south, to Saint Petersburg in Russia to the east, where the river Neva drains into it. Other major cities around the gulf include Helsinki and Tallinn. The eastern parts of the Gulf of Finland belong to Russia, and some of Russia's most important oil harbors are located farthest in, near Saint Petersburg (including Primorsk). As the seaway to Saint Petersburg, the Gulf of Finland has been and continues to be of considerable strategic importance to Russia. Some of the environmental problems affecting the Baltic Sea are at their most pronounced in the shallow gulf.
Geography
The gulf has an area of . The length (from the Hanko Peninsula to Saint Petersburg) is and the width varies from near the entrance to on the meridian of Moshchny Island; in the Neva Bay, it decreases to . The gulf is relatively shallow, with the depth decreasing from the entrance to the gulf to the continent. The sharpest change occurs near Narva-Jõesuu, which is why this place is called the Narva wall. The average depth is with the maximum of . The depth of the Neva Bay is less than ; therefore, a channel was dug at the bottom for safe navigation. Because of the large influx of fresh water from rivers, especially from the Neva River (two-thirds of the total runoff), the gulf water has very low salinity – between 0.2 and 0.3 ‰ at the surface and 0.3–0.5 ‰ near the bottom. The average water temperature is close to in winter; in summer, it is at the surface and at the bottom. Parts of the gulf can freeze from late November to late April; the freezing starts in the east and gradually proceeds to the west. Complete freezing usually occurs by late January, and it may not occur in mild winters.
Frequent strong western winds cause waves, surges of water and floods.
The northern coast of the gulf is high and winding, with abundant small bays and skerries, but only a few large bays (Vyborg) and peninsulas (Hanko and Porkkalanniemi). The coast is mostly sloping; there are abundant sandy dunes, with occasional pine trees. The southern shores are smooth and shallow, but along the entire coast runs a limestone escarpment, the Baltic Klint, with a height up to . In the east, the gulf ends with Neva Bay; in the west it merges with the Baltic Sea.
The gulf contains numerous banks, skerries and islands. The largest include Kotlin Island with the city of Kronstadt (population 42,800), Beryozovye Islands, Lisiy Island, Maly Vysotsky Island with the nearby city of Vysotsk (population 1706), Gogland (Suursaari), Moshtchny (Lavansaari), Bolshoy Tyuters (Tytärsaari), Sommers, Naissaar, Kimitoön, Kökar, Seskar (Seiskari), Pakri Islands and others.
Starting in 1700, Russia constructed nineteen artificial islands with fortresses in the gulf. They aimed to defend Russia from maritime attacks, especially in the context of the Great Northern War of 1700–1721. Such fortresses include Fort Alexander, Krasnaya Gorka, Ino, Totleben and .
The largest rivers flowing into the gulf are the Neva (from the east), the Narva (from the south), and the Kymi (from the north). Keila, Pirita, Jägala, Kunda, Luga, Sista and Kovashi flow into the gulf from the south. From the north flow the Sestra River, Porvoo, Vantaa and several other small rivers. The Saimaa Canal connects the gulf with the Saimaa lake.
Extent
The International Hydrographic Organization defines the western limit of the Gulf of Finland as a line running from Spithami (59°13'N), in Estonia, through the Estonian island of Osmussaar from SE to NW and on to the SW extremity of Hanko Peninsula (22°54'E) in Finland.
Geological history
The modern depression can be traced to the incision of large rivers during the Cenozoic prior to the Quaternary glaciation. These rivers eroded the sedimentary strata above the Fennoscandian Shield. In particular the eroded material was made up of Ediacaran (Vendian) and Cambrian-aged claystone and sandstone. As erosion progressed, the rivers encountered harder layers of Ordovician-aged limestone, leading to the formation of the cliffs of Baltic Klint in northern Estonia and Ingria. Subsequently, the depression was somewhat reshaped by glacier activities. Its retreat formed the Littorina Sea, whose water level was some 7–9 metres higher than the present level of the Baltic Sea. Some 4,000 years ago the sea receded and shoals in the gulf have become its islands. Later uplifting of the Baltic Shield skewed the surface of the gulf; for this reason, its ancient northern shores are significantly higher than the southern ones.
Flora and fauna
The climate in the area is humid continental climate, characterized by temperate to hot summers and cold, occasionally severe winters with regular precipitation. The vegetation is dominated by a mixture of coniferous and deciduous forests and treeless coastal meadows and cliffs. The major forest trees are pine, spruce, birch, willows, rowan, aspen, common and gray alder. In the far eastern part of the gulf vegetation of the marshy areas consists mainly of bulrush and reeds, as well as fully aquatic plants, such as white and yellow waterlilies and acute sedge. Aquatic plants in the shallow waters of the gulf include Ruppia and spiny naiad.
Fish species of the gulf include Atlantic salmon, viviparous eelpout, gobies, belica, loach, European chub, common minnow, silver bream, common dace, ruffe, Crucian carp, stickleback, European smelt, common rudd, brown trout, tench, pipefish, burbot, perch, gudgeon, lumpsucker, roach, lamprey, vendace, garfish, common whitefish, common bream, zander, orfe, northern pike, spined loach, sprat, Baltic herring, sabre carp, common bleak, European eel and Atlantic cod. Commercial fishing is carried out in spring and autumn. Grey seal and ringed seal are met in the gulf, but the latter is very rare.
History
Before 1700
Many ancient sites were discovered on the shores of the gulf dated to up to nine thousand years old. Humans began to inhabit these places soon after the ice age glaciers have retreated and the water level of the Littorina Sea lowered to reveal the land. Remains of about 11 Neolithic settlements were found since 1905 in the mouth of the river Sestra River (Leningrad Oblast). They contain arrow tips and scrapers made of quartz, numerous food utensils and traces of fire camps – all indicative of hunting rather than agricultural or animal husbandry activities.
The gulf coast was later populated by Finnic peoples. Eesti (or Chud) inhabited the region of the modern Estonia, Votes were living on the south of the gulf and Izhorians to the south of Neva River. Korela tribes settled to the west of Lake Ladoga. In the 8th and 9th centuries, the banks of Neva and of the Gulf of Finland was populated by East Slavs, in particular by Ilmen Slavs and Krivichs. They were engaged in slash-and-burn agriculture, animal husbandry, hunting and fishing. From the 8th to the 13th century, the Gulf of Finland and Neva were parts of the waterway from Scandinavia, through Eastern Europe to the Byzantine Empire.
From the 9th century, the eastern coast of the gulf belonged to Veliky Novgorod and were called Vodskaya Pyatina. As a result of the 1219 crusade and the Battle of Lindanise, the Northern Estonia became part of Denmark (Danish Estonia). In the 12th century, the city Reval (, ) was established on the territory of modern Tallinn. As a result of the Estonian uprising in 1343, the Northern Estonia was taken over by the Teutonic Order and sold by Denmark in 1346. In 1559, during the Livonian War, the Bishop of Ösel-Wiek in Old Livonia sold his lands to King Frederick II of Denmark for 30,000 thalers. The Danish king gave the territory to his younger brother Magnus who landed on Saaremaa with an army in 1560. The whole of Saaremaa became a Danish possession in 1573, and remained so until it was transferred to Sweden in 1645.
In the 12th and 13th centuries, the Finnish tribes on the north of the gulf were conquered by the Swedes who then proceeded to the Slavs. The first encounter is attributed to 1142 when 60 Swedish ships attacked 3 Russian merchant vessels. After a Swedish attack in 1256, the Russian army of Alexander Nevsky crossed the frozen gulf and raided the Swedish territories in the modern Finland. In 1293, the Vyborg Castle and city of Vyborg was founded by the Swedish marshal Torkel Knutsson. The castle was fought over for decades between Sweden and the Novgorod Republic. By the Treaty of Nöteborg in 1323, Vyborg was finally recognized as a part of Sweden. It withstood a prolonged siege by Daniil Shchenya during the Russo–Swedish War of 1496–1499. The town's trade privileges were chartered by King Eric of Pomerania in 1403. Vyborg remained in Swedish hands until its capture by Peter the Great in the Great Northern War (1710).
In 1323, the Treaty of Nöteborg set the border between Sweden and Russia along the river Sestra. In the 15th century, the Izhorian lands of the Novgorod Republic were attached to the Grand Duchy of Moscow. In 1550, Gustav I of Sweden founded a city on the site of modern Helsinki. As a result of the Russian defeat in the Ingrian War (1610–1617) and the Treaty of Stolbovo (1617) the lands on the Gulf of Finland and Neva River became part of the Swedish Ingria. Its capital Nyen was located in the delta of Neva River.
History since 1700
Russia reclaimed the eastern part of the gulf as a result of the victory in the Great Northern War (1700–1721). On 16 May 1703, Saint Petersburg was founded in the mouth of Neva River, not far from Nyen, and in 1712 it became Russia's capital. To protect the city from the Swedish fleet, the Kronshlot fortress was built on an artificial island near the Kotlin Island in May 1704. By 1705, five more such forts were built nearby composing the city Kronstadt. These fortifications, nicknamed by the contemporaries "the Russian Dardanelles", were designed to control the Gulf waterway.
In 1710, the cities of Peterhof and Oranienbaum were founded on the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland. On 27 July 1714, near the Hanko Peninsula, the Russian Navy won the Battle of Gangut – a decisive victory over the Imperial Swedish Navy. The Russo-Swedish war ended in 1721 by the Treaty of Nystad, by which Russia received all the lands along the Neva and the Gulf of Finland, as well as Estland, Swedish Livonia and western part of the Karelian Isthmus, including Vyborg. However, Finland was returned to Sweden. The war resumed in (1788–1790), and the Battle of Hogland occurred on 6 July 1788 near the island Gogland. Both the battle and the war were relatively minor and indecisive, with the outcome of Russia retaining its territories.
The next Russo-Swedish war was fought in (1808–1809). It ended with the Treaty of Fredrikshamn giving the Russia rights on the territory of Finland and Åland. The newly established in 1809 Grand Duchy of Finland received broad autonomy within the Russian Empire and Western Karelia was returned to Finland. On 6 December 1917, the Parliament of Finland promulgated the Finnish Declaration of Independence. Western Karelia was annexed by the Soviet Union after the Winter War.
Estonia declared independence on 24 February 1918 and fought a war of independence. The republic existed until 1940 and then was annexed by the Soviet Union. Estonia regained its independence after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
In March 1921, the Kronstadt rebellion by sailors was put down by the Red Army. The Gulf of Finland had several major naval operations during World War II. In August 1941, during the evacuation of the Baltic Fleet from Tallinn to Kronstadt, German forces sank 15 Russian military vessels, (5 destroyers, 2 submarines, 3 guard ships, 2 minesweepers, 2 gunboats and 1 Motor Torpedo Boat) as well as 43 transport and support ships. Several ships still remain on the gulf bottom near Cape Juminda, and a monument was raised there in memory of those lost in the events.
In 1978, construction was started on the Saint Petersburg Dam aiming to protect Saint Petersburg from the frequent floods. The work was halted at 60% completion in the late 1980s, due to the financial problems related to the breakup of the Soviet Union; it was resumed in 2001 and is – as of August 2011 – complete.
Economy
The southern coast of the gulf contains the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant and a network of ports and unique natural and historical places. Navigation has long been the dominant activity in the gulf. The major port cities and their functions are, in Russia: Saint Petersburg (all kinds of goods), Kronstadt (container shipping),
Lomonosov (general cargo, containers, metals), Vyborg (general cargo), Primorsk (oil and petroleum products), Vysotsk (oil and coal), Ust-Luga (oil, coal, timber, containers); in Finland: Helsinki (containers), Kotka (containers, timber, agricultural products; it is the main transhipment cargo port for Russia), Hanko (containers, vehicles), Turku (containers, rail ferry), Kilpilahti/Sköldvik harbour (oil refinery); in Estonia: Tallinn (grains, refrigerators, oil), Paldiski, Sillamäe. Gulf of Finland is also part of the Volga–Baltic Waterway and White Sea–Baltic Canal. Important goods include apatite from the Kola Peninsula, Karelian granite and greenstone, timber from Arkhangelsk Oblast and Vologda, ferrous metals from Cherepovets, coal from Donbas and the Kuznetsk Basin, pyrite from Ural, potassium chloride from Solikamsk, oil from Volga region, and grains from many regions of Russia.
Passenger transport on the gulf includes a number of ferry lines which connect the following ports: Helsinki and Hanko (Finland), Mariehamn (Åland), Stockholm and Kapellskär (Sweden), Tallinn and Paldiski(Estonia), Rostock (Germany), Saint Petersburg and Kaliningrad (Russia), as well as many other cities.
Another major and historical activity in the gulf is fishing, especially on the northern coast near Vyborg, Primorsk and on the southern coast near Ust-Luga. Commercial fish species are herring, sprats, European smelt, whitefishes, carp bream, roaches, perch, European eel, lamprey and others. In 2005, the catchment was 2000 tons by the ships of Saint Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast alone.
In September 2005 the agreement was signed on the construction of the Nord Stream offshore gas pipeline on the Baltic Sea, from Vyborg to the German city of Greifswald. The first line was expected become operational in 2011. Afterwards, the first line of Nord Stream was laid by May 2011 and was inaugurated on 8 November 2011; the second line was inaugurated on 8 October 2012.
Archaeology
The bottom of the gulf is one of the world's largest ship cemeteries. Because of the low salinity and cold waters, and no shipworms, the ships are relatively well preserved. Since the 6th century, major waterways were running through the gulf, and from the 8th to the 10th century, about 3,000 tonnes of silver was transported there. Later, the gulf was actively used by Sweden and Russia for transport of goods. Every year saw dozens of lost ships. In the fall of 1743, 17 Russian warships returning from Finland sank in just 7 hours, and in the summer of 1747, 26 merchant vessels sank within 4 hours near Narva. A record was set in 1721 when during the evacuation of Russian troops from Finland, more than 100 vessels were lost within 3 months, including 64 in a single night.
By the end of 1996, about 5,000 submerged objects were identified in the Russian part of the gulf, including 2,500 ships, 1,500 airplanes, and small items such as boats, anchors, tanks, tractors, cars, cannons, and even naval mines, aerial bombs, torpedoes, and other ammunition. The ships belonged to Russia (25%), Germany (19%), United Kingdom (17%), Sweden (15%), Netherlands (8%), and Finland (7%). The remaining 9% are from Norway, Denmark, France, United States, Italy, Estonia, and Latvia. These objects present potential hazards to navigation, fishery, coastal construction, laying of submarine pipelines and cables, and the environment. Mines were laid in the gulf during World War I (38,932 units), the Russian Civil War, and the Winter War (1939–1940), with an estimated total number of 60,000; 85,000 more mines were set during World War II, and only a fraction of all those were eliminated after the wars.
Pollution
The ecological condition of the Gulf of Finland, Neva Bay and Neva River is unsatisfactory. There is significant contamination by ions of mercury and copper, organochlorine pesticides, phenols, petroleum products and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Cleaning of waste water in Saint Petersburg was started in 1979 and by 1997 about 74% of wastewater was purified. This number rose to 85% in 2005, to 91.7% by 2008, and as of 2009 was expected to reach 100% by 2011 with the completion of the expansion of the main sewerage plant. Nevertheless, in 2008, the Federal Service of Saint Petersburg announced that no beach of Saint Petersburg is fit for swimming.
Fish catchment decreased 10 times between 1989 and 2005. Apart from pollution, another reason for that is hydraulic and engineering works. For example, construction of new ports in Ust-Luga and Vysotsk and on Vasilyevsky Island adversely affected the spawning of fish. Extraction of sand and gravel in the Neva Bay for the land reclamation destroy spawning sites of European smelt.
Construction of the Saint Petersburg Dam reduced water exchange of the Neva Bay with the eastern part of the gulf by 10–20% that increased the contamination level of Neva Bay. The largest changes occur within from the dam. Some shallow areas between Saint Petersburg and the dam are turning into swamps. Waterlogging and the associated rotting of plants may eventually lead to eutrophication of the area. Also worrying is expansion of oil ports in the gulf and the construction of a treatment center for spent fuel from the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant.
The port of Kronstadt is currently serving as a transit point for the import in Russia of radioactive waste through the Baltic Sea. The waste, mostly depleted uranium hexafluoride, is further transported through Saint Petersburg to Novouralsk, Angarsk and other cities of eastern Russia. This transit point will be moved from Saint Petersburg to the port Ust-Luga, which is about west of Saint Petersburg, and within the Border Security Zone of Russia, as decided by the Russian government in 2003 (Order No. 1491-r of 14 October 2003). It is expected that after this completes it should reduce the ecological risks for Saint Petersburg. Ust-Luga is envisioned to be the largest transportation and logistics hub in northwestern Russia. However, in 2015 it was reported that some construction plans in Ust-Luga were frozen, and the construction of Ust-Luga Multimodal Complex, supposed to be the transit point for radioactive waste, never started.
Major cities
Espoo
Hamina
Hanko
Helsinki
Kirkkonummi
Kotka
Kronstadt
Kunda
Loksa
Lomonosov
Loviisa
Maardu
Narva-Jõesuu
Paldiski
Peterhof
Porvoo
Primorsk
Saint Petersburg
Sestroretsk
Sillamäe
Sosnovy Bor
Tallinn
Vyborg
Zelenogorsk
See also
Kven Sea
Peter the Great's Naval Fortress
References
External links
ESA satellite photograph of the Gulf of Finland
Finland, Gulf of
Gulfs of the Atlantic Ocean
Gulfs of Russia
Gulfs of Finland
Bodies of water of Estonia
Estonia–Russia border
Finland–Russia border
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12099 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gda%C5%84sk | Gdańsk | Gdańsk ( , also ; ; ; ; , ) is a city on the Baltic coast of northern Poland. With a population of 470,805, Gdańsk is the capital and largest city of the Pomeranian Voivodeship and the most prominent city in the geographical region of Pomerania. It is Poland's principal seaport and the country's fourth-largest metropolitan area.
The city is situated at the southern edge of Gdańsk Bay, in a conurbation with the city of Gdynia, the resort town of Sopot, and suburban communities; these form a metropolitan area called the Tricity (Trójmiasto), with a population of approximately 1.5 million. Gdańsk lies at the mouth of the Motława River, connected to the Leniwka, a branch in the delta of the Vistula River, which drains 60 percent of Poland and connects Gdańsk with the Polish capital, Warsaw.
The city's history is complex, with periods of Polish, Prussian and German rule, and periods of autonomy as a free city-state. An important shipbuilding port and trade point since the Middle Ages, in 1361 it became a member of the Hanseatic League which defined its economic, demographic and urban landscape for several centuries. From 1918 to 1939, Gdańsk lay in the disputed Polish Corridor between Poland and Germany; its ambiguous political status created tensions that culminated in the Invasion of Poland and the first clash of the Second World War at nearby Westerplatte. The contemporary city was shaped by extensive border changes, expulsions and new settlement in or after 1945. In the 1980s, Gdańsk was the birthplace of the Solidarity movement, which played a major role in bringing an end to Communism in Poland and helped precipitate the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact.
Gdańsk is home to the University of Gdańsk, Gdańsk University of Technology, the National Museum, the Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre, the Museum of the Second World War, the Polish Baltic Philharmonic and the European Solidarity Centre. The city also hosts St. Dominic's Fair, which dates back to 1260, and is regarded as one of the biggest trade and cultural events in Europe. Gdańsk has also topped rankings for the quality of life, safety and living standards worldwide, and its historic city center has been listed as one of Poland's national monuments.
Names
Origin
There are countless theories as to the origin of the city's name, with some being the subject of speculation. It is likely that the name was derived from Gdania, a river presently known as Motława on which the city is situated.
Linguists argue that the name stems from the Proto-Slavic adjective/prefix gъd-, which meant wet or moisty with the addition of the morpheme ń/ni and the suffix -sk. Conrad Celtes and Johann Uphagen believed that the appellation was given to the settlement by the Germanic Goths. Other scholars from the 19th century claimed that the name originated from the expression ku Dansk, which meant "to/towards Denmark".
History
The name of the settlement was recorded after St. Adalbert's death in AD 997 as urbs Gyddanyzc and it was later written as Kdanzk in 1148, Gdanzc in 1188, Danceke in 1228, Gdańsk in 1236, Danzc in 1263, Danczk in 1311, Danczik in 1399, Danczig in 1414, Gdąnsk in 1656. In Polish the modern name of the city is pronounced . In English (where the diacritic over the "n" is frequently omitted) the usual pronunciation is or . The German name, Danzig, is pronounced .
The city's Latin name may be given as either Gedania, Gedanum or Dantiscum; the variety of Latin names reflects the mixed influence of the city's Polish, German and Kashubian heritage. Other former spellings of the name include Dantzig, Dantsic and Dantzic.
Ceremonial names
On special occasions the city is also referred to as "The Royal Polish City of Gdańsk" (Polish: Królewskie Polskie Miasto Gdańsk, Latin: Regia Civitas Polonica Gedanensis, Kashubian: Królewsczi Polsczi Gard Gduńsk). In the Kashubian language the city is called . Although some Kashubians may also use the name "Our Capital City Gduńsk" (Nasz Stoleczny Gard Gduńsk) or "The Kashubian Capital City Gduńsk" (Stoleczny Kaszëbsczi Gard Gduńsk), the cultural and historical connections between the city and the region of Kashubia are debatable and use of such names rises controversy among Kashubians.
History
Ancient history
The oldest evidence found for the existence of a settlement on the lands of what is now Gdańsk comes from the Bronze Age (which is estimated to be from 2500–1700 BC). The settlement that is now known as Gdańsk began in the 9th century, being mostly an agriculture and fishing-dependent village. In the beginning of the 10th century, it began becoming an important centre for trade (especially between the Pomeranians) until its annexation in 975 by Mieszko I.
Early Poland
The first written record thought to refer to Gdańsk is the vita of Saint Adalbert. Written in 999, it describes how in 997 Saint Adalbert of Prague baptised the inhabitants of urbs Gyddannyzc, "which separated the great realm of the duke [i.e. Bolesław the Brave of Poland] from the sea." No further written sources exist for the 10th and 11th centuries. Based on the date in Adalbert's vita, the city celebrated its millennial anniversary in 1997.
Archaeological evidence for the origins of the town was retrieved mostly after World War II had laid 90 percent of the city centre in ruins, enabling excavations. The oldest seventeen settlement levels were dated to between 980 and 1308. It is generally thought that Mieszko I of Poland erected a stronghold on the site in the 980s, thereby connecting the Polish state ruled by the Piast dynasty with the trade routes of the Baltic Sea. Traces of buildings and housing from the 10th century have been found in archaeological excavations of the city.
Pomeranian Poland
The site was ruled as a duchy of Poland by the Samborides. It consisted of a settlement at the modern Long Market, settlements of craftsmen along the Old Ditch, German merchant settlements around St Nicholas's church and the old Piast stronghold. In 1186, a Cistercian monastery was set up in nearby Oliwa, which is now within the city limits. In 1215, the ducal stronghold became the centre of a Pomerelian splinter duchy. At that time the area of the later city included various villages. From at least 1224/25 a German market settlement with merchants from Lübeck existed in the area of today's Long Market.
In 1224/25, merchants from Lübeck were invited as hospites (immigrants with specific privileges) but were soon (in 1238) forced to leave by Swantopolk II of the Samborides during a war between Swantopolk and the Teutonic Knights, during which Lübeck supported the latter. Migration of merchants to the town resumed in 1257. Significant German influence did not reappear until the 14th century, after the takeover of the city by the Teutonic Knights.
At latest in 1263 Pomerelian duke, Swantopolk II. granted city rights under Lübeck law to the emerging market settlement. It was an autonomy charter similar to that of Lübeck, which was also the primary origin of many settlers. In a document of 1271 the Pomerelian duke Mestwin II addressed the Lübeck merchants settled in the city as his loyal citizens from Germany.
In 1300, the town had an estimated population of 2,000. While overall the town was far from an important trade centre at that time, it had some relevance in the trade with Eastern Europe. Low on funds, the Samborides lent the settlement to Brandenburg, although they planned to take the city back and give it to Poland. Poland threatened to intervene, and the Brandenburgians left the town. Subsequently, the city was taken by Danish princes in 1301. The Teutonic Knights were hired by the Polish nobles to drive out the Danes.
Teutonic Knights
In 1308, the town was taken by Brandenburg and the Teutonic Knights restored order. Subsequently, the Knights took over control of the town. Primary sources record a massacre carried out by the Teutonic Knights against the local population, of 10,000 people, but the exact number killed is subject of dispute in modern scholarship. Some authors accept the number given in the original sources, while others consider 10,000 to have been a medieval exaggeration, although scholarly consensus is that a massacre of some magnitude did take place. The events were used by the Polish crown to condemn the Teutonic Knights in a subsequent papal lawsuit.
The knights colonised the area, replacing local Kashubians and Poles with German settlers. In 1308, they founded Osiek Hakelwerk near the town, initially as a Slavic fishing settlement. In 1340, the Teutonic Knights constructed a large fortress, which became the seat of the knights' Komtur. In 1346 they changed the Town Law of the city, which then consisted only of the Rechtstadt, to Kulm law. In 1358, Danzig joined the Hanseatic League, and became an active member in 1361. It maintained relations with the trade centres Bruges, Novgorod, Lisboa and Sevilla. Around 1377, the Old Town was equipped with city rights as well. In 1380, the New Town was founded as the third, independent settlement.
After a series of Polish-Teutonic Wars, in the Treaty of Kalisz (1343) the Order had to acknowledge that it would hold Pomerelia as a fief from the Polish Crown. Although it left the legal basis of the Order's possession of the province in some doubt, the city thrived as a result of increased exports of grain (especially wheat), timber, potash, tar, and other goods of forestry from Prussia and Poland via the Vistula River trading routes, although after its capture, the Teutonic Knights tried to actively reduce the economic significance of the town. While under the control of the Teutonic Order German migration increased. The Order's religious networks helped to develop Danzig's literary culture. A new war broke out in 1409, culminating in the Battle of Grunwald (1410), and the city came under the control of the Kingdom of Poland. A year later, with the First Peace of Thorn, it returned to the Teutonic Order.
Kingdom of Poland
In 1440, the city participated in the foundation of the Prussian Confederation which was an organisation opposed to the rule of the Teutonic Knights. The organisation in its complaint of 1453 mentioned repeated cases in which the Teutonic Knights imprisoned or murdered local patricians and mayors without a court verdict. Upon the request of the organisation King Casimir IV of Poland reincorporated the territory to the Kingdom of Poland in 1454. This led to the Thirteen Years' War between Poland and the State of the Teutonic Order (1454–1466). Since 1454, the city was authorized by the King to mint Polish coins. The local mayor pledged allegiance to the King during the incorporation in March 1454 in Kraków, and the city again solemnly pledged allegiance to the King in June 1454 in Elbląg, recognizing the prior Teutonic annexation and rule as unlawful. On 25 May 1457 the city gained its rights as an autonomous city.
On 15 May 1457, Casimir IV of Poland granted the town the Great Privilege, after he had been invited by the town's council and had already stayed in town for five weeks. With the Great Privilege, the town was granted full autonomy and protection by the King of Poland. The privilege removed tariffs and taxes on trade within Poland, Lithuania and Ruthenia (present day Belarus and Ukraine) and conferred on the town independent jurisdiction, legislation and administration of her territory, as well as the right to mint its own coin. Furthermore, the privilege united Old Town, Osiek and Main Town, and legalised the demolition of New Town, which had sided with the Teutonic Knights. By 1457, New Town was demolished completely, no buildings remained.
Gaining free and privileged access to Polish markets, the seaport prospered while simultaneously trading with the other Hanseatic cities. After the Second Peace of Thorn (1466) between Poland and the Teutonic Order the warfare ended permanently. After the Union of Lublin between Poland and Lithuania in 1569 the city continued to enjoy a large degree of internal autonomy (cf. Danzig law). Being the largest and one of the most influential cities of Poland, it enjoyed voting rights during the royal election period in Poland.
In 1569 a Mennonite Church was founded here.
In the 1575 election of a king to the Polish throne, Danzig supported Maximilian II in his struggle against Stephen Báthory. It was the latter who eventually became monarch but the city, encouraged by the secret support of Denmark and Emperor Maximilian, shut its gates against Stephen. After the Siege of Danzig (1577), lasting six months, the city's army of 5,000 mercenaries was utterly defeated in a field battle on 16 December 1577. However, since Stephen's armies were unable to take the city by force, a compromise was reached: Stephen Báthory confirmed the city's special status and her Danzig law privileges granted by earlier Polish kings. The city recognised him as ruler of Poland and paid the enormous sum of 200,000 guldens in gold as payoff ("apology").
During the Polish–Swedish War of 1626–1629, in 1627, the naval Battle of Oliwa was fought near the city, and it is considered one of the greatest victories in the history of the Polish Navy. During the Swedish invasion of Poland of 1655–1660, commonly known as the Deluge, the city was unsuccessfully besieged by Sweden. In 1660, the war was ended with the Treaty of Oliwa, signed in the present-day district of Oliwa.
Around 1640, Johannes Hevelius established his astronomical observatory in the Old Town. Polish King John III Sobieski regularly visited Hevelius numerous times.
Beside a majority of German-speakers, whose elites sometimes distinguished their German dialect as Pomerelian, the city was home to a large number of Polish-speaking Poles, Jewish Poles, Latvian speaking Kursenieki, Flemings and Dutch. In addition, a number of Scots took refuge or migrated to and received citizenship in the city. During the Protestant Reformation, most German-speaking inhabitants adopted Lutheranism. Due to the special status of the city and significance within the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the city inhabitants largely became bi-cultural sharing both Polish and German culture and were strongly attached to the traditions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
The city suffered a last great plague and a slow economic decline due to the wars of the 18th century. As a stronghold of Stanisław Leszczyński's supporters during the War of the Polish Succession, it was taken by the Russians after the Siege of Danzig in 1734.
The Danzig Research Society founded in 1743 was one of the first of its kind.
Prussia and Germany
Danzig was annexed by the Kingdom of Prussia in 1793, in the Second Partition of Poland. Both the Polish and the German-speaking population largely opposed the Prussian annexation and wished the city to remain part of Poland. The mayor of the city stepped down from his office due to the annexation, and also notable city councilor Jan (Johann) Uphagen, historian and art collector, whose Baroque house is now a museum, resigned as a sign of protest against the annexation. An attempted student uprising against Prussia led by was crushed quickly by the authorities in 1797.
During the Napoleonic Wars, in 1807, the city was besieged and captured by a coalition of French, Polish, Italian, Saxon and Baden forces. Afterwards, it was a free city from 1807 to 1814, when it was captured by combined Prussian-Russian forces.
In 1815, after France's defeat in the Napoleonic Wars, it again became part of Prussia and became the capital of within the province of West Prussia. The city's longest serving president was Robert von Blumenthal, who held office from 1841, through the revolutions of 1848, until 1863. With the unification of Germany in 1871 under Prussian hegemony, the city became part of the German Empire and remained so until 1919, after Germany's defeat in World War I.
Inter-war years and World War II
When Poland regained its independence after World War I with access to the sea as promised by the Allies on the basis of Woodrow Wilson's "Fourteen Points" (point 13 called for "an independent Polish state", "which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea"), the Poles hoped the city's harbour would also become part of Poland.
However, in the end – since Germans formed a majority in the city, with Poles being a minority (in the 1923 census 7,896 people out of 335,921 gave Polish, Kashubian or Masurian as their native language) – the city was not placed under Polish sovereignty. Instead, in accordance with the terms of the Versailles Treaty, it became the Free City of Danzig, an independent quasi-state under the auspices of the League of Nations with its external affairs largely under Polish control – without, however, any public vote to legitimize Germany's loss of the city.
Poland's rights also included free use of the harbour, a Polish post office, a Polish garrison in Westerplatte district, and customs union with Poland. The Free City had its own constitution, national anthem, parliament, and government (). It issued its own stamps as well as its currency, the Danzig gulden.
With the growth of Nazism among Germans, anti-Polish sentiment increased and both Germanisation and segregation policies intensified, in the 1930s the rights of local Poles were commonly violated and limited by the local administration. Polish children were refused admission to public Polish-language schools, premises were not allowed to be rented to Polish schools and preschools. Due to such policies, only 8 Polish-language public schools existed in the city, and Poles managed to organize 7 more private Polish schools.
In 1937, Poles who sent their children to private Polish schools were demanded to transfer children to German schools, under threat of police intervention, and attacks were carried out on Polish schools and Polish youth. German militias carried out numerous beatings of Polish activists, scouts and even mailmen, as "punishment" for distributing the Polish press. German students attacked and expelled Polish students from the technical university. Dozens of Polish surnames were forcibly Germanized, while Polish symbols that reminded that for centuries Gdańsk was part of Poland were removed from the city's landmarks, such as the Artus Court and the Neptune's Fountain.
From 1937, the employment of Poles by German companies was prohibited, and already employed Poles were fired, the use of Polish in public places was banned and Poles were not allowed to enter several restaurants, in particular those owned by Germans. In 1939, before the German invasion of Poland and outbreak of World War II, local Polish railwaymen were victims of beatings, and after the invasion, they were also imprisoned and murdered in concentration camps.
In the early 1930s, the local Nazi Party capitalised on pro-German sentiments and in 1933 garnered 50% of vote in the parliament. Thereafter, the Nazis under Gauleiter Albert Forster achieved dominance in the city government, which was still nominally overseen by the League of Nations' High Commissioner. The German government officially demanded the return of Danzig to Germany along with an extraterritorial (meaning under German jurisdiction) highway through the area of the Polish Corridor for land-based access from the rest of Germany. Hitler used the issue of the status of the city as a pretext for attacking Poland and in May 1939, during a high-level meeting of German military officials explained to them: "It is not Danzig that is at stake. For us it is a matter of expanding our Lebensraum in the east", adding that there will be no repeat of the Czech situation, and Germany will attack Poland at first opportunity, after isolating the country from its Western Allies.
After the German proposals to solve the three main issues peacefully were refused, German-Polish relations rapidly deteriorated. Germany attacked Poland on 1 September after having signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union (which included a Secret Part regarding the division of Poland and the Baltic States between the two countries) in late August and after postponing the attack three times.
The German attack began in Danzig, with a bombardment of Polish positions at Westerplatte by the German battleship , and the landing of German infantry on the peninsula. Outnumbered Polish defenders at Westerplatte resisted for seven days before running out of ammunition. Meanwhile, after a fierce day-long fight (1 September 1939), defenders of the Polish Post office were tried and executed then buried on the spot in the Danzig quarter of Zaspa in October 1939. In 1998 a German court overturned their conviction and sentence.
The city was officially annexed by Nazi Germany and incorporated into the Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia. About 50 percent of members of the Jewish community had left the city within a year after a pogrom in October 1937, after the Kristallnacht riots in November 1938 the community decided to organize its emigration and in March 1939 a first transport to Palestine started. By September 1939 barely 1,700 mostly elderly Jews remained. In early 1941, just 600 Jews were still living in Danzig, most of whom were later murdered in the Holocaust.
Out of the 2,938 Jewish community in the city 1,227 were able to escape from the Nazis before the outbreak of war. Nazi secret police had been observing Polish minority communities in the city since 1936, compiling information, which in 1939 served to prepare lists of Poles to be captured in Operation Tannenberg. On the first day of the war, approximately 1,500 ethnic Poles were arrested, some because of their participation in social and economic life, others because they were activists and members of various Polish organisations. On 2 September 1939, 150 of them were deported to the Sicherheitsdienst camp Stutthof some from Danzig, and murdered. Many Poles living in Danzig were deported to Stutthof or executed in the Piaśnica forest.
During the war, the Germans operated a Nazi prison in the city, an Einsatzgruppen-operated penal camp, a camp for Romani people, and several subcamps of the Stutthof concentration camp within the present-day city limits.
In 1941, Hitler ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union, eventually causing the fortunes of war to turn against Germany. As the Soviet Army advanced in 1944, German populations in Central and Eastern Europe took flight, resulting in the beginning of a great population shift. After the final Soviet offensives began in January 1945, hundreds of thousands of German refugees converged on Danzig, many of whom had fled on foot from East Prussia, some tried to escape through the city's port in a large-scale evacuation involving hundreds of German cargo and passenger ships. Some of the ships were sunk by the Soviets, including the after an evacuation was attempted at neighbouring Gdynia. In the process, tens of thousands of refugees were killed.
The city also endured heavy Allied and Soviet air raids. Those who survived and could not escape had to face the Soviet Army, which captured the heavily damaged city on 30 March 1945, followed by large-scale rape and looting. In line with the decisions made by the Allies at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, the city was annexed by Poland, although with a Soviet-installed communist regime, which stayed in power until the Fall of Communism in the 1980s. The remaining German residents of the city who had survived the war fled or were expelled to postwar Germany. The city was repopulated by ethnic Poles; up to 18 percent (1948) of them had been deported by the Soviets in two major waves from pre-war eastern Polish areas annexed by the Soviet Union.
Contemporary times
In 1946, the communists executed 17-year-old Danuta Siedzikówna and 42-year-old , Polish resistance members, in the local prison.
The port of Gdańsk was one of the three Polish ports through which Greeks and Macedonians, refugees of the Greek Civil War, reached Poland. In 1949, four transports of Greek and Macedonian refugees arrived at the port of Gdańsk, from where they were transported to new homes in Poland.
Parts of the historic old city of Gdańsk, which had suffered large-scale destruction during the war, were rebuilt during the 1950s and 1960s. The reconstruction sought to dilute the German character of the city, and set it back to how it supposedly looked like before the annexation to Prussia in 1793. Nineteenth-century transformations were ignored as "ideologically malignant" by post-war administrations, or regarded as "Prussian barbarism" worth of demolition, while Flemish/Dutch, Italian and French influences were emphasized in order to "neutralize" the German influx on the general outlook of the city.
Boosted by heavy investment in the development of its port and three major shipyards for Soviet ambitions in the Baltic region, Gdańsk became the major shipping and industrial centre of the People's Republic of Poland.
In December 1970, Gdańsk was the scene of anti-regime demonstrations, which led to the downfall of Poland's communist leader Władysław Gomułka. During the demonstrations in Gdańsk and Gdynia, military as well as the police opened fire on the demonstrators causing several dozen deaths. Ten years later, in August 1980, Gdańsk Shipyard was the birthplace of the Solidarity trade union movement.
In September 1981, to deter Solidarity, Soviet Union launched Exercise Zapad-81, the largest military exercise in history, during which amphibious landings were conducted near Gdańsk. Meanwhile, the Solidarity held its first national congress in Hala Olivia, Gdańsk when more than 800 deputies participated. Its opposition to the Communist regime led to the end of Communist Party rule in 1989, and sparked a series of protests that overthrew the Communist regimes of the former Soviet bloc. Solidarity's leader, Lech Wałęsa, became President of Poland in 1990. In 2014 the European Solidarity Centre, a museum and library devoted to the history of the movement, opened in Gdańsk.
Gdańsk native Donald Tusk became Prime Minister of Poland in 2007, and President of the European Council in 2014. Today Gdańsk is a major shipping port and tourist destination.
In 2014, the remains of Danuta Siedzikówna and Feliks Selmanowicz were found at the local Garrison Cemetery, and then their state burial was held in Gdańsk in 2016, with the participation of thousands of people from all over Poland and the highest Polish authorities.
In January 2019, the Mayor of Gdańsk, Paweł Adamowicz, was assassinated by a man who had just been released from prison for violent crimes; the man claimed after stabbing the mayor in the abdomen, near the heart that the mayor's political party had been responsible for imprisoning him. Though Adamowicz was able to undergo a multi-hour surgery to try to treat his wounds, he died the next day.
In October 2019, the City of Gdańsk was awarded the Princess of Asturias Award in the Concord category as a recognition of the fact that "the past and present in Gdańsk are sensitive to solidarity, the defense of freedom and human rights, as well as to the preservation of peace".
Geography
Climate
Gdańsk has a climate with both oceanic and continental influences. According to some categorizations, it has an oceanic climate (Cfb), while others classify it as belonging to the continental climate zone (Dfb). It actually depends on whether the mean reference temperature for the coldest winter month is set at or . Gdańsk's dry winters and the precipitation maximum in summer are indicators of continentality. However seasonal extremes are less pronounced than those in inland Poland.
The city has moderately cold and cloudy winters with mean temperature in January and February near or below and mild summers with frequent showers and thunderstorms. Average temperatures range from and average monthly rainfall varies per month with a rather low annual total of . In general, it is damp, variable, and mild.
The seasons are clearly differentiated. Spring starts in March and is initially cold and windy, later becoming pleasantly warm and often very sunny. Summer, which begins in June, is predominantly warm but hot at times with temperature reaching as high as at least couple times a year with plenty of sunshine interspersed with heavy rain. Gdańsk averages 1,700 hours of sunshine per year. July and August are the warmest months. Autumn comes in September and is at first warm and usually sunny, turning cold, damp, and foggy in November. Winter lasts from December to March and includes periods of snow. January and February are the coldest months with the temperature sometimes dropping as low as .
Economy
The industrial sections of the city are dominated by shipbuilding, petrochemical, and chemical industries, and food processing. The share of high-tech sectors such as electronics, telecommunications, IT engineering, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals is on the rise. Amber processing is also an important part of the local economy, as the majority of the world's amber deposits lie along the Baltic coast. The Pomeranian Voivodeship, including Gdańsk, is also a major tourist destination in the summer, as millions of Poles and other European tourists flock to the beaches of the Baltic coastline.
Major companies in Gdańsk:
Acxiom – IT
Arla Foods – food processing
Bayer Shared Service Centre – finance & accounting
Cognor – steel, engineering, capital goods
Coleman Research – knowledge broker
Crist – shipbuilding
Delphi – automotive parts
Dr. Oetker – food processing
Grupa Lotos – energy, petrol refinery
Energa Trading – electrical and heat energy
Bank BPH – finance
Gdańska Stocznia Remontowa – shipbuilding
Elektrociepłownie Wybrzeże – energy
LPP – retail
Polnord Energobudowa – construction company
Petrobaltic – energy, oil drilling
Intel – IT
IBM – IT
IVONA – IT
FINEOS – IT
Wirtualna Polska – internet service
Kainos – IT
Lufthansa Systems – IT
Jeppesen – IT
Compuware – IT
Thomson Reuters – media
ThyssenKrupp – steel, engineering, capital goods
Maersk Line – services & pick-up
Transcom WorldWide – business processing outsourcing
Jysk – retail
Meritum Bank – finance
Glencore – raw materials
Orlen Morena – energy
Fosfory Ciech – chemical company
Hydrobudowa – construction company
Llentabhallen – steel constructions
Ziaja – cosmetics and beauty company
Stabilator – construction company
Skanska – construction company
Flügger – paints manufacturing
HD heavy duty – retail
Dresser Wayne – retail fueling systems
First Data – finance
Masterlease – finance
Transcom WorldWide – business processing outsourcing
Weyerhaeuser Cellulose Fibres – cellulose fibre manufacturing
Gdańsk Shipyard – shipbuilding
OIE Support – education services (part of Laureate International Universities)
PricewaterhouseCoopers – professional services
Kemira – chemical industry group
BreakThru Films – animated film studio
Schibsted – IT
IWG – business support services
Mango Media – home shopping channel
MOL Europe – shipping
VB Leasing – finance
Metsä Group – forest industry
Competence Call Centre – call centre
EPAM Systems – IT
Esotiq&Henderson – retail
Bayer – chemical and pharmaceutical company
Playsoft – IT
Staples Advantage – office products
Deloitte – professional services
KPMG – professional services
Comarch – IT
ESO Audit – professional services
TF Bank – finance
Ensono – IT
Main sights
Architecture
The city has some buildings surviving from the time of the Hanseatic League. Most tourist attractions are located along or near Ulica Długa (Long Street) and Długi Targ (Long Market), a pedestrian thoroughfare surrounded by buildings reconstructed in historical (primarily during the 17th century) style and flanked at both ends by elaborate city gates. This part of the city is sometimes referred to as the Royal Route, since it was once the former path of processions for visiting Kings of Poland.
Walking from end to end, sites encountered on or near the Royal Route include:
Highland Gate (Brama Wyżynna), which marks the beginning of the Royal Route
Torture House (Katownia) and Prison Tower (Wieża więzienna), now housing the Amber Museum (Muzeum Bursztynu)
Mansion of the Society of Saint George (Dwór Bractwa św. Jerzego)
Golden Gate (Złota Brama)
Ulica Długa ("Long Lane"), filled with picturesque tenements
Uphagen's House (Dom Uphagena), branch of the Museum of Gdańsk
Lion's Castle (Lwi Zamek)
Main Town Hall (Ratusz Głównego Miasta, built 1378–1492)
Długi Targ ("Long Market")
Artus' Court (Dwór Artusa)
Neptune's Fountain (Fontanna Neptuna), a masterpiece by architect Abraham van den Blocke, 1617.
New Jury House (Nowy Dom Ławy), in which the seemingly 17th-century Maiden in the Window appears every day during the tourist season, referring to a popular novel Panienka z okienka ("Maiden in the Window") by Jadwiga Łuszczewska, set in 17th-century Gdańsk
Golden House (Złota Kamienica), a distinctive Renaissance townhouse from the early 17th century, decorated with numerous reliefs and sculptures
Green Gate (Zielona Brama), a Mannerist gate, built as a formal residence of Polish kings, now housing a branch of the National Museum in Gdańsk
Gdańsk has a number of historical churches, including St. Catherine's Church and St. Mary's Church (Bazylika Mariacka). This latter is a municipal church built during the 15th century, and is the largest brick church in the world.
The city's 17th-century fortifications represent one of Poland's official national Historic Monuments (Pomnik historii), as designated on 16 September 1994 and tracked by the National Heritage Board of Poland.
Other main sights in the historical city centre include:
Royal Chapel of the Polish King John III Sobieski
Żuraw – medieval port crane
Gradowa Hill
Granaries on the Ołowianka and Granary Islands
Great Armoury
John III Sobieski Monument
Old Town Hall
Jan Heweliusz Monument
Great Mill (1350)
Small Mill
House of Research Society
Polish Post Office, site of the 1939 battle
brick gothic town gates, i.e. Mariacka Gate, Straganiarska Gate, Cow Gate
Main sights outside the historical city centre include:
Abbot's Palace in the Oliwa Park
Lighthouse in Nowy Port
Oliwa Cathedral
Pachołek Hill – an observation point in Oliwa
Pier in Brzeźno
Medieval city walls
Westerplatte
Wisłoujście Fortress
Gdańsk Zoo
Museums
National Museum (Muzeum Narodowe)
Department of Ancient Art – contains a number of important artworks, including Hans Memling's Last Judgement
Green Gate
Department of Modern Art – in the Abbot's Palace in Oliwa
Ethnography Department – in the Abbot's Granary in Oliwa
Gdańsk Photography Gallery
Historical Museum (Muzeum Historyczne Miasta Gdańska):
Main Town Hall
Artus' Court
Uphagen's House
Amber Museum (Muzeum Bursztynu)
Museum of the Polish Post (Muzeum Poczty Polskiej)
Wartownia nr 1 na Westerplatte
Museum of Tower Clocks (Muzeum Zegarów Wieżowych)
Wisłoujście Fortress
National Maritime Museum, Gdańsk (Narodowe Muzeum Morskie):
Żuraw Crane
Granaries in Ołowianka
museum ship SS Soldek is anchored on the Motława River and was the first ship built in post-war Poland.
European Solidarity Centre. Museum and library dedicated to the history of the Solidarity movement.
Archeological Museum (Muzeum Archeologiczne)
Gdańsk Nowy Port Lighthouse (Latarnia Morska Gdańsk Nowy Port)
Izba Pamięci Wincentego Pola w Gdańsku-Sobieszewie
Archdiocese Museum (Muzeum Archidiecezjalne)
Museum of the Second World War
Entertainment
Polish Baltic Philharmonic
Baltic Opera
Teatr Wybrzeże
Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre is a Shakespearean theatre built on the historical site of a 17th-century playhouse where English travelling players came to perform. The new theatre, completed in 2014, hosts the annual Gdańsk Shakespeare Festival.
Transport
Gdańsk Lech Wałęsa Airport – an international airport located in Gdańsk;
The Szybka Kolej Miejska, (SKM) the Fast Urban Railway, functions as a Metro system for the Tricity area including Gdańsk, Sopot and Gdynia, operating frequent trains to 27 stations covering the Tricity. The service is operated by electric multiple unit trains at a frequency of 6 minutes to 30 minutes between trains (depending on the time of day) on the central section between Gdańsk and Gdynia, and less frequently on outlying sections. The SKM system has been extended northwest of the Tricity, to Wejherowo, Lębork and Słupsk, west of Gdynia, and to the south it has been extended to Tczew, south of Gdańsk.
Railways: The principal station in Gdańsk is Gdańsk Główny railway station, served by both SKM local trains and PKP long-distance trains. In addition, long-distance trains also stop at Gdańsk Oliwa railway station, Gdańsk Wrzeszcz railway station, Sopot and Gdynia. Gdańsk also has nine other railway stations, served by local SKM trains;
Long-distance trains are operated by PKP Intercity which provides connections with all major Polish cities, including Warsaw, Kraków, Łódź, Poznań, Katowice and Szczecin, and with the neighbouring Kashubian Lakes region.
In 2011–2015 the Warsaw-Gdańsk-Gdynia railway route underwent a major upgrading costing $3 billion, partly funded by the European Investment Bank, including track replacement, realignment of curves and relocation of sections of track to allow speeds up to , modernization of stations, and installation of the most modern ETCS signalling system, which was completed in June 2015. In December 2014 new Alstom Pendolino high-speed trains were put into service between Gdańsk, Warsaw and Kraków reducing the rail travel time from Gdańsk to Warsaw to 2 hours 58 minutes, further reduced in December 2015 to 2 hours 39 minutes.
A new railway, Pomorska Kolej Metropolitalna (PKM, the 'Pomeranian Metropolitan Railway'), commenced service on 1 September 2015, connecting Gdańsk Lech Wałęsa Airport with Wrzeszcz and downtown Gdańsk. It connects to the Szybka Kolej Miejska (Tricity) (SKM) which provides further connections to the entire area served by SKM.
City buses and trams are operated by ZTM Gdańsk (Zarząd Transportu Miejskiego w Gdańsku).
From 1 October 2018 selected circuits of line 31 from PKT Gdynia go to bus stop Sopot Ergo Arena without trolley pole. Small part of this rote passes through Gdańsk.
Port of Gdańsk – a seaport located on the southern coast of Gdańsk Bay within the city;
Obwodnica Trojmiejska – part of expressway S6 that bypasses the cities of Gdańsk, Sopot and Gdynia.
The A1 motorway connects the port and city of Gdańsk with the southern border of the country. , some fragments of the A1 motorway are still incomplete.
Gdańsk is the starting point of the EuroVelo 9 cycling route which continues southward through Poland, then into the Czech Republic, Austria and Slovenia before ending at the Adriatic Sea in Pula, Croatia.
Additionally, Gdańsk is part of the Rail-2-Sea project. This project's objective is to connect the city with the Romanian Black Sea port of Constanța with a long railway line passing through Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania.
Sports
There are many popular professional sports teams in the Gdańsk and Tricity area. Amateur sports are played by thousands of Gdańsk citizens and also in schools of all levels (elementary, secondary, university).
The city's professional football club is Lechia Gdańsk. Founded in 1945, they play in the Ekstraklasa, Poland's top division. Their home stadium, Stadion Miejski, was one of the four Polish stadiums to host the UEFA Euro 2012 competition, as well as the host of the 2021 UEFA Europa League Final. Other notable football clubs are Gedania 1922 Gdańsk and SKS Stoczniowiec Gdańsk, which both played in the second tier in the past.
Other notable clubs include:
Speedway club Wybrzeże Gdańsk, which competes in the second tier as of 2020, but for decades competed in Poland's top division, most recently in 2014, where it finished 2nd in 1967, 1978 and 1985;
Rugby club Lechia Gdańsk, which competes in Poland's top division, 13 times Polish champions, most recently in 2014;
Handball club GKS Wybrzeże Gdańsk, which plays in the Poland's top division, 10 times Polish champions, most recently in 2001, two times European Cup runners up;
Ice Hockey club Stoczniowiec Gdańsk, which competes in Poland's top division, finishing 3rd in 2003;
Volleyball club Trefl Gdańsk, which competes in Poland's top division, and finished 2nd in 2015.
The city's Hala Olivia was a venue for the official 2009 EuroBasket, and the Ergo Arena was one of the 2013 Men's European Volleyball Championship, 2014 FIVB Volleyball Men's World Championship and 2016 European Men's Handball Championship venues.
Politics and local government
Contemporary Gdańsk is the capital of the province called Pomeranian Voivodeship and is one of the major centres of economic and administrative life in Poland. Many important agencies of the state and local government levels have their main offices here: the Provincial Administration Office, the Provincial Government, the Ministerial Agency of the State Treasury, the Agency for Consumer and Competition Protection, the National Insurance regional office, the Court of Appeals, and the High Administrative Court.
Regional centre
Gdańsk Voivodeship was extended in 1999 to include most of former Słupsk Voivodeship, the western part of Elbląg Voivodeship and Chojnice County from Bydgoszcz Voivodeship to form the new Pomeranian Voivodeship.
The area of the region was thus extended from and the population rose from 1,333,800 (1980) to 2,198,000 (2000). By 1998, Tricity constituted an absolute majority of the population; almost half of the inhabitants of the new region live in the centre.
Municipal government
Legislative power in Gdańsk is vested in a unicameral Gdańsk City council (Rada Miasta), which comprises 34 members. Council members are elected directly every four years. Like most legislative bodies, the City Council divides itself into committees which have the oversight of various functions of the city government.
City Council in 2002–2006
Civic Platform – 15 seats
Democratic Left Alliance – Labour Union – 6 seats
Law and Justice – 6 seats
League of Polish Families – 5 seats
Self-Defence of the Republic of Poland – 1 seat
Bogdan Borusewicz – 1 seat
City Council in 2006–2010
Civic Platform – 21 seats
Law and Justice – 13 seats
City Council in 2010–2014
Civic Platform – 26 seats
Law and Justice – 7 seats
Democratic Left Alliance – 1 seat
City Council in 2014–2018
Civic Platform – 22 seats
Law and Justice – 12 seats
City Council in 2018–2023
Civic Coalition – 15 seats
Law and Justice – 12 seats
All for Gdańsk – 7 seats
Districts
Gdańsk is divided into 34 administrative divisions: 6 and 28 . Gdańsk include Chełm, Piecki-Migowo, Przymorze Wielkie, Śródmieście, Wrzeszcz Dolny, Wrzeszcz Górny.
are Aniołki, Brętowo, Brzeźno, Jasień, Kokoszki, Krakowiec-Górki Zachodnie, Letnica, Matarnia, Młyniska, Nowy Port, Oliwa, Olszynka, Orunia-Św. Wojciech-Lipce, Osowa, Przeróbka, Przymorze Małe, Rudniki, Siedlce, Sobieszewo Island, Stogi, Strzyża, Suchanino, Ujeścisko-Łostowice, VII Dwór, Wzgórze Mickiewicza, Zaspa-Młyniec, Zaspa-Rozstaje, Żabianka-Wejhera-Jelitkowo-Tysiąclecia.
Education and science
There are 15 higher schools including three universities. In 2001 there were 60,436 students, including 10,439 graduates.
University of Gdańsk (Uniwersytet Gdański)
Gdańsk University of Technology (Politechnika Gdańska)
Gdańsk Medical University (Gdański Uniwersytet Medyczny)
Academy of Physical Education and Sport of Gdańsk (Akademia Wychowania Fizycznego i Sportu im. Jędrzeja Śniadeckiego)
Musical Academy (Akademia Muzyczna im. Stanisława Moniuszki)
Arts Academy (Akademia Sztuk Pięknych)
Institute of Fluid Flow Machinery of the Polish Academy of Sciences – Instytut Maszyn Przepływowych im. Roberta Szewalskiego PAN
Instytut Budownictwa Wodnego PAN
AteneumSzkoła Wyższa
Gdańska Wyższa Szkoła Humanistyczna
Gdańska Wyższa Szkoła Administracji
Wyższa Szkoła Społeczno-Ekonomiczna
Wyższa Szkoła Turystyki i Hotelarstwa w Gdańsku
Wyższa Szkoła Zarządzania
WSB Universities – WSB University in Gdańsk
Scientific and regional organizations
Gdańsk Scientific Society
Baltic Institute (Instytut Bałtycki), established 1925 in Toruń, since 1946 (?) in Gdańsk
TNOiK – Towarzystwo Naukowe Organizacji i Kierowania (Scientific Society for Organization and Management) O/Gdańsk
IBNGR – Instytut Badań nad Gospodarką Rynkową (The Gdańsk Institute for Market Economics)
International relations
Twin towns – sister cities
Gdańsk is twinned with:
Helsingør, Denmark
Bremen, Germany
Cleveland, United States
Kaliningrad, Russia
Kalmar, Sweden
Nice, France
Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan
Rotterdam, Netherlands
Saint Petersburg, Russia
Sefton, England, United Kingdom
Turku, Finland
Vilnius, Lithuania
Partnerships and cooperation
Gdańsk also cooperates with:
Ghent, Belgium
Le Havre, France
Marseille, France
Odessa, Ukraine
Gallery
Population after World War II
The 1923 census conducted in the Free City of Danzig indicated that of all inhabitants, 95% were German, and 3% were Polish and Kashubian. Subsequent inter-war statistics are subject of dispute. The end of World War II is a significant break in continuity with regard to the inhabitants of Gdańsk.
German citizens began to flee en masse as the Soviet Red Army advanced, composed of both spontaneous flights driven by rumors of Soviet atrocities, and organised evacuation starting in the summer of 1944 which continued into the spring of 1945. Approximately 1% (100,000) of the German civilian population residing east of the Oder–Neisse line perished in the fighting prior to the surrender in May 1945. German civilians were also sent as "reparations labour" to the Soviet Union.
Poles from other parts of Poland replaced the former German-speaking population, with the first settlers arriving in March 1945. On 30 March 1945, the Gdańsk Voivodeship was established as the first administrative Polish unit in the Recovered Territories. As of 1 November 1945, around 93,029 Germans remained within the city limits. The locals of German descent who declared Polish nationality were permitted to remain, as of 1 January 1949 13,424 persons who had received Polish citizenship in a post-war "ethnic vetting" process lived in Gdańsk.
The settlers can be grouped according to their background:
Poles that had been freed from forced labor in Nazi Germany
Repatriates: Poles expelled from the areas east of the new Polish-Soviet border. This included assimilated minorities such as the Polish-Armenian community
Poles incl. Kashubians relocating from nearby villages and small towns
Settlers from central Poland migrating voluntarily
non-Poles forcibly resettled during the Operation Vistula in 1947. Large numbers of Ukrainians were forced to move from south-eastern Poland under a 1947 Polish government operation aimed at dispersing, and therefore assimilating, those Ukrainians who had not been expelled eastward already, throughout the newly acquired territories. Belarusians living around the area around Białystok were also pressured into relocating to the formerly German areas for the same reasons. This scattering of members of non-Polish ethnic groups throughout the country was an attempt by the Polish authorities to dissolve the unique ethnic identity of groups like the Ukrainians, Belarusians and Lemkos, and broke the proximity and communication necessary for strong communities to form.
Jewish Holocaust survivors, most of them Polish repatriates from the Eastern Borderlands.
Greeks and Macedonians, refugees of the Greek Civil War.
Notable people
See also
Tourism in Poland
List of honorary citizens of Gdańsk
764 Gedania – a minor planet orbiting the Sun
Danzig Highflyer
Father Eugeniusz Dutkiewicz SAC Hospice
Kashubians
Kursenieki
List of neighbourhoods of Gdańsk
St. Mary's Church, Gdańsk
Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art
Ronald Reagan Park
Live in Gdańsk
Notes
References
Citations
Bibliography
External links
The official tourist service of the Marshal's Office of the Pomeranian Voivodeship
Virtual Gdańsk
Danzig
Gdańsk
European Jamboree 2020
The power of Gdansk article at The Globe and Mail
7 Reasons to Fall in Love with Gdańsk
980s establishments
Populated places established in the 10th century
Members of the Hanseatic League
City counties of Poland
Cities and towns in Pomeranian Voivodeship
Port cities and towns of the Baltic Sea
Geographical naming disputes
Holocaust locations in Poland
Nazi war crimes in Poland | [
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12100 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton | Graviton | In theories of quantum gravity, the graviton is the hypothetical quantum of gravity, an elementary particle that mediates the force of gravitational interaction. There is no complete quantum field theory of gravitons due to an outstanding mathematical problem with renormalization in general relativity. In string theory, believed to be a consistent theory of quantum gravity, the graviton is a massless state of a fundamental string.
If it exists, the graviton is expected to be massless because the gravitational force has a very long range, and appears to propagate at the speed of light. The graviton must be a spin-2 boson because the source of gravitation is the stress–energy tensor, a second-order tensor (compared with electromagnetism's spin-1 photon, the source of which is the four-current, a first-order tensor). Additionally, it can be shown that any massless spin-2 field would give rise to a force indistinguishable from gravitation, because a massless spin-2 field would couple to the stress–energy tensor in the same way that gravitational interactions do. This result suggests that, if a massless spin-2 particle is discovered, it must be the graviton.
Theory
It is hypothesized that gravitational interactions are mediated by an as yet undiscovered elementary particle, dubbed the graviton. The three other known forces of nature are mediated by elementary particles: electromagnetism by the photon, the strong interaction by gluons, and the weak interaction by the W and Z bosons. All three of these forces appear to be accurately described by the Standard Model of particle physics. In the classical limit, a successful theory of gravitons would reduce to general relativity, which itself reduces to Newton's law of gravitation in the weak-field limit.
History
The term graviton was originally coined in 1934 by Soviet physicists Dmitrii Blokhintsev and F.M. Gal'perin. A mediation of the gravitational interaction by particles was anticipated by Pierre-Simon Laplace. Just like Newton's anticipation of photons, Laplace's anticipated "gravitons" had a greater speed than c, the speed of gravitons expected in modern theories, and were not connected to quantum mechanics or special relativity, since these theories didn't yet exist during Laplace's lifetime.
Gravitons and renormalization
When describing graviton interactions, the classical theory of Feynman diagrams and semiclassical corrections such as one-loop diagrams behave normally. However, Feynman diagrams with at least two loops lead to ultraviolet divergences. These infinite results cannot be removed because quantized general relativity is not perturbatively renormalizable, unlike quantum electrodynamics and models such as the Yang–Mills theory. Therefore, incalculable answers are found from the perturbation method by which physicists calculate the probability of a particle to emit or absorb gravitons, and the theory loses predictive veracity. Those problems and the complementary approximation framework are grounds to show that a theory more unified than quantized general relativity is required to describe the behavior near the Planck scale.
Comparison with other forces
Like the force carriers of the other forces (see photon, gluon), gravitation plays a role in general relativity, in defining the spacetime in which events take place. In some descriptions energy modifies the "shape" of spacetime itself, and gravity is a result of this shape, an idea which at first glance may appear hard to match with the idea of a force acting between particles. Because the diffeomorphism invariance of the theory does not allow any particular space-time background to be singled out as the "true" space-time background, general relativity is said to be background-independent. In contrast, the Standard Model is not background-independent, with Minkowski space enjoying a special status as the fixed background space-time. A theory of quantum gravity is needed in order to reconcile these differences. Whether this theory should be background-independent is an open question. The answer to this question will determine our understanding of what specific role gravitation plays in the fate of the universe.
Gravitons in speculative theories
String theory predicts the existence of gravitons and their well-defined interactions. A graviton in perturbative string theory is a closed string in a very particular low-energy vibrational state. The scattering of gravitons in string theory can also be computed from the correlation functions in conformal field theory, as dictated by the AdS/CFT correspondence, or from matrix theory.
A feature of gravitons in string theory is that, as closed strings without endpoints, they would not be bound to branes and could move freely between them. If we live on a brane (as hypothesized by brane theories), this "leakage" of gravitons from the brane into higher-dimensional space could explain why gravitation is such a weak force, and gravitons from other branes adjacent to our own could provide a potential explanation for dark matter. However, if gravitons were to move completely freely between branes, this would dilute gravity too much, causing a violation of Newton's inverse-square law. To combat this, Lisa Randall found that a three-brane (such as ours) would have a gravitational pull of its own, preventing gravitons from drifting freely, possibly resulting in the diluted gravity we observe, while roughly maintaining Newton's inverse square law. See brane cosmology.
A theory by Ahmed Farag Ali and Saurya Das adds quantum mechanical corrections (using Bohm trajectories) to general relativistic geodesics. If gravitons are given a small but non-zero mass, it could explain the cosmological constant without need for dark energy and solve the smallness problem. The theory received an Honorable Mention in the 2014 Essay Competition of the Gravity Research Foundation for
explaining the smallness of cosmological constant. Also the theory received an Honorable Mention in the 2015 Essay Competition of the Gravity Research Foundation for naturally explaining the observed large-scale homogeneity and isotropy of the universe due to the proposed quantum corrections.
Energy and wavelength
While gravitons are presumed to be massless, they would still carry energy, as does any other quantum particle. Photon energy and gluon energy are also carried by massless particles. It is unclear which variables might determine graviton energy, the amount of energy carried by a single graviton.
Alternatively, if gravitons are massive at all, the analysis of gravitational waves yielded a new upper bound on the mass of gravitons. The graviton's Compton wavelength is at least , or about 1.6 light-years, corresponding to a graviton mass of no more than . This relation between wavelength and mass-energy is calculated with the Planck–Einstein relation, the same formula that relates electromagnetic wavelength to photon energy. However, if gravitons are the quanta of gravitational waves, then the relation between wavelength and corresponding particle energy is fundamentally different for gravitons than for photons, since the Compton wavelength of the graviton is not equal to the gravitational-wave wavelength. Instead, the lower-bound graviton Compton wavelength is about times greater than the gravitational wavelength for the GW170104 event, which was ~ 1,700 km. The report did not elaborate on the source of this ratio. It is possible that gravitons are not the quanta of gravitational waves, or that the two phenomena are related in a different way.
Experimental observation
Unambiguous detection of individual gravitons, though not prohibited by any fundamental law, is impossible with any physically reasonable detector. The reason is the extremely low cross section for the interaction of gravitons with matter. For example, a detector with the mass of Jupiter and 100% efficiency, placed in close orbit around a neutron star, would only be expected to observe one graviton every 10 years, even under the most favorable conditions. It would be impossible to discriminate these events from the background of neutrinos, since the dimensions of the required neutrino shield would ensure collapse into a black hole.
LIGO and Virgo collaborations' observations have directly detected gravitational waves. Others have postulated that graviton scattering yields gravitational waves as particle interactions yield coherent states. Although these experiments cannot detect individual gravitons, they might provide information about certain properties of the graviton. For example, if gravitational waves were observed to propagate slower than c (the speed of light in a vacuum), that would imply that the graviton has mass (however, gravitational waves must propagate slower than c in a region with non-zero mass density if they are to be detectable). Recent observations of gravitational waves have put an upper bound of on the graviton's mass. Astronomical observations of the kinematics of galaxies, especially the galaxy rotation problem and modified Newtonian dynamics, might point toward gravitons having non-zero mass.
Difficulties and outstanding issues
Most theories containing gravitons suffer from severe problems. Attempts to extend the Standard Model or other quantum field theories by adding gravitons run into serious theoretical difficulties at energies close to or above the Planck scale. This is because of infinities arising due to quantum effects; technically, gravitation is not renormalizable. Since classical general relativity and quantum mechanics seem to be incompatible at such energies, from a theoretical point of view, this situation is not tenable. One possible solution is to replace particles with strings. String theories are quantum theories of gravity in the sense that they reduce to classical general relativity plus field theory at low energies, but are fully quantum mechanical, contain a graviton, and are thought to be mathematically consistent.
See also
Gravitino
Dual graviton
Gravitoelectromagnetism
Multiverse
Planck mass
Static forces and virtual-particle exchange
References
External links
Bosons
Gauge bosons
Quantum gravity
String theory
Hypothetical elementary particles
Messenger particles | [
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12101 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6ta%20Canal | Göta Canal | The Göta Canal () was a Swedish canal constructed in the early 19th century.
The canal was long, of which were dug or blasted, with a width varying between and a maximum depth of about .
The Göta Canal was a part of a waterway long, linking a number of lakes and rivers to provide a route from Gothenburg (Göteborg) on the west coast to Söderköping on the Baltic Sea via the Trollhätte kanal and Göta älv river, through the large lakes Vänern and Vättern.
This waterway was dubbed as Sweden's Blue Ribbon ().
Contrary to the popular belief it was not correct to consider this waterway as a sort of greater Göta Canal: the Trollhätte Canal and the Göta Canal are completely separate entities.
History
The idea of a canal across southern Sweden was first put forward as early as 1516, by Hans Brask, the bishop of Linköping. However, it was not until the start of the 19th century that Brask's proposals were put into action by Baltzar von Platen, a German-born former officer in the Swedish Navy. He organised the project and obtained the necessary financial and political backing. His plans attracted the enthusiastic backing of the government and the new king, Charles XIII, who saw the canal as a way of kick-starting the modernisation of Sweden. Von Platen himself extolled the modernising virtues of the canal in 1806, claiming that mining, agriculture and other industries would benefit from "a navigation way through the country."
The project was inaugurated on 11 April 1810 with a budget of 24 million Swedish riksdalers. It was by far the greatest civil engineering project ever undertaken in Sweden up to that time, taking 22 years of effort by more than 58,000 workers. Much of the expertise and equipment had to be acquired from abroad, notably from Britain, whose canal system was the most advanced in the world at that time. The Scottish civil engineer Thomas Telford, renowned for his design of the Caledonian Canal in Scotland, developed the initial plans for the canal and travelled to Sweden in 1810 to oversee some of the early work on the route. Many other British engineers and craftsmen were imported to assist with the project, along with significant quantities of equipment - even apparently mundane items such as pickaxes, spades and wheelbarrows.
The Göta Canal was officially opened on 26 September 1832. Von Platen himself did not live to see the completion of the canal, having died shortly before its opening. However, the return on investment for the canal didn't live up to the hopes of the government. Bishop Hans Brask's original justifications for the canal's construction were the onerous Sound Dues imposed by Denmark–Norway on all vessels passing through the narrow Øresund channel between Sweden and Denmark and the trouble with the Hanseatic League. The canal enabled vessels travelling to or from the Baltic Sea to bypass the Øresund and so evade the Danish toll. In 1851, the tycoon André Oscar Wallenberg founded the Company for Swedish Canal Steamboat Transit Traffic to carry goods from England to Russia via the canal. However, it only ran two trips between St Petersburg and Hull via Motala before the Crimean War halted Anglo-Russian trade. After the war ended, the great powers pressured Denmark into ending the four-hundred-year-old tradition of the Sound Dues, thus eliminating at a stroke the canal's usefulness as an alternative to the Øresund.
The arrival of the railways in 1855 quickly made the canal redundant, as trains could carry passengers and goods far more rapidly and did not have to shut down with the arrival of winter, which made the canal impassable for five months of the year. By the 1870s, the canal's goods traffic had dwindled to just three major types of bulk goods - forest products, coal and ore, none of which required rapid transportation. Traffic volumes stagnated after that and never recovered.
The canal had one major industrial legacy in the shape of Motala Verkstad - a factory established in Motala to produce the machines such as cranes and steam dredgers that were needed to build the canal. This facility has sometimes been referred to as the "cradle of the Swedish engineering industry". After the canal was opened, Motala Verkstad focused on producing equipment, locomotives and rolling stock for the newly constructed railways, beginning a tradition of railway engineering that continues to this day in the form of AB Svenska Järnvägsverkstädernas Aeroplanavdelning (ASJA) that was bought by the aeroplane manufacturer SAAB in Linköping.
Description
These days the canal is primarily used as a tourist and recreational attraction. Around two million people visit the canal each year on pleasure cruises - either on own boats or on one of the many cruise ships - and related activities. The canal sometimes is ironically called the "divorce ditch" () because of the troubles that inexperienced couples have to endure while trying to navigate the narrow canal and the many locks by themselves.
Locks
The canal has 58 locks and can accommodate vessels up to long, wide and in draft.
From the east-coast of Sweden to Lake Vänern the locks are as follows (with meters of height difference per lock):
Mem, 3
Tegelbruket, 2.3
Söderköping, 2.4
Duvkullen nedre, 2.3
Duvkullen övre, 2.4
Mariehov nedre, 2.1
Mariehov övre, 2.6
Carlsborg nedre, 5.1
Carlsborg övre, 4.7
Klämman, open
Hulta, 3.2
Bråttom, 2.3
Norsholm, 0.8
Carl Johans slussar (seven locks), 18.8
Oskars slussar, 4.8
Karl Ludvig Eugéns slussar, 5.5
Brunnby, 5.3
Heda, 5.2
Borensberg, 0.2
Borenshult, 15.3
Motala, 0.1
Lake Vättern (88 m above sea level)
Forsvik, 3.5
Lake Viken (92 m above sea level – canal's highest point)
Tåtorp, 0.2
Hajstorp övre, 5.0
Hajstorp nedre, 5.1
Riksberg, 7.5
Godhögen, 5.1
Norrkvarn övre, 2.9
Norrkvarn nedre, 2.9
Sjötorp 7-8, 4.6
Sjötorp 6, 2.4
Sjötorp 4-5, 4.8
Sjötorp 2-3, 4.8
Sjötorp 1, 2.9
After Lake Vänern (44 m above sea level) Trollhätte kanal to Gothenburg and the west-coast of Sweden.
Canal vessel's measurements
Maximal ship or boat measurements:
Length: 30 m
Beam: 7 m
Draft: 2.8 m
Air draft: 22 m
Maximum speed: 5 knots
See also
List of government enterprises of Sweden
Bibliography and references
Eric de Maré, Swedish Cross Cut, Sweden, 1965. (In English)
External links
Göta Canal - Official site
Canals opened in 1832
19th century in Sweden
Canals in Sweden
Government-owned companies of Sweden
Tourist attractions in Sweden
Works of Thomas Telford
Historic Civil Engineering Landmarks | [
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12102 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General%20Motors | General Motors | General Motors Company (GM) is an American multinational automotive manufacturing corporation. Headquartered in Detroit, Michigan, the company is the largest automobile manufacturer based in the United States and one of the largest worldwide. It was the largest automaker worldwide for 77 consecutive years, from 1931 when it overtook Ford Motor Company, until 2008, when it was overtaken by Toyota.
General Motors is ranked 22nd on the Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue.
The company has manufacturing plants in 8 countries. Its four core automobile brands are Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, and Cadillac. It also holds interests in Chinese brands Wuling Motors and Baojun as well as DMAX via joint ventures. BrightDrop is the company's delivery-focused service. GM Defense serves military vehicles. OnStar provides vehicle safety, security and information services. ACDelco is the company's auto parts division. The company provides financing via GM Financial. The company is developing self-driving cars through its majority ownership in Cruise LLC.
GM intends to end production and sales of vehicles using internal combustion engines, including hybrid vehicles and plug-in hybrids, by 2035 as part of its plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2040. GM offers more flexible-fuel vehicles, which can operate on either E85 ethanol fuel or gasoline, or any blend of both, than any other automaker.
The company traces itself to a holding company for Buick established on September 16, 1908, by William C. Durant, the largest seller of horse-drawn vehicles at the time. The current entity was established in 2009 after the General Motors Chapter 11 reorganization.
Brands
History
William C. Durant's Durant-Dort Carriage Company, of Flint, Michigan, had become the largest manufacturer of horse-drawn vehicles in the United States by 1900. Durant was averse to automobiles, but fellow Flint businessman James H. Whiting, owner of Flint Wagon Works, sold him the Buick Motor Company in 1904. Durant formed General Motors Company in 1908 as a holding company, with partner Charles Stewart Mott, borrowing a naming convention from General Electric. GM's first acquisition was Buick, which Durant already owned, then Oldsmobile on November 12, 1908. In 1909, Durant's GM acquired in Cadillac, Elmore, Welch, Cartercar, Oakland (predecessor of Pontiac), and the Reliance Motor Truck Company of Owosso, Michigan and the Rapid Motor Vehicle Company of Pontiac, Michigan (predecessors of GMC). Durant, with the board's approval, tried acquiring Ford Motor Company in 1909 but needed an additional $2 million. Durant over-leveraged GM in making these acquisitions, and was removed by the board of directors in 1910 at the behest of the bankers who backed the loans to keep GM in business. The action of the bankers was partially influenced by the Panic of 1910–1911 that followed the earlier enforcement of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.
In 1911, Charles F. Kettering, with Henry M. Leland, of Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company (DELCO) invented and patented the first electric starter in America.
In November 1911 Durant co-founded Chevrolet with Swiss race car driver Louis Chevrolet, who left the company bearing his name in 1915 after a disagreement with Durant.
In 1916, GM was reincorporated in Detroit as General Motors Corporation and became a public company via an initial public offering. By 1917, Chevrolet had become successful enough that Durant, with the backing of Samuel McLaughlin and Pierre S. du Pont, reacquired a controlling interest in GM. Chevrolet Motor Company was consolidated into GM on May 2, 1918. In 1919, the company acquired Guardian Frigerator Company, part owned by Durant, which was renamed Frigidaire. In 1920, du Pont orchestrated the removal of Durant once again and replaced him with Alfred P. Sloan.
At a time when GM was competing heavily with Ford Motor Company, Sloan established annual model changes, making previous years' models "dated" and creating a market for used cars. He also implemented the pricing strategy that all car companies use today. The pricing strategy had Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac priced from least expensive to most, respectively.
In 1917, GM acquired Samson Tractor.
In 1918, GM acquired United Motors, a parts supplier founded by Durant and headed by Alfred P. Sloan, for $45 million. The McLaughlin Motor Car Company, founded by R. S. McLaughlin, became General Motors of Canada Limited.
In 1919, GM formed the General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC) to provide financing to automotive customers.
In 1921, Thomas Midgley Jr., an engineer for GM, discovered tetraethyllead (leaded gasoline) as an antiknock agent and GM patented the compound because ethanol could not be patented. This led to the development of higher compression engines resulting in more power and efficiency. The public later realized that lead in gasoline was harmful to various biological organisms including humans. Evidence shows that corporate executives understood the health implications of tetraethyllead from the beginning. Also as an engineer for GM, Midgley developed chlorofluorocarbons, which have now been banned due to their contribution to climate change.
In 1925, under the encouragement of GM President Alfred P. Sloan Jr., GM acquired Vauxhall Motors for $2.5 million. In 1925, the company acquired an interest in the Yellow Cab Manufacturing Company and its president, John D. Hertz joined the board of directors of GM; it acquired the remainder of the company in 1943.
In 1926, the company introduced the Pontiac brand.
In 1926, GM set up General Motors Group Insurance Program to provide life insurance to employees.
In 1927, after the success of the 1927 model of the Cadillac Lasalle designed by Harley Earl, Sloan created the “Art and Colour Section” of GM, and named Earl as its first director, making Earl the first top executive ever appointed in design of a major corporation in American history. Earl created a system of automobile design that is still practiced today.
In 1929, GM acquired 80% of Opel, which at that time had a 37.5% market share in Europe, for $26 million and acquired the remaining 20% of Opel in 1931.
In 1929, GM acquired Allison Engine Company and began developing a 1,000 horsepower liquid-cooled aircraft engine.
In the late-1920s, Charles Kettering embarked on a program to develop a lightweight two-stroke diesel engine for possible usage in automobiles.
In 1930, GM acquired Electro-Motive Company and the Winton Engine Co., and in 1941 it expanded EMC's realm to locomotive engine manufacturing.
In 1932, GM acquired Packard.
In 1933, GM acquired a controlling interest in North American Aviation and merged it with the General Aviation Manufacturing Corporation.
In 1935, the United Auto Workers labor union was formed, and in 1936 the UAW organized the Flint Sit-Down Strike, which initially idled two key plants in Flint, but later spread to 6 other plants including those in Janesville, Wisconsin and Fort Wayne, Indiana. In Flint, police attempted to enter the plant to arrest strikers, leading to violence; in other cities the plants were shuttered peacefully. The strike was resolved on February 11, 1937, when GM recognized the UAW as the exclusive bargaining representative for its workers and gave workers a 5% raise and permission to speak in the lunchroom.
In 1935, at the age of 24, Bill Mitchell was recruited by Harley Earl to the design team at GM and the following year he was appointed as Chief Designer of Cadillac. After Earl retired in December 1958, Mitchell took over automotive design for GM.
In 1937, Jominy & Boegehold of GM invented the Jominy end-quench test for hardenability of carbon steel, a breakthrough in heat treating still in use today as ASTM A255.
In 1938, GM established Detroit Diesel.
In 1939, the company founded Motors Insurance Corporation and entered the vehicle insurance market.
In 1939, GM introduced the Hydramatic, the world's first affordable and successful automatic transmission, for the 1940 Oldsmobile.
During World War II, GM produced vast quantities of armaments, vehicles, and aircraft for the Allies of World War II. In 1940, GM's William S. Knudsen served as head of U.S. wartime production for President Franklin Roosevelt and by 1942, all of GM's production was to support the war. GM's Vauxhall Motors manufactured the Churchill tank series for the Allies, instrumental in the North African campaign. However, its Opel division, based in Germany, supplied the Nazi Party with vehicles. Sloan, head of GM at the time, was an ardent opponent of the New Deal, which bolstered labor unions and public transport, and Sloan admired and supported Adolf Hitler. Nazi armaments chief Albert Speer allegedly said in 1977 that Hitler "would never have considered invading Poland" without synthetic fuel technology provided by General Motors. GM was compensated $32 million by the U.S. government because its German factories were bombed by U.S. forces during the war.
Effective January 28, 1953, Charles Erwin Wilson, then GM president, was named by Dwight D. Eisenhower as United States Secretary of Defense.
In December 1953, GM acquired Euclid Trucks, a manufacturer of heavy equipment for earthmoving, including dump trucks, loaders and wheel tractor-scrapers, which later spawned the Terex brand.
In April 1956, Alfred P. Sloan retired as chairman and was succeeded by Albert Bradley.
In 1962, GM introduced the first turbo charged engine in the world for a car in the Oldsmobile Cutlass Turbo-Jetfire.
In 1966, GM released the Electrovan, the first hydrogen fuel cell car ever produced. Though fuel cells have been around since the early 1800s, General Motors was the first to use a fuel cell, supplied by Union Carbide, to power the wheels of a vehicle with a budget of "millions of dollars".
In the 1960s, GM was the first to use turbochargers and was an early proponent of V6 engines but quickly lost interest as popularity of muscle cars increased. GM demonstrated gas turbine vehicles powered by kerosene, an area of interest throughout the industry, but abandoned the alternative engine configuration due to the 1973 oil crisis.
In 1971, in partnership with Boeing, GM's Delco Defense Electronics Division designed the Lunar Roving Vehicle, which traversed the surface of the Moon.
In 1972, GM produced the first rear wheel anti-lock braking system for two models: the Toronado and Eldorado.
In 1973, the Oldsmobile Toronado was the first retail sold car with a passenger airbag.
In November 1974, Thomas Murphy became CEO of the company, succeeding Richard C. Gerstenberg.
In 1974, for its 1975 models, GM installed its first catalytic converters.
From 1978 to 1985, GM pushed the benefits of diesel engines and cylinder deactivation technologies. However, it had disastrous results due to poor durability in the Oldsmobile diesels and drivability issues in the Cadillac V8-6-4 variable-cylinder engines.
In 1979, the company sold Frigidaire, which had between $450 million and $500 million in annual revenues but was losing money.
In 1984, Robert Lee of GM invented the Fe14Nd2B permanent magnet, fabricated by rapid solidification.
In 1984, GM acquired Electronic Data Systems from Ross Perot for $2.5 billion as part of a strategy by CEO Roger Smith to derive at least 10% of its annual worldwide revenue from nonautomotive sources. GM also intended to have EDS handle its bookkeeping, help computerize factories, and integrate GM's computer systems. The transaction made Ross Perot the largest shareholder of GM; however, disagreements with Roger Smith led the company to buy all shares held by Ross Perot for $750 million in 1986.
In 1985, in a continuation of its diversification plans, GMAC formed GMAC Mortgage and acquired Colonial Mortgage as well as the servicing arm of Norwest Mortgage, which included an $11 billion mortgage portfolio.
In 1985, GM also acquired Hughes Aircraft Company for $5 billion in cash and stock and merged it into Delco Electronics.
In 1986, GM acquired 59.7% of Lotus Cars, a British producer of high-performance sports cars.
In 1987, in conjunction with AeroVironment, GM built the Sunraycer, which won the inaugural World Solar Challenge and was a showcase of advanced technology. Much of the technology from Sunraycer found its way into the Impact prototype electric vehicle (also built by Aerovironment) and was the predecessor to the General Motors EV1.
In 1988, GM acquired a 15% stake in AeroVironment.
In 1989, GM acquired half of Saab Automobile's car operations for $600 million.
In August 1990, Robert Stempel became CEO of the company, succeeding Roger Smith. GM cut output significantly and suffered losses that year due to the early 1990s recession.
In 1990, GM debuted the General Motors EV1 (Impact) concept, a battery electric vehicle, at the LA Auto Show. It was the first car with zero-emissions marketed in the US in over three decades. The Impact was produced as the EV1 for the 1996 model year and was available through only via lease from certain dealers in California and Arizona. In 1999–2002, GM ceased production of the vehicles and started to not renew the leases, disappointing many people, allegedly because the program would not be profitable and would cannibalize its existing business. All of the EV1s were eventually returned to General Motors and, with the exception of around 40 which were donated to museums with their electric powertrains deactivated, all were destroyed. The documentary film Who Killed the Electric Car? covered the EV1 story.
In November 1992, John F. Smith Jr. became CEO of the company.
In 1993, GM sold Lotus Cars to Bugatti.
In 1996, in a return to its automotive basics, GM completed the corporate spin-off of Electronic Data Systems.
In 1997, GM sold the military businesses of Hughes Aircraft Company to Raytheon Company for $9.5 billion in stock and the assumption of debt.
In February 2000, Rick Wagoner was named CEO, succeeding John F. Smith Jr.
In March 2000, GM gave 5.1% of its common stock, worth $2.4 billion, to acquire a 20% share of Fiat.
In May 2004, GM delivered the first full-sized pickup truck hybrid vehicles, the 1/2-ton Chevrolet Silverado/GMC Sierra. These mild hybrids did not use electrical energy for propulsion, like GM's later designs.
In 2004, the company debuted a hybrid technology, co-developed with DaimlerChrysler and BMW, in diesel-electric hybrid powertrain manufactured by Allison Transmission for transit buses.
In January 2005, the Opel Astra diesel engine Hybrid concept vehicle was introduced.
In April 2005, GM sold its Electro-Motive Diesel locomotive division to private equity firms Berkshire Partners and Greenbriar Equity Group.
In 2005, after the partnership with Fiat resulted in an increasingly contentious dispute, GM paid $2 billion to sever its ties with Fiat.
In mid-2005, GM began adding its "Mark of Excellence" emblem on all new vehicles produced and sold in North America. However, after the reorganization in 2009, the company no longer added the logo, saying that emphasis on its four core divisions would downplay the GM logo.
In 2005, Edward T. Welburn, was promoted to the newly created position of vice president, GM Global Design, making him the first African American to lead a global automotive design organization, and the highest ranking African American in the US motor industry at that time. On July 1, 2016, he retired from General Motors after 44 years. He was replaced by Michael Simcoe.
In 2006, GM introduced a bright yellow gas cap on its vehicles to remind drivers that cars can operate using E85 ethanol fuel.
In January 2006, GM introduced the 2006 Saturn Vue Green Line, a hybrid vehicle.
In 2008, General Motors committed to engineering half of its manufacturing plants to be landfill-free. In order to achieve its landfill-free status, production waste is recycled or reused in the manufacturing process.
Starting in 2008, GM offered the 2-mode hybrid system in the Chevrolet Tahoe, GMC Yukon, Cadillac Escalade, and pickup trucks.
In late 2008, the world's largest rooftop solar power installation was installed at GM's manufacturing plant in Zaragoza. The Zaragoza solar installation has about of roof at the plant and contains about 85,000 solar panels. The installation was created, owned and operated by Veolia Environment and Clairvoyant Energy, which leases the rooftop area from GM.
Chapter 11 bankruptcy and bailout
In March 2009, after the company had received $17.4 billion in bailouts but was not effective in a turnaround, President Barack Obama forced the resignation of CEO Rick Wagoner.
General Motors filed for a government-backed Chapter 11 reorganization on June 8, 2009. On July 10, 2009, the original General Motors sold assets and some subsidiaries to an entirely new company, including the trademark "General Motors". Liabilities were left with the original GM, renamed Motors Liquidation Company, freeing the companies of many liabilities and resulting in a new GM.
Through the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the United States Department of the Treasury invested $49.5 billion in General Motors and recovered $39 billion when it sold its shares on December 9, 2013, resulting in a loss of $10.3 billion. The Treasury invested an additional $17.2 billion into GM's former financing company, GMAC (now Ally Financial). The shares in Ally were sold on December 18, 2014, for $19.6 billion netting the government $2.4 billion in profit, including dividends. A study by the Center for Automotive Research found that the GM bailout saved 1.2 million jobs and preserved $34.9 billion in tax revenue.
In 2009, the company shut down its Saturn Corporation and Pontiac brands after failing to find a buyer for the brands, and sold Hummer to Tengzhong.
General Motors Canada was not part of the General Motors Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Post-reorganization
In June 2009, at the request of Steven Rattner, lead adviser to President Barack Obama on the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry, Edward Whitacre Jr., who had led a restructuring of AT&T was named chairman of the company.
In July 2009, after 40 days of bankruptcy protection, the company emerged from the government-backed General Motors Chapter 11 reorganization.
In December 2009, the board of directors forced CEO Frederick Henderson to resign and Edward Whitacre Jr. was named interim CEO.
In 2010, GM acquired Americredit, a subprime lender, for $3.5 billion, which was merged into GM Financial.
In November 2010, GM again became a public company via an initial public offering that was one of the world's top five largest IPOs to date.
The company returned to profitability in 2010.
In January 2010, GM sold Saab Automobile to Dutch automaker Spyker Cars.
In May 2010, the company repaid a $6.7 billion loan from the government ahead of schedule.
In September 2010, Daniel Akerson became CEO of the company.
In 2010, GM introduced the Chevrolet Volt as an extended-range electric vehicle (EREV), an electric vehicle with back-up generators powered by gasoline, or series plug-in hybrid. GM delivered the first Volt in December 2010. The Chevrolet Volt was a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle with back-up generators powered by gasoline (range-extended electric vehicle). General Motors built a prototype two-seat electric vehicle with Segway Inc. An early prototype of the Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility vehicle—dubbed Project P.U.M.A. – was presented in New York at the 2009 New York International Auto Show.
In July 2011, General Motors invested $7.5 million in solar-panel provider Sunlogics to install solar panels on GM facilities.
In October 2011, GM introduced the Chevrolet Spark EV, an all-electric car version of the third generation Chevrolet Spark, the first all-electric passenger car marketed by General Motors in the U.S. since the General Motors EV1 was discontinued in 1999. The production version was unveiled at the 2012 Los Angeles Auto Show. The Chevrolet Spark was released in the U.S. in selected markets in California and Oregon in June 2013. Retail sales began in South Korea in October 2013.
In 2011, GM revived one of its idled U.S. factories for the production of a subcompact car in Orion, Michigan, with the creation of 1,500 jobs. This was the first time that GM produced a subcompact car in the United States since the Chevrolet Chevette ended production in 1986. Production started in late 2011 with the Chevrolet Sonic. GM ended production of the Sonic at Orion Assembly on October 19, 2020.
In 2012, PSA Group and General Motors formed an alliance and GM acquired 7% of PSA Group. The ownership was divested on December 13, 2013, generating gross proceeds of €250 million.
On July 2, 2013, GM and Honda announced a partnership to develop fuel cell systems and hydrogen storage technologies for the 2020 time frame. GM and Honda are leaders in fuel cell technology, ranking first and second, respectively, in total fuel cell patents filed between 2002 and 2012, with more than 1,200 between them according to the Clean Energy Patent Growth Index.
In late 2013, after having lost approximately $18 billion over 12 years, GM began phasing out mainstream sales of Chevrolet in Europe, and finished by late 2015, to focus on Opel/Vauxhall. The Chevrolet brand had been reintroduced in Europe in 2005, selling mostly rebranded Daewoo Motors cars acquired by GM Korea.
On January 15, 2014, Mary Barra was named chief executive officer, succeeding Daniel Akerson. Barra also joined the GM board.
The 2014 General Motors recall, which was due to faulty ignition switches, and was linked to at least 124 deaths, was estimated to cost the company $1.5 billion.
In October 2015, the second-generation Volt was launched in the United States and Canada. The second generation had an upgraded drivetrain and improved battery system that increased the all-electric range from .
On January 4, 2016, GM invested $500 million in Lyft. This was GM's first investment in ride-sharing.
In March 2016, General Motors acquired Cruise, a San Francisco self-driving vehicle start-up, to develop self-driving cars that could be used in ride-sharing fleets.
In October 2016, GM began production of the Chevrolet Bolt EV, the first ever mass market all-electric car with a range of more than . The battery pack and most drivetrain components were built by LG Corporation and assembled in GM's plant in Lake Orion, Michigan.
In December 2016, General Motors began testing self-driving vehicles on public roads in Michigan after Governor Rick Snyder signed bills legalizing the operation of autonomous vehicles.
In 2017, GM introduced its Super Cruise autopilot feature into certain models of its cars.
On March 6, 2017, General Motors sold its Opel and Vauxhall brands to PSA Group for $2.3 billion.
On April 20, 2017, the Government of Venezuela seized the General Motors Venezolana plant in Valencia, Carabobo.
In October 2017, GM acquired Strobe, a solid state LIDAR company. Strobe's prototypes produce brief "chirps" of frequency-modulated (FM) laser light, where the frequency within each chirp varies linearly. Measuring the phase and frequency of the echoing chirp allows the system to directly measure both the distance and the velocity of objects in the road ahead. Strobe, Cruise and GM will work together to develop the technology for future self-driving cars.
In October 2018, Honda invested $2.75 billion in GM's self-driving car unit, including an initial investment of $275 million, followed by $2 billion within a year.
In November 2018, GM announced it would lay off more than 14,000 employees in North America, comprising 15% of its workforce and 25% of its executive staff in the region. The company ceased production at three assemblies: Lordstown Assembly in Ohio, Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly in Michigan and Oshawa in Canada and two engine/transmission (White Marsh, Maryland, and Warren, Michigan) plants in 2019.
In March 2019, GM ceased production of the Chevrolet Volt.
In March 2019, the company announced that it would begin production of a new EV model in Lake Orion, Michigan.
In May 2019, General Motors received pushback on its plan to release a fleet of up to 2,500 modified Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicles. The company planned to release these vehicles by Q4 of 2019 as part of initiatives to build a controlled self-driving fleet.
In November 2019, GM sold its former Chevy Cruze plant in Lordstown, Ohio to Lordstown Motors.
In January 2020, GM announced the return of the Hummer nameplate as a series of electric vehicles to be sold from within the GMC portfolio, known as the GMC Hummer EV. The first vehicle, a pickup truck variant with over 1,000 horsepower, shipped in December 2021.
On March 21, 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, General Motors began assisting Ventec Life Systems to produce ventilators.
In April 2020, the company shut down Maven, a car-sharing service in the United States.
In September 2020, GM announced a partnership with Nikola Corporation to engineer and manufacture the Nikola Badger and GM made an equity investment in Nikola. The Badger will use GM's Ultium battery technology, and GM will be an exclusive fuel cell supplier for all of Nikola's class 7/8 trucks. Following fraud allegations from short-seller Hindenburg Research in relation to the mechanical capabilities of the Badger pickup truck along with separate sexual misconduct allegations involving former CEO Trevor Milton, GM scaled back its investment with Nikola via a smaller revised deal.
In September 2020, GM and Honda announced an alliance to cooperate on purchasing, research, and vehicle development.
In November 2020, GM committed to increased capital investment in electric vehicles to over half of new capital expenditures, totaling $27 billion over five years.
On January 8, 2021, GM introduced a new logo alongside a tagline "EVerybody in", with the capitalized "EV" as a nod to the company's commitment to electric vehicles. GM's new logo used negative space to create the idea of an electric plug in the "M" of the logo.
At the January 2021 Consumer Electronics Show, GM launched BrightDrop, its brand for all-electric commercial vehicles.
On January 28, 2021, GM announced that it will end production and sales of fossil-fuel vehicles (including hybrids and plug-in hybrids) by 2035 as part of its plan to reach carbon neutrality by 2040.
In 2021, GM announced plans to establish an automotive battery and battery pack laboratory in Michigan. GM will be responsible for battery management systems and power electronics, thermal management, as well as the pack assembly. An existing GM facility at Brownstown Township was chosen to be upgraded as battery pack plant. LG Chem's U.S. subsidiary, Compact Power of Troy, Michigan, has been building the prototype packs for the development vehicles and will continue to provide integration support and act as a liaison for the program.
in April 2021, after being criticized for not advertising enough in black-owned businesses, General Motors said that it will spend 2% of 2021's advertising budget in Black-owned media and 4% in 2022 until reaching 8% in 2025.
In April 2021, GM announced plans alongside with LG to build a $2.3 billion plant to build batteries for electric vehicles.
In November 2021, GM acquired a 25% stake in Pure Watercraft, a producer of all-electric boats.
General Motors has launched the largest investment project in its home state of Michigan, announcing plans to invest $7 billion to convert a plant to produce electric cars and build a new battery plant. Besides that General Motors has announced investment of $154 million into its Western New York Lockport Components plant.
Other international history
China
For the Chinese market, most of its cars are manufactured within China. Shanghai GM, a joint venture with the Chinese company SAIC Motor, was created with Canadian Regal in 1990 on March 25, 1997. The Shanghai GM plant was officially opened on December 15, 1998, when the first Chinese-built Buick came off the assembly line. The SAIC-GM-Wuling Automobile joint-venture is also selling microvans under the Wuling brand (34% owned by GM).
Buick is strong in China from early introduction by the Canadian Buick sold to the last Emperor of China, later being led by the Buick Regal 1990 subcompact. The last emperor of China owned a Buick.
The Cadillac brand was introduced in China in 2004, starting with exports to China. GM pushed the marketing of the Chevrolet brand in China in the mid-2000s as well. As part of this push, GM transferred Buick Sail to that brand as an attempt to appeal to Chinese middle-class buyers looking for small and affordable cars.
In August 2009, FAW-GM, a joint venture between GM and FAW Group that mainly produced FAW Jiefang light-duty trucks, was formed. GM left the joint venture in 2019, and the Jiefang brand is now wholly owned by FAW.
In 2011, GM opened an auto research center as part of a US250 million corporate campus in Shanghai to develop gasoline-hybrid cars, electric vehicles and alternative fuel vehicles, engines, and new technologies. A second phase opened in 2012.
SAIC-GM-Wuling established the low-cost Baojun brand to better compete with domestic rivals, Chery Automobile, Geely Automobile and BYD Auto for first-time buyers of cars priced around US$10,000.
Japan
GM maintains a dealership presence in Japan, called GM Chevrolet Shop, previously known as GM Auto World Shop. Current GM Japan dealerships were either former Saturn dealerships or Isuzu dealership locations. GM products are also currently sold by the company Yanase Co., Ltd. since 1915.
Indonesia
In August 2011, GM announced plans to build a $150 million 190,300 square-foot plant in Bekasi, West Java, Indonesia, which would produce 40,000 passenger cars per year for the Southeast Asian market. The plant opened on March 11, 2013. The plant was shut in 2015.
GM withdrew from Indonesia in March 2020. However, GM continues to sell the Wuling and Baojun badged vehicles in Indonesia through the SAIC-GM-Wuling joint venture.
South Korea
In October 2011, the South Korea free trade agreement opened the South Korean auto market to American made cars. GM owns 77.0% of its joint venture in South Korea, GM Korea, which mainly designs and produces Chevrolet and Holden branded vehicles.
In 2011, GM discontinued the Daewoo brand in South Korea and replaced it with the Chevrolet brand.
In 2018, the company approached the Korea Development Bank to participate in a $2.7 billion debt swap issued by its Korean subsidiary.
In February 2018, General Motors shut one factory in South Korea. The plant was affected by the pullout of the Chevrolet brand from Europe.
Uzbekistan
In 2008, GM Uzbekistan was established, owned 25% by GM. It produced Ravon, Chevrolet, and Daewoo branded vehicles. This interest was sold to the Government of Uzbekistan in 2019.
India
In 1928, GM became the first car maker to manufacture cars in India. GM entered the market for the second time in 1996. The older Halol, Gujarat plant with a capacity for 50,000 units stopped production on April 28, 2017, and was sold to MG Motor India. GM continues to manufacture cars for the export market from its Talegaon Dhamdhere, Maharashtra plant, which has a capacity of 160,000 units annually.
Thailand
GM stopped production of the Chevrolet Sonic in Thailand in mid-2015.
In February 2020, GM discontinued the Chevrolet brand in Thailand. GM withdrew from the Thai market and sold its Rayong plant to Great Wall Motors.
Egypt
GM has a long history in Egypt which began in the 1920s with the assembly of cars and light pickup trucks for the local market. In the mid of the 1950s, GM withdrew from the Egyptian market. Some years later, the Ghabbour Brothers began to assemble Cadillac, Chevrolet and Buick models up to the 1990s.
Since 1983, GM and Al-Monsour Automotive have owned General Motors Egypt, which is currently the only manufacturer of traditional GM branded vehicles in Egypt.
Nigeria
In the 1920s Miller Brothers Nigeria was founded as an importer of commercial vehicles of the Bedford brand into the country. In 1949, the company opened its own assembly plant and operated under the name Niger/Nigeria Motors. In 1965 the plant and its distribution network were split into different companies and renamed as Federated Motors Industries. In 1991 the company was taken in by a joint venture between General Motors and UACN of Nigeria.
Tunisia
In 1982, GM formed Industries Mécaniques Maghrébines, which built a plant in Kairouan, Tunisia.
East Africa
Formed in 1975, General Motors East Africa (GMEA) was the largest assembler of commercial vehicles in the region exporting them from Kenya to East and Central African countries including Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, Rwanda and Burundi. Its facility located in Nairobi assembled a wide range of Isuzu trucks and buses including the popular Isuzu N-Series versatile light commercial vehicle, TF Series pick-ups and Isuzu bus chassis. In addition to assembly, GMEA also marketed the Chevrolet Spark and Optra. In 2017, GM sold its 57.7% stake in General Motors East Africa to Isuzu, and GMEA was renamed Isuzu East Africa Limited.
South Africa
General Motors began operating in South Africa in 1913 through its wholly owned subsidiary, General Motors South Africa and was a market that briefly had its own local brand, Ranger. Following the passage of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act in 1986, GM was forced to divest from South Africa, and GMSA became the independent Delta Motor Corporation. GM purchased a 49% stake in Delta in 1997 following the end of apartheid, and acquired the remaining 51% in 2004, reverting the company to its original name. By 2014, it was targeting the production of 50,000 cars a year but was being hampered by national labor unrest, strikes, and protests. GM exited the South Africa market in 2017, selling its parts business to Isuzu.
New Zealand
In New Zealand, GM locally assembled Chevrolet, Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac, and Pontiac vehicles from 1926, and Vauxhall cars from 1931. After World War II, the local production of Chevrolet and Vauxhalls resumed followed by Pontiac in 1959. In 1954, sales of fully imported Holden vehicles into New Zealand began. New Zealand assembly of Holdens began in 1957 and by the end of the 1960s Holdens replaced all Chevrolets and Pontiacs (both in 1968), and most Vauxhalls. Opel, Bedford, and Isuzu, vehicles were assembled or imported at different times during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. All local General Motors assembly plants in New Zealand closed by 1990. GM New Zealand was renamed Holden New Zealand in 1994.
Australia
In 1926, GM formed an Australian subsidiary, General Motors (Australia) Limited, which imported, distributed and assembled General Motors products. The bodies were manufactured at an Adelaide-based family business, Holden's Motor Body Builders, which had built up its operations with the help of tariff protection and amicable relations with trade unions. During the Great Depression, Holden's Motor Body Builders collapsed, which allowed General Motors to acquire Holden, becoming General Motors-Holden [GMH] in 1931. In 1948, the first fully manufactured Australian car, the Holden 48-215, was released to great fanfare amongst the Australian public. It was marketed as "Australia's Own" Holden, and became an iconic feature of post-war Australian culture.
In 2012, GM established Opel as a niche marque in Australia and began to sell Opel branded cars in Australia. However, in August 2013, less than twelve months later, sales of Opel ceased due to low sales.
On December 10, 2013, GM announced that Holden would cease manufacturing operations in Australia by the end of 2017.
In 2020, GM discontinued the Holden brand due to poor reception and sales, shutting the facilities where they were produced. GM continues to export some Buick, Chevrolet, Cadillac, and GMC vehicles through a new entity called General Motors Specialty Vehicles.
Motorsports history
GM participated in the World Touring Car Championship (WTCC) from 2004 to 2012, and has also participated in other motorsport championships, including 24 Hours of Le Mans, NASCAR, SCCA and Supercars Championship.
GM's engines were successful in the Indy Racing League (IRL) throughout the 1990s, winning many races in the small V8 class. GM has also done much work in the development of electronics for GM auto racing. An unmodified Aurora V8 in the Aerotech, captured 47 world records, including the record for speed endurance in the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America. Recently, the Cadillac V-Series has entered motorsports racing.
GM has also designed cars specifically for use in NASCAR auto racing. The Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 is the only entry in the series. In the past, the Pontiac Grand Prix, Buick Regal, Oldsmobile Cutlass, Chevrolet Lumina, Chevrolet Malibu, Chevrolet Monte Carlo, Chevrolet Impala, and the Chevrolet SS were also used. GM has won many NASCAR Cup Series manufacturer's championships, including 40 with Chevrolet, the most of any make in NASCAR history, 3 with Oldsmobile, 2 with Buick, and 1 with Pontiac. In 2021, Chevrolet became the first brand to reach 800 wins.
In Australia, the Supercars Championship included Holden cars based on the Holden Commodore running a 5.0-litre V8-cylinder engine producing . These cars had a top speed of and ran 0–100 km/h in 3.8 seconds. The Holden Racing Team, now known as Walkinshaw Andretti United, is the most successful team in Australian touring car history. The drivers' championship was won by the closely linked, now defunct, HSV Dealer Team in 2006 and 2007.
Financial results
Vehicle sales
General Motors was the largest global automaker by annual vehicle sales for 77 consecutive years, from 1931 when it overtook Ford Motor Company, until 2008, when it was overtaken by Toyota. This reign was longer than any other automaker, and GM is still among the world's largest automakers by vehicle unit sales.
In 2008, the third-largest individual country by sales was Brazil with some 550,000 GM vehicles sold. In that year Argentina, Colombia, and Venezuela sold another 300,000 GM vehicles, suggesting that the total GM sales in South America (including sales in other South American countries such as Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, etc.) in that year were at a similar level to sales in China.
In 2009, General Motors sold 6.5 million cars and trucks globally; in 2010, it sold 8.39 million. Sales in China rose 66.9% in 2009 to 1,830,000 vehicles and accounting for 13.4% of the market.
In 2010, General Motors ranked second worldwide with 8.5 million vehicles produced. In 2011, GM returned to the first place with 9.025 million units sold worldwide, corresponding to 11.9% market share of the global motor vehicle industry. In 2010, vehicle sales in China by GM rose 28.8% to a record 2,351,610 units. The top two markets in 2011 were China, with 2,547,203 units, and the United States, with 2,503,820 vehicles sold. The Chevrolet brand was the main contributor to GM performance, with 4.76 million vehicles sold around the world in 2011, a global sales record.
Based on global sales in 2012, General Motors was ranked among the world's largest automakers.
In May 2012, GM recorded an 18.4% market share in the U.S. with stock imported.
Annual worldwide sales volume reached 10 million vehicles in 2016. Sales in India for April 2016 – March 2017 declined to 25,823 units from 32,540 the previous year and market share contracted from 1.17% to 0.85% for the same period. However, exports surged 89% during the same period to 70,969 units. GMTC-I, GM's technical center in Bangalore, India continued in operation. Weak product line-up and below par service quality were the reasons for the poor showing by GM in India that year.
Global Volt/Ampera family sales totaled about 177,000 units from its inception in December 2010 through 2018. including over 10,000 Opel/Vauxhall Amperas sold in Europe up to December 2015. The Volt family of vehicles ranked as the world's all-time top-selling plug-in hybrid , and it is also the third best selling plug-in electric car in history after the Nissan Leaf (375,000) and the Tesla Model S (253,000), . The Chevrolet Volt is also the U.S. all-time top-selling plug-in electric car with 148,556 units delivered through October 2018.
Management
Current board of directors
Notable members of the board of directors of the company are as follows:
Chairmen of the Board of General Motors
Thomas Neal—November 19, 1912 – November 16, 1915
Pierre S. du Pont—November 16, 1915 – February 7, 1929
Lammot du Pont II—February 7, 1929 – May 3, 1937
Alfred P. Sloan Jr.—May 3, 1937 – April 2, 1956
Albert Bradley—April 2, 1956 – August 31, 1958
Frederic G. Donner—September 1, 1958 – October 31, 1967
James M. Roche—November 1, 1967 – December 31, 1971
Richard C. Gerstenberg—January 1, 1972 – November 30, 1974
Thomas A. Murphy—December 1, 1974 – December 31, 1980
Roger B. Smith—January 1, 1981 – July 31, 1990
Robert C. Stempel—August 1, 1990 – November 1, 1992
John G. Smale—November 2, 1992 – December 31, 1995
John F. Smith Jr.—January 1, 1996 – April 30, 2003
Rick Wagoner—May 1, 2003 – March 30, 2009
Kent Kresa—March 30, 2009 – July 10, 2009
Edward Whitacre Jr.—July 10, 2009 – December 31, 2010
Daniel Akerson—December 31, 2010 – January 15, 2014
Tim Solso—January 15, 2014 – January 4, 2016
Mary Barra—January 4, 2016 – Present
Chief Executive Officers of General Motors
Chief Executive Officers of General Motors
Alfred P. Sloan Jr.—May 10, 1923 – June 3, 1946
Charles Erwin Wilson—June 3, 1946 – January 26, 1953
Harlow H. Curtice—February 2, 1953 – August 31, 1958
James M. Roche—November 1, 1967 – December 31, 1971
Richard C. Gerstenberg—January 1, 1972 – November 30, 1974
Thomas A. Murphy—December 1, 1974 – December 31, 1980
Roger B. Smith—January 1, 1981 – July 31, 1990
Robert C. Stempel—August 1, 1990 – November 1, 1992
John F. Smith Jr.—November 2, 1992 – May 31, 2000
Rick Wagoner—June 1, 2000 – March 30, 2009
Frederick Henderson—March 30, 2009 – December 1, 2009
Edward Whitacre Jr.—December 1, 2009 – September 1, 2010
Daniel Akerson—September 1, 2010 – January 15, 2014
Mary Barra—January 15, 2014 – Present
Philanthropy
GM publishes an annual Social Impact Report detailing its contributions to charity; in 2020 it provided nearly $35 million in funding to 357 U.S.-based nonprofits as well as in-kind assets (primarily donations of vehicles) to nonprofits valued at more than $9.8 million. From 1976 until 2017, philanthropic activity was carried out via the General Motors Foundation, a 501(c)(3) foundation.
General Motors has a close relationship with the Nature Conservancy, and has fundraised for and donated cash and vehicles to the charity.
In 1996, GM commissioned five designer-original vehicles, sold in silent auction for Concept: Cure, to benefit the Nina Hyde Center for breast cancer research, founded by Ralph Lauren. The program involved five designers, each lending their artistic talents to customize five different vehicles. Nicole Miller, Richard Tyler, Anna Sui, Todd Oldham, and Mark Eisen were tasked with transforming a Cadillac STS, Buick Riviera, GMC Yukon, Oldsmobile Bravada and Chevrolet Camaro Z28, respectively. The cars were then auctioned with the proceeds presented to the Nina Hyde Center at the Greater LA Auto Show in 1997.
Since 1997, GM has been a source of funding for Safe Kids Worldwide's "Safe Kids Buckle Up" program, an initiative to ensure child automobile safety through education and inspection.
Labor conflicts
Flint sit-down strike
The 1936–1937 Flint sit-down strike against General Motors changed the United Automobile Workers (UAW) from a collection of isolated local unions on the fringes of the industry into a major labor union and led to the unionization of the domestic United States automobile industry.
After the first convention of UAW in 1936, the union decided that it could not survive by piecemeal organizing campaigns at smaller plants, as it had in the past, but that it could organize the automobile industry only by going after its biggest and most powerful employer, General Motors Corporation, focusing on GM's production complex in Flint, Michigan.
Organizing in Flint was a difficult and dangerous plan. GM controlled city politics in Flint and kept a close eye on outsiders. According to Wyndham Mortimer, the UAW officer put in charge of the organizing campaign in Flint, he received a death threat by an anonymous caller when he visited Flint in 1936. GM also maintained an extensive network of spies throughout its plants. This forced UAW members to keep the names of new members in secret and meeting workers at their homes.
As the UAW studied its target, it discovered that GM had only two factories that produced the dies from which car body components were stamped: one in Flint that produced the parts for Buicks, Pontiacs, and Oldsmobiles, and another in Cleveland that produced Chevrolet parts.
While the UAW called for a sit-down strike in Flint, the police, armed with guns and tear gas, attempted to enter the Fisher Body 2 plant on January 11, 1937. The strikers inside the plant pelted them with hinges, bottles, and bolts. At the time, Vice President John Nance Garner supported federal intervention to break up the Flint Strike, but this idea was rejected by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The president urged GM to distinguish a union so the plants could re-open. The strike ended after 44 days.
That development forced GM to bargain with the union. John L. Lewis, President of the United Mine Workers and founder and leader of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, spoke for the UAW in those negotiations; UAW President Homer Martin was sent on a speaking tour to keep him out of the way. GM's representatives refused to be in the same room as the UAW's, so Governor Frank Murphy acted as a courier and intermediary between the two groups. Governor Murphy sent in the U.S. National Guard, not to evict the strikers, but rather to protect them from the police and corporate strike-breakers. The two parties finally reached agreement on February 11, 1937, on a one-page agreement that recognized the UAW as the exclusive bargaining representative for GM's employees who were members of the union for the next six months.
Tool and die strike of 1939
The tool and die strike of 1939, also known as the "strategy strike", was an ultimately successful attempt by the United Auto Workers Union (UAW) to be recognized as the sole representative for General Motors workers. In addition to representation rights, the UAW, working jointly with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), sought to resolve existing grievances of skilled workers.
United Auto Workers (UAW) strike of 1945–1946
From November 21, 1945, until March 13, 1946 (113 days), CIO's United Automobile Workers (UAW), organized "320,000 hourly workers" to form a US-wide strike against the General Motors Corporation, workers used the tactic of the sit down strike. It was "the longest strike against a major manufacturer" that the UAW had yet seen, and it was also "the longest national GM strike in its history". As director of the UAW's General Motors Department (coordinator of union relations with GM), Walter Reuther suggested to his colleagues the idea of striking the GM manufacturing plants with a 'one-at-a-time' strategy, which was "intended to maximize pressure on the target company". Reuther also put forth the demands of the strikers: a 30 percent increase in wages and a hold on product prices. However, the strike ended with the dissatisfaction of Walter Reuther and the UAW, and the workers received only a 17.5-percent increase in wages.
2007 General Motors strike
The 2007 General Motors strike was a strike from September 24 to 26, 2007, by the United Auto Workers (UAW) against General Motors.
On September 24, 2007, General Motors workers represented by the United Auto Workers union went on strike against the company. The first US-wide strike against GM since 1970 was expected to idle 59 plants and facilities for an indefinite period of time. Talks broke down after more than 20 straight days of bargaining failed to produce a new contract. Major issues that proved to be stumbling blocks for an agreement included wages, benefits, job security and investments in US facilities.
Two car assembly plants in Oshawa, Ontario, and a transmission facility in Windsor closed on September 25. However, on September 26, a tentative agreement was reached, and the strike's end was announced by UAW officials in a news conference at 4 a.m. By the following day, all GM workers in both countries were back to work.
2019 General Motors strike
On the morning of September 15, 2019, after talks broke down to renew their contract, which expired earlier that day, the United Auto Workers announced that GM employees would begin striking at 11:59 PM. This strike shut down operations in nine states, including 33 manufacturing plants and 22 parts distribution warehouses.
After 40 days, on October 25, 2019, the "longest strike by autoworkers in a decade", and the longest against GM since 1970, came to an end when United Auto Workers members voted to approve a new contract with GM. The strike cost GM more than $2 billion, while members of the labor union were reduced to a salary of $275 a week in strike pay.
Controversies
Streetcar conspiracy
Between 1938 and 1950, GM allegedly deliberately monopolized the sale of buses and supplies to National City Lines (NCL) and its subsidiaries, in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, with the intention to dismantle streetcar systems in many cities in the United States and make buses, sold by GM, the dominant form of public transport.
Ralph Nader and the Corvair
Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader, published in 1965, is a book accusing car manufacturers of being slow to introduce safety features, and reluctant to spend money on improving safety. It relates to the first models of the Chevrolet Corvair (1960–1964) that had a swing axle suspension design which was prone to 'tuck under' in certain circumstances. In substitution for the cost-cutting lack of a front stabilizer bar (anti-roll bar), Corvairs required tire pressures that were outside of the tire manufacturer's recommended tolerances. The Corvair relied on an unusually high front to rear pressure differential (15 psi front, 26 psi rear, when cold; 18 psi and 30 psi hot), and if one inflated the tires equally, as was standard practice for all other cars at the time, the result was dangerous over-steer.
In early March 1966, several media outlets, including The New Republic and The New York Times, alleged that GM had tried to discredit Ralph Nader, hiring private detectives to tap his phones and investigate his past, and hiring prostitutes to trap him in compromising situations. Nader sued the company for invasion of privacy and settled the case for $425,000. Nader's lawsuit against GM was ultimately decided by the New York Court of Appeals, whose opinion in the case expanded tort law to cover "overzealous surveillance". Nader used the proceeds from the lawsuit to start the pro-consumer Center for Study of Responsive Law.
A 1972 safety commission report conducted by Texas A&M University concluded that the 1960–1963 Corvair possessed no greater potential for loss of control than its contemporary competitors in extreme situations. The United States Department of Transportation (DOT) issued a press release in 1972 describing the findings of NHTSA testing from the previous year. NHTSA had conducted a series of comparative tests in 1971 studying the handling of the 1963 Corvair and four contemporary cars — a Ford Falcon, Plymouth Valiant, Volkswagen Beetle, and Renault Dauphine — along with a second-generation Corvair (with its completely redesigned, independent rear suspension). The 143-page report reviewed NHTSA's extreme-condition handling tests, national crash-involvement data for the cars in the test as well as General Motors' internal documentation regarding the Corvair's handling. NHTSA went on to contract an independent advisory panel of engineers to review the tests. This review panel concluded that 'the 1960–63 Corvair compares favorably with contemporary vehicles used in the tests [...] the handling and stability performance of the 1960–63 Corvair does not result in an abnormal potential for loss of control or rollover, and it is at least as good as the performance of some contemporary vehicles both foreign and domestic'.
Former GM executive John DeLorean asserted, in his book On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors, that Nader's criticisms were valid.
Journalist David E. Davis noted that despite Nader's claim that swing-axle rear suspension were dangerous, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, and Volkswagen all used similar swing-axle concepts during that era.
Ignition switch recall
In May 2014, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration fined the company $35 million for failing to recall cars with faulty ignition switches for a decade, despite knowing there was a problem with the switches. General Motors paid compensation for 124 deaths linked to the faulty switches. The $35 million fine was the maximum the regulator could impose. The total cost of the recall was estimated to be $1.5 billion. As well as the Cobalts, the switches of concern had been installed in many other cars, such as the Pontiac G5, the Saturn Ion, the Chevrolet HHR, the Saturn Sky, and Pontiac Solstice. The recall involved about 2.6 million GM cars worldwide.
See also
History of General Motors
Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers
ASOTRECOL
Crucible Industries
EcoCAR
General Motors EV1
General Motors Hy-wire
General Motors Proving Grounds
General Motors streetcar conspiracy
General Motors Technical Center
GM people
GM vehicles by brand
List of automobile manufacturers of the United States
List of GM engines
List of General Motors factories
List of GM platforms
List of GM transmissions
United States Council for Automotive Research
VIA Motors
References
Further reading
External links
1908 establishments in Michigan
1910s initial public offerings
2010 initial public offerings
Aircraft engine manufacturers of the United States
American companies established in 1908
Automotive transmission makers
Battery electric vehicle manufacturers
Car manufacturers of the United States
Companies that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2009
Companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange
Defense companies of the United States
Diesel engine manufacturers
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Vehicle manufacturing companies established in 1908 | [
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12103 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden%20Gate%20Bridge | Golden Gate Bridge | The Golden Gate Bridge is a suspension bridge spanning the Golden Gate, the strait connecting San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. The structure links the U.S. city of San Francisco, California—the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula—to Marin County, carrying both U.S. Route 101 and California State Route 1 across the strait. It also carries pedestrian and bicycle traffic, and is designated as part of U.S. Bicycle Route 95. Being declared one of the Wonders of the Modern World by the American Society of Civil Engineers, the bridge is one of the most internationally recognized symbols of San Francisco and California. It was initially designed by engineer Joseph Strauss in 1917.
The Frommer's travel guide describes the Golden Gate Bridge as "possibly the most beautiful, certainly the most photographed, bridge in the world." At the time of its opening in 1937, it was both the longest and the tallest suspension bridge in the world, with a main span of and a total height of .
History
Ferry service
Before the bridge was built, the only practical short route between San Francisco and what is now Marin County was by boat across a section of San Francisco Bay. A ferry service began as early as 1820, with a regularly scheduled service beginning in the 1840s for the purpose of transporting water to San Francisco.
The Sausalito Land and Ferry Company service, launched in 1867, eventually became the Golden Gate Ferry Company, a Southern Pacific Railroad subsidiary, the largest ferry operation in the world by the late 1920s. Once for railroad passengers and customers only, Southern Pacific's automobile ferries became very profitable and important to the regional economy. The ferry crossing between the Hyde Street Pier in San Francisco and Sausalito Ferry Terminal in Marin County took approximately 20 minutes and cost $1.00 per vehicle, a price later reduced to compete with the new bridge. The trip from the San Francisco Ferry Building took 27 minutes.
Many wanted to build a bridge to connect San Francisco to Marin County. San Francisco was the largest American city still served primarily by ferry boats. Because it did not have a permanent link with communities around the bay, the city's growth rate was below the national average. Many experts said that a bridge could not be built across the strait, which had strong, swirling tides and currents, with water deep at the center of the channel, and frequent strong winds. Experts said that ferocious winds and blinding fogs would prevent construction and operation.
Conception
Although the idea of a bridge spanning the Golden Gate was not new, the proposal that eventually took hold was made in a 1916 San Francisco Bulletin article by former engineering student James Wilkins. San Francisco's City Engineer estimated the cost at $100 million (equivalent to $ billion today), and impractical for the time. He asked bridge engineers whether it could be built for less. One who responded, Joseph Strauss, was an ambitious engineer and poet who had, for his graduate thesis, designed a railroad bridge across the Bering Strait. At the time, Strauss had completed some 400 drawbridges—most of which were inland—and nothing on the scale of the new project. Strauss's initial drawings were for a massive cantilever on each side of the strait, connected by a central suspension segment, which Strauss promised could be built for $17 million (equivalent to $ million today).
Local authorities agreed to proceed only on the assurance that Strauss would alter the design and accept input from several consulting project experts. A suspension-bridge design was considered the most practical, because of recent advances in metallurgy.
Strauss spent more than a decade drumming up support in Northern California. The bridge faced opposition, including litigation, from many sources. The Department of War was concerned that the bridge would interfere with ship traffic. The US Navy feared that a ship collision or sabotage to the bridge could block the entrance to one of its main harbors. Unions demanded guarantees that local workers would be favored for construction jobs. Southern Pacific Railroad, one of the most powerful business interests in California, opposed the bridge as competition to its ferry fleet and filed a lawsuit against the project, leading to a mass boycott of the ferry service.
In May 1924, Colonel Herbert Deakyne held the second hearing on the Bridge on behalf of the Secretary of War in a request to use federal land for construction. Deakyne, on behalf of the Secretary of War, approved the transfer of land needed for the bridge structure and leading roads to the "Bridging the Golden Gate Association" and both San Francisco County and Marin County, pending further bridge plans by Strauss. Another ally was the fledgling automobile industry, which supported the development of roads and bridges to increase demand for automobiles.
The bridge's name was first used when the project was initially discussed in 1917 by M.M. O'Shaughnessy, city engineer of San Francisco, and Strauss. The name became official with the passage of the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District Act by the state legislature in 1923, creating a special district to design, build and finance the bridge. San Francisco and most of the counties along the North Coast of California joined the Golden Gate Bridge District, with the exception being Humboldt County, whose residents opposed the bridge's construction and the traffic it would generate.
Design
Strauss was the chief engineer in charge of the overall design and construction of the bridge project. However, because he had little understanding or experience with cable-suspension designs, responsibility for much of the engineering and architecture fell on other experts. Strauss's initial design proposal (two double cantilever spans linked by a central suspension segment) was unacceptable from a visual standpoint. The final graceful suspension design was conceived and championed by Leon Moisseiff, the engineer of the Manhattan Bridge in New York City.
Irving Morrow, a relatively unknown residential architect, designed the overall shape of the bridge towers, the lighting scheme, and Art Deco elements, such as the tower decorations, streetlights, railing, and walkways. The famous International Orange color was Morrow's personal selection, winning out over other possibilities, including the US Navy's suggestion that it be painted with black and yellow stripes to ensure visibility by passing ships.
Senior engineer Charles Alton Ellis, collaborating remotely with Moisseiff, was the principal engineer of the project. Moisseiff produced the basic structural design, introducing his "deflection theory" by which a thin, flexible roadway would flex in the wind, greatly reducing stress by transmitting forces via suspension cables to the bridge towers. Although the Golden Gate Bridge design has proved sound, a later Moisseiff design, the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge, collapsed in a strong windstorm soon after it was completed, because of an unexpected aeroelastic flutter. Ellis was also tasked with designing a "bridge within a bridge" in the southern abutment, to avoid the need to demolish Fort Point, a pre–Civil War masonry fortification viewed, even then, as worthy of historic preservation. He penned a graceful steel arch spanning the fort and carrying the roadway to the bridge's southern anchorage.
Ellis was a Greek scholar and mathematician who at one time was a University of Illinois professor of engineering despite having no engineering degree. He eventually earned a degree in civil engineering from the University of Illinois prior to designing the Golden Gate Bridge and spent the last twelve years of his career as a professor at Purdue University. He became an expert in structural design, writing the standard textbook of the time. Ellis did much of the technical and theoretical work that built the bridge, but he received none of the credit in his lifetime. In November 1931, Strauss fired Ellis and replaced him with a former subordinate, Clifford Paine, ostensibly for wasting too much money sending telegrams back and forth to Moisseiff. Ellis, obsessed with the project and unable to find work elsewhere during the Depression, continued working 70 hours per week on an unpaid basis, eventually turning in ten volumes of hand calculations.
With an eye toward self-promotion and posterity, Strauss downplayed the contributions of his collaborators who, despite receiving little recognition or compensation, are largely responsible for the final form of the bridge. He succeeded in having himself credited as the person most responsible for the design and vision of the bridge. Only much later were the contributions of the others on the design team properly appreciated. In May 2007, the Golden Gate Bridge District issued a formal report on 70 years of stewardship of the famous bridge and decided to give Ellis major credit for the design of the bridge.
Finance
The Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District, authorized by an act of the California Legislature, was incorporated in 1928 as the official entity to design, construct, and finance the Golden Gate Bridge. However, after the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the District was unable to raise the construction funds, so it lobbied for a $30 million bond measure (equivalent to $ million today). The bonds were approved in November 1930, by votes in the counties affected by the bridge. The construction budget at the time of approval was $27 million ($ million today). However, the District was unable to sell the bonds until 1932, when Amadeo Giannini, the founder of San Francisco–based Bank of America, agreed on behalf of his bank to buy the entire issue in order to help the local economy.
Construction
Construction began on January 5, 1933. The project cost more than $35 million ($ in dollars), and was completed ahead of schedule and $1.3 million under budget (equivalent to $ million today).
The Golden Gate Bridge construction project was carried out by the McClintic-Marshall Construction Co., a subsidiary of Bethlehem Steel Corporation founded by Howard H. McClintic and Charles D. Marshall, both of Lehigh University.
Strauss remained head of the project, overseeing day-to-day construction and making some groundbreaking contributions. A graduate of the University of Cincinnati, he placed a brick from his alma mater's demolished McMicken Hall in the south anchorage before the concrete was poured. He innovated the use of movable safety netting beneath the construction site, which saved the lives of many otherwise-unprotected ironworkers. Of eleven men killed from falls during construction, ten were killed on February 17, 1937, when the bridge was near completion and the net failed under the stress of a scaffold that had fallen. The workers' platform that was attached to a rolling hanger on a track collapsed when the bolts that were connected to the track were too small and the weight was too great to bear. The platform fell into the safety net, but was too heavy and the net gave way. Two of the twelve workers survived the fall into the icy waters, including the 37-year-old foreman, Slim Lambert. Nineteen others who were saved by the net over the course of construction became members of the Half Way to Hell Club.
The project was finished and opened on May 27, 1937.
The Bridge Round House diner was then included in the southeastern end of the Golden Gate Bridge, adjacent to the tourist plaza which was renovated in 2012. The Bridge Round House, an Art Deco design by Alfred Finnila completed in 1938, has been popular throughout the years as a starting point for various commercial tours of the bridge and an unofficial gift shop. The diner was renovated in 2012 and the gift shop was then removed as a new, official gift shop has been included in the adjacent plaza.
During the bridge work, the Assistant Civil Engineer of California Alfred Finnila had overseen the entire iron work of the bridge as well as half of the bridge's road work. With the death of Jack Balestreri in April 2012, all workers involved in the original construction are now deceased.
Torsional bracing retrofit
On December 1, 1951, a windstorm revealed swaying and rolling instabilities of the bridge, resulting in its closure. In 1953 and 1954, the bridge was retrofitted with lateral and diagonal bracing that connected the lower chords of the two side trusses. This bracing stiffened the bridge deck in torsion so that it would better resist the types of twisting that had destroyed the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940.
Bridge deck replacement (1982–1986)
The original bridge used a concrete deck. Salt carried by fog or mist reached the rebar, causing corrosion and concrete spalling. From 1982 to 1986, the original bridge deck, in 747 sections, was systematically replaced with a 40% lighter, and stronger, steel orthotropic deck panels, over 401 nights without closing the roadway completely to traffic. The roadway was also widened by two feet, resulting in outside curb lane width of 11 feet, instead of 10 feet for the inside lanes. This deck replacement was the bridge's greatest engineering project since it was built and cost over $68 million.
Opening festivities, and 50th and 75th anniversaries
The bridge-opening celebration in 1937 began on May 27 and lasted for one week. The day before vehicle traffic was allowed, 200,000 people crossed either on foot or on roller skates. On opening day, Mayor Angelo Rossi and other officials rode the ferry to Marin, then crossed the bridge in a motorcade past three ceremonial "barriers," the last a blockade of beauty queens who required Joseph Strauss to present the bridge to the Highway District before allowing him to pass. An official song, "There's a Silver Moon on the Golden Gate," was chosen to commemorate the event. Strauss wrote a poem that is now on the Golden Gate Bridge entitled "The Mighty Task is Done." The next day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt pushed a button in Washington, D.C. signaling the official start of vehicle traffic over the Bridge at noon. As the celebration got out of hand there was a small riot in the uptown Polk Gulch area. Weeks of civil and cultural activities called "the Fiesta" followed. A statue of Strauss was moved in 1955 to a site near the bridge.
As part of the fiftieth anniversary celebration in 1987, the Golden Gate Bridge district again closed the bridge to automobile traffic and allowed pedestrians to cross it on May 24. This Sunday morning celebration attracted 750,000 to 1,000,000 people, and ineffective crowd control meant the bridge became congested with roughly 300,000 people, causing the center span of the bridge to flatten out under the weight. Although the bridge is designed to flex in that way under heavy loads, and was estimated not to have exceeded 40% of the yielding stress of the suspension cables, bridge officials stated that uncontrolled pedestrian access was not being considered as part of the 75th anniversary on Sunday, May 27, 2012, because of the additional law enforcement costs required "since 9/11."
Structural specifications
Until 1964, the Golden Gate Bridge had the longest suspension bridge main span in the world, at . Since 1964 its main span length has been surpassed by seventeen bridges; it now has the second-longest main span in the Americas, after the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge in New York City. The total length of the Golden Gate Bridge from abutment to abutment is .
The Golden Gate Bridge's clearance above high water averages while its towers, at above the water, were the world's tallest on a suspension bridge until 1993 when it was surpassed by the Mezcala Bridge, in Mexico.
The weight of the roadway is hung from 250 pairs of vertical suspender ropes, which are attached to two main cables. The main cables pass over the two main towers and are fixed in concrete at each end. Each cable is made of 27,572 strands of wire. The total length of galvanized steel wire used to fabricate both main cables is estimated to be . Each of the bridge's two towers has approximately 600,000 rivets.
In the 1960s, when the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART) was being planned, the engineering community had conflicting opinions about the feasibility of running train tracks north to Marin County over the bridge. In June 1961, consultants hired by BART completed a study that determined the bridge's suspension section was capable of supporting service on a new lower deck. In July 1961, one of the bridge's consulting engineers, Clifford Paine, disagreed with their conclusion. In January 1962, due to more conflicting reports on feasibility, the bridge's board of directors appointed an engineering review board to analyze all the reports. The review board's report, released in April 1962, concluded that running BART on the bridge was not advisable.
Aesthetics
Aesthetics was the foremost reason why the first design of Joseph Strauss was rejected. Upon re-submission of his bridge construction plan, he added details, such as lighting, to outline the bridge's cables and towers. In 1999, it was ranked fifth on the List of America's Favorite Architecture by the American Institute of Architects.
The color of the bridge is officially an orange vermilion called international orange. The color was selected by consulting architect Irving Morrow because it complements the natural surroundings and enhances the bridge's visibility in fog.
The bridge was originally painted with red lead primer and a lead-based topcoat, which was touched up as required. In the mid-1960s, a program was started to improve corrosion protection by stripping the original paint and repainting the bridge with zinc silicate primer and vinyl topcoats. Since 1990, acrylic topcoats have been used instead for air-quality reasons. The program was completed in 1995 and it is now maintained by 38 painters who touch up the paintwork where it becomes seriously corroded.
The ongoing maintenance task of painting the bridge is continuous.
Traffic
Most maps and signage mark the bridge as part of the concurrency between U.S. Route 101 and California State Route 1. Although part of the National Highway System, the bridge is not officially part of California's Highway System. For example, under the California Streets and Highways Code § 401, Route 101 ends at "the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge" and then resumes at "a point in Marin County opposite San Francisco". The Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District has jurisdiction over the segment of highway that crosses the bridge instead of the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans).
The movable median barrier between the lanes is moved several times daily to conform to traffic patterns. On weekday mornings, traffic flows mostly southbound into the city, so four of the six lanes run southbound. Conversely, on weekday afternoons, four lanes run northbound. During off-peak periods and weekends, traffic is split with three lanes in each direction.
From 1968 to 2015, opposing traffic was separated by small, plastic pylons; during that time, there were 16 fatalities resulting from 128 head-on collisions. To improve safety, the speed limit on the Golden Gate Bridge was reduced from on October 1, 1983. Although there had been discussion concerning the installation of a movable barrier since the 1980s, only in March 2005 did the Bridge Board of Directors commit to finding funding to complete the $2 million study required prior to the installation of a movable median barrier. Installation of the resulting barrier was completed on January 11, 2015, following a closure of 45.5 hours to private vehicle traffic, the longest in the bridge's history. The new barrier system, including the zipper trucks, cost approximately $30.3 million to purchase and install.
The bridge carries about 112,000 vehicles per day according to the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District.
Usage and tourism
The bridge is popular with pedestrians and bicyclists, and was built with walkways on either side of the six vehicle traffic lanes. Initially, they were separated from the traffic lanes by only a metal curb, but railings between the walkways and the traffic lanes were added in 2003, primarily as a measure to prevent bicyclists from falling into the roadway. The bridge was designated as part of U.S. Bicycle Route 95 in 2021.
The main walkway is on the eastern side, and is open for use by both pedestrians and bicycles in the morning to mid-afternoon during weekdays (5:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.), and to pedestrians only for the remaining daylight hours (until 6:00 p.m., or 9:00 p.m. during DST). The eastern walkway is reserved for pedestrians on weekends (5:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., or 9:00 p.m. during DST), and is open exclusively to bicyclists in the evening and overnight, when it is closed to pedestrians. The western walkway is open only for bicyclists and only during the hours when they are not allowed on the eastern walkway.
Bus service across the bridge is provided by two public transportation agencies: San Francisco Muni and Golden Gate Transit. Muni offers Saturday and Sunday service on the Marin Headlands Express bus line, and Golden Gate Transit runs numerous bus lines throughout the week. The southern end of the bridge, near the toll plaza and parking lot, is also accessible daily from 5:30 a.m. to midnight by Muni line 28. The Marin Airporter, a private company, also offers service across the bridge between Marin County and San Francisco International Airport.
A visitor center and gift shop, originally called the "Bridge Pavilion" (since renamed the “Golden Gate Bridge Welcome Center”), is located on the San Francisco side of the bridge, adjacent to the southeast parking lot. It opened in 2012, in time for the bridge's 75th-anniversary celebration. A cafe, outdoor exhibits, and restroom facilities are located nearby. On the Marin side of the bridge, only accessible from the northbound lanes, is the H. Dana Bower Rest Area and Vista Point, named after the first landscape architect for the California Division of Highways.
Lands and waters under and around the bridge are homes to varieties of wildlife such as bobcats, harbor seals, and sea lions. Three species of cetaceans (whales) that had been absent in the area for many years have shown recent recoveries/(re)colonizations in the vicinity of the bridge; researchers studying them have encouraged stronger protections and recommended that the public watch them from the bridge or from land, or use a local whale watching operator.
Tolls
When the Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937, the toll was 50cents per car (equivalent to $ in ), collected in each direction. In 1950 it was reduced to 40cents each way ($ in ), then lowered to 25cents in 1955 ($ in ). In 1968, the bridge was converted to only collect tolls from southbound traffic, with the toll amount reset back to 50cents ($ in ).
The last of the construction bonds were retired in 1971, with $35 million (equivalent to $M in ) in principal and nearly $39 million ($M in ) in interest raised entirely from bridge tolls. Tolls continued to be collected and subsequently incrementally raised; in 1991, the toll was raised a dollar to $3.00 (equivalent to $ in ).
The bridge began accepting tolls via the FasTrak electronic toll collection system in 2002, with $4 tolls for FasTrak users and $5 for those paying cash (equivalent to $ and $ respectively in ). In November 2006, the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District recommended a corporate sponsorship program for the bridge to address its operating deficit, projected at $80 million over five years. The District promised that the proposal, which it called a "partnership program", would not include changing the name of the bridge or placing advertising on the bridge itself. In October 2007, the Board unanimously voted to discontinue the proposal and seek additional revenue through other means, most likely a toll increase. The District later increased the toll amounts in 2008 to $5 for FasTrak users and $6 to those paying cash (equivalent to $ and $ respectively in ).
In an effort to save $19.2 million over the following 10 years, the Golden Gate District voted in January 2011 to eliminate all toll takers by 2012 and use only open road tolling. Subsequently, this was delayed and toll taker elimination occurred in March 2013. The cost savings have been revised to $19 million over an eight-year period. In addition to FasTrak, the Golden Gate Transportation District implemented the use of license plate tolling (branded as "Pay-by-Plate"), and also a one-time payment system for drivers to pay before or after their trip on the bridge. Twenty-eight positions were eliminated as part of this plan.
On April 7, 2014, the toll for users of FasTrak was increased from $5 to $6 (equivalent to $ in ), while the toll for drivers using either the license plate tolling or the one time payment system was raised from $6 to $7 (equivalent to $ in ). Bicycle, pedestrian, and northbound motor vehicle traffic remain toll free. For vehicles with more than two axles, the toll rate was $7 per axle for those using license plate tolling or the one time payment system, and $6 per axle for FasTrak users. During peak traffic hours, carpool vehicles carrying two or more people and motorcycles paid a discounted toll of $4 (equivalent to $ in ); drivers must have had Fastrak to take advantage of this carpool rate. The Golden Gate Transportation District then increased the tolls by 25cents in July 2015, and then by another 25cents each of the next three years.
In March 2019, the Golden Gate Transportation District approved a plan to implement 35-cent annual toll increases through 2023, except for the toll-by-plate program which will increase by 20cents per year.
Congestion pricing
In March 2008, the Golden Gate Bridge District board approved a resolution to start congestion pricing at the Golden Gate Bridge, charging higher tolls during the peak hours, but rising and falling depending on traffic levels. This decision allowed the Bay Area to meet the federal requirement to receive $158 million in federal transportation funds from USDOT Urban Partnership grant. As a condition of the grant, the congestion toll was to be in place by September 2009.
In August 2008, transportation officials ended the congestion pricing program in favor of varying rates for metered parking along the route to the bridge including on Lombard Street and Van Ness Avenue.
Issues
Suicides
The Golden Gate Bridge is the most used suicide site in the world. The deck is about above the water. After a fall of four seconds, jumpers hit the water at around . Most die from impact trauma. About 5% survive the initial impact but generally drown or die of hypothermia in the cold water.
After years of debate and an estimated more than 1,500 deaths, suicide barriers, consisting of a stainless steel net extending 20 feet from the bridge and supported by structural steel 20 feet under the walkway, began to be installed in April 2017. Construction was first estimated to take approximately four years at a cost of over $200 million. In December 2019, it was reported that construction of the suicide prevention net had fallen two years behind schedule because the lead contractor, Shimmick Construction Co., had been sold in 2017, leading to the slowdown of several existing projects. As of December 2019, the completion date for the Golden Gate Bridge net was set for 2023.
Wind
The Golden Gate Bridge was designed to safely withstand winds of up to . Until 2008, the bridge was closed because of weather conditions only three times: on December 1, 1951, because of gusts of ; on December 23, 1982, because of winds of ; and on December 3, 1983, because of wind gusts of . An anemometer placed midway between the two towers on the west side of the bridge, has been used to measure wind speeds. Another anemometer was placed on one of the towers.
As part of the retrofitting of the bridge and installation of the suicide barrier, starting in 2019 the railings on the west side of the pedestrian walkway were replaced with thinner, more flexible slats in order to improve the bridge's aerodynamic tolerance of high wind to . Starting in June 2020, reports were received of a loud hum, heard across San Francisco and Marin County, produced by the new railing slats when a strong west wind was blowing. The sound had been predicted from wind tunnel tests, but not included in the environmental impact report; ways of ameliorating it are being considered. An independent engineering analysis of a 2020 sound recording of the tones concludes that the singing noise comprises a variety of Aeolian tones (the sound produced by air flowing past a sharp edge), arising in this case from the ambient wind blowing across metal slats of the newly installed sidewalk railings. The tones observed were frequencies of 354, 398, 439 and 481 Hz, corresponding to the musical notes F4, G4, A4, and B4; these notes happen to form a G9 chord which impresses a strange, discordant musical sense.
Seismic vulnerability and improvements
Modern knowledge of the effect of earthquakes on structures led to a program to retrofit the Golden Gate to better resist seismic events. The proximity of the bridge to the San Andreas Fault places it at risk for a significant earthquake. Once thought to have been able to withstand any magnitude of foreseeable earthquake, the bridge was actually vulnerable to complete structural failure (i.e., collapse) triggered by the failure of supports on the arch over Fort Point. A $392 million program was initiated to improve the structure's ability to withstand such an event with only minimal (repairable) damage. A custom-built electro-hydraulic synchronous lift system for construction of temporary support towers and a series of intricate lifts, transferring the loads from the existing bridge onto the temporary supports, were completed with engineers from Balfour Beatty and Enerpac, without disrupting day-to-day commuter traffic. Although the retrofit was initially planned to be completed in 2012, it was expected to take several more years.
The former elevated approach to the Golden Gate Bridge through the San Francisco Presidio, known as Doyle Drive, dated to 1933 and was named after Frank P. Doyle. Doyle, the president of the Exchange Bank in Santa Rosa and son of the bank's founder, was the man who, more than any other person, made it possible to build the Golden Gate Bridge. The highway carried about 91,000 vehicles each weekday between downtown San Francisco and the North Bay and points north. The road was deemed "vulnerable to earthquake damage", had a problematic 4-lane design, and lacked shoulders; a San Francisco County Transportation Authority study recommended that it be replaced. Construction on the $1 billion replacement, temporarily known as the Presidio Parkway, began in December 2009.
The elevated Doyle Drive was demolished on the weekend of April 27–30, 2012, and traffic used a part of the partially completed Presidio Parkway, until it was switched onto the finished Presidio Parkway on the weekend of July 9–12, 2015. , an official at Caltrans said there is no plan to permanently rename the portion known as Doyle Drive.
Gallery
See also
25 de Abril Bridge, a bridge with a similar design in Portugal
The Bridge, a 2006 documentary on suicides from the Bridge
Golden Gate Bridge in popular culture
List of Historic Civil Engineering Landmarks
List of longest suspension bridge spans
List of San Francisco Designated Landmarks
List of tallest bridges
San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge
Suicide bridge
Suspension bridge
References
Further reading
External links
Bay Area FasTrak – includes toll information on this and the other Bay Area toll facilities
(A documentary film about the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge.)
(Educational poster.)
1937 establishments in California
Art Deco architecture in California
Articles containing video clips
Bridges by Joseph Strauss (engineer)
Bridges completed in 1937
Bridges in San Francisco
Bridges in Marin County, California
Bridges in the San Francisco Bay Area
Bridges of the United States Numbered Highway System
California Historical Landmarks
California State Route 1
Bridge
Historic American Engineering Record in California
Historic Civil Engineering Landmarks
Landmarks in the San Francisco Bay Area
Pedestrian bridges in California
Road bridges in California
Roads with a reversible lane
San Francisco Designated Landmarks
Suspension bridges in California
Symbols of California
Toll bridges in California
U.S. Route 101
Tourist attractions in Marin County, California
Works Progress Administration in California
Open-spandrel deck arch bridges in the United States
Steel bridges in the United States
Truss arch bridges in the United States | [
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12104 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guglielmo%20Marconi | Guglielmo Marconi | Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi, 1st Marquis of Marconi (; 25 April 187420 July 1937) was an Italian inventor and electrical engineer, known for his creation of a practical radio wave-based wireless telegraph system. This led to Marconi being credited as the inventor of radio, and he shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun "in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy".
Marconi was also an entrepreneur, businessman, and founder of The Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company in the United Kingdom in 1897 (which became the Marconi Company). In 1929, Marconi was ennobled as a Marchese (marquis) by King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, and, in 1931, he set up Vatican Radio for Pope Pius XI.
Biography
Early years
Marconi was born into the Italian nobility as Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi in Palazzo Marescalchi in Bologna on 25 April 1874, the second son of Giuseppe Marconi (an Italian aristocratic landowner from Porretta Terme) and his Irish wife Annie Jameson (daughter of Andrew Jameson of Daphne Castle in County Wexford, Ireland, and granddaughter of John Jameson, founder of whiskey distillers Jameson & Sons). Marconi had a brother, Alfonso, and a stepbrother, Luigi. Between the ages of two and six, Marconi and his elder brother Alfonso lived with their mother in the English town of Bedford.
Education
Marconi did not attend school as a child and did not go on to formal higher education. Instead, he learned chemistry, mathematics, and physics at home from a series of private tutors hired by his parents. His family hired additional tutors for Guglielmo in the winter when they would leave Bologna for the warmer climate of Tuscany or Florence. Marconi noted an important mentor was professor Vincenzo Rosa, a high school physics teacher in Livorno. Rosa taught the 17-year-old Marconi the basics of physical phenomena as well as new theories on electricity. At the age of 18 and back in Bologna, Marconi became acquainted with University of Bologna physicist Augusto Righi, who had done research on Heinrich Hertz's work. Righi permitted Marconi to attend lectures at the university and also to use the University's laboratory and library.
Radio work
From youth, Marconi was interested in science and electricity. In the early 1890s, he began working on the idea of "wireless telegraphy"—i.e., the transmission of telegraph messages without connecting wires as used by the electric telegraph. This was not a new idea; numerous investigators and inventors had been exploring wireless telegraph technologies and even building systems using electric conduction, electromagnetic induction and optical (light) signalling for over 50 years, but none had proven technically and commercially successful. A relatively new development came from Heinrich Hertz, who, in 1888, demonstrated that one could produce and detect electromagnetic radiation, based on the work of James Clerk Maxwell. At the time, this radiation was commonly called "Hertzian" waves, and is now generally referred to as radio waves.
There was a great deal of interest in radio waves in the physics community, but this interest was in the scientific phenomenon, not in its potential as a communication method. Physicists generally looked on radio waves as an invisible form of light that could only travel along a line of sight path, limiting its range to the visual horizon like existing forms of visual signaling. Hertz's death in 1894 brought published reviews of his earlier discoveries including a demonstration on the transmission and detection of radio waves by the British physicist Oliver Lodge and an article about Hertz's work by Augusto Righi. Righi's article renewed Marconi's interest in developing a wireless telegraphy system based on radio waves, a line of inquiry that Marconi noted other inventors did not seem to be pursuing.
Developing radio telegraphy
At the age of 20, Marconi began to conduct experiments in radio waves, building much of his own equipment in the attic of his home at the Villa Griffone in Pontecchio (now an administrative subdivision of Sasso Marconi), Italy, with the help of his butler, Mignani. Marconi built on Hertz's original experiments and, at the suggestion of Righi, began using a coherer, an early detector based on the 1890 findings of French physicist Édouard Branly and used in Lodge's experiments, that changed resistance when exposed to radio waves. In the summer of 1894, he built a storm alarm made up of a battery, a coherer, and an electric bell, which went off when it picked up the radio waves generated by lightning.
Late one night, in December 1894, Marconi demonstrated a radio transmitter and receiver to his mother, a set-up that made a bell ring on the other side of the room by pushing a telegraphic button on a bench. Supported by his father, Marconi continued to read through the literature and picked up on the ideas of physicists who were experimenting with radio waves. He developed devices, such as portable transmitters and receiver systems, that could work over long distances, turning what was essentially a laboratory experiment into a useful communication system. Marconi came up with a functional system with many components:
A relatively simple oscillator or spark-producing radio transmitter;
A wire or metal sheet capacity area suspended at a height above the ground;
A coherer receiver, which was a modification of Édouard Branly's original device with refinements to increase sensitivity and reliability;
A telegraph key to operate the transmitter to send short and long pulses, corresponding to the dots-and-dashes of Morse code; and
A telegraph register activated by the coherer which recorded the received Morse code dots and dashes onto a roll of paper tape.
In the summer of 1895, Marconi moved his experiments outdoors on his father's estate in Bologna. He tried different arrangements and shapes of antenna but even with improvements he was able to transmit signals only up to one half-mile, a distance Oliver Lodge had predicted in 1894 as the maximum transmission distance for radio waves.
Transmission breakthrough
A breakthrough came in the summer of 1895, when Marconi found that much greater range could be achieved after he raised the height of his antenna and, borrowing from a technique used in wired telegraphy, grounded his transmitter and receiver. With these improvements, the system was capable of transmitting signals up to and over hills. The monopole antenna reduced the frequency of the waves compared to the dipole antennas used by Hertz, and radiated vertically polarized radio waves which could travel longer distances. By this point, he concluded that a device could become capable of spanning greater distances, with additional funding and research, and would prove valuable both commercially and militarily. Marconi's experimental apparatus proved to be the first engineering-complete, commercially successful radio transmission system.
Marconi wrote to the Ministry of Post and Telegraphs, then under the direction of Pietro Lacava, explaining his wireless telegraph machine and asking for funding. He never received a response to his letter, which was eventually dismissed by the Minister, who wrote "to the Longara" on the document, referring to the insane asylum on Via della Lungara in Rome.
In 1896, Marconi spoke with his family friend Carlo Gardini, Honorary Consul at the United States Consulate in Bologna, about leaving Italy to go to Great Britain. Gardini wrote a letter of introduction to the Ambassador of Italy in London, Annibale Ferrero, explaining who Marconi was and about his extraordinary discoveries. In his response, Ambassador Ferrero advised them not to reveal Marconi's results until after a patent was obtained. He also encouraged Marconi to come to Britain, where he believed it would be easier to find the necessary funds to convert his experiments into practical use.
Finding little interest or appreciation for his work in Italy, Marconi travelled to London in early 1896 at the age of 21, accompanied by his mother, to seek support for his work. (He spoke fluent English in addition to Italian.) Marconi arrived at Dover, and the Customs officer opened his case to find various apparatus. The customs officer immediately contacted the Admiralty in London. While there, Marconi gained the interest and support of William Preece, the Chief Electrical Engineer of the General Post Office (the GPO). During this time Marconi decided he should patent his system, which he applied for on 2 June 1896, British Patent number 12039 titled "Improvements in Transmitting Electrical impulses and Signals, and in Apparatus therefor", which would become the first patent for a radio wave based communication system.
Demonstrations and achievements
Marconi made the first demonstration of his system for the British government in July 1896. A further series of demonstrations for the British followed, and, by March 1897, Marconi had transmitted Morse code signals over a distance of about across Salisbury Plain. On 13 May 1897, Marconi sent the first ever wireless communication over open sea – a message was transmitted over the Bristol Channel from Flat Holm Island to Lavernock Point near Cardiff, a distance of . The message read, "Are you ready". The transmitting equipment was almost immediately relocated to Brean Down Fort on the Somerset coast, stretching the range to .
Impressed by these and other demonstrations, Preece introduced Marconi's ongoing work to the general public at two important London lectures: "Telegraphy without Wires", at the Toynbee Hall on 11 December 1896; and "Signalling through Space without Wires", given to the Royal Institution on 4 June 1897.
Numerous additional demonstrations followed, and Marconi began to receive international attention. In July 1897, he carried out a series of tests at La Spezia, in his home country, for the Italian government. A test for Lloyd's between The Marine Hotel in Ballycastle and Rathlin Island, both in County Antrim in Ulster, Ireland, was conducted on 6 July 1898 by George Kemp and Edward Edwin Glanville. A transmission across the English channel was accomplished on 27 March 1899, from Wimereux, France to South Foreland Lighthouse, England. Marconi set up an experimental base at the Haven Hotel, Sandbanks, Poole Harbour, Dorset, where he erected a 100-foot high mast. He became friends with the van Raaltes, the owners of Brownsea Island in Poole Harbour, and his steam yacht, the Elettra, was often moored on Brownsea or at The Haven Hotel. Marconi purchased the vessel after the Great War and converted it to a seaborne laboratory from where he conducted many of his experiments. Among the Elettras crew was Adelmo Landini, his personal radio operator, who was also an inventor.
In December 1898, the British lightship service authorised the establishment of wireless communication between the South Foreland lighthouse at Dover and the East Goodwin lightship, twelve miles distant. On 17 March 1899, the East Goodwin lightship sent the first SOS message, a signal on behalf of the merchant vessel Elbe which had run aground on Goodwin Sands. The message was received by the radio operator of the South Foreland lighthouse, who summoned the aid of the Ramsgate lifeboat.
In the autumn of 1899, his first demonstration in the United States took place. Marconi had sailed to the U.S. at the invitation of The New York Herald newspaper to cover the America's Cup international yacht races off Sandy Hook, New Jersey. The transmission was done aboard the SS Ponce, a passenger ship of the Porto Rico Line. Marconi left for England on 8 November 1899 on the American Line's , and he and his assistants installed wireless equipment aboard during the voyage. Prior to this voyage the Second Boer War had begun, and Marconi's wireless would bring news of the conflict to passengers at the request of "some of the officials of the American line." On 15 November the SS Saint Paul became the first ocean liner to report her imminent return to Great Britain by wireless when Marconi's Royal Needles Hotel radio station contacted her 66 nautical miles off the English coast. The first Transatlantic Times, a newspaper containing wireless transmission news from the Needles Station at the Isle of Wight, was published onboard the SS Saint Paul prior to its arrival.
Transatlantic transmissions
At the turn of the 20th century, Marconi began investigating a means to signal across the Atlantic to compete with the transatlantic telegraph cables. Marconi established a wireless transmitting station at Marconi House, Rosslare Strand, County Wexford, in 1901 to act as a link between Poldhu in Cornwall, England, and Clifden in Connemara, County Galway, Ireland. He soon made the announcement that the message was received at Signal Hill in St. John's, Newfoundland (now part of Canada), on 12 December 1901, using a kite-supported antenna for reception—signals transmitted by the company's new high-power station at Poldhu, Cornwall. The distance between the two points was about . It was heralded as a great scientific advance, yet there also was—and continues to be—considerable scepticism about this claim. The exact wavelength used is not known, but it is fairly reliably determined to have been in the neighbourhood of 350 meters (frequency ≈ 850 kHz). The tests took place at a time of day during which the entire transatlantic path was in daylight. It is now known (although Marconi did not know then) that this was the worst possible choice. At this medium wavelength, long-distance transmission in the daytime is not possible because of heavy absorption of the skywave in the ionosphere. It was not a blind test; Marconi knew in advance to listen for a repetitive signal of three clicks, signifying the Morse code letter S. The clicks were reported to have been heard faintly and sporadically. There was no independent confirmation of the reported reception, and the transmissions were difficult to distinguish from atmospheric noise. A detailed technical review of Marconi's early transatlantic work appears in John S. Belrose's work of 1995. The Poldhu transmitter was a two-stage circuit.Belrose, John S. (5 September 1995) "Fessenden and Marconi: Their Differing Technologies and Transatlantic Experiments During the First Decade of this Century". International Conference on 100 Years of Radio.
Feeling challenged by sceptics, Marconi prepared a better organised and documented test. In February 1902, the SS Philadelphia sailed west from Great Britain with Marconi aboard, carefully recording signals sent daily from the Poldhu station. The test results produced coherer-tape reception up to , and audio reception up to . The maximum distances were achieved at night, and these tests were the first to show that radio signals for medium wave and longwave transmissions travel much farther at night than in the day. During the daytime, signals had been received up to only about , less than half of the distance claimed earlier at Newfoundland, where the transmissions had also taken place during the day. Because of this, Marconi had not fully confirmed the Newfoundland claims, although he did prove that radio signals could be sent for hundreds of kilometres (miles), despite some scientists' belief that they were limited essentially to line-of-sight distances.
On 17 December 1902, a transmission from the Marconi station in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, Canada, became the world's first radio message to cross the Atlantic from North America. In 1901, Marconi built a station near South Wellfleet, Massachusetts, that sent a message of greetings on 18 January 1903 from United States President Theodore Roosevelt to King Edward VII of the United Kingdom. However, consistent transatlantic signalling was difficult to establish.
Marconi began to build high-powered stations on both sides of the Atlantic to communicate with ships at sea, in competition with other inventors. In 1904, he established a commercial service to transmit nightly news summaries to subscribing ships, which could incorporate them into their on-board newspapers. A regular transatlantic radio-telegraph service was finally begun on 17 October 1907Second Test of the Marconi Over-Ocean Wireless System Proved Entirely Successful . Sydney Daily Post. 24 October 1907. between Clifden, Ireland, and Glace Bay, but even after this the company struggled for many years to provide reliable communication to others.
Titanic
The role played by Marconi Co. wireless in maritime rescues raised public awareness of the value of radio and brought fame to Marconi, particularly the sinking of the RMS Titanic on 15 April 1912 and the RMS Lusitania on 7 May 1915.
RMS Titanic radio operators Jack Phillips and Harold Bride were not employed by the White Star Line but by the Marconi International Marine Communication Company. After the sinking of the ocean liner on 15 April 1912, survivors were rescued by the RMS Carpathia of the Cunard Line. The Carpathia took a total of 17 minutes to both receive and decode the SOS signal sent by the Titanic. There was a distance of 58 miles between the two ships. When Carpathia docked in New York, Marconi went aboard with a reporter from The New York Times to talk with Bride, the surviving operator. After this incident, Marconi gained popularity and became more recognised for his contributions to the field of radio and wireless technology.
On 18 June 1912, Marconi gave evidence to the Court of Inquiry into the loss of the Titanic regarding the marine telegraphy's functions and the procedures for emergencies at sea. Britain's Postmaster-General summed up, referring to the Titanic disaster: "Those who have been saved, have been saved through one man, Mr. Marconi ... and his marvellous invention." Marconi was offered free passage on the Titanic before she sank, but had taken the Lusitania three days earlier. As his daughter Degna later explained, he had paperwork to do and preferred the public stenographer aboard that vessel.
Continuing work
Over the years, the Marconi companies gained a reputation for being technically conservative, in particular by continuing to use inefficient spark-transmitter technology, which could be used only for radio-telegraph operations, long after it was apparent that the future of radio communication lay with continuous-wave transmissions which were more efficient and could be used for audio transmissions. Somewhat belatedly, the company did begin significant work with continuous-wave equipment beginning in 1915, after the introduction of the oscillating vacuum tube (valve). The New Street Works factory in Chelmsford was the location for the first entertainment radio broadcasts in the United Kingdom in 1920, employing a vacuum tube transmitter and featuring Dame Nellie Melba. In 1922, regular entertainment broadcasts commenced from the Marconi Research Centre at Great Baddow, forming the prelude to the BBC, and he spoke of the close association of aviation and wireless telephony in that same year at a private gathering with Florence Tyzack Parbury, and even spoke of interplanetary wireless communication.
Later years
In 1914, Marconi was made a Senator in the Senate of the Kingdom of Italy and appointed Honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order in the UK. During World War I, Italy joined the Allied side of the conflict, and Marconi was placed in charge of the Italian military's radio service. He attained the rank of lieutenant in the Italian Royal Army and of commander in the Regia Marina. In 1929, he was made a marquess by King Victor Emmanuel III.
Marconi joined the Italian Fascist party in 1923. In 1924, the Marconi Company co-established the Unione Radiofonica Italiana (now RAI). In 1930, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini appointed him President of the Royal Academy of Italy, which made Marconi a member of the Fascist Grand Council.
While helping to develop microwave technology, the Marchese Marconi suffered nine heart attacks in the span of three years preceding his death. Marconi died in Rome on 20 July 1937 at age 63, following the ninth, fatal, heart attack, and Italy held a state funeral for him. As a tribute, shops on the street where he lived were "Closed for national mourning". In addition, at 6 pm the next day, the time designated for the funeral, transmitters around the world observed two minutes of silence in his honour. The British Post Office also sent a message requesting that all broadcasting ships honour Marconi with two minutes of broadcasting silence. His remains are housed in the Mausoleum of Guglielmo Marconi in the grounds of Villa Griffone at Sasso Marconi, Emilia-Romagna, which assumed that name in his honour in 1938.
In 1943, Marconi's elegant sailing yacht, the Elettra, was commandeered and refitted as a warship by the German Navy. She was sunk by the RAF on 22 January 1944. After the war, the Italian Government tried to retrieve the wreckage, to rebuild the boat, and the wreckage was removed to Italy. Eventually, the idea was abandoned, and the wreckage was cut into pieces which were distributed amongst Italian museums.
In 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down a decision on Marconi's radio patents restoring some of the prior patents of Oliver Lodge, John Stone Stone, and Nikola Tesla. The decision was not about Marconi's original radio patents and the court declared that their decision had no bearing on Marconi's claim as the first to achieve radio transmission, just that since Marconi's claim to certain patents was questionable, he could not claim infringement on those same patents. There are claims the high court was trying to nullify a World War I claim against the United States government by the Marconi Company via simply restoring the non-Marconi prior patent.
Personal life
Marconi was a friend of Charles van Raalte and his wife Florence, the owners of Brownsea Island; and of Margherita, their daughter, and in 1904 he met her Irish friend, The Hon. Beatrice O'Brien (1882–1976), a daughter of The 14th Baron Inchiquin. On 16 March 1905, Beatrice O'Brien and Marconi were married, and spent their honeymoon on Brownsea Island. They had three daughters, Degna (1908–1998), Gioia (1916–1996), and Lucia (born and died 1906), and a son, Giulio, 2nd Marchese Marconi (1910–1971). In 1913, the Marconi family returned to Italy and became part of Rome society. Beatrice served as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elena. At Marconi's request, his marriage to Beatrice was annulled on 27 April 1927, so he could remarry. Marconi and Beatrice had divorced on 12 February 1924 in the free city of Fiume (Rijeka).
On June 12, 1927, Marconi went on to marry Maria Cristina Bezzi-Scali (2 April 1900 – 15 July 1994), the only daughter of Francesco, Count Bezzi-Scali. To do this he had to be confirmed in the Catholic faith and became a devout member of the Church. He was baptised Catholic but had been brought up as a member of the Anglican Church. On 12 June 1927, Marconi married Maria Cristina in a civil service, with a religious ceremony performed on 15 June. Marconi was 53 years old and Maria Cristina was 26. They had one daughter, Maria Elettra Elena Anna (born 1930), who married Prince Carlo Giovannelli (1942–2016) in 1966; they later divorced. For unexplained reasons, Marconi left his entire fortune to his second wife and their only child, and nothing to the children of his first marriage.
Later in life, Marconi was an active Italian Fascist and an apologist for their ideology and actions such as the attack by Italian forces in Ethiopia.
In his lecture he stated: "I reclaim the honour of being the first fascist in the field of radiotelegraphy, the first who acknowledged the utility of joining the electric rays in a bundle, as Mussolini was the first in the political field who acknowledged the necessity of merging all the healthy energies of the country into a bundle, for the greater greatness of Italy".
Marconi wanted to personally introduce in 1931 the first radio broadcast of a Pope, Pius XI, and did announce at the microphone: "With the help of God, who places so many mysterious forces of nature at man's disposal, I have been able to prepare this instrument which will give to the faithful of the entire world the joy of listening to the voice of the Holy Father".
Legacy and honours
Honours and awards
In 1901, he was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society.
In 1902, the King of Italy created him Commander of the Orders of St. Maurice and St. Lazarus, and awarded him the Grand Cross of the Order of the Crown of Italy
In 1902, Marconi was bestowed the Order of St. Anne Grand Cross, by Tsar Nicholas II of Russia Empire.
In 1903, Marconi also received the freedom of the City of Rome.
In 1905, he was created Chevalier of the Civil Order of Savoy.
In 1909, Marconi shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun for their "contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy" (radio communications).
In 1914, Marconi was named senator by the king of Italy Vittorio Emanuele III
In 1914, he was appointed Honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order in England.
In 1918, he was awarded the Franklin Institute's Franklin Medal.
In 1920, he was awarded the IRE Medal of Honor, now the IEEE Medal of Honor.
In 1929, he was made a marquess by King Victor Emmanuel III, thus becoming Marchese Marconi.
In 1931, he was awarded the John Scott Medal by the Franklin Institute and the City Council of Philadelphia.
In 1933, he was awarded Order of the Rising Sun.
In 1934, he was awarded the Wilhelm Exner Medal.
In 1974, Italy marked the birth centennial of Marconi with a circulating commemorative 100-lira coin.
In 1975, Marconi was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
In 1978, Marconi was inducted into the NAB Broadcasting Hall of Fame.
In 1988, the Radio Hall of Fame (Museum of Broadcast Communications, Chicago) inducted Marconi as a Pioneer (soon after the inception of its awards).
In 1990, the Bank of Italy issued a 2,000 lire banknote featuring his portrait on the front and on the back his accomplishments.
In 2001, Great Britain released a commemorative British two-pound coin celebrating the 100th anniversary of Marconi's first wireless communication.
Marconi's early experiments in wireless telegraphy were the subject of two IEEE Milestones; one in Switzerland in 2003 and most recently in Italy in 2011.
In 2009, Italy issued a commemorative silver 10 Euro coin honouring the centennial of Marconi's Nobel Prize.
In 2009, he was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
The Dutch radio academy bestows the annually for outstanding radio programmes, presenters and stations.
The National Association of Broadcasters (US) bestows the annual NAB Marconi Radio Awards also for outstanding radio programmes and stations.
Tributes
A funerary monument to the effigy of Marconi can be seen in the Basilica of Santa Croce, Florence, but his remains are in the Mausoleum of Guglielmo Marconi in Sasso Marconi, Italy. His former villa, adjacent to the mausoleum is the Marconi Museum (Italy) with much of his equipment.
A statue of Guglielmo Marconi stands in Church Square Park in Hoboken, NJ.
A Guglielmo Marconi sculpture by Attilio Piccirilli stands in Washington, D.C.
A large collection of Marconi artefacts was held by The General Electric Company, plc (GEC) of the United Kingdom which later renamed itself Marconi plc and Marconi Corporation plc. In December 2004 the extensive Marconi Collection, held at the former Marconi Research Centre at Great Baddow, Chelmsford, Essex UK was donated to the nation by the Company via the University of Oxford. This consisted of the BAFTA award-winning MarconiCalling website, some 250+ physical artefacts and the massive ephemera collection of papers, books, patents and many other items. The artefacts are now held by The Museum of the History of Science and the ephemera Archives by the nearby Bodleian Library. Following three years' work at the Bodleian, an Online Catalogue to the Marconi Archives was released in November 2008.
A granite obelisk stands on the cliff top near the site of Marconi's Marconi's Poldhu Wireless Station in Cornwall, commemorating the first transatlantic transmission.
An urban park square named in 1937 located Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at Oregon Ave and South Broad Street, including later in 1975 a bronze statue erected of Marconi on the east side of Marconi Plaza Park.
Places and organisations named after Marconi
Outer space
The asteroid 1332 Marconia is named in his honour. A large crater on the far side of the moon is also named after him.
Europe
Marconi building at DRA at the University of St. AndrewsItaly Bologna Guglielmo Marconi Airport (IATA: BLQ – ICAO: LIPE), of Bologna, is named after Marconi, its native son.
Open University Guglielmo Marconi in Rome, Italy (Università Telematica "Guglielmo Marconi")
Ponte Guglielmo Marconi, bridge that connects Piazza Augusto Righi with Piazza Tommaso Edison, in Rome
Department of Electrical, Electronic and Information Engineering "Guglielmo Marconi" (DEI), Università di BolognaSweden The street Marconigatan in Frölunda in Gothenburg.
OceaniaAustralia Australian football (soccer) and social club Marconi Stallions.
North America Canada'''
The Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company of Canada (now CMC Electronics and Ultra Electronics), of Montreal, Quebec, Canada, was created in 1903 by Guglielmo Marconi. In 1925 the company was renamed to the 'Canadian Marconi Company', which was acquired by English Electric in 1953. The company name changed again to CMC Electronics Inc. (French: CMC Électronique) in 2001. In 2002, the company historical radio business was sold to Ultra Electronics to become Ultra Electronics TCS Inc., now doing business as Ultra Communications. Both CMC Electronics and Ultra Communications are still located in Montreal.
The Marconi National Historic Sites of Canada was created by Parks Canada as a tribute to Marconi's vision in the development of radio telecommunications. The first official wireless message was sent from this location by the Atlantic Ocean to England in 1902. The museum site is located in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, at Table Head on Timmerman Street.
As of 2016 the Canadian Marconi Company and CMC Electronics no longer exist. Most bought up by Esterline in Ottawa. The Marine Service Group was acquired by MacKay Marine but many of the employees left the group at transition.
United States
California
Marconi Conference Center and State Historic Park, site of the transoceanic Marshall Receiving Station, Marshall.
Hawaii
Marconi Wireless Telegraphy Station on Oahu's North Shore, briefly the world's most powerful telegraph station.
Massachusetts
Marconi Beach in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, part of the Cape Cod National Seashore, located near the site of his first transatlantic wireless signal from the United States to Britain. There are still remnants of the wireless tower at this beach and at Forest Road Beach in Chatham, Massachusetts.
New Jersey
New Brunswick Marconi Station, now the Guglielmo Marconi Memorial Plaza in Somerset, NJ. President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points speech was transmitted from the site in 1918.
Belmar Marconi Station, now the InfoAge Science History Center in Wall Township, NJ.
New York
La Scuola d'Italia Guglielmo Marconi on New York City's Upper East Side.
Pennsylvania
Marconi Plaza, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Roman terrace-styled plaza originally designed by the architects Olmsted Brothers in 1914–1916, built as the grand entrance for the 1926 Sesquicentennial Exposition and renamed to honour Marconi.
Patents
British patents
British patent No. 12,039 (1897) "Improvements in Transmitting Electrical impulses and Signals, and in Apparatus therefor". Date of Application 2 June 1896; Complete Specification Left, 2 March 1897; Accepted, 2 July 1897 (later claimed by Oliver Lodge to contain his own ideas which he failed to patent).
British patent No. 7,777 (1900) "Improvements in Apparatus for Wireless Telegraphy". Date of Application 26 April 1900; Complete Specification Left, 25 February 1901; Accepted, 13 April 1901.
British patent No. 10245 (1902)
British patent No. 5113 (1904) "Improvements in Transmitters suitable for Wireless Telegraphy". Date of Application 1 March 1904; Complete Specification Left, 30 November 1904; Accepted, 19 January August 1905.
British patent No. 21640 (1904) "Improvements in Apparatus for Wireless Telegraphy". Date of Application 8 October 1904; Complete Specification Left, 6 July 1905; Accepted, 10 August 1905.
British patent No. 14788 (1904) "Improvements in or relating to Wireless Telegraphy". Date of Application 18 July 1905; Complete Specification Left, 23 January 1906; Accepted, 10 May 1906.
US patents
"Transmitting electrical signals", (using Ruhmkorff coil and Morse code key) filed December 1896, patented July 1897
"Apparatus employed in wireless telegraphy".
"Apparatus employed in wireless telegraphy".
"Apparatus employed in wireless telegraphy".
"Apparatus employed in wireless telegraphy".
"Apparatus employed in wireless telegraphy".
"Apparatus employed in wireless telegraphy".
"Apparatus employed in wireless telegraphy".
"Receiver for electrical oscillations".
"Apparatus for wireless telegraphy" (later practical version of system)
"Wireless telegraphy system". Filed 19 November 1901; Issued 19 April 1904.
"Wireless signaling system". Filed 10 September 1903; Issued 24 May 1904.
"Apparatus for wireless telegraphy" (Four tuned system; this innovation was predated by N. Tesla, O. Lodge, and J. S. Stone)
"Wireless telegraphy". Filed 13 October 1903
"Wireless telegraphy". Filed 13 October 1903; Issued 13 June 1905.
"Wireless telegraphy". Filed 28 November 1902; Issued 14 April 1908.
"Wireless telegraphy".
"Detecting electrical oscillations". Filed 2 February 1903; Issued 14 April 1908.
"Wireless telegraphy". Filed 2 February 1903; Issued 14 April 1908.
"Wireless signaling system". Filed 9 August 1906; Issued 8 June 1909.
"Transmitting apparatus for wireless telegraphy". Filed 10 April 1908; Issued 28 September 1909.
"Apparatus for wireless telegraphy".
"Apparatus for wireless telegraphy". Filed 10 April 1908; Issued 28 September 1909.
"Apparatus for wireless telegraphy". Filed 31 March 1909; Issued 12 April 1910.
"Transmitting apparatus for wireless telegraphy". Filed 15 July 1910; Issued 11 July 1911.
"Means for generating alternating electric currents". Filed 27 January 1914; Issued 7 July 1914.
"Transmitting apparatus for use in wireless telegraphy and telephony". Filed 31 December 1913; Issued 15 May 1917.
"Wireless telegraph transmitter".
"Electric accumulator". Filed 9 March 1918
"Transmitter for wireless telegraphy". Filed 20 July 1908; Issued 3 August 1915.
"Thermionic valve". Filed 14 October 1926; Issued 20 November 1934.
Reissued (US)
"Transmitting electrical impulses and signals and in apparatus, there-for". Filed 1 April 1901; Issued 4 June 1901.
See also
History of radio
Jagadish Chandra Bose
List of people on stamps of Ireland
List of covers of Time magazine during the 1920s – 6 December 1926
Marconi's law
References
Sources
Further reading
Relatives and company publications
Bussey, Gordon, Marconi's Atlantic Leap, Marconi Communications, 2000.
Isted, G.A., Guglielmo Marconi and the History of Radio – Part I, General Electric Company, p.l.c., GEC Review, Volume 7, No. 1, p45, 1991,
Isted, G.A., Guglielmo Marconi and the History of Radio – Part II, General Electric Company, p.l.c., GEC Review, Volume 7, No. 2, p110, 1991,
Marconi, Degna, My Father, Marconi, James Lorimer & Co, 1982. (Italian version): Marconi, mio padre, Di Renzo Editore, 2008,
Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company, Year book of wireless telegraphy and telephony, London: Published for the Marconi Press Agency Ltd., by the St. Catherine Press / Wireless Press. LCCN 14017875 sn 86035439
Simons, R.W., Guglielmo Marconi and Early Systems of Wireless Communication, General Electric Company, p.l.c., GEC Review, Volume 11, No. 1, p37, 1996,
Scholarly studies
Ahern, Steve (ed), Making Radio (2nd Edition) Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2006 .
Aitken, Hugh G. J., Syntony and Spark: The Origins of Radio, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1976.
Aitken, Hugh G. J., The Continuous Wave: Technology and American Radio, 1900–1932, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1985. .
Anderson, Leland I., Priority in the Invention of Radio – Tesla vs. Marconi
Baker, W. J., A History of the Marconi Company, 1970.
Brodsky, Ira. The History of Wireless: How Creative Minds Produced Technology for the Masses (Telescope Books, 2008)
Cheney, Margaret, Tesla: Man Out of Time Laurel Publishing, 1981. Chapter 7, esp pp 69, re: published lectures of Tesla in 1893, copied by Marconi.
Clark, Paddy, "Marconi's Irish Connections Recalled," published in 100 Years of Radio, IEE Conference Publication 411, 1995.
Coe, Douglas and Kreigh Collins (ills), Marconi, pioneer of radio, New York, J. Messner, Inc., 1943. LCCN 43010048
Garratt, G. R. M., The early history of radio: from Faraday to Marconi, London, Institution of Electrical Engineers in association with the Science Museum, History of technology series, 1994. LCCN gb 94011611
Geddes, Keith, Guglielmo Marconi, 1874–1937, London : H.M.S.O., A Science Museum booklet, 1974. LCCN 75329825 (ed. Obtainable in the United States. from Pendragon House Inc., Palo Alto, California.)
Hancock, Harry Edgar, Wireless at sea; the first fifty years: A history of the progress and development of marine wireless communications written to commemorate the jubilee of the Marconi International Marine Communication Company, Limited, Chelmsford, Eng., Marconi International Marine Communication Co., 1950. LCCN 51040529 /L
Homer, Peter and O'Connor, Finbar, Marconi Wireless Radio Station: Malin Head from 1902, 2014.
Hughes, Michael and Bosworth, Katherine, Titanic Calling : Wireless Communications During the Great Disaster, Oxford, Worldcat.org, 2012,
Janniello, Maria Grace, Monteleone, Franco and Paoloni, Giovanni (eds) (1996), One hundred years of radio: From Marconi to the future of the telecommunications. Catalogue of the extension, Venice: Marsilio.
Jolly, W. P., Marconi, 1972.
Larson, Erik, Thunderstruck, New York: Crown Publishers, 2006. A comparison of the lives of Hawley Harvey Crippen and Marconi. Crippen was a murderer whose Transatlantic escape was foiled by the new invention of shipboard radio.
MacLeod, Mary K., Marconi: The Canada Years – 1902–1946, Halifax, Nova Scotia: Nimbus Publishing Limited, 1992,
Masini, Giancarlo, Guglielmo Marconi, Turin: Turinese typographical-publishing union, 1975. LCCN 77472455 (ed. Contains 32 tables outside of the text)
Mason, H. B. (1908). Encyclopaedia of ships and shipping, Wireless Telegraphy. London: Shipping Encyclopaedia. 1908.
Raboy, Marc. Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World (Oxford University Press, 2016) 872 pp. online review
Stone, Ellery W., Elements of Radiotelegraphy
Weightman, Gavin, Signor Marconi's magic box: the most remarkable invention of the 19th century & the amateur inventor whose genius sparked a revolution, 1st Da Capo Press ed., Cambridge, MA : Da Capo Press, 2003.
Winkler, Jonathan Reed. Nexus: Strategic Communications and American Security in World War I. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). Account of rivalry between Marconi's firm and the United States government during World War I.
External links
Wikimedia
General achievements
including the Nobel Lecture, 11 December 1909 Wireless Telegraphic Communication
Marconi il 5 marzo 1896, presenta a Londra la prima richiesta provvisoria di brevetto, col numero 5028 e col titolo "Miglioramenti nella telegrafia e relativi apparati" (Great Britain and France between 1896 and 1924)
List of British and French patents (1896–1924) The first patent application number 5028 of 5 March 1896 (Provisional deprivation)
Foundations and academics
University of Oxford Introduction to the Online Catalogue of the Marconi Collection
University of Oxford Online Catalogue of the Marconi Archives
Guglielmo Marconi Foundation, Pontecchio Marconi, Bologna, Italy
Galileo Legacy Foundation: pictures of the Dedication of the Guglielmo Marconi Square, Johnston RI United States Dedication Photos
History of Marconi House, Marconi House, Strand / Aldwych, London.
Multimedia and books
MarconiCalling – The Life, Science and Achievements of Guglielmo Marconi, part of the Marconi Collection at the University of Oxford
Canadian Heritage Minute featuring Marconi
Guglielmo Marconi documentary, narrated by Walter Cronkite
Review of Signor Marconi's Magic Box
Transatlantic "signals" and radio
Robert (Bob) White, Guglielmo Marconi – Aerial Assistance with a Kite. Bridging the Atlantic By Wireless Signal – 12 December 1901. Kiting, The Journal of the American Kitefliers Association. Vol. 23, Issue 5 – Winter 2002. November 2001
Faking the Waves, 1901
Marconi and "wireless telegraphy" using kites
Keys and "signals"
Sparks Telegraph Key Review An exhaustive listing of wireless telegraph key manufacturers including photos of most Marconi keys
United States Senate Inquiry into the Titanic disaster – Testimony of Guglielmo Marconi
Priority of invention
vs Tesla
PBS: Marconi and Tesla: Who invented radio?
United States Supreme Court, Marconi Wireless Telegraph co. of America v. United States. 320 U.S. 1. Nos. 369, 373. Argued 9–12 April 1943. Decided 21 June 1943.
21st Century Books: Priority in the Invention of Radio – Tesla vs. Marconi
Personal
Information about Marconi and his yacht Elettra
I diari di laboratorio di Guglielmo Marconi (The diaries of laboratory Guglielmo Marconi.)
Comitato Guglielmo Marconi International, Bologna, Italy (Marconi's voice)
August 1914 photo article on Marconi Belmar station in Wall, NJ, InfoAge. (See also, Marconi Period of Significance Historic Buildings.)
Marconi, Guglielmo: Statue north of Meridian Hill Park in Washington , D.C. by Attilio Piccirilli
Other
Guglielmo Marconi, 2000 Italian Lire (1990)
1874 births
1937 deaths
Engineers from Bologna
Italian people of Scottish descent
Italian people of Irish descent
Nobility from Bologna
Italian Roman Catholics
Converts to Roman Catholicism from Anglicanism
Members of the Grand Council of Fascism
Members of the Senate of the Kingdom of Italy
20th-century Italian physicists
European amateur radio operators
Experimental physicists
Italian electrical engineers
Italian emigrants to the United States
Italian expatriates in England
19th-century Italian inventors
Radio pioneers
Members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences
Members of the Royal Academy of Italy
Foreign associates of the National Academy of Sciences
Rectors of the University of St Andrews
Italian military personnel of World War I
Nobel laureates in Physics
Italian Nobel laureates
John Fritz Medal recipients
Recipients of the Order of the Crown (Italy)
Recipients of the Order of Merit for Labour
Recipients of the Order of St. Anna
Honorary Knights Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order
IEEE Medal of Honor recipients
Fellows of the Royal Society of Arts
Amateur radio people
Businesspeople from Bologna
Recipients of the Matteucci Medal
History of radio | [
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... |
12105 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf%20%28disambiguation%29 | Gulf (disambiguation) | A gulf is a large inlet from the ocean into a landmass.
Gulf or the gulf may also refer to:
Places
Persian Gulf, sometimes called simply "The Gulf"
Arab states of the Persian Gulf, or "The Gulf"
Gulf of Mexico, known colloquially as just "the gulf"
Gulf Country, a region in Australia
Gulf Province, a province of Papua New Guinea
Gulf, North Carolina, a census-designated place in the United States
Gulf Freeway, a highway in Texas, United States
Arts and media
Gulf (novella), by Robert A. Heinlein (1949)
The Gulf (play), 2010/2015 play by Audrey Cefaly
The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea, book by Jack E. Davis
Gulf (film), Indian Telugu-language film
Businesses and organizations
Gulf Air, the principal flag carrier of the Kingdom of Bahrain
Gulf FM (disambiguation), various radio stations
Gulf High School, a four-year public high school in New Port Richey, Florida
Gulf Oil, a major oil company from 1901 to 1985
Gulf Canada, a major Canadian oil company since 1906, a subsidiary of Gulf Oil
JWA Gulf, a Gulf Oil-sponsored motor racing team of John Wyer in the 1960s and 1970s
Gulf Power Company, an American investor-owned electric utility
Gulf and Western Industries, an American conglomerate
Global University Leaders Forum, an organization within World Economic Forum
Gulf News, a daily English language newspaper published from Dubai
Other uses
Gulf house, a type of farmhouse that emerged in the 16th and 17th centuries in North Germany
Gulf of evaluation, the degree to which a computer system provides representations that can be directly perceived and interpreted in terms of the expectations and intentions of the user
Gulf of execution, a term usually used in human computer interaction to describe the gap between a user's goal for action and the means to execute that goal
See also
Arabian Gulf (disambiguation)
Gulf breeze (disambiguation)
Gulf Coast (disambiguation)
Grand Gulf (disambiguation)
Gulf Building (disambiguation)
Gulf Cup (disambiguation)
Gulf states (disambiguation)
Gulf University (disambiguation)
Golf (disambiguation)
Gulf Stream, a maritime current
Gulf War, 1990–91 war waged by coalition forces led by the United States against Iraq
Gulf Coast of the United States, the coastline along the Southern United States and the Gulf of Mexico
List of gulfs, a list of large bays and gulfs | [
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12106 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6ta%20%C3%A4lv | Göta älv | The Göta älv (; "River of (the) Geats") is a river that drains lake Vänern into the Kattegat, at the city of Gothenburg, on the western coast of Sweden. It was formed at the end of the last glaciation, as an outflow channel from the Baltic Ice Lake to the Atlantic Ocean and nowadays it has the largest drainage basin in Scandinavia.
The Göta älv is located in Götaland, with the river itself being a site of early Geatish settlement. Its length is . The Bohus Fortress is located by the river at Kungälv. There the river splits into two, with the northern part being the Nordre älv and the southern part keeping the name Göta älv.
At Trollhättan there is a dam, canal locks and a hydropower station in the river. The locks make the river navigable, even for large cargo vessels ( long). The artificial parts are called Trollhätte Canal. The river and the canal is part of a mostly inland waterway, Göta Canal, which spans the width of Sweden to the Baltic Sea south of Stockholm.
The power station supplied electric power to the heavy steel industry concentrated around Trollhättan Falls, contributing to its industrial revolution. In the summer months the spillway of the dam is opened for a few minutes daily and tourists gather to see the water rushing down the river (picture).
There are concerns about whether the maximum permitted discharge of is enough in a scenario where heavy rain floods the lake Vänern, causing considerable damage. Previously this was thought not to be possible in reality, but in 2001 the lake was flooded almost above maximum level (and some upstream lakes like Glafsfjorden flooded ). In this situation, Göta älv was allowed a discharge of for months causing a big risk of landslides. Now a water tunnel between Vänersborg and Uddevalla is considered as a rescue solution.
There is a large risk of landslides along the river and historical records of 15 landslides exist. The largest occurred in the years 1150, 1648, 1950, 1957 and 1977 (Tuve landslide).
Name in other languages
In Old Norse the river was called the Gautelfr; in Icelandic it is Gautelfur; and in Norwegian it is sometimes rendered as Gøtelv.
See also
Name of the Goths
References
Götaland
Gothenburg
Hisingen
Bohuslän
Rivers of Västra Götaland County
Ramsar sites in Sweden | [
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12108 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greece | Greece | Greece (, ), officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country located in Southeastern Europe. Its population is approximately 10.7 million as of 2021; Athens is its largest and capital city, followed by Thessaloniki. Situated on the southern tip of the Balkans, Greece is located at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa. It shares land borders with Albania to the northwest, North Macedonia and Bulgaria to the north, and Turkey to the northeast. The Aegean Sea lies to the east of the mainland, the Ionian Sea to the west, the Cretan Sea and the Mediterranean Sea to the south. Greece has the longest coastline on the Mediterranean Basin and the 11th longest coastline in the world at in length, featuring many islands, of which 227 are inhabited. Eighty percent of Greece is mountainous, with Mount Olympus being the highest peak at . The country consists of nine traditional geographic regions: Macedonia, Central Greece, the Peloponnese, Thessaly, Epirus, the Aegean Islands (including the Dodecanese and Cyclades), Thrace, Crete, and the Ionian Islands.
Greece is considered the cradle of Western civilization, being the birthplace of democracy, Western philosophy, Western literature, historiography, political science, major scientific and mathematical principles, theatre and the Olympic Games. From the eighth century BC, the Greeks were organised into various independent city-states, known as poleis (singular polis), which spanned the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Philip II of Macedon united most of present-day Greece in the fourth century BC, with his son Alexander the Great rapidly conquering much of the ancient world, from the eastern Mediterranean to India. The subsequent Hellenistic period saw the height of Greek culture and influence in antiquity. Greece was annexed by Rome in the second century BC, becoming an integral part of the Roman Empire and its continuation, the Byzantine Empire, which was culturally and linguistically predominantly Greek. The Greek Orthodox Church, which emerged in the first century AD, helped shape modern Greek identity and transmitted Greek traditions to the wider Orthodox world. After falling under Ottoman rule in the mid-15th century, Greece emerged as a modern nation state in 1830 following a war of independence. The country's rich historical legacy is reflected in part by its 18 UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
Greece is a unitary parliamentary republic, and a developed country, with an advanced high-income economy, and a high quality of life, ranking simultaneously very high in the Human Development Index. Its economy is the largest in the Balkans, where it is an important regional investor. A founding member of the United Nations, Greece was the tenth member to join the European Communities (precursor to the European Union) and has been part of the Eurozone since 2001. It is also a member of numerous other international institutions, including the Council of Europe, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), and the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF). Greece's unique cultural heritage, large tourism industry, prominent shipping sector and geostrategic importance classify it as a middle power.
Name
The native name of the country in Modern Greek is (, pronounced ). The corresponding form in Ancient Greek and conservative formal Modern Greek (Katharevousa) is (, classical: , modern: ). This is the source of the English alternate name Hellas, which is mostly found in archaic or poetic contexts today. The Greek adjectival form (, ) is sometimes also translated as Hellenic and is often rendered in this way in the formal names of Greek institutions, as in the official name of the Greek state, the Hellenic Republic (, ).
The English names Greece and Greek are derived, via the Latin and , from the name of the Graeci (, ; singular , ), who were among the first ancient Greek tribes to settle Magna Graecia in southern Italy. The term is ultimately derived from the Proto-Indo-European root , "to grow old".
History
Prehistory and early history
The earliest evidence of the presence of human ancestors in the southern Balkans, dated to 270,000BC, is to be found in the Petralona cave, in the Greek province of Macedonia. The Apidima Cave in Mani, in southern Greece, contains the oldest remains of anatomically modern humans outside of Africa, dated to 210,000 years ago. All three stages of the Stone Age (Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic) are represented in Greece, for example in the Franchthi Cave. Neolithic settlements in Greece, dating from the 7th millennium BC, are the oldest in Europe by several centuries, as Greece lies on the route via which farming spread from the Near East to Europe. Following the end of the Greek Neolithic period in 3.200 BC, a slow transition period between the stone economy to the bronze economy during the end of the 4th Millennium BC including Eutresis culture and Korakou culture with the first large buildings (House of the Tiles) until the middle of the 3rd Millennium BC took place in the Greek mainland. Tiryns culture before the Middle Helladic period that developed the socioeconomic base of the following Minoan civilization and Mycenean civilisation.
Greece is home to the first advanced civilizations in Europe and is considered the birthplace of Western civilisation, beginning with the Cycladic civilization on the islands of the Aegean Sea at around 3200 BC, the Minoan civilization in Crete (2700–1500 BC), and then the Mycenaean civilization on the mainland (1600–1100 BC). These civilizations possessed writing, the Minoans using an undeciphered script known as Linear A, and the Mycenaeans writing the earliest attested form of Greek in Linear B. The Mycenaeans gradually absorbed the Minoans, but collapsed violently around 1200 BC, along with other civilizations, during the regional event known as the Late Bronze Age collapse. This ushered in a period known as the Greek Dark Ages, from which written records are absent. Though the unearthed Linear B texts are too fragmentary for the reconstruction of the political landscape and can't support the existence of a larger state, contemporary Hittite and Egyptian records suggest the presence of a single state under a "Great King" based in mainland Greece.
Archaic and Classical period
The end of the Dark Ages is traditionally dated to 776 BC, the year of the first Olympic Games. The Iliad and the Odyssey, the foundational texts of Western literature, are believed to have been composed by Homer in the 7th or 8th centuries BC. With the end of the Dark Ages, there emerged various kingdoms and city-states across the Greek peninsula, which spread to the shores of the Black Sea, Southern Italy ("Magna Graecia") and Asia Minor. These states and their colonies reached great levels of prosperity that resulted in an unprecedented cultural boom, that of classical Greece, expressed in architecture, drama, science, mathematics and philosophy. In 508 BC, Cleisthenes instituted the world's first democratic system of government in Athens.
By 500 BC, the Persian Empire controlled the Greek city states in Asia Minor and Macedonia. Attempts by some of the Greek city-states of Asia Minor to overthrow Persian rule failed, and Persia invaded the states of mainland Greece in 492 BC, but was forced to withdraw after a defeat at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC. In response, the Greek city-states formed the Hellenic League in 481 BC, led by Sparta, which was the first historically recorded union of Greek states since the mythical union of the Trojan War. A second invasion by the Persians followed in 480 BC. Following decisive Greek victories in 480 and 479 BC at Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale, the Persians were forced to withdraw for a second time, marking their eventual withdrawal from all of their European territories. Led by Athens and Sparta, the Greek victories in the Greco-Persian Wars are considered a pivotal moment in world history, as the 50 years of peace that followed are known as the Golden Age of Athens, the seminal period of ancient Greek development that laid many of the foundations of Western civilization.
Lack of political unity within Greece resulted in frequent conflict between Greek states. The most devastating intra-Greek war was the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), won by Sparta and marking the demise of the Athenian Empire as the leading power in ancient Greece. Both Athens and Sparta were later overshadowed by Thebes and eventually Macedon, with the latter uniting most of the city-states of the Greek hinterland in the League of Corinth (also known as the Hellenic League or Greek League) under the control of Phillip II. Despite this development, the Greek world remained largely fragmented and would not be united under a single power until the Roman years. Sparta did not join the League and actively fought against it, raising an army led by Agis III to secure the city-states of Crete for Persia.
Following the assassination of Phillip II, his son Alexander III ("The Great") assumed the leadership of the League of Corinth and launched an invasion of the Persian Empire with the combined forces of the League in 334 BC. Undefeated in battle, Alexander had conquered the Persian Empire in its entirety by 330 BC. By the time of his death in 323 BC, he had created one of the largest empires in history, stretching from Greece to India. Upon his death, his empire split into several kingdoms, the most famous of which were the Seleucid Empire, Ptolemaic Egypt, the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, and the Indo-Greek Kingdom. Many Greeks migrated to Alexandria, Antioch, Seleucia, and the many other new Hellenistic cities in Asia and Africa. Although the political unity of Alexander's empire could not be maintained, it resulted in the Hellenistic civilization and spread the Greek language and Greek culture in the territories conquered by Alexander. Greek science, technology, and mathematics are generally considered to have reached their peak during the Hellenistic period.
Hellenistic and Roman periods (323 BC – 4th century AD)
After a period of confusion following Alexander's death, the Antigonid dynasty, descended from one of Alexander's generals, established its control over Macedon and most of the Greek city-states by 276 BC. From about 200 BC the Roman Republic became increasingly involved in Greek affairs and engaged in a series of wars with Macedon. Macedon's defeat at the Battle of Pydna in 168 BC signalled the end of Antigonid power in Greece. In 146 BC, Macedonia was annexed as a province by Rome, and the rest of Greece became a Roman protectorate.
The process was completed in 27 BC when the Roman emperor Augustus annexed the rest of Greece and constituted it as the senatorial province of Achaea. Despite their military superiority, the Romans admired and became heavily influenced by the achievements of Greek culture, hence Horace's famous statement: Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit ("Greece, although captured, took its wild conqueror captive"). The epics of Homer inspired the Aeneid of Virgil, and authors such as Seneca the younger wrote using Greek styles. Roman heroes such as Scipio Africanus, tended to study philosophy and regarded Greek culture and science as an example to be followed. Similarly, most Roman emperors maintained an admiration for things Greek in nature. The Roman emperor Nero visited Greece in AD 66, and performed at the Ancient Olympic Games, despite the rules against non-Greek participation. Hadrian was also particularly fond of the Greeks. Before becoming emperor, he served as an eponymous archon of Athens.
Greek-speaking communities of the Hellenised East were instrumental in the spread of early Christianity in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, and Christianity's early leaders and writers (notably St. Paul) were mostly Greek-speaking, though generally not from Greece itself. The New Testament was written in Greek, and some of its sections (Corinthians, Thessalonians, Philippians, Revelation of St. John of Patmos) attest to the importance of churches in Greece in early Christianity. Nevertheless, much of Greece clung tenaciously to paganism, and ancient Greek religious practices were still in vogue in the late 4th century AD, when they were outlawed by the Roman emperor Theodosius I in 391–392. The last recorded Olympic games were held in 393, and many temples were destroyed or damaged in the century that followed. In Athens and rural areas, paganism is attested well into the sixth century AD and even later. The closure of the Neoplatonic Academy of Athens by the Emperor Justinian in 529 is considered by many to mark the end of antiquity, although there is evidence that the Academy continued its activities for some time after that. Some remote areas such as the southeastern Peloponnese remained pagan until well into the 10th century AD.
Medieval period (4th – 15th century)
The Roman Empire in the east, following the fall of the Empire in the west in the 5th century, is conventionally known as the Byzantine Empire (but was simply called "Kingdom of the Romans" in its own time) and lasted until 1453. With its capital in Constantinople, its language and culture were Greek and its religion was predominantly Eastern Orthodox Christian.
From the 4th century, the Empire's Balkan territories, including Greece, suffered from the dislocation of barbarian invasions. The raids and devastation of the Goths and Huns in the 4th and 5th centuries and the Slavic invasion of Greece in the 7th century resulted in a dramatic collapse in imperial authority in the Greek peninsula. Following the Slavic invasion, the imperial government retained formal control of only the islands and coastal areas, particularly the densely populated walled cities such as Athens, Corinth and Thessalonica, while some mountainous areas in the interior held out on their own and continued to recognise imperial authority. Outside of these areas, a limited amount of Slavic settlement is generally thought to have occurred, although on a much smaller scale than previously thought. However, the view that Greece in late antiquity underwent a crisis of decline, fragmentation and depopulation is now considered outdated, as Greek cities show a high degree of institutional continuity and prosperity between the 4th and 6th centuries AD (and possibly later as well). In the early 6th century, Greece had approximately 80 cities according to the Synecdemus chronicle, and the period from the 4th to the 7th century AD is considered one of high prosperity not just in Greece but in the entire Eastern Mediterranean.
Until the 8th century almost all of modern Greece was under the jurisdiction of the Holy See of Rome according to the system of Pentarchy. Byzantine Emperor Leo III moved the border of the Patriarchate of Constantinople westward and northward in the 8th century.
The Byzantine recovery of lost provinces began toward the end of the 8th century and most of the Greek peninsula came under imperial control again, in stages, during the 9th century. This process was facilitated by a large influx of Greeks from Sicily and Asia Minor to the Greek peninsula, while at the same time many Slavs were captured and re-settled in Asia Minor and the few that remained were assimilated. During the 11th and 12th centuries the return of stability resulted in the Greek peninsula benefiting from strong economic growth – much stronger than that of the Anatolian territories of the Empire. During that time, the Greek Orthodox Church was also instrumental in the spread of Greek ideas to the wider Orthodox world.
Following the Fourth Crusade and the fall of Constantinople to the "Latins" in 1204, mainland Greece was split between the Greek Despotate of Epirus (a Byzantine successor state) and French rule (known as the Frankokratia), while some islands came under Venetian rule. The re-establishment of the Byzantine imperial capital in Constantinople in 1261 was accompanied by the empire's recovery of much of the Greek peninsula, although the Frankish Principality of Achaea in the Peloponnese and the rival Greek Despotate of Epirus in the north both remained important regional powers into the 14th century, while the islands remained largely under Genoese and Venetian control. During the Paleologi dynasty (1261–1453) a new era of Greek patriotism emerged accompanied by a turning back to ancient Greece.
As such prominent personalities at the time also proposed changing the imperial title to "Emperor of the Hellenes", and, in late fourteenth century, the emperor was frequently referred to as the "Emperor of the Hellenes". Similarly, in several international treaties of that time the Byzantine emperor is styled as "Imperator Graecorum".
In the 14th century, much of the Greek peninsula was lost by the Byzantine Empire at first to the Serbs and then to the Ottomans. By the beginning of the 15th century, the Ottoman advance meant that Byzantine territory in Greece was limited mainly to its then-largest city, Thessaloniki, and the Peloponnese (Despotate of the Morea). After the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, the Morea was one of the last remnants of the Byzantine Empire to hold out against the Ottomans. However, this, too, fell to the Ottomans in 1460, completing the Ottoman conquest of mainland Greece. With the Turkish conquest, many Byzantine Greek scholars, who up until then were largely responsible for preserving Classical Greek knowledge, fled to the West, taking with them a large body of literature and thereby significantly contributing to the Renaissance.
Venetian possessions and Ottoman rule (15th century – 1821)
While most of mainland Greece and the Aegean islands was under Ottoman control by the end of the 15th century, Cyprus and Crete remained Venetian territory and did not fall to the Ottomans until 1571 and 1670 respectively. The only part of the Greek-speaking world that escaped long-term Ottoman rule was the Ionian Islands, which remained Venetian until their capture by the First French Republic in 1797, then passed to the United Kingdom in 1809 until their unification with Greece in 1864.
While some Greeks in the Ionian Islands and Constantinople lived in prosperity, and Greeks of Constantinople (Phanariotes) achieved positions of power within the Ottoman administration, much of the population of mainland Greece suffered the economic consequences of the Ottoman conquest. Heavy taxes were enforced, and in later years the Ottoman Empire enacted a policy of creation of hereditary estates, effectively turning the rural Greek populations into serfs.
The Greek Orthodox Church and the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople were considered by the Ottoman governments as the ruling authorities of the entire Orthodox Christian population of the Ottoman Empire, whether ethnically Greek or not. Although the Ottoman state did not force non-Muslims to convert to Islam, Christians faced several types of discrimination intended to highlight their inferior status in the Ottoman Empire. Discrimination against Christians, particularly when combined with harsh treatment by local Ottoman authorities, led to conversions to Islam, if only superficially. In the 19th century, many "crypto-Christians" returned to their old religious allegiance.
The nature of Ottoman administration of Greece varied, though it was invariably arbitrary and often harsh. Some cities had governors appointed by the Sultan, while others (like Athens) were self-governed municipalities. Mountainous regions in the interior and many islands remained effectively autonomous from the central Ottoman state for many centuries.
Prior to the Greek Revolution of 1821, there had been a number of wars which saw Greeks fight against the Ottomans, such as the Greek participation in the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, the Epirus peasants' revolts of 1600–1601 (led by the Orthodox bishop Dionysios Skylosophos), the Morean War of 1684–1699, and the Russian-instigated Orlov Revolt in 1770, which aimed at breaking up the Ottoman Empire in favour of Russian interests. These uprisings were put down by the Ottomans with great bloodshed. On the other side, many Greeks were conscripted as Ottoman citizens to serve in the Ottoman army (and especially the Ottoman navy), while also the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, responsible for the Orthodox, remained in general loyal to the empire.
The 16th and 17th centuries are regarded as something of a "dark age" in Greek history, with the prospect of overthrowing Ottoman rule appearing remote with only the Ionian islands remaining free of Turkish domination. Corfu withstood three major sieges in 1537, 1571 and 1716 all of which resulted in the repulsion of the Ottomans. However, in the 18th century, due to their mastery of shipping and commerce, a wealthy and dispersed Greek merchant class arose. These merchants came to dominate trade within the Ottoman Empire, establishing communities throughout the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and Western Europe. Though the Ottoman conquest had cut Greece off from significant European intellectual movements such as the Reformation and the Enlightenment, these ideas together with the ideals of the French Revolution and romantic nationalism began to penetrate the Greek world via the mercantile diaspora. In the late 18th century, Rigas Feraios, the first revolutionary to envision an independent Greek state, published a series of documents relating to Greek independence, including but not limited to a national anthem and the first detailed map of Greece, in Vienna. Feraios was murdered by Ottoman agents in 1798.
Modern period
Greek War of Independence (1821–1832)
In the late eighteenth century, an increase in secular learning during the Modern Greek Enlightenment led to the revival among Greeks of the diaspora of the notion of a Greek nation tracing its existence to ancient Greece, distinct from the other Orthodox peoples, and having a right to political autonomy. One of the organizations formed in this intellectual milieu was the Filiki Eteria, a secret organization formed by merchants in Odessa in 1814. Appropriating a long-standing tradition of Orthodox messianic prophecy aspiring to the resurrection of the eastern Roman empire and creating the impression they had the backing of Tsarist Russia, they managed amidst a crisis of Ottoman trade, from 1815 onwards, to engage traditional strata of the Greek Orthodox world in their liberal nationalist cause. The Filiki Eteria planned to launch revolution in the Peloponnese, the Danubian Principalities and Constantinople. The first of these revolts began on 6 March 1821 in the Danubian Principalities under the leadership of Alexandros Ypsilantis, but it was soon put down by the Ottomans. The events in the north spurred the Greeks of the Peloponnese into action and on 17 March 1821 the Maniots declared war on the Ottomans.
By the end of the month, the Peloponnese was in open revolt against the Ottomans and by October 1821 the Greeks under Theodoros Kolokotronis had captured Tripolitsa. The Peloponnesian revolt was quickly followed by revolts in Crete, Macedonia and Central Greece, which would soon be suppressed. Meanwhile, the makeshift Greek navy was achieving success against the Ottoman navy in the Aegean Sea and prevented Ottoman reinforcements from arriving by sea. In 1822 and 1824 the Turks and Egyptians ravaged the islands, including Chios and Psara, committing wholesale massacres of the population. Approximately three-quarters of the Chios' Greek population of 120,000 were killed, enslaved or died of disease. This had the effect of galvanizing public opinion in western Europe in favour of the Greek rebels.
Tensions soon developed among different Greek factions, leading to two consecutive civil wars. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Sultan negotiated with Mehmet Ali of Egypt, who agreed to send his son Ibrahim Pasha to Greece with an army to suppress the revolt in return for territorial gain. Ibrahim landed in the Peloponnese in February 1825 and had immediate success: by the end of 1825, most of the Peloponnese was under Egyptian control, and the city of Missolonghi—put under siege by the Turks since April 1825—fell in April 1826. Although Ibrahim was defeated in Mani, he had succeeded in suppressing most of the revolt in the Peloponnese, and Athens had been retaken.
After years of negotiation, three great powers, France, Russian Empire, and the United Kingdom, decided to intervene in the conflict and each nation sent a navy to Greece. Following news that combined Ottoman–Egyptian fleets were going to attack the Greek island of Hydra, the allied fleet intercepted the Ottoman–Egyptian fleet at Navarino. A week-long standoff ended with the Battle of Navarino (20 October 1827) which resulted in the destruction of the Ottoman–Egyptian fleet. A French expeditionary force was dispatched to supervise the evacuation of the Egyptian army from the Peloponnese, while the Greeks proceeded to the captured part of Central Greece by 1828. As a result of years of negotiation, the nascent Greek state was finally recognised under the London Protocol in 1830.
Kingdom of Greece
In 1827, Ioannis Kapodistrias, from Corfu, was chosen by the Third National Assembly at Troezen as the first governor of the First Hellenic Republic. Kapodistrias established a series of state, economic and military institutions. Soon tensions appeared between him and local interests. Following his assassination in 1831 and the subsequent London conference a year later, the Great Powers of Britain, France and Russia installed Bavarian Prince Otto von Wittelsbach as monarch. Otto's reign was despotic, and in its first 11 years of independence Greece was ruled by a Bavarian oligarchy led by Joseph Ludwig von Armansperg as Prime Minister and, later, by Otto himself, who held the title of both King and Premier. Throughout this period Greece remained under the influence of its three protecting Great Powers, France, Russia, and the United Kingdom, as well as Bavaria. In 1843 an uprising forced Otto to grant a constitution and a representative assembly.
Despite the absolutism of Otto's reign, the early years proved instrumental in creating institutions (improving those established by Ioannis Kapodisrias) which are still the bedrock of Greek administration and education. Important steps were taken in areas including the education system, maritime and postal communications, effective civil administration and, most importantly, the legal code. Historical revisionism took the form of de-Byzantinification and de-Ottomanisation, in favour of promoting the country's Ancient Greek heritage. In this spirit, the national capital was moved from Nafplio, where it had been since 1829, to Athens, which was at the time a smaller town (this approach weighed heavily in the debate over the final selection of the country's capital ). Religious reform also took place, and the Church of Greece was established as Greece's national church, although Otto remained a Catholic. 25 March, the day of Annunciation, was chosen as the anniversary of the Greek War of Independence in order to reinforce the link between Greek identity and Orthodoxy. Pavlos Karolidis called the Bavarian efforts to create a modern state in Greece as "not only appropriate for the peoples' needs, but also based on excellent administrative principles of the era".
Otto was deposed in the 23 October 1862 Revolution. Multiple causes led to his deposition and exile, including the Bavarian-dominated government, heavy taxation, and a failed attempt to annex Crete from the Ottoman Empire. The catalyst for the revolt was Otto's dismissal of Konstantinos Kanaris from the Premiership. A year later, he was replaced by Prince Wilhelm (William) of Denmark, who took the name George I and brought with him the Ionian Islands as a coronation gift from Britain. A new Constitution in 1864 changed Greece's form of government from constitutional monarchy to the more democratic crowned republic. In 1875 the concept of parliamentary majority as a requirement for the formation of a government was introduced by Charilaos Trikoupis, curbing the power of the monarchy to appoint minority governments of its preference.
Corruption, coupled with Trikoupis' increased spending to fund infrastructure projects like the Corinth Canal, overtaxed the weak Greek economy and forced the declaration of public insolvency in 1893. Greece also accepted the imposition of an International Financial Control authority to pay off the country's debtors. Another political issue in 19th-century Greece was uniquely Greek: the language question. The Greek people spoke a form of Greek called Demotic. Many of the educated elite saw this as a peasant dialect and were determined to restore the glories of Ancient Greek.
Government documents and newspapers were consequently published in Katharevousa (purified) Greek, a form which few ordinary Greeks could read. Liberals favoured recognising Demotic as the national language, but conservatives and the Orthodox Church resisted all such efforts, to the extent that, when the New Testament was translated into Demotic in 1901, riots erupted in Athens and the government fell (the Evangeliaka). This issue would continue to plague Greek politics until the 1970s.
All Greeks were united, however, in their determination to liberate the Hellenic lands under Ottoman rule. Especially in Crete, a prolonged revolt in 1866–1869 had raised nationalist fervour. When war broke out between Russia and the Ottomans in 1877, Greek popular sentiment rallied to Russia's side, but Greece was too poor and too concerned about British intervention, to officially enter the war. Nevertheless, in 1881, Thessaly and small parts of Epirus were ceded to Greece as part of the Treaty of Berlin, while frustrating Greek hopes of receiving Crete.
Greeks in Crete continued to stage regular revolts, and in 1897, the Greek government under Theodoros Deligiannis, bowing to popular pressure, declared war on the Ottomans. In the ensuing Greco-Turkish War of 1897, the badly trained and equipped Greek army was defeated by the Ottomans. Through the intervention of the Great Powers, however, Greece lost only a little territory along the border to Turkey, while Crete was established as an autonomous state under Prince George of Greece. With state coffers empty, fiscal policy came under International Financial Control. Alarmed by the abortive Ilinden uprising of the autonomist Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) in 1903, the Greek government, aiming to quell Komitadjis (IMRO bands) and detach the Slavophone peasants of the region from Bulgarian influence, sponsored a guerrilla campaign in Ottoman-ruled Macedonia, led by Greek officers and known as the Macedonian Struggle, which ended with the Young Turk Revolution in 1908.
Expansion, disaster, and reconstruction
Amidst general dissatisfaction with the seeming inertia and unattainability of national aspirations under the premiership of the cautious reformist Theotokis, a group of military officers organised a coup in August 1909 and shortly thereafter called to Athens Cretan politician Eleftherios Venizelos, who conveyed a vision of national regeneration. After winning two elections and becoming Prime Minister in 1910, Venizelos initiated wide-ranging fiscal, social, and constitutional reforms, reorganised the military, made Greece a member of the Balkan League, and led the country through the Balkan Wars. By 1913, Greece's territory and population had almost doubled, annexing Crete, Epirus, and Macedonia. In the following years, the struggle between King Constantine I and charismatic Venizelos over the country's foreign policy on the eve of First World War dominated the country's political scene and divided the country into two opposing groups. During parts of WW1, Greece had two governments: A royalist pro-German one in Athens and a Venizelist pro-Entente one in Thessaloniki. The two governments were united in 1917, when Greece officially entered the war on the side of the Entente.
In the aftermath of World War I, Greece attempted further expansion into Asia Minor, a region with a large native Greek population at the time, but was defeated in the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922, contributing to a massive flight of Asia Minor Greeks. These events overlapped, with both happening during the Greek genocide (1914–1922), a period during which, according to various sources, Ottoman and Turkish officials contributed to the death of several hundred thousand Asia Minor Greeks, along with similar numbers of Assyrians and a rather larger number of Armenians. The resultant Greek exodus from Asia Minor was made permanent, and expanded, in an official Population exchange between Greece and Turkey. The exchange was part of the terms of the Treaty of Lausanne which ended the war.
The following era was marked by instability, as over 1.5 million propertyless Greek refugees from Turkey had to be integrated into Greek society. Cappadocian Greeks, Pontian Greeks, and non-Greek followers of Greek Orthodoxy were all subject to the exchange as well. Some of the refugees could not speak the language and were from what had been unfamiliar environments to mainland Greeks, such as in the case of the Cappadocians and non-Greeks. The refugees also made a dramatic post-war population boost, as the number of refugees was more than a quarter of Greece's prior population.
Following the catastrophic events in Asia Minor, the monarchy was abolished via a referendum in 1924 and the Second Hellenic Republic was declared. In 1935, a royalist general-turned-politician Georgios Kondylis took power after a coup d'état and abolished the republic, holding a rigged referendum, after which King George II returned to Greece and was restored to the throne.
Dictatorship, World War II, and reconstruction
An agreement between Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas and the head of state George II followed in 1936, which installed Metaxas as the head of a dictatorial regime known as the 4th of August Regime, inaugurating a period of authoritarian rule that would last, with short breaks, until 1974. Although a dictatorship, Greece remained on good terms with Britain and was not allied with the Axis.
On 28 October 1940, Fascist Italy demanded the surrender of Greece, but the Greek administration refused, and, in the following Greco-Italian War, Greece repelled Italian forces into Albania, giving the Allies their first victory over Axis forces on land. The Greek struggle and victory against the Italians received exuberant praise at the time. Most prominent is the quote attributed to Winston Churchill: "Hence we will not say that Greeks fight like heroes, but we will say that heroes fight like Greeks." French general Charles de Gaulle was among those who praised the fierceness of the Greek resistance. In an official notice released to coincide with the Greek national celebration of the Day of Independence, De Gaulle expressed his admiration for the Greek resistance:In the name of the captured yet still alive French people, France wants to send her greetings to the Greek people who are fighting for their freedom. The 25 March 1941 finds Greece in the peak of their heroic struggle and in the top of their glory. Since the Battle of Salamis, Greece had not achieved the greatness and the glory which today holds. The country would eventually fall to urgently dispatched German forces during the Battle of Greece, despite the fierce Greek resistance, particularly in the Battle of the Metaxas Line. Adolf Hitler himself recognised the bravery and the courage of the Greek army, stating in his address to the Reichstag on 11 December 1941, that: "Historical justice obliges me to state that of the enemies who took up positions against us, the Greek soldier particularly fought with the highest courage. He capitulated only when further resistance had become impossible and useless."
The Nazis proceeded to administer Athens and Thessaloniki, while other regions of the country were given to Nazi Germany's partners, Fascist Italy and Bulgaria. The occupation brought about terrible hardships for the Greek civilian population. Over 100,000 civilians died of starvation during the winter of 1941–1942, tens of thousands more died because of reprisals by Nazis and collaborators, the country's economy was ruined, and the great majority of Greek Jews (tens of thousands) were deported and murdered in Nazi concentration camps. The Greek Resistance, one of the most effective resistance movements in Europe, fought vehemently against the Nazis and their collaborators. The German occupiers committed numerous atrocities, mass executions, and wholesale slaughter of civilians and destruction of towns and villages in reprisals. In the course of the concerted anti-guerrilla campaign, hundreds of villages were systematically torched and almost 1 million Greeks left homeless. In total, the Germans executed some 21,000 Greeks, the Bulgarians 40,000, and the Italians 9,000.
Following liberation and the Allied victory over the Axis, Greece annexed the Dodecanese Islands from Italy and regained Western Thrace from Bulgaria. The country almost immediately descended into a bloody civil war between communist forces and the anti-communist Greek government, which lasted until 1949 with the latter's victory. The conflict, considered one of the earliest struggles of the Cold War, resulted in further economic devastation, mass population displacement and severe political polarisation for the next thirty years.
Although the post-war decades were characterised by social strife and widespread marginalisation of the left in political and social spheres, Greece nonetheless experienced rapid economic growth and recovery, propelled in part by the U.S.-administered Marshall Plan. In 1952, Greece joined NATO, reinforcing its membership in the Western Bloc of the Cold War.
Military regime (1967–74)
King Constantine II's dismissal of George Papandreou's centrist government in July 1965 prompted a prolonged period of political turbulence, which culminated in a coup d'état on 21 April 1967 by the Regime of the Colonels. Under the junta, civil rights were suspended, political repression was intensified, and human rights abuses, including state-sanctioned torture, were rampant. Economic growth remained rapid before plateauing in 1972. The brutal suppression of the Athens Polytechnic uprising on 17 November 1973 set in motion the events that caused the fall of the Papadopoulos regime, resulting in a counter-coup which overthrew Georgios Papadopoulos and established brigadier Dimitrios Ioannidis as the new junta strongman. On 20 July 1974, Turkey invaded the island of Cyprus in response to a Greek-backed Cypriot coup, triggering a political crisis in Greece that led to the regime's collapse and the restoration of democracy through Metapolitefsi.
Third Hellenic Republic
The former prime minister Konstantinos Karamanlis was invited back from Paris where he had lived in self-exile since 1963, marking the beginning of the Metapolitefsi era. The first multiparty elections since 1964 were held on the first anniversary of the Polytechnic uprising. A democratic and republican constitution was promulgated on 11 June 1975 following a referendum which chose to not restore the monarchy.
Meanwhile, Andreas Papandreou, George Papandreou's son, founded the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) in response to Karamanlis's conservative New Democracy party, with the two political formations dominating in government over the next four decades. Greece rejoined NATO in 1980. Greece became the tenth member of the European Communities (subsequently subsumed by the European Union) on 1 January 1981, ushering in a period of sustained growth. Widespread investments in industrial enterprises and heavy infrastructure, as well as funds from the European Union and growing revenues from tourism, shipping, and a fast-growing service sector raised the country's standard of living to unprecedented levels. Traditionally strained relations with neighbouring Turkey improved when successive earthquakes hit both nations in 1999, leading to the lifting of the Greek veto against Turkey's bid for EU membership.
Recent history
The country adopted the euro in 2001 and successfully hosted the 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens. More recently, Greece has suffered greatly from the late-2000s recession and has been central to the related European sovereign debt crisis. Due to the adoption of the euro, when Greece experienced financial crisis, it could no longer devalue its currency to regain competitiveness. Youth unemployment was especially high during the 2000s. The Greek government-debt crisis, and subsequent austerity policies, have resulted in protests and social strife. Left-wing Syriza, led by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, governed Greece since 2015 until 2019. Syriza gained support by opposing the austerity policy that had affected Greeks since the beginning of the Greek government-debt crisis. However, prime minister Tsipras was succeeded by Kyriakos Mitsotakis after the landslide victory of centre-right New Democracy in the 2019 elections.
In March 2020, Greece's parliament elected a non-partisan candidate, Ekaterini Sakellaropoulou, as the first female President of Greece.
Geography
Located in Southern and Southeast Europe, Greece consists of a mountainous, peninsular mainland jutting out into the sea at the southern end of the Balkans, ending at the Peloponnese peninsula (separated from the mainland by the canal of the Isthmus of Corinth) and strategically located at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Due to its highly indented coastline and numerous islands, Greece has the 11th longest coastline in the world with ; its land boundary is . The country lies approximately between latitudes 34° and 42° N, and longitudes 19° and 30° E, with the extreme points being:
North: Ormenio village
South: Gavdos island
East: Strongyli (Kastelorizo, Megisti) island
West: Othonoi island
Eighty percent of Greece consists of mountains or hills, making the country one of the most mountainous in Europe. Mount Olympus, the mythical abode of the Greek Gods, culminates at Mytikas peak , the highest in the country. Western Greece contains a number of lakes and wetlands and is dominated by the Pindus mountain range. The Pindus, a continuation of the Dinaric Alps, reaches a maximum elevation of at Mt. Smolikas (the second-highest in Greece) and historically has been a significant barrier to east–west travel.
The Pindus range continues through the central Peloponnese, crosses the islands of Kythera and Antikythera and finds its way into southwestern Aegean, in the island of Crete where it eventually ends. The islands of the Aegean are peaks of underwater mountains that once constituted an extension of the mainland. Pindus is characterised by its high, steep peaks, often dissected by numerous canyons and a variety of other karstic landscapes. The spectacular Vikos Gorge, part of the Vikos-Aoos National Park in the Pindus range, is listed by the Guinness book of World Records as the deepest gorge in the world. Another notable formation are the Meteora rock pillars, atop which have been built medieval Greek Orthodox monasteries.
Northeastern Greece features another high-altitude mountain range, the Rhodope range, spreading across the region of East Macedonia and Thrace; this area is covered with vast, thick, ancient forests, including the famous Dadia Forest in the Evros regional unit, in the far northeast of the country.
Extensive plains are primarily located in the regions of Thessaly, Central Macedonia and Thrace. They constitute key economic regions as they are among the few arable places in the country. Rare marine species such as the pinniped seals and the loggerhead sea turtle live in the seas surrounding mainland Greece, while its dense forests are home to the endangered brown bear, the Eurasian lynx, the roe deer and the wild goat.
Islands
Greece features a vast number of islands - between 1,200 and 6,000, depending on the definition, 227 of which are inhabited - and is considered a non-contiguous transcontinental country. Crete is the largest and most populous island; Euboea, separated from the mainland by the 60 m-wide Euripus Strait, is the second largest, followed by Lesbos and Rhodes.
The Greek islands are traditionally grouped into the following clusters: the Argo-Saronic Islands in the Saronic gulf near Athens, the Cyclades, a large but dense collection occupying the central part of the Aegean Sea, the North Aegean islands, a loose grouping off the west coast of Turkey, the Dodecanese, another loose collection in the southeast between Crete and Turkey, the Sporades, a small tight group off the coast of northeast Euboea, and the Ionian Islands, located to the west of the mainland in the Ionian Sea.
Climate
The climate of Greece is primarily Mediterranean, featuring mild, wet winters and hot, dry summers. This climate occurs at all coastal locations, including Athens, the Cyclades, the Dodecanese, Crete, the Peloponnese, the Ionian Islands and parts of the Central Continental Greece region. The Pindus mountain range strongly affects the climate of the country, as areas to the west of the range are considerably wetter on average (due to greater exposure to south-westerly systems bringing in moisture) than the areas lying to the east of the range (due to a rain shadow effect).
The mountainous areas of Northwestern Greece (parts of Epirus, Central Greece, Thessaly, Western Macedonia) as well as in the mountainous central parts of Peloponnese – including parts of the regional units of Achaea, Arcadia and Laconia – feature an Alpine climate with heavy snowfalls. The inland parts of northern Greece, in Central Macedonia and East Macedonia and Thrace feature a temperate climate with cold, damp winters and hot, dry summers with frequent thunderstorms. Snowfalls occur every year in the mountains and northern areas, and brief snowfalls are not unknown even in low-lying southern areas, such as Athens.
Biodiversity
Phytogeographically, Greece belongs to the Boreal Kingdom and is shared between the East Mediterranean province of the Mediterranean Region and the Illyrian province of the Circumboreal Region. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature and the European Environment Agency, the territory of Greece can be subdivided into six ecoregions: the Illyrian deciduous forests, Pindus Mountains mixed forests, Balkan mixed forests, Rhodope montane mixed forests, Aegean and Western Turkey sclerophyllous and mixed forests, and Crete Mediterranean forests. It had a 2018 Forest Landscape Integrity Index mean score of 6.6/10, ranking it 70th globally out of 172 countries.
Politics
Greece is a unitary parliamentary republic. The current Constitution was drawn up and adopted by the Fifth Revisionary Parliament of the Hellenes and entered into force in 1975 after the fall of the military junta of 1967–1974. It has been revised three times since, in 1986, 2001, 2008 and 2019. The Constitution, which consists of 120 articles, provides for a separation of powers into executive, legislative, and judicial branches, and grants extensive specific guarantees (further reinforced in 2001) of civil liberties and social rights. Women's suffrage was guaranteed with an amendment to the 1952 Constitution.
The nominal head of state is the President of the Republic, who is elected by the Parliament for a five-year term. According to the Constitution, executive power is exercised by the President and the Government. However, the Constitutional amendment of 1986 curtailed the President's duties and powers to a significant extent, rendering the position largely ceremonial; most political power is thus vested in the Prime Minister, Greece's head of government. The position is filled by the current leader of the political party that can obtain a vote of confidence by the Parliament. The President of the Republic formally appoints the Prime Minister and, on his recommendation, appoints and dismisses the other members of the Cabinet.
Legislative powers are exercised by a 300-member elective unicameral Parliament. Statutes passed by the Parliament are promulgated by the President of the Republic. Parliamentary elections are held every four years, but the President of the Republic is obliged to dissolve the Parliament earlier on the proposal of the Cabinet, in view of dealing with a national issue of exceptional importance. The President is also obliged to dissolve the Parliament earlier, if the opposition manages to pass a motion of no confidence. The voting age is 17.
According to a 2016 report by the OECD, Greeks display a moderate level of civic participation compared to most other developed countries; voter turnout was 64 percent during recent elections, lower than the OECD average of 69 percent.
Political parties
Since the restoration of democracy, the Greek party system was dominated by the liberal-conservative New Democracy (ND) and the social-democratic Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK). Other parties represented in the Hellenic Parliament include the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), Greek Solution and MeRA25.
PASOK and New Democracy largely alternated in power until the outbreak of the government-debt crisis in 2009. From that time, the two major parties, New Democracy and PASOK, experienced a sharp decline in popularity. In November 2011, the two major parties joined the smaller Popular Orthodox Rally in a grand coalition, pledging their parliamentary support for a government of national unity headed by former European Central Bank vice-president Lucas Papademos. Panos Kammenos voted against this government and he split off from ND forming the right-wing populist Independent Greeks.
The coalition government led the country to the parliamentary elections of May 2012. The power of the traditional Greek political parties, PASOK and New Democracy, declined from 43% to 13% and from 33% to 18%, respectively. The left-wing party of SYRIZA became the second major party, with an increase from 4% to 16%. No party could form a sustainable government, which led to the parliamentary elections of June 2012. The result of the second elections was the formation of a coalition government composed of New Democracy (29%), PASOK (12%) and Democratic Left (6%) parties.
SYRIZA has since overtaken PASOK as the main party of the centre-left . Alexis Tsipras led SYRIZA to victory in the general election held on 25 January 2015, falling short of an outright majority in Parliament by just two seats. The following morning, Tsipras reached an agreement with Independent Greeks party to form a coalition, and he was sworn in as Prime Minister of Greece. Tsipras called snap elections in August 2015, resigning from his post, which led to a month-long caretaker administration headed by judge Vassiliki Thanou-Christophilou, Greece's first female prime minister. In the September 2015 general election, Alexis Tsipras led SYRIZA to another victory, winning 145 out of 300 seats and re-forming the coalition with the Independent Greeks. However, he was defeated in the July 2019 general election by Kyriakos Mitsotakis who leads New Democracy. On 7 July 2019, Kyriakos Mitsotakis was sworn in as the new Prime Minister of Greece. He formed a centre-right government after the landslide victory of his New Democracy party.
Foreign relations
Greece's foreign policy is conducted through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its head, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, currently Nikos Dendias. Officially, the main aims of the Ministry are to represent Greece before other states and international organizations; safeguard the interests of the Greek state and of its citizens abroad; promote Greek culture; foster closer relations with the Greek diaspora; and encourage international cooperation.
Following the resolution of the Macedonia naming dispute with the Prespa Agreement in 2018, the Ministry identifies two remaining issues of particular importance to the Greek state: Turkish challenges to Greek sovereignty rights in the Aegean Sea and corresponding airspace and the Cyprus dispute involving the Turkish occupation of Northern Cyprus.
There is a long-standing conflict between Turkey and Greece over natural resources in the eastern Mediterranean. Turkey doesn't recognize a legal continental shelf and exclusive economic zone around the Greek islands.
Additionally, due to its political and geographical proximity to Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa, Greece is a country of significant geostrategic importance, which it has leveraged to develop a regional policy to help promote peace and stability in the Balkans, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. This has accorded the country middle power status in global affairs.
Greece is a member of numerous international organizations, including the Council of Europe, the European Union, the Union for the Mediterranean, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Organisation internationale de la francophonie and the United Nations, of which it is a founding member.
Military
The Hellenic Armed Forces are overseen by the Hellenic National Defense General Staff (Greek: Γενικό Επιτελείο Εθνικής Άμυνας – ΓΕΕΘΑ), with civilian authority vested in the Ministry of National Defence. It consists of three branches:
Hellenic Army (Ellinikos Stratos, ES)
Hellenic Navy (Elliniko Polemiko Navtiko, EPN)
Hellenic Air Force (Elliniki Polemiki Aeroporia, EPA)
Moreover, Greece maintains the Hellenic Coast Guard for law enforcement at sea, search and rescue, and port operations. Though it can support the navy during wartime, it resides under the authority of the Ministry of Shipping.
Greek military personnel total 364,050, of whom 142,700 are active and 221,350 are reserve. Greece ranks 28th in the world in the number of citizens serving in the armed forces. Mandatory military service is nine months for the Army and one year for the Navy and Air Force. Additionally, Greek males between the ages of 18 and 60 who live in strategically sensitive areas may be required to serve part-time in the National Guard.
As a member of NATO, the Greek military participates in exercises and deployments under the auspices of the alliance, although its involvement in NATO missions is minimal. Greece spends over US$7 billion annually on its military, or 2.3 percent of GDP, the 24th-highest in the world in absolute terms, the seventh-highest on a per capita basis, and the second-highest in NATO after the United States. Moreover, Greece is one of only five NATO countries to meet or surpass the minimum defence spending target of 2 percent of GDP.
Law and justice
The Judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislature and comprises three Supreme Courts: the Court of Cassation (Άρειος Πάγος), the Council of State (Συμβούλιο της Επικρατείας) and the Court of Auditors (Ελεγκτικό Συνέδριο). The Judiciary system is also composed of civil courts, which judge civil and penal cases and administrative courts, which judge disputes between the citizens and the Greek administrative authorities.
The Hellenic Police () is the national police force of Greece. It is a very large agency with its responsibilities ranging from road traffic control to counter-terrorism. It was established in 1984 under Law 1481/1-10-1984 (Government Gazette 152 A) as the result of the fusion of the Gendarmerie (Χωροφυλακή, Chorofylaki) and the Cities Police (Αστυνομία Πόλεων, Astynomia Poleon) forces.
Administrative divisions
Since the Kallikratis programme reform entered into effect on 1 January 2011, Greece has consisted of 13 regions subdivided into a total of 325, from 2019 232 (Cleisthenes programme), municipalities. The 54 old prefectures and prefecture-level administrations have been largely retained as sub-units of the regions. Seven decentralised administrations group one to three regions for administrative purposes on a regional basis. There is also one autonomous area, Mount Athos (, "Holy Mountain"), which borders the region of Central Macedonia.
Economy
Introduction
According to World Bank statistics for the year 2013, the economy of Greece is the 43rd largest by nominal gross domestic product at $242 billion and 53rd largest by purchasing power parity (PPP) at $284 billion. Additionally, Greece is the 15th largest economy in the 27-member European Union. In terms of per capita income, Greece is ranked 41st or 47th in the world at $18,168 and $29,045 for nominal GDP and PPP respectively. The Greek economy is classified as advanced and high-income.
Greece is a developed country with a high standard of living and a high ranking in the Human Development Index. Its economy mainly comprises the service sector (85.0%) and industry (12.0%), while agriculture makes up 3.0% of the national economic output. Important Greek industries include tourism (with 14.9 million international tourists in 2009, it is ranked as the 7th most visited country in the European Union and 16th in the world by the United Nations World Tourism Organization) and merchant shipping (at 16.2% of the world's total capacity, the Greek merchant marine is the largest in the world), while the country is also a considerable agricultural producer (including fisheries) within the union.
In October 2021, unemployment stood at 12.9% and youth unemployment at 33.2%, compared to respectively 7% and 15.9% in the EU and in the Euro zone.
With an economy larger than all the other Balkan economies combined, Greece is the largest economy in the Balkans, and an important regional investor. Greece is the number-two foreign investor of capital in Albania, the number-three foreign investor in Bulgaria, at the top-three of foreign investors in Romania and Serbia and the most important trading partner and largest foreign investor of North Macedonia. Greek banks open a new branch somewhere in the Balkans on an almost weekly basis. The Greek telecommunications company OTE has become a strong investor in other Balkan countries.
Greece was a founding member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC). In 1979 the accession of the country in the European Communities and the single market was signed, and the process was completed in 1982. Greece was accepted into the Economic and Monetary Union of the European Union on 19 June 2000, and in January 2001 adopted the Euro as its currency, replacing the Greek drachma at an exchange rate of 340.75 drachma to the Euro. Greece is also a member of the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, and is ranked 24th on the KOF Globalization Index for 2013.
Debt crisis (2010–2018)
The Greek economy had fared well for much of the 20th century, with high growth rates and low public debt. Even until the eve of the Financial crisis of 2007–2008, it featured high rates of growth, which, however, were coupled with high structural deficits, thus maintaining a (roughly unchanged throughout this period) public debt to GDP ratio of just over 100%. The Greek crisis was triggered by the turmoil of the 2007–2009 Great Recession, which led the budget deficits of several Western nations to reach or exceed 10% of GDP. In Greece's case, the high budget deficit (which, after several corrections and revisions, was revealed to have been allowed to reach 10.2% and 15.1% of GDP in 2008 and 2009, respectively) was coupled with a high public debt to GDP ratio (relatively stable, at just over 100% until 2007 - as calculated after all corrections). Thus, the country appeared to lose control of its public debt to GDP ratio, which already reached 127% of GDP in 2009. In addition, being a member of the Eurozone, the country had essentially no autonomous monetary policy flexibility.
Finally, there was an effect of controversies about Greek statistics (due to the aforementioned drastic budget deficit revisions which led to an increase in the calculated value of the Greek public debt by about 10%, i.e., a public debt to GDP of about 100% until 2007), while there have been arguments about a possible effect of media reports. Consequently, Greece was "punished" by the markets which increased borrowing rates, making it impossible for the country to finance its debt since early 2010.
The above revisions were largely connected with the fact that in the years before the crisis Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and numerous other banks had developed financial products which enabled the governments of Greece, Italy, and many other European countries to hide their borrowing. Dozens of similar agreements were concluded across Europe whereby banks supplied cash in advance in exchange for future payments by the governments involved; in turn, the liabilities of the involved countries were "kept off the books". These conditions had enabled Greece as well as other European governments to spend beyond their means, while meeting the deficit targets set out in the Maastricht Treaty.
In May 2010, the Greece's deficit was again revised and estimated to be 13.6% which was the second highest in the world relative to GDP, with Iceland in first place at 15.7% and the United Kingdom in third with 12.6%. Public debt was forecast, according to some estimates, to hit 120% of GDP in the same year, causing a crisis of confidence in Greece's ability pay back loans.
To avert a sovereign default, Greece, the other Eurozone members, and the International Monetary Fund agreed on a rescue package which involved giving Greece an immediate € in loans, with additional funds to follow, totaling €. To secure the funding, Greece was required to adopt harsh austerity measures to bring its deficit under control. A second bail-out amounting to € ($) was agreed in 2012, subject to strict conditions, including financial reforms and further austerity measures. A debt haircut was also agreed as part of the deal. Greece achieved a primary government budget surplus in 2013, while in April 2014, it returned to the global bond market. Greece returned to growth after six years of economic decline in the second quarter of 2014, and was the Eurozone's fastest-growing economy in the third quarter. A third bailout was agreed in July 2015, after a confrontation with the newly elected government of Alexis Tsipras.
There was a 25% drop in Greece's GDP, connected with the bailout programmes. This had a critical effect: the Debt-to-GDP ratio, the key factor defining the severity of the crisis, would jump from its 2009 level of 127% to about 170%, solely due to the shrinking economy. In a 2013 report, the IMF admitted that it had underestimated the effects of so extensive tax hikes and budget cuts on the country's GDP and issued an informal apology. The Greek programmes imposed a very rapid improvement in structural primary balance (at least two times faster than for other Eurozone bailed-out countries). The policies have been blamed for worsening the crisis, while Greece's president, Prokopis Pavlopoulos, stressed the creditors' share in responsibility for the depth of the crisis. Greek Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, asserted that errors in the design of the first two programmes which led to a loss of 25% of the Greek economy due to the harsh imposition of excessive austerity.
Between 2009 and 2017 the Greek government debt rose from €300 bn to €318 bn, i.e. by only about 6% (thanks, in part, to the 2012 debt restructuring); however, during the same period, the critical debt-to-GDP ratio shot up from 127% to 179% basically due to the severe GDP drop during the handling of the crisis.
Greece's bailouts successfully ended (as declared) on 20 August 2018.
Agriculture
In 2010, Greece was the European Union's largest producer of cotton (183,800 tons) and pistachios (8,000 tons) and ranked second in the production of rice (229,500 tons) and olives (147,500 tons), third in the production of figs (11,000 tons), almonds (44,000 tons), tomatoes (1,400,000 tons), and watermelons (578,400 tons) and fourth in the production of tobacco (22,000 tons). Agriculture contributes 3.8% of the country's GDP and employs 12.4% of the country's labor force.
Greece is a major beneficiary of the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union. As a result of the country's entry to the European Community, much of its agricultural infrastructure has been upgraded and agricultural output increased. Between 2000 and 2007, organic farming in Greece increased by 885%, the highest change percentage in the EU.
Energy
Electricity production in Greece is dominated by the state-owned Public Power Corporation (known mostly by its acronym ΔΕΗ, transliterated as DEI). In 2009 DEI supplied for 85.6% of all electric energy demand in Greece, while the number fell to 77.3% in 2010. Almost half (48%) of DEI's power output is generated using lignite, a drop from the 51.6% in 2009.
Twelve percent of Greece's electricity comes from hydroelectric power plants and another 20% from natural gas. Between 2009 and 2010, independent companies' energy production increased by 56%, from 2,709 Gigawatt hour in 2009 to 4,232 GWh in 2010.
In 2012, renewable energy accounted for 13.8% of the country's total energy consumption, a rise from the 10.6% it accounted for in 2011, a figure almost equal to the EU average of 14.1% in 2012. 10% of the country's renewable energy comes from solar power, while most comes from biomass and waste recycling. In line with the European Commission's Directive on Renewable Energy, Greece aims to get 18% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020.
In 2013, according to the independent power transmission operator in Greece (ΑΔΜΗΕ) more than 20% of the electricity in Greece has been produced from renewable energy sources and hydroelectric powerplants. This percentage in April reached 42%. Greece currently does not have any nuclear power plants in operation; however, in 2009 the Academy of Athens suggested that research in the possibility of Greek nuclear power plants begin.
Maritime industry
The shipping industry has been a key element of Greek economic activity since ancient times. Shipping remains one of the country's most important industries, accounting for 4.5 percent of GDP, employing about 160,000 people (4 percent of the workforce), and representing a third of the trade deficit.
According to a 2011 report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the Greek Merchant Navy is the largest in the world at 16.2 percent of total global capacity, up from 15.96 percent in 2010 but below the peak of 18.2 percent in 2006. The country's merchant fleet ranks first in total tonnage (202 million dwt), fourth in total number of ships (at 3,150), first in both tankers and dry bulk carriers, fourth in the number of containers, and fifth in other ships. However, today's fleet roster is smaller than an all-time high of 5,000 ships in the late 1970s. Additionally, the total number of ships flying a Greek flag (includes non-Greek fleets) is 1,517, or 5.3 percent of the world's dwt (ranked fifth globally).
During the 1960s, the size of the Greek fleet nearly doubled, primarily through the investment undertaken by the shipping magnates, Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos. The basis of the modern Greek maritime industry was formed after World War II when Greek shipping businessmen were able to amass surplus ships sold to them by the U.S. government through the Ship Sales Act of the 1940s.
Greece has a significant shipbuilding and ship maintenance industry. The six shipyards around the port of Piraeus are among the largest in Europe. In recent years, Greece has also become a leader in the construction and maintenance of luxury yachts.
Tourism
Tourism has been a key element of the economic activity in the country and one of the country's most important sectors, contributing 20.6% of the gross domestic product as of 2018. Greece welcomed over 28 million visitors in 2016, which is an increase from the 26.5 million tourists it welcomed in 2015 and the 19.5 million in 2009, and the 17.7 million tourists in 2007, making Greece one of the most visited countries in Europe in the recent years.
The vast majority of visitors in Greece in 2007 came from the European continent, numbering 12.7 million, while the most visitors from a single nationality were those from the United Kingdom, (2.6 million), followed closely by those from Germany (2.3 million). In 2010, the most visited region of Greece was that of Central Macedonia, with 18% of the country's total tourist flow (amounting to 3.6 million tourists), followed by Attica with 2.6 million and the Peloponnese with 1.8 million. Northern Greece is the country's most-visited geographical region, with 6.5 million tourists, while Central Greece is second with 6.3 million.
In 2010, Lonely Planet ranked Greece's northern and second-largest city of Thessaloniki as the world's fifth-best party town worldwide, comparable to other cities such as Dubai and Montreal. In 2011, Santorini was voted as "The World's Best Island" in Travel + Leisure. Its neighboring island Mykonos, came in fifth in the European category. There are 18 UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Greece, and Greece is ranked 16th in the world in terms of total sites. 14 further sites are on the tentative list, awaiting nomination.
Transport
Since the 1980s, the road and rail network of Greece has been significantly modernised. Important works include the A2 (Egnatia Odos) motorway, that connects northwestern Greece (Igoumenitsa) with northern Greece (Thessaloniki) and northeastern Greece (Kipoi); the Rio–Antirrio bridge, the longest suspension cable bridge in Europe ( long), connecting the Peloponnese (Rio, from Patras) with Aetolia-Akarnania (Antirrio) in western Greece.
Also completed are the A5 (Ionia Odos) motorway that connects northwestern Greece (Ioannina) with western Greece (Antirrio); the last sections of the A1 motorway, connecting Athens to Thessaloniki and Evzonoi in northern Greece; as well as the A8 motorway (part of the Olympia Odos) in Peloponnese, connecting Athens to Patras. The remaining section of Olympia Odos, connecting Patras with Pyrgos, is under planning.
Other important projects that are currently underway, include the construction of the Thessaloniki Metro.
The Athens Metropolitan Area in particular is served by some of the most modern and efficient transport infrastructure in Europe, such as the Athens International Airport, the privately run A6 (Attiki Odos) motorway network and the expanded Athens Metro system.
Most of the Greek islands and many main cities of Greece are connected by air mainly from the two major Greek airlines, Olympic Air and Aegean Airlines. Maritime connections have been improved with modern high-speed craft, including hydrofoils and catamarans.
Railway connections play a somewhat lesser role in Greece than in many other European countries, but they too have also been expanded, with new suburban/commuter rail connections, serviced by Proastiakos around Athens, towards its airport, Kiato and Chalkida; around Thessaloniki, towards the cities of Larissa and Edessa; and around Patras. A modern intercity rail connection between Athens and Thessaloniki has also been established, while an upgrade to double lines in many parts of the network is underway; along with a new double track, standard gauge railway between Athens and Patras (replacing the old metre-gauge Piraeus–Patras railway) which is currently under construction and opening in stages. International railway lines connect Greek cities with the rest of Europe, the Balkans and Turkey.
Telecommunications
Modern digital information and communication networks reach all areas. There are over of fiber optics and an extensive open-wire network. Broadband internet availability is widespread in Greece: there were a total of 2,252,653 broadband connections , translating to 20% broadband penetration. According to 2017 data, around 82% of the general population used the internet regularly.
Internet cafés that provide net access, office applications and multiplayer gaming are also a common sight in the country, while mobile internet on 3G and 4G- LTE cellphone networks and Wi-Fi connections can be found almost everywhere. 3G/4G mobile internet usage has been on a sharp increase in recent years. Based on 2016 data 70% of Greek internet users have access via 3G/4G mobile. The United Nations International Telecommunication Union ranks Greece among the top 30 countries with a highly developed information and communications infrastructure.
Science and technology
The General Secretariat for Research and Technology of the Ministry of Development and Competitiveness is responsible for designing, implementing and supervising national research and technological policy. In 2017, spending on research and development (R&D) reached an all-time high of €2 billion, equal to 1.14 percent of GDP.
Although lower than the EU average of 1.93 percent, between 1990 and 1998, total R&D expenditure in Greece enjoyed the third-highest increase in Europe, after Finland and Ireland. Greece was ranked 43rd in the Global Innovation Index in 2020, down from 41st in 2019. Because of its strategic location, qualified workforce, and political and economic stability, many multinational companies such as Ericsson, Siemens, Motorola, Coca-Cola, and Tesla have their regional R&D headquarters in Greece.
Greece has several major technology parks with incubator facilities and has been a member of the European Space Agency (ESA) since 2005. Cooperation between ESA and the Hellenic National Space Committee began in 1994 with the signing of the first cooperation agreement. After applying for full membership in 2003, Greece became the ESA's sixteenth member on 16 March 2005. The country participates in the ESA's telecommunication and technology activities and the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security Initiative.
The National Centre of Scientific Research "Demokritos" was founded in 1959. The original objective of the center was the advancement of nuclear research and technology. Today, its activities cover several fields of science and engineering.
Greece has one of the highest rates of tertiary enrollment in the world, while Greeks are well represented in academia worldwide; numerous leading Western universities employ a disproportionately high number of Greek faculty. Greek scientific publications have grown significantly in terms of research impact, surpassing both the EU and global average from 2012 to 2016.
Notable Greek scientists of modern times include Georgios Papanikolaou (inventor of the Pap test), mathematician Constantin Carathéodory (known for the Carathéodory theorems and Carathéodory conjecture), astronomer E. M. Antoniadi, archaeologists Ioannis Svoronos, Valerios Stais, Spyridon Marinatos, Manolis Andronikos (discovered the tomb of Philip II of Macedon in Vergina), Indologist Dimitrios Galanos, botanist Theodoros G. Orphanides, such as Michael Dertouzos, Nicholas Negroponte, John Argyris, John Iliopoulos (2007 Dirac Prize for his contributions on the physics of the charm quark, a major contribution to the birth of the Standard Model, the modern theory of Elementary Particles), Joseph Sifakis (2007 Turing Award, the "Nobel Prize" of Computer Science), Christos Papadimitriou (2002 Knuth Prize, 2012 Gödel Prize), Mihalis Yannakakis (2005 Knuth Prize) and physicist Dimitri Nanopoulos.
Demographics
According to the official statistical body of Greece, the Hellenic Statistical Authority (ELSTAT), the country's total population in 2011 was 10,816,286. Eurostat places the current population at 10.7 million in 2018.
Greek society has changed rapidly over the last several decades, coinciding with the wider European trend of declining fertility and rapid aging. The birth rate in 2003 stood at 9.5 per 1,000 inhabitants, significantly lower than the rate of 14.5 per 1,000 in 1981. At the same time, the mortality rate increased slightly from 8.9 per 1,000 inhabitants in 1981 to 9.6 per 1,000 inhabitants in 2003. Estimates from 2016 show the birth rate decreasing further still to 8.5 per 1,000 and mortality climbing to 11.2 per 1,000.
The fertility rate of 1.41 children per woman is well below the replacement rate of 2.1, and is one of the lowest in the world, considerably below the high of 5.47 children born per woman in 1900. Subsequently, Greece's median age is 44.2 years, the seventh-highest in the world. In 2001, 16.71 percent of the population were 65 years old and older, 68.12 percent between the ages of 15 and 64 years old, and 15.18 percent were 14 years old and younger. By 2016, the proportion of the population age 65 and older had risen to 20.68 percent, while the proportion of those aged 14 and younger declined to slightly below 14 percent.
Marriage rates began declining from almost 71 per 1,000 inhabitants in 1981 until 2002, only to increase slightly in 2003 to 61 per 1,000 and then fall again to 51 in 2004. Moreover, divorce rates have seen an increase from 191.2 per 1,000 marriages in 1991 to 239.5 per 1,000 marriages in 2004.
As a result of these trends, the average Greek household is smaller and older than in previous generations. The economic crisis has exacerbated this development, with 350,000-450,000 Greeks, predominantly young adults, emigrating since 2010.
Cities
Almost two-thirds of the Greek people live in urban areas. Greece's largest and most influential metropolitan centres are those of Athens and Thessaloniki—that latter commonly referred to as the (, )—with metropolitan populations of approximately 4 million and 1 million inhabitants respectively. Other prominent cities with urban populations above 100,000 inhabitants include Patras, Heraklion, Larissa, Volos, Rhodes, Ioannina, Agrinio, Chania, and Chalcis.
The table below lists the largest cities in Greece, by population contained in their respective contiguous built up urban areas, which are either made up of many municipalities, evident in the cases of Athens and Thessaloniki, or are contained within a larger single municipality, case evident in most of the smaller cities of the country. The results come from the preliminary figures of the population census that took place in Greece in May 2011.
Religion
The Greek Constitution recognises Eastern Orthodoxy as the 'prevailing' faith of the country, while guaranteeing freedom of religious belief for all. The Greek government does not keep statistics on religious groups and censuses do not ask for religious affiliation. According to the U.S. State Department, an estimated 97% of Greek citizens identify themselves as Eastern Orthodox, belonging to the Greek Orthodox Church, which uses the Byzantine rite and the Greek language, the original language of the New Testament. The administration of the Greek territory is shared between the Church of Greece and the Patriarchate of Constantinople.
In a 2010 Eurostat–Eurobarometer poll, 79% of Greek citizens responded that they "believe there is a God". According to other sources, 15.8% of Greeks describe themselves as "very religious", which is the highest among all European countries. The survey also found that just 3.5% never attend a church, compared to 4.9% in Poland and 59.1% in the Czech Republic.
Estimates of the recognised Greek Muslim minority, which is mostly located in Thrace, range around 100,000, (about 1% of the population). Some of the Albanian immigrants to Greece come from a nominally Muslim background, although most are secular in orientation. Following the 1919–1922 Greco-Turkish War and the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, Greece and Turkey agreed to a population transfer based on cultural and religious identity. About 500,000 Muslims from Greece, predominantly those defined as Turks, but also Greek Muslims like the Vallahades of western Macedonia, were exchanged with approximately 1.5 million Greeks from Turkey. However, many refugees who settled in former Ottoman Muslim villages in Central Macedonia, and were defined as Christian Orthodox Caucasus Greeks, arrived from the former Russian Transcaucasus province of Kars Oblast, after it had been retroceded to Turkey prior to the official population exchange.
Judaism has been present in Greece for more than 2,000 years.
The ancient community of Greek Jews are called Romaniotes, while the Sephardi Jews were once a prominent community in the city of Thessaloniki, numbering some 80,000, or more than half of the population, by 1900. However, after the German occupation of Greece and the Holocaust during World War II, is estimated to number around 5,500 people.
The Roman Catholic community is estimated to be around 250,000 of which 50,000 are Greek citizens. Their community is nominally separate from the smaller Greek Byzantine Catholic Church, which recognises the primacy of the Pope but maintains the liturgy of the Byzantine Rite. Old Calendarists account for 500,000 followers. Protestants, including the Greek Evangelical Church and Free Evangelical Churches, stand at about 30,000. Other Christian minorities, such as Assemblies of God, International Church of the Foursquare Gospel and various Pentecostal churches of the Greek Synod of Apostolic Church total about 12,000 members. The independent Free Apostolic Church of Pentecost is the biggest Protestant denomination in Greece with 120 churches. There are no official statistics about Free Apostolic Church of Pentecost, but the Orthodox Church estimates the followers as 20,000. The Jehovah's Witnesses report having 28,874 active members.
Since 2017, Hellenic Polytheism, or Helenism has been legally recognised as an actively practiced religion in Greece, with estimates of 2,000 active practitioners and an additional 100,000 "sympathisers". Hellenism refers to various religious movements that continue, revive, or reconstruct ancient Greek religious practices.
Languages
The first textual evidence of the Greek language dates back to the 15th century BC and the Linear B script which is associated with the Mycenaean Civilization. Greek was a widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world and beyond during Classical Antiquity, and would eventually become the official parlance of the Byzantine Empire.
During the 19th and 20th centuries there was a major dispute known as the Greek language question, on whether the official language of Greece should be the archaic Katharevousa, created in the 19th century and used as the state and scholarly language, or the Dimotiki, the form of the Greek language which evolved naturally from Byzantine Greek and was the language of the people. The dispute was finally resolved in 1976, when Dimotiki was made the only official variation of the Greek language, and Katharevousa fell to disuse.
Greece is today relatively homogeneous in linguistic terms, with a large majority of the native population using Greek as their first or only language. Among the Greek-speaking population, speakers of the distinctive Pontic dialect came to Greece from Asia Minor after the Greek genocide and constitute a sizable group. The Cappadocian dialect came to Greece due to the genocide as well, but is endangered and is barely spoken now. Indigenous Greek dialects include the archaic Greek spoken by the Sarakatsani, traditionally transhument mountain shepherds of Greek Macedonia and other parts of Northern Greece. The Tsakonian language, a distinct Greek language deriving from Doric Greek instead of Koine Greek, is still spoken in some villages in the southeastern Peloponnese.
The Muslim minority in Thrace, which amounts to approximately 0.95% of the total population, consists of speakers of Turkish, Bulgarian (Pomaks) and Romani. Romani is also spoken by Christian Roma in other parts of the country. Further minority languages have traditionally been spoken by regional population groups in various parts of the country. Their use has decreased radically in the course of the 20th century through assimilation with the Greek-speaking majority.
Today they are only maintained by the older generations and are on the verge of extinction. This goes for the Arvanites, an Albanian-speaking group mostly located in the rural areas around the capital Athens, and for the Aromanians and Megleno-Romanians, also known as "Vlachs", whose language is closely related to Romanian and who used to live scattered across several areas of mountainous central Greece. Members of these groups usually identify ethnically as Greek and are today all at least bilingual in Greek.
Near the northern Greek borders there are also some Slavic–speaking groups, locally known as Slavomacedonian-speaking, most of whose members identify ethnically as Greeks. It is estimated that after the population exchanges of 1923, Macedonia had 200,000 to 400,000 Slavic speakers. The Jewish community in Greece traditionally spoke Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), today maintained only by a few thousand speakers. Other notable minority languages include Armenian, Georgian, and the Greco-Turkic dialect spoken by the Urums, a community of Caucasus Greeks from the Tsalka region of central Georgia and ethnic Greeks from southeastern Ukraine who arrived in mainly Northern Greece as economic migrants in the 1990s.
Migration
Throughout the 20th century, millions of Greeks migrated to the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and Germany, creating a large Greek diaspora. Net migration started to show positive numbers from the 1970s, but until the beginning of the 1990s, the main influx was that of returning Greek migrants or of Pontic Greeks and others from Russia, Georgia, Turkey the Czech Republic, and elsewhere in the former Soviet Bloc.
A study from the Mediterranean Migration Observatory maintains that the 2001 census recorded 762,191 persons residing in Greece without Greek citizenship, constituting around 7% of the total population. Of the non-citizen residents, 48,560 were EU or European Free Trade Association nationals and 17,426 were Cypriots with privileged status. The majority come from Eastern European countries: Albania (56%), Bulgaria (5%) and Romania (3%), while migrants from the former Soviet Union (Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, etc.) comprise 10% of the total. Some of the immigrants from Albania are from the Greek minority in Albania centred on the region of Northern Epirus. In addition, the total Albanian national population which includes temporary migrants and undocumented persons is around 600,000.
The 2011 census recorded 9,903,268 Greek citizens (91,56%), 480,824 Albanian citizens (4,44%), 75,915 Bulgarian citizens (0,7%), 46,523 Romanian citizenship (0,43%), 34,177 Pakistani citizens (0,32%), 27,400 Georgian citizens (0,25%) and 247,090 people had other or unidentified citizenship (2,3%). 189,000 people of the total population of Albanian citizens were reported in 2008 as ethnic Greeks from Southern Albania, in the historical region of Northern Epirus.
The greatest cluster of non-EU immigrant population are the larger urban centers, especially the Municipality of Athens, with 132,000 immigrants comprising 17% of the local population, and then Thessaloniki, with 27,000 immigrants reaching 7% of the local population. There is also a considerable number of co-ethnics that came from the Greek communities of Albania and the former Soviet Union.
Greece, together with Italy and Spain, is a major entry point for illegal immigrants trying to enter the EU. Illegal immigrants entering Greece mostly do so from the border with Turkey at the Evros River and the islands of the eastern Aegean across from Turkey (mainly Lesbos, Chios, Kos, and Samos). In 2012, the majority of illegal immigrants entering Greece came from Afghanistan, followed by Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. In 2015, arrivals of refugees by sea had increased dramatically mainly due to the ongoing Syrian civil war. There were 856,723 arrivals by sea in Greece, an almost fivefold increase to the same period of 2014, of which the Syrians represent almost 45%. The majority of refugees and migrants use Greece as a transit country, while their intended destinations are northern European Nations such as Austria, Germany and Sweden.
Education
Greeks have a long tradition of valuing and investing in paideia (education), which was upheld as one of the highest societal values in the Greek and Hellenistic world. The first European institution described as a university was founded in fifth-century Constantinople and continued operating in various incarnations until the city's fall to the Ottomans in 1453. The University of Constantinople was Christian Europe's first secular institution of higher learning, and by some measures was the world's first university.
Compulsory education in Greece comprises primary schools (Δημοτικό Σχολείο, Dimotikó Scholeio) and gymnasium (Γυμνάσιο). Nursery schools (Παιδικός σταθμός, Paidikós Stathmós) are popular but not compulsory. Kindergartens (Νηπιαγωγείο, Nipiagogeío) are now compulsory for any child above four years of age. Children start primary school aged six and remain there for six years. Attendance at gymnasia starts at age 12 and lasts for three years.
Greece's post-compulsory secondary education consists of two school types: unified upper secondary schools (Γενικό Λύκειο, Genikό Lykeiό) and technical–vocational educational schools (Τεχνικά και Επαγγελματικά Εκπαιδευτήρια, "TEE"). Post-compulsory secondary education also includes vocational training institutes (Ινστιτούτα Επαγγελματικής Κατάρτισης, "IEK") which provide a formal but unclassified level of education. As they can accept both Gymnasio (lower secondary school) and Lykeio (upper secondary school) graduates, these institutes are not classified as offering a particular level of education.
According to the Framework Law (3549/2007), Public higher education "Highest Educational Institutions" (Ανώτατα Εκπαιδευτικά Ιδρύματα, Anótata Ekpaideytiká Idrýmata, "ΑΕΙ") consists of two parallel sectors:the university sector (Universities, Polytechnics, Fine Arts Schools, the Open University) and the Technological sector (Technological Education Institutions (TEI) and the School of Pedagogic and Technological Education). There are also State Non-University Tertiary Institutes offering vocationally oriented courses of shorter duration (2 to 3 years) which operate under the authority of other Ministries. Students are admitted to these Institutes according to their performance at national level examinations taking place after completion of the third grade of Lykeio. Additionally, students over twenty-two years old may be admitted to the Hellenic Open University through a form of lottery. The Capodistrian University of Athens is the oldest university in the eastern Mediterranean.
The Greek education system also provides special kindergartens, primary, and secondary schools for people with special needs or difficulties in learning. There are also specialist gymnasia and high schools offering musical, theological, and physical education.
Seventy-two percent of Greek adults aged 25–64 have completed upper secondary education, which is slightly less than the OECD average of 74 percent. The average Greek pupil scored 458 in reading literacy, maths and science in the OECD's 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). This score is lower than the OECD average of 486. On average, girls outperformed boys by 15 points, much more than the average OECD gap of two points.
Healthcare system
Greece has universal health care. The system is mixed, combining a national health service with social health insurance (SHI). 2000 World Health Organization report, its health care system ranked 14th in overall performance of 191 countries surveyed. In a 2013 Save the Children report, Greece was ranked the 19th out of 176 countries for the state of mothers and newborn babies. In 2010, there were 138 hospitals with 31,000 beds, but in 2011, the Ministry of Health announced plans to decrease the number to 77 hospitals with 36,035 beds to reduce expenses and further enhance healthcare standards. However, as of 2014, there were 124 public hospitals, of which 106 were general hospitals and 18 specialised hospitals, with a total capacity of about 30,000 beds.
Greece's healthcare expenditures as a percentage of GDP were 9.6% in 2007, just above the OECD average of 9.5%. By 2015, spending declined to 8.4% of GDP (compared with the EU average of 9.5%), a decline of one-fifth since 2010. Nevertheless, the country maintains the highest doctor-to-population ratio of any OECD country and the highest doctor-to-patient ratio in the EU.
Life expectancy in Greece is among the highest in the world; a 2011 OECD report placed it at 80.3 years, above the OECD average of 79.5, while a more recent 2017 study found life expectancy in 2015 to be 81.1 years, slightly above the EU average of 80.6. The island of Icaria has the highest percentage of nonagenarians in the world; approximately 33% of islanders are 90 or older. Icaria is subsequently classified as a "blue zone", a region where people allegedly live longer than average and have lower rates of cancer, heart disease, or other chronic illnesses.
The 2011 OECD report showed that Greece had the largest percentage of adult daily smokers of any of the 34 OECD members. The country's obesity rate is 18.1%, which is above the OECD average of 15.1%, but considerably lower than the American rate of 27.7%. In 2008, Greece had the highest rate of perceived good health in the OECD, at 98.5%. Infant mortality, with a rate of 3.6 deaths per 1,000 live births, was below the 2007 OECD average of 4.9.
Culture
The culture of Greece has evolved over thousands of years, beginning in Mycenaean Greece and continuing most notably into Classical Greece, through the influence of the Roman Empire and its Greek Eastern continuation, the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire. Other cultures and nations, such as the Latin and Frankish states, the Ottoman Empire, the Venetian Republic, the Genoese Republic, and the British Empire have also left their influence on modern Greek culture, although historians credit the Greek War of Independence with revitalising Greece and giving birth to a single, cohesive entity of its multi-faceted culture.
In ancient times, Greece was the birthplace of Western culture. Modern democracies owe a debt to Greek beliefs in government by the people, trial by jury, and equality under the law. The ancient Greeks pioneered in many fields that rely on systematic thought, including logic, biology, geometry, geography, medicine, history, philosophy, physics and mathematics. They introduced such important literary forms as epic and lyric poetry, history, tragedy, comedy and drama. In their pursuit of order and proportion, the Greeks created an ideal of beauty that strongly influenced Western art.
Visual arts
Artistic production in Greece began in the prehistoric pre-Greek Cycladic and the Minoan civilizations, both of which were influenced by local traditions and the art of ancient Egypt.
There were several interconnected traditions of painting in ancient Greece. Due to their technical differences, they underwent somewhat differentiated developments. Not all painting techniques are equally well represented in the archaeological record. The most respected form of art, according to authors like Pliny or Pausanias, were individual, mobile paintings on wooden boards, technically described as panel paintings. Also, the tradition of wall painting in Greece goes back at least to the Minoan and Mycenaean Bronze Age, with the lavish fresco decoration of sites like Knossos, Tiryns and Mycenae. Much of the figural or architectural sculpture of ancient Greece was painted colourfully. This aspect of Greek stonework is described as polychrome.
Ancient Greek sculpture was composed almost entirely of marble or bronze; with cast bronze becoming the favoured medium for major works by the early 5th century. Both marble and bronze are easy to form and very durable. Chryselephantine sculptures, used for temple cult images and luxury works, used gold, most often in leaf form and ivory for all or parts (faces and hands) of the figure, and probably gems and other materials, but were much less common, and only fragments have survived. By the early 19th century, the systematic excavation of ancient Greek sites had brought forth a plethora of sculptures with traces of notably multicolored surfaces. It was not until published findings by German archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann in the late 20th century, that the painting of ancient Greek sculptures became an established fact.
The art production continued also during the Byzantine era. The most salient feature of this new aesthetic was its "abstract", or anti-naturalistic character. If classical art was marked by the attempt to create representations that mimicked reality as closely as possible, Byzantine art seems to have abandoned this attempt in favour of a more symbolic approach. The Byzantine painting concentrated mainly on icons and hagiographies. The Macedonian art (Byzantine) was the artistic expression of Macedonian Renaissance, a label sometimes used to describe the period of the Macedonian dynasty of the Byzantine Empire (867–1056), especially the 10th century, which some scholars have seen as a time of increased interest in classical scholarship and the assimilation of classical motifs into Christian artwork.
Post Byzantine art schools include the Cretan School and Heptanese School. The first artistic movement in the Greek Kingdom can be considered the Greek academic art of the 19th century (Munich School). Notable modern Greek painters include Nikolaos Gyzis, Georgios Jakobides, Theodoros Vryzakis, Nikiforos Lytras, Konstantinos Volanakis, Nikos Engonopoulos and Yannis Tsarouchis, while some notable sculptors are Pavlos Prosalentis, Ioannis Kossos, Leonidas Drosis, Georgios Bonanos and Yannoulis Chalepas.
Architecture
The architecture of ancient Greece was produced by the ancient Greeks (Hellenes), whose culture flourished on the Greek mainland, the Aegean Islands and their colonies, for a period from about 900 BC until the 1st century AD, with the earliest remaining architectural works dating from around 600 BC. The formal vocabulary of ancient Greek architecture, in particular the division of architectural style into three defined orders: the Doric Order, the Ionic Order and the Corinthian Order, was to have profound effect on Western architecture of later periods.
Byzantine architecture is the architecture promoted by the Byzantine Empire, also known as the Eastern Roman Empire, which dominated Greece and the Greek speaking world during the Middle Ages. The empire endured for more than a millennium, dramatically influencing Medieval architecture throughout Europe and the Near East, and becoming the primary progenitor of the Renaissance and Ottoman architectural traditions that followed its collapse.
After the Greek Independence, the modern Greek architects tried to combine traditional Greek and Byzantine elements and motives with the western European movements and styles. Patras was the first city of the modern Greek state to develop a city plan. In January 1829, Stamatis Voulgaris, a Greek engineer of the French army, presented the plan of the new city to the Governor Kapodistrias, who approved it. Voulgaris applied the orthogonal rule in the urban complex of Patras.
Two special genres can be considered the Cycladic architecture, featuring white-coloured houses, in the Cyclades and the Epirotic architecture in the region of Epirus. Important is also the influence of the Venetian style in the Ionian islands and the "Mediterranean style" of Florestano Di Fausto (during the years of the fascist regime) in the Dodecanese islands.
After the establishment of the Greek Kingdom, the architecture of Athens and other cities was mostly influenced by the Neoclassical architecture. For Athens, the first King of Greece, Otto of Greece, commissioned the architects Stamatios Kleanthis and Eduard Schaubert to design a modern city plan fit for the capital of a state. As for Thessaloniki, after the fire of 1917, the government ordered for a new city plan under the supervision of Ernest Hébrard. Other modern Greek architects include Anastasios Metaxas, Lysandros Kaftanzoglou, Panagis Kalkos, Ernst Ziller, Xenophon Paionidis, Dimitris Pikionis and Georges Candilis.
Theatre
Theatre in its western form was born in Greece. The city-state of Classical Athens, which became a significant cultural, political, and military power during this period, was its centre, where it was institutionalised as part of a festival called the Dionysia, which honoured the god Dionysus. Tragedy (late 6th century BC), comedy (486 BC), and the satyr play were the three dramatic genres to emerge there.
During the Byzantine period, the theatrical art was heavily declined. According to Marios Ploritis, the only form survived was the folk theatre (Mimos and Pantomimos), despite the hostility of the official state. Later, during the Ottoman period, the main theatrical folk art was the Karagiozis. The renaissance which led to the modern Greek theatre, took place in the Venetian Crete. Significal dramatists include Vitsentzos Kornaros and Georgios Chortatzis.
The modern Greek theatre was born after the Greek independence, in the early 19th century, and initially was influenced by the Heptanesean theatre and melodrama, such as the Italian opera. The Nobile Teatro di San Giacomo di Corfù was the first theatre and opera house of modern Greece and the place where the first Greek opera, Spyridon Xyndas' The Parliamentary Candidate (based on an exclusively Greek libretto) was performed. During the late 19th and early 20th century, the Athenian theatre scene was dominated by revues, musical comedies, operettas and nocturnes and notable playwrights included Spyridon Samaras, Dionysios Lavrangas, Theophrastos Sakellaridis and others.
The National Theatre of Greece was opened in 1900 as Royal Theatre. Notable playwrights of the modern Greek theatre include Gregorios Xenopoulos, Nikos Kazantzakis, Pantelis Horn, Alekos Sakellarios and Iakovos Kambanelis, while notable actors include Cybele Andrianou, Marika Kotopouli, Aimilios Veakis, Orestis Makris, Katina Paxinou, Manos Katrakis and Dimitris Horn. Significant directors include Dimitris Rontiris, Alexis Minotis and Karolos Koun.
Literature
Greek literature can be divided into three main categories: Ancient, Byzantine and modern Greek literature.
Athens is considered the birthplace of Western literature. At the beginning of Greek literature stand the two monumental works of Homer: the Iliad and the Odyssey. Though dates of composition vary, these works were fixed around 800 BC or after. In the classical period many of the genres of western literature became more prominent. Lyrical poetry, odes, pastorals, elegies, epigrams; dramatic presentations of comedy and tragedy; historiography, rhetorical treatises, philosophical dialectics, and philosophical treatises all arose in this period. The two major lyrical poets were Sappho and Pindar. The Classical era also saw the dawn of drama.
Of the hundreds of tragedies written and performed during the classical age, only a limited number of plays by three authors have survived: those of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The surviving plays by Aristophanes are also a treasure trove of comic presentation, while Herodotus and Thucydides are two of the most influential historians in this period. The greatest prose achievement of the 4th century was in philosophy with the works of the three great philosophers.
Byzantine literature refers to literature of the Byzantine Empire written in Atticizing, Medieval and early Modern Greek, and it is the expression of the intellectual life of the Byzantine Greeks during the Christian Middle Ages. Although popular Byzantine literature and early Modern Greek literature both began in the 11th century, the two are indistinguishable.
Modern Greek literature refers to literature written in common Modern Greek, emerging from late Byzantine times in the 11th century. The Cretan Renaissance poem Erotokritos is considered the masterpiece of this period of Greek literature. It is a verse romance written around 1600 by Vitsentzos Kornaros (1553–1613). Later, during the period of Greek enlightenment (Diafotismos), writers such as Adamantios Korais and Rigas Feraios prepared with their works the Greek Revolution (1821–1830).
Leading figures of modern Greek literature include Dionysios Solomos, Andreas Kalvos, Angelos Sikelianos, Emmanuel Rhoides, Demetrius Vikelas, Kostis Palamas, Penelope Delta, Yannis Ritsos, Alexandros Papadiamantis, Nikos Kazantzakis, Andreas Embeirikos, Kostas Karyotakis, Gregorios Xenopoulos, Constantine P. Cavafy, Nikos Kavvadias, Kostas Varnalis and Kiki Dimoula. Two Greek authors have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature: George Seferis in 1963 and Odysseas Elytis in 1979.
Philosophy
Most western philosophical traditions began in Ancient Greece in the 6th century BC. The first philosophers are called "Presocratics," which designates that they came before Socrates, whose contributions mark a turning point in western thought. The Presocratics were from the western or the eastern colonies of Greece and only fragments of their original writings survive, in some cases merely a single sentence.
A new period of philosophy started with Socrates. Like the Sophists, he rejected entirely the physical speculations in which his predecessors had indulged, and made the thoughts and opinions of people his starting-point. Aspects of Socrates were first united from Plato, who also combined with them many of the principles established by earlier philosophers, and developed the whole of this material into the unity of a comprehensive system.
Aristotle of Stagira, the most important disciple of Plato, shared with his teacher the title of the greatest philosopher of antiquity. But while Plato had sought to elucidate and explain things from the supra-sensual standpoint of the forms, his pupil preferred to start from the facts given to us by experience. Except from these three most significant Greek philosophers other known schools of Greek philosophy from other founders during ancient times were Stoicism, Epicureanism, Skepticism and Neoplatonism.
Byzantine philosophy refers to the distinctive philosophical ideas of the philosophers and scholars of the Byzantine Empire, especially between the 8th and 15th centuries. It was characterised by a Christian world-view, but one which could draw ideas directly from the Greek texts of Plato, Aristotle, and the Neoplatonists.
On the eve of the Fall of Constantinople, Gemistus Pletho tried to restore the use of the term "Hellene" and advocated the return to the Olympian Gods of the ancient world. After 1453 a number of Greek Byzantine scholars who fled to western Europe contributed to the Renaissance.
In modern period, Diafotismos (Greek: Διαφωτισμός, "enlightenment", "illumination") was the Greek expression of the Age of Enlightenment and its philosophical and political ideas. Some notable representatives were Adamantios Korais, Rigas Feraios and Theophilos Kairis.
Other modern era Greek philosophers or political scientists include Cornelius Castoriadis, Nicos Poulantzas and Christos Yannaras.
Music and dances
Greek vocal music extends far back into ancient times where mixed-gender choruses performed for entertainment, celebration and spiritual reasons. Instruments during that period included the double-reed aulos and the plucked string instrument, the lyre, especially the special kind called a kithara. Music played an important role in the education system during ancient times. Boys were taught music from the age of six. Later influences from the Roman Empire, Middle East, and the Byzantine Empire also had effect on Greek music.
While the new technique of polyphony was developing in the West, the Eastern Orthodox Church resisted any type of change. Therefore, Byzantine music remained monophonic and without any form of instrumental accompaniment. As a result, and despite certain attempts by certain Greek chanters (such as Manouel Gazis, Ioannis Plousiadinos or the Cypriot Ieronimos o Tragoudistis), Byzantine music was deprived of elements of which in the West encouraged an unimpeded development of art. However, this method which kept music away from polyphony, along with centuries of continuous culture, enabled monophonic music to develop to the greatest heights of perfection. Byzantium presented the monophonic Byzantine chant; a melodic treasury of inestimable value for its rhythmical variety and expressive power.
Along with the Byzantine (Church) chant and music, the Greek people also cultivated the Greek folk song (Demotiko) which is divided into two cycles, the akritic and klephtic. The akritic was created between the 9th and 10th centuries and expressed the life and struggles of the akrites (frontier guards) of the Byzantine empire, the most well known being the stories associated with Digenes Akritas. The klephtic cycle came into being between the late Byzantine period and the start of the Greek War of Independence. The klephtic cycle, together with historical songs, paraloghes (narrative song or ballad), love songs, mantinades, wedding songs, songs of exile and dirges express the life of the Greeks. There is a unity between the Greek people's struggles for freedom, their joys and sorrow and attitudes towards love and death.
The Heptanesean kantádhes (καντάδες 'serenades'; sing.: καντάδα) became the forerunners of the Greek modern urban popular song, influencing its development to a considerable degree. For the first part of the next century, several Greek composers continued to borrow elements from the Heptanesean style. The most successful songs during the period 1870–1930 were the so-called Athenian serenades, and the songs performed on stage (επιθεωρησιακά τραγούδια 'theatrical revue songs') in revue, operettas and nocturnes that were dominating Athens' theater scene.
Rebetiko, initially a music associated with the lower classes, later (and especially after the population exchange between Greece and Turkey) reached greater general acceptance as the rough edges of its overt subcultural character were softened and polished, sometimes to the point of unrecognizability. It was the base of the later laïkó (song of the people). The leading performers of the genre include Vassilis Tsitsanis, Grigoris Bithikotsis, Stelios Kazantzidis, George Dalaras, Haris Alexiou and Glykeria.
Regarding the classical music, it was through the Ionian islands (which were under western rule and influence) that all the major advances of the western European classical music were introduced to mainland Greeks. The region is notable for the birth of the first School of modern Greek classical music (Heptanesean or Ionian School, Greek: Επτανησιακή Σχολή), established in 1815. Prominent representatives of this genre include Nikolaos Mantzaros, Spyridon Xyndas, Spyridon Samaras and Pavlos Carrer. Manolis Kalomiris is considered the founder of the Greek National School of Music.
In the 20th century, Greek composers have had a significant impact on the development of avant garde and modern classical music, with figures such as Iannis Xenakis, Nikos Skalkottas, and Dimitri Mitropoulos achieving international prominence. At the same time, composers and musicians such as Mikis Theodorakis, Manos Hatzidakis, Eleni Karaindrou, Vangelis and Demis Roussos garnered an international following for their music, which include famous film scores such as Zorba the Greek, Serpico, Never on Sunday, America America, Eternity and a Day, Chariots of Fire, Blade Runner, among others. Greek American composers known for their film scores include also Yanni and Basil Poledouris. Notable Greek opera singers and classical musicians of the 20th and 21st century include Maria Callas, Nana Mouskouri, Mario Frangoulis, Leonidas Kavakos, Dimitris Sgouros and others.
During the dictatorship of the Colonels, the music of Mikis Theodorakis was banned by the junta and the composer was jailed, internally exiled, and put in a concentration camp, before finally being allowed to leave Greece due to international reaction to his detention. Released during the junta years, Anthrope Agapa, ti Fotia Stamata (Make Love, Stop the Gunfire), by the pop group Poll is considered the first anti-war protest song in the history of Greek rock. The song was echoing the hippie slogan Make love, not war and was inspired directly by the Vietnam War, becoming a "smash hit" in Greece.
Greece participated in the Eurovision Song Contest 35 times after its debut at the 1974 Contest. In 2005, Greece won with the song "My Number One", performed by Greek-Swedish singer Elena Paparizou. The song received 230 points with 10 sets of 12 points from Belgium, Bulgaria, Hungary, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Albania, Cyprus, Serbia & Montenegro, Sweden and Germany and also became a smash hit in different countries and especially in Greece. The 51st Eurovision Song Contest was held in Athens at the Olympic Indoor Hall of the Athens Olympic Sports Complex in Maroussi, with hosted by Maria Menounos and Sakis Rouvas.
Cuisine
Greek cuisine is characteristic of the Mediterranean diet, which is epitomised by dishes of Crete. Greek cuisine incorporates fresh ingredients into a variety of local dishes such as moussaka, pastitsio, classic Greek salad, fasolada, spanakopita and souvlaki. Some dishes can be traced back to ancient Greece like skordalia (a thick purée of walnuts, almonds, crushed garlic and olive oil), lentil soup, retsina (white or rosé wine sealed with pine resin) and pasteli (candy bar with sesame seeds baked with honey). Throughout Greece people often enjoy eating from small dishes such as meze with various dips such as tzatziki, grilled octopus and small fish, feta cheese, dolmades (rice, currants and pine kernels wrapped in vine leaves), various pulses, olives and cheese. Olive oil is added to almost every dish.
Some sweet desserts include melomakarona, diples and galaktoboureko, and drinks such as ouzo, metaxa and a variety of wines including retsina. Greek cuisine differs widely from different parts of the mainland and from island to island. It uses some flavorings more often than other Mediterranean cuisines: oregano, mint, garlic, onion, dill and bay laurel leaves. Other common herbs and spices include basil, thyme and fennel seed. Many Greek recipes, especially in the northern parts of the country, use "sweet" spices in combination with meat, for example cinnamon and cloves in stews.
Koutouki, or Koutoukian, are an underground restaurant common in Greece.
Cinema
Cinema first appeared in Greece in 1896, but the first actual cine-theatre was opened in 1907 in Athens. In 1914, the Asty Films Company was founded and the production of long films began. Golfo (Γκόλφω), a well known traditional love story, is considered the first Greek feature film, although there were several minor productions such as newscasts before this. In 1931, Orestis Laskos directed Daphnis and Chloe (Δάφνις και Χλόη), containing one of the first nude scene in the history of European cinema; it was also the first Greek movie which was played abroad. In 1944, Katina Paxinou was honoured with the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for For Whom the Bell Tolls.
The 1950s and early 1960s are considered by many to be a "golden age" of Greek cinema. Directors and actors of this era were recognised as important figures in Greece and some gained international acclaim: George Tzavellas, Irene Papas, Melina Mercouri, Michael Cacoyannis, Alekos Sakellarios, Nikos Tsiforos, Iakovos Kambanelis, Katina Paxinou, Nikos Koundouros, Ellie Lambeti and others. More than sixty films per year were made, with the majority having film noir elements. Some notable films include The Drunkard (1950, directed by George Tzavellas), The Counterfeit Coin (1955, by Giorgos Tzavellas), Πικρό Ψωμί (1951, by Grigoris Grigoriou), O Drakos (1956, by Nikos Koundouros), Stella (1955, directed by Cacoyannis and written by Kampanellis), Woe to the Young (1961, by Alekos Sakellarios), Glory Sky (1962, by Takis Kanellopoulos) and The Red Lanterns (1963, by Vasilis Georgiadis)
Cacoyannis also directed Zorba the Greek with Anthony Quinn which received Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Film nominations. Finos Film also contributed in this period with movies such as Λατέρνα, Φτώχεια και Φιλότιμο, Madalena, I theia ap' to Chicago, Το ξύλο βγήκε από τον Παράδεισο and many more.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Theo Angelopoulos directed a series of notable and appreciated movies. His film Eternity and a Day won the Palme d'Or and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival.
There are also internationally renowned filmmakers in the Greek diaspora, such as the Greek-French Costa-Gavras and the Greek-Americans Elia Kazan, John Cassavetes and Alexander Payne.
More recently Yorgos Lanthimos (film and stage director, producer, and screenwriter) has received four Academy Award nominations for his work, including Best Foreign Language Film for Dogtooth (2009), Best Original Screenplay for The Lobster (2015), and Best Picture and Best Director for The Favourite (2018).
Sports
Greece is the birthplace of the ancient Olympic Games, first recorded in 776 BC in Olympia, and hosted the modern Olympic Games twice, the inaugural 1896 Summer Olympics and the 2004 Summer Olympics. During the parade of nations, Greece is always called first, as the founding nation of the ancient precursor of modern Olympics. The nation has competed at every Summer Olympic Games, one of only four countries to have done so. Having won a total of 110 medals (30 gold, 42 silver and 38 bronze), Greece is ranked 32nd by gold medals in the all-time Summer Olympic medal count. Their best ever performance was in the 1896 Summer Olympics, when Greece finished second in the medal table with 10 gold medals.
The Greek national football team, ranking 12th in the world in 2014 (and having reached a high of 8th in the world in 2008 and 2011), were crowned European Champions in Euro 2004 in one of the biggest upsets in the history of the sport. The Greek Super League is the highest professional football league in the country, comprising fourteen teams. The most successful are Olympiacos, Panathinaikos, and AEK Athens.
The Greek national basketball team has a decades-long tradition of excellence in the sport, being considered among the world's top basketball powers. , it ranked 4th in the world and 2nd in Europe. They have won the European Championship twice in 1987 and 2005, and have reached the final four in two of the last four FIBA World Championships, taking the second place in the world in 2006 FIBA World Championship, after a 101–95 win against Team USA in the tournament's semifinal. The domestic top basketball league, A1 Ethniki, is composed of fourteen teams. The most successful Greek teams are Panathinaikos, Olympiacos, Aris Thessaloniki, AEK Athens and P.A.O.K. Greek basketball teams are the most successful in European basketball the last 25 years, having won 9 Euroleagues since the establishment of the modern era Euroleague Final Four format in 1988, while no other nation has won more than 4 Euroleague championships in this period. Besides the 9 Euroleagues, Greek basketball teams (Panathinaikos, Olympiacos, Aris Thessaloniki, AEK Athens, P.A.O.K, Maroussi) have won 3 Triple Crowns, 5 Saporta Cups, 2 Korać Cups and 1 FIBA Europe Champions Cup. After the 2005 European Championship triumph of the Greek national basketball team, Greece became the reigning European Champion in both football and basketball.
The Greece women's national water polo team have emerged as one of the leading powers in the world, becoming World Champions after their gold medal win against the hosts China at the 2011 World Championship. They also won the silver medal at the 2004 Summer Olympics, the gold medal at the 2005 World League and the silver medals at the 2010 and 2012 European Championships. The Greece men's national water polo team became the third best water polo team in the world in 2005, after their win against Croatia in the bronze medal game at the 2005 World Aquatics Championships in Canada. The domestic top water polo leagues, Greek Men's Water Polo League and Greek Women's Water Polo League are considered amongst the top national leagues in European water polo, as its clubs have made significant success in European competitions. In men's European competitions, Olympiacos has won the Champions League, the European Super Cup and the Triple Crown in 2002 becoming the first club in water polo history to win every title in which it has competed within a single year (National championship, National cup, Champions League and European Super Cup), while NC Vouliagmeni has won the LEN Cup Winners' Cup in 1997. In women's European competitions, Greek water polo teams (NC Vouliagmeni, Glyfada NSC, Olympiacos, Ethnikos Piraeus) are amongst the most successful in European water polο, having won 4 LEN Champions Cups, 3 LEN Trophies and 2 European Supercups.
The Greek men's national volleyball team has won two bronze medals, one in the European Volleyball Championship and another one in the Men's European Volleyball League, a 5th place in the Olympic Games and a 6th place in the FIVB Volleyball Men's World Championship. The Greek league, the A1 Ethniki, is considered one of the top volleyball leagues in Europe and the Greek clubs have had significant success in European competitions. Olympiacos is the most successful volleyball club in the country having won the most domestic titles and being the only Greek club to have won European titles; they have won two CEV Cups, they have been CEV Champions League runners-up twice and they have played in 12 Final Fours in the European competitions, making them one of the most traditional volleyball clubs in Europe. Iraklis have also seen significant success in European competitions, having been three times runners-up of the CEV Champions League.
In handball, AC Diomidis Argous is the only Greek club to have won a European Cup.
Apart from these, cricket is relatively popular in Corfu.
Mythology
The numerous gods of the ancient Greek religion as well as the mythical heroes and events of the ancient Greek epics (The Odyssey and The Iliad) and other pieces of art and literature from the time make up what is nowadays colloquially referred to as Greek mythology. Apart from serving a religious function, the mythology of the ancient Greek world also served a cosmological role as it was meant to try to explain how the world was formed and operated.
The principal gods of the ancient Greek religion were the Dodekatheon, or the Twelve Gods, who lived on the top of Mount Olympus. The most important of all ancient Greek gods was Zeus, the king of the gods, who was married to his sister, Hera. The other Greek gods that made up the Twelve Olympians were Ares, Poseidon, Athena, Demeter, Dionysus, Apollo, Artemis, Aphrodite, Hephaestus, and Hermes. Apart from these twelve gods, Greeks also had a variety of other mystical beliefs, such as nymphs and other magical creatures.
Public holidays and festivals
According to Greek law, every Sunday of the year is a public holiday. Since the late '70s, Saturday also is a non-school and not working day. In addition, there are four mandatory official public holidays: 25 March (Greek Independence Day), Easter Monday, 15 August (Assumption or Dormition of the Holy Virgin), and 25 December (Christmas). 1 May (Labour Day) and 28 October (Ohi Day) are regulated by law as being optional but it is customary for employees to be given the day off. There are, however, more public holidays celebrated in Greece than are announced by the Ministry of Labour each year as either obligatory or optional. The list of these non-fixed national holidays rarely changes and has not changed in recent decades, giving a total of eleven national holidays each year.
In addition to the national holidays, there are public holidays that are not celebrated nationwide, but only by a specific professional group or a local community. For example, many municipalities have a "Patron Saint" parallel to "Name Days", or a "Liberation Day". On such days it is customary for schools to take the day off.
Notable festivals, beyond the religious fests, include Patras Carnival, Athens Festival and various local wine festivals. The city of Thessaloniki is also home of a number of festivals and events. The Thessaloniki International Film Festival is one of the most important film festivals in Southern Europe.
See also
Outline of Greece
Outline of ancient Greece
Index of Greece-related articles
Notes
References
Citations
Bibliography
"Minorities in Greece – Historical Issues and New Perspectives". History and Culture of South Eastern Europe. An Annual Journal. München (Slavica) 2003.
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, 219 pp. The impact of European Union membership on Greek politics, economics, and society.
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External links
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12111 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics%20of%20Greece | Demographics of Greece | The Demographics of Greece refer to the demography of the population that inhabits the Greek peninsula. The population of Greece was estimated by the United Nations to be in (including displaced refugees).
Historical overview
Greece was inhabited as early as the Paleolithic period. Prior to the 2nd millennium BC, the Greek peninsula was inhabited by various pre-Hellenic peoples, the most notable of which were the Pelasgians. The Greek language ultimately dominated the peninsula and Greece's mosaic of small city-states became culturally similar. The population estimates on the Greeks during the 4th century BC, is approximately 3.5 million on the Greek peninsula and 4 to 6.5 million in the rest of the entire Mediterranean Basin, including all colonies such as those in Magna Graecia, Asia Minor and the shores of the Black Sea.
During the history of the Byzantine Empire, the Greek peninsula was occasionally invaded by the foreign peoples like Goths, Avars, Slavs, Normans, Franks and other Romance-speaking peoples who had betrayed the Crusades. The only group, however, that planned to establish permanent settlements in the region were the Slavs. They settled in isolated valleys of the Peloponnese and Thessaly, establishing segregated communities that were referred by the Byzantines as Sclaveni. Traces of Slavic culture in Greece are very rare and by the 9th century, the Sclaveni in Greece were largely assimilated. However, some Slavic communities managed to survive in rural Macedonia. At the same time a large Sephardi Jewish emigrant community from the Iberian peninsula established itself in Thessaloniki, while there were population movements of Arvanites and "Vlachs" (Aromanians and Megleno-Romanians), who established communities in several parts of the Greek peninsula. The Byzantine Empire ultimately fell to Ottoman Turks in the 15th century and as a result Ottoman colonies were established in the Balkans, notably in Macedonia, the Peloponnese and Crete. Many Greeks either fled to other European nations or to geographically isolated areas (i.e. mountains and heavily forested territories) in order to escape foreign rule. For those reasons, the population decreased in the plains, while increasing on the mountains. The population transfers with Bulgaria and Turkey that took place in the early 20th century, added in total some two million Greeks to the demography of the Greek Kingdom.
During the next decades, the population of Greece continued to increase, except during a large part of 1940s due to World War II and subsequent events. After 1940s the population of Greece continued to grow, though on a decreased pace after 1960s, due to a gradual decrease in fertility and emigration to various countries, such as West Germany, Australia, United Kingdom and many others. The birth rate decreased significantly in 1980s, while in 1987 the Greek population surpassed 10 million. At this time Greece had started to appear a positive migration rate, due to the return of Greek Civil War refugees and international immigration. During the nineties the population increased by close a million, as the collapse of the communist governments in Eastern Europe and the economic downturn resulted in a significant influx of Eastern European immigrants in Greece and especially from the Balkans, including many Greeks living in these countries. In 2000s the population continued to increase reaching 11 million, thanks to an increased birth rate, a stable influx of migrants from other countries and the return of Greeks from United States, Germany, Australia and other countries. In the 2010s, in the wake of the Greek financial crisis, the population started to decrease and birthrates plummeted, while death rates increased due to an aging population. Many Greeks emigrated abroad, while more recently the population decrease has been largely stabilized due to foreign immigration.
Urbanization
Population
According to the 2001 census the population of Greece was 10,964,020. Eurostat estimations as of January 2008 gave the number of 11,214,992 inhabitants in the Greek peninsula. According to the official 2011 census, which used sophisticated methodology, the population of Greece was 10,816,286.
By region
Greece is divided into nine geographic regions. The population of each region according to the 2001 census:
Fertility rate from 1850 to 1920
The total fertility rate is the number of children born per woman. It is based on fairly good data for the entire period. Sources: Our World In Data and Gapminder Foundation.
Life expectancy from 1950 to 2015
Source: UN World Population Prospects
Vital statistics from 1921
Source: Hellenic Statistical Authority
Current vital statistics
Other demographic statistics
Demographic statistics according to the World Population Review in 2019.
One birth every 6 minutes
One death every 4 minutes
Net loss of one person every 21 minutes
One net migrant every 53 minutes
Demographic statistics according to the CIA World Factbook, unless otherwise indicated.
Population
10,761,523 (July 2018 est.)
10,768,477 (July 2017 est.)
Age structure
0-14 years: 14.53% (male 794,918/female 745,909)
15-24 years: 10.34% (male 577,134/female 519,819)
25-54 years: 39.6% (male 2,080,443/female 2,119,995)
55-64 years: 13.1% (male 656,404/female 732,936)
65 years and over: 22.43% (male 1,057,317/female 1,322,176) (2020 est.)
0-14 years: 13.83% (male 767,245/female 722,313)
15-24 years: 9.67% (male 532,179/female 509,487)
25-54 years: 42.45% (male 2,275,984/female 2,295,082)
55-64 years: 13.13% (male 692,420/female 721,641)
65 years and over: 20.91% (male 986,816/female 1,265,310) (2017 est.)
0-14 years: 14.2% (male 787,143/female 741,356)
15-64 years: 66.2% (male 3,555,447/female 3,567,383)
65 years and over: 19.6% (male 923,177/female 1,185,630) (2011 est.)
Median age
total: 45.3 years. Country comparison to the world: 9th
male: 43.7 years
female: 46.8 years (2020 est.)
total: 44.5 years
male: 43.5 years
female: 45.6 years (2017 est.)
total: 42.5 years
male: 41.4 years
female: 43.6 years (2011 est.)
Mother's mean age at first birth
29.9 years (2017 est.)
Total fertility rate
1.39 children born/woman (2021 est.) Country comparison to the world: 225th
Population growth rate
-0.34% (2021 est.) Country comparison to the world: 221st
Birth rate
7.72 births/1,000 population (2021 est.) Country comparison to the world: 222nd
8.4 births/1,000 population (2017 est.)
Death rate
12.05 deaths/1,000 population (2021 est.) Country comparison to the world: 14th
Net migration rate
0.97 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2021 est.) Country comparison to the world: 62nd
Life expectancy at birth
total population: 81.28 years. Country comparison to the world: 41st
male: 78.73 years
female: 84 years (2021 est.)
Infant mortality rate
total: 3.61 deaths/1,000 live births. Country comparison to the world: 204th
male: 4 deaths/1,000 live births
female: 3.19 deaths/1,000 live births (2021 est.)
Ethnic groups
population: Greek 91.6%, Albanian 4.4%, other 4% (2011)
Note: data represent citizenship, since Greece does not collect data on ethnicity
Dependency ratios
total dependency ratio: 56.1
youth dependency ratio: 21.3
elderly dependency ratio: 34.8
potential support ratio: 2.9 (2020 est.)
Religions
Greek Orthodox (official) 81-90%, Muslim 2%, other 3%, none 4-15%, unspecified 1% (2015 est.)
Urbanization
urban population: 79.7% of total population (2020)
rate of urbanization: 0.22% annual rate of change (2015-20 est.)
Unemployment, youth ages 15–24
total: 39.9%. Country comparison to the world: 11th
male: 36.4%
female: 43.9% (2018 est.)
School life expectancy (primary to tertiary education)
total: 20 years
male: 20 years
female: 20 years (2018)
Immigration
Greece has received a large number of immigrants since the early 1990s. The majority of them come from the neighbouring countries. As of 2011, the number of foreigners in an enumerated total of 10,815,197 people was 911,299.
Foreign-born by country (Eurostat):
Non-registered immigration
Greece has received many illegal immigrants beginning in the 1990s and continuing during the 2000s and 2010s. Migrants make use of the many islands in the Aegean Sea, directly west of Turkey. A spokesman for the European Union's border control agency said that the Greek-Albanian border is "one of Europe's worst-affected external land borders." Migrants across the Evros region bordering Turkey face land-mines. Principal illegal immigrants include Albanians, Indians, Kurds, Afghans, Iraqis and Somalis.
Age structure
Being part of the phenomenon of the aging of Europe, the Greek population shows a rapid increase of the percentage of the elderly people. Greece's population census of 1961 found that 10.9% of the total population was above the age of 65, while the percentage of this group age increased to 19.0% in 2011. In contrast, the percentage of the population of the ages 0–14 had a total decrease of 10.2% between 1961 and 2011.
Ethnic groups, languages and religion
The population of northern Greece has primarily been ethnically, religiously and linguistically diverse.
The Muslim minority of Greece is the only explicitly recognized minority in Greece by the government. The officials define it as a group of Greek Muslims numbering 98,000 people, consisting of Turks (50%), Pomaks (35%) and Romani (15%). No other minorities are officially acknowledged by the government. There is no official information for the size of the ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities because asking the population questions pertaining to the topic have been abolished since 1951.
Minorities in Greece according to Minority Rights Group International:
Roma/Gypsies: 160,000-250,000
Vlachs (Aromanians and Megleno-Romanians): 200,000
Slavs: 100,000-200,000
Arvanites: 95,000
Turks: 90,000
Pomaks: 35,000
The official language of Greece is Greek, spoken by almost all as a second language at least. Additionally, there are a number of linguistic minority groups that are bilingual in a variety of non-Greek languages, and parts of these groups identify ethnically as Greeks.
Languages spoken in Greece:
According to the Greek constitution, Eastern Orthodox Christianity is recognized as the "prevailing religion" in Greece. During the centuries that Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire, besides its spiritual mandate, the Orthodox Church, based in Constantinople (present-day Istanbul), also functioned as an official representative of the Christian population of the empire. The Church is often credited with the preservation of the Greek language, values, and national identity during Ottoman times. The Church was also an important rallying point in the war for independence against the Ottoman Empire, although the official Church in Constantinople initially condemned the breakout of the armed struggle in fear of retaliation from the Ottoman side. The Church of Greece was established shortly after the formation of a Greek national state. Its authority to this day extends only to the areas included in the independent Greek state before the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913. There is a Muslim minority concentrated in Thrace and officially protected by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923). Besides Pomaks (Muslim Bulgarian speakers) and Roma, it consists mainly of ethnic Turks, who speak Turkish and receive instruction in Turkish at special government-funded schools. There are also a number of Jews in Greece, most of whom live in Thessaloniki. There are also some Greeks who adhere to a reconstruction of the ancient Greek religion. A place of worship has been recognized as such by court.
Education
Greek education is free and compulsory for children between the ages of 5 and 15. English study is compulsory from first grade through high school. University education, including books, is also free, contingent upon the student's ability to meet stiff entrance requirements. A high percentage of the student population seeks higher education. More than 100,000 students are registered at Greek universities, and 15% of the population currently holds a university degree. Admission in a university is determined by state-administered exams, the candidate's grade-point average from high school, and his/her priority choices of major. About one in four candidates gains admission to Greek universities.
Greek law does not currently offer official recognition to the graduates of private universities that operate in the country, except for those that offer a degree valid in another European Union country, which is automatically recognized by reciprocity. As a result, a large and growing number of students are pursuing higher education abroad. The Greek Government decides through an evaluation procedure whether to recognize degrees from specific foreign universities as qualification for public sector hiring. Other students attend private, post-secondary educational institutions in Greece that are not recognized by the Greek Government. At the moment extensive public talk is made for the reform of the Constitution in order to recognize private higher education in Greece as equal with public and to place common regulations for both.
The number of Greek students studying at European institutions is increasing along with EU support for educational exchange. In addition, nearly 5,000 Greeks are studying in the United States, about half of whom are in graduate school. Greek per capita student representation in the US (one every 2,200) is among the highest in Europe.
See also
Demographic history of Greece
Turks of Western Thrace
Minorities in Greece
Aging of Europe
Albanian immigrants in Greece
Notes
References
External links
General Secretariat of National Statistical Service of Greece
The World Factbook
Greek society | [
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12112 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics%20of%20Greece | Politics of Greece | Greece is a parliamentary representative democratic republic, where the President of Greece is the head of state and the Prime Minister of Greece is the head of government within a multi-party system. Legislative power is vested in both the government and the Hellenic Parliament. Between the restoration of democracy in 1974 and the Greek government-debt crisis the party system was dominated by the liberal-conservative New Democracy and the social-democratic PASOK.
The judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislature.
The Constitution of Greece, which describes Greece as a "presidential parliamentary republic", includes extensive specific guarantees of civil liberties and vests the powers of the head of state in a president elected by parliament. The Greek governmental structure is similar to that found in many other Western democracies, and has been described as a compromise between the French and German models. The prime minister and cabinet play the central role in the political process, while the president performs some executive and legislative functions in addition to ceremonial duties. Voting in Greece is compulsory but is not enforced.
Executive branch
The Cabinet of Greece, which is the main organ of the government, includes the heads of all executive ministries, appointed by the president on the recommendation of the prime minister.
President
The President of the Republic is elected by the Parliament for a five-year term (election last held 22 January 2020), and a maximum of two terms in office. When a presidential term expires, Parliament votes to elect the new president. In the first two votes, a majority (200 votes) is necessary. The third and final vote requires a (180 votes) majority.
If the third vote is fruitless, Parliament is dissolved and elections are proclaimed by the outgoing President within the next 30 days. In the new Parliament, the election for president is repeated immediately with a majority required for the initial vote, an absolute majority for the second one (151 votes) and a simple majority for the third and final one. The system is so designed as to promote consensus presidential candidates among the main political parties.
The president has the power to declare war, to grant pardon (forgiveness) and to conclude agreements of peace, alliance, and participation in international organizations; upon the request of the government a simple parliamentary majority is required to confirm such actions, agreements, or treaties. An absolute or a three-fifths majority is required in exceptional cases (for example, the accession into the EU needed a majority).
The president can also exercise certain emergency powers, which must be countersigned by the appropriate cabinet minister. The president may not dissolve parliament, dismiss the government, suspend certain articles of the constitution, issue a proclamation or declare a state of siege without countersigning by the prime minister or the appropriate cabinet minister. To call a referendum, they must obtain approval from parliament. They can appoint ministers after they are recommended by the Prime Minister. Although not official, the President of Greece is usually from the main opposition party so that the government and opposition can agree and not host elections. Sometimes they are chosen from outside the political ranks. Currently, the President of Greece is Katerina Sakellaropoulou, the eighth and first female President of Greece since the restoration of democracy in 1974.
Prime minister
The prime minister is elected by the Parliament and is usually the leader of the party controlling the absolute majority of MPs. According to the Constitution, the prime minister safeguards the unity of the government and directs its activities. Although officially holding the second highest rank as head of the Hellenic government and not the Republic, they are the most powerful person of the Greek political system and recommends ministers to the President for appointment or dismissal. Although officially just head of Government, not of state, they conduct professional business and the President is just the Supreme Executive.
Maintaining the support of parliament
Greek parliamentary politics hinge upon the principle of the "" (pronounced "dhedhilomeni"), the "declared confidence" of Parliament to the Prime Minister and his/her administration. This means that the President of the Republic is bound to appoint, as Prime Minister, a person who will be approved by a majority of the Parliament's members (i.e. 151 votes). With the current electoral system, it is the leader of the party gaining a plurality of the votes in the Parliamentary elections who is appointed Prime Minister.
An administration may at any time seek a "vote of confidence". Conversely a number of Members of Parliament may ask that a "vote of reproach" be taken. Both are rare occurrences with usually predictable outcomes as voting outside the party line happens very seldom.
On 4 October 2009, George Papandreou, president of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement party and son and grandson of Prime Ministers, was elected as the new Prime Minister of Greece, following five years of government under New Democracy leader Kostas Karamanlis, the nephew of long-time Prime Minister and President Konstantinos Karamanlis.
Legislative branch
Greece elects a legislature by universal suffrage of all citizens over the age of 17 (changed in 2018). The Greek Parliament (Βουλή των Ελλήνων) has 300 members, elected for a four-year term by a system of reinforced proportional representation in 48 multi-seat constituencies, 8 single-seat constituencies and a single nationwide list. 288 of the 300 seats are determined by constituency voting, and voters may select the candidate or candidates of their choice by marking their name on the party ballot. The remaining 12 seats are filled from nationwide party lists on a top-down basis and based on the proportion of the total vote each party received.
Greece uses a complex reinforced proportional representation electoral system which discourages splinter parties and makes a parliamentary majority possible even if the leading party falls short of a majority of the popular vote. Under the current electoral law, any single party must receive at least a 3% nationwide vote tally in order to elect Members of Parliament (the so-called "3% threshold"). The largest party gets a 50-seat bonus (out of 300 seats) ostensibly to ensure elections return viable governing majorities. Various times throughout the years, the system has been changed, and parties often fall short of the 151 seats required to have a majority, so they create coalition. In 2012, the two historically largest parties and enemies, New Democracy and Panhellenic Socialist Movement, joined a coalition government to defeat the Coalition of Radical Left. Same thing with the SYRIZA-ANEL government.
The law in its current form favors the first past the post party to achieve an absolute (151 parliamentary seats) majority, provided it receives a 41%+ nationwide vote. This is touted to enhance governmental stability. These electoral laws can be changed by simple parliamentary majority, but a law so changed will not come into effect for two election cycles unless passed by a majority in the Hellenic Parliament.
Judicial branch
In Greece the judicial branch is divided into civil, and administrative courts. Civil courts judge civil and penal cases, whereas administrative courts judge administrative cases, namely disputes between the citizens and the State.
The judicial system of Greece comprises three Supreme Courts: the Court of Cassation (Άρειος Πάγος), the Council of State (Συμβούλιο της Επικρατείας) and the Chamber of Accounts (Ελεγκτικό Συνέδριο). These high courts are composed of professional judges, graduates of the National School of Judges. The way the judges are gradually promoted, until they become members of the Supreme Courts, is defined by the Constitution and the existing laws. The presidents and the vice-presidents of the three Supreme Courts are chosen by the Cabinet of Greece among the serving members of each of the Supreme Courts.
The Court of Cassation is the supreme civil and penal court, whereas the Council of State is the supreme administrative court. The Chamber of Accounts has an exclusive jurisdiction over certain administrative areas (for example it judges disputes arising from the legislation regulating the pensions of civil servants) and its decisions are irrevocable. This means that they are not judged at second instance by the Council of State.
Sometimes, the Supreme Courts take contradictory decisions or they judge differently the constitutionality of a legal provision. These disputes are resolved by the Supreme Special Court, whose composition and jurisdiction is regulated by the Constitution (article 100). As its name reveals, this court is not permanent and it sits when a special case belonging to its jurisdiction arises. When the Supreme Special Court sits, it comprises eleven members: the Presidents of the three Supreme Courts, four members of the Court of Cassation and four members of the Council of State.
When it judges the constitutionality of a law or resolves the disputes between Supreme Courts, its composition comprises two more members: two professors of the Law Schools of Greece. The Supreme Special Court is the only court which can declare an unconstitutional legal provision as "powerless" (something like "null and void"), while the three Supreme Courts can only declare an unconstitutional legal provision as "inapplicable" to that particular case. The Supreme Special Court is also the Supreme Electoral Court, judging pleas against the legality of the legislative elections.
Administrative divisions
Greece is divided into 13 administrative regions which are further divided into 74 regional units. The 13 administrative regions (Περιφέρειες, Periféries) are each headed by a popularly elected governor (Περιφερειάρχης, Periferiárhis) and presided over by the popularly elected regional council (Περιφερειακό Συμβούλιο, Periferiakó Simvoúlio). Each of the 74 regional units (Περιφερειακές Ενότητες, Periferiakés Enóti̱tes) are headed by a vice governor (Αντιπεριφερειάρχης, Antiperiferiárhis), who is taken from the same political party as the elected governor. The 13 regions are mostly political and geographically. Greece is home to nine regions: Thrace, with the capital Alexandroupolis, Macedonia, with the capital of Thessaloniki; Epirus; Central Greece; Pelloponese; the Ionian Islands; the Aegean islands; Crete; and Athens.
Greece's 74 regional units are divided into 325 municipalities (Δήμοι, Dhími) which are led by a popularly elected mayor (Δήμαρχος, Dhímarhos) and municipal council (Δημοτικό Συμβούλιο, Dhimotikó Simvoúlio). Each municipality is divided into small municipal units (Δημοτικές Ενότητες, Dhimotikés Enótites) which in turn contain municipal communities (relatively urban communities) and local communities (relatively rural communities). Municipal councils select community members to serve on more local town hall councils which focus on local needs in the municipality's communities and give local feedback to the municipal government.
Although municipalities and villages have elected officials, they often do not have an adequate independent revenue base and must depend on the central government budget for a large part of their financial needs. Consequently, they are subject to numerous central government controls. This also leads to extremely low municipal taxes (usually around 0.2% or less).
Greece also includes one autonomous region, the monastic community of the Holy Mountain, Mount Athos.
Foreign relations
As one of the oldest Euro-Atlantic member states in the region of Southeast Europe, Greece enjoys a prominent geopolitical role, due to its political and geographical proximity to Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Its main allies are France, United Kingdom, Italy, Bulgaria, United States, the other NATO countries and the European Union.
Greece also maintains strong diplomatic relations with Cyprus, Albania, Russia, Serbia, Armenia and Israel, while at the same time focuses at improving further the good relations with Egypt and the Arab World, Caucasus, India and China. As member of both the EU and the Union for the Mediterranean, Greece is a key player in the eastern Mediterranean region and has encouraged the collaboration between neighbors, as well as promoting the Energy Triangle, for gas exports to Europe. Greece also has the largest economy in the Balkans, where it is an important regional investor.
Prominent issues in Hellenic foreign policy include the claims in the Aegean Sea and Eastern Mediterranean by Turkey and the Turkish occupation of Cyprus.
Notable politicians of Greece
Former
Evangelos Averoff
Georgios Christakis-Zografos
Epameinondas Deligiorgis
Theodoros Deligiannis
Ion Dragoumis
Stephanos Dragoumis
Dimitrios Gounaris
Ilias Iliou
Dimitrios Kallergis
Konstantinos Kanaris
Panagiotis Kanellopoulos
Ioannis Kapodistrias
Konstantinos Karamanlis
Ioannis Kolettis
Alexandros Koumoundouros
Leonidas Kyrkos
Grigoris Lambrakis
Spyros Markezinis
Alexandros Mavrokordatos
Andreas Metaxas
Ioannis Metaxas
Konstantinos Mitsotakis
Alexandros Panagoulis
Alexandros Papagos
Alexandros Papanastasiou
Andreas Papandreou
Georgios Papandreou
Nikolaos Plastiras
Georgios Rallis
Alexandros Rizos Rangavis
Ioannis Sfakianakis
Themistoklis Sofoulis
Konstantinos Stephanopoulos
Georgios Theotokis
Charilaos Trikoupis
Spyridon Trikoupis
Eleftherios Venizelos
Sofoklis Venizelos
Nikos Zachariadis
Alexandros Zaimis
Current
Dimitris Avramopoulos
Dora Bakoyannis
Kostas Bakoyannis
Stavros Dimas
Maria Damanaki
Nikos Dendias
Anna Diamantopoulou
Pavlos Geroulanos
Kostis Hatzidakis
Kostas Karamanlis
Nikos Kotzias
Dimitris Koutsoumpas
Fotis Kouvelis
Stefanos Manos
Kyriakos Mitsotakis
Dimitrios Papadimoulis
George Papandreou
Giannis Ragousis
Katerina Sakellaropoulou
Antonis Samaras
Alexis Tsipras
Euclid Tsakalotos
Stavros Theodorakis
Yanis Varoufakis
Kyriakos Velopoulos
Evangelos Venizelos
Political issues
Education
Under the Greek constitution, education is the responsibility of the state. Most Greeks attend public primary and secondary schools. There are a few private schools, which must meet the standard curriculum of and are supervised by the Ministry of Education. The Ministry of Education oversees and directs every aspect of the public education process at all levels, including hiring all teachers and professors and producing all required textbooks.
Non-state owned universities
A recent issue concerning education in Greece is the institutionalisation of private universities. According to the constitution only state-run universities operate on the land. However, in recent years many foreign private universities have established branches in Greece, offering bachelor's level degrees, thus creating a legal contradiction between the Greek constitution and the EU laws allowing foreign companies to operate anywhere in the Union. Additionally, every year, tens of thousands of Greek students are not accepted to the state-run University system and become "educational immigrants" to other countries' Higher Education institutions, where they move to study.
This has created a chronic problem for Greece, in terms of loss of capital as well as human resources, since many of those students opt to seek employment in the countries they studied, after completing their studies. It is characteristic that in 2006, Greece, with 11.5 million inhabitants, was fourth in the world in terms of student export in absolute numbers, with 60,000 students abroad, while the first country in this regard, People's Republic of China of over 1.3 billion inhabitants, had 100,000 students abroad. In terms of students abroad as a percent of the general population, Greece is by far the leading country, with 5,250 students per million, compared to second Malaysia's 1,780 students per million inhabitants.
Citing these problems as a result of the state's monopoly on Higher Education, New Democracy (ND) committed to amending the constitution, in order to allow private universities to operate in Greece on a non-profit basis. This proposal was rejected by then-ruling Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) in the late nineties, and thus could not muster the support necessary to be put to vote on the constitutional amendment of 2001. However, PASOK has since changed its stance, and now also supports a constitutional provision for the creation of private Universities on a non-profit basis. This proposal continues to encounter the fierce opposition of the Left parties and part of the academic community, both professors and students.
At the outset of 2006, prime minister Kostas Karamanlis announced the initiative of his government for a new amendment of the Constitution. According to his assertion one of the main issues of this amendment (the second within less than 10 years) is going to be the creation of "non-state owned" universities.
Illegal immigration
Greece has problems with illegal immigration, especially from or via Turkey. Greek authorities believe that 90% of illegal immigrants in the EU enter through Greece, many fleeing because of unrest and poverty in the Middle East and Africa.
Several European courts have held that Greece is not complying with minimum standards of treatment for asylum seekers, so that illegal migrants who reach other countries cannot be sent back to Greece.
Numerous solutions have been proposed by the Greek government such as building a fence on the Turkish border and setting up detention camps.
Judicial system
One of the main problems of the system is the long-time process needed, even for a simple case, something that negatively impacts investment, entrepreneurship, social relations, corporate governance, and public governance. Also corruption cases have appeared during the last years, such as the Paradikastiko organization scandal.
Manipulation of the judicial system and its decisions by each government, is another common phenomenon which violates the independency of the system.
Prisons
There are three prison types in Greece: general, special, and therapeutic prisons. General prisons include three different types of inmates: type A, type B, and type C. Special prisons include rural units, juvenile institutions, and semi-liberty centers. One example of a special prison would be an agricultural prison. The last type is a therapeutic prison, which includes hospitals and rehab centers for inmates.
Within these centers the percentage of female prisoners is 5.5%, which amounts to around 538 prisoners. The percentage of juveniles in Greek prison is 2.9%. Greece's occupancy rate in prisons is 99%, which means that its prisons are near full capacity. With some exceptions occupancy exceeds 100%, and in some establishments, it reaches, or surpasses, 300%. Because of this the Greek Justice Ministry and the European Council want to improve Greek prison conditions. These improvements include training for guards, improving of medical facilities, and better treatment of prisoners. These selected improvements are three human rights that the Greek correctional system would like to tackle.
Media
The Greek media, collectively, is a very influential institution – usually aggressive, sensationalist. As with many countries, most of the media are owned by businesses with commercial interests in other sectors of the economy. There are often accusations of newspapers, magazines, and radio and television channels being used to promote their commercial enterprises as well as to seek political influence.
In 1994, the Ministry of Press and Media was established to deal with media and communication issues. ERT S.A., a public corporation supervised by the Minister of Press, operates three national television channels and five national radio channels. The Minister of Press also serves as the primary government spokesperson.
The Secretary General of Press and Information prepares the semi-official Athens News Agency (ANA) Bulletin. Along with AP and Reuters, this is a primary source of information for the Greek press. The Ministry of Press and Information also issues the semi-official Macedonian News Agency (MPE) Bulletin, which is distributed throughout the Balkan region. For international news, CNN is a particular influence in the Greek market; the major television channels often use it as a source. State and private television stations also use Eurovision and Visnews as sources. While few papers and stations have overseas correspondents, those few correspondents abroad can be very influential.
In 1988, a new law provided the legal framework for the establishment of private radio stations and, in 1989, private television stations. According to the law, supervision of radio and television is exercised by the National Radio and Television Council. In practice, however, official licensing has been delayed for many years. Because of this, there has been a proliferation of private radio and television stations, as well as European satellite channels, including Euronews. More than 1,000 radio stations were operating before March 2002, when the government implemented plans to reallocate television frequencies and issue licenses as authorized by the 1993 Media Law, effectively reducing this number.
Media freedom
In 2011, the government proposed new measures that will restrict the freedom of speech in the internet. According to some proposals, every individual who would like to use free platforms, such like Blogspot or WordPress.com will be forced to get officially registered in the courts, as due to tough austerity measures web sites that criticize the government and the political system in general have been multiplied.
Press freedom sharply eroded in Greece during the economic and financial crisis of 2010–2015, passing from the 35th place in 2009 in Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index to the 99th place in 2014, well below all Western Balkans countries as well as states with repressive media policies such as Gabon, Kuwait or Liberia. Greece is today the EU member state "where journalism and the media face their most acute crisis".
Military service
Nine months for all males of 18 years of age; Compulsory with fines and imprisonment if denied, but neither fine nor imprisonment has been imposed since 1994, where the last warrant against a draft-dodger was issued. Members of families with three children serve a reduced time of six months. Military service can also be substituted with a longer public service, which by the standards of Amnesty International, ought to be considered punitive as it is twice as long as the regular tour of duty.
Limited steps have been taken to turn the Greek military into a semi-professional army in the last years, leading to the gradual reduction of the service from 18 to 12 to 9 months and the inclusion of a greater number of professional military personnel in most vertices of the force. Recent developments, though, within the anti-conscription movement in Greece, such as the high death rate from suicides during service and work-related accidents, such as the Manitsa incident, combined with a high rate of draft-dodging, have advanced the idea that mandatory conscription should be abolished and an all-professional/all-volunteer army should be put in place.
Military spending
Greece directs approximately 1.7% of its GDP to military expenditures, the 7th highest percentage in Europe. In absolute numbers the Greek military budget ranked 28th in the world in 2005. By the same measure, Greek military budget ranked 6th in the Mediterranean basin (behind France, Italy, Turkey, Israel and Spain) and 2nd (behind Turkey) in its immediate vicinity, the Balkans. Greek arms purchasing is among the highest in the world: Greece ranked 3rd in the world in 2004.
These figures are explained in the light of the arms race between Greece and Turkey with key issues being the Cyprus dispute and disagreement over sovereignty of certain islets of the Aegean. For more information see Greco-Turkish relations. Conversely, the foreign relations of Greece as well as many internal policy decisions are largely affected by its arms purchases. The United States, being the major arms seller to Greece has been known to actively intervene in military spending decisions made by the Greek government. The US has at times actively stepped in to help avoid large scale crisis, as in the case of the Imia-Kardak crisis.
The reduction of military spending has long been an issue in Greek politics. The former prime minister, Kostas Karamanlis had proposed a reduction to military spending through a "Defence Eurozone", referring to the European Security and Defence Policy. The previous PASOK administration, also planned on reducing military spending prior to its failure to be re-elected in 2004, while PASOK politicians usually refer to money saved from reducing military spending as a "peace dividend" ("μέρισμα ειρήνης").
Some of the parties on the left, such as the Communist Party of Greece and Synaspismos, have been vocal in condemning military spending. Regarding the purchase of 30 F-16 and 333 Leopard tanks in 2005, both parties criticized the New Democracy administration for spending money on weapons while doing nothing to relieve the lower classes and said that high military spending "does not correspond to the real needs of the country but is carried out according to NATO planning and to serve weapon manufacturers and the countries that host them".
Church-state relations
The Greek Orthodox Church is under the protection of the State, which pays the clergy's salaries, and Orthodox Christianity is the "'prevailing" religion of Greece according to the Constitution. The Greek Orthodox Church is self-governing but under the spiritual guidance of the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople. Freedom of religious beliefs is guaranteed by the Constitution, but "proselytism" is officially illegal. According to the most recent Eurostat "Eurobarometer" poll, in 2005, 81% of Greek citizens responded that "they believe there is a God", whereas 16% answered that "they believe there is some sort of spirit or life force" and only 3% that "they do not believe there is a God, spirit, nor life force". This would make Greece one of the most religious countries in the European Union of 25 members, after Malta and Cyprus.
The Muslim minority, concentrated in Thrace, was given legal status by provisions of the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) and is Greece's only officially recognized religious minority. There are small Roman Catholic communities on some of the Cyclades and the Ionian Islands, remnants of the long Venetian rule over the islands. The recent influx of (mostly illegal) immigrants from Eastern Europe and the Third World has an expectedly varied multi-religious profile (Roman Catholic, Muslim, Hindu etc.).
During the 2001 constitutional amendment, complete separation of church and state was proposed, but the two major parties, ND and PASOK, decided not to open this controversial matter, which clashes with both the population and the clergy. For example, numerous protests occurred over the removal of the Religious Denomination entry from the National ID card in 2000.
Since 2015
More left-wing Syriza overtook PASOK as the main party of the centre-left.Alexis Tsipras led Syriza to victory in the general election held on 25 January 2015, falling short of an outright majority in Parliament by just two seats. Syriza gained support by opposing the austerity policy that had affected Greeks since the beginning of the Greek government-debt crisis. The following morning, Tsipras reached an agreement with Independent Greeks party to form a coalition, and he was sworn in as Prime Minister of Greece. Tsipras called snap elections in August 2015, resigning from his post, which led to a month-long caretaker administration headed by judge Vassiliki Thanou-Christophilou, Greece's first female prime minister. In the September 2015 general election, Alexis Tsipras led Syriza to another victory, winning 145 out of 300 seats and re-forming the coalition with the Independent Greeks. However, he was defeated in the July 2019 general election by Kyriakos Mitsotakis who leads New Democracy. On 7 July 2019, Kyriakos Mitsotakis was sworn in as the new Prime Minister of Greece. He formed a centre-right government after the landslide victory of his New Democracy party.
In March 2020, Greece's parliament elected a non-partisan candidate, Ekaterini Sakellaropoulou, as the first female President of Greece.
Notes
External links
Greek Politics Specialist Group (GPSG) of the UK's Political Studies Association
Official election results, via the Greek Ministry of Internal Affairs
ekloges.gr, Greek elections
Official website of the Prime Minister of Greece
Greece the first country in the globe in terms of student export
Greek politics community forums
Greece and eurozone in crisis, dossier by Radio France Internationale in English June 2010 | [
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12113 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy%20of%20Greece | Economy of Greece | The economy of Greece is the 51st largest in the world, with a nominal gross domestic product (GDP) of $189.410 billion per annum. In terms of purchasing power parity, Greece is the world's 54th largest economy, at $305.005 billion per annum. As of 2020, Greece is the sixteenth-largest economy in the 27-member European Union. According to the International Monetary Fund's figures for 2021, Greece's GDP per capita is $19,827 at nominal value and $31,821 at purchasing power parity.
Greece is a developed country with an economy based on the service (80%) and industrial sectors (16%), with the agricultural sector contributing an estimated 4% of national economic output in 2017. Important Greek industries include tourism and shipping. With 18 million international tourists in 2013, Greece was the 7th most visited country in the European Union and 16th in the world. The Greek Merchant Navy is the largest in the world, with Greek-owned vessels accounting for 15% of global deadweight tonnage as of 2013. The increased demand for international maritime transportation between Greece and Asia has resulted in unprecedented investment in the shipping industry.
The country is a significant agricultural producer within the EU. Greece has the largest economy in the Balkans and is an important regional investor. Greece was the largest foreign investor in Albania in 2013, the third in Bulgaria, in the top-three in Romania and Serbia and the most important trading partner and largest foreign investor in North Macedonia. The Greek telecommunications company OTE has become a strong investor in certain former Yugoslav and other Balkan countries.
Greece is classified as an advanced, high-income economy, and was a founding member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and of the Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC). The country joined what is now the European Union in 1981. In 2001 Greece adopted the euro as its currency, replacing the Greek drachma at an exchange rate of 340.75 drachmae per euro. Greece is a member of the International Monetary Fund and of the World Trade Organization, and ranked 34th on Ernst & Young's Globalization Index 2011.
World War II (1939–1945) devastated the country's economy, but the high levels of economic growth that followed from 1950 to 1980 have been called the Greek economic miracle. From 2000 Greece saw high levels of GDP growth above the Eurozone average, peaking at 5.8% in 2003 and 5.7% in 2006. The subsequent Great Recession and Greek government-debt crisis, a central focus of the wider European debt crisis, plunged the economy into a sharp downturn, with real GDP growth rates of −0.3% in 2008, −4.3% in 2009, −5.5% in 2010, −10.1% in 2011, −7.1% in 2012 and −2.5% in 2013. In 2011, the country's public debt reached €356 billion (172% of nominal GDP). After negotiating the biggest debt restructuring in history with the private sector, a loss of 100 billions for bonds private investors, Greece reduced its sovereign debt burden to €280 billion (137% of GDP) in the first quarter of 2012. Greece achieved a real GDP growth rate of 0.5% in 2014—after 6 years of economic decline—but contracted by 0.2% in 2015 and by 0.5% in 2016. The country returned to modest growth rates of 1.1% in 2017, 1.7% in 2018 and 1.8% in 2019. GDP contracted by 9% in 2020 during the global recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the economy posted strong growth rates of 16.6% in the second quarter and 13.4% in the third quarter of 2021 on a year-on-year basis, indicating a strong recovery.
History
The evolution of the Greek economy during the 19th century (a period that transformed a large part of the world because of the Industrial Revolution) has been little researched. Recent research from 2006 examines the gradual development of industry and further development of shipping in a predominantly agricultural economy, calculating an average rate of per capita GDP growth between 1833 and 1911 that was only slightly lower than that of the other Western European nations. Industrial activity, (including heavy industry like shipbuilding) was evident, mainly in Ermoupolis and Piraeus. Nonetheless, Greece faced economic hardships and defaulted on its external loans in 1826, 1843, 1860 and 1893.
Other studies support the above view on the general trends in the economy, providing comparative measures of standard of living. The per capita income (in purchasing power terms) of Greece was 65% that of France in 1850, 56% in 1890, 62% in 1938, 75% in 1980, 90% in 2007, 96.4% in 2008 and 97.9% in 2009.
The country's post-World War II development has largely been connected with the Greek economic miracle. During that period, Greece saw growth rates second only to those of Japan, while ranking first in Europe in terms of GDP growth. It is indicative that between 1960 and 1973 the Greek economy grew by an average of 7.7%, in contrast to 4.7% for the EU15 and 4.9% for the OECD. Also during that period, exports grew by an average annual rate of 12.6%.
Strengths and weaknesses
Greece enjoys a high standard of living and very high Human Development Index, being ranked 32nd in the world in 2019. However, the severe recession of recent years saw GDP per capita fall from 94% of the EU average in 2009 to 67% between 2017 and 2019. During the same period, Actual Individual Consumption (AIC) per capita fell from 104% to 78% of the EU average.
Greece's main industries are tourism, shipping, industrial products, food and tobacco processing, textiles, chemicals, metal products, mining and petroleum. Greece's GDP growth has also, as an average, since the early 1990s been higher than the EU average. However, the Greek economy continues to face significant problems, including high unemployment levels, an inefficient public sector bureaucracy, tax evasion, corruption and low global competitiveness.
Greece is ranked 59th in the world, and 22nd among EU member states, on the Corruption Perceptions Index. This represents a steady improvement over recent years; in 2012, it was ranked 94th in the world and a distant last in the EU. However, Greece still has the EU's lowest Index of Economic Freedom and second lowest Global Competitiveness Index, ranking 100th and 59th in the world respectively.
After fourteen consecutive years of economic growth, Greece went into recession in 2008. By the end of 2009, the Greek economy faced the highest budget deficit and government debt-to-GDP ratio in the EU. After several upward revisions, the 2009 budget deficit is now estimated at 15.7% of GDP. This, combined with rapidly rising debt levels (127.9% of GDP in 2009) led to a precipitous increase in borrowing costs, effectively shutting Greece out of the global financial markets and resulting in a severe economic crisis.
Greece was accused of trying to cover up the extent of its massive budget deficit in the wake of the global financial crisis. The allegation was prompted by the massive revision of the 2009 budget deficit forecast by the new PASOK government elected in October 2009, from "6–8%" (estimated by the previous New Democracy government) to 12.7% (later revised to 15.7%). However, the accuracy of the revised figures has also been questioned, and in February 2012 the Hellenic Parliament voted in favor of an official investigation following accusations by a former member of the Hellenic Statistical Authority that the deficit had been artificially inflated in order to justify harsher austerity measures.
The Greek labor force, which amount around workers, average 2,032 hours of work per worker annually in 2011, is ranked fourth among OECD countries, after Mexico, South Korea and Chile. The Groningen Growth & Development Centre has published a poll revealing that between 1995 and 2005, Greece was the country whose workers have the most hours/year work among European nations; Greeks worked an average of 1,900 hours per year, followed by Spaniards (average of 1,800 hours/year).
As a result of the ongoing economic crisis, industrial production in the country went down by 8% between March 2010 and March 2011, The volume of building activity saw a reduction of 73% in 2010. Additionally, the turnover in retail sales saw a decline of 9% between February 2010 and February 2011.
Between 2008 and 2013 unemployment skyrocketed, from a generational low of 7.2% in the second and third quarters of 2008 to a high of 27.9% in June 2013, leaving over a million jobless. Youth unemployment peaked at 64.9% in May 2013. Unemployment figures have steadily improved in recent years, with the overall rate falling to 12.8% and youth unemployment dropping to 27% in December 2021.
Eurozone entry
Greece was accepted into the Economic and Monetary Union of the European Union by the European Council on 19 June 2000, based on a number of criteria (inflation rate, budget deficit, public debt, long-term interest rates, exchange rate) using 1999 as the reference year. After an audit commissioned by the incoming New Democracy government in 2004, Eurostat revealed that the statistics for the budget deficit had been under-reported.
Most of the differences in the revised budget deficit numbers were due to a temporary change of accounting practices by the new government, i.e., recording expenses when military material was ordered rather than received. However, it was the retroactive application of ESA95 methodology (applied since 2000) by Eurostat, that finally raised the reference year (1999) budget deficit to 3.38% of GDP, thus exceeding the 3% limit. This led to claims that Greece (similar claims have been made about other European countries like Italy)
had not actually met all five accession criteria, and the common perception that Greece entered the Eurozone through "falsified" deficit numbers.
In the 2005 OECD report for Greece, it was clearly stated that "the impact of new accounting rules on the fiscal figures for the years 1997 to 1999 ranged from 0.7 to 1 percentage point of GDP; this retroactive change of methodology was responsible for the revised deficit exceeding 3% in 1999, the year of [Greece's] EMU membership qualification". The above led the Greek minister of finance to clarify that the 1999 budget deficit was below the prescribed 3% limit when calculated with the ESA79 methodology in force at the time of Greece's application, and thus the criteria had been met.
The original accounting practice for military expenses was later restored in line with Eurostat recommendations, theoretically lowering even the ESA95-calculated 1999 Greek budget deficit to below 3% (an official Eurostat calculation is still pending for 1999).
An error sometimes made is the confusion of discussion regarding Greece's Eurozone entry with the controversy regarding usage of derivatives' deals with U.S. Banks by Greece and other Eurozone countries to artificially reduce their reported budget deficits. A currency swap arranged with Goldman Sachs allowed Greece to "hide" 2.8 billion Euros of debt, however, this affected deficit values after 2001 (when Greece had already been admitted into the Eurozone) and is not related to Greece's Eurozone entry.
A study of the period 1999–2009 by forensic accountants has found that data submitted to Eurostat by Greece, among other countries, had a statistical distribution indicative of manipulation; "Greece with a mean value of 17.74, shows the largest deviation from Benford's law among the members of the eurozone, followed by Belgium with a value of 17.21 and Austria with a value of 15.25".
2010–2018 government debt crisis
Historical Debt
Greece, like other European nations, had faced debt crises in the 19th century, as well as a similar crisis in 1932 during the Great Depression. In general, however, during the 20th century it enjoyed one of the highest GDP growth rates on the planet
(for a quarter century from the early 1950s to mid 1970s, second in the world after Japan). Average Greek government debt-to-GDP for the entire century before the crisis (1909-2008) was lower than that for the UK, Canada, or France, while for the 30-year period (1952-1981) until entrance into the European Economic Community, the Greek government debt-to-GDP ratio averaged only 19.8%.
Between 1981 and 1993 it steadily rose, surpassing the average of what is today the Eurozone in the mid-1980s (see chart right).
For the next 15 years, from 1993 to 2007 (i.e., before the Financial crisis of 2007–2008), Greece's government debt-to-GDP ratio remained roughly unchanged (the value was not affected by the 2004 Athens Olympics), averaging 102% - a value lower than that for Italy (107%) and Belgium (110%) during the same 15-year period, and comparable to that for the U.S. or the OECD average in 2017.
During the latter period, the country's annual budget deficit usually exceeded 3% of GDP, but its effect on the debt-to-GDP ratio was counterbalanced by high GDP growth rates. The debt-to-GDP values for 2006 and 2007 (about 105%) were established after audits resulted in corrections according to Eurostat methodology, of up to 10 percentage points for the particular years (as well as similar corrections for the years 2008 and 2009). These corrections, although altering the debt level by a maximum of about 10%, resulted in a popular notion that "Greece was previously hiding its debt".
Evolution of the debt crisis
The Greek crisis was triggered by the turmoil of the Great Recession, which lead the budget deficits of several Western nations to reach or exceed 10% of GDP. In Greece's case, the high budget deficit (which, after several corrections, was revealed that it had been allowed to reach 10.2% and 15.1% of GDP in 2008 and 2009, respectively) was coupled with a high public debt to GDP ratio (which, until then, was relatively stable for several years, at just above 100% of GDP - as calculated after all corrections). Thus, the country appeared to lose control of its public debt to GDP ratio, which already reached 127% of GDP in 2009. In addition, being a member of the Eurozone, the country had essentially no autonomous monetary policy flexibility.
Finally, there was an effect of controversies about Greek statistics (due the aforementioned drastic budget deficit revisions which lead to an increase in the calculated value of the Greek public debt by about 10%, i.e., a public debt to GDP of about 100% until 2007), while there have been arguments about a possible effect of media reports. Consequently, Greece was "punished" by the markets which increased borrowing rates, making impossible for the country to finance its debt since early 2010.
Thus, the Greek economy faced its most-severe crisis since the restoration of democracy in 1974 as the Greek government revised its deficit forecasts from 3.7% in early 2009 and 6% in September 2009, to 12.7% of gross domestic product (GDP) in October 2009.
The aforementioned budget deficit and debt revisions were connected with findings that, through the assistance of Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and numerous other banks, financial products were developed which enabled the governments of Greece, Italy and many other European countries to hide parts of their borrowing. Dozens of similar agreements were concluded across Europe whereby banks supplied cash in advance in exchange for future payments by the governments involved; in turn, the liabilities of the involved countries were "kept off the books".
According to Der Spiegel, credits given to European governments were disguised as "swaps" and consequently did not get registered as debt because Eurostat at the time ignored statistics involving financial derivatives. A German derivatives dealer had commented to Der Spiegel that "The Maastricht rules can be circumvented quite legally through swaps," and "In previous years, Italy used a similar trick to mask its true debt with the help of a different US bank." These conditions had enabled Greek as well as many other European governments to spend beyond their means, while meeting the deficit targets of the European Union and the monetary union guidelines. In May 2010, the Greek government deficit was again revised and estimated to be 13.6% which was among the highest relative to GDP, with Iceland in first place at 15.7% and the United Kingdom third with 12.6%. Public debt was forecast, according to some estimates, to hit 120% of GDP during 2010.
As a consequence, there was a crisis in international confidence in Greece's ability to repay its sovereign debt, as reflected by the rise of the country's borrowing rates (although their slow rise – the 10-year government bond yield only exceeded 7% in April 2010 – coinciding with a large number of negative articles, has led to arguments about the role of international news media in the evolution of the crisis). In order to avert a default (as high borrowing rates effectively prohibited access to the markets), in May 2010 the other Eurozone countries, and the IMF, agreed to a "rescue package" which involved giving Greece an immediate € in bail-out loans, with more funds to follow, totaling €. In order to secure the funding, Greece was required to adopt harsh austerity measures to bring its deficit under control. Their implementation was to be monitored and evaluated by the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF.
The financial crisis – particularly the austerity package put forth by the EU and the IMF – has been met with anger by the Greek public, leading to riots and social unrest, while there have been theories about the effect of international media. Despite - others say because of - the long range of austerity measures, the government deficit has not been reduced accordingly, mainly, according to many economists, because of the subsequent recession.
Public sector workers have come out on strike in order to resist job cuts and reductions to salaries as the government promises that a large scale privatisation programme will be accelerated. Immigrants are sometimes treated as scapegoats for economic problems by far-right extremists.
In 2013, Greece became the first developed market to be reclassified as an emerging market by different financial rating companies.
By July 2014 there were still anger and protests about the austerity measures, with a 24-hour strike among government workers timed to coincide with an audit by inspectors from the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and European Central Bank in advance of a decision on a second bailout of one billion euros ($1.36 billion), due in late July.
Greece exited its six-year recession in the second quarter of 2014, but the challenges of securing political stability and debt sustainability remain.
A third bailout was agreed in July 2015, after a confrontation with the newly elected leftist government of Alexis Tsipras. In June 2017, news reports indicated that the "crushing debt burden" had not been alleviated and that Greece was at the risk of defaulting on some payments. The International Monetary Fund stated that the country should be able to borrow again "in due course". At the time, the Euro zone gave Greece another credit of $9.5-billion, $8.5 billion of loans and brief details of a possible debt relief with the assistance of the IMF. On 13 July, the Greek government sent a letter of intent to the IMF with 21 commitments it promised to meet by June 2018. They included changes in labour laws, a plan to cap public sector work contracts, to transform temporary contracts into permanent agreements and to recalculate pension payments to reduce spending on social security.
Greece's bailouts successfully ended (as declared) on 20 August 2018.
Effects of the bailout programmes on the debt crisis
There was a 25% drop in Greece's GDP, connected with the bailout programmes. This had a critical effect: the Debt-to-GDP ratio, the key factor defining the severity of the crisis, would jump from its 2009 level of 127% to about 170%, solely due to the GDP drop (i.e., for the same Debt). Such a level is considered unsustainable.
In a 2013 report, the IMF admitted that it had underestimated the effects of so extensive tax hikes and budget cuts on the country's GDP and issued an informal apology
.
COVID-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted all sectors of the Greek economy, and tourism in particular. As a result, GDP shrank by 9% in 2020. After a further drop of 1.9% in the first quarter of 2021 on a year-on-year basis, the economy expanded by 16.6% in the second quarter and by 13.4% in the third quarter. In June 2021, the European Commission agreed to disburse approximately 30 billion Euros in COVID-19 related economic aid (12 billion in loans and 18 billion in grants).
Data
The following table shows the main economic indicators in 1980–2020 (with IMF staff estimtates in 2021–2026). Inflation below 5% is in green.
Primary sector
Agriculture and fishery
In 2010, Greece was the European Union's largest producer of cotton (183,800 tons) and pistachios (8,000 tons) and ranked second in the production of rice (229,500 tons) and olives (147,500 tons), third in the production of figs (11,000 tons) and almonds (44,000 tons), tomatoes (1,400,000 tons) and watermelons (578,400 tons) and fourth in the production of tobacco (22,000 tons). Agriculture contributes 3.8% of the country's GDP and employs 12.4% of the country's labor force.
Greece is a major beneficiary of the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union. As a result of the country's entry to the European Community, much of its agricultural infrastructure has been upgraded and agricultural output increased. Between 2000 and 2007 organic farming in Greece increased by 885%, the highest change percentage in the EU.
In 2007, Greece accounted for 19% of the EU's fishing haul in the Mediterranean Sea, ranked third with 85,493 tons, and ranked first in the number of fishing vessels in the Mediterranean between European Union members. Additionally, the country ranked 11th in the EU in total quantity of fish caught, with 87,461 tons.
Secondary sector
Industry
Between 2005 and 2011, Greece has had the highest percentage increase in industrial output compared to 2005 levels out of all European Union members, with an increase of 6%. Eurostat statistics show that the industrial sector was hit by the Greek financial crisis throughout 2009 and 2010, with domestic output decreasing by 5.8% and industrial production in general by 13.4%. Currently, Greece is ranked third in the European Union in the production of marble (over 920,000 tons), after Italy and Spain.
Between 1999 and 2008, the volume of retail trade in Greece increased by an average of 4.4% per year (a total increase of 44%), while it decreased by 11.3% in 2009. The only sector that did not see negative growth in 2009 was administration and services, with a marginal growth of 2.0%.
In 2009, Greece's labor productivity was 98% that of the EU average, but its productivity-per-hour-worked was 74% that the Eurozone average. The largest industrial employer in the country (in 2007) was the manufacturing industry (407,000 people), followed by the construction industry (305,000) and mining (14,000).
Greece has a significant shipbuilding and ship maintenance industry. The six shipyards around the port of Piraeus are among the largest in Europe. In recent years, Greece has become a leader in the construction and maintenance of luxury yachts.
Mining
Tertiary sector
Maritime industry
Shipping has traditionally been a key sector in the Greek economy since ancient times. In 1813, the Greek merchant navy was made up of 615 ships. Its total tonnage was 153,580 tons and was manned with 37,526 crewmembers and 5,878 cannons. In 1914 the figures stood at 449,430 tons and 1,322 ships (of which 287 were steam boats).
During the 1960s, the size of the Greek fleet nearly doubled, primarily through the investment undertaken by the shipping magnates Onassis, Vardinoyannis, Livanos and Niarchos. The basis of the modern Greek maritime industry was formed after World War II when Greek shipping businessmen were able to amass surplus ships sold to them by the United States Government through the Ship Sales Act of the 1940s.
Greece has the largest merchant navy in the world, accounting for more than 15% of the world's total deadweight tonnage (dwt) according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. The Greek merchant navy's total dwt of nearly 245 million is comparable only to Japan's, which is ranked second with almost 224 million. Additionally, Greece represents 39.52% of all of the European Union's dwt. However, today's fleet roster is smaller than an all-time high of 5,000 ships in the late 1970s.
Greece is ranked fourth in the world by number of ships (3,695), behind China (5,313), Japan (3,991), and Germany (3,833). A European Community Shipowners' Associations report for 2011–2012 reveals that the Greek flag is the seventh-most-used internationally for shipping, while it ranks second in the EU.
In terms of ship categories, Greek companies have 22.6% of the world's tankers and 16.1% of the world's bulk carriers (in dwt). An additional equivalent of 27.45% of the world's tanker dwt is on order, with another 12.7% of bulk carriers also on order. Shipping accounts for an estimated 6% of Greek GDP, employs about 160,000 people (4% of the workforce), and represents 1/3 of the country's trade deficit. Earnings from shipping amounted to €14.1 billion in 2011, while between 2000 and 2010 Greek shipping contributed a total of €140 billion (half of the country's public debt in 2009 and 3.5 times the receipts from the European Union in the period 2000–2013). The 2011 ECSA report showed that there are approximately 750 Greek shipping companies in operation.
The latest available data from the Union of Greek Shipowners show that "the Greek-owned ocean-going fleet consists of 3,428 ships, totaling 245 million deadweight tonnes in capacity. This equals 15.6 percent of the carrying capacity of the entire global fleet, including 23.6 percent of the world tanker fleet and 17.2 percent of dry bulk".
Counting shipping as quasi-exports and in terms of monetary value, Greece ranked 4th globally in 2011 having exported shipping services worth 17,704.132 million $; only Denmark, Germany and South Korea ranked higher during that year. Similarly counting shipping services provided to Greece by other countries as quasi-imports and the difference between exports and imports as a trade balance, Greece in 2011 ranked in the latter second behind Germany, having imported shipping services worth 7,076.605 million US$ and having run a trade surplus of 10,712.342 million US$.
Telecommunications
Between 1949 and the 1980s, telephone communications in Greece were a state monopoly by the Hellenic Telecommunications Organization, better known by its acronym, OTE. Despite the liberalization of telephone communications in the country in the 1980s, OTE still dominates the Greek market in its field and has emerged as one of the largest telecommunications companies in Southeast Europe. Since 2011, the company's major shareholder is Deutsche Telekom with a 40% stake, while the Greek state continues to own 10% of the company's shares. OTE owns several subsidiaries across the Balkans, including Cosmote, Greece's top mobile telecommunications provider, Cosmote Romania and Albanian Mobile Communications.
Other mobile telecommunications companies active in Greece are Wind Hellas and Vodafone Greece. The total number of active cellular phone accounts in the country in 2009 based on statistics from the country's mobile phone providers was over 20 million, a penetration of 180%. Additionally, there are 5.745 million active landlines in the country.
Greece has tended to lag behind its European Union partners in terms of Internet use, with the gap closing rapidly in recent years. The percentage of households with Internet access more than doubled between 2006 and 2013, from 23% to 56% respectively (compared with an EU average of 49% and 79%). At the same time, there was a massive increase in the proportion of households with a broadband connection, from 4% in 2006 to 55% in 2013 (compared with an EU average of 30% and 76%). By 2021, the percentage of Greek households with Internet access and a broadband connection had reached 85.1% and 85.0% respectively.
Tourism
Tourism in the modern sense only started to flourish in Greece in the years post-1950, although tourism in ancient times is also documented in relation to religious or sports festivals such as the Olympic Games. Since the 1950s, the tourism sector saw an unprecedented boost as arrivals went from 33,000 in 1950 to 11.4 million in 1994.
Greece attracts more than 16 million tourists each year, thus contributing 18.2% to the nation's GDP in 2008 according to an OECD report. The same survey showed that the average tourist expenditure while in Greece was $1,073, ranking Greece 10th in the world. The number of jobs directly or indirectly related to the tourism sector were 840,000 in 2008 and represented 19% of the country's total labor force. In 2009, Greece welcomed over 19.3 million tourists, a major increase from the 17.7 million tourists the country welcomed in 2008.
Among the member states of the European Union, Greece was the most popular destination for residents of Cyprus and Sweden in 2011.
The ministry responsible for tourism is the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, while Greece also owns the Greek National Tourism Organization which aims in promoting tourism in Greece.
In recent years a number of well-known tourism-related organizations have placed Greek destinations in the top of their lists. In 2009 Lonely Planet ranked Thessaloniki, the country's second-largest city, the world's fifth best "Ultimate Party Town", alongside cities such as Montreal and Dubai, while in 2011 the island of Santorini was voted as the best island in the world by Travel + Leisure. The neighbouring island of Mykonos was ranked as the 5th best island Europe. Thessaloniki was the European Youth Capital in 2014.
Trade and investment
Foreign investment
Since the fall of communism, Greece has invested heavily in neighbouring Balkan countries. Between 1997 and 2009, 12.11% of foreign direct investment capital in North Macedonia was Greek, ranking fourth. In 2009 alone, Greeks invested €380 million in the country, with companies such as Hellenic Petroleum having made important strategic investments.
Greece invested €1.38 billion in Bulgaria between 2005 and 2007 and many important companies (including Bulgarian Postbank, United Bulgarian Bank Coca-Cola Bulgaria) are owned by Greek financial groups. In Serbia, 250 Greek companies are active with a total investment of over €2 billion. Romanian statistics from 2016 show that Greek investment in the country exceeded €4 billion, ranking Greece fifth or sixth among foreign investors. Greece has been the largest investor in Albania since the fall of communism with 25% of foreign investments in 2016 coming from Greece, in addition business relations between both are extremely strong and continuously rising.
Inflows
A prominent investor of the Abu Dhabi royal family, Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan entered Greece to make several selective investments. From a five-storey property of 2,900 sq. m. in Athens to the hotel Ermioni Club in Porto Heli, Al Nahyan made way into Greece. The Emirati royal family member associated with the Royal Group was approached during the SYRIZA government and was persuaded to cooperate in the export of olive oil and edible olives. The funding was expected to come from an Abu Dhabi fund. However, risk was seen in the increasing presence of Tahnoun bin Zayed in Greece, as he was linked to the UAE's International Golden Group (IGG) that was involved in the war crimes in Libya and Yemen. Besides, the acts of spying by the Emirati Sheikh's firm, Group 42, also left a similar threat for Greece.
Trade
Since the start of the debt crisis, Greece's negative balance of trade has decreased significantly—from €44.3 billion in 2008 to €18.15 billion in 2020. After a temporary reduction in trade during the COVID-19 recession of 2020, exports and imports rebounded in 2021 by 29.5% and 31.1% respectively.
Greece is also the largest import partner of Cyprus (18.0%) and the largest export partner of Palau (82.4%).
Transport
As of 2012, Greece had a total of 82 airports, of which 67 were paved and six had runways longer than 3,047 meters. Of these airports, two are classified as "international" by the Hellenic Civil Aviation Authority, but 15 offer international services. Additionally Greece has 9 heliports. Greece does not have a flag carrier, but the country's airline industry is dominated by Aegean Airlines and its subsidiary Olympic Air.
Between 1975 and 2009, Olympic Airways (known after 2003 as Olympic Airlines) was the country's state-owned flag carrier, but financial problems led to its privatization and relaunch as Olympic Air in 2009. Both Aegean Airlines and Olympic Air have won awards for their services; in 2009 and 2011, Aegean Airlines was awarded the "Best regional airline in Europe" award by Skytrax, and also has two gold and one silver awards by the ERA, while Olympic Air holds one silver ERA award for "Airline of the Year" as well as a "Condé Nast Traveller 2011 Readers Choice Awards: Top Domestic Airline" award.
The Greek road network is made up of 116,986 km of roads, of which 1863 km are highways, ranking 24th worldwide, as of 2016. Since the entry of Greece to the European Community (now the European Union), a number of important projects (such as the Egnatia Odos and the Attiki Odos) have been co-funded by the organization, helping to upgrade the country's road network. In 2007, Greece ranked 8th in the European Union in goods transported by road at almost 500 million tons.
Greece's rail network is estimated to be at 2,548 km. Rail transport in Greece is operated by TrainOSE, a current subsidiary of the Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane after the Hellenic Railways Organisation had sold its 100% stake on the operator. Most of the country's network is standard gauge (1,565 km), while the country also has 983 km of narrow gauge. A total of 764 km of rail are electrified. Greece has rail connections with Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Turkey. A total of three suburban railway systems (Proastiakos) are in operation (in Athens, Thessaloniki and Patras), while one metro system, the Athens Metro, is operational in Athens with another, the Thessaloniki Metro, under construction.
According to Eurostat, Greece's largest port by tons of goods transported in 2010 is the port of Aghioi Theodoroi, with 17.38 million tons. The Port of Thessaloniki comes second with 15.8 million tons, followed by the Port of Piraeus, with 13.2 million tons, and the port of Eleusis, with 12.37 million tons. The total number of goods transported through Greece in 2010 amounted to 124.38 million tons, a considerable drop from the 164.3 million tons transported through the country in 2007. Since then, Piraeus has grown to become the Mediterranean's third-largest port thanks to heavy investment by Chinese logistics giant COSCO. In 2013, Piraeus was declared the fastest-growing port in the world.
In 2010 Piraeus handled 513,319 TEUs, followed by Thessaloniki, which handled 273,282 TEUs. In the same year, 83.9 million people passed through Greece's ports, 12.7 million through the port of Paloukia in Salamis, another 12.7 through the port of Perama, 9.5 million through Piraeus and 2.7 million through Igoumenitsa. In 2013, Piraeus handled a record 3.16 million TEUs, the third-largest figure in the Mediterranean, of which 2.52 million were transported through Pier II, owned by COSCO and 644,000 were transported through Pier I, owned by the Greek state.
Energy
Energy production in Greece is dominated by the Public Power Corporation (known mostly by its acronym ΔΕΗ, or in English DEI). In 2009 DEI supplied for 85.6% of all energy demand in Greece, while the number fell to 77.3% in 2010. Almost half (48%) of DEI's power output is generated using lignite, a drop from the 51.6% in 2009. Another 12% comes from Hydroelectric power plants and another 20% from natural gas. Between 2009 and 2010, independent companies' energy production increased by 56%, from 2,709 Gigawatt hour in 2009 to 4,232 GWh in 2010.
In 2008 renewable energy accounted for 8% of the country's total energy consumption, a rise from the 7.2% it accounted for in 2006, but still below the EU average of 10% in 2008. 10% of the country's renewable energy comes from solar power, while most comes from biomass and waste recycling. In line with the European Commission's Directive on Renewable Energy, Greece aims to get 18% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020. In 2013 and for several months, Greece produced more than 20% of its electricity from renewable energy sources and hydroelectric power plants. Greece currently does not have any nuclear power plants in operation, however in 2009 the Academy of Athens suggested that research in the possibility of Greek nuclear power plants begin.
Greece had 10 million barrels of proven oil reserves as of 1 January 2012. Hellenic Petroleum is the country's largest oil company, followed by Motor Oil Hellas. Greece's oil production stands at 1,751 barrels per day (bbl/d), ranked 95th worldwide, while it exports 19,960 bbl/d, ranked 53rd, and imports 355,600 bbl/d, ranked 25th.
In 2011 the Greek government approved the start of oil exploration and drilling in three locations within Greece, with an estimated output of 250 to 300 million barrels over the next 15 to 20 years. The estimated output in euros of the three deposits is €25 billion over a 15-year period, of which €13–€14 billion will enter state coffers. Greece's dispute with Turkey over the Aegean poses substantial obstacles to oil exploration in the Aegean Sea.
In addition to the above, Greece is also to start oil and gas exploration in other locations in the Ionian Sea, as well as the Libyan Sea, within the Greek exclusive economic zone, south of Crete. The Ministry of the Environment, Energy and Climate Change announced that there was interest from various countries (including Norway and the United States) in exploration, and the first results regarding the amount of oil and gas in these locations were expected in the summer of 2012. In November 2012, a report published by Deutsche Bank estimated the value of natural gas reserves south of Crete at €427 billion.
A number of oil and gas pipelines are currently under construction or under planning in the country. Such projects include the Interconnector Turkey-Greece-Italy (ITGI) and South Stream gas pipelines.
EuroAsia Interconnector will electrically connect Attica and Crete in Greece with Cyprus and Israel with 2000 MW HVDC undersea power cable. EuroAsia Interconnector is specially important for isolated systems, like Cyprus and Crete. Crete is energetically isolated from mainland Greece and Hellenic Republic covers for Crete electricity costs difference of around €300 million per year.
Taxation and tax evasion
Greece has a tiered tax system based on progressive taxation. Greek law recognizes six categories of taxable income: immovable property, movable property (investment), income from agriculture, business, employment, and income from professional activities. Greece's personal income tax rate, until recently, ranged from 0% for annual incomes below €12,000 to 45% for annual incomes over €100,000. Under the new 2010 tax reform, tax exemptions have been abolished.
Also under the new austerity measures and among other changes, the personal income tax-free ceiling has been reduced to €5,000 per annum while further future changes, for example abolition of this ceiling, are already being planned.
Greece's corporate tax dropped from 40% in 2000 to 20% in 2010. For 2011 only, corporate tax will be at 24%. Value added tax (VAT) has gone up in 2010 compared to 2009: 23% as opposed to 19%.
The lowest VAT possible is 6.5% (previously 4.5%) for newspapers, periodicals and cultural event tickets, while a tax rate of 13% (from 9%) applies to certain service sector professions. Additionally, both employers and employees have to pay social contribution taxes, which apply at a rate of 16% for white collar jobs and 19.5% for blue collar jobs, and are used for social insurance. In 2017 the VAT tax rate was 24% with minor exceptions, 13% reduced for some basic foodstuffs which will be soon abolished and everything, as it seems, will soon go to 24% in order to fight the phantom of tax evasion.
The Ministry of Finance expected tax revenues for 2012 to be €52.7 billion (€23.6 billion in direct taxes and €29.1 billion in indirect taxes), an increase of 5.8% from 2011. In 2012, the government was expected to have considerably higher tax revenues than in 2011 on a number of sectors, primarily housing (an increase of 217.5% from 2011).
Tax evasion
Greece suffers from very high levels of tax evasion. In the last quarter of 2005, tax evasion reached 49%, while in January 2006 it fell to 41.6%. It is worth noting that the newspaper Ethnos which published these figures went bankrupt; it is no longer published and some sources suggest that the information it had published was highly debatable. A study by researchers from the University of Chicago concluded that tax evasion in 2009 by self-employed professionals alone in Greece (accountants, dentists, lawyers, doctors, personal tutors and independent financial advisers) was €28 billion or 31% of the budget deficit that year.
Greece's "shadow economy" was estimated at 24.3% of GDP in 2012, compared with 28.6% for Estonia, 26.5% for Latvia, 21.6% for Italy, 17.1% for Belgium, 14.7% for Sweden, 13.7% for Finland, and 13.5% for Germany, and is certainly related to the fact that the percentage of Greeks that are self-employed is more than double the EU average (2013 est.).
The Tax Justice Network estimated in 2011 that there were over 20 billion euros in Swiss bank accounts held by Greeks. The former Finance Minister of Greece, Evangelos Venizelos, was quoted as saying, "Around 15,000 individuals and companies owe the taxman 37 billion euros". Additionally, the TJN put the number of Greek-owned off-shore companies at over 10,000.
In 2012, Swiss estimates suggested that Greeks had some 20 billion euros in Switzerland of which only one percent had been declared as taxable in Greece. Estimates in 2015 were even more dramatic. They indicated that the amount due to the government of Greece from Greeks' accounts in Swiss banks totaled around 80 billion euros.
A mid-2017 report indicated Greeks have been "taxed to the hilt" and many believed that the risk of penalties for tax evasion were less serious than the risk of bankruptcy. One method of evasion is the so-called black market, grey economy or shadow economy: work is done for cash payment which is not declared as income; as well, VAT is not collected and remitted. A January 2017 report by the DiaNEOsis think-tank indicated that unpaid taxes in Greece at the time totaled approximately 95 billion euros, up from 76 billion euros in 2015, much of it was expected to be uncollectable. Another early 2017 study estimated that the loss to the government as a result of tax evasion was between 6% and 9% of the country's GDP, or roughly between 11 billion and 16 billion euros per annum.
The shortfall in the collection of VAT (sales tax) is also significant. In 2014, the government collected 28% less than was owed to it; this shortfall was about double the average for the EU. The uncollected amount that year was about 4.9 billion euros. The DiaNEOsis study estimated that 3.5% of GDP is lost due to VAT fraud, while losses due to smuggling of alcohol, tobacco and petrol amounted to approximately another 0.5% of the country's GDP.
Planned solutions
Following similar actions by the United Kingdom and Germany, the Greek government was in talks with Switzerland in 2011, attempting to force Swiss banks to reveal information on the back accounts of Greek citizens. The Ministry of Finance stated that Greeks with Swiss bank accounts would either be required to pay a tax or reveal information such as the identity of the bank account holder to the Greek internal revenue services. The Greek and Swiss governments were to reach a deal on the matter by the end of 2011.
The solution demanded by Greece still had not been effected as of 2015. That year, estimates indicated that the amount of evaded taxes stored in Swiss banks was around 80 billion euros. By then, however, a tax treaty to address this issue was under serious negotiation between the Greek and Swiss governments. An agreement was finally ratified by Switzerland on 1 March 2016 creating a new tax transparency law that would allow for a more effective battle against tax evasion. Starting in 2018, banks in both Greece and Switzerland will exchange information about the bank accounts of citizens of the other country to minimize the possibility of hiding untaxed income.
In 2016 and 2017, the government was encouraging the use of credit cards or debit cards to pay for goods and services in order to reduce cash only payments. By January 2017, taxpayers were only granted tax-allowances or deductions when payments were made electronically, with a "paper trail" of the transactions that the government could easily audit. This was expected to reduce the problem of businesses taking payments but not issuing an invoice; that tactic had been used by various companies to avoid payment of VAT (sales) tax as well as income tax.
By 28 July 2017, numerous businesses were required by law to install a point of sale device to enable them to accept payment by credit or debit card. Failure to comply with the electronic payment facility can lead to fines of up to 1,500 euros. The requirement applied to around 400,000 firms or individuals in 85 professions. The greater use of cards was one of the factors that had already achieved significant increases in VAT collection in 2016.
Wealth and standards of living
National and regional GDP
Greece's most economically important regions are Attica, which contributed €87.378 billion to the economy in 2018, and Central Macedonia, which contributed €25.558 billion. The smallest regional economies were those of the North Aegean (€2.549 billion) and Ionian Islands (€3.257 billion).
In terms of GDP per capita, Attica (€23,300) far outranks any other Greek region. The poorest regions in 2018 were the North Aegean (€11,800), Eastern Macedonia and Thrace (€11,900) and Epirus (€12,200). At the national level, GDP per capita in 2018 was €17,200.
Welfare state
Greece is a welfare state which provides a number of social services such as quasi-universal health care and pensions. In the 2012 budget, expenses for the welfare state (excluding education) stand at an estimated €22.487 billion (€6.577 billion for pensions and €15.910 billion for social security and health care expenses), or 31.9% of the all state expenses.
Largest companies by revenue 2018
According to the 2018 Forbes Global 2000 index, Greece's largest publicly traded companies are:
Labour force
Working hours
In 2011, 53.3 percent of employed persons worked more than 40 to 49 hours a week and 24.8 percent worked more than 50 hours a week, totaling up to 78.1 percent of employed persons working 40 or more hours a week. When accounting for varying age groups, the percentage of employees working 40 to 49 hours a week peaked in the 25 to 29 age range. As workers got older, they gradually decreased in percentage working 40 to 49 hours, but increased in working 50+ hours, suggesting a correlation that as employees grow older, they work more hours. Of different occupation groups, skilled agricultural, forestry, and fishery workers and managers were the most likely to work 50+ hours; however, they do not take up a significant portion of the labor force, only 14.3 percent. In 2014, the average number of working hours for Greek employees was 2124 hours, ranking as the third highest among OECD countries and the highest in the Eurozone.
Recent trends in employment indicate that the number of working hours will decrease in the future due to the rise of part-time work. Since 2011, average working hours have decreased. In 1998, Greece passed legislation introducing part-time employment in public services with the goal of reducing unemployment, increasing the total, but decreasing the average number of hours worked per employee. Whether the legislation was successful in increasing public-sector part-time work, labor market trends show that part-time employment has increased from 7.7 percent in 2007 to 11 percent in 2016 of total employment. Both men and women have had the part-time share of employment increase over this period. While women still constitute a majority of part-time workers, recently men have been taking a larger share of part-time employment.
Currency
Between 1832 and 2002 the currency of Greece was the drachma. After signing the Maastricht Treaty, Greece applied to join the eurozone. The two main convergence criteria were a maximum budget deficit of 3% of GDP and a declining public debt if it stood above 60% of GDP. Greece met the criteria as shown in its 1999 annual public account. On 1 January 2001, Greece joined the eurozone, with the adoption of the euro at the fixed exchange rate ₯340.75 to €1. However, in 2001 the euro only existed electronically, so the physical exchange from drachma to euro only took place on 1 January 2002. This was followed by a ten-year period for eligible exchange of drachma to euro, which ended on 1 March 2012.
Prior to the adoption of the euro, 64% of Greek citizens viewed the new currency positively, but in February 2005 this figure fell to 26% and by June 2005 it fell further to 20%. Since 2010 the figure has risen again, and a survey in September 2011 showed that 63% of Greek citizens viewed of the euro positively.
Charts gallery
Poverty rate
As a result of the recession sparked by the public debt crisis, poverty has increased. The rate of people at risk of poverty or social exclusion reached a high of 36% in 2014, before subsiding over the following years to 28.9% in 2020. Those living in extreme poverty rose to 15% in 2015, up from 8.9% in 2011, and a huge increase from 2009 when it was not more than 2.2%. The rate among children 0-17 is 17.6% and for young people 18-29 the rate is 24.4%. With unemployment on the rise, those without jobs are at the highest risk of poverty (70–75%), up from less than 50% in 2011. Those out of work lose their health insurance after two years, further exacerbating the poverty rate. Younger unemployed people tend to rely on the older generations of their families for financial support. However, long-term unemployment has depleted pension funds due to fewer workers making social security contributions, resulting in higher poverty rates in intergenerational households reliant on the reduced pensions received by their retired members. Over the course of the economic crisis, Greeks have endured significant job losses and wage cuts, as well as deep cuts to workers' compensation and welfare benefits. From 2008 to 2013, Greeks became 40% poorer on average, and in 2014 saw their disposable household income drop below 2003 levels.
References
Further reading
Pasiouras, Fotios. Greek Banking: From the Pre-Euro Reforms to the Financial Crisis and Beyond (Palgrave Macmillan; 2012) 217 pages; covers the mid-1990s to 2011.
External links
Economy of Greece Ten Years After the Financial Crisis – Macro Affairs
Nick Malkoutzis Greece – A Year in Crisis – Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, June 2011
The Greek Economy: Which Way Forward?, from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, January 2015
The Greek Economy – a bi-monthly publication by the Hellenic Statistical Authority on the state of the economy
The Greek Exports – Database of Greek Exporters
Greek Banks Digest – (in English)
World Bank Summary Trade Statistics Greece
New study on the "Economic, Social and Territorial Situation of Greece" – European Parliament, Committee on Regional Development's delegation to Greece, 13 – 15 July 2011
OECD data for Greece
Federal Reserve Economic Data for Greece
Greece
Greece
Greece
World Trade Organization member economies | [
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12114 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications%20in%20Greece | Telecommunications in Greece | The telecommunications and postal services market in Greece is regulated by the Hellenic Telecommunications and Post Commission (EETT).
Landline telephone
COSMOTE, the former state monopoly, is the main player in fixed-line telephony. Since the liberalization of the telecommunications market, COSMOTE (OTE) has been slowly losing market share to "alternative", competing telecom operators, such as Vodafone, Wind, Nova. As of 2005, COSMOTE's share on the market hovered around 76%.
Telephones – main lines in use: 6,348,800 (2004).
Telephone system:
modern networks reach all areas; microwave radio relay carries most traffic; 35,000 kilometers of optical fibers and extensive open-wire network; submarine cables to off-shore islands.
domestic: 100% digital; microwave radio relay, open wire, and submarine cable.
international: 100% digital; tropospheric scatter; 8 submarine cables; satellite earth stations – 2 Intelsat (1 Atlantic Ocean and 1 Indian Ocean), 1 Eutelsat, and 1 Inmarsat (Indian Ocean region).
Cellular network
Greece has three mobile telecom companies; Cosmote, Vodafone, and WIND.
Number of active lines: 20,285,000 (September 2009), which means 180% penetration.
Satellite
Greece owns one telecommunications satellite, named Hellas Sat, which provides telecommunication services in a major part of Eastern Europe and Western Asia.
Internet
4,893,840 IP addresses, 1.6638e+30 IPv6 addresses, 5,920,000 Internet Users,
2,396,700 broadband connections,
23 Internet Service Providers.
Mass media
Radio broadcast stations:
The state radio and television broadcasting agency is ERT (Elliniki Radiofonia kai Tileorasi – Greek Radio & Television). The station owns 3 national television stations, ERT1, ERT2 and ERT3 which is based out of Thessaloniki. In January 2006, ERT launched digital terrestrial television with 3 channels. By March 2006, at least 65% of the Greek population was able to view Digital TV for free with the use of set-top boxes. ERT also operates 7 national radio stations, including the Voice of Greece, which broadcasts internationally via shortwave. ERT is based in Athens.
The first non-pirate private radio station to broadcast in Greece was Athens 98.4 FM, in 1987. Private television began in November 1989, when Mega Channel began operating. Today, over 1,000 radio stations and approximately 150 television stations broadcast in Greece. Digital satellite broadcasting began in 1999 by the South-African conglomerate Naspers which uses the trademark Nova.
The Broadcasting Media in Greece is considerably free and fair. Established state-run and commercial TV networks broadcast nationally and compete actively against each other, and hundreds of thousands of viewers subscribe to satellite pay-TV services. Domestically made variety programmes, comedies and game shows dominate the peak-time TV schedules and are highly popular and widely shown in Greece.
Main television stations in Greece
Private: Mega Channel, ANT1, Star Channel, Alpha TV, Open TV, Makedonia TV, Skai TV and several other regional and local stations.
Public: ΕΡΤ1, ΕΡΤ2 and ΕΡΤ3 (Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation).
Further Information
Radios: 5.02 million (1997)
Television broadcast stations: 64 (plus about 1,000 low-power repeaters); also two stations in the US Armed Forces Network (1999)
Televisions: 2.54 million (1997)
Mail
Hellenic Post is the state-owned postal service provider of Greece. A number of private courier services, such as DHL, ACS, United Parcel Service and FedEx (Speedex), also operate in Greece.
See also
Economy of Greece
OTE
Hellenic Telecommunications and Post Commission
References
Telecommunications in Greece | [
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12115 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport%20in%20Greece | Transport in Greece | Transport in Greece have undergone significant changes in the past two decades, vastly modernizing the country's infrastructure and transportation. Although ferry transport between islands remains the prominent method of transport between the nation's islands, improvements to the road infrastructure, rail, urban transport, and airports have all led to a vast improvement in transportation. These upgrades have played a key role in supporting Greece's economy, which in the past decade has come to rely heavily on the construction industry.
Cable transport
Lycabettus Funicular
Parnitha Funitel
Santorini cable car
Rail transport
Railways
total: , ( are, or will be, electrified)
standard gauge: gauge
narrow gauge: gauge; gauge
dual gauge: combined and gauges (three rail system) (2004)
The state owned company that owns and maintains Greece's railway network is called OSE, while TrainOSE is the company responsible for operating all passenger and freight trains.
Metro
Cities with a rapid transit railway network:
Athens Metro (3 lines) (1 under construction)
Thessaloniki Metro (2 lines) (under construction)
Commuter rail
Cities with a commuter rail network (Proastiakos):
Athens (5 lines)
Thessaloniki (2 lines)
Patras (1 line)
Tram
Athens Tram
List of town tramway systems in Greece
Road transport
Highways
As of 2017, Greece has 2500 km of motorways.
Roads:
total: 117,000 km
paved: 107,406 km
unpaved: 9,594 km (1996 est.)
over 2500 tunnels (est.)
Bus transport
Urban bus transport
OSY subsidiary of OASA organizes mass bus (Busses and trolleybuses) transit in Athens.
OASTH organizes mass bus transit in Thessaloniki.
Companies named Astiko KTEL provide mass bus transit in many of the other cities of Greece.
Intercity and regional bus transport
KTEL is the common name for every company which is responsible for intercity and regional bus transit. Most of the regional units, though, have their own regional network of buses, and have their regional unit names labeled on KTEL vehicles that operate there. (e.g. KTEL Argolidas).
There are 3 major bus terminals in Greece, the biggest is in Thessaloniki (Macedonia Inter city bus terminal) which serves all of Greece while Athens has 2 separate bus terminals serving different parts of Greece (Kifissos bus terminal and Liossion bus terminal). A new Athens bus terminal in Elaionas will replace the two separate terminals and serve all of Greece with completion by 2025.
Water transport
Waterways
The 80 km system consists of three coastal canals including the Corinth Canal (6 km) and three unconnected rivers.
The Corinth Canal crosses the Isthmus of Corinth, connecting the Gulf of Corinth with the Saronic Gulf; and shortens the sea voyage from the Adriatic to Piraeus by 325 km.
Ports and harbours
Alexandroupoli
Argostoli
Elefsina
Ermoupolis
Heraklion, Crete
Kalamata
Kavala
Kerkyra
Kos
Chalkis
Igoumenitsa
Lavrio
Patras
Piraeus
Port of Thessaloniki
Volos
Katakolo
Mykonos
Mytilene
Rhodes (city)
Souda
Syros
Merchant marine
total: 3,338 ships (with a volume of or over) totaling /
ships by type (1999 est.)
bulk carrier: 273
cargo ship: 60
chemical tanker: 22
combination bulk: 5
combination ore/oil: 8
container ship: 43
Liquified Gas Carrier: 5
multi-functional large load carrier: 1
passenger ship: 12
passenger/cargo: 2
petroleum tanker: 245
refrigerated cargo: 3
roll-on/roll-off ship: 19
short-sea passenger: 75
specialized tanker: 4
vehicle carrier: 2
Airports
total: 82 (2005)
With paved runways: 67
over 3,047 m: 5
2,438 to 3,047 m: 16
1,524 to 2,437 m: 19
914 to 1,523 m: 17
under 914 m: 10 (2005)
With unpaved runways: 15
914 to 1,523 m: 3
under 914 m: 12 (2005)
heliports: 8 (2005)
Pipelines
crude oil: 26 km
petroleum products: 547 km
Major construction projects
Completed projects
Motorways
Central Greece Motorway
Egnatia Odos 670 km (420 mi)
Motorway 25
Motorway 29 77 km (48 mi)
Ionia Odos "196 km (122 mi)"
Motorway 1 (ATHE) 550 km (340 mi)
Attiki Odos 69.7 km (43.3 mi)
Moreas Motorway 205 km (127 mi)
Olympia Odos 210 km (130 mi)
Rio–Antirrio bridge 2,880 metre long (9,449 ft) (2nd longest cable bridge in Europe
Railways
Athens Airport–Patras railway (completed until Aigio)
Thessaloniki–Alexandroupoli railway
Athens Metro
Line 1
Line 2
Line 3
Athens Tram
Ports and harbours
Pireaus Port
Rafina Port
Lavrion Port
Airports
Athens International Airport
Thessaloniki Airport - "Makedonia"
Projects under construction
North Road Axis of Crete
Branches of Egnatia Odos
Motorway 21
Motorway 27
Motorway 71
Railways
Construction and electrification of extension to Patras of Athens Airport–Patras railway
Line 3 (Athens Metro) extension to Dimotiko Theatro
Line 4 (Athens Metro)
Thessaloniki Metro
Athens Tram extension to Piraeus
Ports and harbours
Airports
New Heraklion Airport in Kasteli
Future projects
Motorways
Larisa-Kozane Motorway
Railways
Line 4
Igoumenitsa-Ioannina-Kalampaka Railway line
Kalampaka-Kastoria Railway line
Florina-Pogradec Railway line
Kalampaka-Kozani-Thessaloniki-Kavala-Toxotes Railway line
Ioannina-Rio Railway line
Thessaloniki-Chalkidiki Railway line
Thessaloniki-Giannitsa-Skydra Railway line
Chania-Rethymnon-Herakleion Railway line
Thessaloniki Tram
Heraklion Tram
Patras Tram
Larisa Tram
Ioannina Tram
Volos Tram
Airports
See also
Rapid transit in Greece
Greek shipping
References
External links
www.Greek-Motorway.Net
The Hellenic Merchant Maritime Sector: A Historical and Business Overview (Balkanalysis.com) | [
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12116 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellenic%20Armed%20Forces | Hellenic Armed Forces | The Hellenic Armed Forces () are the combined ground, naval and air forces of Greece. They consist of the Hellenic Army, the Hellenic Navy, and the Hellenic Air Force.
The civilian authority overseeing the Hellenic Armed Forces is the Ministry of National Defense.
History
General information
Greece is ranked 29 out of 139 countries reviewed for an annual global firepower ranking score, that uses a modified power index formulated after evaluating 50 individual, but subjective factors. In 2021 it holds an index rating of 0.4954, with 0.0000 considered a "perfect" score.
Conscription
Greece currently has universal compulsory military service for males from and over 18 years of age. Under Greek law, all men over 18 years of age must serve in the Armed Forces for a period of 9-12 months. Women can serve in the Greek military on a voluntary basis, but cannot be conscripted.
Budget
According to NATO sources in 2008, Greece spent 2.8% of GDP on its military, which translated to approximately €6.9 billion (US$9.3 billion). In 2008, Greece was the largest importer of conventional weapons in Europe and its military spending was the highest in the European Union relative to the country's GDP, reaching twice the European average.
Data for the 2017 fiscal year showed an estimated expense of €4.3 billion in constant 2010 prices, or €4.2 billion in current prices, equivalent to 2.38% of GDP (+0.01 change since 2016). For the 2018 fiscal year, the expenditure was estimated at €4.3 billion in constant 2010 prices or €4.1 billion in current prices, equivalent to 2.27% of GDP (-0.11% change since 2017).
Military personnel
Military personnel was estimated at approximately 106,000 for year 2017 and 105,000 for year 2018.
International operations
Greece is an EU and NATO member and currently participates primarily in peacekeeping operations. Such operations are ISAF in Afghanistan, EUFOR in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Chad, and KFOR in Kosovo. Greece also maintains a small force in Cyprus.
Component forces and their organization
Hellenic National Defense General Staff
The Hellenic National Defense General Staff has the operational command of the Joint Armed Forces Headquarters and the units that operate under them. It is also responsible for organising and implementing routine operations and exercises of the Joint Armed Forces, coordinating and implementing operations during the management of wartime and peacetime crises and overseeing operations of the Hellenic Armed Forces outside Greek national territory.
Hellenic Army
The basic components of the Hellenic Army are Arms and Corps. The former is responsible for combat missions and the latter for logistical support. It is organized in Commands, Formations, and Units with the main being brigade, division and corps. Its main mission is to guarantee the territorial integrity and independence of the country.
Hellenic Navy
The Hellenic Navy incorporates a modern fleet consisting of strike units, such as frigates, gunboats, submarines and fast attack guided missile vessels and multiple types of support vessels, in order to be able to conduct naval operations that protect Greek national interests and guarantee the integrity of Greek territorial waters, the mainland and the islands.
Hellenic Air Force
The Hellenic Air Force incorporates a modern aircraft fleet and congruent structure, combined with a comprehensive air defense system that consists of a widespread network of anti-aircraft weapons. The structure, which is overseen by the Air Force General Staff, includes the Tactical Air Force Command, the Air Force Support Command, the Air Force Training Command and a number of other independent defense units and services. Its main mission is to defend Greek airspace and to provide combat support to the Hellenic Army and the Hellenic Navy.
See also
Conscription in Greece
Hellenic army
Greek military ranks
Hellenic Republic / Ministry of National Defense
List of Greek military bases
Military history of Greece
Military history of Greece during World War II
Athens War Museum
War Museum of Thessaloniki
References
External links
Hellenic Ministry of Defense – official website
Hellenic National Defense General Staff – official website
Hellenic Army General Staff – official website
Hellenic Navy General Staff – official website
Hellenic Air Force General Staff – official website
Defense expenditures of NATO countries
Permanent Structured Cooperation | [
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12117 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign%20relations%20of%20Greece | Foreign relations of Greece | As one of the oldest Euro-Atlantic member states in the region of Southeast Europe, Greece enjoys a prominent geopolitical role as a middle power, due to its political and geographical proximity to Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Its main allies are the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, the other NATO countries, Cyprus and the rest of the European Union and Israel.
Greece also maintains strong diplomatic relations with Armenia, Albania, Bulgaria, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Serbia and Romania while at the same time focuses at improving further the good relations with the Arab World, Caucasus, China, India, South Korea and Japan. As member of both the EU and the Union for the Mediterranean, Greece is a key player in the eastern Mediterranean region and has encouraged the collaboration between neighbors, as well as promoting the Energy Triangle, for gas exports to Europe. Greece also has the second largest economy in the Balkans, where it is an important regional investor.
Prominent issues in Hellenic foreign policy include the claims in the Aegean Sea and Eastern Mediterranean by Turkey and the Turkish occupation of Cyprus.
Overview
Greece has diplomatic relations with almost all the countries in the world, as shown in the map below.
Representation through: embassy – Greek embassy in another country general consulate – no representation – Greece
Disputes
Following the resolution of the Macedonia naming dispute with North Macedonia due to the Prespa Agreement in 2018, the Ministry identifies two remaining issues of particular importance to the Greek state: Turkish challenges to Greek sovereignty rights in the Aegean Sea and corresponding airspace and the Cyprus dispute involving the Turkish occupation of Northern Cyprus.
Cyprus dispute
As the island of Cyprus was heading towards independence from the United Kingdom the Greek (82%) and Turkish (18%) communities became embroiled in bitter inter-communal fighting, partly sponsored by the two "motherlands". EOKA-B and the Turkish Resistance Organization (TMT) were responsible for many atrocities which resulted in cementing tensions and led to total isolation of the communities with Turkish Cypriots withdrawn into enclaves.
In 1974 the US-backed Greek junta – in power since 1967 – partly in a move to draw attention away from internal turmoil and partly unsatisfied with Makarios' policy in Cyprus, on 15 July attempted a coup to replace him with Nikos Sampson and declare union with Greece. Seven days later, Turkey launched an invasion of Cyprus allegedly to reinstate the constitution but which resulted in blooded conflict, partition of the island and mass ethnic cleansing. The overwhelming Turkish land, naval and air superiority against island's weak defenses led to the bringing of 37% of the land under Turkish control.
170,000 Greek Cypriots were evicted from their homes in the north with 50,000 Turks following the opposite path concluding the de facto division of Cyprus. In 1983 Turkish Cypriots proclaimed independence unilaterally with only Turkey recognizing them. As of today the north is under an embargo as a measure against the illegal partition of the island.
Ever since both countries along with the two communities of the island are engages into a vicious cycle of negotiations which led to little. In 2004 the Annan Plan for Cyprus was put to vote but whilst it was accepted by the north, it was rejected by the Greek-Cypriots as it meant in their eyes, endorsing a confederal state with a weak central government and considerable local autonomy. The Republic of Cyprus is a constitutional democracy which has reached great levels of prosperity, with a booming economy and good infrastructures, part of the United Nations, European Union and several others organizations by whom it is recognized as the sole legitimate government of the whole island.
Greece calls for the removal of Turkish troops from Cyprus and the restoration of a unified state. The Republic of Cyprus is receiving strong support from Greece in international forums with the latter maintaining a military contingent on the island, and Greek officers filling key positions in the Cypriot National Guard.
Aegean claims by Turkey
Other issues dividing Greece and Turkey involve the delimitation of the continental shelf in the Aegean Sea, territorial waters and airspace. In March 1987 a dispute concerning oil drilling rights, almost led to war between the countries with Greece advocating the dispute to be decided by the International Court of Justice. In early 1988, the Turkish and Greek Prime Ministers met at Davos, Switzerland, and later in Brussels. They agreed on various measures to reduce bilateral tensions and to encourage cooperation.
Tensions over the Aegean Sea surfaced again in November 1994, when Greece claimed under the Law of the Sea Treaty, which Turkey has not signed, that it reserved the right to declare an expansion of its continental shelf from around its Aegean islands. Turkey which has itself expanded its continental shelf in the Black Sea shore, stated that it would consider any such action a cause for war. New technical-level bilateral discussions began in 1994 but soon fizzled-out.
In January 1996, Greece and Turkey came close to an armed confrontation over the question of which country had sovereignty over an islet in the Aegean. In July 1997, on the sidelines of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit in Madrid, Greek and Turkish leaders reached agreement on six principles to govern their bilateral relations. Within a few months, however, the two countries were again at odds over Aegean airspace and sovereignty issues. Tensions remained high for months, although various confidence-building measures were discussed to reduce the risk of military accidents or conflict in the Aegean, under the auspices of the NATO Secretary General.
Turkey and the EU
Greece has come out in support of Turkey's bid for European Union membership, and supports its full integration to the union when conditions for its acceptance are met. On 6 May 2004, Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan became the first Turkish leader to visit Greece in fifty years. On 24 January 2008, Greece's premier Costas Karamanlis visited Turkey a full 48 years after the last Greek premier and uncle of his Constantine Karamanlis had visited the neighboring country.
Turkish government arson admission
On Monday 23 December 2011, in an interview on Turkish newspaper BirGün discussing secret budgets, former Turkish Prime Minister Mesut Yılmaz admitted that Turkish secret agents intentionally started forest fires in Greece between 1995 and 1997 during the Prime Ministership of Tansu Çiller as part of state-sponsored sabotage, resulting in huge damage caused by major forest fires on the islands of the eastern Aegean and in Macedonia. Mesut Yılmaz's admission sparked political outrage in Greece on Monday, causing Greece's Foreign Ministry spokesman Grigoris Delavekouras to say that the claims were "serious and must be investigated," adding that Athens was awaiting a briefing from Ankara. Conservative New Democracy's shadow foreign minister Panos Panayiotopoulos said the revelations "cast heavy shadows over Greek-Turkish relations" and called on Turkey recompense Greece for losses incurred.
Following an official complaint from Greece on 24 December seeking clarification over comments by former Prime Minister Mesut Yılmaz relating to forest fires in Greece in the mid-1990s, the Greek and Turkish foreign ministers, Stavros Dimas and Ahmet Davutoğlu, spoke on Wednesday 28 December. Dimas stressed how important it was that Ankara investigate the claims that in the past Turkey's intelligence services paid arsonists to set fire to forests in Greece. In addition to Greek Foreign Ministry meetings with Turkish officials, Greece's Supreme Court prosecutor Yiannis Tentes launched an emergency inquiry on 27 December, ordering the investigations into the mid-1990s wildfires blamed on arson to be reopened with regard to the initial claims reportedly made by Yılmaz.
Former head of Greek intelligence service Leonidas Vasilikopoulos said they had received information from their agents in Turkey that Turkish agents or others were involved in the forest fires on Greek islands. After making the comments in Turkish daily newspaper BirGün, Yilmaz said that his words had been distorted and that he was referring to Greek agents causing fires in Turkey. However, on Thursday 29, Turkish daily Milliyet published an article referring to a secret report that seemed to support claims made in the interview by Mesut Yılmaz that secret agents had caused forest fires in Greece in the 1990s. According to Milliyet, an associate of Yılmaz's, Kutlu Savas, compiled a 12-page report that detailed the actions of Turkish agents in Greece. It described how the National Intelligence Organization of Turkey (MIT) had formed two teams: one which carried out bombings at tourist sites on Crete and other parts of Greece and another which was responsible for starting the wildfires. An attack on an army camp in Lamia, central Greece, is also mentioned.
Bilateral relations
Africa
Greece enjoys close historic relations with many members of the African Union, such as South Africa, Sudan, and Ethiopia.
The Americas
Asia
Greece has a special interest in Middle East and North Africa because of its geographic position and its economic and historic ties to the area. The country cooperated with allied forces during the 1990–1991 Gulf War. Since 1994, Greece has signed defense cooperation agreements with Israel and Egypt and in recent years, Greek leaders have made numerous trips to the region in order to strengthen bilateral ties and encourage the Middle East Peace Process. In July 1997, December 1997, and July 1998 Greece hosted meetings of Israeli and Palestinian politicians to contribute to the peace process. Greece also maintains diplomatic relations with the General Palestinian Delegation while enjoying cordial relations with Syria.
Europe
Australia and Oceania
Terms
North Macedonia
Greece rejected the use of the term Macedonia or "Republic of Macedonia" to refer to its northern neighbour after its independence from the former Yugoslavia in 1991. The Greek government opposed the use of the name without any qualification such as 'Republic of Northern Macedonia' to the post-1991 constitutional name of its northern neighbour, citing historical and territorial concerns resulting from the ambiguity between the terms Republic of Macedonia, the Greek region of Macedonia and the ancient kingdom of Macedon, which falls within Greek Macedonia.
Greece also objected to the use of the terms "Macedonian" to denote ethnic Macedonians and the Macedonian language, as these terms have a different meaning in Greece (inhabitants of the Greek region of Macedonia and the Macedonian dialect of Greek). The dispute has escalated to the highest level of international mediation, involving numerous attempts to achieve a resolution, notably by the United Nations.
The provisional reference the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) was used in relations involving states which do not recognise the constitutional name, Republic of Macedonia. Nevertheless, all the United Nations member-states have agreed to accept any final agreement resulting from negotiations between the two countries. The dispute has not prevented the two countries from enjoying close trade links and investment levels (especially from Greece), but it has generated a great deal of political and academic debate on both sides.
On 13 September 1995 the two countries signed the Interim Accord, whereby Greece recognized the Republic of Macedonia under its provisional reference. As of August 2011 negotiations aimed at resolving the dispute are ongoing. Under Greek pressure, the European Union and NATO agreed that in order for the Republic of Macedonia to receive an invitation to join these institutions the name dispute must be resolved first. This resulted in a case at the International Court of Justice against Greece for violation of the Interim Accord. The Court deemed Greece was wrong to block its neighbour's bid to join NATO. No penalties were imposed but the result made it politically more difficult for Greece to object to any of its neighbour's future applications to either NATO or the EU.
On 12 June 2018 the Prespes agreement was signed between the two countries which changed the constitutional name of "Macedonia" to Republic of North Macedonia. Opposition arose in both countries but in the end the agreement was mutually ratified. The Prespes agreement went into force 12 February 2019. Greece officially endorsed North Macedonia's accession to NATO on 15 February 2019, being the first country in the defense alliance to do so.
Northern Epirus
Northern Epirus is the name used generally by Greeks to refer to the southern part of Albania, home to a Greek minority which after 1989 keeps reducing due to immigration to Greece. The Greek minority was subject to oppression and harassment during Enver Hoxha's communist rule and along with the rest of Albanians was hit hardly by the isolation that the regime imposed and from the economic hardship that followed the fall of communism as well. The treatment of the minority by the Albanian government is strongly linked with the status of Greco-Albanian relations.
The Greek minority is organized under the Unity for Human Rights Party which is the continuation of the former banned party called "Omonoia" (Unity in Greek) and has since 1997 joined the Socialist coalition. At the 1996 Albanian election the Greek minority party received 4.1% of the vote and two seats in parliament. The party leader is Vangjel Dule, while party member Vasilis Bolanos is former mayor of the town of Himara. The party is represented in the ELDR group in the Council of Europe. Strong Greek presence exists in Gjirokastër, Korçë, Sarandë, Himara and the nearby areas. The former CIA director George J. Tenet, Pyrros Dimas, Sotiris Ninis and former Greek president Kostis Stefanopoulos have ancestral links to the Greek minority.
Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople
The Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, protected under the treaty of Lausanne is a point of controversy between Greece and Turkey as the latter refuses to recognize the Ecumenical character of the Patriarchate thus requiring the Patriarch himself to be a Turkish citizen. Moreover, the biggest part of the Patriarchate's property – known as Vakoufia – had been confiscated by Turkish authorities and the Theological school of Halki, the traditional school out of which the Eastern Orthodox Church draws its clergy, has been closed since 1971. To no avail numerous Greek, European Union and USA officials have criticized Turkey's attitude and even president Bill Clinton during his visit in Greece asked for the theological school to open. During Greek prime-minister's Kostas Karamanlis historic visit to Turkey in 2007, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan promised to reconsider his country's stance on the matter.
Black Sea
The Black Sea is a region heavily colonized by Greeks throughout history. It used to have a significant presence of Greeks up until the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923. Nowadays there remains Greek presence on the shores of Black Sea mainly in Mariupol (Ukraine), Crimea, Russia and Georgia despite emigration to Greece during and after the dissolution of Soviet Union. Today Greeks in the region are estimated to be around 215,000 according to official Greek diaspora figures. Greece is a founding member of the Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation.
International organization participation
Greece is a major participant in most large-scale international bodies, with the geographic significance of the region proving advantageous for diplomatic, trade and political crossroads.
In 1967, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands brought the Greek Case against the Greek junta regime for human rights violations. As a result, Greece left the Council of Europe in 1969, returning in 1976. It is the only country to have left the Council of Europe.
BIS, BSEC, CCC, CE, EAPC, EBRD, ECA (associate), ECE, ECLAC, EIB, EMU, EU, FAO, IAEA, IBRD, ICAO, IDA, IEA, IFAD, IFC, ILO, IMF, International Maritime Organization, Interpol, IOC, IOM, ISO, NATO, OECD, OSCE, UN, UN Security Council, UNCTAD, UNESCO, UNHCR, WEU, WHO, WIPO, WMO.
Greece was elected by the United Nations General Assembly to the United Nations Security Council, on 15 October 2004, as a non-permanent member for 2005 and 2006.
See also
List of diplomatic missions in Greece
List of diplomatic missions of Greece
Foreign relations of the European Union
References
Further reading
External links
Greece's foreign policy , via the Greek Ministry of Foreign affairs
Ethnic groups in Albania, via CIA – The World Factbook
Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs | [
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12118 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland | Greenland | Greenland (, ; , ) is an island nation located between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Greenland is the world's largest island, and one of the three constituent countries that form the Kingdom of Denmark, along with Denmark and the Faroe Islands; the citizens of these countries are all Danish nationals. Greenland is divided into five municipalities: Sermersooq, Kujalleq, Qeqqata, Qeqertalik and Avannaata. The northeast of the island composes the unincorporated Northeast Greenland National Park. Thule Air Base is also unincorporated, an enclave within Avannaata municipality administered by the United States Space Force. Greenland's capital is Nuuk.
Though physiographically a part of the continent of North America, Greenland has been politically and culturally associated with Europe (specifically Norway and Denmark, the colonial powers) for more than a millennium, beginning in 986. The majority of its residents are Inuit, whose ancestors migrated from Alaska through Northern Canada, gradually settling across the island by the 13th century.
Today, the population is concentrated mainly on the southwest coast, while the rest of the island is sparsely populated. Three-quarters of Greenland is covered by the only permanent ice sheet outside of Antarctica. With a population of 56,081 (2020), it is the least densely populated region in the world. About a third of the population lives in Nuuk, the capital and largest city; the second-largest city in terms of population is Sisimiut, north of Nuuk. The Arctic Umiaq Line ferry acts as a lifeline for western Greenland, connecting the various cities and settlements.
Greenland has been inhabited at intervals over at least the last 4,500 years by Arctic peoples whose forebears migrated there from what is now Canada. Norsemen settled the uninhabited southern part of Greenland beginning in the 10th century, having previously settled Iceland. These Norsemen later set sail from Greenland and Iceland, with Leif Erikson becoming the first known European to reach North America nearly 500 years before Columbus reached the Caribbean islands. Inuit peoples arrived in the 13th century. Though under continuous influence of Norway and Norwegians, Greenland was not formally under the Norwegian crown until 1261. The Norse colonies disappeared in the late 15th century after Norway was hit by the Black Death and entered a severe decline. Soon after their demise, beginning in 1499, the Portuguese briefly explored and claimed the island, naming it Terra do Lavrador (later applied to Labrador in Canada).
In the early 17th century, Danish explorers reached Greenland again. To strengthen trading and power, Denmark–Norway affirmed sovereignty over the island. Because of Norway's weak status, it lost sovereignty over Greenland in 1814 when the union was dissolved. Greenland became Danish in 1814 and was fully integrated in the Danish state in 1953 under the Constitution of Denmark. With the Constitution of 1953, the people in Greenland became citizens of Denmark. From 1961 Greenland joined the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), which Denmark joined as a founding member of the EFTA in 1960, but its membership ceased with effect from 1973 when Denmark joined the European Communities. In 1973, Greenland joined the European Economic Community (EEC) with Denmark. However, in a referendum in 1982, a majority of the population voted for Greenland to withdraw from the EEC. This was effected in 1985, changing Greenland to an OCT (Overseas Countries and Territories) associated with the EEC, now the European Union (EU). The associated relationship with the EU also means that all Greenlandic nationals (OCT-nationals) are EU citizens.
Greenland contains the world's largest and northernmost national park, Northeast Greenland National Park (Kalaallit Nunaanni nuna eqqissisimatitaq). Established in 1974 and expanded to its present size in 1988, it protects of the interior and northeastern coast of Greenland and is bigger than all but twenty-nine countries in the world.
In 1979, Denmark granted home rule to Greenland; in 2008, Greenlanders voted in favour of the Self-Government Act, which transferred more power from the Danish government to the local Greenlandic government. Under the new structure, Greenland has gradually assumed responsibility for policing, the judicial system, company law, accounting, auditing, mineral resource activities, aviation, law of legal capacity, family law and succession law, immigration and border controls, the working environment, and financial regulation and supervision. The Danish government still retains control of citizenship, monetary policy and foreign affairs including defence. It also provided an initial annual subsidy of DKK 3.4 billion, that will diminish gradually. Greenland expects to grow its economy based on increased income from the extraction of natural resources. The capital, Nuuk, held the 2016 Arctic Winter Games. At 70%, Greenland has one of the highest shares of renewable energy in the world, mostly coming from hydropower.
Etymology
The early Norse settlers named the island as Greenland. In the Icelandic sagas, the Norwegian-born Icelander Erik the Red was said to be exiled from Iceland for manslaughter. Along with his extended family and his thralls (i.e. slaves or serfs), he set out in ships to explore an icy land known to lie to the northwest. After finding a habitable area and settling there, he named it (translated as "Greenland"), supposedly in the hope that the pleasant name would attract settlers. The Saga of Erik the Red states: "In the summer, Erik left to settle in the country he had found, which he called Greenland, as he said people would be attracted there if it had a favorable name."
The name of the country in the indigenous Greenlandic language is ("land of the Kalaallit"). The Kalaallit are the indigenous Greenlandic Inuit people who inhabit the country's western region.
The military of the United States used as a code name for Greenland in World War II, where they kept several bases named as Bluie (East or West) (sequential numeral).
History
Early Paleo-Inuit cultures
In prehistoric times, Greenland was home to several successive Paleo-Inuit cultures known today primarily through archaeological finds. The earliest entry of the Paleo-Inuit into Greenland is thought to have occurred about 2500 BC. From around 2500 BC to 800 BC, southern and western Greenland were inhabited by the Saqqaq culture. Most finds of Saqqaq-period archaeological remains have been around Disko Bay, including the site of Saqqaq, after which the culture is named.
From 2400 BC to 1300 BC, the Independence I culture existed in northern Greenland. It was a part of the Arctic small tool tradition. Towns, including Deltaterrasserne, started to appear. Around 800 BC, the Saqqaq culture disappeared and the Early Dorset culture emerged in western Greenland and the Independence II culture in northern Greenland. The Dorset culture was the first culture to extend throughout the Greenlandic coastal areas, both on the west and east coasts. It lasted until the total onset of the Thule culture in 1500 AD. The Dorset culture population lived primarily from hunting of whales and caribou.
Norse settlement
From 986, Greenland's west coast was settled by Icelanders and Norwegians, through a contingent of 14 boats led by Erik the Red. They formed three settlements – known as the Eastern Settlement, the Western Settlement and the Middle Settlement – on fjords near the southwesternmost tip of the island. They shared the island with the late Dorset culture inhabitants who occupied the northern and western parts, and later with the Thule culture that entered from the north. Norse Greenlanders submitted to Norwegian rule in 1261 under the Kingdom of Norway. Later the Kingdom of Norway entered into a personal union with Denmark in 1380 and from 1397 was a part of the Kalmar Union.
The Norse settlements, such as Brattahlíð, thrived for centuries but disappeared sometime in the 15th century, perhaps at the onset of the Little Ice Age. Apart from some runic inscriptions, the only contemporary records or historiography that survives from the Norse settlements is of their contact with Iceland or Norway. Medieval Norwegian sagas and historical works mention Greenland's economy as well as the bishops of Gardar and the collection of tithes. A chapter in the Konungs skuggsjá (The King's Mirror) describes Norse Greenland's exports and imports as well as grain cultivation.
Icelandic saga accounts of life in Greenland were composed in the 13th century and later, and do not constitute primary sources for the history of early Norse Greenland. Those accounts are closer to primary for more contemporaneous accounts of late Norse Greenland. Modern understanding therefore mostly depends on the physical data from archeological sites. Interpretation of ice core and clam shell data suggests that between 800 and 1300 AD, the regions around the fjords of southern Greenland experienced a relatively mild climate several degrees Celsius higher than usual in the North Atlantic, with trees and herbaceous plants growing, and livestock being farmed. Barley was grown as a crop up to the 70th parallel. The ice cores indicate Greenland has had dramatic temperature shifts many times over the past 100,000 years. Similarly the Icelandic Book of Settlements records famines during the winters, in which "the old and helpless were killed and thrown over cliffs".
These Icelandic settlements vanished during the 14th and early 15th centuries. The demise of the Western Settlement coincides with a decrease in summer and winter temperatures. A study of North Atlantic seasonal temperature variability during the Little Ice Age showed a significant decrease in maximum summer temperatures beginning in the late 13th century to early 14th century – as much as lower than modern summer temperatures. The study also found that the lowest winter temperatures of the last 2,000 years occurred in the late 14th century and early 15th century. The Eastern Settlement was likely abandoned in the early to mid-15th century, during this cold period.
Theories drawn from archeological excavations at Herjolfsnes in the 1920s suggest that the condition of human bones from this period indicates that the Norse population was malnourished, possibly because of soil erosion resulting from the Norsemen's destruction of natural vegetation in the course of farming, turf-cutting, and wood-cutting. Malnutrition may also have resulted from widespread deaths from pandemic plague; the decline in temperatures during the Little Ice Age; and armed conflicts with the Skrælings (Norse word for Inuit, meaning "wretches"). Recent archeological studies somewhat challenge the general assumption that the Norse colonization had a dramatic negative environmental effect on the vegetation. Data support traces of a possible Norse soil amendment strategy. More recent evidence suggests that the Norse, who never numbered more than about 2,500, gradually abandoned the Greenland settlements over the 15th century as walrus ivory, the most valuable export from Greenland, decreased in price because of competition with other sources of higher-quality ivory, and that there was actually little evidence of starvation or difficulties.
Other explanations of the disappearance of the Norse settlements have been proposed:
Lack of support from the homeland.
Ship-borne marauders (such as Basque, English, or German pirates) rather than Skrælings, could have plundered and displaced the Greenlanders.
They were "the victims of hidebound thinking and of a hierarchical society dominated by the Church and the biggest land owners. In their reluctance to see themselves as anything but Europeans, the Greenlanders failed to adopt the kind of apparel that the Inuit employed as protection against the cold and damp or to borrow any of the Inuit hunting gear."
That portion of the Greenlander population willing to adopt Inuit ways and means intermarried with and assimilated into the Inuit community. Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Unsolved Mysteries of the Arctic, 1938, chapter 1. Much of the Greenland population today is mixed Inuit and European ancestry. It was impossible in 1938 when Stefansson wrote his book to distinguish between intermarriage before the European loss of contact and after the contact was restored.
"Norse society's structure created a conflict between the short-term interests of those in power, and the long-term interests of the society as a whole."
Thule culture (1300–present)
The Thule people are the ancestors of the current Greenlandic population. No genes from the Paleo-Inuit have been found in the present population of Greenland. The Thule culture migrated eastward from what is now known as Alaska around 1000 AD, reaching Greenland around 1300. The Thule culture was the first to introduce to Greenland such technological innovations as dog sleds and toggling harpoons.
There is an account of contact and conflict with the Norse population, as told by the Inuit. It is republished in The Norse Atlantic Sagas, by Gwyn Jones. Jones reports that there is also an account of perhaps the same incident, of more doubtful provenance, told by the Norse side.
1500–1814
In 1500, King Manuel I of Portugal sent Gaspar Corte-Real to Greenland in search of a Northwest Passage to Asia which, according to the Treaty of Tordesillas, was part of Portugal's sphere of influence. In 1501, Corte-Real returned with his brother, Miguel Corte-Real. Finding the sea frozen, they headed south and arrived in Labrador and Newfoundland. Upon the brothers' return to Portugal, the cartographic information supplied by Corte-Real was incorporated into a new map of the world which was presented to Ercole I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, by Alberto Cantino in 1502. The Cantino planisphere, made in Lisbon, accurately depicts the southern coastline of Greenland.
In 1605–1607, King Christian IV of Denmark sent a series of expeditions to Greenland and Arctic waterways to locate the lost eastern Norse settlement and assert Danish sovereignty over Greenland. The expeditions were mostly unsuccessful, partly due to leaders who lacked experience with the difficult Arctic ice and weather conditions, and partly because the expedition leaders were given instructions to search for the Eastern Settlement on the east coast of Greenland just north of Cape Farewell, which is almost inaccessible due to southward drifting ice. The pilot on all three trips was English explorer James Hall.
After the Norse settlements died off, Greenland came under the de facto control of various Inuit groups, but the Danish government never forgot or relinquished the claims to Greenland that it had inherited from the Norse. When it re-established contact with Greenland in the early 17th century, Denmark asserted its sovereignty over the island. In 1721, a joint mercantile and clerical expedition led by Danish-Norwegian missionary Hans Egede was sent to Greenland, not knowing whether a Norse civilization remained there. This expedition is part of the Dano-Norwegian colonization of the Americas. After 15 years in Greenland, Hans Egede left his son Paul Egede in charge of the mission there and returned to Denmark, where he established a Greenland Seminary. This new colony was centred at Godthåb ("Good Hope") on the southwest coast. Gradually, Greenland was opened up to Danish merchants, but closed to those from other countries.
Treaty of Kiel to World War II
When the union between the crowns of Denmark and Norway was dissolved in 1814, the Treaty of Kiel severed Norway's former colonies and left them under the control of the Danish monarch. Norway occupied then-uninhabited eastern Greenland as Erik the Red's Land in July 1931, claiming that it constituted terra nullius. Norway and Denmark agreed to submit the matter in 1933 to the Permanent Court of International Justice, which decided against Norway.
Greenland's connection to Denmark was severed on 9 April 1940, early in World War II, after Denmark was occupied by Nazi Germany. On 8 April 1941, the United States occupied Greenland to defend it against a possible invasion by Germany. The United States occupation of Greenland continued until 1945. Greenland was able to buy goods from the United States and Canada by selling cryolite from the mine at Ivittuut. The major air bases were Bluie West-1 at Narsarsuaq and Bluie West-8 at Søndre Strømfjord (Kangerlussuaq), both of which are still used as Greenland's major international airports. Bluie was the military code name for Greenland.
During this war, the system of government changed: Governor Eske Brun ruled the island under a law of 1925 that allowed governors to take control under extreme circumstances; Governor Aksel Svane was transferred to the United States to lead the commission to supply Greenland. The Danish Sirius Patrol guarded the northeastern shores of Greenland in 1942 using dogsleds. They detected several German weather stations and alerted American troops, who destroyed the facilities. After the collapse of the Third Reich, Albert Speer briefly considered escaping in a small aeroplane to hide out in Greenland, but changed his mind and decided to surrender to the United States Armed Forces.
Greenland had been a protected and very isolated society until 1940. The Danish government had maintained a strict monopoly of Greenlandic trade, allowing no more than small scale barter trading with British whalers. In wartime Greenland developed a sense of self-reliance through self-government and independent communication with the outside world. Despite this change, in 1946 a commission including the highest Greenlandic council, the Landsrådene, recommended patience and no radical reform of the system. Two years later, the first step towards a change of government was initiated when a grand commission was established. A final report (G-50) was presented in 1950, which recommended the introduction of a modern welfare state with Denmark's development as sponsor and model. In 1953, Greenland was made an equal part of the Danish Kingdom. Home rule was granted in 1979.
Home rule and self-rule
Following World War II, the United States developed a geopolitical interest in Greenland, and in 1946 the United States offered to buy the island from Denmark for $100,000,000. Denmark refused to sell it. Historically this repeated an interest by Secretary of State William H. Seward. In 1867 he worked with former senator Robert J. Walker to explore the possibility of buying Greenland and perhaps Iceland. Opposition in Congress ended this project. In the 21st century, the United States, according to WikiLeaks, remains interested in investing in the resource base of Greenland and in tapping hydrocarbons off the Greenlandic coast. In August 2019, the American president Donald Trump again proposed to buy the country, prompting premier Kim Kielsen to issue the statement, "Greenland is not for sale and cannot be sold, but Greenland is open for trade and cooperation with other countries – including the United States."
In 1950, Denmark agreed to allow the US to regain the use of Thule Air Base; it was greatly expanded between 1951 and 1953 as part of a unified NATO Cold War defence strategy. The local population of three nearby villages was moved more than 100 kilometres (62 mi) away in the winter. The United States tried to construct a subterranean network of secret nuclear missile launch sites in the Greenlandic ice cap, named Project Iceworm. According to documents declassified in 1996, this project was managed from Camp Century from 1960 to 1966 before abandonment as unworkable. The missiles were never fielded and necessary consent from the Danish Government to do so was never sought. The Danish government did not become aware of the programme's mission until 1997, when they discovered it while looking, in the declassified documents, for records related to the crash of a nuclear equipped B-52 bomber at Thule in 1968.
With the 1953 Danish constitution, Greenland's colonial status ended as the island was incorporated into the Danish realm as an amt (county). Danish citizenship was extended to Greenlanders. Danish policies toward Greenland consisted of a strategy of cultural assimilation – or de-Greenlandification. During this period, the Danish government promoted the exclusive use of the Danish language in official matters, and required Greenlanders to go to Denmark for their post-secondary education. Many Greenlandic children grew up in boarding schools in southern Denmark, and a number lost their cultural ties to Greenland. While the policies "succeeded" in the sense of shifting Greenlanders from being primarily subsistence hunters into being urbanized wage earners, the Greenlandic elite began to reassert a Greenlandic cultural identity. A movement developed in favour of independence, reaching its peak in the 1970s. As a consequence of political complications in relation to Denmark's entry into the European Common Market in 1972, Denmark began to seek a different status for Greenland, resulting in the Home Rule Act of 1979.
This gave Greenland limited autonomy with its own legislature taking control of some internal policies, while the Parliament of Denmark maintained full control of external policies, security, and natural resources. The law came into effect on 1 May 1979. The Queen of Denmark, Margrethe II, remains Greenland's head of state. In 1985, Greenland left the European Economic Community (EEC) upon achieving self-rule, as it did not agree with the EEC's commercial fishing regulations and an EEC ban on seal skin products. Greenland voters approved a referendum on greater autonomy on 25 November 2008. According to one study, the 2008 vote created what "can be seen as a system between home rule and full independence."
On 21 June 2009, Greenland gained self-rule with provisions for assuming responsibility for self-government of judicial affairs, policing, and natural resources. Also, Greenlanders were recognized as a separate people under international law. Denmark maintains control of foreign affairs and defence matters. Denmark upholds the annual block grant of 3.2 billion Danish kroner, but as Greenland begins to collect revenues of its natural resources, the grant will gradually be diminished. This is generally considered to be a step toward eventual full independence from Denmark. Greenlandic was declared the sole official language of Greenland at the historic ceremony.
Tourism
Tourism increased significantly between 2010 and 2019, with the number of visitors increasing from 460,000 per year to 2 million. Condé Nast Traveler describes that high level as "overtourism". One source estimated that in 2019 the revenue from this aspect of the economy was about 450 million kroner (US$67 million). Like many aspects of the economy, this slowed dramatically in 2020, and into 2021, due to restrictions required as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic; one source describes it as being the "biggest economic victim of the coronavirus". (The overall economy did not suffer too severely as of mid 2020, thanks to the fisheries "and a hefty subsidy from Copenhagen".) Greenland's goal for returning tourism is to develop it "right" and to "build a more sustainable tourism for the long run".
Geography and climate
Greenland is the world's largest non-continental island and the third largest area in North America after Canada and the United States. It is between latitudes 59° and 83°N, and longitudes 11° and 74°W. Greenland is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Greenland Sea to the east, the North Atlantic Ocean to the southeast, the Davis Strait to the southwest, Baffin Bay to the west, the Nares Strait and Lincoln Sea to the northwest. The nearest countries are Canada, to the west and southwest across Nares Strait and Baffin Bay; and Iceland, southeast of Greenland in the Atlantic Ocean. Greenland also contains the world's largest national park, and it is the largest dependent territory by area in the world, as well as the fourth largest country subdivision in the world, after Sakha Republic in Russia, Australia's state of Western Australia, and Russia's Krasnoyarsk Krai, and the largest in North America.
The lowest temperature ever recorded in the Northern Hemisphere was recorded in Greenland, near the topographic summit of the Greenland Ice Sheet, on 22 December 1991, when the temperature reached . In Nuuk, the average daily temperature varies over the seasons from The total area of Greenland is (including other offshore minor islands), of which the Greenland ice sheet covers (81%) and has a volume of approximately . The highest point on Greenland is Gunnbjørn Fjeld at of the Watkins Range (East Greenland mountain range). The majority of Greenland, however, is less than in elevation.
The weight of the ice sheet has depressed the central land area to form a basin lying more than below sea level, while elevations rise suddenly and steeply near the coast.
The ice flows generally to the coast from the centre of the island. A survey led by French scientist Paul-Emile Victor in 1951 concluded that, under the ice sheet, Greenland is composed of three large islands. This is disputed, but if it is so, they would be separated by narrow straits, reaching the sea at Ilulissat Icefjord, at Greenland's Grand Canyon and south of Nordostrundingen.
All towns and settlements of Greenland are situated along the ice-free coast, with the population being concentrated along the west coast. The northeastern part of Greenland is not part of any municipality, but it is the site of the world's largest national park, Northeast Greenland National Park.
At least four scientific expedition stations and camps had been established on the ice sheet in the ice-covered central part of Greenland (indicated as pale blue in the adjacent map): Eismitte, North Ice, North GRIP Camp and The Raven Skiway. There is a year-round station Summit Camp on the ice sheet, established in 1989. The radio station Jørgen Brønlund Fjord was, until 1950, the northernmost permanent outpost in the world.
The extreme north of Greenland, Peary Land, is not covered by an ice sheet, because the air there is too dry to produce snow, which is essential in the production and maintenance of an ice sheet. If the Greenland ice sheet were to melt away completely, the world's sea level would rise by more than .
In 2003, a small island, in length and width, was discovered by arctic explorer Dennis Schmitt and his team at the coordinates of 83-42. Whether this island is permanent is not yet confirmed. If it is, it is the northernmost permanent known land on Earth.
In 2007, the existence of a new island was announced. Named "Uunartoq Qeqertaq" (English: Warming Island), this island has always been present off the coast of Greenland, but was covered by a glacier. This glacier was discovered in 2002 to be shrinking rapidly, and by 2007 had completely melted away, leaving the exposed island. The island was named Place of the Year by the Oxford Atlas of the World in 2007. Ben Keene, the atlas's editor, commented: "In the last two or three decades, global warming has reduced the size of glaciers throughout the Arctic and earlier this year, news sources confirmed what climate scientists already knew: water, not rock, lay beneath this ice bridge on the east coast of Greenland. More islets are likely to appear as the sheet of frozen water covering the world's largest island continues to melt". Some controversy surrounds the history of the island, specifically over whether the island might have been revealed during a brief warm period in Greenland during the mid-20th century.
Climate change
Between 1989 and 1993, US and European climate researchers drilled into the summit of Greenland's ice sheet, obtaining a pair of long ice cores. Analysis of the layering and chemical composition of the cores has provided a revolutionary new record of climate change in the Northern Hemisphere going back about 100,000 years and illustrated that the world's weather and temperature have often shifted rapidly from one seemingly stable state to another, with worldwide consequences. The glaciers of Greenland are also contributing to a rise in the global sea level faster than was previously believed. Between 1991 and 2004, monitoring of the weather at one location (Swiss Camp) showed that the average winter temperature had risen almost . Other research has shown that higher snowfalls from the North Atlantic oscillation caused the interior of the ice cap to thicken by an average of each year between 1994 and 2005.
In July 2021, Greenland banned all new oil and gas exploration in its territory, with government officials stating that the environmental "price of oil extraction is too high."
In August 2021, rain fell on the summit of Greenland's ice cap for the first time in recorded history, which scientists attributed to climate change.
Geology
The island was part of the very ancient Precambrian continent of Laurentia, the eastern core of which forms the Greenland Shield, while the less exposed coastal strips become a plateau. On these ice-free coastal strips are sediments formed in the Precambrian, overprinted by metamorphism and now formed by glaciers, which continue into the Cenozoic and Mesozoic in parts of the island.
In the east and west of Greenland there are remnants of flood basalts. Notable rock provinces (metamorphic igneous rocks, ultramafics and anorthosites) are found on the southwest coast at Qeqertarsuatsiaat. East of Nuuk, the banded iron ore region of Isukasia, over three billion years old, contains the world's oldest rocks, such as greenlandite (a rock composed predominantly of hornblende and hyperthene), formed 3.8 billion years ago, and nuummite. In southern Greenland, the Illimaussaq alkaline complex consists of pegmatites such as nepheline, syenites (especially kakortokite or naujaite) and sodalite (sodalite-foya). In Ivittuut, where cryolite was formerly mined, there are fluoride-bearing pegmatites. To the north of Igaliku, there are the Gardar alkaline pegmatitic intrusions of augite syenite, gabbro, etc.
To the west and southwest are Palaeozoic carbonatite complexes at Kangerlussuaq (Gardiner complex) and Safartoq, and basic and ultrabasic igneous rocks at Uiffaq on Disko Island, where there are masses of heavy native iron up to in the basalts.
Biodiversity
Greenland is home to two ecoregions: Kalaallit Nunaat high arctic tundra and Kalaallit Nunaat low arctic tundra. There are approximately 700 known species of insects in Greenland, which is low compared with other countries (over one million species have been described worldwide). The sea is rich in fish and invertebrates, especially in the milder West Greenland Current; a large part of the Greenland fauna is associated with marine-based food chains, including large colonies of seabirds. The few native land mammals in Greenland include the polar bear, reindeer (introduced by Europeans), arctic fox, arctic hare, musk ox, collared lemming, ermine, and arctic wolf. The last four are found naturally only in East Greenland, having immigrated from Ellesmere Island. There are dozens of species of seals and whales along the coast. Land fauna consists predominantly of animals which have spread from North America or, in the case of many birds and insects, from Europe. There are no native or free-living reptiles or amphibians on the island.
Phytogeographically, Greenland belongs to the Arctic province of the Circumboreal Region within the Boreal Kingdom. The island is sparsely populated in vegetation; plant life consists mainly of grassland and small shrubs, which are regularly grazed by livestock. The most common tree native to Greenland is the European white birch (Betula pubescens) along with gray-leaf willow (Salix glauca), rowan (Sorbus aucuparia), common juniper (Juniperus communis) and other smaller trees, mainly willows.
Greenland's flora consists of about 500 species of "higher" plants, i.e. flowering plants, ferns, horsetails and lycopodiophyta. Of the other groups, the lichens are the most diverse, with about 950 species; there are 600–700 species of fungi; mosses and bryophytes are also found. Most of Greenland's higher plants have circumpolar or circumboreal distributions; only a dozen species of saxifrage and hawkweed are endemic. A few plant species were introduced by the Norsemen, such as cow vetch.
The terrestrial vertebrates of Greenland include the Greenland dog, which was introduced by the Inuit, as well as European-introduced species such as Greenlandic sheep, goats, cattle, reindeer, horse, chicken and sheepdog, all descendants of animals imported by Europeans. Marine mammals include the hooded seal (Cystophora cristata) as well as the grey seal (Halichoerus grypus). Whales frequently pass very close to Greenland's shores in the late summer and early autumn. Whale species include the beluga whale, blue whale, Greenland whale, fin whale, humpback whale, minke whale, narwhal, pilot whale, sperm whale.
As of 2009, 269 species of fish from over 80 different families are known from the waters surrounding Greenland. Almost all are marine species with only a few in freshwater, notably Atlantic salmon and charr. The fishing industry is the primary industry of Greenland's economy, accounting for the majority of the country's total exports.
Birds, particularly seabirds, are an important part of Greenland's animal life; they consist of both Palearctic and Nearctic species, breeding populations of auks, puffins, skuas, and kittiwakes are found on steep mountainsides. Greenland's ducks and geese include common eider, long-tailed duck, king eider, white-fronted goose, pink-footed goose and barnacle goose. Breeding migratory birds include the snow bunting, lapland bunting, ringed plover, red-throated loon and red-necked phalarope. Non-migratory land birds include the arctic redpoll, ptarmigan, short-eared owl, snowy owl, gyrfalcon and white-tailed eagle.
Politics
The Greenlandic government holds executive power in local government affairs. The head of the government is called Naalakkersuisut Siulittaasuat ("Premier") and serves as head of Greenlandic Government. Any other member of the cabinet is called a Naalakkersuisoq ("Minister"). The Greenlandic parliament – the Inatsisartut ("Legislators"). The parliament currently has 31 members.
In contemporary times, elections are held at municipal, national (Inatsisartut), and kingdom (Folketing) levels.
Greenland is a self-governing entity within the constitutional monarchy of the Kingdom of Denmark, in which Queen Margrethe II is the head of state. The monarch officially retains executive power and presides over the Council of State (privy council). However, following the introduction of a parliamentary system of government, the duties of the monarch have since become strictly representative and ceremonial, such as the formal appointment and dismissal of the prime minister and other ministers in the executive government. The monarch is not answerable for his or her actions, and the monarch's person is sacrosanct.
Political system
The party system is dominated by the social-democratic Forward Party, and the democratic socialist Inuit Community Party, both of which broadly argue for greater independence from Denmark. While the 2009 election saw the unionist Democrat Party (two MPs) decline greatly, the 2013 election consolidated the power of the two main parties at the expense of the smaller groups, and saw the eco-socialist Inuit Party elected to the Parliament for the first time. The dominance of the Forward and Inuit Community parties began to wane after the snap 2014 and 2018 elections.
The non-binding 2008 referendum on self-governance favouring increased self-governance and autonomy was passed winning 76.22% of the vote.
In 1985, Greenland left the European Economic Community (EEC), unlike Denmark, which remains a member. The EEC later became the European Union (EU, renamed and expanded in scope in 1992). Greenland retains some ties through its associated relationship with the EU. However, EU law largely does not apply to Greenland except in the area of trade. Greenland is designated as a member of the Overseas Countries and Territories (OCT) and is thus officially not a part of the European Union, though Greenland can and does receive support from the European Development Fund, Multiannual Financial Framework, European Investment Bank and EU Programmes.
Government
Greenland's head of state is Queen Margrethe II of Denmark. The Queen's government in Denmark appoints a high commissioner (Rigsombudsmand) to represent it on the island. The commissioner is Mikaela Engell.
The Greenland constituency elect two MP representatives to the Kingdom Parliament (Folketinget) in Denmark, out of a total of 179. The current representatives are Aki-Matilda Høegh-Dam of the Siumut Party and Aaja Chemnitz Larsen of the Inuit Community Party.
Greenland has national Parliament that consists of 31 representatives. The government is the Naalakkersuisut whose members are appointed by the premier. The head of government is the premier, usually the leader of the majority party in Parliament. The premier is Múte Bourup Egede of the Inuit Ataqatigiit party.
Military
Several American and Danish military bases are located in Greenland, including Thule Air Base, which is home to the United States Space Force's global network of sensors providing missile warning, space surveillance and space control to North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). Elements of the sensor systems are commanded and controlled variously by Space Delta's 2, 4, and 6.
In 1995, a political scandal in Denmark occurred after a report revealed the government had given tacit permission for nuclear weapons to be located in Greenland, in contravention of Denmark's 1957 nuclear-free zone policy. The United States built a secret nuclear powered base, called Camp Century, in the Greenland ice sheet. On 21 January 1968, a B-52G, with four nuclear bombs aboard as part of Operation Chrome Dome, crashed on the ice of the North Star Bay while attempting an emergency landing at Thule Air Base. The resulting fire caused extensive radioactive contamination. One of the H-bombs remains lost.
Administrative divisions
Formerly consisting of three counties comprising a total of 18 municipalities, Greenland abolished these in 2009 and has since been divided into large territories known as "municipalities" (, ): Sermersooq ("Much Ice") around the capital Nuuk and also including all East Coast communities; Kujalleq ("South") around Cape Farewell; Qeqqata ("Centre") north of the capital along the Davis Strait; Qeqertalik ("The one with islands") surrounding Disko Bay; and Avannaata ("Northern") in the northwest; the latter two having come into being as a result of the Qaasuitsup municipality, one of the original four, being partitioned in 2018. The northeast of the island composes the unincorporated Northeast Greenland National Park. Thule Air Base is also unincorporated, an enclave within Avannaata municipality administered by the United States Air Force. During its construction, there were as many as 12,000 American residents but in recent years the number has been below 1,000.
Economy
The Greenlandic economy is highly dependent on fishing. Fishing accounts for more than 90% of Greenland's exports. The shrimp and fish industry is by far the largest income earner.
Greenland is abundant in minerals. Mining of ruby deposits began in 2007. Other mineral prospects are improving as prices are increasing. These include iron, uranium, aluminium, nickel, platinum, tungsten, titanium, and copper. Despite resumption of several hydrocarbon and mineral exploration activities, it will take several years before hydrocarbon production can materialize. The state oil company Nunaoil was created to help develop the hydrocarbon industry in Greenland. The state company Nunamineral has been launched on the Copenhagen Stock Exchange to raise more capital to increase the production of gold, started in 2007.
Electricity has traditionally been generated by oil or diesel power plants, even if there is a large surplus of potential hydropower. There is a programme to build hydro power plants. The first, and still the largest, is Buksefjord hydroelectric power plant.
There are also plans to build a large aluminium smelter, using hydropower to create an exportable product. It is expected that much of the labour needed will be imported.
The European Union has urged Greenland to restrict People's Republic of China development of rare-earth projects, as China accounts for 95% of the world's current supply. In early 2013, the Greenland government said that it had no plans to impose such restrictions.
The public sector, including publicly owned enterprises and the municipalities, plays a dominant role in Greenland's economy. About half the government revenues come from grants from the Danish government, an important supplement to the gross domestic product (GDP). Gross domestic product per capita is equivalent to that of the average economies of Europe.
Greenland suffered an economic contraction in the early 1990s. But, since 1993, the economy has improved. The Greenland Home Rule Government (GHRG) has pursued a tight fiscal policy since the late 1980s, which has helped create surpluses in the public budget and low inflation. Since 1990, Greenland has registered a foreign-trade deficit following the closure of the last remaining lead and zinc mine that year. In 2017, new sources of ruby in Greenland have been discovered, promising to bring new industry and a new export from the country. (See Gemstone industry in Greenland).
Transport
There is air transport both within Greenland and between the island and other nations. There is also scheduled boat traffic, but the long distances lead to long travel times and low frequency. There are virtually no roads between cities because the coast has many fjords that would require ferry service to connect a road network. The only exception is a gravel road of length between Kangilinnguit and the now abandoned former cryolite mining town of Ivittuut. In addition, the lack of agriculture, forestry and similar countryside activities has meant that very few country roads have been built.
Kangerlussuaq Airport (SFJ) is the largest airport and the main aviation hub for international passenger transport. It serves international and domestic airline operated flight. SFJ is far from the vicinity of the larger metropolitan capital areas, to the capital Nuuk, and airline passenger services are available. Greenland has no passenger railways.
Nuuk Airport (GOH) is the second-largest airport located just from the centre of the capital. GOH serves general aviation traffic and has daily- or regular domestic flights within Greenland. GOH also serves international flights to Iceland, business and private airplanes.
Ilulissat Airport (JAV) is a domestic airport that also serves international flights to Iceland. There are a total of 13 registered civil airports and 47 helipads in Greenland; most of them are unpaved and located in rural areas. The second longest runway is at Narsarsuaq, a domestic airport with limited international service in south Greenland.
All civil aviation matters are handled by the Danish Transport Authority. Most airports including Nuuk Airport have short runways and can only be served by special fairly small aircraft on fairly short flights. Kangerlussuaq Airport around inland from the west coast is the major airport of Greenland and the hub for domestic flights. Intercontinental flights connect mainly to Copenhagen. Travel between international destinations (except Iceland) and any city in Greenland requires a plane change.
Icelandair operates flights from Reykjavík to a number of airports in Greenland, and the company promotes the service as a day-trip option from Iceland for tourists.
There are no direct flights to the United States or Canada, although there have been flights Kangerlussuaq – Baltimore, and Nuuk – Iqaluit, which were cancelled because of too few passengers and financial losses. An alternative between Greenland and the United States/Canada is Icelandair with a plane change in Iceland.
Sea passenger transport is served by several coastal ferries. Arctic Umiaq Line makes a single round trip per week, taking 80 hours each direction.
Cargo freight by sea is handled by the shipping company Royal Arctic Line from, to and across Greenland. It provides trade and transport opportunities between Greenland, Europe and North America.
Population
Demographics
Greenland has a population of 56,421 (2021). In terms of country of birth, the population is estimated to be of 89.7% Greenlandic (Inuit including European-Inuit multi-ethnic), 7.8% Danish, 1.1% Nordic and 1.4% other. The multi-ethnic population of European-Inuit represent people of Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, Dutch (whalers), German (Herrnhuters), Czech (Jednota bratrská) descent and others.
The Inuit are indigenous to the Arctic and have traditionally inhabited Greenland, as well as areas in Canada and in Alaska in the United States.
A 2015 wide genetic study of Greenlanders found modern-day Inuit in Greenland are direct descendants of the first Inuit pioneers of the Thule culture with ∼25% admixture of the European colonizers from the 16th century. Despite previous speculations, no evidence of Viking settlers predecessors has been found. The majority of the population is Lutheran. Nearly all Greenlanders live along the fjords in the south-west of the main island, which has a relatively mild climate. In 2021, 18,800 people reside in Nuuk, the capital city. Greenland's warmest climates such as the vegetated area around Narsarsuaq are sparsely populated, whereas the majority of the population lives north of 64°N in colder coastal climates.
Greenland is the only country in the Americas where natives make up a majority of the population.
Languages
Both Greenlandic (an Eskaleut language, effectively meaning West Greenlandic) and Danish have been used in public affairs since the establishment of home rule in 1979; the majority of the population can speak both. Greenlandic became the sole official language in June 2009. In practice, Danish is still widely used in the administration and in higher education, as well as remaining the first or only language for some Danish immigrants in Nuuk and other larger towns. Debate about the roles of Greenlandic and Danish in the country's future is ongoing. The orthography of Greenlandic was established in 1851 and revised in 1973. The country has a 100% literacy rate.
A majority of the population speaks West Greenlandic, most of them bi- or tri-lingually. It is spoken by about 50,000 people, making it the most populous of the Eskaleut language family, spoken by more people than all the other languages of the family combined.
Kalaallisut is the language of West Greenland, which has long been the most populous area of the island. This has led to its de facto status as the official "Greenlandic" language, although the northern language Inuktun is spoken by 1,000 or so people around Qaanaaq, and East Greenlandic (Tunumiisut) by around 3,000. Each of these varieties is nearly unintelligible to the speakers of the others. Inuktun is closer to the Inuit languages of Canada than it is to other Greenlandic, and some linguists consider Tunumiit to be a separate language as well. A UNESCO report has labelled the other varieties as endangered, and measures are now being considered to protect East Greenlandic dialect.
About 12% of the population speak Danish as a first or sole language. These are primarily Danish immigrants in Greenland, many of whom fill positions such as administrators, professionals, academics, or skilled tradesmen. While Greenlandic is dominant in all smaller settlements, a part of the population of Inuit or multi-ethnic ancestry, especially in towns, speaks Danish. Most of the Inuit population speaks Danish as a second language. In larger towns, especially Nuuk and in the higher social strata, this is a large group.
English is another important language for Greenland, taught in schools from the first school year.
Education
Education is organized in a similar way to Denmark. There is ten year mandatory primary school. There is also a secondary school, with either work education or preparatory for university education. There is one university, the University of Greenland () in Nuuk. Many Greenlanders attend universities in Denmark or elsewhere.
The public school system in Greenland is, as in Denmark, under the jurisdiction of the municipalities: they are therefore municipal schools. The legislature specifies the standards allowed for the content in schools, but the municipal governments decide how the schools under their responsibility are run. Education is free and compulsory for children aged seven to 16. The financial effort devoted to education is now very important (11.3% of GDP). Section 1 of the Government Ordinance on Public Schools (as amended on June 6, 1997) requires Greenlandic as the language of instruction.
Education is governed by Regulation No. 10 of 25 October 1990 on primary and lower secondary education. This regulation was amended by Regulation No. 8 of 13 May 1993 and Regulation No. 1 of 1 March 1994. Under Regulation No. 10 of 25 October 1990, linguistic integration in primary and lower secondary schools became compulsory for all students. The aim is to place Greenlandic-speaking and Danish-speaking pupils in the same classes, whereas previously they were placed in separate classes according to their mother tongue. At the same time, the government guarantees that Danish speakers can learn Greenlandic. In this way, the Greenlandic government wants to give the same linguistic, cultural and social education to all students, both those of Greenlandic and Danish origin. A study, which was carried out during a three-year trial period, concluded that this policy had achieved positive results. This bilingualism policy has been in force since 1994.About 100 schools have been established. Greenlandic and Danish are taught there. Normally, Greenlandic is taught from kindergarten to the end of secondary school, but Danish is compulsory from the first cycle of primary school as a second language. As in Denmark with Danish, the school system provides for "Greenlandic 1" and "Greenlandic 2" courses. Language tests allow students to move from one level to the other. Based on the teachers' evaluation of their students, a third level of courses has been added: "Greenlandic 3". Secondary education in Greenland is generally vocational and technical education. The system is governed by Regulation No. 16 of 28 October 1993 on Vocational and Technical Education, Scholarships and Career Guidance. Danish remains the main language of instruction. The capital, Nuuk, has a (bilingual) teacher training college and a (bilingual) university. At the end of their studies, all students must pass a test in the Greenlandic language.
Higher education is offered in Greenland: "university education" (regulation no. 3 of May 9, 1989); training of journalists, training of primary and lower secondary school teachers, training of social workers, training of social educators (regulation no. 1 of May 16, 1989); and training of nurses and nursing assistants (regulation no. 9 of May 13, 1990). Greenlandic students can continue their education in Denmark, if they wish and have the financial means to do so. For admission to Danish educational institutions, Greenlandic applicants are placed on an equal footing with Danish applicants. Scholarships are granted to Greenlandic students who are admitted to Danish educational institutions. To be eligible for these scholarships, the applicant must be a Danish citizen and have had permanent residence in Greenland for at least five years. The total period of residence outside Greenland may not exceed three years.
Religion
The nomadic Inuit people were traditionally shamanistic, with a well-developed mythology primarily concerned with appeasing a vengeful and fingerless sea goddess called Sedna who controlled the success of the seal and whale hunts.
The first Norse colonists worshipped the Norse gods, but Erik the Red's son Leif was converted to Christianity by King Olaf Trygvesson on a trip to Norway in 999 and sent missionaries back to Greenland. These swiftly established sixteen parishes, some monasteries, and a bishopric at Garðar.
Rediscovering these colonists and spreading ideas of the Protestant Reformation among them was one of the primary reasons for the Danish recolonization in the 18th century. Under the patronage of the Royal Mission College in Copenhagen, Norwegian and Danish Lutherans and German Moravian missionaries searched for the missing Norse settlements, but no Norse were found, and instead they began preaching to the Inuit. The principal figures in the Christianization of Greenland were Hans and Poul Egede and Matthias Stach. The New Testament was translated piecemeal from the time of the very first settlement on Kangeq Island, but the first translation of the whole Bible was not completed until 1900. An improved translation using the modern orthography was completed in 2000.
Today, the major religion is Protestant Christianity, represented mainly by the Church of Denmark, which is Lutheran in orientation. While there are no official census data on religion in Greenland, the Bishop of Greenland Sofie Petersen estimates that 85% of the Greenlandic population are members of her congregation. The Church of Denmark is the established church through the Constitution of Denmark.
The Roman Catholic minority is pastorally served by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Copenhagen. There are still Christian missionaries on the island, but mainly from charismatic movements proselytizing fellow Christians. According to Operation World, just 4.7% of Greenlanders are Evangelical Christian, although the Evangelical population is growing at an annual rate of 8.4%.
Social issues
The rate of suicide in Greenland is very high. According to a 2010 census, Greenland holds the highest suicide rate in the world. Another significant social issue faced by Greenland is a high rate of alcoholism. Alcohol consumption rates in Greenland reached their height in the 1980s, when it was twice as high as in Denmark, and had by 2010 fallen slightly below the average level of consumption in Denmark (which at the time were 12th highest in the world, but has since fallen). However, at the same time, alcohol prices are far higher, meaning that consumption has a large social impact. Prevalence of HIV/AIDS used to be high in Greenland and peaked in the 1990s when the fatality rate also was relatively high. Through a number of initiatives the prevalence (along with the fatality rate through efficient treatment) has fallen and is now low, 0.13%, below most other countries. In recent decades, the unemployment rates have generally been somewhat above those in Denmark; in 2017, the rate was 6.8% in Greenland, compared to 5.6% in Denmark.
Culture
Today Greenlandic culture is a blending of traditional Inuit (Kalaallit, Tunumiit, Inughuit) and Scandinavian culture. Inuit, or Kalaallit, culture has a strong artistic tradition, dating back thousands of years. The Kalaallit are known for an art form of figures called tupilak or a "spirit object". Traditional art-making practices thrive in the Ammassalik. Sperm whale ivory remains a valued medium for carving.
Music
Greenland also has a successful, albeit small, music culture. Some popular Greenlandic bands and artists include Sume (classic rock), Chilly Friday (rock), Nanook (rock), Siissisoq (rock), Nuuk Posse (hip hop) and Rasmus Lyberth (folk), who performed in the Danish national final for the 1979 Eurovision Song Contest, performing in Greenlandic. The singer-songwriter Simon Lynge is the first musical artist from Greenland to have an album released across the United Kingdom, and to perform at the UK's Glastonbury Festival. The music culture of Greenland also includes traditional Inuit music, largely revolving around singing and drums.
The drum is the traditional Greenlandic instrument. It was used to perform traditional drum dances. For this purpose, a round drum (qilaat) in the form of a frame made of driftwood or walrus ribs covered with a polar bear bladder, polar bear stomach or walrus stomach was used. The drumming was not done on the membrane, but with a stick from underneath the frame. Simple melodies were sung for this purpose.
The drum dance used to serve two functions: On the one hand, the drum was used to drive away fear on long, dark winter nights. To do this, the drum dancer would make faces and try to make others laugh until all fear was forgotten.
Disputes were also settled with the drum. If someone had misbehaved, he was challenged with the drum. People would gather at certain powerful places and take turns beating the drum and singing to it. They tried to ridicule the other person as much as possible. The spectators expressed with their laughter who was the winner and who was therefore the guilty one.
The drum could also be used by shamans for ritual conjurations of spirits.
After the arrival of missionaries in the 18th century, the drum dance (still popular among Canadian Inuit today) was banned as pagan and shamanistic and replaced by polyphonic singing of secular and church songs. This choral singing is known today for its special sound. Church hymns are partly of German origin due to the influence of the Herrnhuter Brüdergemeinde. Scandinavian, German and Scottish whalers brought the fiddle, accordion and polka (kalattuut) to Greenland, where they are now played in intricate dance steps.
Sport
Sport is an important part of Greenlandic culture, as the population is generally quite active. Popular sports include association football, track and field, handball and skiing. Handball is often referred to as the national sport, and Greenland's men's national team was ranked among the top 20 in the world in 2001.
Greenland has excellent conditions for skiing, fishing, snowboarding, ice climbing and rock climbing, although mountain climbing and hiking are preferred by the general public. Although the environment is generally ill-suited for golf, there is a golf course in Nuuk.
Cuisine
The national dish of Greenland is suaasat, a soup made from seal meat. Meat from marine mammals, game, birds, and fish play a large role in the Greenlandic diet. Due to the glacial landscape, most ingredients come from the ocean. Spices are seldom used besides salt and pepper. Greenlandic coffee is a "flaming" dessert coffee (set alight before serving) made with coffee, whiskey, Kahlúa, Grand Marnier, and whipped cream. It is stronger than the familiar Irish dessert coffee.
Media
Kalaallit Nunaata Radioa (KNR) is the public broadcasting company of Greenland. It is an associate member of Eurovision and an associate member of the Nordvision network. Nearly one hundred people are directly employed by this company, which is one of the largest in the territory. The city of Nuuk also has its own radio and television station. The city of Nuuk also has a local television channel, Nanoq Media, which was created on 1 August 2002. It is the largest local television station in Greenland, reaching more than 4,000 households as receiving members, which corresponds to about 75% of all households in the capital.
Today only two newspapers are published in Greenland, both of which are distributed nationally. The Greenlandic weekly Sermitsiaq is published every Friday, while the online version is updated several times a day. It was distributed only in Nuuk until the 1980s. It is named after the mountain Sermitsiaq, located about northeast of Nuuk. The bi-weekly Atuagagdliutit/Grønlandsposten (AG) is the other newspaper in Greenland, published every Tuesday and Thursday in Greenlandic as Atuagagdliutit and in Danish as Grønlandsposten. The articles are all published in both languages.
Fine arts
The Inuit have their own arts and crafts tradition; for example, they carve tupilaks, sculptures of figures of avenging monsters practiced within shaman traditions. This Kalaallisut word means soul or spirit of a deceased person and today describes an artistic figure, usually no more than 20 centimetres tall, carved mainly from walrus ivory, with a variety of unusual shapes. This sculpture actually represents a mythical or spiritual being; usually, however, it has become a mere collector's item because of its grotesque appearance for Western visual habits. Modern artisans, however, still use indigenous materials such as musk ox and sheep wool, seal fur, shells, soapstone, reindeer antlers or gemstones.
The history of Greenlandic painting began with Aron von Kangeq, who depicted the old Greenlandic sagas and myths in his drawings and watercolours in the mid-19th century. In the 20th century, landscape and animal painting developed, as well as printmaking and book illustrations with sometimes expressive colouring. It was mainly through their landscape paintings that Kiistat Lund and Buuti Pedersen became known abroad. Anne-Birthe Hove chose themes from Greenlandic social life. There is a museum of fine arts in Nuuk, the Nuuk Art Museum.
See also
Index of Greenland-related articles
Outline of Greenland
Danish Realm
Faroe Islands
Other similar territories
Åland (Finland)
Svalbard (Norway)
Notes
References
Bibliography
Works cited
Bardarson, I. (ed. Jónsson, F.) "Det gamle Grønlands beskrivelse af Ívar Bárðarson (Ivar Bårdssön)", (Copenhagen, 1930).
CIA World Factbook, 2000.
Conkling, P. W. et al. 2011. The Fate of Greenland: Lessons from Abrupt Climate Change, co-authored with Richard Alley, Wallace Broecker and George Denton, with photographs by Gary Comer, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Steffen, Konrad, N. Cullen, and R. Huff (2005). "Climate variability and trends along the western slope of the Greenland Ice Sheet during 1991–2004", Proceedings of the 85th American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting (San Diego).
Sowa, F. 2013. Relations of Power & Domination in a World Polity: The Politics of Indigeneity & National Identity in Greenland. In: Heininen, L. Arctic Yearbook 2013. The Arctic of regions vs. the globalized Arctic. Akureyri: Northern Research Forum, pp. 184–198.www.arcticyearbook.com/ay2013
Sowa, F. 2014. Greenland. in: Hund, A. Antarctica and the Arctic Circle: A Geographic Encyclopedia of the Earth's Polar Regions. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, pp. 312–316.
External links
Greenland entry at Denmark.dk.
The Government of Greenland Offices official website
Visit Greenland – the official Greenlandic Tourist Board
Inuit Circumpolar Council Greenland
Inuit territories
Nordic countries
Regions of the Arctic
Dependent territories in North America
Special territories of the European Union
Island countries
Members of the Nordic Council
States and territories established in 1979
Danish dependencies
Danish-speaking countries and territories
Kingdom of Denmark
Former Norwegian colonies
Kingdom of Norway (872–1397)
Christian states
Northern America | [
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0.14518204... |
12120 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography%20of%20Greenland | Geography of Greenland | Greenland is located between the Arctic Ocean and the North Atlantic Ocean, northeast of Canada and northwest of Iceland. The territory comprises the island of Greenland—the largest island in the world—and more than a hundred other smaller islands (see alphabetic list). As an island, Greenland has no land boundaries and 44,087 km of coastline. A sparse population is confined to small settlements along certain sectors of the coast. Greenland possesses the world's second largest ice sheet.
Greenland sits atop the Greenland plate, a subplate of the North American plate. The Greenland craton is made up of some of the oldest rocks on the face of the earth. The Isua greenstone belt in southwestern Greenland contains the oldest known rocks on Earth, dated at 3.7–3.8 billion years old.
The vegetation is generally sparse, with the only patch of forested land being found in Nanortalik Municipality in the extreme south near Cape Farewell.
The climate is arctic to subarctic, with cool summers and cold winters. The terrain is mostly a flat but gradually sloping icecap that covers all land except for a narrow, mountainous, barren, rocky coast. The lowest elevation is sea level and the highest elevation is the summit of Gunnbjørn Fjeld, the highest point in the Arctic at . The northernmost point of the island of Greenland is Cape Morris Jesup, discovered by Admiral Robert Peary in 1900. Natural resources include zinc, lead, iron ore, coal, molybdenum, gold, platinum, uranium, hydropower and fish.
Area
Total area:
2,166,086 km2
Land area:
2,166,086 km2 (410,449 km2 ice-free, 1,755,637 km2 ice-covered)
Maritime claims:
Territorial sea:
Exclusive fishing zone:
Land use
Arable land:
approximately 6%; some land is used to grow silage.
Permanent crops:
Approximately 0%
Other:
100% (2012 est.)
The total population comprises around 56,000 inhabitants, of whom approximately 18,000 live in the capital, Nuuk.
Natural hazards
Continuous ice sheet covers 84% of the country; the rest is permafrost.
Environment – current issues
Protection of the Arctic environment, climate change, pollution of the food chain, excessive hunting of endangered species (walrus, polar bears, narwhal, beluga whale and several sea birds).
Climate
Greenland's climate is a tundra climate on and near the coasts and an ice cap climate in inland areas. It typically has short, cool summers and long, moderately cold winters.
Due to Gulf Stream influences, Greenland's winter temperatures are very mild for its latitude. In Nuuk, the capital, average winter temperatures are only . In comparison, the average winter temperatures for Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada, are around . Conversely, summer temperatures are very low, with an average high around . This is too low to sustain trees, and the land is treeless tundra.
On the Greenland ice sheet, the temperature is far below freezing throughout the year, and record high temperatures have peaked only slightly above freezing. The record high temperature at Summit Camp is .
In the far south of Greenland, there is a very small forest in the Qinngua Valley, due to summer temperatures being barely high enough to sustain trees. There are mountains over high surrounding the valley, which protect it from cold, fast winds travelling across the ice sheet. It is the only natural forest in Greenland, but is only long.
Climate change
The Greenland ice sheet is thick and broad enough to blanket an area the size of Mexico. The ice is so massive that its weight presses the bedrock of Greenland below sea level and is so all-concealing that not until recently did scientists discover Greenland's Grand Canyon or the possibility that Greenland might actually be three islands.
If the ice melted, the interior bedrock below sea level would be covered by water. It is not clear whether this water would be at sea level or a lake above sea level. If it would be at sea level it could connect to the sea at Ilulissat Icefjord, in Baffin Bay and near Nordostrundingen, creating three large islands. But it is most likely that it would be a lake with one drain.
It is thought that before the last Ice Age, Greenland had mountainous edges and a lowland (and probably very dry) center which drained to the sea via one big river flowing out westwards, past where Disko Island is now.
There is concern about sea level rise caused by ice loss (melt and glaciers falling into the sea) on Greenland. Between 1997 and 2003 ice loss was , compared to about for 1993/4-1998/9. Half of the increase was from higher summer melting, with the rest caused by the movements of some glaciers exceeding the speeds needed to balance upstream snow accumulation. A complete loss of ice on Greenland would cause a sea level rise of as much as .
Researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Kansas reported in February 2006 that the glaciers are melting twice as fast as they were five years ago. By 2005, Greenland was beginning to lose more ice volume than anyone expected – an annual loss of up to per year, according to more recent satellite gravity measurements released by JPL. The increased ice loss may be partially offset by increased snow accumulation due to increased precipitation.
Between 1991 and 2006, monitoring of the weather at one location (Swiss Camp) found that the average winter temperature had risen almost .
Recently, Greenland's three largest outlet glaciers have started moving faster, satellite data show. These are the Jakobshavn Isbræ at Ilulissat on the western edge of Greenland, and the Kangerdlugssuaq and Helheim glaciers on the eastern edge of Greenland. The two latter accelerated greatly during the years 2004–2005, but returned to pre-2004 velocities in 2006. The accelerating ice flow has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in seismic activity. In March 2006, researchers at Harvard University and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University reported that the glaciers now generate swarms of earthquakes up to magnitude 5.0.
The retreat of Greenland's ice is revealing islands that were thought to be part of the mainland. In September 2005 Dennis Schmitt discovered an island north of the Arctic Circle in eastern Greenland which he named Uunartoq Qeqertaq, Inuit for "warming island".
Future projections
In the Arctic, temperatures are rising faster than anywhere else in the world. Greenland is losing 200 billion tonnes of ice per year. Research suggests that this could increase the sea levels' rise by 30 centimeters by the end of the century. These projections have the possibility of changing as satellite data only dates back to 40 years ago. This means that researchers must view old photographs of glaciers and compare them to ones taken today to determine the future of Greenland's ice.
Temperature extremes
Highest temperatures
Lowest temperatures
Topography
The ice sheet covering Greenland varies significantly in elevation across the landmass, rising dramatically between the coastline at sea level and the East-Central interior, where elevations reach . The coastlines are rocky and predominantly barren with fjords. Numerous small islands spread from the Central to Southern coastlines.
Greenland's mountain ranges are partially or completely buried by ice. The highest mountains are in the Watkins Range, which runs along the eastern coast. Greenland's highest mountain is Gunnbjorn Fjeld with a height of .
Scientists discovered an asteroid impact crater in the northwestern region of Greenland, buried underneath the ice sheet. At a size larger than Washington, D.C., it is the first impact crater found beneath one of Earth's ice sheets.
Extreme points
This is a list of the extreme points of Greenland, the points that are farther north, south, east or west than any other location.
Territory of Greenland
Northernmost point — Kaffeklubben Island (83°40'N) – the northernmost permanent land in the world. There are also some shifting gravel bars that lie north of Kaffeklubben, the most famous being Oodaaq.
Southernmost point — unnamed islet 2.3 km south of Cape Farewell, Egger Island (59°44'N)
Westernmost point — Nordvestø, Carey Islands (73°10'W)
Easternmost point — Nordostrundingen, Greenland (11°19'W)
Highest point — Gunnbjørn Fjeld,
Mainland Greenland
Northernmost point — Cape Morris Jesup (83°39'N)
Southernmost point — Peninsula near Nanortalik (60°08′31″N)
Westernmost point — Cape Alexander (73°08'W)
Easternmost point — Nordostrundingen, Greenland (11°19'W)
Highest point — Gunnbjørn Fjeld, .
Towns
Greenland has 17 towns – settlements with more than 500 inhabitants. Nuuk is the largest town – and the capital – with roughly one third of the country's urban population. Sisimiut with approximately 5,500 inhabitants is the second largest town, while Ilulissat is number three with around 5,000 inhabitants.
Aasiaat
Ilulissat
Ittoqqortoormiit
Kangaatsiaq
Maniitsoq
Nanortalik
Narsaq
Nuuk
Paamiut
Qaanaaq
Qaqortoq
Qasigiannguit
Qeqertarsuaq
Sisimiut
Tasiilaq
Upernavik
Uummannaq
History of exploration
Gallery
See also
List of mountain peaks of Greenland
List of mountain ranges of Greenland
Greenland's Grand Canyon
Climate change adaptation in Greenland
References
External links
www.geus.dk Geological map of Greenland from the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS).
"Times Atlas reviews Greenland map accuracy after climate change row" – The Guardian, 22 September 2011 | [
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12121 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics%20of%20Greenland | Demographics of Greenland | This article is about the demographic features of the population of Greenland, including population density, ethnicity, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects of the population.
Populations
On 1 July 2014, Greenland had 56,295 inhabitants. This represents an increase of 13 over 1 January but a decrease of 188 over 1 July 2013. The decrease in Greenland's population is due to emigration, as natural growth is positive.
Age structure
0–6 years: 5,605
(male 2,893; female 2,712)
7–14 years: 6,531
(male 3,316; female 3,215)
15–17 years: 2,462
(male 1,243; female 1,219)
18–24 years: 6,491
(male 3,293; female 3,198)
25–64 years: 31,128
(male 16,960; female 14,168)
65- years: 4,153
(male 2,133; female 2,020)
Vital statistics
Structure of the population
Structure of the population (01.07.2013) (estimates; population statistics are compiled from registers):
Life expectancy at birth
total population:
71.25 years
male:
68.6 years
female:
74.04 years (2012 est.)
Ethnic groups
The population of Greenland consists of Greenlandic Inuit (including mixed-race persons), Danish Greenlanders and other Europeans and North Americans. The Inuit population makes up approximately 85-90% of the total (2009 est.). 6,792 people from Denmark live in Greenland, which is 12% of its total population.
In recent years, Greenland experienced a significant increase in immigration from Asia, especially from the Philippines, Thailand, and China.
Languages
The only official language of Greenland is Greenlandic. The number of speakers of Greenlandic is estimated at 50,000 (85–90% of the total population), divided in three main dialects, Kalaallisut (West-Greenlandic, 44,000 speakers and the dialect that is used as official language), Tunumiit (East-Greenlandic, 3,000 speakers) and Inuktun (North-Greenlandic, 800 speakers). The remainder of the population mainly speaks Danish; Inuit Sign Language is the language of the deaf community.
Religion
The nomadic Inuit people were traditionally shamanistic, with a well-developed mythology primarily concerned with propitiating a vengeful and fingerless sea goddess who controlled the success of the seal and whale hunts.
The first Norse colonists were pagan, but Erik the Red's son Leif was converted to Catholic Christianity by King Olaf Trygvesson on a trip to Norway in 990 and sent missionaries back to Greenland. These swiftly established sixteen parishes, some monasteries, and a bishopric at Garðar.
Rediscovering these colonists and spreading the Protestant Reformation among them was one of the primary reasons for the Danish recolonization in the 18th century. Under the patronage of the Royal Mission College in Copenhagen, Norwegian and Danish Lutherans and German Moravian missionaries searched for the missing Norse settlements and began converting the Inuit. The principal figures in the Christianization of Greenland were Hans and Poul Egede and Matthias Stach. The New Testament was translated piecemeal from the time of the very first settlement on Kangeq Island, but the first translation of the whole Bible was not completed until 1900. An improved translation using the modern orthography was completed in 2000.
Today, the major religion is Protestant Christianity, mostly members of the Lutheran Church of Denmark. While there is no official census data on religion in Greenland, the Lutheran Bishop of Greenland Sofie Petersen estimates that 85% of the Greenlandic population are members of its congregation.
References
Greenlandic society | [
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0.22242566943168... |
12122 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics%20of%20Greenland | Politics of Greenland | The politics of Greenland, an autonomous country (, ) within the Kingdom of Denmark, function in a framework of a parliamentary representative democratic dependency, whereby the prime minister is the head of government, and of a multi-party system. Executive power is exercised by the government. Legislative power is vested in both the government and parliament Inatsisartut. The judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislature. Greenland has full autonomy on most matters, except on policies and decisions affecting the region including negotiations with the devolved legislatures and the Folketing ().
Executive powers
|Queen
|Margrethe II of Denmark
|
|14 January 1972
|-
|High Commissioner
|Mikaela Engell
|
|1 April 2011
|-
|Prime Minister
|Múte Bourup Egede
|Inuit Ataqatigiit
|23 April 2021
|}
Executive power rests with a high commissioner, and a prime minister heads the Cabinet. The high commissioner of Greenland is appointed by the monarch (on from 2011: Queen Margrethe II), and the prime minister is elected indirectly by parliament elections results for four-year terms.
The High Commissioner has a seat in the Inatsisartut, he or she is allowed to speak in the Inatsisartut regarding common Danish/Greenlandic affairs, but he or she is not allowed to vote. Following legislative elections, the leader of the party that wins the most seats is usually given the initiative to establish a new coalition by the Greenlandic Parliament, unless the current Naalakkersuisut Siulittaasuat (Prime Minister in English) is still in power. However, if he/she fails, the Chairman of the parliament asks all chairmen of the parties elected to the parliament, and asks them to point to another chairman who they feel can rightly form a new coalition. The chairman with the most votes is then handed the initiative. After forming the coalition, the Naalakkersuisut Siulittaasuat leads the Naalakkersuisut. The Naalakkersuisut will often consist of around 9 members. The coalition parties divide the various ministries among themselves and after this, the parties elect their representative to these ministries. Any other member of the cabinet is called a Naalakkersuisoq.
Legislative branch
Legislative power is shared by the government and the legislature. The legislature Greenlandic Parliament () is made up of 31 members elected by direct, popular vote to serve four-year terms by proportional representation. Election of 2 seats to the Danish Parliament () was last held on June 5, 2019. The current composition is shown below.
Judicial branch
Greenland's judicial system is based on the Danish civil law system, operates independently of the legislature and the executive. It has two court of first instance: the District Courts and the Court of Greenland depending on the type of case, whereas the High Court of Greenland hears cases as the second instance. Decisions made by the High Court of Greenland may be brought before the Supreme Court subject to the permission of the Appeals Permission Board. Appeals may be submitted to the Østre Landsret and the Supreme Court of Denmark (Højesteret).
Political parties and elections
Greenland has a multi-party system (disputing independence versus unionism as well as left versus right). Governments are usually coalition governments. The Greenlandic Parliament (Inatsisartut) has 31 seats. Members are elected by popular vote to serve four-year terms.
Administrative divisions
The island is administratively divided into 5 municipalities with about 72 cities and villages.
International affairs
Along with diplomatic missions to the European Union and the United States, Greenland participates in the Nordic Council, Arctic Council, International Whaling Commission (Complete list of participation of Greenland in international organisations).
With Denmark having responsibility for Greenland's international affairs, other countries do not have direct diplomatic representation in Greenland — their embassies or consulates in Copenhagen are responsible for their relations with Greenland and their citizens staying or living there.
Greenland is represented internationally by the embassies and consulates of Denmark, although Greenland has an independent Representation to the European Union in Brussels since 1992 and in the United States in Washington D.C since 2014.
Greenland maintains economic and cultural relations with Taiwan via Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Canada.
International organization participation
Arctic Council
Council of Europe
Inuit Circumpolar Conference
NATO
Nordic Council
Nordic Investment Bank
West Nordic Council
See also
Arctic cooperation and politics
Arctic policy of Denmark
Politics of Denmark
List of Danish High Commissioners in Greenland
Foreign relations of Greenland
Greenland–European Union relations
References
External links
Prime Minister’s Office
Government of Greenland official government website (in English)
Greenland.com from the Greenland Tourism & Business Council
Statistics Greenland | [
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12123 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy%20of%20Greenland | Economy of Greenland | The economy of Greenland can be characterized as small, mixed and vulnerable. Greenland's economy consists of a large public sector and comprehensive foreign trade. This has resulted in an economy with periods of strong growth, considerable inflation, unemployment problems and extreme dependence on capital inflow from the Kingdom Government.
GDP per capita is close to the average for European economies, but the economy is critically dependent upon substantial support from the Danish government, which supplies about half the revenues of the Self-rule Government, which in turn employs 10,307 Greenlanders out of 25,620 currently in employment (2015). Unemployment nonetheless remains high, with the rest of the economy dependent upon demand for exports of shrimp and fish.
Historical development
Except for an abortive royal colony established under Major Claus Paarss between 1728 and 1730, colonial Greenland was administered by companies under royal charter until 1908. Hans Egede's Hope Colony was organized under the auspices of the Bergen Greenland Company prior to its bankruptcy in 1727; it was succeeded by the merchant Jacob Severin (1733–1749), the General Trade Company (Det almindelige Handelskompagni; 1749–1774), and finally the Royal Greenland Trading Department (KGH; 1776–1908).
Early hopes of mineral or agricultural wealth were dashed, and open trade proved a failure owing to other nations' better quality, lower priced goods and hostility. Kale, lettuce, and other vegetables were successfully introduced, but repeated attempts to cultivate wheat or clover failed throughout Greenland, limiting the ability to raise European livestock. After government-funded whaling failed, the KGH eventually settled on maintaining the native Greenlanders in their traditional pursuits of hunting and whaling and enforced a monopoly on trade between them and Europe. Repeated attempts to open trade were opposed on both commercial and humanitarian grounds, although minor reforms in the 1850s and 60s lowered the prices charged to the natives for "luxuries" like sugar and coffee; transferred more of the KGH's profits to local communities; and granted the important Ivigtut cryolite concession to a separate company.
During the years before World War I, the KGH's independence was curtailed and the company folded into the Ministry of the Interior. Climate change, apparent since the 1920s, disrupted traditional Kalaallit life as the milder weather reduced the island's seal populations but filled the waters offshore with cod. After World War II, reforms were finally enacted by the Danish Greenland Commission composed of Greenland Provincial Council members and Danish economists. The report outlined a program to end the KGH model and establish a modern welfare state on the Danish model and supported by the Kingdom Government. The KGH monopolies were ended in 1950; Greenland was made an equal part of the Kingdom of Denmark in 1953 and Home Rule granted in 1979.
The KGH had long opposed urbanization of the Kalaallit Greenlanders, but during the 1950s and 1960s the Danish government introduced an urbanization and modernization program aimed at consolidating existing settlements. The program was intended to reduce costs, improve access to education and health care, and provide workers for modernized cod fisheries, which were growing rapidly at the time. The program faced a number of problems including the collapse of the fisheries and the shoddy construction of many of the buildings, particularly the infamous Blok P, and produced a number of problems of its own, including continuing unemployment and alcoholism.
Greenland left the European Economic Community in February 1985, principally due to EEC policies on fishing and sealskin. Most EU laws do not apply to Greenland; however, owing to its connection with Denmark, Greenland continues to enjoy preferential access to EU markets. In the same year, Greenland exercised its new control over the Royal Greenland Trading Company to reestablish it as KNI. Over the next few decades, divisions of the conglomerate were slowly spun off and competition within the Greenlandic economy somewhat increased.
Following the closure of the Maarmorilik lead and zinc mine in 1990 and the collapse of the cod fisheries amid colder ocean currents, Greenland faced foreign trade deficits and a shrinking economy, but it has been growing since 1993.
Sectors of the economy
The Greenland economy is extremely dependent on exports of fish and on support from the Danish Government, which supplies about half of government revenues. The public sector, including publicly owned enterprises and the municipalities, plays the dominant role in the economy.
Governance
The largest employers in Greenland are the various levels of administration, including the central Kingdom Government in Denmark, the Local Greenland Self-Rule Government, and the municipalities. Most of these positions are in the capital Nuuk. In addition to this direct employment, the government heavily subsidizes other major employers in other areas of the economy, including Great Greenland's sealskin purchases, Pilersuisoq's rural stores, and some of Air Greenland and Royal Arctic's regional routes.
Fishing industry
The second-largest sector by employment is Greenland's fishing industry. The commercial fishing fleet consists of approximately 5,000 dinghies, 300 cutters, and 25 trawlers. While cod was formerly the main catch, today the industry centers on cold-water shrimp and Greenland halibut.
The fish processing industry is almost entirely centered on Royal Greenland, the world's largest retailer of cold-water shrimp.
Hunting and whaling
Whaling and seal hunting were once traditional mainstays of Greenland's economy. Greenlanders still kill an estimated 170,000 seals a year and 175 whales a year, ranking them second and third in the world respectively. Both whaling and sealing have become controversial, limiting the potential market for their products. As such, the only seal tannery in the country Great Greenland in Qaqortoq is heavily subsidized by the government to maintain the livelihood of smaller communities which are economically dependent on the hunt.
Reindeer or caribou are found in the northwest of the island, while muskoxen are found in the northeast and at Kangerlussuaq. Because the muskoxen's natural range favors the protected Northeast Greenland National Park, it is a less common object of hunting than in the past. Polar bear and reindeer hunting in Greenland still occur but are regulated to avoid endangering the populations.
Retail
Approximately half of total sales are conducted by KNI, the state-owned successor to the Royal Greenland Trade Department; its rural sales division Pilersuisoq; or its daughter company which has been purchased by the Danish Dagrofa Pisiffik. The third major chain is the Brugsen association of cooperatives.
Mining
Ivigtut used to be the world's premier source of natural cryolite, an important mineral in aluminum extraction, but the commercially viable reserves were depleted in the 1980s. Similarly, deposits of coal, diamonds, and many metals including silver, nickel, platinum, copper, molybdenum, iron, niobium, tantalum, uranium, and rare earths are known to exist, but not yet in commercially viable deposits. Greenland's Bureau of Minerals and Petroleum is working to promote Greenland as an attractive destination for prospectors. Improvements in technology and increases in mineral prices have led to some mines being reopened, such as the lead and zinc mine at Maarmorilik and the gold mine at Nalunaq.
Greenland is expected to be one of the world's next great mining frontiers as global warming starts to uncover precious metals from the frozen surroundings. Substantial volumes of minerals are now within reach of geological land mapping technologies, according to research conducted by GlobalData, a natural resources business intelligence provider.
Energy
At 70%, Greenland has one of the highest shares of renewable energy in the world, mostly coming from hydropower.
While the Greenland Home Rule Government has primary sovereignty over mineral deposits on the mainland, oil resources are within the domain of the Danish exclusive economic zone. Nonetheless, prospecting takes place under the auspices of NUNAOIL, a partnership between the two governments. Some geologists believe Greenland has some of the world's largest remaining oil resources: in 2001, the U.S. Geological Survey found that the waters off north-eastern Greenland (north and south of the Arctic Circle) could contain up to of oil, and in 2010 the British petrochemical company Cairns Oil reported "the first firm indications" of commercially viable oil deposits. Nonetheless, all six wells drilled since the 1970s have been dry.
Greenland has offered eight license blocks for tender along its west coast by Baffin Bay. Seven of those blocks have been bid for by a combination of multinational oil companies and NUNAOIL. Companies that have participated successfully in the previous license rounds and have formed a partnership for the licenses with NUNAOIL are DONG Energy, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Husky Energy, and Cairn Energy. The area available known as the West Disko licensing round is of interest due to its relative accessibility compared to other Arctic basins, as the area remains largely free of ice and contains a number of promising geological leads and prospects from the Paleocene era.
Coal used to be mined at Qullissat but this has been suspended.
Electricity generation is controlled by the state-owned Nukissiorfiit. It is distributed at 220 V and 50 Hz and sockets of Danish type K are used. Electricity has historically been generated by oil or diesel power plants, even though there is a large surplus of potential hydropower. Because of rising oil prices, there is a program to build hydro power plants. Since the success of the 1993 Buksefjord dam, whose distribution path to Nuuk includes the Ameralik Span the long-term policy of the Greenland government is to produce the island's electricity from renewable domestic sources. A third turbine at Buksefjord brought its capacity up to 45 MW in 2008; in 2007, a second, 7.2 MW dam was constructed at Qorlortorsuaq; and in 2010, a third, 15 MW dam was constructed at Sisimiut. There is a plan for an Aluminium smelter plant, which requires multiple large (total 600-750 MW) hydropower plants. Domestic heating is provided by electricity at locations where there is a hydro power plant.
Tourism
Tourism is limited by the short summers and high costs. Access is almost exclusively by air, mainly from Scandinavia and Iceland. Some tourists arrive by cruise ship (but they don't spend much locally, since the ship provides accommodation and meals). There have been tests with direct flights from the US East Coast from 2007 to 2008, but these were discontinued.
The state-owned tourism agency Visit Greenland has the web address Greenland.com.
Tourism increased significantly between 2010 and 2019, with the number of visitors increasing from 460,000 per year to 2 million. Condé Nast Traveler describes that high level as "overtourism". One source estimated that in 2019 the revenue from this aspect of the economy was about 450 million kroner (US$67 million). Like many aspects of the economy, this slowed dramatically in 2020, and into 2021, due to restrictions required as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic; one source describes it as being the "biggest economic victim of the coronavirus". (The overall economy did not suffer too severely as of mid 2020, thanks to the fisheries.) Visitors will begin arriving again in late 2020 or early 2021. Greenland's goal is to develop it "right" and to "build a more sustainable tourism for the long run".
Agriculture and forestry
Agriculture is of little importance in the economy but due to climate change in southern Greenland, the growing season averages about three weeks longer than a decade ago which has enabled expanded production of existing crops. At present, local production accounts for 10% of potatoes consumption in Greenland, but that is projected to grow to 15% by 2020. Similarly, it has enabled new crops like apples, strawberries, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and carrots to be grown and for the cultivated areas of the country to be extended although even now only about 1% of Greenland is considered arable. Expanded production is subsidized by the government through purchase guarantees by the state-owned Neqi A/S grocery store chain.
The only forest in Greenland is in the Qinngua Valley near Nanortalik. It is protected and not used for timber production.
Animal husbandry
Animal husbandry consists mainly of sheep farming, with free-grazing flocks. Modern sheep farming methods were introduced in the early 20th century, with the first farm built in 1906. The farms provide meat for local consumption and wool mainly for export. Some 20,000 lambs are slaughtered annually in Narsaq by the state-owned Neqi A/S. The lack of private land ownership rights on Greenland forces farmers to jointly agree to terms of land usage. In the south, there is also a small cattle farm.
Reindeer herding has been introduced to Greenland in waves since 1952. Supervision by Scandinavian Sami ended in 1978 and subsequent results were dismal. Repeated attempts in mid-west Greenland in the 1980s and the 1990s failed due to the immobility of the herds, which destroyed their forage. In 1998, the remaining herd was sold to the Nuuk municipality and removed through hunting. At that point, only one Greenlander was still a deerherd; the rest about 20 people were still hired Norwegian Sami. Although the conclusion was drawn that reindeer herding was incompatible with the local culture, the southern herds continue to prosper. In 2008, there was still a strong herd at the Isortoq Reindeer Station maintained by the Icelander Stefán Magnússon and Norwegian Ole Kristiansen.
See also
Greenland krone
Bank of Greenland
Further reading
Laust Høgedahl (ed.). 2021. Greenland's Economy and Labour Markets. Routledge.
References
External links
"Setting up a Business in Greenland", from the Greenland Home Rule Government | [
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12124 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications%20in%20Greenland | Telecommunications in Greenland | Telecommunications in Greenland include radio, television, fixed and mobile telephones, and the Internet.
Greenland has, by law, only one service provider for telecommunications and the Internet, TELE Greenland, which is fully owned by the Greenlandic Home Rule government. TELE Greenland provides switched telephone and data, land mobile communications, and VHF and MF shore-to-ship communication. This type of monopoly is not uncommon in Greenland.
Radio and television
Television in Greenland began in the 1960s.
Privately owned transmitters were created to receive TV from Canada, Iceland, and mainland Denmark. This can date as far back when television was introduced to Greenland in the 1960s. It was possible to receive TV from Canada with a normal household TV antenna, but color transmissions were NTSC and signals were in very bad quality and however in some circumstances, television transmissions were not available at all due to factors such as weather conditions or time of day, even for the people who owned private transmitters. Greenland did not have any local TV service until 1982.
The state broadcaster is Kalaallit Nunaata Radioa (KNR, Greenlandic Broadcasting Corporation), which provides one television and one radio service nationwide. Both broadcast in Greenlandic and Danish. Administered as an independent public corporation by the Greenlandic government, KNR has a seven-person board and management committee. They employ 100 people and are funded publicly and by advertising.
A few private local TV and radio stations are also available as Danish public radio rebroadcasts. An umbrella organization in Greenland, known as the STTK, operates local radio and TV stations throughout the country. There are also American Forces Network stations, operated by the United States Air Force.
Greenlanders owned an estimated 30,000 radios and 30,000 television sets, as of 2002.
Telephones
Calling code: +299
International call prefix: 00
Fixed telephone lines: 7,259 lines in use, 197th in the world (2019).
Mobile telephone connections: 66,009, 202nd in the world (2019).
All telephone numbers have 6 digits.
There are adequate domestic and international telephone services, provided by cables and microwave radio relay. The system was totally digitized in 1995. The Greenland Connect submarine cable provides connectivity to Europe via Iceland and to North America via Newfoundland. TELE Greenland first used satellite communication in 1978 and currently uses 15 satellite earth stations (12 Intelsat, 1 Eutelsat, and 2 Americom GE-2), all over the Atlantic Ocean.
Mobile
As of 2019 there were 66,009 active mobile telephony subscriptions in use in Greenland. In 2007, all NMT (1G) networks were shut down. 4G launched in 2014.
Mobile coverage extends to nearly all inhabited areas in Greenland except some remote areas.
In Greenland, VHF radio-telephone is also used. Users make calls over a radio instead of a phone. Outside of Greenland, VHF phones are mainly used on ships, but in Greenland they can also used as regular phones. In 2001, 42% of Greenlanders owned a portable VHF phone.
Internet
Greenland has one Internet Service Providers (ISP): Tele Greenland (Tele Post Greenland A/S).
Greenland has one major data center: Tele Greenland Nuuk.
The country code for top-level domains is .gl
40,084 people or 64.48% of Greenland's population were able to use the Internet in 2019, placing Greenland 201st in the world.
There were 13,192 fixed broadband subscriptions placing Greenland 164th in the world with a 23% penetration rate (2019).
Greenland has been allocated 16,384 IPv4 addresses, less than 0.05% of the world's total or 284 addresses per 1000 people (2012).
Internet and telephone services rely on the Greenland Connect submarine communications cables for external traffic.
Internet censorship and surveillance
As a territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, Greenland has a democratically elected home-rule government whose powers may encompass all matters except foreign and national security affairs, police services, and monetary matters. Greenlanders have the same rights throughout the kingdom as other citizens.
The Danish government places no restrictions on access to the Internet and there are no credible reports that e-mail or Internet chat rooms are monitored without appropriate legal authority. Authorities continue to employ an Internet filter designed to block child pornography. In no known cases did the filter affect legitimate sites. The Danish Constitution provides for freedom of speech and press with some limitations such as cases involving child pornography, libel, blasphemy, hate speech, and racism, and the government generally respects these rights in practice.
In April 2013, the registrar for the .gl domain unilaterally voluntarily suspended resolution of thepiratebay.gl, intended to be a new primary Domain Name for the famous Bittorrent search engine The Pirate Bay.
See also
Internet censorship in Greenland (Kingdom of Denmark)
References
External links
TELE Greenland
KNR, Greenlandic Broadcasting Corporation.
Greenland Television
STTK
Greenland | [
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12125 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport%20in%20Greenland | Transport in Greenland | The transportation system in Greenland is very unusual in that Greenland has no railways, no inland waterways, and virtually no roads between towns. Historically the major means of transportation has been by boat around the coast in summer and by dog sled in winter, particularly in the north and east. Nowadays air travel, by helicopter or other aircraft, is the main way of travel.
Air transport
While Germany occupied Denmark during World War II, the United States controlled Greenland and built bases and airports. The airports were codenamed as Bluie West One through to Bluie West Eight on the west of the island and Bluie East One to Bluie East Four on the eastern side (some had only sea plane access, some no air access). The largest of those airports, Bluie West Eight, now renamed Kangerlussuaq Airport, remains the international hub for travel to Greenland, as it is the only airport that has a long enough runway to service large jets (not counting Thule Airbase). American authorities at one time entertained the idea of building a road from Kangerlussuaq to the second-largest airport, in Narsarsuaq, several hundred kilometres to the south. The idea was abandoned after feasibility studies failed to prove it was possible. These airbases are generally not located near settlements, so travellers need an air transfer by helicopter (small plane from Kangerlussuaq) to reach settlements. All civil aviation matters are handled by the Civil Aviation Administration Denmark or the Greenland Airport Authority.
Greenland now has 18 airstrips, 14 of which are paved. Some are based on US airbases, but most are built by the Greenlandic government. All domestic flights are operated by Air Greenland. The name was anglicized in 2002 from the Danish Grønlandsfly (Greenlandair in English). International flights are limited to four weekly flights from Copenhagen to Kangerlussuaq, and to Reykjavík, Iceland.
Icelandair flies from Reykjavík to Narsarsuaq. It offers also "day trips to the wilderness" from Reykjavík to Kulusuk on the east coast. Icelandair flies to Ittoqqortoormiit over Kulusuk once or twice a week throughout the year. Flights from Reykjavik are operated throughout the year. Also, year-round flights from Reykjavik to Ilulissat will be offered after April 2011. From 2012 Air Greenland operates a route from Iqaluit in Canada to Nuuk during summer.
Air cargo is very important for Greenland. Most perishable foodstuff is imported from Denmark by air. It uses the Air Greenland Copenhagen–Kangerlussuaq passenger aircraft, and this is a reason why such a large aircraft is used. The air containers are then transported to the other airports by small planes that can use the small runways. Some air cargo is transported by boat from Kangerlussuaq, but not in the winter when the Kangerlussuaq Fjord freezes (one of the reasons to build the Sisimiut–Kangerlussuaq road).
A state-owned firm called Kalaallit Airports is since 2017 tasked with operating and updating the airports in Nuuk and Ilulissat. This process has been contentious as Chinese firms bid for the contract, with one Danish PM stating "We don't want a communist dictatorship in our backyard."
Roads
There are no roads between settlements, only within them and around them.
There are 150 km (90 mi) of roads in the whole country; 60 km (40 mi) of the roads are paved. The roads are primary or local roads, there are no highways in Greenland.
Speed limit ranges from for local roads to on primary roads.
Some farms in the south have fairly extensive very simple roads for all-terrain vehicles (not included in the above figures), used for sheep farming and hay collection. There are some other short simple gravel roads, such as that leading from the shore to hydropower plants.
There are plans for a road between Sisimiut and Kangerlussuaq, discussed for several years. In 2015 the cost of it (500 million Danish krone) caused it to be replanned as a one-lane road for terrain-capable vehicles, costing a tenth as much (50 million Danish krone). It was decided including financing in 2019, a contract with a construction company signed in 2020 and is expected to be built in 2021.
Water transport
There are ports at Ilulissat, Kangerlussuaq (also known by its Danish name Søndre Strømfjord), Qaqortoq, Narsaq, Nuuk (Godthåb), Aasiaat and Sisimiut. Several other towns have also small ports. The main users of the harbors are Royal Arctic Line and Arctic Umiaq Line. Royal Arctic Line organises freight ships, for example container ships, with regular sailings from Denmark. Arctic Umiaq Line runs a passenger ship which also carries freight. The distance from Denmark to Nuuk by ship is 3,800 kilometres (2,400 mi/2,000 nmi/4 days at 20 knots), so more perishable foodstuff is imported by air.
There are no car ferries in or to Greenland. It is possible to transport cars as container freight with Royal Arctic Line (both domestic and from Denmark). Passengers must travel by another method. This is done mostly when moving or buying a car, not normally when travelling, as there is no large road network anywhere.
Many of the tourists to Greenland arrive by cruise ship.
Railways
Historically, special-purpose narrow gauge railways, such as the gauge Qoornoq X-press in the village of Qoornoq in the Nuuk fjord, have operated. The Qoornoq X-press was used for transporting fish from the harbour to scaffolds for drying. The railway cars were only flatbed wagon cars with no locomotives to move them.
Built in 1955, the railway was abandoned shortly before the village around 1971.
Besides Qoornoq there are several other railways that existed in Greenland:
Malmbjerg
Mestersvig – likely for the local mines that existed in the 1950s and 1960s
Julianehaab
Ivigtut – likely for the local mine that once operated in the community
Disko Island near Qutdligssat
Maamorilik
References
External links | [
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0.00139221048448... |
12126 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%20of%20Greenland | Military of Greenland | The defence of Greenland is the responsibility of the Kingdom of Denmark. The government of Greenland does not have control of Greenland's military or foreign affairs. The most important part of Greenland's defensive territory remains the 12 maritime zones. In recent years there has been a significant increase in the presence of new challenges. In the history of Greenland there have been many changes of presence regarding who is in charge of the security of Greenlandic people and its land.
History
Danish military history on Greenland has its origins in the early 18th century. In 1721 Hans Egede, a Danish-Norwegian missionary first colonised the region. Soldiers were stationed on Greenland to protect the Danish colony from looting, especially against foreign whalers. Denmark and Norway split a century later in 1814, leaving Greenland under complete Danish rule.
In 1932, the Navy Flyvevæsen (Naval Air Force) made its first appearance. The Air Force contributed aerial photography to the Geodætisk Institute, a cartographic institute under the Ministry of Defence. All military work was carried out during the summer months, from May to September, after which the ships were transferred to Iceland or Denmark during the winter months.
The Danish Navy was actively involved in exploring Greenland through expeditions until the beginning of the Second World War. The armed forces were also responsible for surveying and cartography. Greenland took its first step towards independence in 1953 when representation in the Danish Parliament was gained. "The Folketing shall consist of one assembly of not more than one hundred and seventy-nine Members of whom two Members shall be elected in the Faroe Islands and two Members in Greenland.”
Second World War
Due to the German occupation of Denmark (operation Weserübung), on 9 April 1940, Denmark was prompted to sign an agreement with the United States in order to maintain control of the Greenlandic territory in allied hands. The Thulesag 1 agreement, signed on 9 April 1941, gave the US military authority over the defence of Greenland. The US-built airfields, harbors, anti-aircraft fortifications, radio, and meteorological sites. The allies feared that Nazi Germany could use Greenland as a base of operations to conduct offensive attacks on Washington, D.C. via bombing and submarine attacks. The United States' entry into the war meant that Greenland would become much more valuable to the allied war efforts as airfields and harbors in Greenland were used for important transatlantic links. As per the Thulesag 1 agreement, these facilities fell entirely under US jurisdiction while at the same time Danish sovereignty over Greenland was maintained.
Article 10 of the agreement contained a repeal clause. The treaty was to remain in force until "existing threats to the peace and security of the American continent no longer exist". This prompted the United States to build a number of military bases during the Second World War, including Thule Air Base, airfields, and a military hospital. The agreement was finally ratified by the Danish Parliament (Today's Folketing) after the end of the war on 16 May 1945. By the end of World War II, the U.S. had built or expanded 17 facilities, including air bases such as Narsarsuaq and Kangerlussuaq.
As a countermeasure against the Germans, a permanent patrol service with sledge dogs was established with the Sirius Patrol, which still exists today. The first offensive against the Germans took place on 13 May 1943, when the German weather patrol was discovered by members of the Sledge Patrol. Eli Knudsen, a Danish corporal, was killed during the battle. A second battle took place on 22 April 1944. The Sledge Patrol of Greenland was defunct after the end of the war. In 1953, a new dog unit was named as Sirius Patrol, after the star constellation Canis Major. It contains Sirius, also well known as the brightest star in the night sky, called “dog-star”. Prince Frederik of Denmark took part in a Sirius expedition from 11 February to 31 May 2000, which gave the Unit a new value in the story of Greenland.
Postwar Period
Following the Second World War, the sovereignty and defence of Greenland once again returned to Denmark. The United States continued to be interested in a permanent military presence due to the increasing tensions of the Cold War; however, Greenland was expected to remain under sole Danish control by the public. A US proposal to buy Greenland was rejected by the Danish government, with regard to the Soviet Union.
Cold War
Since overseas territories, such as Greenland, could hardly be protected by a Scandinavian Defence Alliance, Denmark's integration into NATO was prone to happen. In 1949, new opportunities for both countries opened up as the Danish membership into the military alliance was in place. The USA hoped to solve the question of a navy presence through multilateral negotiations. However, Denmark saw itself in a position to circumvent agreements with the American superpower, which was based solely on bilateral negotiations, and to guarantee Greenland's sovereignty for the future. On 27 April 1951, Thulesag 2 was signed. This meant that the United States would assist Denmark in necessary defence of Greenland within the framework of the North Atlantic Treaty. For this purpose, more American military bases were to be established. Article 5, paragraph 3, guaranteed the US and its troops unrestricted freedom of operation between these bases, on land, air, and sea, throughout the entire national territory. Article 6 obliged the US "to show due respect for all regulations and customs affecting the population and the administration of Greenland". The military airbase in Narsarsuaq was developed into a joint base of Danish and American troops.
At the end of 1953, the secret of a weather station 140 km from the army base in Kangerlussuaq came to light. The station had been built by US forces without the knowledge of the Danish government.
Nevertheless, on 15 March 1954, the expansion of Thule Air Base was set into motion. This included the installation of a new generation air defense system that was equipped with nuclear weapons. The expansion also involved the forced resettlement of local Inuit inhabitants.
Changes from 2008 / 2009
A referendum on the law on self-government was held in Greenland on 25 November 2008. A large majority of 75.5% voted in favour of extended self-government. The law is to be seen as a step towards independence from Denmark. On 21 June 2009, an extended agreement on autonomy came into force. Only foreign and defence policy remained in Danish responsibility. The Greenlandic government took over responsibilities for the police, justice, and coastal protection. Those that affect Navy provision include:
Greenland's government will be given significant autonomy in determining foreign affairs.
Many aspects of foreign affairs policy will no longer be linked to Danish policy.
Control of the militarised Greenlandic Coast Guard will be transferred to the Government of Greenland.
The Greenlandic government will take control of policing, including the police motor launches currently trained to assist the military in the Island Command Greenland.
Today’s challenges
There are many new challenges that Greenland has to face today. New sea routes lead past Greenland that require special protection. Ice cap melting may increase the availability of raw materials that must be protected. The likelihood of military conflict in Greenland is unlikely; however, a relevant defence in the Arctic region is at the core of Danish defence priorities. The country's naval presence and activities are based on close relationships with the local populations and authorities of both Greenland and the Faroe Islands. It is in no doubt important to the Danish armed forces' future presence in the Arctic to continue to strengthen and develop this relationship. The consequences of climate change will likely not only bring better maritime accessibility but also an increased interest in the extraction of natural resources, as well as intensified scientific and commercial activity. There is also a significant increase in military activity in the region. Accordingly, the geopolitical importance of the Arctic will become increasingly significant in the years to come.
Military efforts in the Arctic are strengthened by:
The Arctic Agreement of December 2016, which augments surveillance, command, control, communication, and operational efforts in the Arctic Region, is continued. New operational initiatives can be re-prioritised within the framework of the Agreement. An annually allocated sum of 120 million DKK for initiatives, with a total sum of 720 million DKK after six years. Furthermore, a total of 235 million DKK will be allocated through the Defence Agreement to the following additional initiatives.
Equipment to prevent pollution in the waters around Greenland.
An increased focus on different education methods. The important issues are now civil preparedness and contingency education, as well as other projects such as the Greenland Guard.
Initial conscription enrolment assessments to be carried out in Greenland for volunteers who want to sign up for national service.
Subsidised travel schemes for Greenlandic conscripts to travel home.
More apprentice positions for secondary school students to be established in connection to Armed Forces units.
A contribution to the mapping of the ice chart north of 62°N and to the new land mapping of Greenland.
The Ministry of Defence will finance the operational costs of the radio room at the maritime emergency radio in Greenland.
New military vessels solve environmental protection and pollution control tasks. The Parties note that the tender for new pollution control ships will be reconsidered in order to further examine a solution where new military vessels, in addition to their operational military tasks, when necessary, can also solve environmental protection and pollution control tasks. Denmark does not have a specific coast guard entity, as the Royal Danish Navy (Søværnet) is responsible for providing the services that would normally fall to a coast guard. The Navy is thus used by various agencies to carry out search and rescue, navigation assistance, environmental protection, and fisheries inspections, in addition to sovereignty and maritime surveillance. Today, the Danish Navy is divided into the First and Second Squadrons. While the Second Squadron is focused on foreign operations, the first squadron has responsibility for internal affairs, which includes the northern Atlantic (Greenland) and the North Sea (Faroe Islands). Responsibility for coast guard tasks, therefore, falls under the first squadron headquarters in Frederikshavn, as well as the newly established Arctic Command in Nuuk, Greenland (Danish Ministry of Defence 2011). The Arctic Command is responsible for overseeing all maritime activity in the waters around Greenland and the Faroe Islands so that the Danish Navy and the local authorities are in close coordination in crisis situations in the High North.
See also
Joint Arctic Command
Sirius Arctic Patrol
Military of Denmark
References
Literature used for additional Information
Archer, Clive. "Greenland, US bases and missile defence: new two-level negotiations?
NASA, T. Greicius; "Greenland's Rapid Melt Will Mean More Flooding"; (2019)
O’connor Tom, Newsweek; "Russia says Donald Trump has the right to try to buy Greenland" (2019)
Policy and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2020. 439-452
Pompeo, Michael R. "Looking North: Sharpening America’s Arctic Focus." US Department of State 6 (2019)
Rahbek-Clemmensen, Jon. "The Arctic turn: How did the High North become a foreign and security policy priority for Denmark?" Greenland and the International Politics of a Changing
Rottem Svein Vigeland. "The Arctic Council: Between environmental protection and geopolitics." The Arctic Council. Palgrave Pivot, Singapore, 2020. 91-95
Slim Allagui, PHYSORG, "Greenland becomes new promised land for oil firms"; (2011)
Sørensen, Camilla Tenna Nørup, and Mikkel Runge Olesen. "Stormagtsspillet i Arktis udfordrer småstaterne. Erfaringer fra Finland, Norge og Island." (2019)
The Guardian. "Independent Greenland 'could not afford' to sign up to Paris climate deal" (2016)
Vidal, John. "Time to listen to the ice scientists about the arctic death spiral." The Guardian 18 (2016)
Wang Nils, and Damien Degeorges. "Greenland and the New Arctic: Political and security implications of a statebuilding project." (2014)
Wiseman, Matthew S. "The Future of the Arctic Council." The Palgrave Handbook of Arctic
Military of Denmark | [
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12127 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign%20relations%20of%20Greenland | Foreign relations of Greenland | Being part of the Kingdom of Denmark, the foreign relations of Greenland are handled in cooperation with the Danish government and the Government of Greenland.
Unlike Denmark, Greenland is no longer part of the European Union, the country changed its status to an OCT associated to the EU, a dependent territory that has a special relationship with a member state of the EU. However, Greenland remains a full member of the Council of Europe and NATO.
General aspects of diplomatic relations
With the Kingdom of Denmark having the responsibility for Greenland's international affairs, other countries often do not have direct diplomatic representation in Greenland—their embassies or consulates in Denmark are responsible for their relations with Greenland and their citizens in Greenland. Greenland is represented internationally by the embassies and consulates of Denmark, although Greenland does directly participate in some Nordic organisations like the West Nordic Council and the Overseas Countries and Territories Association that provide membership for dependent territories.
The United States reopened its consulate in Nuuk, closed in 1953, in June 2020.
Consulates General
Nuuk, Greenland
(Consulate General)
(Consulate General)
Honorary Consuls
Nuuk, Greenland
(Honorary Consul)
(Honorary Consul)
(Honorary Consul)
(Honorary Consul)
(Honorary Consul)
(Honorary Consul)
(Honorary Consul)
(Honorary Consul)
(Honorary Consul)
(Honorary Consul)
(Honorary Consul)
(Honorary Consul)
Tasiilaq, Greenland
(Honorary Consul)
Qaqortoq, Greenland
(Honorary Consul)
Diplomatic representations
Greenland has representative offices in several countries and otherwise is represented by Embassies of Denmark worldwide. The Self-Government Act of 2009 allows the island to open diplomatic offices for trade and other areas that it is responsible for.
Current representations
Brussels (Representative Office)
Copenhagen (Representative Office)
Reykjavík (Representative Office)
Washington, D.C. (Representative Office)
Planned representations
Beijing (Representative Office)
New York City (Representative Office)
Disputes – international
Qaanaaq (formerly Thule) is a sensitive area, due to the forced removal of the local population when establishing the base, handling of removal, compensation of the locals, later incidents aggravated the case.
Uncontested dispute with Canada over Hans Island sovereignty in the Kennedy Channel between Canadian Ellesmere Island and Greenland.
See also
Greenland – European Union relations
List of diplomatic missions in Greenland
Politics of Greenland
External links
Official website of the Department of Foreign Affairs of Greenland – Naalakkersuisut
References
Government of Greenland | [
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12129 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History%20of%20Grenada | History of Grenada | The history of islands of Grenada in the Caribbean, part of the Lesser Antilles group of islands, covers a period from the earliest human settlements to the establishment of the contemporary nationstate of Grenada.
First settled by indigenous peoples, by the time of European contact it was inhabited by the Caribs. British colonists killed most of the Caribs on the island and established plantations on the island, eventually importing African slaves to work on the sugar plantations.
Control of the island was disputed by Great Britain and France in the 18th century, with the British ultimately prevailing. In 1795, Fédon's Rebellion, inspired by the Haitian Revolution, very nearly succeeded, taking significant military intervention to quell. Slavery was abolished in 1833, and in 1885, the island's capital, St. George's, became the capital of the British Windward Islands.
Grenada achieved independence from Britain in 1974. Following a coup by the Marxist New Jewel Movement in 1979, the island was invaded by United States troops and the government overthrown. The island's major crop, nutmeg, was significantly damaged by Hurricane Ivan in 2004.
Early history
Approximately 2 million years ago, Grenada was formed by volcanic activity which then resulted in land formation.
The earliest potential evidence for human presence on Grenada comes from the increase of charcoal particulates and the decline of arboreal pollen from the original climax forests, around 3760-3525 BC, during the Archaic Age. This evidence remains controversial, as it could be natural (e.g., lightning fires, volcanic eruptions, etc.). Several shell fragments from archaeological sites have been dated 1700-1380 BC, but are from mixed, insecure contexts. More secure are the shell middens at Point Salines, dated between 765-535 BC. None of these dates are associated with definitively human artifacts, however. The earliest human-made artifacts that have been scientifically dated are from Early Ceramic Age settlements at Beausejour (260-410 AD) and Pearls (370-645 AD). Only one other known site (Grand Marquis) may have been occupied during this time as well.
Beginning around AD 750, the Amerindian population began to rise, probably as a result of continued migration from the South American mainland. Most of the 87 pre-Columbian sites identified in Grenada have a component during this period (AD 750-1200), marking the height Grenada's indigenous population. This period also represents major cultural and environmental changes throughout the Caribbean. Several waves of groups arrived in prehistory, often associated with Arawakan or Cariban languages, but linguistic reconstruction has shown the Cariban dialect to be fragmentary (as a trade language), the primary language family being Arawakan.
Christopher Columbus reportedly sighted the island on his third voyage in 1498, but he did not land and the name he gave ("La Concepcion") was never used. By the 1520s, it was known as "La Granada," after the recently conquered city in Andalusia (and thus the Grenadines were "Los Granadillos"—or "little Granadas"). By the beginning of the 18th century, the name "la Grenade" in French, was in common use, eventually Anglicized to "Grenada".
Partly because of indigenous resistance, Grenada (and much of the Windwards) remained uncolonized for nearly 150 years after Columbus passed by. When the French finally settled Grenada in 1649 (see below), there were at least two, separate indigenous groups: “Caraibe” (Caribs) in the north and “Galibis” in the southeast. Evidence suggests the “Galibis” were more recent arrivals from the mainland (arriving around AD 1250), whereas the group the French called “Caraibe” were living in villages that had been (in some cases) continuously occupied for over millennium, per archaeological evidence. That is, the indigenous names were somewhat reversed in Grenada: the people the French called “Caribs” were likely descendants of the earliest peoples on Grenada, whereas the Galibis appear to have been more recent arrivals from the mainland (and thus, closer to the Carib stereotype).
17th century
English attempted settlement
In June 1609, the first attempt at settlement by Europeans was made by an English expedition of 24 colonizers led by Mossis Goldfry, Hall, Lull, and Robincon, who arrived in the ships Diana, the Penelope, and the Endeavour. The settlement was attacked and destroyed by the indigenous islanders and many tortured and killed. The few survivors were evacuated when the ships returned on 15 December 1609.
French settlement and conquest
On 17 March 1649, a French expedition of 203 men from Martinique, led by Jacques Dyel du Parquet who had been the Governor of Martinique on behalf of the Compagnie des Iles de l'Amerique (Company of the Isles of America) since 1637, landed at St. Georges Harbour and constructed a fortified settlement, which they named Fort Annunciation. A treaty was swiftly agreed between du Parquet and the indigenous Chief Kairouane to peacefully partition the island between the two communities. Du Parquet returned to Martinique leaving his cousin Jean Le Comte as Governor of Grenada. Conflict broke out between the French and the indigenous islanders in November 1649 and fighting lasted for five years until 1654, when the last opposition to the French on Grenada was crushed. Rather than surrender, Kairouane and his followers chose to throw themselves off a cliff, a fact celebrated in the poetry of Jan Carew. The island continued for some time after to suffer raids by war canoe parties from St. Vincent, whose inhabitants had aided the local Grenadian islanders in their struggle and continued to oppose the French.
French administration
On 27th Sep 1650, du Parquet bought Grenada, Martinique, and St. Lucia from the Compagnie des Iles de l'Amerique, which was dissolved, for the equivalent of £1160. In 1657 du Parquet sold Grenada to Jean de Faudoas, Comte de Sérillac for the equivalent of £1890. In 1664, King Louis XIV bought out the independent island owners and established the French West India Company. In 1674 the French West India Company was dissolved. Proprietary rule ended in Grenada, which became a French colony as a dependency of Martinique.
In 1675, Dutch privateers captured Grenada, but a French man-of-war arrived unexpectedly and recaptured the island.
18th century
French colony
In 1700, Grenada had a population of 257 whites, 53 coloureds, and 525 slaves. There were 3 sugar estates, 52 indigo plantations, 64 horses, and 569 head of cattle. Between 1705 and 1710 the French built Fort Royal at St. George's which is now known as Fort George. The collapse of the sugar estates and the introduction of cocoa and coffee in 1714 encouraged the development of smaller land holdings, and the island developed a land-owning yeoman farmer class. In 1738 the first hospital was constructed.
British colony
Grenada was captured by the British during the Seven Years' War on 4 March 1762 by Commodore Swanton without a shot being fired. Grenada was formally ceded to Britain by the Treaty of Paris on 10 February 1763. In 1766 the island was rocked by a severe earthquake. In 1767 a slave uprising was put down. In 1771 and again in 1775 the town of St. George, which was constructed solely of wood, was burnt to the ground – after which it was sensibly rebuilt using stone and brick. France recaptured Grenada between 2–4 July 1779 during the American War of Independence, after Comte d'Estaing stormed Hospital Hill. A British relief force was defeated in the naval Battle of Grenada on 6 July 1779. However the island was restored to Britain with the Treaty of Versailles four years later on 3 September 1783. In 1784 the first newspaper, the Grenada Chronicle, began publication.
Fédon's Rebellion
Julien Fédon, a mixed race owner of the Belvedere estate in the St. John Parish, launched a rebellion against British rule on the night of 2 March 1795, with coordinated attacks on the towns of Grenville, La Baye and Gouyave. Fédon was clearly influenced by the ideas emerging from the French Revolution, especially the Convention's abolition of slavery in 1794: he stated that he intended to make Grenada a "Black Republic just like Haiti". Fédon and his troops controlled all of Grenada except the parish of St George's, the seat of government, between March 1795 and June 1796. During those insurgent months 14,000 of Grenada's 28,000 slaves joined the revolutionary forces in order to write their own emancipation and transform themselves into "citizens"; some 7,000 of these self-liberated slaves would perish in the name of freedom. The British defeated Fédon's forces in late 1796, but they never caught Fédon himself, and his fate is unknown.
19th century
Early 19th century
In 1833, Grenada became part of the British Windward Islands Administration and remained so until 1958. Slavery was abolished in 1834. Nutmeg was introduced in 1843, when a merchant ship called in on its way to England from the East Indies.
Late 19th century
In 1857, the first East Indian immigrants arrived. In 1871 Grenada was connected to the telegraph. In 1872 the first secondary school was built. On 3 December 1877 the pure Crown colony model replaced Grenada's old representative system of government. On 3 December 1882, the largest wooden jetty ever built in Grenada was opened in Gouyave. In 1885, after Barbados left the British Windward Islands, the capital of the colonial confederation was moved from Bridgetown to St. George on Grenada. From 1889–1894 the 340 foot Sendall Tunnel was built for horse carriages.
Last colonial years 1900–1974
Early 20th century
The 1901 census showed that the population of the colony was 63,438. In 1917 T.A. Marryshow founded the Representative Government Association (RGA) to agitate for a new and participative constitutional dispensation for the Grenadian people. Partly as a result of Marryshow's lobbying the Wood Commission of 1921–1922 concluded that Grenada was ready for constitutional reform in the form of a 'modified' Crown Colony government. This modification granted Grenadians from 1925 the right to elect 5 of the 15 members of the Legislative Council, on a restricted property franchise enabling the wealthiest 4% of Grenadian adults to vote. In 1928 electricity was installed in St. George's. In 1943 Pearls Airport was opened. On 5 August 1944 the Island Queen schooner disappeared with the loss of all 56 passengers and 11 crew.
Towards independence:1950–1974
In 1950, Grenada had its constitution amended to increase the number of elected seats on the Legislative Council from 5 to 8, to be elected by full adult franchise at the 1951 election. In 1950 Eric Gairy founded the Grenada United Labour Party, initially as a trade union, which led the 1951 general strike for better working conditions. This sparked great unrest – so many buildings were set ablaze that the disturbances became known as the 'red sky' days – and the British authorities had to call in military reinforcements to help regain control of the situation. On 10 October 1951 Grenada held its first general elections on the basis of universal adult suffrage. United Labour won 6 of the 8 elected seats on the Legislative Council in both the 1951 and 1954 elections. However the Legislative Council had few powers at this time, with government remaining fully in the hands of the colonial authorities.
On 22 September 1955, Hurricane Janet hit Grenada, killing 500 people and destroying 75% of the nutmeg trees. A new political party, the Grenada National Party led by Herbert Blaize, contested the 1957 general election and with the cooperation of elected independent members took control of the Legislative Council from the Grenada United Labour Party. In 1958, the Windward Islands Administration was dissolved, and Grenada joined the Federation of the West Indies.
In 1960, another constitutional evolution established the post of Chief Minister, making the leader of the majority party in the Legislative Council, which at that time was Herbert Blaize, effective head of government. In March 1961 the Grenada United Labour Party won the general election and George E.D. Clyne became chief minister until Eric Gairy was elected in a by-election and took the role in August 1961. Also in 1961 the cruise ship the Bianca C caught fire in the St Georges harbor. All on board were rescued except for the engineer who was fatally burnt. In April 1962 Grenada's Administrator, the Queens representative on the island, James Lloyd suspended the constitution, dissolved the Legislative Council, and removed Eric Gairy as Chief Minister, following allegations concerning the Gairy's financial impropriety. At the 1962 general election the Grenada National Party won a majority and Herbert Blaize became Chief Minister for the second time.
After the Federation of the West Indies collapsed in 1962, the British government tried to form a small federation out of its remaining dependencies in the Eastern Caribbean. Following the failure of this second effort, the British and the islanders developed the concept of "associated statehood". Under the West Indies Act on 3 March 1967 (also known as the Associated Statehood Act) Grenada was granted full autonomy over its internal affairs. Herbert Blaize was the first Premier of the Associated State of Grenada from March to August 1967. Eric Gairy served as Premier from August 1967 until February 1974, as the Grenada United Labour Party won majorities in both the 1967 and 1972 general elections.
Independence, Revolution and US invasion: 1974–1983
Independence
On 7 February 1974, Grenada became a fully independent state. Grenada continued to practise a modified Westminster parliamentary system based on the British model with a governor general appointed by and representing the British monarch (head of state) and a prime minister who is both leader of the majority party and the head of government. Eric Gairy was independent Grenada's first prime minister serving from 1974 until his overthrow in 1979. Gairy won re-election in Grenada's first general election as an independent state in 1976; however, the opposition New Jewel Movement refused to recognize the result, claiming the poll was fraudulent, and so began working towards the overthrow of the Gairy regime by revolutionary means. In 1976 St. George's University was established.
The 1979 coup and revolutionary government
On March 13, 1979, the New Jewel Movement launched an armed revolution which removed Gairy, suspended the constitution, and established a People's Revolutionary Government (PRG), headed by Maurice Bishop who declared himself prime minister. His Marxist-Leninist government established close ties with Cuba, Nicaragua, and other communist bloc countries. All political parties except for the New Jewel Movement were banned and no elections were held during the four years of PRG rule.
The 1983 coups
On 14 October 1983, a power struggle within Bishop's ruling party ended with his house arrest. His erstwhile friend and rival, Deputy Prime Minister, Bernard Coard, briefly became Head of Government. This coup precipitated demonstrations in various parts of the island which eventually led to Bishop being freed from arrest by an impassioned crowd of his loyal supporters on Oct. 19, 1983. Bishop was soon recaptured by Grenadian soldiers loyal to the Coard faction and executed along with seven others, including three members of the cabinet.
That same day the Grenadian military under Gen. Hudson Austin took power in a second coup and formed a military government to run the country. A four-day total curfew was declared under which any civilian outside their home was subject to summary execution.
Invasion
A U.S.–Caribbean force invaded Grenada on October 25, 1983, in an action called Operation Urgent Fury, and swiftly defeated the Grenadian forces and their Cuban allies. During the fighting 45 Grenadians, 25 Cubans, and 19 Americans were killed. This action was taken in response to an appeal obtained from the governor general and to a request for assistance from the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, without consulting the island's head of state, Queen Elizabeth II, Commonwealth institutions or other usual diplomatic channels (as had been done in Anguilla). Furthermore, United States government military strategists feared that Soviet use of the island would enable the Soviet Union to project tactical power over the entire Caribbean region. U.S. citizens were evacuated, and constitutional government was resumed. The United States gave $48.4 million in economic assistance to Grenada in 1984.
In 1986, members of the PRG and the PRA were criminally tried for civilian killings associated with the Oct. 19 coup. Fourteen, including Coard and his wife, Phyllis, were sentenced to death for actions related to the murder of 11 people including Maurice Bishop. Three other defendants, all PRA soldiers, were convicted of the lesser charge of manslaughter and sentenced to 30 or more years. The convicted prisoners came to be known as the Grenada 17, and the subject of an ongoing international campaign for their release. In 1991, all the murder sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. In October 2003 Amnesty International issued a report which stated that their trial had been "gross violation of international standards governing the fairness of trials." In 2009, the last seven prisoners were released after serving 26 years.
Democracy restored: 1983 to present day
Post invasion politics
When US troops withdrew from Grenada in December 1983, Nicholas Braithwaite was appointed Prime Minister of an interim administration by the Governor General Sir Paul Scoon until elections could be organized.
On 28 October 1984, the new Point Salines International Airport was opened, which enabled Grenada to receive large commercial jets for the first time.
The first democratic elections since 1976 were held in December 1984 and were won by the Grenada National Party under Herbert Blaize who won 14 out of 15 seats in elections and served as Prime Minister until his death in December 1989. The NNP continued in power until 1989 but with a reduced majority. Five NNP parliamentary members, including two cabinet ministers, left the party in 1986–87 and formed the National Democratic Congress (NDC) which became the official opposition. In August 1989, Prime Minister Blaize broke with the GNP to form another new party, The National Party (TNP), from the ranks of the NNP. This split in the NNP resulted in the formation of a minority government until constitutionally scheduled elections in March 1990. Prime Minister Blaize died in December 1989 and was succeeded as prime minister by Ben Jones until after the 1990 elections.
The National Democratic Congress emerged from the 1990 elections as the strongest party, winning 7 of the fifteen available seats. Nicholas Brathwaite added 2 TNP members and 1 member of the Grenada United Labor Party (GULP) to create a 10-seat majority coalition. The governor general appointed him to be prime minister for a second time. Braithwaite resigned in Feb 1995 and was succeeded as Prime Minister by George Brizan who served until the Jun 1995 election.
In parliamentary elections on 20 June 1995, the NNP won 8 of the 15 seats and formed a government headed by Keith Mitchell. The NNP maintained and affirmed its hold on power when it took all 15 parliamentary seats in the January 1999 elections. Mitchell went on to win the 2003 elections with a reduced majority of 8 of the 15 seats and served as Prime Minister for a record 13 years until his defeat in 2008.
The 2001 census showed that the population of Grenada was 100,895.
The 2008 election was won by the National Democratic Congress under Tillman Thomas with 11 of the 15 seats.
In 2009, Point Salines International Airport was renamed Maurice Bishop International Airport in tribute to the former Prime Minister.
Keith Mitchell in power
In February 2013, the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC) lost the election. The opposition New National Party (NNP) won all 15 seats in the general election. Keith Mitchell, leader of NNP, who had served three terms as prime minister between 1995 and 2008, returned to power.
In December 2014, Grenada joined Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) as a full member. Prime minister Mitchell said that the membership was a natural extension of the co-operation Grenada have had over the years with both Cuba and Venezuela.
Mitchell has led NNP to win all 15 seats in the House of Representatives on 3 separate occasions. In November 2021, Prime Minister Keith Mitchell said that the upcoming general elections which are constitutionally due no later than June 2023, will be the last one for him.
Truth and reconciliation commission
In 2000–02, much of the controversy of the late 1970s and early 1980s was once again brought into the public consciousness with the opening of the truth and reconciliation commission. The commission was chaired by a Catholic priest, Father Mark Haynes, and was tasked with uncovering injustices arising from the PRA, Bishop's regime, and before. It held a number of hearings around the country. The commission was formed because of a school project. Brother Robert Fanovich, head of Presentation Brothers' College (PBC) in St. George's tasked some of his senior students with conducting a research project into the era and specifically into the fact that Maurice Bishop's body was never discovered. Their project attracted a great deal of attention, including from the Miami Herald and the final report was published in a book written by the boys called Big Sky, Little Bullet. It also uncovered that there was still a lot of resentment in Grenadian society resulting from the era, and a feeling that there were many injustices still unaddressed. The commission began shortly after the boys concluded their project.
Hurricane Ivan
On September 7, 2004, Grenada was hit directly by category four Hurricane Ivan. The hurricane destroyed about 85% of the structures on the island, including the prison and the prime minister's residence, killed thirty-nine people, and destroyed most of the nutmeg crop, Grenada's economic mainstay. Grenada's economy was set back several years by Hurricane Ivan's impact. Hurricane Emily ravaged the island's north end in June 2005.
See also
British colonization of the Americas
French colonization of the Americas
History of North America
History of the Americas
History of the British West Indies
History of the Caribbean
List of governors of the Windward Islands
List of heads of government of Grenada
Politics of Grenada
Spanish colonization of the Americas
West Indies Federation
References
Further reading
Grenade, Wendy C. ed. The Grenada Revolution: Reflections and Lessons (University Press of Mississippi; 2015) 320 pages; $political history of the 1970s and 1980s
Kurlansky, Mark. 1992. A Continent of Islands: Searching for the Caribbean Destiny. Addison-Wesley Publishing. .
Puri, Shalini: The Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present - Operation Urgent Memory Palgrave Macmillan US 2014
External links
Background Note: Grenada
History of the Invasion of Grenada from the Dean Peter Krogh Foreign Affairs Digital Archives | [
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12130 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography%20of%20Grenada | Geography of Grenada | Grenada is an island country located between the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean, north of Trinidad and Tobago. It is located at . There are no large inland bodies of water on the island, which consists entirely of the state of Grenada. The coastline is 121 km long. The island has 15 constituencies and speaks English and Grenadian Creole. It is volcanic in origin and its topography is mountainous.
Natural resources include timber, tropical fruit and deepwater harbours.
Grenada and its largely uninhabited outlying territories are the most southerly of the Windward Islands. The Grenadine Islands chain consists of some 600 islets; those south of the Martinique Channel belong to Grenada, while those north of the channel are part of the nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Located about 160 kilometers north of Venezuela, at approximately 12° north latitude and 61° west longitude, Grenada and its territories occupy a small area of 433 square kilometers. Grenada, known as the Spice Isle because of its production of nutmeg and mace, is the largest at 310 square kilometers, or about the size of the city of Detroit. The island is oval shaped and framed by a jagged southern coastline; its maximum width is thirty-four kilometers, and its maximum length is nineteen kilometers. St. George's, the capital and the nation's most important harbour, is favorably situated near a lagoon on the southwestern coast. Of all the islands belonging to Grenada, only two are of consequence: Carriacou, with a population of a few thousand, and its neighbour Petit Martinique, roughly 40 kilometers northeast of Grenada and populated by some 700 inhabitants.
Terrain
Part of the volcanic chain in the Lesser Antilles arc, Grenada and its possessions generally vary in elevation from under 300 meters to over 600 meters above sea level. Grenada is more rugged and densely foliated than its outlying possessions, but other geographical conditions are more similar. Grenada's landmass rises from a narrow, coastal plain in a generally north–south trending axis of ridges and narrow valleys. Mount St. Catherine is the highest peak at 840 meters.
Although many of the rocks and soils are of volcanic origin, the volcanic cones dotting Grenada are long dormant. The only known active volcano in the area is Kick 'em Jenny, just north between Grenada and Carriacou. Some of the drainage features on Grenada remain from its volcanic past. There are a few crater lakes, the largest of which is Grand Etang. The swift upper reaches of rivers, which occasionally overflow and cause flooding and landslides, generally cut deeply into the conic slopes. By contrast, many of the water courses in the lowlands tend to be sluggish and meandering.
Table of Islands
Climate
The Grenadian climate is tropical, tempered by northeast trade winds.
The abundance of water is primarily caused by the tropical, wet climate. Yearly precipitation, largely generated by the warm and moisture-laden northeasterly trade winds, varies from more than on the windward mountainsides to less than in the lowlands. The greatest monthly totals are recorded throughout Grenada from June through November, the months when tropical storms and hurricanes are most likely to occur. Rainfall is less pronounced from December through May, when the equatorial low-pressure system moves south. Similarly, the highest humidities, usually close to 80 percent, are recorded during the rainy months, and values from 68 to 78 percent are registered during the drier period. Temperatures averaging are constant throughout the year, however, with slightly higher readings in the lowlands. Nevertheless, diurnal ranges within a 24-hour period are appreciable: between during the day and between at night.
Statistics
Area
Total: 348.5 km²
Land: 344 km²
Maritime claims
Territorial sea:
Exclusive economic zone: and
Land use
Arable land: 8.82%
Permanent crops: 20.59%
Other: 70.59% (2012 est.)
Irrigated land
2.19 km² (2003)
Natural hazards
Lies on edge of hurricane belt; hurricane season lasts from June to November
Extreme points
Northernmost point – Gun Point, Carriacou
Northernmost point (Grenada only) - Tanga Langue, Saint Patrick Parish
Easternmost point – east coast of Petite Martinique island
Easternmost point (Grenada only) - Artiste Point, Saint Andrew Parish
Southernmost point – Glover Island, Saint George Parish
Southernmost point (Grenada only) - Prickly Point, Saint George Parish
Westernmost point – Point Salines, Saint George Parish
Highest point – Mount Saint Catherine: 840 m
Lowest point – Caribbean Sea: 0 m
Environment - international agreements
Party to: Biodiversity, Climate Change, Desertification, Endangered Species, Law of the Sea, Ozone Layer Protection, Whaling
Geography - note
The administration of the islands of the Grenadines group is divided between Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (northern Grenadines) and Grenada (southern Grenadines)
See also
Grenadines
List of cities in Grenada
List of islands of Grenada
List of rivers of Grenada
List of volcanoes in Grenada
Parishes of Grenada
Notes
References
External links
Grenada geography-related lists
Islands
Subdivisions of Grenada | [
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12131 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics%20of%20Grenada | Demographics of Grenada | This article is about the demographic features of the population of Grenada, including population density, ethnicity, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects of the population.
Population
According to the 2011 census Grenada has 105,539 inhabitants. The estimated population of is ().
Fertility rate
The fertility rate in Grenada was 2.21 in 2013.
Vital statistics
Other demographics statistics
Demographic statistics according to the World Population Review in 2019:
One birth every 288 minutes
One death every 480 minutes
One net migrant every 1440 minutes
Net gain of one person every 1440 minutes
Demographic statistics according to the CIA World Factbook, unless otherwise indicated:
Nationality
noun: Grenadian(s)
adjective: Grenadian
Population
108,333 (January 2019 est.)
Ethnic groups
African descent 82.4%, mixed 13.3%, East Indian 2.2%, other 1.3%, unspecified 0.9% (2011 est.)
Age structure
0-14 years: 23.84% (male 13,901 /female 12,851)
15-24 years: 14.61% (male 8,196 /female 8,201)
25-54 years: 40.27% (male 23,121 /female 22,067)
55-64 years: 10.97% (male 6,284 /female 6,023)
65 years and over: 10.31% (male 5,377 /female 6,186) (2018 est.)
Median age
total: 32.1 years. Country comparison to the world: 105th
male: 32 years
female: 32.2 years (2018 est.)
Birth rate
15.2 births/1,000 population (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 122nd
Death rate
8.2 deaths/1,000 population (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 83rd
Total fertility rate
2 children born/woman (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 117th
Net migration rate
-2.8 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 174th
Population growth rate
0.42% (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 161st
Languages
English (official), French patois
Religions
Protestant 49.2% (includes Pentecostal 17.2%, Seventh Day Adventist 13.2%, Anglican 8.5%, Baptist 3.2%, Church of God 2.4%, Evangelical 1.9%, Methodist 1.6%, other 1.2%), Roman Catholic 36%, Jehovah's Witness 1.2%, Rastafarian 1.2%, other 5.5%, none 5.7%, unspecified 1.3% (2011 est.)
Life expectancy at birth
total population: 74.8 years
male: 72.1 years
female: 77.6 years (2018 est.)
Dependency ratios
total dependency ratio: 50.7 (2015 est.)
youth dependency ratio: 39.9 (2015 est.)
elderly dependency ratio: 10.8 (2015 est.)
potential support ratio: 9.3 (2015 est.)
Urbanization
urban population: 36.3% of total population (2018)
rate of urbanization: 0.76% annual rate of change (2015-20 est.)
Obesity - adult prevalence rate
21.3% (2016). Country comparison to the world: 90th
Literacy
definition: age 15 and over can read and write (2014 est.)
total population: 98.6%
male: 98.6%
female: 98.6% (2014 est.)
School life expectancy (primary to tertiary education)
total: 17 years
male: 16 years
female: 17 years (2017)
Ethnic groups
The vast majority of the population of Grenada are of African descent (89.4% at the 2001 census). There is also a significant mixed population (8.2%), along with a small European origin minority (0.4%), East Indians (1.6%), and there are small numbers of Lebanese/Syrians (0.04%) and Chinese (0.02%).
Amerindians
Grenada has a small population of pre-Columbian native Caribs. According to the 2001 census there are only 125 Caribs remaining (0.12% of the total population).
Languages
Apart from a 114-year period of French occupancy (1649-1763) English has been the country's official language. However, over time the minority of the population use a colloquial spoken language considered to be either English-based creole languages or (Grenadian Creole English) and which is said reflects the African, European and Indian heritage of the nation.
The Grenadian creoles originally influenced by French, now contain elements from a variety of Grenadian Creole and a little of the African languages. Grenadian Creole French is mainly spoken in smaller rural areas, but today it can only be heard in a few small pockets of the society. Grenadian Creole French is mainly known as Patois and may have similarities to the Saint Lucian Creole French.
It is believed that the one-time native or indigenous languages were Iñeri and Karina.
Religion
Historically the religious makeup of the islands of Grenada covers the period from first European occupation in the 17th century. This has always been predominantly Christian and largely Roman Catholic (due to the first occupants being French) and from the 1891 census we get a snapshot of the population and its religious proclivities - over half were Roman Catholic (55%), a third were Church of England (36%), others listed were Wesleyan (6%) and Presbyterian (0.88%).
More recently, according to the 2001 census, 89.1% percent of the population of Grenada is considered Christian, 1.5% is non-Christian and 3.6% has no religion or stated "other" (5.7%).
Roughly one half of Christians are Roman Catholics (44.6% of the total population), a reflection of early French influence on the island, and one half are Protestant. Anglicanism constitutes the largest Protestant group, with 11.5% of the population. Pentecostals are the second largest group (11.3%), followed by Seventh-day Adventists (10.5% of the population). Other Christians include Baptists (2.9%), Church of God (2.6%), Methodists (1.8%), Evangelicals (1.6%) Jehovah's Witnesses (1.1%), and Brethren Christian (0.5%).
The number of non-Christians is small. These religious groups include the Rastafarian Movement (1.1% of the population), Hinduism (0.2%) and Muslims (0.3%).
References
Grenadian society | [
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12132 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics%20of%20Grenada | Politics of Grenada | The politics of Grenada takes place in a framework of a parliamentary representative democracy, whereby the prime minister is the head of government. Grenada is an independent Commonwealth realm. It is governed under a multi-party parliamentary system whose political and legal traditions closely follow those of the United Kingdom; it has a prime minister and a cabinet, and a bicameral Parliament with an elected House of Representatives and an appointed Senate. Executive power is exercised by the government. Legislative power is vested in both the government and parliament. Constitutional safeguards include freedom of speech, press, worship, motion, and association. Grenada is a member of the eastern Caribbean court system. The Judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislature. Jurisprudence is based on English common law.
Citizens enjoy a wide range of civil and political rights guaranteed by the constitution. Grenada's constitution provides citizens with the right to change their government peacefully. Citizens exercise this right through periodic, free, and fair elections held on the basis of universal suffrage.
Grenada has two significant political parties, both moderate: the National Democratic Congress (liberal) and the New National Party (conservative). Minor parties include the up-and-coming Progress Party, which is led by Kerry Velon Simmons – one of the youngest active political leaders, the left-of-center Maurice Bishop Patriotic Movement (MBPM, organized by the pro-Bishop survivors of the October 1983 anti-Bishop coup) and the populist GULP of former Prime Minister Eric Gairy.
At the July 2008, election the NDC won a comfortable seven-seat majority over the government of former Prime Minister Keith Mitchell. New Prime Minister Tillman Thomas formed a government after narrowly losing by one seat to Mitchell's NNP in the November 2003 election. In elections held on February 19, 2013, Keith Mitchell's NNP swept all fifteen parliamentary seats. This historic victory was a repeat of the 1999 elections in which the NNP also swept all 15 seats. Prime Minister Mitchell has the distinction as being the only Caribbean politician to sweep all seats on two occasions. Constitutionally, this development means that there is no official opposition in Parliament. As such, Governor General Carlye Glean, who is the titular head of state, will appoint 5 Senators to the Upper House, who will serve as the de facto opposition.
Security in Grenada is maintained by the 650 members of the Royal Grenada Police Force (RGPF), which included an 80-member paramilitary special services unit (SSU) and a 30-member coast guard. The U.S. Army and the U.S. Coast Guard provide periodic training and material support for the SSU and the coast guard.
Executive branch
As head of state, Queen Elizabeth II is represented in Grenada by a governor general who acts on the advice of the prime minister and the cabinet. The leader of the majority party serves as Prime Minister and head of government. The cabinet consists of members, including the prime minister and ministers of executive departments. They answer politically to the House of Assembly. The Governor General appoints the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court on the advice of the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. The Governor General appoints the other justices with the advice of a judicial commission. The Privy Council of the United Kingdom serves as the highest appellate court.
|Monarch
|Queen Elizabeth II
|
|6 February 1952
|-
|Governor-General
|Cécile La Grenade
|
|7 May 2013
|-
|Prime Minister
|Keith Mitchell
|New National Party
|20 February 2013
|}
Legislative branch
The Parliament has two chambers. The House of Representatives has 15 members, elected for a five-year term in single-seat constituencies. The Senate has 13 appointed members, 10 appointed by the government and three by the leader of the opposition).
Political parties and elections
Judicial branch
The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council was the highest court until 1979, when People's Law No. 84 was passed terminating appeals from the Grenadian courts. Appeals to the J.C.P.C. was restored in 1991.
West Indies Associated States Supreme Court or Eastern Caribbean States Supreme Court is the judiciary of Grenada from 1967 to 1979 and since 1991. An associate judge resides in Grenada.
From 1979 to 1991 the court system comprises the High Court and the Court of Appeals, which replaced the Eastern Caribbean States Supreme Court established under the West Indies Act of 1967. Grenada was readmitted into the Eastern Caribbean States Supreme Court in 1991.
Administrative divisions
6 parishes and 1 dependency*; Carriacou and Petit Martinique*, Saint Andrew, Saint David, Saint George, Saint John, Saint Mark, Saint Patrick
International organization participation
ACP, C, Caricom, CDB, ECLAC, FAO, G-77, IBRD, ICAO, ICFTU, ICRM, IDA, IFAD, IFC, IFRCS, ILO, IMF, IMO, Interpol, IOC, ISO (subscriber), ITU, LAES, NAM, OAS, OECS, OPANAL, OPCW, UN, UNCTAD, UNESCO, UNIDO, UPU, WCL, WHO, WIPO, WToO, WTrO, frat
References | [
0.19669806957244873,
0.34103924036026,
0.05297296494245529,
-0.2286364883184433,
0.11017998307943344,
-0.16545091569423676,
-0.1775171458721161,
0.5608388185501099,
-1.076355218887329,
0.1351999193429947,
-0.593647837638855,
0.6727868914604187,
-0.11207914352416992,
0.22409363090991974,
... |
12133 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy%20of%20Grenada | Economy of Grenada | The economy of Grenada is a largely tourism-based, small and open economy. Over the past two decades, the main thrust of Grenada's economy has shifted from agriculture to services, with tourism serving as the leading foreign currency earning sector. The country's principal export crops are the spices nutmeg and mace (Grenada is the world’s second largest producer of nutmeg after Indonesia). Other crops for export include cocoa, citrus fruits, bananas, cloves, and cinnamon. Manufacturing industries in Grenada operate mostly on a small scale, including production of beverages and other foodstuffs, textiles, and the assembly of electronic components for export.
Economic growth picked up in the late 1990s following slow growth and domestic fiscal adjustment in early years of the decade. Despite an expansionary fiscal policy, the public debt remained moderate at around 50 percent of GDP as deficits were financed partly by privatization receipts. Since 2001, economic growth declined. The decline was caused by adverse shocks, such as a slowdown in the global economy and natural disasters. To deal with the shocks, fiscal policy became more expansionary, while privatization receipts declined. As a result, public debt increased sharply to near 110 percent of GDP in 2003. Economic conditions worsened when Hurricane Ivan hit the country in September 2004; progress in fiscal consolidation was impeded as government revenues fell and policy priority was shifted to post-hurricane relief.
Although reconstruction has proceeded quickly with significant aid from the international community, tourism and agricultural activities remain weak and nearly offset the stimulus from the reconstruction boom. The country is still facing the difficult task of reconstruction and recovery, while public debt is unsustainable and the government faces large financing gaps. In the years ahead, reinvigorating growth will be a high priority, and continued efforts are needed to address vulnerabilities.
Economic Performance
After experiencing GDP growth averaging nearly six percent a year in the late 1990s, economic growth declined considerably after 2001 as a result of a decline in the tourism industry following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and damages caused by several hurricanes.
The economy of Grenada was brought to a near standstill in September 2004 by Hurricane Ivan, which damaged or destroyed 90 percent of the country's buildings, including some tourist facilities. In July 2005 Hurricane Emily struck Grenada again as the country was still recovering from the impact of Hurricane Ivan. Besides the negative impacts to the tourism industry, the two devastating hurricanes destroyed or significantly damaged a large percentage of Grenada’s tree crops, which may take years to recover.
As the damage of Hurricane Ivan to the economy exceeded 200 percent of GDP, economic growth registered a negative growth of three percent in 2004, compared with a positive growth rate of 5.8 percent in 2003. Although signs of recovery have been seen in Grenada after the damage inflicted by Hurricanes Ivan and Emily, economic conditions remain difficult; GDP is projected at a growth rate of only one percent for 2005.
With the absence of sustained growth, the fiscal situation started to deteriorate after 2001 reflecting a continued expansionary policy with sharp increase in spending on social sectors, the wage bill, and goods and services. As a result, the fiscal deficit rose to 8.5 percent of GDP in 2001 from 3.2 percent in 2000. The fiscal situation remained shaky in 2002 with the deficit widening to 19.2 percent of GDP due to dampened output from Tropical Storm Lili. As the economic began to recover in 2003, the government began to take steps for fiscal consolidation, and the fiscal deficit fell to 4.8 percent of GDP. But progress in fiscal consolidation was impeded in 2004 as the government policy changed abruptly to post-hurricane relief. Meanwhile, government revenues decreased as a result of the impact of the hurricanes on the economy.
While economic growth has declined since 2001 due to adverse shocks, including slowdown in the global economy and natural disasters, fiscal policy became more expansionary when privatization receipts declined. As a result, public debt has increased sharply to over 100 percent of GDP since 2002; it remained as high as near 130 percent of GDP in 2004.
Grenada is a member of the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank (ECCB), which manages monetary policy and issues a common currency for all the member countries. Inflation has remained low and stable within the framework of the currency board arrangement, with inflation averaging at two percent over the past 15 years.
Balance of Payments
Grenada's current account balance has remained in large deficit due to its heavy dependence on import of most consumer goods and domestic investment. Following an average deficit of around 44 percent of GDP from 1997 to 2000, the current account deficit has increased to over 35 percent of GDP since 2001 due to higher import demand combined with lower receipts from tourism and nutmeg exports. The current account deficits are financed by inflows of foreign direct investment, official grants and loans, and commercial borrowing by the private sector.
Grenada’s economy is vulnerable to external shocks considering its high dependence on tourism, exports, and imports of most of the goods that are consumed or invested domestically. It is also prone to other adverse shocks such as natural disasters.
Regional Situation
In the aftermath of Hurricanes Ivan and Emily, the priority now for Grenada is to continue the recovery process necessary to restore the infrastructure that was devastated by the hurricanes. The international community has disbursed significant amounts of aid, including financial help under the International Monetary Fund's emergency assistance policy for natural disasters and assistance from the World Bank and the Caribbean Development Bank.
In the context of regional economic development, further integration into the Eastern Caribbean regional economy will help enhance Grenada’s competitiveness and increase its scale of economy in production, marketing and distribution.
Statistics
GDP:
purchasing power parity - $1.401 billion (2015 est.)
GDP - real growth rate:
4.6% (2015 est.)
GDP - per capita:
purchasing power parity - $13,100 (2015 est.)
GDP - composition by sector:
agriculture: 6.2%
industry: 14.3%
services: 79.5% (2015 est.)
Population below poverty line:
38% (2008 est.)
Household income or consumption by percentage share:
lowest 10%: NA%
highest 10%: NA%
Inflation rate (consumer prices):
1.3% (2015)
Labor force:
59,900 (2013)
Labor force - by occupation:
services 69%, agriculture 11%, industry 20% (2008 est.)
Unemployment rate:
33.5% (2013)
Budget:
revenues: $191.8 million
expenditures: $230.9 million (2012 est)
Industries:
food and beverages, textiles, light assembly operations, tourism, construction
Industrial production growth rate:
-1% (2015 est.)
Electricity - production:
193 GWh (2012 est.)
Electricity - production by source:
fossil fuel: 98.2%
hydro: 0%
nuclear: 0%
other: 1.4% (2012 est.)
Electricity - consumption:
178 GWh (2012 est.)
Electricity - exports:
0 kWh (2013 est.)
Electricity - imports:
0 kWh (2013 est.)
Agriculture - products:
bananas, cocoa, nutmeg, mace, citrus, avocados, root crops, sugarcane, maize, vegetables
Exports:
$43.8 million (2015 est.)
Exports - commodities:
nutmeg, bananas, cocoa, fruit and vegetables, clothing, mace
Exports - partners:
Nigeria 44.7%, St. Lucia 10.8%, Antigua and Barbuda 7.3%, St. Kitts and Nevis 6.6%, Dominica 6.6%, United States 5.8% (2015)
Imports:
$310.4 million (2015 est.)
Imports - commodities:
food, manufactured goods, machinery, chemicals, fuel
Imports - partners:
Trinidad and Tobago 49.6%, United States 16.4% (2015)
Debt - external:
$679 million (2013 est.)
Economic aid - recipient:
$8.3 million (1995)
Currency:
1 East Caribbean dollar (EC$) = 100 cents
Exchange rates:
East Caribbean dollars (EC$) per US$1 – 2.7000 (fixed rate since 1976)
Fiscal year:
calendar year
References
Grenada | [
0.21334132552146912,
0.5964729189872742,
-0.20173825323581696,
-0.4156787395477295,
0.27372831106185913,
0.31413722038269043,
-0.14703401923179626,
1.1067495346069336,
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0.040328994393348694,
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0.39938247203826904,
-0.30292809009552,
0.657212972640991... |
12135 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport%20in%20Grenada | Transport in Grenada | Transport in Grenada consists of a network of highways connecting major population centres, airports and ports and harbours along the coast. Grenada has no merchant marine.
There is one industrial railway, used by a rum distillery.
Highways:
total:
1,127 km
paved:
687 km
Drivers in Grenada drive on the left hand side of the road. Visitors not accustomed to this should be extra cautious when driving on the island's highways and roads.
unpaved:
440 km (1999 est.)
Grenada's roads can pose hazardous driving conditions, including aggressive drivers and sharp curves.
Grenada has several ports of entry including seaports, bays and harbours:
St. George's
St. David's Bay
Grenville
Hillsborough on Carriacou
Airports:
3 (1999 est.)
Airports - with paved runways:
total:
3
2,438 to 3,047 m:
1
914 to 1,523 m:
1
under 914 m:
1 (2006 est.)
References
CIA World Fact Book | [
-0.07574043422937393,
0.407355934381485,
0.08428522199392319,
-0.05077050253748894,
0.25770995020866394,
0.29306328296661377,
-0.08356237411499023,
0.44349443912506104,
-0.8909898996353149,
-0.6123917698860168,
-0.4809393286705017,
0.4233097732067108,
-0.1485440582036972,
0.096090786159038... |
12137 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign%20relations%20of%20Grenada | Foreign relations of Grenada | The United States, Venezuela, Cuba, and the People's Republic of China have embassies in Grenada. Grenada has been recognized by most members of the United Nations and maintains diplomatic missions in the United Kingdom, the United States, Venezuela, and Canada.
Grenada is a member of the Caribbean Development Bank, CARICOM, the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), and the Commonwealth of Nations. It joined the United Nations in 1974, and the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Organization of American States in 1975. Grenada also is a member of the Eastern Caribbean's Regional Security System (RSS).
In December 2014, Grenada joined Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) as a full member. Prime minister Mitchell said that the membership was a natural extension of the co-operation Grenada have had over the years with both Cuba and Venezuela.
Bilateral relations
International recognition of Grenada
UN member states
Non-UN member states
Grenada and the Commonwealth of Nations
Grenada has been an independent Commonwealth realm since 1974.
Even under the People's Revolutionary Government, Grenada was never declared a republic, but remained a Commonwealth realm, albeit, under the dictatorship of the New Jewel Movement's leader, Maurice Bishop.
Illicit drugs
Small-scale cannabis cultivation; lesser transshipment point for cannabis and cocaine to the US.
See also
List of diplomatic missions in Grenada
List of diplomatic missions of Grenada
References
Government of Grenada
Politics of Grenada
Grenada and the Commonwealth of Nations | [
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-0.20901793241500854,
0.7056530714035... |
12148 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History%20of%20Guam | History of Guam | The history of Guam starts with the early arrival around 2000 BC of Austronesian people known today as the CHamorus. The CHamorus then developed a "pre-contact" society, that was Spanish colonized by the Spanish in the 17th century. The present American rule of the island began with the 1898 Spanish–American War. Guam's history of colonialism is the longest among the Pacific islands.
Guam prior to European contact
Migrations
The Mariana Islands were the first islands settled by humans in Remote Oceania. Incidentally it is also the first and the longest of the ocean-crossing voyages of the Austronesian peoples into Remote Oceania, and is separate from the later Polynesian settlement of the rest of Remote Oceania. They were first settled around 1500 to 1400 BC by migrants departing from the Philippines.
Archeological studies of human activity on the islands has revealed potteries with red-slipped, circle-stamped and punctate-stamped designs found in the Mariana Islands dating between 1500 and 1400 BC. These artifacts show similar aesthetics to pottery found in Northern and Central Philippines, the Nagsabaran (Cagayan Valley) pottery, which flourished during the period between 2000 and 1300 BC.
Comparative and historical linguistics also indicate that the CHamoru language is most closely related to the Philippine subfamily of the Austronesian languages, instead of the Oceanic subfamily of the languages of the rest of Remote Oceania.
Mitchondrial DNA and whole genome sequencing of the CHamoru people strongly support an ancestry from the Philippines. Genetic analysis of pre-Latte period skeletons in Guam also show that they do not have Australo-Melanesian ("Papuan") ancestry which rules out origins from the Bismarck Archipelago, New Guinea, or eastern Indonesia. The Lapita culture itself (the ancestral branch of the Polynesian migrations) is younger than the first settlement of the Marianas (the earliest Lapita artifacts are dated to around 1350 to 1300 BCE), indicating that they originated from separate migration voyages.
Nevertheless, DNA analysis also show close genetic relationship between ancient settlers of the Marianas and early Lapita settlers in the Bismarck Archipelago. This may indicate that both the Lapita culture and the Marianas were settled from direct migrations from the Philippines, or that early settlers from the Marianas voyaged further southwards into the Bismarcks and reconnected with the Lapita people.
The Marianas also later established contact and received migrations from the Caroline Islands at around the first millennium CE. This brought new pottery styles, language, genes, and the hybrid Polynesian breadfruit.
The period 900 to 1700 CE of the Marianas, immediately before and during the Spanish colonization, is known as the Latte period. It is characterized by rapid cultural change, most notably by the massive megalithic latte stones (also spelled latde or latti). These were composed of the haligi pillars capped with another stone called tasa (which prevented rodents from climbing the posts). These served as supports for the rest of the structure which was made of wood. Remains of structures made with similar wooden posts have also been found. Human graves have also been found in front of latte structures, The Latte period was also characterized by the introduction of rice agriculture, which is unique in the pre-contact Pacific Islands.
The reasons for these changes are still unclear, but it is believed that it may have resulted from a third wave of migrants from Island Southeast Asia. Comparisons with other architectural traditions makes it likely that this third migration wave were again from the Philippines, or from eastern Indonesia (either Sulawesi or Sumba), all of which have a tradition of raised buildings with capstones. Interestingly, the word haligi ("pillar") is also used in various languages throughout the Philippines; while the CHamoru word guma ("house") closely resembles the Sumba word uma.
Ancient Chamoru society
Most of what is known about Pre-Contact ("Ancient") CHamorus comes from legends and myths, archaeological evidence, Jesuit missionary accounts, and observations from visiting scientists like Otto von Kotzebue and Louis de Freycinet.
When Europeans first arrived on Guam, CHamoru society roughly fell into three classes: matao (upper class), achaot (middle class), and mana'chang (lower class). The matao were located in the coastal villages, which meant they had the best access to fishing grounds while the mana'chang were located in the interior of the island. Matao and mana'chang rarely communicated with each other, and matao often used achaot as a go-between.
There were also "makhanas" (shamans) and "suruhanus" (herb doctors), skilled in healing and medicine. Belief in spirits of ancient Chamorros called Taotao Mona still persists as remnant of pre-European society. Early European explorers noted the sakman, CHamorus' fast sailing vessels used for trading with other islands of Micronesia.
Latte
The latte stones were not a recent development in Contact CHamoru society. The latte stone consists of a head and a base shaped out of limestone. Like the Easter Island Moai statues, there is plenty of speculation over how this was done by a society without machines or metal, but the generally accepted view is that the head and base were etched out of the ground by sharp adzes and picks (possibly with the use of fire), and carried to the assembly area by an elaborate system of ropes and logs. The latte stone was used as a part of the raised foundation for a magalahi (matao chief) house, although they may have also been used for canoe sheds.
Archaeologists using carbon-dating have broken Pre-Contact Guam (i.e. CHamoru) history into three periods: "Pre-Latte" (BC 2000? to AD 1) "Transitional Pre-Latte" (AD 1 to AD 1000), and "Latte" (AD 1000 to AD 1521). Archaeological evidence also suggests that CHamoru society was on the verge of another transition phase by 1521, as latte stones became bigger.
Assuming the stones were used for chiefly houses, it can be argued that CHamoru society was becoming more stratified, either from population growth or the arrival of new people. The theory remains tenuous, however, due to lack of evidence, but if proven correct, will further support the idea that Pre-Contact CHamorus lived in a vibrant and dynamic environment.
Spanish era
Magellan's first encounter with Guam
The first known contact between Guam and Western Europe occurred when a Spanish expedition led by Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese explorer sailing for the King of Spain, King Charles I, later King Charles V (Holy Roman Emperor), arrived with his 3-ship fleet in Guam on March 6, 1521 after a long voyage across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, from Spain. History credits the village of Umatac as his landing place, but drawings from the navigator's diary suggest that Magellan may have landed in Tumon in northern Guam. The expedition had started out in Spain with five ships. By the time they reached the Marianas they were down to three ships and nearly half the crew, due to storms, diseases and the mutiny in one ship which destroyed the expedition. Tired and hungry from their long discovery voyage, the crew prepared to go ashore and restore provisions in Guam. However, the excited native CHamorus who had a different concept of ownership, based on subsistence living. Locals canoed out to the ships and began helping themselves to everything that was not nailed down to the deck of the galleons. "The aboriginals were willing to engage in barter... Their love of gain overcame every other consideration." hen Magellan arrived on Guam, he was greeted by hundreds of small outrigger canoes that appeared to be flying over the water due to their considerable speed. These outrigger canoes were called Proas and resulted in Magellan naming Guam Islas de las Velas Latinas ("Islands of the Lateen sails"). Antonio Pigafetta (one of Magellan's original 18) said that the name was "Island of Sails," but he also writes that the inhabitants "entered the ships and stole whatever they could lay their hands on," including "the small boat that was fastened to the poop of the flagship." "Those people are poor, but ingenious and very thievish, on account of which we called those three islands Islas de los Ladrones ("Islands of thieves")."
After a few shots were fired from the Trinidad's big guns, the natives were frightened off from the ship and retreated into the surrounding jungle. Magellan was eventually able to obtain rations and offered iron, a highly prized material, in exchange for fresh fruits, vegetables, and water. Details of this visit, the first in history between Westerners and a Pacific island people, come from the journal of Antonio Pigafetta, the expedition's scribe and one of only 18 crew members to eventually survive the circumnavigation of the globe, completed by Juan Sebastian Elcano.
Spanish colonization
Despite Magellan's visit, Guam was not officially claimed by Spain until 1565 by Miguel Lopez de Legazpi. However, the island was not actually colonized until the 17th century.
On June 15, 1668, the galleon San Diego arrived at the shore of the island of Guam. Jesuit missionaries led by Diego Luis de San Vitores arrived on Guam to introduce Christianity and develop trade. The Spanish taught the CHamorus to cultivate maize (corn), raise cattle, and tan hides, as well as to adopt western-style clothing. They also introduced the Spanish language and culture. Once Christianity was established, the Catholic Church became the focal point for village activities, as in other Spanish cities. Since 1565, Guam became a regular port-of-call for the Spanish galleons that crossed the Pacific Ocean from Mexico to the Philippines.
Chief Quipuha was the maga'lahi, or high ranking male, in the area of Hagåtña when the Spanish landed off its shores in 1668. Quipuha welcomed the missionaries and consented to be baptized by San Vitores as Juan Quipuha. Quipuha granted the lands on which the first Catholic Church in Guam was constructed in 1669. Chief Quipuha died in 1669 but his policy of allowing the Spanish to establish a base on Guam had important consequences for the future of the island. It also facilitated the Manila Galleon trade.
A few years later, Jesuit priest San Vitores and his assistant, Pedro Calungsod, were killed by Chief Mata'pang of Tomhom (Tumon), allegedly for baptizing the Chief's baby girl without the Chief's consent. This was in April 1672. Many CHamorus at the time believed baptisms killed babies: because priests would baptize infants already near death (in the belief that this was the only way to save such children's souls), baptism seemed to many CHamorus to be the cause of death. Precipitated by the death of Quipuha, and the murder of Father San Vitores and Pedro Calungsod by local rebel chief Matapang, tensions led to a number of conflicts. Captain Juan de Santiago started a campaign to conquer the island, which was continued by the successive commanders of the Spanish forces. The Spanish-Chamorro Wars on Guam began in 1670 over growing tensions with the Jesuit mission, with the last large-scale uprising in 1683. After his arrival in 1674, Captain Damian de Esplana ordered the arrest of rebels who attacked the population of certain towns. Hostilities eventually led to the destruction of villages such as Chochogo, Pepura, Tumon, Sidia-Aty, Sagua, Nagan and Ninca. Starting in June 1676, the first Spanish Governor of Guam, Capt. Francisco de Irrisarri y Vinar, controlled internal affairs more strictly than his predecessors in order to curb tensions. He also ordered the construction of schools, roads and other infrastructure. In 1680, Captain Jose de Quiroga arrived and continued some of the development projects started by his predecessors. He also continued the search for the rebels who had assassinated Father San Vitores, resulting in campaigns against the rebels which were hiding out in some islands, eventually leading to the death of Matapang, Hurao and Aguarin. Quiroga brought some natives from the northern islands to Guam, ordering the population to live in a few large villages. These included Jinapsan, Umatac, Pago, Agat and Inarajan, where he built a number of churches. By July 1695, Quiroga had completed the conquest of Guam, Rota, Tinian and Aguigan. Intermittent warfare, plus the typhoons of 1671 and 1693, and in particular the smallpox epidemic of 1688, reduced the Chamorro population from 50,000 to 10,000, finally to less than 5,000.
During the course of the Spanish administration of Guam, lower birth rates and diseases reduced the population from 12,000 to roughly 5,000 by 1741. After 1695, CHamorus settled in five villages: Hagåtña, Agat, Umatac, Pago, and Fena. During this historical period, Spanish language and customs were introduced in the island and Catholicism became the predominant religion. The Spanish built infrastructures such as roads and ports, as well as schools and hospitals. Spanish and Filipinos, mostly men, increasingly intermarried with the CHamorus, particularly the new cultured or "high" people (manak'kilo) or gentry of the towns. In 1740, CHamorus of the Northern Mariana Islands, except Rota, were moved from some of their home islands to Guam.
Expulsion of the Jesuits
On February 26, 1767, Charles III of Spain issued a decree confiscating the property of the Jesuits and banishing them from Spain and her possessions. As a consequence, the Jesuit fathers on Guam departed on November 2, 1769, on the schooner Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, abandoning their churches, rectories and ranches.
The arrival of Governor Don Mariano Tobias, on September 15, 1771, brought agricultural reforms, including making land available to the islanders for cultivation, encouraged the development of cattle raising, imported deer and water buffalo from Manila, donkeys and mules from Acapulco, established cotton mills and salt pans, free public schools, and the first Guam militia. Later, he was transferred to Manila in June 1774.
Span built several defensive fortification to protect their Pacific fleet, such as Fort Nuestra Señora de la Soledad in Umatac. The Galleon Era ended in 1815 following the Mexican Independence. Guam later was host to a number of scientists, voyagers, and whalers from Russia, France, and England who also provided detailed accounts of the daily life on Guam under Spanish rule. Through the Spanish colonial period, Guam inherited food, language, and surnames from Spain and Spanish America. Other reminders of colonial times include the old Governor's Palace in Plaza de España and the Spanish Bridge, both in Hagatña. Guam's Cathedral Dulce Nombre de Maria was formally opened on February 2, 1669, as was the Royal College of San Juan de Letran. The cultures of both Guam and the Northern Marianas gained many similarities with Spanish culture due to three centuries of Spanish rule.
Post-Napoleonic era
Following the Napoleonic Wars, many Spanish colonies in the Western Hemisphere had become independent, shifting the economic dependence of Guam from Mexico to the Philippines. Don Francisco Ramon de Villalobos, who became governor in 1831, improved economic conditions including the promotion of rice cultivation and the establishment of a leper hospital.
Otto von Kotzebue visited the island in November 1817, and Louis de Freycinet in March 1819. Jules Dumont d'Urville made two visits, the first in May 1828. The island became a rest stop for whalers starting in 1823.
A devastating typhoon struck the island on August 10, 1848, followed by a severe earthquake on January 25, 1849, which resulted in many refugees from the Caroline Islands, victims of the resultant tsunami. After a smallpox epidemic killed 3,644 Guamanians in 1856, Carolinians and Japanese were permitted to settle in the Marianas. Guam received nineteen Filipino prisoners after their failed 1872 Cavite mutiny.
American era
Capture of Guam
On June 21, 1898, the United States captured Guam in a bloodless landing during the Spanish–American War. By the Treaty of Paris, Spain officially ceded the island to the United States. Guam became part of an American telegraph line to the Philippines, also ceded by the treaty; a way station for American ships traveling to and from there; and an important part of the United States' War Plan Orange against Japan. Although Alfred Thayer Mahan, Robert Coontz, and others envisioned the island as "a kind of Gibraltar" in the Pacific, Congress repeatedly failed to fulfill the military's requests to fortify Guam; when the German warship was interned in 1914 before America's entry into World War I, its crew of 543 outnumbered their American custodians.
Guam came to serve as a station for American merchant and warships traveling to and from the Philippines (another American acquisition from Spain) while the Northern Mariana Islands were sold by Spain to Germany for part of its rapidly expanding German Empire. A U.S. Navy yard was established at Piti in 1899, and a United States Marine Corps barracks at Sumay in 1901. Following the Philippine–American War of 1899–1902, rebel nationalist leader Apolinario Mabini was exiled to Guam in 1901 after his capture. Following the German defeat in World War I, the Northern Mariana Islands became part of the South Seas Mandate, a League of Nations Mandate in 1919 with the nearby Empire of Japan as the mandatory ("trustee") as a member nation of the victorious Allies in the "Great War".
The 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia said of Guam, "of its total population of 11,490 (11,159 natives), Hagåtña, the capital, contains about 8,000. Possessing a good harbor, the island serves as a United States naval station, the naval commandant acting also as governor. The products of the island are maize, copra, rice, sugar, and valuable timber." Military officers governed the island as "USS Guam", and the United States Navy opposed proposals for civilian government until 1950.
World War II
During World War II, Guam was attacked and invaded by Japan on Monday, December 8, 1941, at the same time as the attack on Pearl Harbor, across the International Date Line. In addition, Japan made major military moves into Southeast Asia and the East Indies islands of the South Pacific Ocean against the British and Dutch colonies, opening a new wider Pacific phase in the Second World War. The Japanese renamed Guam (Great Shrine Island).
The Northern Mariana Islands had become a League of Nations mandate assigned to Japan in 1919, pursuant to the Treaty of Versailles of 1919. Indigenous Chamorro people from the Northern Marianas were brought to Guam to serve as interpreters and in other capacities for the occupying Japanese force. The Guamanian Chamorros were treated as an occupied enemy by the Japanese military. After the war, this would cause resentment between the Guamanian Chamorros and the Chamorros of the Northern Marianas. Guam's Chamorros believed their northern brethren should have been compassionate towards them, whereas having been administered by Japan for over 30 years, the Northern Mariana Chamorros were loyal to the Japanese government.
The Japanese occupation of Guam lasted for approximately 31 months, from 1941 to 1944. During this period, the indigenous people of Guam were subjected to forced labor, family separation, incarceration, execution, concentration camps and forced prostitution. Approximately 1,000 people died during the occupation, according to later Congressional committee testimony in 2004. Some historians estimate that war violence killed 10% of Guam's then 20,000 population. It was a coercive experience for the CHamoru people, whose loyalty to the United States became a point of contention with the Japanese. Several American servicemen remained on the island, however, and were hidden by the CHamoru people. All of these servicemen were found and executed by Japanese forces in 1942; only one escaped.
The second Battle of Guam began on July 21, 1944 with American troops landing on western side of the island after several weeks of pre-invasion bombardment by the U.S. Navy. After several weeks of heavy fighting, Japanese forces officially surrendered on August 10, 1944. More than 18,000 Japanese were killed as only 485 surrendered. Sergeant Shoichi Yokoi, who surrendered in January 1972, appears to have been the last confirmed Japanese holdout, having held out for 28 years in the forested back country on Guam. The United States also captured and occupied the nearby Northern Marianas Islands.
Guam was subsequently converted into a forward operations base for the U.S. Navy and Air Force. Airfields were constructed in the northern part of the island (including Andersen Air Force Base), the island's pre-WWII Naval Station was expanded, and numerous facilities and supply depots were constructed throughout the island. North Field was established in 1944, and was renamed for Brigadier General James Roy Andersen of the old U.S. Army Air Forces as Andersen Air Force Base.
Guam's two largest pre-war communities (Sumay and Hagåtña) were virtually destroyed during the 1944 battle. Many CHamoru families lived in temporary re-settlement camps near the beaches before moving to permanent homes constructed in the island's outer villages. Guam's southern villages largely escaped damage, however.
Self-determination
The immediate years after World War II saw the U.S. Navy attempting to resume its predominance in Guam affairs. This eventually led to resentment, and thus increased political pressure from Chamoru leaders for greater autonomy.
The result was the Guam Organic Act of 1950 which established Guam as an unincorporated organized territory of the United States and, for the first time in Guam history, provided for a civilian government.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, section 307, granted U.S. citizenship to "all persons born in the island of Guam on or after April 11, 1899. In the 1960s, the island's required security clearance for visitors was lifted.
On September 11, 1968, eighteen years after passage of the Organic Act, Congress passed the "Elective Governor Act" (Public Law 90-497), which allowed the people of Guam to elect their own governor and lieutenant governor. Nearly four years later, Congress passed the "Guam-Virgin Islands Delegate" Act that allowed for one Guam delegate in the U.S. House of Representatives. The delegate has a voice in debates and a vote in committees, but no vote on the floor of the House.
Andersen Air Force Base played a major role in the Vietnam War. The host unit was later designated the 36th Wing (36 WG), assigned to the Pacific Air Forces (PACAF) Thirteenth Air Force (13AF). In September 2012, 13 AF was deactivated and its functions merged into PACAF. The multinational Cope North military exercise is an annual event.
Although Public Law 94-584 established the formation of a "locally drafted" constitution (later known as the "Guam Constitution"), the proposed document was rejected by Guam residents in an August 4, 1979 referendum.
In the meantime, Guam's local government had formed several political status commissions to address possible options for self-determination. The following year after passage of the Guam Delegate Act saw the creation of the "Status Commission" by the Twelfth Guam Legislature.
This was followed by the establishment of the "Second Political Status Commission" in 1975 and the Guam "Commission on Self-Determination" (CSD) in 1980. The Twenty-Fourth Guam Legislature established the "Commission on Decolonization" in 1996 to enhance CSD's ongoing studies of various political status options and public education campaigns.
These efforts enabled the CSD, barely two years after its creation, to organize a status referendum on January 12, 1982. 49% of voters chose a closer relationship with the United States via Commonwealth.
Twenty-six percent voted for Statehood, while ten percent voted for the Status Quo (as an Unincorporated territory). A subsequent run-off referendum held between Commonwealth and Statehood saw 73% of Guam voters choosing Commonwealth over Statehood (27%). Today, Guam remains an unincorporated territory despite referendums and a United Nations mandate to establish a permanent status for the island.
Contemporary Guam
Guam's U.S. military installations remain among the most strategically vital in the Pacific Ocean. When the United States closed U.S. Naval Base Subic Bay and Clark Air Base bases in the Philippines after the expiration of their leases in the early 1990s, many of the forces stationed there were relocated to Guam.
The removal of Guam's security clearance by President John F. Kennedy in 1963 allowed for the development of a tourism industry. The island's rapid economic development was fueled both by rapid growth in this industry as well as increased U.S. Federal Government spending during the 1980s and 1990s.
Since 1974, about 124 historic sites in Guam have been recognized under the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. Guam temporarily hosted 100,000 Vietnamese refugees in 1975's Operation New Life , and 6,600 Kurdish refugees in 1996.
On August 6, 1997, Guam was the site of the Korean Air Flight 801 aircraft accident. The Boeing 747–300 jetliner was preparing to land when it crashed into a hill, killing 228 of the 254 people on board.
The 1997 Asian financial crisis, which hit Japan particularly hard, severely affected Guam's tourism industry. Military cutbacks in the 1990s also disrupted the island's economy. Economic recovery was further hampered by devastation from Supertyphoons Paka in 1997 and Pongsona in 2002, as well as the effects of the September 11 terrorist attacks on tourism.
The recovery of the Japanese and Korean tourist markets reflected those countries' economic recoveries, as well as Guam's continued appeal as a weekend tropical retreat. U.S. military spending also dramatically increased as part of the War on Terrorism.
The late 2000s saw proposals to strengthen U.S. military facilities, including negotiations to transfer 8,000 U.S. Marines from Okinawa. American forces were originally scheduled to relocate from Okinawa to Guam beginning in 2012 or 2013. However, that was set back due to budget constrains and local resistance to the additional military presence; Marine Corps Base Camp Blaz was activated in 2020 but the relocation is scheduled to be completed in 2025.
In August 2017, North Korea warned that it might launch mid-range ballistic missiles into waters within of Guam, following an exchange of threats between the governments of North Korea and the United States.
In 2018, a Government Accountability Office report stated that Agent Orange was used as a commercial herbicide in Guam during the Vietnam and Korean Wars. An analysis of chemicals present in the island's soil, together with resolutions passed by Guam's legislature, suggest that Agent Orange was among the herbicides routinely used on and around military bases Anderson Air Force Base, Naval Air Station Agana, Guam. Despite the evidence, the Department of Defense continues to deny that Agent Orange was ever stored or used on Guam. Several Guam veterans have collected an enormous amount of evidence to assist in their disability claims for direct exposure to dioxin containing herbicides such as 2,4,5-T which are similar to the illness associations and disability coverage that has become standard for those who were harmed by the same chemical contaminant of Agent Orange used in Vietnam.
"Cosmopolitan" Guam poses particular challenges for CHamorus struggling to preserve their culture and identity in the face of acculturation. The increasing numbers of CHamorus, especially CHamoru youth, relocating to the U.S. Mainland has further complicated both the definition and preservation of CHamoru identity.
See also
Guam
Villages of Guam
San Vitores
Chief Kepuha
Further reading
Robert F. Rogers, Destiny's Landfall: A History of Guam (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995)
Paul Carano and Pedro C. Sanchez, A Complete History of Guam (Rutland, VT: C. E. Tuttle, 1964)
Howard P. Willens and Dirk Ballendorf, The Secret Guam Study: How President Ford's 1975 Approval of Commonwealth Was Blocked by Federal Officials (Mangilao, Guam: Micronesian Area Research Center; Saipan: Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands Division of Historical Preservation, 2004)
Lawrence J. Cunningham, Ancient Chamorro Society (Honolulu: Bess Press, 1992)
Anne Perez Hattori, Colonial Dis-Ease: U.S. Navy Health Policies and the Chamorros of Guam, 1898-1941 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004)
Pat Hickey, The Chorito Hog-Leg, Book One: A Novel of Guam in Time of War (Indianapolis: AuthorHouse Publishing, 2007)
Vicente Diaz, Repositioning the Missionary: Rewriting the Histories of Colonialism, Native Catholicism, and Indigeneity in Guam (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010)
Keith Lujan Camacho, Cultures of Commemoration: The Politics of War, Memory, and History in the Mariana Islands (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011)
References
External links
allthingsguam A Guam History resource—virtual textbook, virtual workbook and more
Guam Humanities Council
Guampedia, Guam's Online Encyclopedia
War in the Pacific National Historic Park
The Latte Stones of Guam
Bisita Guam
Prefecture Apostolic of Mariana Islands
Guam Online's History Webpage
Brief History of Guam's U.S. Naval Hospital
Senate Resolution 254, 105th Congress Includes brief history of Guam's movement towards self-determination | [
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12149 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography%20of%20Guam | Geography of Guam | Guam is a U.S. territory in the western Pacific Ocean, at the boundary of the Philippine Sea. It is the southernmost and largest member of the Mariana Islands archipelago, which is itself the northernmost group of islands in Micronesia. The closest political entity is the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), another U.S. territory. Guam shares maritime boundaries with CNMI to the north and the Federated States of Micronesia to the south. It is located approximately one quarter of the way from the Philippines to Hawaii. Its location and size make it strategically important. It is the only island with both a protected harbor and land for multiple airports between Asia and Hawaii, on an east–west axis, and between Papua New Guinea and Japan, on a north–south axis.
The island is a result of the volcanic activity created by subduction of the Pacific Plate under the Philippine Sea Plate at the nearby Mariana Trench, which runs from the east of Guam to the southwest. Volcanic eruptions established the base of the island in the Eocene, roughly 56 to 33.9 million years ago (mya). The north of Guam is a result of this base being covered with layers of coral reef, turning into limestone, and then being thrust by tectonic activity to create a plateau. The rugged south of the island is a result of more recent volcanic activity. Cocos Island off the southern tip of Guam is the largest of the many small islets along the coastline.
Politically, Guam is divided into 19 villages. The majority of the population lives on the coralline limestone plateaus of the north, with political and economic activity centered in the central and northern regions. The rugged geography of the south largely limits settlement to rural coastal areas. The western coast is leeward of the trade winds and is the location of Apra Harbor, the capitol Hagåtña, and the tourist center of Tumon. The U.S. Defense Department owns about 29% of the island, under the management of Joint Region Marianas.
Geology
The Mariana Islands lie atop the largely submerged East Mariana Ridge, a part of the Izu–Bonin–Mariana (IBM) Arc. The IBM Arc is a tectonic plate convergent boundary where the west Pacific Plate subducts the Philippine Sea Plate. Guam is actually located on the Mariana Plate, a micro plate between the two. The subduction area is marked by the Mariana Trench, the deepest gash in the earth's surface, which includes three deep spots to the south of Guam. From east to west, these are: Nero Deep, which was the deepest known spot in the ocean from 1899 to 1927 at ; Sirena Deep, the third deepest measured point at ; and Challenger Deep, the deepest point at .
There have been three major eruptions on Guam. the first, the Facpi formation, in the mid Eocene, laid the base of the island and is still the topmost formation along the southwestern coast. The second eruption created the Alutom formation that is still the topmost strata in the middle of the island. The Mount Alifan-Mount Lamlam ridge is the remnant of the Alutom formation caldera. The last volcanic layer, called the Umatac formation, was formed by the third and final eruption, which surrounded this ridge in the south of Guam. Meanwhile, volcanic activity alternately submerged areas of the island, which hosted coral reefs, and then lifted those reefs, which became limestone. The island may be divided into four general geophysical regions: the uplifted and relatively flat coralline limestone plateau in the north that provides most of the drinking water; the low-rising hills of the Alutom Formation in the center; the mountains of the Umatac formation in the south; and the coastal lowlands ringing most of the island. Much of the coast is protected by a fringing reef.
Soils are mostly silty clay or clay and may be gray, black, brown or reddish brown; acidity and depth vary. There are four National Natural Landmarks in Guam chosen as exemplars of the island's geology: Facpi Point, Fouha Point, Mount Lamlam, and Two Lovers Point.
Earthquakes
Guam occasionally experiences earthquakes. In recent years, most with epicenters near Guam have had magnitudes ranging from 5.0 to 8.7. Unlike Anatahan in the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam is not volcanically active, though vog (volcanic smog) from Anatahan affects it due to proximity.
Strategic position
Guam is about from both Tokyo in the north and Manila in the west, and about from Honolulu in the east. Guam's size and possession of a natural safe anchorage at Apra Harbor, uniquely among its neighbors, have driven much of its history.
Guam was a minor but integral part of the Spanish Manila galleon trade. Located on the east-to-west trade winds, galleons from Mexico would briefly reprovision on Guam before continuing on to Manila. The westerlies are well away from Guam so it was not a stop on the return trip. During the height of Pacific whaling, Apra Harbor was a major stop for whalers. After the American capture of Guam in 1898, the Commercial Pacific Cable Company laid submarine communications cable for telegraph through Guam Cable Station, linking the United States to Asia for the first time. Guam continues to be a major submarine cable hub in the western Pacific. In 1935, Pan American Airways made Sumay, Guam, a base for its China Clipper, the first trans-Pacific air cargo service, flying from San Francisco to Manila, arrived at Sumay on November 27, 1935 and the first passenger service flight on October 21, 1936.
The Japanese capture of Guam in 1941 and subsequent American liberation in 1944 were driven by a recognition of Guam's strategic location in a Pacific War. Military facilities on Guam, including Naval Base Guam and Andersen Air Force Base, are considered critical forward deployment bases in the Asia-Pacific. Guam was a support center for the Korean War (1949-1953) and became even more important during the Vietnam War, when the bombing campaigns Operation Arc Light (1965-1973) and Operation Linebacker II (1972) were flown out of Andersen Air Force Base. Guam was similarly the site of Operation New Life, the processing of Vietnamese refugees after the Fall of Saigon in 1975.
Guam is a linchpin of the "Second Island Chain" in the Island Chain Strategy first described by the U.S. during the Korean War, but which has become an increasing focus of Chinese foreign policy. In 2016, China deployed the DF-26, their first intermediate-range ballistic missile with the range to hit Guam; Chinese media wonks and military experts dubbed it the "Guam Killer."
Settlement patterns
A 1668 description reported that there were approximately 180 CHamoru villages on Guam with a total island population between 35,000 and 50,000. However, the Spanish strategy of villagization, called reducción, which began in the Spanish-Chamorro Wars, transferred the population to seven towns. These relocated people were forced to travel to work on distant farms and ranches, creating the lanchu system of farmsteading, which was to become a traditional part of CHamoru society well into the twentieth century. Still, a map of the early 1700s shows nearly 40 villages on Guam, mostly along the coastlines. However, the Spanish eventually emptied all of the northern and central villages of Guam, except for Hagåtña. The population of Guam and the entire Northern Marianas, except for Rota, was moved to Hagåtña, and five southern villages: Agat, Inarajan, Merizo, Pago (which no longer exists), and Umatac. Meanwhile, outbreaks of infectious disease inflicted a terrible toll, which was accelerated by concentrating the population. The Chamoru population in 1689 was estimated at about 10,000, a third to fifth of number just 20 years previously.
The population changed little over the next two centuries. The population in 1901, after the American Capture of Guam, was 9,676, with the majority located in Hagåtña and Sumay on Apra Harbor. The population increased to 18,509 in 1930. The American Naval government build roads and schools in outlying areas in order to urge the population to spend time on their ranch lands and produce more agricultural products. There were eight municipalities approved by the Naval governor in the 1920s, Hagåtña, Agat, Asan, Inarajan, Merizo, Piti, Sumay and Yona, increasing to 15 in 1939.
The devastation of the U.S. retaking of Guam in 1941 and subsequent mass military build-up of installations at the end of the Pacific War transformed the island's settlements. Two municipalities that disappeared entirely after the land became military bases were Machanao in the north and Sumay on Apra Harbor, which is now part of Naval Base Guam. The military government prohibited resettlement and rebuilding of Hagåtña, which held almost half of the pre-war population. The former residents of Hagåtña dispersed, mainly to their lanchus (ranches). Once most of the wartime bases, northern Guam experienced sustained housing construction. The original location of Dededo was bulldozed by the Americans to create Harmon Air Force Base. However, when the new location was devastated by Typhoon Karen in 1962 and Typhoon Olive in 1963, the resulting federal aid sparked a construction boom that then resulted in the first large housing subdivisions. Meanwhile, the neighboring municipality of Yigo on the northeast of the island has also experienced dramatic population growth. In 1940, there were about 40 families living in the area and it was, by the beginning of the 21st century, Guam's second most populous village after Dededo.
Climate
Guam has a tropical marine climate that is generally warm and humid, but moderated by northeast trade winds. Dry season is from January to June and wet season is from July to December. There is little temperature variation. There are frequent squalls during wet season. Typhoons are relatively rare but are most common during wet season and are potentially very destructive. Typhoon Pongsona in 2002 had wind gusts up to 290 km/h (183 mph 1-min) over Guam and caused widespread devastation, but no direct deaths because of strict building standards. Pongsona was the most damaging typhoon on Guam since Typhoon Paka in 1997.
Environment
The rapid proliferation of the brown tree snake (Boiga irregularis), an exotic species, caused the local extinction of the native bird population, such as the Guam rail and Guam kingfisher. The island also supports feral populations of introduced Philippine deer (Rusa marianna), pigs (Sus scrofa), and carabao (Bubalus bubalis carabanesis).
Extraction of natural resources for economic gain is based around the sea. This includes commercial fishing (mostly servicing and unloading of longline fleets and commercial vessels) and recreational fishing of Indo-Pacific blue marlin (Makaira mazara), wahoo (Acanthocybium solandri), mahi-mahi (Coryphaena hippurus), yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares), and deepwater reef fish. Tourism from Japan in particular, but increasingly from China and South Korea, largely derives from an attractive tropical climate and amenities. A 2012 estimate was that 16.67% of the land area was being used for permanent crops while only 1.85% was considered arable land suitable for plowing, planting, and reaping. 2 km2 was irrigated.
Extreme points
The three highest points on Guam are Mount Lamlam at , Mount Jumullong Manglo at , and Mount Bolanos, . Mount Lamlam is sometimes claimed to be the world's highest mountain at , measured from a base in Challenger Deep away. Even if measured from Sirena Deep, away, Mount Lamlam is taller than Mauna Kea, which is typically cited as the tallest mountain including subsurface rise from the ocean floor at .
The extreme north, east, south, and west locations on mainland Guam are Ritidian Point, Pati Point, Aga Point, and Point Udall, respectively. However, Cocos Island, located off the southern coast of Guam's mainland is the ultimate southernmost point of the territory. Point Udall, previously named Orote Point, is also the westernpoint point of the U.S., as measured from the geographic center of the United States.
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12150 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics%20of%20Guam | Demographics of Guam | The demographics of Guam details an array of demographic statistics relating to the territory of Guam. This includes statistics on population, including the Indigenous population; religious affiliations; language; and immigration. Furthermore, The Demographics of Guam provides an overview of the history of Guam, as well as a depiction of the villages in the United States territory and its populace. The population of Guam, as of July 2021 was 168,801, based on data procured from the CIA World Factbook. While there are no large cities in Guam, however the populace resides in villages. The most populated village in Guam is Dededo, with a population of 44,943 in 2010. The Indigenous people of Guam are known as the Chamorro people, and are the largest ethnic group in Guam, however this group is categorised as a minority in the United States territory. The mean age in the territory of Guam is 31.4 years (The World Factbook, 2021). Guam is in the Mariana Islands, and is the largest and most populated of the territories in this location.
The population density of Guam is approximately 31 people per square metre, with a total land area of 544 km2. The urbanisation of Guam is vast, as the populace is saturated in urban areas, with 94.9% of the population of Guam residing in urban regions.
The demographics of Guam include the demographic features of the population of Guam, including population density, ethnicity, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects of the population.
According to the 2020 U.S. Census, Guam had a population of 153,836, representing a decrease of 3.5 percent from the population of 159,358 reported in the 2010 Census.
Births and deaths
CIA World Factbook demographic statistics
The following demographic statistics are from the CIA World Factbook.
Age structure
0–14 years: 25.47% (male 21,189/female 20,017)
15–24 years: 17% (male 14,267/female 13,241)
25–54 years: 39.23% (male 32,315/female 31,159)
55–64 years: 9.4% (male 7,655/female 7,560)
65 years and over: 8.89% (male 6,552/female 7,830) (2015 est.)
Population
174,445 as of 2017
Population growth rate
0.54%
Birth rate
16.82 births/1,000 population
Death rate
5.12 deaths/1,000 population
Net migration rate
-6.34 migrant(s)/1,000 population
Sex ratio
At birth: 1.06 male(s)/female
0–14 years: 1.06 male(s)/female
15–24 years: 1.08 male(s)/female
25–54 years: 1.04 male(s)/female
55–64 years: 1.01 male(s)/female
65 years and over: 0.84 male(s)/female
Total population: 1.03 male(s)/female (2015 est.)
Infant mortality rate
Total: 5.41 deaths/1,000 live births
Male: 5.81 deaths/1,000 live births
Female: 4.99 deaths/1,000 live births (2015 est.)
Life expectancy at birth
Total population: 78.98 years
Male: 75.94 years
Female: 82.21 years
Total fertility rate
2.34 children born/woman
Nationality
noun: Guamanian / Guamanians
adjective: Guamanian
Ethnic groups
Chamorro 37.3%
Filipino 29.3%
White 7.1%
Chuukese 7%
Korean 2.2%
Other Pacific Islander 2%
Other Asian 2%
Chinese 1.6%
Palauan 1.6%
Japanese 1.5%
Pohnpeian 1.4%
Mixed 9.4%
Other 0.6%
Religion
According to the Pew Research Center, 2010:
Roman Catholic 75%
Protestants 17.7%
Unaffiliated 1.7%
Other religions 1.6%
Folk religions 1.5%
Other Christians 1.4%
Buddhists 1.1%
Eastern Orthodox <1%
Hindu <1%
Muslim <1%
Jews <1%
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) reported 2,550 members in the LDS Church in Guam in 5 congregations as of December 31, 2019. On May 4, 2019, the church broke ground for a temple in Yigo.
Languages
English 43.6%
Filipino 21.2%
Chamorro 17.8%
Other Pacific island languages 10%
Other Asian languages 6.3%
Other 1.1%
History
Guam is known to be the first inhabited island in the Pacific Island, discovered by the Spaniards in 1521. After Guam was discovered by Ferdinand Magellan under the flag of Spain, the island was repeatedly invaded by alien military forces. The island was officially claimed by Spain in 1565, thus it was the first island as well as the Mariana Islands, inhabited by humans in Remote Oceania. Guam has since been occupied by outside entities for over 330 years. Magellan arrived on the shores of Guam with three ships, the Trinidad, the Conception and the Victoria.The population of Guam in the mid 16th century was severely reduced, due to the bloodshed caused by the Spaniards, as well as the many diseases carried by the Europeans. Guam was ceded to the United States after the Spanish–American War in 1898. It was then taken by the Japanese in 1941 during World War II. It was retaken by the United States in 1944.
While Guam merely covers 520km squared of land area, the United States territory is considered to be of international significance, due to geopolitics, as well as the strategic importance of Guam's straits, islands and canals. Guam is additionally the largest landfall, for use of communications, military bases and shipping. Guam was utilised as a military base in World War II against the Japanese.
Guam is a multi-ethnic island, as settlers from the Philippines, Korea, Japan and China form part of its populace. Guam was first settled by migrants from the Philippines in 1500 to 1400 BCE.
The Chamorro people
The Mariana Islands is an ethnic and cultural heritage of the Chamorro people. Despite the invasion attempts from leading military countries, such as Spain, The United States of America and Japan, the Chamorro people have maintained their traditions. The cultural endurance of the Chamorro people was evident, as the Indigenous peoples of the Mariana Islands maintained their language, tradition and integrity, in spite of the dominance of imperialism. While Guam has remained a colony in the postmodern world, the Chamorro people of Guam have gained an amount of local political control of the island traditions.
Architecture
The most prominent historical architectural complex in Guam is latte architecture. This style of architecture is described as village complexes with both residential and communal functions. This structure is unique, as the width is constant in all sizes of latte architecture, however the height of the complex differs from small, medium and large. Latte architecture is unique to Guam and the Mariana Islands. These types of villages were utilised as expressions of a collective identity, rather than modes of competition or rank. Furthermore, the latte structures were tropes for social organisation as well as a Micronesian egalitarian and matrilineal clan. This system incorporated hierarchical authority that was founded on respect and reciprocity, rather than totalitarian power or unequal distributions of wealth.
Environment
Climate change in Guam is rife throughout the US Island territory and is a pressing issue, as well as a cause for concern for its populace.
Increased Air Temperatures
There has been increasing rising temperatures in daytime and nighttime air temperatures in Guam. The annual number of hot days in Guam had increased, with an average of five days a year exceeding the temperature of 31.1°C (88°F). It is estimated that 70% of days the year in Guam will potentially experience temperatures over 32°C (90°F). Furthermore, cool nights (below 23.3°C/74°F) in Guam have significantly decreased. The 2017 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Information (NCRI) report found that the number of cold nights in Guam have decreased from an average of forty nights per year in 1995, to zero per year since 2005. Increased air temperatures is an area of concern, partucularly in regards to public health, building construction and utilities.
Rainfall
Drought conditions are expected to be more frequent in Guam in the near future, due to decreased amounts of rainfall in the island territory. Overall, Guam is likely to become drier in the future, which is an underlying threat to ecosystems and the populace of Guam. This issue formulates difficulties in attaining fresh water.
Tropical Storms and Typhoons
The intensity of tropical storms are expected to increase in Guam. While Tropical cyclones will likely decrease in the near future, the cyclones that do form will be more extremely intense and of a higher category, ultimately creating higher wind speeds. Guam is situated in one of the most active regions for tropical cyclones in the world.
Sea levels
Rising sea levels in Guam produce threats to infrastructure, and is expected to damage natural and built assets in the island territory. This is due to the fact that rising sea levels creates extreme coastal erosion, flooding and saltwater intrusion into coastal aquifers. Changes in sea levels and cyclone occurrence has resulted in increased water frequency and coastal erosion. High water can create issues, such as the erosion of buildings and infrastructure, as well as vegetation.
Changes to the Ocean
As a result of human activities, the chemical composition, temperature and circulation of oceans have significantly changed, which is concerning for marine ecosystems. The increased rising temperatures of the sea surface directly causes coral reef bleaching, and is likely to worsen in the near future. This is a major issue, due to the fact that coral reefs and ocean ecosystems in Guam facilitate tourism, contributing millions of dollars to Guam's economy. The intensity and frequency of heat stress has increased. From 2013 to 2017, more than one third of Guam's shallow corals were bleached and died, as a result of rising heat levels in the ocean.
Issues in relation to Climate Change in Guam
Climate change is a concept that pervades the entirety of the globe, and is no different in the US island territory of Guam. An array of groups, such as the elderly, children and low-income communities are disproportionately affected by climate change. Extreme weather and climate shifts will likely disrupt of the fabric of Guamanian society. In relation to human health, rising heat temperatures are a cause for concern, particularly in regards to heat related illnesses. Extreme storms and heatwaves are likely to aggravate existing illnesses, increasing the transition of disease. The decreased amount of rainfall in Guam, as well as the rise in heat temperatures facilitate an increased demand for fresh water. This additionally causes a decreased supply of fresh water. The increased droughts in Guam, as a result of the lack of rainfall has caused an increased dependency on well water. The amalgamation of potential pumping, droughts and rising sea levels may cause saltwater contamination in wells. Therefore, water conservation may be necessary in the near future, to prevent the depletion and access to fresh water in Guam.
References
Guam
Guamanian society | [
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0.01557983923703... |
12151 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics%20of%20Guam | Politics of Guam | Guam is a two-party presidential representative democracy, in which the Governor is the head of government. Guam is an organized, unincorporated territory of the United States, with policy relations between Guam and the US under the jurisdiction of the Office of Insular Affairs.
Background
The economic situation in Guam is currently dependent on the significant U.S. military presence there. Its status as a tourist destination for Japanese, Singaporeans and South Koreans also contributes to Guam's economy, as well as economic migrants from the Philippines working at lower-wage jobs in the hospitality industry.
Maintenance of the status quo vis-à-vis the current political relationship between the territory and the United States is controversial. There is a significant movement in favor of the Territory becoming a commonwealth, which would give it a political status similar to Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands. Competing movements exist, which advocate political independence from the United States, statehood, or a combination with the Northern Mariana Islands as a single territory (not necessarily commonwealth). These proposals, however, are not seen as favorable by the U.S. federal government, which argues Guam does not have the financial stability or self-sufficiency to warrant such status. They cite Guam's increasing reliance on Federal spending as evidence, and question how commonwealth status or statehood would benefit the United States as a whole.
A portion of the people on Guam favor a modified version of the current Territorial status, involving greater autonomy from the federal government (similar to the autonomy of individual States). Perceived indifference by the U.S. Congress regarding a change-of-status petition submitted by Guam has led many to feel that the territory is being deprived of the benefits of a more equitable union with the United States.. Guam is also listed on the United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories.
Political parties and elections
See also
Political party strength in Guam
External links
Guam Residents Organize Against US Plans for $15B Military Buildup on Pacific Island - video report by Democracy Now! | [
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12153 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications%20in%20Guam | Communications in Guam | Though Guam is a United States territory, some U.S. long-distance plans and courier services list Guam as an international location. As a result of Guam's being added to the North American Numbering Plan (NANP) in 1997, calls made to the U.S., Canada, or other participating countries from Guam (or to Guam from other NANP locations) only require the caller to dial a 1 followed by the area code.
In this way, only domestic charges are incurred between the US and Guam on most carriers. Before Guam's inclusion, calling the U.S. required dialing the international 011 first, thus resulting in higher long-distance rates and less frequent calls to the U.S. by relatives in Guam. Prices of long-distance calls to these destinations have dropped significantly to the point where now calling the U.S. from Guam or calling Guam from the U.S. costs the same.
Mail
Some companies in the U.S. mainland still treat Guam as a foreign country and refuse to sell and ship items to Guam. However, if an item is shipped via USPS, shipping costs to Guam are the same as coast-to-coast shipping costs within the US. Many others will ship to Guam but will charge the shipping as an international destination. This is mainly because the company is using a private shipping company like UPS, FedEx, or DHL for its shipping.
Much of the mail to and from Guam routes through Hawaii and awaits cargo space on United Airlines which is contracted to deliver mail between Hawaii and Guam.
Telephones
Telephones – main lines in use:
85,000 (2007)
Telephones – mobile cellular:
98,000 (2007)
Telephone system:
domestic: GTA: ~70,000 local access lines, dial-up and DSL, Internet, long-distance service, TDMA and GSM wireless services via Pulse Mobile & Docomo Pacific (formerly Guam Wireless) ChoicePhone LLC, dba iConnect with iDen, GSM and 4G LTE networks.
international: satellite earth stations – 2 Intelsat (Pacific Ocean); submarine cables to United States, Japan and Australia.
international access code: +1.671 (in the North American Numbering Plan, Area code 671)
Radio and television
Radio broadcast stations:
AM 4, FM 7, shortwave 2 (2005)
Radios:
300,000 (2007)
Television broadcast stations:
8 (2007)
Televisions:
200,000 (2007)
Internet
Internet Service Providers (ISPs):
4 (2013)
Country code (Top-level domain): GU
Submarine cables
Because of its location in the western Pacific and its status as U.S. territory, Guam has one of the most extensive submarine communications cable infrastructures in the Asia-Pacific. The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami cut many of the primary cables connecting the United States and Asia, prompting companies to look for alternate locations for new cables. In 2019, GTA Teleguam and RTI Cable built the island's first combined neutral cable landing station and data center. This coincided with a bill introduced to the Legislature of Guam by Sen. Telo Taitague to conduct an economic study and develop policy recommendations on submarine cables. GTA also seeks to attract U.S. companies to build data centers on Guam, noting the reduced network latency from Asia to Guam, compared to the U.S. Existing cable landing stations and their cables are:
Tanguisson cable landing station in Tamuning: Asia-America Gateway, Australia–Japan Cable and Guam-Philippines
Tumon Bay cable landing station in Tamuning: TPC-5CN, Australia–Japan Cable
Tata Piti cable landing station: VSNL Transpacific, Tata TGN-Intra Asia, and Pipe Pacific Cable-1
GTA Piti-I cable landing station: SEA-US, Japan-Guam-Australia South
Gateway Network Connections neutral cable landing station and data center in Piti: HK-G, Japan-Guam-Australia North, SxS Cable System
Unknown landing station: HANTRU-1
Retired cables landing on Guam include China-US Cable Network and PacRimWest.
See also
Area code 671, Guam's telephone area code
References
Guam | [
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12154 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation%20in%20Guam | Transportation in Guam | The United States territory of Guam has no railways or freeways, nor does it have a merchant marine. The largest port is Apra Harbor, which serves almost all commercial traffic including cruise, cargo and fishing vessels. There are smaller harbors located on the island (most notably one in Hagatna and one in Agat) which serve recreational boaters. Roads are primarily paved by a coral/oil mixture that, when it gets wet, tends to have oil float to the surface, making the roads dangerous. This is one of the reasons the speed limit on most of the island is 35 mph. But, during road repair or maintenance, a different mixture of asphalt that is not as slippery is used. Its main commercial airport is the Antonio B. Won Pat International Airport.
Highways:
total: 885 km
paved: 675 km
unpaved: 210 km
note: there is another 685 km of roads classified non-public, including roads located on federal government installations
Airports:
5 (1999 est.)
Airports - with paved runways:
total: 4
over 3,047 m: 2
2,438 to 3,047 m: 1
914 to 1,523 m: 1 (2007 est.)
Airports - with unpaved runways:
total: 1
under 914 m: 1 (2007 est.)
See also
Guam
List of highways in Guam
References
Guam | [
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12157 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History%20of%20Guatemala | History of Guatemala | The history of Guatemala begins with the Maya civilization (300 BC – 250 AD), which was among those that flourished in their country. The country's modern history began with the Spanish conquest of Guatemala in 1524. Most of the great Classic-era (250 – 900 AD) Maya cities of the Petén Basin region, in the northern lowlands, had been abandoned by the year 1000 AD. The states in the Belize central highlands flourished until the 1525 arrival of Spanish conquistador Pedro de Alvarado. Called "The Invader" by the Mayan people, he immediately began subjugating the Indian states.
Guatemala was part of the Captaincy General of Guatemala for nearly 330 years. This captaincy included what is now Chiapas in Mexico and the modern countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. The colony became independent in 1821 and then became a part of the First Mexican Empire until 1823. From 1824 it was a part of the Federal Republic of Central America. When the Republic dissolved in 1841, Guatemala became fully independent.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, Guatemala's potential for agricultural exploitation attracted several foreign companies, most prominently the United Fruit Company (UFC). These companies were supported by the country's authoritarian rulers and the United States government through their support for brutal labor regulations and massive concessions to wealthy landowners. In 1944, the policies of Jorge Ubico led to a popular uprising that began the ten-year Guatemalan Revolution. The presidencies of Juan Jose Arévalo and Jacobo Árbenz saw sweeping social and economic reforms, including a significant increase in literacy and a successful agrarian reform program.
The progressive policies of Arévalo and Árbenz led the United Fruit Company to lobby the United States government for their overthrow, and a US-engineered coup in 1954 ended the revolution and installed a military regime. This was followed by other military governments, and jolted off a civil war that lasted from 1960 to 1996. The war saw human rights violations, including a genocide of the indigenous Maya population by the military. Following the war's end in 1997, Guatemala re-established a representative democracy. It has since struggled to enforce the rule of law and suffers a high crime rate and continued extrajudicial killings, often executed by security forces.
Pre-Columbian era
The earliest human settlements in Guatemala date back to the Paleo-Indian period and were made up of hunters and gatherers.Sites dating back to 6500 BC have been found in Quiché in the Highlands and Sipacate, Escuintla on the central Pacific coast.
Although it is unclear when these groups of hunters and gatherers turned to cultivation, pollen samples from Petén and the Pacific coast indicate maize cultivation as early as 3500 BC. By 2500 BC, small settlements were developing in Guatemala's Pacific lowlands in such places as Tilapa, La Blanca, Ocós, El Mesak, and Ujuxte, where the oldest pieces of ceramic pottery from Guatemala have been found. Excavations in the Antigua Guatemala Urías and Rucal, have yielded stratified materials from the Early and Middle Preclassic periods (2000 BC to 400 BC). Paste analyses of these early pieces of pottery in the Antigua Valley indicate they were made of clays from different environmental zones, suggesting people from the Pacific coast expanded into the Antigua Valley.
Guatemala's Pre-Columbian era can be divided into the Preclassic period (from 2000 BC to 250 AD), the Classic period (250 to 900 AD) and the Postclassic period (900 to 1500 AD). Until recently, the Preclassic was regarded as a formative period, consisting of small villages of farmers who lived in huts and few permanent buildings, but this notion has been challenged by recent discoveries of monumental architecture from that period, such as an altar in La Blanca, San Marcos, from 1000 BC; ceremonial sites at Miraflores and El Naranjo from 801 BC; the earliest monumental masks; and the Mirador Basin cities of Nakbé, Xulnal, El Tintal, Wakná and El Mirador.
In Monte Alto near La Democracia, Escuintla, giant stone heads and potbellies (or barrigones) have been found, dating back to around 1800 BC. The stone heads have been ascribed to the Pre-Olmec Monte Alto Culture and some scholars suggest the Olmec Culture originated in the Monte Alto area. It has also been argued the only connection between the statues and the later Olmec heads is their size. The Monte Alto Culture may have been the first complex culture of Mesoamerica, and predecessor of all other cultures of the region. In Guatemala, some sites have unmistakable Olmec style, such as Chocolá in Suchitepéquez, La Corona in Peten, and Tak'alik A´baj, in Retalhuleu, the last of which is the only ancient city in the Americas with Olmec and Mayan features.
El Mirador was by far the most populated city in pre-Columbian America. Both the El Tigre and Monos pyramids encompass a volume greater than 250,000 cubic meters. Richard Hansen, the director of the archaeological project of the Mirador Basin, believes the Maya at Mirador Basin developed the first politically organized state in America around 1500 BC, named the Kan Kingdom in ancient texts. There were 26 cities, all connected by sacbeob (highways), which were several kilometers long, up to 40 meters wide, and two to four meters above the ground, paved with stucco. These are clearly distinguishable from the air in the most extensive virgin tropical rain forest in Mesoamerica.
Hansen believes the Olmec were not the mother culture in Mesoamerica. Due to findings at Mirador Basin in Northern Petén, Hansen suggests the Olmec and Maya cultures developed separately, and merged in some places, such as Tak'alik Abaj in the Pacific lowlands.
Northern Guatemala has particularly high densities of Late Pre-classic sites, including Naachtun, Xulnal, El Mirador, Porvenir, Pacaya, La Muralla, Nakbé, El Tintal, Wakná (formerly Güiro), Uaxactún, and Tikal. Of these, El Mirador, Tikal, Nakbé, Tintal, Xulnal and Wakná are the largest in the Maya world, Such size was manifested not only in the extent of the site, but also in the volume or monumentality, especially in the construction of immense platforms to support large temples. Many sites of this era display monumental masks for the first time (Uaxactún, El Mirador, Cival, Tikal and Nakbé). Hansen's dating has been called into question by many other Maya archaeologists, and developments leading to probably extra-regional power by the Late Preclassic of Kaminaljuyu, in the southern Maya area, suggest that Maya civilization developed in different ways in the Lowlands and the SMA to produce what we know as the Classic Maya.
The Classic period of Mesoamerican civilization corresponds to the height of the Maya civilization, and is represented by countless sites throughout Guatemala. The largest concentration is found in Petén. This period is characterized by expanded city-building, the development of independent city-states, and contact with other Mesoamerican cultures.
This lasted until around 900 AD, when the Classic Maya civilization collapsed. The Maya abandoned many of the cities of the central lowlands or died in a drought-induced famine. Scientists debate the cause of the Classic Maya Collapse, but gaining currency is the Drought Theory discovered by physical scientists studying lake beds, ancient pollen, and other tangible evidence.
Spanish conquest
Second-in-command to Hernán Cortés, Pedro de Alvarado was sent to the Guatemala highlands with 300 Spanish foot soldiers, 120 Spanish horsemen and several hundred Cholula and Tlascala auxiliaries.
Alvarado entered Guatemala from Soconusco on the Pacific lowlands, headed for Xetulul Humbatz, Zapotitlán. He initially allied himself with the Cakchiquel nation to fight against their traditional rivals the K'iche'. The conquistador started his conquest in Xepau Olintepeque, defeating the K'iché's 72,000 men, led by Tecún Umán (now Guatemala's national hero). Alvarado went to Q'umarkaj, (Utatlan), the K'iche' capital, and burned it on 7 March 1524. He proceeded to Iximche, and made a base near there in Tecpan on 25 July 1524. From there he made several campaigns to other cities, including Chuitinamit, the capital of the Tzutuhils, (1524); Mixco Viejo, capital of the Poqomam; and Zaculeu, capital of the Mam (1525). He was named captain general in 1527.
Having secured his position, Alvarado turned against his allies the Cakchiquels, confronting them in several battles until they were subdued in 1530. Battles with other tribes continued up to 1548, when the Q'eqchi' in Nueva Sevilla, Izabal were defeated, leaving the Spanish in complete control of the region.
Not all native tribes were subdued by bloodshed. Bartolomé de las Casas pacified the Kekchí in Alta Verapaz without violence.
After more than a century of colonization, during which mutually independent Spanish authorities in Yucatán and Guatemala made various attempts to subjugate Petén and neighboring parts of what is now Mexico. In 1697, the Spanish finally conquered Nojpetén, capital of the Itza Maya, and Zacpetén, capital of the Kowoj Maya. Due to Guatemala's location in the Pacific American coast, it became a trade node in the commerce between Asia and Latin America when it arose to become a supplementary trade route to the Manila Galleons.
19th century
Independence and Central America civil war
In 1821, Fernando VII's power in Spain was weakened by French invasions and other conflicts, and Mexico declared the Plan de Iguala; this led Mariano Aycinena y Piñol and other criollos to demand the weak Captain General Gabino Gaínza to declare Guatemala and the rest of Central America as an independent entity. Aycinena y Piñol was one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence of Central America from the Spanish Empire, and then lobbied strongly for the Central America annexation to the Mexican Empire of Agustín de Iturbide, due to its conservative and ecclesiastical nature. Aycinena remained in the legislature and was the advisor of the Governors of Guatemala in the next few years.
In October 1826, Central American Federation president Manuel José de Arce y Fagoaga dissolved the Legislature and tried to establish a Unitarian System for the region, switching from the Liberal to the Conservative party, that Aycinena led. The rest of Central America did not want this system; they wanted the Aycinena family out of power altogether, and therefore, the Central American Civil War (1826–1829) started. From this war emerged the dominant figure of the Honduran general Francisco Morazán. Mariano Aycinena y Piñol -leader of the Ayicena family and the conservative power- was appointed as Governor of Guatemala on 1 March 1827 by president Manuel José Arce; Aycinena regime was a dictatorship: he censored free press and any book with liberal ideology was forbidden. He also established Martial Law and the retroactive death penalty. He reinstated mandatory tithing for the secular clergy of the Catholic Church
Invasion of General Morazán in 1829
Morazán and his liberal forces were fighting around San Miguel, in El Salvador beating any conservative federal forces sent by Guatemalan general Manuel Arzú from San Salvador. Then, Arzú decided to take matters in his own hands and left colonel Montúfar in charge of San Salvador and went after Morazán. After realizing that Arzu was after him, Morazán left for Honduras to look for more volunteers for his army. On 20 September, Manuel Arzá was close to the Lempa River with 500 men, when he was notified that the rest of his army had capitulated in San Salvador. Morazán then went back to El Salvador with a considerable army and general Arzú, feigning a sickness, fled to Guatemala, leaving lieutenant colonel Antonio de Aycinena in command. Aycinena and his 500 troops were going to Honduras when they were intercepted by Morazán troops in San Antonio, forcing Aycinena to concede defeat on 9 October. With Aycinena defeat, there were no more conservative federal troops in El Salvador. On 23 October, general Morazán marched triumphantly in San Salvador. A few days later, he went to Ahuachapán, to organize an army to take down the conservative aristocrats led by Mariano Aycinena y Piñol in Guatemala and establish a regime favorable to the central American Federation that was the dream of the liberal criollos.
Upon learning this, Aycinena y Piñol tried to negotiate with Morazán to no avail: Morazán was willing to take down the aristocrats at all costs.
After his victory in San Miguelito, Morazán's army increased in size given that a lot of voluntaries from Guatemala joined him. On 15 March, when Morazán and his army were on their way to occupy their previous positions, they were intercepted by federal troops in Las Charcas. However, Morazán had a better position and smashed the federal army. The battle field was left full of corpses, while the allies took a lot of prisoners and weaponry. the allies continued to recapture their old positions in San José Pinula and Aceituno, and place Guatemala City under siege once again. General Verveer, Ambassador from the King of Netherlands and Belgium before the Central American government and who was in Guatemala to negotiate the construction of a transoceanic Canal in Nicaragua, tried to mediate between the State of Guatemala and Morazán, but did not succeed. Military operations continued, with great success for the allies.
To prepare for the siege from Morazán troops, on 18 March 1829, Aycinena decreed Martial Law, but he was completely defeated. On 12 April 1829, Aycinena conceded defeat and he and Morazán signed an armistice pact; then, he was sent to prison, along with his Cabinet members and the Aycinena family was secluded in their Mansion. Morazán, however, annulled the pact on 20 April, since his real objective was to take power away from the conservatives and the regular clergy of the Catholic Church in Guatemala, whom the Central American leaders despised since they had had the commerce and power monopoly during the Spanish Colony.
Liberal rule
A member of the liberal party, Mariano Gálvez was appointed the chief of state in 1831. This was during a period of turmoil that made governing difficult. After the expulsion of the conservative leader of the Aycinena family and the regular clergy in 1829, Gálvez was appointed by Francisco Morazán as Governor of Guatemala in 1831. According to liberal historians Ramón Rosa and Lorenzo Montúfar y Rivera, Gálvez promoted major innovations in all aspects of the administration to make it less dependent on the influence of the Catholic Church. He also made public education independent of the Church, fostered science and the arts, eliminated religious festivals as holidays, founded the National Library and the National Museum, promoted respect for the laws and the rights of citizens, guaranteed freedom of the press and freedom of thought, established civil marriage and divorce, respected freedom of association, and promulgated the Livingston Code (penal code of Louisiana). Gálvez did this against much opposition from the population who were not used to the fast pace of change; he also initiated judicial reform, reorganized municipal government and established a general head tax which severely impacted the native population. However, these were all changes that the liberals wanted to implement to eliminate the political and economic power of the aristocrats and of the Catholic Church -whose regular orders were expelled in 1829 and the secular clergy was weakened by means of abolishing mandatory tithing.
Among his major errors was a contract made with Michael Bennett -commercial partner of Francisco Morazán in the fine wood business- on 6 August 1834; the contract provided that the territories of Izabal, las Verapaces, Petén and Belize would be colonized within twenty years, but this proved impossible, plus made people irritated by having to deal with "heretics". In February 1835 Gálvez was re-elected for a second term, during which the Asiatic cholera afflicted the country. The secular clergy that was still in the country, persuaded the uneducated people of the interior that the disease was caused by the poisoning of the springs by order of the government and turned the complaints against Gálvez into a religious war. Peasant revolts began in 1837 and under chants of "Hurray for the true religion!" and "Down with the heretics!" started growing and spreading. Gálvez asked the National Assembly to transfer the capital of the Federation from Guatemala City to San Salvador.
His major opponents were Colonel and Juan de Dios Mayorga; also, José Francisco Barrundia and Pedro Molina, who had been his friends and party colleagues, came to oppose him in the later years of his government after he violently tried to repress the peasant revolt using a scorched earth approach against rural communities.
In 1838, Antigua Guatemala, Chiquimula and Salamá withdrew recognition of his government, and in February of that year Rafael Carrera's revolutionary forces entered Guatemala City asking for the cathedral to be opened to restore order in the catholic communities, obliging Gálvez to relinquish power. Gálvez remained in the city after he lost power.
Rise of Rafael Carrera
In 1838, the liberal forces of the Honduran leader Francisco Morazán and Guatemalan José Francisco Barrundia invaded Guatemala and reached San Sur, where they executed Pascual Alvarez, Carrera's father-in-law. They impaled his head on a pike as a warning to all followers of the Guatemalan caudillo. On learning this, Carrera and his wife Petrona – who had come to confront Morazán as soon as they learned of the invasion and were in Mataquescuintla – swore they would never forgive Morazán even in his grave; they felt it impossible to respect anyone who would not avenge family members.
After sending several envoys, whom Carrera would not receive – especially Barrundia whom Carrera did not want to murder in cold blood – Morazán began a scorched earth offensively, destroying villages in his path and stripping them of their few assets. The Carrera forces had to hide in the mountains. Believing that Carrera was totally defeated, Morazán and Barrundia marched on to Guatemala City, where they were welcomed as saviors by the state governor Pedro Valenzuela and members of the conservative Aycinena Clan, who proposed to sponsor one of the liberal battalions, while Valenzuela and Barrundia gave Morazán all the Guatemalan resources needed to solve any financial problem he had. The criollos of both parties celebrated until dawn that they finally had a criollo caudillo like Morazán, who was able to crush the peasant rebellion.
Morazán used the proceeds to support Los Altos and then replaced Valenzuela by Mariano Rivera Paz, member of the Aycinena clan, although he did not return to that clan any property confiscated in 1829; in revenge, Juan José de Aycinena y Piñol voted for the dissolution of the Central American Federation in San Salvador a little later, forcing Morazán to return to El Salvador to fight to save his federal mandate. Along the way, Morazán increased repression in eastern Guatemala, as punishment for helping Carrera. Knowing that Morazán had gone to El Salvador, Carrera tried to take Salamá with the small force that remained but was defeated, losing his brother Laureano in the combat. With just a few men left, he managed to escape, badly wounded, to Sanarate. After recovering to some extent, he attacked a detachment in Jutiapa and managed to get a small amount of booty which he handed to the volunteers who accompanied him and prepared to attack Petapa – near Guatemala City – where he was victorious, though with heavy casualties.
In September of that year, he attempted an assault on the capital of Guatemala, but the liberal general Carlos Salazar Castro defeated him in the fields of Villa Nueva and Carrera had to retreat. After an unsuccessful attempt to take the Quetzaltenango, Carrera was surrounded and wounded, and he had to capitulate to the Mexican General Agustin Guzman, who had been in Quetzaltenango since the time of Vicente Filísola's arrival in 1823. Morazán had the opportunity to shoot Carrera, but did not because he needed the support of the Guatemalan peasants to counter the attacks of Francisco Ferrera in El Salvador; instead, Morazán left Carrera in charge of a small fort in Mita, and without any weapons. Knowing that Morazán was going to attack El Salvador, Francisco Ferrera gave arms and ammunition to Carrera and convinced him to attack Guatemala City.
Meanwhile, despite insistent advice to definitely crush Carrera and his forces, Salazar tried to negotiate with him diplomatically; he even went as far as to show that he neither feared nor distrusted Carrera by removing the fortifications of the Guatemalan capital, in place in since the battle of Villa Nueva. Taking advantage of Salazar's good faith and Ferrera's weapons, Carrera took Guatemala City by surprise on 13 April 1839; Castro Salazar, Mariano Gálvez and Barrundia fled before the arrival of Carrera's militiamen. Salazar, in his nightshirt, vaulted roofs of neighboring houses and sought refuge; reaching the border disguised as a peasant. With Salazar gone, Carrera reinstated Rivera Paz as Head of State of Guatemala.
Invasion and Absorption of Los Altos
On 2 April 1838, in the city of Quetzaltenango, a secessionist group founded the independent State of Los Altos which sought independence from Guatemala. The most important members of the Liberal Party of Guatemala and liberal enemies of the conservative regime moved to Los Altos, leaving their exile in El Salvador. The liberals in Los Altos began severely criticizing the Conservative government of Rivera Paz; they had their own newspaper – El Popular, which contributed to the harsh criticism.
Los Altos was the region with the main production and economic activity of the former state of Guatemala. without Los Altos, conservatives lost much of the resources that had given Guatemala hegemony in Central America. Then, the government of Guatemala tried to reach to a peaceful solution, but altenses, protected by the recognition of the Central American Federation Congress, did not accept; Guatemala's government then resorted to force, sending Carrera as commanding general of the Army to subdue Los Altos.
Carrera defeated General Agustin Guzman when the former Mexican officer tried to ambush him and then went on to Quetzaltenango, where he imposed a harsh and hostile conservative regime instead of the liberals. Calling all council members, he told them flatly that he was behaving leniently towards them as it was the first time they had challenged him, but sternly warned them that there would be no mercy if there was a second time. Finally, Guzmán, and the head of state of Los Altos, Marcelo Molina, were sent to the capital of Guatemala, where they were displayed as trophies of war during a triumphant parade on 17 February 1840; in the case of Guzman, shackled, still with bleeding wounds, and riding a mule.
On 18 March 1840, liberal caudillo Morazán invaded Guatemala with 1500 soldiers to avenge the insult done in Los Altos. Fearing that such action would end with liberal efforts to hold together the Central American Federation, Guatemala had a cordon of guards from the border with El Salvador; without a telegraph service, men ran carrying last-minute messages. With the information from these messengers, Carrera hatched a plan of defense leaving his brother Sotero in charge of troops who presented only slight resistance in the city. Carrera pretended to flee and led his ragtag army to the heights of Aceituno, with few men, few rifles and two old cannons. The city was at the mercy of the army of Morazán, with bells of the twenty churches ringing for divine assistance.
Once Morazán reached the capital, he took it very easily and freed Guzman, who immediately left for Quetzaltenango to give the news that Carrera was defeated; Carrera then, taking advantage of what his enemies believed, applied a strategy of concentrating fire on the Central Park of the city and also employed surprise attack tactics which caused heavy casualties to the army of Morazán, finally forcing the survivors to fight for their lives. Morazán's soldiers lost the initiative and their previous numerical superiority. Furthermore, in unfamiliar surroundings in the city, they had to fight, carry their dead and care for their wounded while resentful and tired from the long march from El Salvador to Guatemala.
Carrera, by then an experienced military man, was able to defeat Morazán thoroughly. The disaster for the liberal general was complete: aided by Angel Molina -son of Guatemalan Liberal leader Pedro Molina Mazariegos- who knew the streets of the city, had to flee with his favorite men, disguised, shouting "Long live Carrera!" through the ravine of "El Incienso" to El Salvador. In his absence, Morazán had been supplanted as Head of State of his country, and had to embark for exile in Perú. In Guatemala, survivors from his troops were shot without mercy, while Carrera was out in unsuccessful pursuit of Morazán. This engagement sealed the status of Carrera and marked the decline of Morazán, and forced the conservative Aycinena clan criollos to negotiate with Carrera and his peasant revolutionary supporters.
Guzmán, who was freed by Morazán when the latter had seemingly defeated Carrera in Guatemala City, had gone back to Quetzaltenango to bring the good news. The city liberal criollo leaders rapidly reinstated the Los Altos State and celebrated Morazán's victory. However, as soon as Carrera and the newly reinstated Mariano Rivera Paz heard the news, Carrera went back to Quetzaltenango with his volunteer army to regain control of the rebel liberal state once and for all. On 2 April 1840, after entering the city, Carrera told the citizens that he had already warned them after he defeated them earlier that year. Then, he ordered the majority of the liberal city hall officials from Los Altos to be shot. Carrera then forcibly annexed Quetzaltenango and much of Los Altos back into conservative Guatemala.
After the violent and bloody reinstatement of the State of Los Altos by Carrera in April 1840, Luis Batres Juarros – conservative member of the Aycinena Clan, then secretary general of the Guatemalan government of recently reinstated Mariano Rivera Paz – obtained from the vicar Larrazabal authorization to dismantle the regionalist Church. Serving priests of Quetzaltenango – capital of the would-be-state of Los Altos, Urban Ugarte and his coadjutor, José Maria Aguilar, were removed from their parish and likewise the priests of the parishes of San Martin Jilotepeque and San Lucas Tolimán. Larrazabal ordered the priests Fernando Antonio Dávila, Mariano Navarrete and Jose Ignacio Iturrioz to cover the parishes of Quetzaltenango, San Martin Jilotepeque and San Lucas Toliman, respectively.
The liberal criollos' defeat and execution in Quetzaltenango enhanced Carrera's status with the native population of the area, whom he respected and protected.
In 1840, Belgium began to act as an external source of support for Carrera's independence movement, in an effort to exert influence in Central America. The Compagnie belge de colonisation (Belgian Colonization Company), commissioned by Belgian King Leopold I, became the administrator of Santo Tomas de Castilla replacing the failed British Eastern Coast of Central America Commercial and Agricultural Company. Even though the colony eventually crumbled, Belgium continued to support Carrera in the mid-19th century, although Britain continued to be the main business and political partner to Carrera.
Rafael Carrera was elected Guatemalan Governor in 1844. On 21 March 1847, Guatemala declared itself an independent republic and Carrera became its first president.
During the first term as president, Carrera had brought the country back from extreme conservatism to a traditional moderation; in 1848, the liberals were able to drive him from office, after the country had been in turmoil for several months. Carrera resigned of his own free will and left for México. The new liberal regime allied itself with the Aycinena family and swiftly passed a law ordering Carrera's execution if he dared to return to Guatemalan soil. The liberal criollos from Quetzaltenango were led by general Agustín Guzmán who occupied the city after Corregidor general Mariano Paredes was called to Guatemala City to take over the Presidential office. They declared on 26 August 1848 that Los Altos was an independent state once again. The new state had the support of Vasconcelos' regime in El Salvador and the rebel guerrilla army of Vicente and Serapio Cruz who were sworn enemies of Carrera. The interim government was led by Guzmán himself and had Florencio Molina and the priest Fernando Davila as his Cabinet members. On 5 September 1848, the criollos altenses chose a formal government led by Fernando Antonio Martínez.
In the meantime, Carrera decided to return to Guatemala and did so entering by Huehuetenango, where he met with the native leaders and told them that they must remain united to prevail; the leaders agreed and slowly the segregated native communities started developing a new Indian identity under Carrera's leadership. In the meantime, in the eastern part of Guatemala, the Jalapa region became increasingly dangerous; former president Mariano Rivera Paz and rebel leader Vicente Cruz were both murdered there after trying to take over the Corregidor office in 1849.
When Carrera arrived to Chiantla in Huehuetenango, he received two altenses emissaries who told him that their soldiers were not going to fight his forces because that would lead to a native revolt, much like that of 1840; their only request from Carrera was to keep the natives under control. The altenses did not comply, and led by Guzmán and his forces, they started chasing Carrera; the caudillo hid helped by his native allies and remained under their protection when the forces of Miguel Garcia Granados – who arrived from Guatemala City were looking for him.
On learning that officer José Víctor Zavala had been appointed as Corregidor in Suchitepéquez Department, Carrera and his hundred jacalteco bodyguards crossed a dangerous jungle infested with jaguars to meet his former friend. When they met, Zavala not only did not capture him, but agreed to serve under his orders, thus sending a strong message to both liberal and conservatives in Guatemala City that they would have to negotiate with Carrera or battle on two fronts – Quetzaltenango and Jalapa. Carrera went back to the Quetzaltenango area, while Zavala remained in Suchitepéquez as a tactical maneuver. Carrera received a visit from a Cabinet member of Paredes and told him that he had control of the native population and that he assured Paredes that he would keep them appeased. When the emissary returned to Guatemala City, he told the president everything Carrera said, and added that the native forces were formidable.
Guzmán went to Antigua Guatemala to meet with another group of Paredes emissaries; they agreed that Los Altos would rejoin Guatemala, and that the latter would help Guzmán defeat his hated enemy and also build a port on the Pacific Ocean. Guzmán was sure of victory this time, but his plan evaporated when, in his absence, Carrera and his native allies had occupied Quetzaltenango; Carrera appointed Ignacio Yrigoyen as Corregidor and convinced him that he should work with the k'iche', mam, q'anjobal and mam leaders to keep the region under control. On his way out, Yrigoyen murmured to a friend: Now he is the King of the Indians, indeed!
Guzmán then left for Jalapa, where he struck a deal with the rebels, while Luis Batres Juarros convinced President Paredes to deal with Carrera. Back in Guatemala City within a few months, Carrera was commander-in-chief, backed by military and political support of the Indian communities from the densely populated western highlands. During the first presidency from 1844 to 1848, he brought the country back from excessive conservatism to a moderate regime, and – with the advice of Juan José de Aycinena y Piñol and Pedro de Aycinena – restored relations with the Church in Rome with a Concordat ratified in 1854. He also kept peace between natives and criollos, with the latter fearing a rising like the one that was taking place in Yucatán at the time.
Caste War of Yucatán
In Yucatán, then an independent republic north of Guatemala, a war started between the natives and criollo people; this war seemed rooted in the defense of communal lands against the expansion of private ownership, which was accentuated by the boom in the production of henequen, which was an important industrial fiber used to make rope. After discovering the value of the plant, the wealthier Yucateco criollos started plantations, beginning in 1833, to cultivate it on a large scale; not long after the henequen boom, a boom in sugar production led to more wealth. The sugar and henequen plantations encroached on native communal land, and native workers recruited to work on the plantations were mistreated and underpaid.
However, rebel leaders in their correspondence with British Honduras were more often inclined to cite taxation as the immediate cause of the war; Jacinto Pat, for example, wrote in 1848 that "what we want is liberty and not oppression, because before we were subjugated with the many contributions and taxes that they imposed on us." Pac's companion, Cecilio Chi added in 1849, that promises made by the rebel Santiago Imán, that he was "liberating the Indians from the payment of contributions" as a reason for resisting the central government, but in fact he continued levying them.
In June 1847, Méndez learned that a large force of armed natives and supplies had gathered at the Culumpich, a property owned by Jacinto Pat, the Maya batab (leader), near Valladolid. Fearing revolt, Mendez arrested Manuel Antonio Ay, the principal Maya leader of Chichimilá, accused of planning a revolt, and executed him at the town square of Valladolid. Furthermore, Méndez searching for other insurgents burned the town of Tepich and repressed its residents. In the following months, several Maya towns were sacked and many people arbitrarily killed. In his letter of 1849, Cecilio Chi noted that Santiago Mendez had come to "put every Indian, big and little, to death" but that the Maya had responded to some degree, in kind, writing "it has pleased God and good fortune that a much greater portion of them [whites] than of the Indians [have died].
Cecilio Chi, the native leader of Tepich, along with Jacinto Pat attacked Tepich on 30 July 1847, in reaction to the indiscriminate massacre of Mayas, ordered that all the non-Maya population be killed. By spring of 1848, the Maya forces had taken over most of the Yucatán, with the exception of the walled cities of Campeche and Mérida and the south-west coast, with Yucatecan troops holding the road from Mérida to the port of Sisal. The Yucatecan governor Miguel Barbachano had prepared a decree for the evacuation of Mérida, but was apparently delayed in publishing it by the lack of suitable paper in the besieged capital. The decree became unnecessary when the republican troops suddenly broke the siege and took the offensive with major advances.
Governor Barbachano sought allies anywhere he could find them, in Cuba (for Spain), Jamaica (for the United Kingdom) and the United States, but none of these foreign powers would intervene, although the matter was taken seriously enough in the United States to be debated in Congress. Subsequently, therefore, he turned to Mexico, and accepted a return to Mexican authority. Yucatán was officially reunited with Mexico on 17 August 1848. Yucateco forces rallied, aided by fresh guns, money, and troops from Mexico, and pushed back the natives from more than half of the state.
By 1850 the natives occupied two distinct regions in the southeast and they were inspired to continue the struggle by the apparition of the "Talking Cross". This apparition, believed to be a way in which God communicated with the Maya, dictated that the War continue. Chan Santa Cruz, or Small Holy Cross became the religious and political center of the Maya resistance and the rebellion came to be infused with religious significance. Chan Santa Cruz also became the name of the largest of the independent Maya states, as well as the name of the capital city which is now the city of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, Quintana Roo. The followers of the Cross were known as the "Cruzob".
The government of Yucatán first declared the war over in 1855, but hopes for peace were premature. There were regular skirmishes, and occasional deadly major assaults into each other's territory, by both sides. The United Kingdom recognized the Chan Santa Cruz Maya as a "de facto" independent nation, in part because of the major trade between Chan Santa Cruz and British Honduras.{{}}
Battle of La Arada
After Carrera returned from exile in 1849, Vasconcelos granted asylum to the Guatemalan liberals, who harassed the Guatemalan government in several different forms: José Francisco Barrundia did it through a liberal newspaper established with that specific goal; Vasconcelos gave support during a whole year to a rebel faction "La Montaña", in eastern Guatemala, providing and distributing money and weapons. By late 1850, Vasconcelos was getting impatient at the slow progress of the war with Guatemala and decided to plan an open attack. Under that circumstance, the Salvadorean head of state started a campaign against the conservative Guatemalan regime, inviting Honduras and Nicaragua to participate in the alliance; only the Honduran government led by Juan Lindo accepted.
Meanwhile, in Guatemala, where the invasion plans were perfectly well known, President Mariano Paredes started taking precautions to face the situation, while the Guatemalan Archbishop, Francisco de Paula García Peláez, ordered peace prayers in the archdiocese.
On 4 January 1851, Doroteo Vasconcelos and Juan Lindo met in Ocotepeque, Honduras, where they signed an alliance against Guatemala. The Salvadorean army had 4,000 men, properly trained and armed and supported by artillery; the Honduran army numbered 2,000 men. The coalition army was stationed in Metapán, El Salvador, due to its proximity with both the Guatemalan and Honduran borders.
On 28 January 1851, Vasconcelos sent a letter to the Guatemalan Ministry of Foreign Relations, in which he demanded that the Guatemalan president relinquish power, so that the alliance could designate a new head of state loyal to the liberals and that Carrera be exiled, escorted to any of the Guatemalan southern ports by a Salvadorean regiment. The Guatemalan government did not accept the terms and the Allied army entered Guatemalan territory at three different places. On 29 January, a 500-man contingent entered through Piñuelas, Agua Blanca and Jutiapa, led by General Vicente Baquero, but the majority of the invading force marched from Metapán. The Allied army was composed of 4,500 men led by Vasconcelos, as Commander in Chief. Other commanders were the generals José Santos Guardiola, Ramón Belloso, José Trinidad Cabañas and Gerardo Barrios. Guatemala was able to recruit 2,000 men, led by Lieutenant General Carrera as Commander in Chief, with several colonels.
Carrera's strategy was to feign a retreat, forcing the enemy forces to follow the "retreating" troops to a place he had previously chosen; on 1 February 1851, both armies were facing each other with only the San José river between them. Carrera had fortified the foothills of La Arada, its summit about above the level of the river. A meadow deep lay between the hill and the river, and boarding the meadow was a sugar cane plantation. Carrera divided his army in three sections: the left wing was led by Cerna and Solares; the right wing led by Bolaños. He personally led the central battalion, where he placed his artillery. Five hundred men stayed in Chiquimula to defend the city and to aid in a possible retreat, leaving only 1,500 Guatemalans against an enemy of 4,500.
The battle began at 8:30 AM, when Allied troops initiated an attack at three different points, with an intense fire opened by both armies. The first Allied attack was repelled by the defenders of the foothill; during the second attack, the Allied troops were able to take the first line of trenches. They were subsequently expelled. During the third attack, the Allied force advanced to a point where it was impossible to distinguish between Guatemalan and Allied troops. Then, the fight became a melée, while the Guatemalan artillery severely punished the invaders. At the height of the battle when the Guatemalans faced an uncertain fate, Carrera ordered that sugar cane plantation around the meadow to be set on fire. The invading army was now surrounded: to the front, they faced the furious Guatemalan firepower, to the flanks, a huge blaze and to the rear, the river, all of which made retreat very difficult. The central division of the Allied force panicked and started a disorderly retreat. Soon, all of the Allied troops started retreating.
The 500 men of the rearguard pursued what was left of the Allied army, which desperately fled for the borders of their respective countries. The final count of the Allied losses were 528 dead, 200 prisoners, 1,000 rifles, 13,000 rounds of ammunition, many pack animals and baggage, 11 drums and seven artillery pieces. Vasconcelos sought refuge in El Salvador, while two Generals mounted on the same horse were seen crossing the Honduran border. Carrera regrouped his army and crossed the Salvadorean border, occupying Santa Ana, before he received orders from the Guatemalan President, Mariano Paredes, to return to Guatemala, since the Allies were requesting a cease-fire and a peace treaty.
Concordat of 1854
The Concordat of 1854 was an international treaty between Carrera and the Holy See, signed in 1852 and ratified by both parties in 1854. Through this, Guatemala gave the education of Guatemalan people to regular orders of the Catholic Church, committed to respect ecclesiastical property and monasteries, imposed mandatory tithing and allowed the bishops to censor what was published in the country; in return, Guatemala received dispensations for the members of the army, allowed those who had acquired the properties that the liberals had expropriated from the Church in 1829 to keep those properties, received the taxes generated by the properties of the Church, and had the right to judge certain crimes committed by clergy under Guatemalan law. The concordat was designed by Juan José de Aycinena y Piñol and not only reestablished but reinforced the relationship between Church and State in Guatemala. It was in force until the fall of the conservative government of Field Marshal Vicente Cerna y Cerna.
In 1854, by initiative of Manuel Francisco Pavón Aycinena, Carrera was declared "supreme and perpetual leader of the nation" for life, with the power to choose his successor. He was in that position until he died on 14 April 1865. While he pursued some measures to set up a foundation for economic prosperity to please the conservative landowners, military challenges at home and in a three-year war with Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua dominated his presidency. His rivalry with Gerardo Barrios, President of El Salvador, resulted in open war in 1863.
At Coatepeque the Guatemalans suffered a severe defeat, which was followed by a truce. Honduras joined with El Salvador, and Nicaragua and Costa Rica with Guatemala. The contest was finally settled in favor of Carrera, who besieged and occupied San Salvador, and dominated Honduras and Nicaragua. He continued to act in concert with the Clerical Party, and tried to maintain friendly relations with the European governments. Before his death, Carrera nominated his friend and loyal soldier, Army Marshall Vicente Cerna y Cerna, as his successor.
Wyke-Aycinena treaty: Limits convention about Belize
The Belize region in the Yucatán Peninsula was never occupied by either Spain or Guatemala. Spain made some exploratory expeditions in the 16th century that served as her basis to claim the area. Guatemala simply inherited that argument to claim the territory, even though it never sent an expedition to the area after independence from Spain, due to the ensuing Central American civil war that lasted until 1860.
The British had had a small settlement there since the middle of the 17th century, mainly as buccaneers' quarters and then for wood production. The settlements were never recognized as British colonies although they were somewhat under the jurisdiction of the British government in Jamaica. In the 18th century, Belize became the main smuggling center for Central America, even though the British accepted Spain's sovereignty over the region via treaties signed in 1783 and 1786, in exchange for a ceasefire and the authorization for British subjects to work in the forests of Belize.
After 1821, Belize became the leading edge of Britain's commercial entrance in the isthmus. British commercial brokers established themselves and began prosperous commercial routes plying the Caribbean harbors of Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.
When Carrera came to power in 1840 he stopped the complaints over Belize and established a Guatemalan consulate in the region to oversee Guatemalan interests. Belize commerce boomed in the region until 1855, when the Colombians built a transoceanic railway that allowed commerce to flow more efficiently between the oceans. Thereafter Belize's commercial importance declined. When the Caste War of Yucatán began in the Yucatán Peninsula the Belize and Guatemala representatives were on high alert; Yucatán refugees fled into both Guatemala and Belize and Belize's superintendent came to fear that Carrera–given his strong alliance with Guatemalan natives–could support the native uprisings.
In the 1850s, the British employed goodwill to settle the territorial differences with Central American countries. They: withdrew from the Mosquito Coast in Nicaragua and began talks that would end by restoring the territory to Nicaragua in 1894: returned the Bay Islands to Honduras and negotiated with the American filibuster William Walker in an effort to prevent him from conducting an invasion of Honduras. They signed a treaty with Guatemala regarding Belize's borders, which has been referred to by some Guatemalans as the worst mistake made by Rafael Carrera.
Pedro de Aycinena y Piñol, as Foreign Secretary, made an extra effort to keep good relations with the Crown. In 1859, Walker again threatened Central America; in order to get the weapons needed to face the filibuster, Carrera's regime had to come to terms about Belize with the British. On 30 April 1859, the Wyke-Aycinena treaty was signed, between the British and Guatemalan representatives. The treaty had two parts:
The first six articles clearly defined the Guatemala-Belize border: Guatemala acknowledged Britain's sovereignty over Belize.
The seventh article was about the construction of a road between Guatemala City and the Caribbean coast, which would be of mutual benefit, as Belize needed a way to communicate with the Pacific coast in order to return to commercial relevance; Guatemala needed a road to improve communication with its Atlantic coast. However, the road was never built; first because Guatemalans and Belizeans could not agree on the exact location for the road, and later because the conservatives lost power in Guatemala in 1871, and the liberal government declared the treaty void.
Among those who signed the treaty was José Milla y Vidaurre, who worked with Aycinena in the Foreign Ministry at the time. Carrera ratified the treaty on 1 May 1859, while Charles Lennox Wyke, British consul in Guatemala, traveled to Great Britain and got royal approval on 26 September 1859. American consul Beverly Clarke objected with some liberal representatives, but the issue was settled.
As of 1850, it was estimated that Guatemala had a population of 600,000.
Guatemala's "Liberal Revolution" came in 1871 under the leadership of Justo Rufino Barrios, who worked to modernize the country, improve trade and introduce new crops and manufacturing. During this era coffee became an important crop for Guatemala. Barrios had ambitions of reuniting Central America and took the country to war in an unsuccessful attempt to attain it, losing his life on the battlefield in 1885 to forces in El Salvador.
Justo Rufino Barrios government
The Conservative government in Honduras gave military backing to a group of Guatemalan Conservatives wishing to take back the government, so Barrios declared war on the Honduran government. At the same time, Barrios, together with President Luis Bogran of Honduras, declared an intention to reunify the old United Provinces of Central America.
During his time in office, Barrios continued with the liberal reforms initiated by García Granados, but he was more aggressive implementing them. A summary of his reforms is:
Definitive separation between Church and State: he expelled the regular clergy such as Morazán had done in 1829 and confiscated their properties.
{|class="wikitable sortable" style="font-size:90%; width:550px;"
|- style="color:white;"
!style="background:#659ec7;"|Regular order
!style="background:#659ec7;"|Coat of arms
!style="background:#659ec7;"|Clergy type
!style="background:#659ec7;"|Confiscated properties
|-
|Order of Preachers||||Regular||
Monasteries
Large extensions of farmland
Sugar mills
Indian doctrines
|-
|Mercedarians||||Regular||
Monasteries
Large extensions of farmland
Sugar mills
Indian doctrines
|-
|Society of Jesus||||Regular||The Jesuits had been expelled from the Spanish colonies back in 1765 and did not return to Guatemala until 1852. By 1871, they did not have major possessions.
|-
|Recoletos||||Regular||
Monasterires
|-
|Conceptionists||||Regular||
Monasteries
Large extensions of farmland
|-
|Archdiocese of Guatemala|| ||Secular||School and Trentin Seminar of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción
|-
|Congregation of the Oratory||||Secular||
Church building and housing in Guatemala City were obliterated by presidential order.
|}
Forbid mandatory tithing to weaken secular clergy members and the archbishop.
Established civil marriage as the only official one in the country
Secular cemeteries
Civil records superseded religious ones
Established secular education across the country
Established free and mandatory elementary schools
Closed the Pontifical University of San Carlos and in its place created the secular National University.
Barrios had a National Congress totally pledge to his will, and therefore he was able to create a new constitution in 1879, which allowed him to be reelected as president for another six-year term.
He also was intolerant with his political opponents, forcing a lot of them to flee the country and building the infamous Guatemalan Central penitentiary where he had numerous people incarcerated and tortured.
Appleton's guide for México and Guatemala from 1884, shows the twenty departments in which Guatemala was divided during Barrios' time in office:
During Barrios tenure, the "indian land" that the conservative regime of Rafael Carrera had so strongly defended was confiscated and distributed among those officers who had helped him during the Liberal Revolution in 1871. Decree # 170 (a.k.a. Census redemption decree) made it easy to confiscate those lands in favor of the army officers and the German settlers in Verapaz as it allowed to publicly sell those common Indian lots. Therefore, the fundamental characteristic of the productive system during Barrios regime was the accumulation of large extension of land among few owners and a sort of "farmland servitude", based on the exploitation of the native day laborers.
In order to make sure that there was a steady supply of day laborers for the coffee plantations, which required a lot of them, Barrios government decreed the Day Laborer regulations, labor legislation that placed the entire native population at the disposition of the new and traditional Guatemalan landlords, except the regular clergy, who were eventually expelled form the country and saw their properties confiscated. This decree set the following for the native Guatemalans:
Were forced by law to work on farms when the owners of those required them, without any regard for where the native towns were located.
Were under control of local authorities, who were in charge to make sure that day laborer batches were sent to all the farms that required them.
Were subject to habilitation: a type of forced advanced pay, which buried the day laborer in debt and then made it legal for the landlords to keep them in their land for as long as they wanted.
Created the day laborer booklet: a document that proved that a day laborer had no debts to his employer. Without this document, any day laborer was at the mercy of the local authorities and the landlords.
In 1879, a constitution was ratified for Guatemala (the Republic's first as an independent nation, as the old Conservador regime had ruled by decree). In 1880, Barrios was reelected President for a six-year term. Barrios unsuccessfully attempted to get the United States of America to mediate the disputed boundary between Guatemala and Mexico.
Government of Manuel Lisandro Barillas
General Manuel Lisandro Barillas Bercián was able to become interim president of Guatemala after the death of President Justo Rufino Barrios in the Batalla of Chalchuapa in El Salvador in April 1885 and after the resignation of first designate Alejandro Manuel Sinibaldi Castro, by means of a clever scam: he went to the General Cemetery when Barrios was being laid to rest and told the Congress president: "please prepare room and board for the 5,000 troops that I have waiting for my orders in Mixco". The congress president was scared of this, and declared Barillas interim president on the spot. By the time he realized that it was all a lie, it was too late to change anything.
Instead of calling for elections, as he should have, Barillas Bercián was able to be declared President on 16 March 1886 and remained in office until 1892.
During the government of general Barillas Bercián, the Carrera theater was remodeled to celebrate the Discovery of America fourth centennial; the Italian community in Guatemala donated a statue of Christopher Columbus -Cristóbal Colón, in Spanish- which was placed next to the theater. Since then, the place was called "Colón Theater".
In 1892, Barillas called for elections as he wanted to take care of his personal business; it was the first election in Guatemala that allowed the candidates to make propaganda in the local newspapers. The candidates who ran for office were:
Barillas Bercian was unique among liberal presidents of Guatemala between 1871 and 1944: he handed over power to his successor peacefully. When election time approached, he sent for the three Liberal candidates to ask them what their government plan would be. Happy with what he heard from general Reyna Barrios, Barillas made sure that a huge column of Quetzaltenango and Totonicapán Indigenous people came down from the mountains to vote for general Reyna Barrios. Reyna was elected president. As to not to offend the losing candidates, Barillas gave them checks to cover the costs of their presidential campaigns. Reyna Barrios went on to become president on 15 March 1892.
20th century
In the 1890s, the United States began to implement the Monroe Doctrine, pushing out European colonial powers and establishing U.S. hegemony over resources and labor in Latin American nations. The dictators that ruled Guatemala during the late 19th and early 20th century were generally very accommodating to U.S. business and political interests; thus, unlike other Latin American nations such as Haiti, Nicaragua and Cuba the U.S. did not have to use overt military force to maintain dominance in Guatemala. The Guatemalan military/police worked closely with the U.S. military and State Department to secure U.S. interests. The Guatemalan government exempted several U.S. corporations from paying taxes, especially the United Fruit Company, privatized and sold off publicly owned utilities, and gave away huge swaths of public land.
Manuel Estrada Cabrera regime (1898–1920)
After the assassination of general José María Reina Barrios on 8 February 1898, the Guatemalan cabinet called an emergency meeting to appoint a new successor, but declined to invite Estrada Cabrera to the meeting, even though he was the First Designated to the Presidency. There are two versions on how he was able to get the Presidency: (a) Estrada Cabrera entered "with pistol drawn" to assert his entitlement to the presidency and (b) Estrada Cabrera showed up unarmed to the meeting and demanded to be given the presidency as he was the First Designated".
The first Guatemalan head of state taken from civilian life in over 50 years, Estrada Cabrera overcame resistance to his regime by August 1898 and called for September elections, which he won handily. At that time, Estrada Cabrera was 44 years old; he was stocky, of medium height, dark, and broad-shouldered. The mustache gave him plebeian appearance. Black and dark eyes, metallic sounding voice and was rather sullen and brooding. At the same time, he already showed his courage and character. This was demonstrated on the night of the death of Reina Barrios when he stood in front of the ministers, meeting in the Government Palace to choose a successor, Gentlemen, let me please sign this decree. As First Designated, you must hand me the Presidency. "His first decree was a general amnesty and the second was to reopen all the elementary schools closed by Reyna Barrios, both administrative and political measures aimed to gain the public opinion. Estrada Cabrera was almost unknown in the political circles of the capital and one could not foresee the features of his government or his intentions.
In 1898, the Legislature convened for the election of President Estrada Cabrera, who triumphed thanks to the large number of soldiers and policemen who went to vote in civilian clothes and to the large number of illiterate family that they brought with them to the polls. Also, the effective propaganda that was written in the official newspaper "the Liberal Idea '. The latter was run by the poet Joaquin Mendez, and among the drafters were Enrique Gómez Carrillo, -a famous writer who had just returned to Guatemala from Paris, and who had confidence that Estrada Cabrera was the president that Guatemala needed- Rafael Spinola, Máximo Soto Hall and Juan Manuel Mendoza, who later would be Gómez Carrillo's biographer, and others. Gómez Carrillo received as a reward for his work as political propagandist the appointment as General Consul in Paris, with 250 gold pesos monthly salary and immediately went back to Europe
One of Estrada Cabrera's most famous and most bitter legacies was allowing the entry of the United Fruit Company into the Guatemalan economical and political arena. As a member of the Liberal Party, he sought to encourage development of the nation's infrastructure of highways, railroads, and sea ports for the sake of expanding the export economy. By the time Estrada Cabrera assumed the presidency, there had been repeated efforts to construct a railroad from the major port of Puerto Barrios to the capital, Guatemala City. Yet due to lack of funding exacerbated by the collapse of the internal coffee trade, the railway fell short of its goal. Estrada Cabrera decided, without consulting the legislature or judiciary, that striking a deal with the United Fruit Company was the only way to get finish the railway. Cabrera signed a contract with UFCO's Minor Cooper Keith in 1904 that gave the company tax-exemptions, land grants, and control of all railroads on the Atlantic side.
Estrada Cabrera often employed brutal methods to assert his authority, as that was the school of government in Guatemala at the time. Like him, presidents Rafael Carrera y Turcios and Justo Rufino Barrios had led tyrannical governments in the country. Right at the beginning of his first presidential period, he started prosecuting his political rivals and soon established a well-organized web of spies. One American Ambassador returned to the United States after he learned the dictator had given orders to poison him. Former President Manuel Barillas was stabbed to death in Mexico City, on a street outside of the Mexican Presidential Residence on Cabrera's orders; the street now bears the name of Calle Guatemala. Also, Estrada Cabrera responded violently to workers' strikes against UFCO. In one incident, when UFCO went directly to Estrada Cabrera to resolve a strike (after the armed forces refused to respond), the president ordered an armed unit to enter the workers' compound. The forces "arrived in the night, firing indiscriminately into the workers' sleeping quarters, wounding and killing an unspecified number."
In 1906, Estrada faced serious revolts against his rule; the rebels were supported by the governments of some of the other Central American nations, but Estrada succeeded in putting them down. Elections were held by the people against the will of Estrada Cabrera and thus he had the president-elect murdered in retaliation. In 1907, the brothers Avila Echeverría and a group of friends decided to kill the president using a bomb along his way. They came from prominent families in Guatemala and studied in foreign universities, but when they returned to their homeland, they found a situation where everybody lived in constant fear and the president ruled without any opposition.
Everything was carefully planned. When Estrada Cabrera went for a ride in his carriage, the bomb exploded, killing the horse and the driver, but only slightly injuring the President. Since their attack failed and they were forced to take their own lives; their families also suffered, as they were jailed in the infamous Penitenciaría Central. Conditions in the penitentiary were cruel and foul. Political offenses were tortured daily and their screams could be heard all over the penitentiary. Prisoners regularly died under these conditions since political crimes had no pardon. It has been suggested that the extreme despotic characteristics of Estrada did not emerge until after an attempt on his life in 1907.
Estrada Cabrera continued in power until forced to resign by new revolts in 1920. By that time, his power had declined drastically and he was reliant on the loyalty of a few generals. While the United States threatened intervention if he was removed through revolution, a bipartisan coalition came together to remove him from the presidency. He was removed from office after the national assembly charged that he was mentally incompetent, and appointed Carlos Herrera in his place on 8 April 1920.
In 1920, prince Wilhelm of Sweden visited Guatemala and made a very objective description of both Guatemalan society and Estrada Cabrera government in his book Between two continents, notes from a journey in Central America, 1920. The prince explained the dynamics of the Guatemalan society at the time pointing out that even though it called itself a "Republic", Guatemala had three sharply defined classes:
Criollos: a minority conformed originally by ancient families descendants of the Spaniards that conquered Central America and that by 1920 conformed both political parties in the country. By 1920, they were mixed to a large extended with foreigners and the great majority had Indian blood in their veins. They led the country both politically and intellectually partly because their education, although poor for European standards of the time, was enormously superior to the rest of the people of the country, partly because only criollos were allowed in the main political parties and also because their families controlled and for the most part owner the cultivated parts of the country.
Ladinos: middle class. Formed of people born of the cross between natives, blacks and criollos. The held almost no political power in 1920 and made the bulk of artisans, storekeepers, tradesmen and minor officials. In the eastern part of the country were found agricultural laborers.
Indians: the majority conformed by a mass of natives. Uneducated and disinclined to all forms of change, they had furnished excellent soldiers for the Army and often raised, as soldiers, to positions of considerable trust given their disinclination for independent political activity and their inherent respect for government and officialdom. They made the main element in the working agricultural population. There were three categories within them:
"Mozos colonos": settled on the plantations. Were given a small piece of land to cultivate on their own account, in return for work in the plantations so many months of the year.
"Mozos jornaleros": day-laborers who were contracted to work for certain periods of time. They were paid a daily wage.
In theory, each "mozo" was free to dispose of his labor as he or she pleased, but they were bound to the property by economical ties. They could not leave until they had paid off their debt to the owner, and they were victim of those owners, who encouraged the "mozos" to get into debt beyond their power to free themselves by granting credit or lending cash. If the mozos ran away, the owner could have them pursued and imprisoned by the authorities, with all the cost incurred in the process charged to the ever increasing debt of the mozo. If one of them refused to work, he or she was put in prison on the spot.
Finally, the wages were extremely low. The work was done by contract, but since every "mozo" starts with a large debt, the usual advance on engagement, they become servants to the owner.
Independent tillers: living in the most remote provinces, survived by growing crops of maize, wheat or beans, sufficient to meet their own needs and leave a small margin for disposal in the market places of the towns and often carried their goods on their back for up to a day.
Jorge Ubico regime (1931–1944)
In 1931, the dictator general Jorge Ubico came to power, backed by the United States, and initiated one of the most brutally repressive governments in Central American history. Just as Estrada Cabrera had done during his government, Ubico created a widespread network of spies and informants and had large numbers of political opponents tortured and put to death. A wealthy aristocrat (with an estimated income of $215,000 per year in 1930s dollars) and a staunch anti-communist, he consistently sided with the United Fruit Company, Guatemalan landowners and urban elites in disputes with peasants. After the crash of the New York Stock Exchange in 1929, the peasant system established by Barrios in 1875 to jump start coffee production in the country was not good enough anymore, and Ubico was forced to implement a system of debt slavery and forced labor to make sure that there was enough labor available for the coffee plantations and that the UFCO workers were readily available.
Allegedly, he passed laws allowing landowners to execute workers as a "disciplinary" measure. He also openly identified as a fascist; he admired Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler, saying at one point: "I am like Hitler. I execute first and ask questions later." Ubico was disdainful of the indigenous population, calling them "animal-like", and stated that to become "civilized" they needed mandatory military training, comparing it to "domesticating donkeys." He gave away hundreds of thousands of hectares to the United Fruit Company (UFCO), exempted them from taxes in Tiquisate, and allowed the U.S. military to establish bases in Guatemala.
Ubico considered himself to be "another Napoleon". He dressed ostentatiously and surrounded himself with statues and paintings of the emperor, regularly commenting on the similarities between their appearances. He militarized numerous political and social institutions—including the post office, schools, and symphony orchestras—and placed military officers in charge of many government posts. He frequently traveled around the country performing "inspections" in dress uniform, followed by a military escort, a mobile radio station, an official biographer, and cabinet members.
On the other hand, Ubico was an efficient administrator:
His new decrees, although unfair to the majority of the indigenous population, proved good for the Guatemalan economy during the Great Depression era, as they increased coffee production across the country.
He cut the bureaucrats' salaries by almost half, forcing inflation to recede.
He kept the peace and order in Guatemala City, by effectively fighting its crime.
October Revolution (1944)
After 14 years, Ubico's repressive policies and arrogant demeanor finally led to pacific disobedience by urban middle-class intellectuals, professionals, and junior army officers in 1944. On 25 June, a peaceful demonstration of female schoolteachers culminated in its suppression by government troops and the assassination of María Chinchilla who became a national heroine. On 1 July 1944 Ubico resigned from office amidst a general strike and nationwide protests. Initially, he had planned to hand over power to the former director of police, General Roderico Anzueto, whom he felt he could control. But his advisors noted that Anzueto's pro-Nazi sympathies had made him very unpopular, and that he would not be able to control the military. So Ubico instead chose to select a triumvirate of Major General Bueneventura Piñeda, Major General Eduardo Villagrán Ariza, and General Federico Ponce Vaides. The three generals promised to convene the national assembly to hold an election for a provisional president, but when the congress met on 3 July, soldiers held everyone at gunpoint and forced them to vote for General Ponce rather than the popular civilian candidate, Dr. Ramón Calderón. Ponce, who had previously retired from military service due to alcoholism, took orders from Ubico and kept many of the officials who had worked in the Ubico administration. The repressive policies of the Ubico administration were continued.
Opposition groups began organizing again, this time joined by many prominent political and military leaders, who deemed the Ponce regime unconstitutional. Among the military officers in the opposition were Jacobo Árbenz and Major Francisco Javier Arana. Ubico had fired Árbenz from his teaching post at the Escuela Politécnica, and since then Árbenz had been living in El Salvador, organizing a band of revolutionary exiles. On 19 October 1944 a small group of soldiers and students led by Árbenz and Arana attacked the National Palace in what later became known as the "October Revolution". Ponce was defeated and driven into exile; and Árbenz, Arana, and a lawyer name Jorge Toriello established a junta. They declared that democratic elections would be held before the end of the year.
The winner of the 1944 elections was a teaching major named Juan José Arévalo, PhD, who had earned a scholarship in Argentina during the government of general Lázaro Chacón due to his superb professor skills. Arévalo remained in South America during a few years, working as a university professor in several countries. Back in Guatemala during the early years of the Jorge Ubico regime, his colleagues asked him to present a project to the president to create the Faculty of Humanism at the National University, to which Ubico was strongly opposed. Realizing the dictatorial nature of Ubico, Arévalo left Guatemala and went back to Argentina. He went back to Guatemala after the 1944 Revolution and ran under a coalition of leftist parties known as the Partido Acción Revolucionaria ("Revolutionary Action Party", PAR), and won 85% of the vote in elections that are widely considered to have been fair and open.
Arévalo implemented social reforms, including minimum wage laws, increased educational funding, near-universal suffrage (excluding illiterate women), and labor reforms. But many of these changes only benefited the upper-middle classes and did little for the peasant agricultural laborers who made up the majority of the population. Although his reforms were relatively moderate, he was widely disliked by the United States government, the Catholic Church, large landowners, employers such as the United Fruit Company, and Guatemalan military officers, who viewed his government as inefficient, corrupt, and heavily influenced by communists. At least 25 coup attempts took place during his presidency, mostly led by wealthy liberal military officers.
Presidency of Juan José Arévalo (1945–1951)
Árbenz served as defense minister under President Arévalo. He was the first minister of this portfolio, since it was previously called the Ministry of War. In 1947, Dr. Arévalo, in company with a friend and two Russian dancers who were visiting Guatemala, had a car accident on the road to Panajachel. Arévalo fell into a ravine and was seriously injured, while all his companions were killed. The official party leaders signed a pact with Lieutenant Colonel Arana, in which he pledged not to attempt any coup against the ailing president, in exchange for the revolutionary parties as the official candidate in the next election. However, the recovery of the sturdy president was almost miraculous and soon he was able to take over the government. Lieutenant Colonel Francisco Javier Arana had accepted this pact because he wanted to be known as a Democratic hero of the uprising against Ponce and believed that the Barranco Pact ensured his position when the time of the presidential elections came.
Arana was a very influential person in Arévalo's government, and had managed to be nominated as the next presidential candidate, ahead of Captain Árbenz, who was told that because of his young age he would have no problem in waiting turn to the next election. Arana died in a gun battle against military civilian who wanted to capture him on 18 July 1949, at the Bridge of Glory, in Amatitlán, where he and his assistant commander had gone to check on weapons and that had been seized at the Aurora Air Base a few days before There are different versions about who ambushed him, and those who ordered the attack; Arbenz and Arévalo have been accused of instigating an attempt to get Arana out of the presidential picture.
The death of Lieutenant Colonel Arana is of critical importance in the history of Guatemala, because it was a pivotal event in the history of the Guatemalan revolution: his death not only paved the way for the election of Colonel Árbenz as president of the republic in 1950 but also caused an acute crisis in the government of Dr. Arévalo Bermejo, who all of a sudden had against him an army that was more faithful to Arana than to him, and elite civilian groups that used the occasion to protest strongly against his government.
Before his death, Arana had planned to run in the upcoming 1950 presidential elections. His death left Árbenz without any serious contenders in the elections (leading some, including the CIA and U.S. military intelligence, to speculate that Árbenz personally had him eliminated for this reason). Árbenz got more than three times as many votes as the runner-up, Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes. Fuentes claimed that electoral fraud benefited Árbenz; however scholars have pointed out that while fraud may possibly have given Árbenz some of his votes, it was not the reason that he won the election. In 1950s Guatemala, only literate men were able to vote by secret ballot; illiterate men and literate women voted by open ballot. Illiterate women were not enfranchised at all.
For the campaign of 1950, Arbenz asked José Manuel Fortuny – a high-ranking member of the Guatemalan Communist party – to write some speeches. The central theme of these was the land reform, the "pet project" of Árbenz. They shared a comfortable victory in elections in late 1950 and, thereafter, the tasks of government. While many of the leaders of the ruling coalition fought hard closeness to the president seeking personal benefits, the leaders of the Guatemalan Labor Party, and especially Fortuny, were the closest advisers and Árbenz were his private practice.
The election of Árbenz alarmed U.S. State Department officials, who stated that Arana "has always represented [the] only positive conservative element in [the] Arévalo administration", that his death would "strengthen Leftist[sic] materially", and that "developments forecast sharp leftist trend within [the] government."
Presidency of Jacobo Árbenz Guzman (1951–1954)
In his inaugural address, Árbenz promised to convert Guatemala from "a backward country with a predominantly feudal economy into a modern capitalist state." He declared that he intended to reduce dependency on foreign markets and dampen the influence of foreign corporations over Guatemalan politics. He also stated that he would modernize Guatemala's infrastructure and do so without the aid of foreign capital.
Based on his plan of government, he did the following:
Promulgated the Decree 900, to expropriate idle land from UFCO.
Began construction of the Atlantic Highway
Began construction of the Santo Tomas de Castilla port where port Matías de Gálvez used to be, to compete with Puerto Barrios, UFCO's port.
Began studies for Jurun Marinalá generation plant to compete with the electric company in the hands of Americans.
Árbenz was a Christian socialist and governed as a European-style democratic socialist, and took great inspiration from Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. According to historian Stephen Schlesinger, while Árbenz did have a few communists in lower-level positions in his administration, he "was not a dictator, he was not a crypto-communist." Nevertheless, some of his policies, particularly those involving agrarian reform, would be branded as "communist" by the upper classes of Guatemala and the United Fruit Company.
Land Reform
Prior to Árbenz's election in 1950, a handful of U.S. corporations controlled Guatemala's primary electrical utilities, the nation's only railroad, and the banana industry, which was Guatemala's chief agricultural export industry. By the mid-1940s, Guatemalan banana plantations accounted for more than one quarter of all of United Fruit Company's production in Latin America. Land reform was the centerpiece of Árbenz's election campaign. The revolutionary organizations that had helped put Árbenz in power put constant pressure on him to live up to his campaign promises regarding land reform. Árbenz continued Arévalo's reform agenda and in June 1952, his government enacted an agrarian reform program. Árbenz set land reform as his central goal, as only 2% of the population owned 70% of the land.
On 17 June 1952 Árbenz's administration enacted an agrarian reform law known as Decree 900. The law empowered the government to create a network of agrarian councils which would be in charge of expropriating uncultivated land on estates that were larger than . The land was then allocated to individual families. Owners of expropriated land were compensated according to the worth of the land claimed in May 1952 tax assessments (which they had often dramatically understated to avoid paying taxes). Land was paid for in 25-year bonds with a 3 percent interest rate. The program was in effect for 18 months, during which it distributed to about 100,000 families. Árbenz himself, a landowner through his wife, gave up of his own land in the land reform program.
In 1953, the reform was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, however the democratically elected Congress later impeached four judges associated with the ruling.
Decree 900, for the Agrarian Reform in Guatemala created the possibility of gaining crops for those field workers who had no land of their own. The effect of this law was similar to what occurred in Europe after the bubonic plague in the Middle Ages: after the plague, which killed one third of Europe's population at the time, the number of landowners decreased, which released many of the terrestrial land, increased supply and lowered land price. At the same time, many farmers also died from the plague, so that the labor force declined; this shift in supply of workers increased wages. The economic effects of the plague are very similar to those caused by the land reform in Guatemala: During the first harvest after the implementation of the law, the average income of farmers increased from Q225.00/year TO Q700.00/year. Some analysts say that conditions in Guatemala improved after the reform and that there was a "fundamental transformation of agricultural technology as a result of the decrease labor supply." Rising living standards also happened in Europe in the fifteenth century, while large-scale technological advances occurred. Missing workforce after the plague was "the mother of invention." The benefits from the reform were not limited solely to the working class of fields: There were increases in consumption, production and domestic private investment.
Construction of transport infrastructure
In order to establish the necessary physical infrastructure to make possible the "independent" and national capitalist development that could get rid of extreme dependence on the United States and break the American monopolies operating in the country, basically the economy of the banana enclave, Arbenz and his government began the planning and construction of the Atlantic Highway, which was intended to compete in the market with the monopoly on land transport exerted by the United Fruit Company, through one of its subsidiaries: the International Railways of Central America (IRCA), which had the concession since 1904, when it was granted by then President Manuel Estrada Cabrera. Construction of the highway began by the Roads Department of the Ministry of Communications, with the help of the military engineering battalion. It was planned to be built parallel along the railway line, as much as possible. The construction of the new port was also aimed to break another UFCO monopoly: Puerto Barrios was owned and operated solely by The Great White Fleet, another UFCO's subsidiary.
National power plant Jurun Marinalá
The Jurun Marinalá electric power generation plant was planned as the first national hydroelectric power plant in Guatemala. The goal was to disrupt the monopoly of the Electric Company, a subsidiary of American Electric Bond and Share (Ebasco), which did not make use of indigenous water resources, but ran fossil fuel-powered plants, thus creating a drain on foreign currency reserves. Owing to its massive economic importance, construction continued beyond the Árbenz presidency. The plant was finally completed under President Julio César Méndez Montenegro in 1968. It is located in the village of Agua Blanca, inside El Salto, Escuintla.
Catholic Campaign national pilgrimage against communism
The Catholic Church, who possessed a large share of power in Central America during the Colonial Era, was gradually losing it after the emancipation from Spain. First, it was the struggle of the liberals who overtook power from Guatemalan conservatives (among whom was included the Major Clergy of the Church); conservatives and the Church lost all of their power quota in the provinces of Central America, Guatemala remaining as their last bastion. In 1838, with the fall of the liberal President Mariano Galvez, the figure of Lieutenant General Rafael Carrera arose and became the country's conservative leader. He rallied his party and the Church back to power, at least in the province of Guatemala. With this state of affairs, the Central American Federation could not be carried out because it was liberal in nature and Guatemala's military power and that of its leader Carrera were invincible in his time; so much so, that Carrera eventually founded the Republic of Guatemala on 21 March 1847. After Carrera's death in 1865, Guatemalan Liberals saw their chance to seize power again, and conducted the Liberal Revolution in 1871. Since that time, the attacks on the senior clergy of the Catholic Church raged in Guatemala and secular education, freedom of religion, the expulsion of several religious orders and the expropriation of many church properties were decreed. This situation continued throughout all the liberal governments that followed, until October Revolution in 1944, in which the religious situation worsened: now the attacks towards the Church were not only economic, but also religious, as many revolutionaries began to declare themselves opposed to any kind of religion.
By 1951, Archbishop Mariano Rossell y Arellano found that it was urgent to recover the elite position of the Catholic Church in Guatemala, and for that reason he allied himself to the interests of the United Fruit Company through the National Liberation Movement and aimed to overthrow the revolutionary governments, which he branded as atheists and communists. After the consecration of the Shrine of Esquipulas (1950), and as part of a smear campaign launched against the Árbenz government, he requested sculptor Julio Urruela Vásquez to carve a replica of the Christ of Esquipulas, which was transferred to bronze in 1952 and converted the following year in symbol and banner of the national pilgrimage against communism. This Christ was then appointed as Commander in Chief of the forces of the National Liberation Movement during the invasion of June 1954.
On 4 April 1954, Rossell Arellano issued a pastoral letter in which he criticized the progress of communism in the country, and made a call to Guatemalans to rise up and fight the common enemy of God and the homeland. This pastoral was distributed throughout the country.
National Liberation (1954)
Agrarian Reform and UFCo conflict
In 1953, when the government implemented Agrarian Reform, it intended to redistribute large holdings of unused land to peasants, both Latino and Amerindian, for them to develop for subsistence farming. It expropriated 250,000 of 350,000 blocks held by the United Fruit Company (UFC) and, according to the government's Decree 900, it would redistribute this land for agricultural purposes. UFCO continued to hold thousands of hectares in pasture as well as substantial forest reserves. The Guatemalan government had offered the company a Q 609,572 in compensation for the appropriated land. The company fought the land expropriation, making several legal arguments. It said the government had misinterpreted its own law. The Agrarian Reform Law was directed at redistributing unused land able to be developed for agricultural purposes. Thus land in pasture, specified forest cover and under cultivation was to be left with the owners and untouched by the expropriators. The company argued that most of the land taken from them was cultivated and in use, so it was illegal for the government to take it.
Secondly, they argued that the offered compensation was insufficient for the amount and value of the land taken. However, the valuations of United Fruit Company's rural property were based on the values declared by the company in its own tax filings. In 1945, Arevalo's administration ordered new assessments, to be complete by 1948. UFCo had submitted the assessment by the due date; but, when the Agrarian Reform was implemented, the company declared that they wanted the value of its property changed from the values the company had previously used to dodge taxes. The government had investigated in 1951, but a new assessment was never completed. UFCo said that the 1948 assessment was outdated, and claimed its land value was much greater. They had estimated just compensation would be as high as Q 15,854,849, nearly twenty times more than what the Guatemalan government had offered.
The U.S. State Department and the embassy actively began to support the position of UFCo, which was a major US company. The Guatemalan government had to fight the pressure. The US officially acknowledged that Guatemala had the right to conduct their own politics and business, but U.S. representatives said they were trying to protect UFCo, a US company that generated much revenue and contributed to the US economy. Arbenz's administration said that Guatemala needed Agrarian Reform to improve its own economy. Arbenz said he would adopt policies for a nationalist economic development if necessary. He argued that all foreign investment would be subject to Guatemalan laws. Arbenz was firm in promoting the Agrarian Reform and within a couple of years had acted quickly; he claimed that Guatemalan government was not prepared to make an exception for the U.S. concerning Decree 900 and that it was not Guatemalan's fault that the American corporation had lied in its tax forms and declared an artificially low value on their land.
Because Arbenz could not be pressured to take into consideration the arguments made to prevent expropriation from UFCo, his government was undermined with propaganda. For U.S. the national security was also highly important. They had combined both political and economic interests. The fear of allowing communist practices in Guatemala was shared by the urban elite and middle classes, who would not relinquish their privileges that easily. The local media-such as newspapers El Imparcial and La Hora- took advantage of the freedom of press of the regime, and with the sponsorship of UFCo were critical of communism and of the government's legal recognition of the party. The opposing political parties organized anticommunism campaigns; thousands of people appeared at the periodic rallies, and the membership in anticommunist organizations had grown steadily.
Arrival of John Peurifoy to Guatemala
Between 1950 and 1955, during the government of General Eisenhower in the United States, a witch hunt for communists was conducted: McCarthyism. This was characterized by persecuting innocent people by mere suspicion, with unfounded accusations, interrogation, loss of labor, passport denial, and even imprisonment. These mechanisms of social control and repression in the United States skirted dangerously with the totalitarian and fascist methods.
One of the main characters of McCarthyism was John Peurifoy, who was sent as the ambassador of the United States to Guatemala, as this was the first country in the American sphere of influence after World War II that included elements openly communists in his government. He came from Greece, where he had already done considerable anticommunist activity, and was installed as ambassador in November 1953, when Carlos Castillo Armas was already organizing his tiny revolutionary army. After a long meeting, Peurifoy made it clear to President Arbenz that the US was worried about the communist elements in his government, and then reported to the Department of State that the Guatemalan leader was not a communist, but that surely a communist leader would come after him; furthermore, in January 1954 he told Time magazine: American public opinion could force us to take some measures to prevent Guatemala from falling into the orbit of international communism.
Operation PBSuccess
The Communist Party was never the center of the communist movement in Guatemala until Jacobo Árbenz came to power in 1951. Prior to 1951, communism lived within the urban labor forces in small study groups during 1944 to 1953 which it had a tremendous influence on these urban labor forces. Despite its small size within Guatemala, many leaders were extremely vocal about their beliefs (for instance, in their protests and, more importantly, their literature). In 1949, in Congress, the Communist Party only had less than forty members, however, by 1953 it went up to nearly four thousand. Before Arbenz come to power in 1951, the communist movement preferred to carry out many of their activities through the so-called mass organization. In addition to Arbenz success, Guatemalan Communist Party moved forward its activities into public.
After Jacobo Arbenz came to power in 1951, he extended political freedom, allowing communists in Guatemala to participate in politics. This move by Arbenz let many opponents in Ubico's regime to recognize themselves as communists. By 1952, Arbenz supported a land reform, and took unused agricultural land, about , from owners who had large properties, and made it available to rural workers and farmers. These lands were to be taken from the United Fruit Company with compensation; however, the UFC believed the compensation was not enough. Meantime, Arbenz allowed the Communist Party to organize and include leaders notably his adviser who were leftist. The propaganda effort that was led by United Fruit Company against the revolution in Guatemala persuaded the U.S. government to fight against communism in Guatemala. The United States clutched on small details to prove the existence of widespread communism in Guatemala. The Eisenhower administration at the time in the U.S. were not happy about the Arbenz government, they considered Arbenz to be too close to communism; there have been reports that Arbenz's wife was a communist and part of the Communist Party in Guatemala. Even though it was impossible for the U.S. to gather evidence and information about Guatemala's relations to the Soviet Union, Americans wanted to believe that communism existed in Guatemala.
As Arbenz proceeded with land reform, the United Fruit Company, which had a practical monopoly on Guatemalan fruit production and some industry, lobbied the Eisenhower administration to remove Arbenz. Of still greater importance, though, was the widespread American concern about the possibility of a so-called "Soviet beachhead" opening up in the western hemisphere. Arbenz's sudden legalization of the Communist party and importing of arms from then Soviet-satellite state of Czechoslovakia, among other events, convinced major policy makers in the White House and CIA to try for Arbenz's forced removal, although his term was to end naturally in two years. This led to a CIA-orchestrated coup in 1954, known as Operation PBSuccess, which saw Arbenz toppled and forced into exile by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas. Despite most Guatemalans' attachment to the original ideals of the 1944 uprising, some private sector leaders and the military began to believe that Arbenz represented a communist threat and supported his overthrow, hoping that a successor government would continue the more moderate reforms started by Arevalo.
Many groups of Guatemalan exiles were armed and trained by the CIA, and commanded by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas they invaded Guatemala on 18 June 1954. The Americans called it an anti-communist coup against Arbenz. The coup was supported by CIA radio broadcasts and so the Guatemalan army refused to resist the coup, Arbenz was forced to resign. In 1954, a military government replaced Arbenz' government and disbanded the legislature and they arrested communist leaders, Castillo Armas became president.
After the CIA coup, hundreds of Guatemalans were rounded up and killed. Documents obtained by the National Security Archive revealed that the CIA was involved in planning assassinations of enemies of the new military government, should the coup be successful.
Earthquake of 1976
Civil war (1960–1996)
The government, right-wing paramilitary organizations, and left-wing insurgents were all engaged in the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–96). A variety of factors contributed: social and economic injustice and racial discrimination suffered by the indigenous population, the 1954 coup which reversed reforms, weak civilian control of the military, the United States support of the government, and Cuban support of the insurgents. The Historical Clarification Commission (commonly known as the "Truth Commission") after the war estimated that more than 200,000 people were killed — the vast majority of whom were indigenous civilians. 93% of the human rights abuses reported to the commission were attributed to the military or other government-supported forces. It also determined that in several instances, the government was responsible for acts of genocide.
In response to the increasingly autocratic rule of Gen. Ydígoras Fuentes, who took power in 1958 following the murder of Col. Castillo Armas, a group of junior military officers revolted in 1960. When they failed, several went into hiding and established close ties with Cuba. This group became the nucleus of the forces who mounted armed insurrection against the government for the next 36 years.
In 1966, the left-of-center former law professor Julio César Méndez Montenegro became President of Guatemala while holding the rank of civilian. However, the historical political odds were still in favor of the nation's military. Shortly after Méndez Montenegro took office, the Guatemalan army launched a major counterinsurgency campaign that largely broke up the guerrilla movement in the countryside.
The guerrillas concentrated their attacks in Guatemala City, where they assassinated many leading figures, including U.S. Ambassador John Gordon Mein in 1968. Despite this, Méndez Montenegro managed to successfully complete his four-year term as President of Guatemala before being succeeded by Army Colonel Carlos Manuel Arana Osorio in 1970. During the next nearly two decades, Méndez Montenegro was the only civilian to head Guatemala until the inauguration of Vinicio Cerezo in 1986.
Franja Transversal del Norte
The first settler project in the FTN was in Sebol-Chinajá in Alta Verapaz. Sebol, then regarded as a strategic point and route through Cancuén river, which communicated with Petén through the Usumacinta River on the border with Mexico and the only road that existed was a dirt one built by President Lázaro Chacón in 1928. In 1958, during the government of General Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) financed infrastructure projects in Sebol, which finally adopted the name "Fray Bartolomé de las Casas', municipality created in 1983 in Alta Verapaz. In 1960, then Army captain Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia inherited Saquixquib and Punta de Boloncó farms in northeastern Sebol. In 1963 he bought the farm "San Fernando" El Palmar de Sejux and finally bought the "Sepur" farm near San Fernando. During those years, Lucas was in the Guatemalan legislature and lobbied in Congress to boost investment in that area of the country.
In those years, the importance of the region was in livestock, exploitation of precious export wood and archaeological wealth. Timber contracts were granted to multinational companies such as Murphy Pacific Corporation from California, which invested US$30 million for the colonization of southern Petén and Alta Verapaz, and formed the North Impulsadora Company. Colonization of the area was made through a process by which inhospitable areas of the FTN were granted to native peasants.
In 1962, the DGAA became the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INTA), by Decree 1551 which created the law of Agrarian Transformation. In 1964, INTA defined the geography of the FTN as the northern part of the departments of Huehuetenango, Quiché, Alta Verapaz and Izabal and that same year priests of the Maryknoll order and the Order of the Sacred Heart began the first process of colonization, along with INTA, carrying settlers from Huehuetenango to the Ixcán sector in Quiché.
The Northern Transversal Strip was officially created during the government of General Carlos Arana Osorio in 1970, by Decree 60–70 in the Congress, for agricultural development.
The Guerrilla Army of the Poor
On 19 January 1972, members of a new Guatemalan guerrilla movement entered Ixcán, from Mexico, and were accepted by many farmers; in 1973, after an exploratory foray into the municipal seat of Cotzal, the insurgent group decided to set up camp underground in the mountains of Xolchiché, municipality of Chajul.
In 1974, the insurgent guerrilla group held its first conference, where it defined its strategy of action for the coming months and called itself Guerrilla Army of the Poor (-Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres -EGP-). In 1975, the organization had spread around the area of the mountains of northern municipalities of Nebaj and Chajul. As part of its strategy EGP agreed to perform acts that notoriety was obtained and through which also symbolize the establishment of a "social justice" against the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of the judicial and administrative organs of the State. They saw also that with these actions the indigenous rural population of the region is identified with the insurgency, thus motivating joining their ranks. As part of this plan was agreed to so-called "executions". To determine who would be these people subject to "execution", the EGP attended complaints received from the public. For example, they selected two victims: Guillermo Monzón, who was a military Commissioner in Ixcán and José Luis Arenas, the largest landowner in the area of Ixcán, and who had been reported to the EGP for allegedly having land conflicts with neighboring settlements and abusing their workers.
On Saturday, 7 June 1975, José Luis Arenas was killed by unknowns when he was in the premises of his farm "La Perla" to pay wage workers. In front of his office there were approximately two to three hundred people to receive their payment and four members of EGP mixed among farmers. Subsequently, the guerrilla members destroyed the communication radio of the farm and executed Arenas. After having murdered José Luis Arenas, guerrilla members spoke in Ixil language to the farmers, informing them that they were members of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor and had killed the "Tiger Ixcán". They requested to prepare beasts to help the injured and were transported to Chajul to receive medical care. Then the attackers fled towards Chajul.
José Luis Arenas' son, who was in San Luis Ixcán at the time, seek refuge in a nearby mountain, waiting for a plane to arrive to take him to the capital, in order to immediately report the matter to the Minister of Defense. The defense minister replied, "You are mistaken, there are no guerrillas in the area".
Panzós massacre
Also located in the Northern Transversal Strip, the valley of the Polochic River was inhabited since ancient times by k'ekchí and P'okomchi people. In the second half of the nineteenth century, President Justo Rufino Barrios (1835–1885) began the allocation of land in the area to German farmers. Decree 170 (or decree of Census Redemption Decree) facilitated the expropriation of Indian land in favor of the Germans, because it promoted the auction of communal lands. Since that time, the main economic activity was export-oriented, especially coffee, bananas and cardamom. The communal property, dedicated to subsistence farming, became private property led to the cultivation and mass marketing of agricultural products. Therefore, the fundamental characteristic of the Guatemalan production system has since that time been the accumulation of property in few hands, and a sort of "farm servitude" based on the exploitation of "farmer settlers".
In 1951, the agrarian reform law that expropriated idle land from private hands was enacted, but in 1954, with the National Liberation Movement coup supported by the United States, most of the land that had been expropriated, was awarded back to its former landowners. Flavio Monzón was appointed mayor and in the next twenty years he became one of the largest landowners in the area. In 1964, several communities settled for decades on the shore of Polochic River claimed property titles to INTA which was created in October 1962, but the land was awarded to Monzón. A Mayan peasant from Panzós later said that Monzón "got the signatures of the elders before he went before INTA to talk about the land. When he returned, gathered the people and said that, by an INTA mistake, the land had gone to his name." Throughout the 1970s, Panzós farmers continued to claim INTA regularization of land ownership receiving legal advice from the FASGUA (Autonomous Trade Union Federation of Guatemala), an organization that supported the peasants' demands through legal procedures. However, no peasant received a property title, ever. Some obtained promises while other had provisional property titles, and there were also some that only had received permission to plant. The peasants began to suffer evictions from their land by farmers, the military and local authorities in favor of the economic interests of Izabal Mining Operations Company (EXMIBAL) and Transmetales. Another threat at that time for peasant proprietors were mining projects and exploration of oil: Exxon, Shenandoah, Hispanoil and Getty Oil all had exploration contracts; besides there was the need for territorial expansion of two mega-projects of that era: Northern Transversal Strip and Chixoy Hydroelectric Plant.
In 1978, a military patrol was stationed a few kilometers from the county seat of Panzós, in a place known as "Quinich". At this time organizational capacity of peasant had increased through committees who claimed titles to their land, a phenomenon that worried the landlord sector. Some of these owners, among them Monzón, stated: "Several peasants living in the villages and settlements want to burn urban populations to gain access to private property", and requested protection from Alta Verapaz governor.
On 29 May 1978, peasants from Cahaboncito, Semococh, Rubetzul, Canguachá, Sepacay villages, finca Moyagua and neighborhood La Soledad, decided to hold a public demonstration in the Plaza de Panzós to insist on the claim of land and to express their discontent caused by the arbitrary actions of the landowners and the civil and military authorities. Hundreds of men, women, indigenous children went to the square of the municipal seat of Panzós, carrying their tools, machetes and sticks. One of the people who participated in the demonstration states: "The idea was not to fight with anyone, what was required was the clarification of the status of the land. People came from various places and they had guns."
There are different versions on how the shooting began: some say it began when "Mama Maquín" -an important peasant leader- pushed a soldier who was in her way; others argue that it started because people kept pushing trying to get into the municipality, which was interpreted by the soldiers as an aggression. The mayor at the time, Walter Overdick, said that "people of the middle of the group pushed those who in front." A witness says one protester grabbed the gun from a soldier but did not use it and several people argue that a military voice yelled: One, two, three! Fire!" In fact, the lieutenant who led the troops gave orders to open fire on the crowd.
The shots that rang for about five minutes, were made by regulation firearms carried by the military as well as the three machine guns located on the banks of the square. 36 Several peasants with machetes wounded several soldiers. No soldier was wounded by gunfire. The square was covered with blood.
Immediately, the army closed the main access roads, despite that "indigenous felt terrified." An army helicopter flew over the town before picking up wounded soldiers.
Transition between Laugerud and Lucas Garcia regimes
Due to his seniority in both the military and economic elites in Guatemala, as well as the fact that he spoke perfectly the q'ekchi, one of the Guatemalan indigenous languages, Lucas García the ideal official candidate for the 1978 elections; and to further enhance his image, he was paired with the leftist doctor Francisco Villagrán Kramer as running mate. Villagrán Kramer was a man of recognized democratic trajectory, having participated in the Revolution of 1944, and was linked to the interests of transnational corporations and elites, as he was one of the main advisers of agricultural, industrial and financial chambers of Guatemala. Despite the democratic façade, the electoral victory was not easy and the establishment had to impose Lucas García, causing further discredit the electoral system -which had already suffered a fraud when General Laugerud was imposed in the 1974 elections.
In 1976, student group called "FRENTE" emerged in the University of San Carlos, which completely swept all student body positions that were up for election that year. FRENTE leaders were mostly members of the Patriotic Workers' Youth, the youth wing of the Guatemalan Labor Party (-Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo- PGT), the Guatemalan communist party who had worked in the shadows since it was illegalized in 1954. Unlike other Marxist organizations in Guatemala at the time, PGT leaders trusted the mass movement to gain power through elections.
FRENTE used its power within the student associations to launch a political campaign for the 1978 university general elections, allied with leftist Faculty members grouped in "University Vanguard". The alliance was effective and Oliverio Castañeda de León was elected as President of the Student Body and Saúl Osorio Paz as President of the university; plus they had ties with the university workers union (STUSC) thru their PGT connections. Osorio Paz gave space and support to the student movement and instead of having a conflicted relationship with students, different representations combined to build a higher education institution of higher social projection. In 1978, the University of San Carlos became one of the sectors with more political weight in Guatemala; that year the student movement, faculty and University Governing Board -Consejo Superior Universitario- united against the government and were in favor of opening spaces for the neediest sectors. In order to expand its university extension, the Student Body (AEU) rehabilitated the "Student House" in downtown Guatemala City; there, they welcomed and supported families of villagers and peasant already sensitized politically. They also organized groups of workers in the informal trade.
At the beginning of his tenure as president, Saúl Osorio founded the weekly Siete Días en la USAC, which besides reporting on the activities of the university, constantly denounced the violation of human rights, especially the repression against the popular movement. It also told what was happening with revolutionary movements in both Nicaragua and El Salvador. For a few months, the state university was a united and progressive institution, preparing to confront the State head on.
Now, FRENTE had to face the radical left, represented then by the Student Revolutionary Front "Robin García" (FERG), which emerged during the Labor Day march of 1 May 1978. FERG coordinated several student associations on different colleges within University of San Carlos and public secondary education institutions. This coordination between legal groups came from the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP), a guerrilla group that had appeared in 1972 and had its headquarters in the oil rich region of northern Quiché department -i.e., the Ixil Triangle of Ixcán, Nebaj and Chajul in Franja Transversal del Norte. Although not strictly an armed group, FERG sought confrontation with government forces all the time, giving prominence to measures that could actually degenerate into mass violence and paramilitary activity. Its members were not interested in working within an institutional framework and never asked permission for their public demonstrations or actions.
On 7 March 1978, Lucas Garcia was elected president; shortly after, on 29 May 1978 -in the late days of General Laugerud García government- in the central square of Panzós, Alta Verapaz, members of the Zacapa Military Zone attacked a peaceful peasant demonstration, killing a lot of people. The deceased, indigenous peasants who had been summoned in place, were fighting for the legalization of public lands they had occupied for years. Their struggle faced them directly with investors who wanted to exploit the mineral wealth of the area, particularly oil reserves -by Basic Resources International and Shenandoah Oil- and nickel -EXMIBAL. The Panzós Massacre caused a stir at the university by the high number of victims and conflicts arose from the exploitation of natural resources by foreign companies. In 1978, for example, Osorio Paz and other university received death threats for their outspoken opposition to the construction of an inter-oceanic pipeline that would cross the country to facilitate oil exploration. On 8 June the AEU organized a massive protest in downtown Guatemala City where speakers denounced the slaughter of Panzós and expressed their repudiation of Laugerud García regime in stronger terms than ever before.
Escalation of violence
After the "execution" of José Luis Arenas population of Hom, Ixtupil, Sajsivan and Sotzil villages, neighbors of La Perla and annexes, increased support for the new guerrilla movement, mainly due to the land dispute that peasants kept with the owners of the farm for several years and that the execution was seen as an act of "social justice".
The murder owner of the farm "La Perla", located in the municipality of Chajul, resulted in the escalation of violence in the area: part of the population moved closer to the guerrillas, while another part of the inhabitants of Hom kept out of the insurgency. In 1979, the owners of the farm "La Perla" established links with the army and for the first time a military detachment was installed within the property; in this same building the first civil patrol of the area was established. The Army high command, meanwhile, was very pleased with the initial results of the operation and was convinced it had succeeded in destroying most of the social basis of EGP, which had to be expelled from the "Ixil Triangle". At this time the presence of EGP in the area decreased significantly due to the repressive actions of the Army, who developed its concept of "enemy" without necessarily including the notion of armed combatants; the officers who executed the plan were instructed to destroy all towns suspect of cooperate with EGP and eliminate all sources of resistance. Army units operating in the "Ixil Triangle" belonged to the Mariscal Zavala Brigade, stationed in Guatemala City. Moreover, although the guerrillas did not intervene directly when the army attacked the civilian population allegedly because they lacked supplies and ammunition, it did support some survival strategies. It streamlined, for example, "survival plans" designed to give evacuation instructions in assumption that military incursions took place. Most of the population began to participate in the schemes finding that them represented their only alternative to military repression.
Lucas Garcia presidency
The election of Lucas García on 7 March 1978 marked the beginning of a full return to the counterinsurgency practices of the Arana period. This was compounded by the strong reaction of the Guatemalan military to the situation unfolding in Nicaragua at the time, where the popularly supported Sandinista insurgency was on the verge of toppling the Somoza regime. With the aim of preventing an analogous situation from unfolding in Guatemala, the government intensified its repressive campaign against the predominantly indigenous mass movement. The repression not only intensified, but became more overt.
On 4 August 1978, high school and university students, along with other popular movement sectors, organized the mass movement's first urban protest of the Lucas García period. The protests, intended as a march against violence, were attended by an estimated 10,000 people. The new minister of the interior under President Lucas García, Donaldo Alvarez Ruiz, promised to break up any protests done without government permission. Having refused to ask for permission, the protesters were met by the Pelotón Modelo (Model Platoon) of the National Police. Employing new anti-riot gear donated by the United States Government, Platoon agents surrounded marchers and tear-gassed them. Students were forced to retreat and dozens of people, mostly school-aged adolescents, were hospitalized. This was followed by more protests and death squad killings throughout the later part of the year. In September 1978 a general strike broke out to protest sharp increases in public transportation fares; the government responded harshly, arresting dozens of protesters and injuring many more. However, as a result of the campaign, the government agreed to the protesters' demands, including the establishment of a public transportation subsidy. Fearful that this concession would encourage more protests, the military government, along with state-sponsored paramilitary death squads, generated an unsafe situation for public leaders.
The administrator of a large cemetery in Guatemala City informed the press that in the first half of 1978, more than 760 unidentified bodies had arrived at the cemetery, all apparent victims of death squads. Amnesty International stated that disappearances were an "epidemic" in Guatemala and reported more than 2,000 killings between mid-1978 and 1980. Between January and November 1979 alone the Guatemalan press reported 3,252 disappearances.
Spanish Embassy fire
On 31 January 1980, a group of displaced K'iche' and Ixil peasant farmers occupied the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City to protest the kidnapping and murder of peasants in Uspantán by elements of the Guatemalan Army. In the subsequent police raid, over the protests of the Spanish ambassador, the police attacked the building with incendiary explosives. A fire ensued as police prevented those inside of the embassy from exiting the building. In all, 36 people were killed in the fire. The funeral of the victims (including the hitherto obscure father of Rigoberta Menchú, Vicente Menchú) attracted hundreds of thousands of mourners, and a new guerrilla group was formed commemorating the date, the Frente patriotico 31 de enero (Patriotic Front of 31 January). The incident has been called "the defining event" of the Guatemalan Civil War. The Guatemalan government issued a statement claiming that its forces had entered the embassy at the request of the Spanish Ambassador, and that the occupiers of the embassy, whom they referred to as "terrorists," had "sacrificed the hostages and immolated themselves afterward." Ambassador Cajal denied the claims of the Guatemalan government and Spain immediately terminated diplomatic relations with Guatemala, calling the action a violation of "the most elementary norms of international law." Relations between Spain and Guatemala were not normalized until 22 September 1984.
Increased insurgency and state repression: 1980–1982
In the months following the Spanish Embassy Fire, the human rights situation continued to deteriorate. The daily number of killings by official and unofficial security forces increased from an average of 20 to 30 in 1979 to a conservative estimate of 30 to 40 daily in 1980. Human rights sources estimated 5,000 Guatemalans were killed by the government for "political reasons" in 1980 alone, making it the worst human rights violator in the hemisphere after El Salvador. In a report titled Guatemala: A Government Program of Political Murder, Amnesty International stated, "Between January and November of 1980, some 3,000 people described by government representatives as "subversives" and "criminals" were either shot on the spot in political assassinations or seized and murdered later; at least 364 others seized in this period have not yet been accounted for."
The repression and excessive force used by the government against the opposition was such that it became source of contention within Lucas Garcia's administration itself. This contention within the government caused Lucas Garcia's Vice President Francisco Villagrán Kramer to resign from his position on 1 September 1980. In his resignation, Kramer cited his disapproval of the government's human rights record as one of the primary reasons for his resignation. He then went into voluntary exile in the United States, taking a position in the Legal Department of the Inter-American Development Bank.
Insurgent mobilization
The effects of state repression on the population further radicalized individuals within the mass movement and led to increased popular support for the insurgency. In late 1979, the EGP expanded its influence, controlling a large amount of territory in the Ixil Triangle in El Quiche and holding many demonstrations in Nebaj, Chajul and Cotzal. At the same time the EGP was expanding its presence in the Altiplano, a new insurgent movement called the ORPA (Revolutionary Organization of Armed People) made itself known. Composed of local youths and university intellectuals, the ORPA developed out of a movement called the Regional de Occidente, which split from the FAR-PGT in 1971. The ORPA's leader, Rodrigo Asturias (a former activist with the PGT and first-born son of Nobel Prize-winning author Miguel Ángel Asturias), formed the organization after returning from exile in Mexico. The ORPA established an operational base in the mountains and rain-forests above the coffee plantations of southwestern Guatemala and in the Atitlan where it enjoyed considerable popular support. On 18 September 1979, the ORPA made its existence publicly known when it occupied the Mujulia coffee farm in the coffee-growing region of the Quezaltenango province to hold a political education meeting with the workers.
Insurgent movements active in the initial phase of the conflict such as the FAR also began to reemerge and prepare for combat. In 1980, guerrilla operations on both the urban and rural fronts greatly intensified, with the insurgency carrying out a number of overt acts of armed propaganda and assassinations of prominent right-wing Guatemalans and landowners. In 1980, armed insurgents assassinated prominent Ixil landowner Enrique Brol, and president of the CACIF (Coordinating Committee of Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial, and Financial Associations) Alberto Habie. Encouraged by guerrilla advances elsewhere in Central America, the Guatemalan insurgents, especially the EGP, began to quickly expand their influence through a wide geographic area and across different ethnic groups, thus broadening the appeal of the insurgent movement and providing it with a larger popular base. In October 1980, a tripartite alliance was formalized between the EGP, the FAR and the ORPA as a precondition for Cuban-backing.
In early 1981, the insurgency mounted the largest offensive in the country's history. This was followed by an additional offensive towards the end of the year, in which many civilians were forced to participate by the insurgents. Villagers worked with the insurgency to sabotage roads and army establishments, and destroy anything of strategic value to the armed forces. By 1981, an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 members of Guatemala's indigenous community actively supported the insurgency. Guatemalan Army Intelligence (G-2) estimated a minimum 360,000 indigenous supporters of the EGP alone. Since late 1981 the Army applied a strategy of "scorched earth" in Quiché, to eliminate the guerrilla social support EGP. In some communities of the region's military forced all residents to leave their homes and concentrate in the county seat under military control. Some families obeyed; others took refuge in the mountains. K'iche's who took refuge in the mountains, were identified by the Army with the guerrillas and underwent a military siege, and continuous attacks that prevented them from getting food, shelter and medical care.
La Llorona massacre, El Estor
La Llorona, located about 18 kilometers from El Estor, department of Izabal (part of the Northern Transversal Strip), was a small village with no more than twenty houses. Most of the first settlers arrived from the areas of Senahú and Panzós, both in Alta Verapaz. In 1981, the total population was about 130 people, all belonging to the q'eqchi' ethnic group. Few people spoke Spanish and most worked in their own cornfields, sporadically working for the local landowners. In the vicinity are the villages of El Bongo, Socela, Benque, Rio Pita, Santa Maria, Big Plan and New Hope. Conflicts in the area were related to land tenure, highlighting the uncertainty about the boundaries between farms and communities, and the lack of titles. As in the National Institute of Agrarian Transformation (INTA) was not registered a legitimate owner of land occupied La Llorona, the community remained in the belief that the land belonged to the state, which had taken steps to obtain title property. However, a farmer with great influence in the area occupied part of the land, generating a conflict between him and the community; men of the village, on its own initiative, devised a new boundary between community land and the farmer, but the problem remained dormant.
The second half of the seventies gave rise to the first news about the presence of guerrillas in the villages. The commander aparacimiento Ramon, talked to people and said they were the Guerrilla Army of the Poor. They passed many villages asking what problems people had and offered to solve them. They told peasants that the land belonged to the poor and that they should trust them. In 1977, Ramon, a guerrilla commander, regularly visited the village of La Llorona and after finding that the issue of land was causing many problems in the community, taught people to practice new measurements, which spread fear among landowners. That same year, the group under Ramon arbitrarily executed the Spanish landowner José Hernández, near El Recreo, which he owned. Following this, a clandestine group of mercenaries, dubbed "fighters of the rich" was formed to protect the interests of landlords; public authority of El Estor organized the group and paid its members, stemming from the funding of major landowners. The group, irregular, was related to the military commissioners of the region and with commanders of the Army, although mutual rivalries also took place. The secret organization murdered several people, including victims who had no connection whatsoever with insurgent groups.
In December 1978, the EGP group leader, Ramon, was captured by soldiers of the military detachment in El Estor and transferred to the military zone of Puerto Barrios; after two years returned to El Estor; but this time as an officer in the Army G2 and joined a group of soldiers that came to the village. On the evening of 28 September 1981, an army officer accompanied by four soldiers and a military commissioner met with about thirty civilians. At seven o'clock, over thirty civilians, mostly from "Nueva Esperanza', including several 'informants' known to military intelligence, gathered around La Llorona along with some military commissioners and a small group of soldiers and army officers. Then they entered the village. Civilians and commissioners entered twelve houses, and each of them were pulling men and shot them dead outside their own homes; those who tried to escape were also killed. Women who tried to protect their husbands were beaten. While the military commissioners and civilians executed men, soldiers subtracted belongings of the victims; within half an hour, the authors of the assault left the village. The victims bodies, fourteen in all, were in front of houses. Women, despite having been threatened with death if they told what happened, ran to the nearest village, El Bongo, for help. After a few hours, women came back with people who helped to bury the bodies. Days later, widows, with almost 60 fatherless children were welcomed by the parish of El Estor for several days, until the soldiers forced them to return to their village. Two widows of those executed on 29 September established close relations with the military commissioners from Bongo. This situation led to divisions that still exist in the community.
The economic and social activity was disrupted in the village: widows had to take the jobs of their husbands; because of their lack of knowledge in the cultivation of land, harvested very little corn and beans. There were diseases, especially among children and the elderly, there was no food or clothing. The teacher of the village came only part-time, mostly out of fear, but left after he realized it was not worth to stay because young people had to work nor could they spend money on travel. The village had no teacher for the next four years. The events generated finally the breakup of the community. Some village women though that their husbands were killed because of three others who were linked with the guerrillas and were involved in a land dispute.
According to the Historical Clarification Commission, the landlord with whom the villagers had the land dispute took advantage of the situation to appropriate another of land.
List of other massacres perpetrated by the Army in Franja Transversal del Norte
The report of the Recovery of Historical Memory lists 422 massacres committed by both sides in the conflict; however, it also states that they did the best they could in terms of obtaining information and therefore the list is incomplete; therefore here are the cases that have also been documented in other reports as well.
List of massacres perpetrated by the EGP in FTN
According to a report by the rightist magazine "Crónica", there were 1,258 guerrilla actions against civilians and infrastructure in Guatemala, including more than two hundred murders, sixty eight kidnappings, eleven bombs against embassies and three hundred twenty-nine attacks against civilians. Almost all guerrilla massacres occurred in 1982 when further militarization reigned and there was widespread presence of PAC in communities; many of them were victims of non-cooperation with the guerrillas and in some cases they came after a previous attack by the PAC. In the massacres perpetrated by the guerrillas there is no use of informants, or concentration of population, or separation of groups; also, there are no recounts of rape or repetitive slaughter. There are cases of razed villages and less tendency to mass flight, even though it occurred in some cases. the use of lists was also more frequent.
In a publication of the Army of Guatemala, sixty massacres perpetrated by the EGP were reported, arguing that they were mostly ignored by REHMI and the Historical Clarification Commission reports. It is also reported that in mid-1982, 32 members of "Star Guerilla Front " were shot for not raising the EGP flag.
Civil war in the city
On 31 January 1980, Guatemala got worldwide attention when the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City was burnt down, resulting in 37 deaths, including embassy personnel and high ranked Guatemalan former government officials. A group of native people from El Quiché occupied the embassy in a desperate attempt to bring attention to the issues they were having with the Army in that region of the country, which was rich in oil and had been recently populated as part of the "Franja Transversal del Norte" agricultural program. In the end, thirty seven people died after a fire started within the embassy after the police force tried to occupy the building; after that, Spain broke its diplomatic relationships with Guatemala.
On 5 September 1980 a terrorist attack by Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP) took place in front of the Guatemalan National Palace, then the headquarters of the Guatemalan government. The intention was to prevent the Guatemalan people to support a huge demonstration that the government of general Lucas Garcia had prepared for Sunday 7 September 1980. In the attack, six adults and a boy died after two bombs inside a vehicle went off.
There was an undetermined number of wounded and heavy material losses, not only from art pieces from the National Palace, but from all the surrounding buildings, particularly in the Lucky Building, which is right across from the Presidential Office. Among the deceased was Domingo Sánchez, Secretary of Agriculture driver; Joaquín Díaz y Díaz, car washer; and Amilcar de Paz, a security guard.
The attacks against private financial, commercial and agricultural targets increased in the Lucas Garcia years, as the leftist Marxist groups saw those institutions as "reactionaries" and "millionaire exploiters" that were collaborating with the genocidal government. The following is a non-exhaustive list of the terrorist attacks that occurred in Guatemala city and are presented in the UN Commission report:
Despite advances by the insurgency, the insurgency made a series of fatal strategic errors. The successes made by the revolutionary forces in Nicaragua against the Somoza regime combined with the insurgency's own successes against the Lucas government led rebel leaders to falsely conclude that a military equilibrium was being reached in Guatemala, thus the insurgency underestimated the military strength of the government. The insurgency subsequently found itself overwhelmed, and was unable to secure its advances and protect the indigenous civilian population from reprisals by the security forces.
'Operation Ceniza'
In response to the guerrilla offensive in early 1981, the Guatemalan Army began mobilizing for a large-scale rural counter-offensive. The Lucas government instituted a policy of forced recruitment and began organizing a "task-force" model for fighting the insurgency, by which strategic mobile forces were drawn from larger military brigades. To curtail civilian participation in the insurgency and provide greater distinction between "hostile" and compliant communities in the countryside, the army resorted to a series of "civic action" measures. The army under Chief of Staff Benedicto Lucas García (the President's brother) began to search out communities in which to organize and recruit civilians into pro-government paramilitary patrols, who would combat the insurgents and kill their collaborators.
In 1980, and 1981, the United States under Reagan administration delivered $10.5 million worth of Bell 212 and Bell 412 helicopters and $3.2 million worth of military trucks and jeeps to the Guatemalan Army. In 1981, the Reagan administration also approved a $2 million covert CIA program for Guatemala.
On 15 April 1981, EGP rebels attacked a Guatemalan Army patrol from the village of Cocob near Nebaj, killing five personnel. On 17 April 1981, a reinforced company of Airborne troops was deployed to the village. They discovered fox holes, guerrillas and a hostile population. The local people appeared to fully support the guerrillas. "The soldiers were forced to fire at anything that moved." The army killed 65 civilians, including 34 children, five adolescents, 23 adults and two elderly people.
In July 1981, the armed forces initiated a new phase of counterinsurgency operations under the code-name "Operación Ceniza," or "Operation Ashes," which lasted through March 1982. The purpose of the operation was to "separate and isolate the insurgents from the civilian population." During "Operación Ceniza" some 15,000 troops were deployed on a gradual sweep through the predominantly indigenous Altiplano region, comprising the departments of El Quiché and Huehuetenango.
Large numbers of civilians were killed or displaced in the Guatemalan military's counterinsurgency operations. To alienate the insurgents from their civilian base, the army carried out large-scale mass killing of unarmed civilians, burned villages and crops, and butchered animals, destroying survivors' means of livelihood. Sources with the human rights office of the Catholic Church estimated the death toll from the counterinsurgency in 1981 at 11,000, with most of the victims indigenous peasants of the Guatemalan highlands. Other sources and observers put the death toll due to government repression in 1981 at between 9,000 and 13,500.
As army repression intensified in the countryside, relations between the Guatemalan military establishment and the Lucas Garcia regime worsened. Professionals within the Guatemalan military considered the Lucas approach counterproductive, on grounds that the Lucas government's strategy of military action and systematic terror overlooked the social and ideological causes of the insurgency while radicalizing the civilian population. Additionally, Lucas went against the military's interests by endorsing his defense minister, Angel Anibal Guevara, as a candidate in the March 1982 presidential elections.
The guerrilla organizations in 1982 combined to form the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG). At the same time, extreme right-wing groups of self-appointed vigilantes, including the Secret Anti-Communist Army (ESA) and the White Hand (La Mano Blanca), tortured and murdered students, professionals, and peasants suspected of involvement in leftist activities.
On 23 March 1982, army troops commanded by junior officers staged a coup d'état to prevent the assumption of power by General Ángel Aníbal Guevara, the hand-picked candidate of outgoing President and General Romeo Lucas García. They denounced Guevara's electoral victory as fraudulent. The coup leaders asked retired Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt to negotiate the departure of Lucas Guevara. Ríos Montt had been the candidate of the Christian Democracy Party in the 1974 presidential election and was widely regarded as having been denied his own victory through fraud.
Ríos Montt was by this time a lay pastor in the evangelical Protestant Church of the Word. In his inaugural address, he stated that his presidency resulted from the will of God. He was widely perceived as having strong backing from the Reagan administration in the United States. He formed a three-member military junta that annulled the 1965 constitution, dissolved Congress, suspended political parties and canceled the electoral law. After a few months, Montt dismissed his junta colleagues and assumed the de facto title of "President of the Republic".
Guerrilla forces and their leftist allies denounced Montt, who sought to defeat them by a combination of military actions and economic reforms; in his words, "rifles and beans". In May 1982, the Conference of Catholic Bishops accused Montt of responsibility for growing militarization of the country and for continuing military massacres of civilians. An army officer was quoted in The New York Times of 18 July 1982 as telling an audience of indigenous Guatemalans in Cunén that: "If you are with us, we'll feed you; if not, we'll kill you."
The Plan de Sánchez massacre occurred on the same day.
The government began to form local civilian defense patrols (PACs). Participation was in theory voluntary, but in practice, many rural Guatemalan men (including young boys and the elderly), especially in the northwest, had no choice but to join either the PACs or be considered guerrillas. At their peak, the PACs are estimated to have included 1 million conscripts. Montt's conscript army and PACs recaptured essentially all guerrilla territory. The insurgents' activity lessened and was largely limited to hit-and-run operations. Montt won this partial victory at an enormous cost in civilian deaths.
Montt's brief presidency was probably the most violent period of the 36-year internal conflict, which resulted in thousands of deaths of mostly unarmed indigenous civilians. Although leftist guerrillas and right-wing death squads also engaged in summary executions, forced disappearances, and torture of noncombatants, the vast majority of human rights violations were carried out by the Guatemalan military and the PACs they controlled. The internal conflict is described in great detail in the reports of the Historical Clarification Commission (CEH) and the Archbishop's Office for Human Rights (ODHAG). The CEH estimates that government forces were responsible for 93% of the violations; ODHAG earlier estimated that government forces were responsible for 80%.
On 8 August 1983, Montt was deposed by his Minister of Defense, General Óscar Humberto Mejía Víctores, who succeeded him as de facto president of Guatemala. Mejía justified his coup, based on problems with "religious fanatics" in government and "official corruption". Seven people were killed in the coup. Montt survived to found a political party (the Guatemalan Republic Front) and to be elected President of Congress in 1995 and again in 2000.
Awareness in the United States of the conflict in Guatemala, and its ethnic dimension, increased with the 1983 publication of the "testimonial" account I, Rigoberta Menchú, a memoir by a leading activist. Rigoberta Menchú was awarded the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize for her work in favor of broader social justice. In 1998, a book by U.S. anthropologist David Stoll challenged some of the details in Menchú's book, creating an international controversy. After the publication of Stoll's book, the Nobel Committee reiterated that it had awarded the Peace Prize based on Menchú's uncontested work promoting human rights and the peace process.
General Mejía allowed a managed return to democracy in Guatemala, starting with a 1 July 1984 election for a Constituent Assembly to draft a democratic constitution. On 30 May 1985, after nine months of debate, the Constituent Assembly finished drafting a new constitution, which took effect immediately. Vinicio Cerezo, a civilian politician and the presidential candidate of the Christian Democracy Party, won the first election held under the new constitution with almost 70% of the vote, and took office on 14 January 1986.
1986 to 1996: from constitution to peace accords
Upon its inauguration in January 1986, President Cerezo's civilian government announced that its top priorities would be to end the political violence and establish the rule of law. Reforms included new laws of habeas corpus and amparo (court-ordered protection), the creation of a legislative human rights committee, and the establishment in 1987 of the Office of Human Rights Ombudsman. The Supreme Court embarked on a series of reforms to fight corruption and improve legal system efficiency.
With Cerezo's election, the military returned to the more traditional role of providing internal security, specifically by fighting armed insurgents. The first two years of Cerezo's administration were characterized by a stable economy and a marked decrease in political violence. Dissatisfied military personnel made two coup attempts in May 1988 and May 1989, but the military leadership supported the constitutional order. The government was strongly criticized for its reluctance to investigate or prosecute cases of human rights violations.
The final two years of Cerezo's government were marked by a failing economy, strikes, protest marches, and allegations of widespread corruption. The government's inability to deal with many of the nation's social and health problems — such as infant mortality, illiteracy, deficient health and social services, and rising levels of violence — contributed to popular discontent.
Presidential and congressional elections were held on 11 November 1990. After a runoff ballot, Jorge Antonio Serrano Elías was inaugurated on 14 January 1991, completing the first successful transition from one democratically elected civilian government to another. Because his Movement of Solidarity Action (MAS) Party gained only 18 of 116 seats in Congress, Serrano entered into a tenuous coalition with the Christian Democrats and the National Union of the center (UCN) to form a government.
The Serrano administration's record was mixed. It had some success in consolidating civilian control over the army, replacing a number of senior officers and persuading the military to participate in peace talks with the URNG. He took the politically unpopular step of recognizing the sovereignty of Belize, which had long been officially, though fruitlessly, claimed as a province by Guatemala. The Serrano government reversed the economic slide it inherited, reducing inflation and boosting real growth.
In 1992, Efraín Bámaca, a notable guerrilla leader also known as Comandante Everardo, "disappeared." It was later found that Bámaca was tortured and killed that year by Guatemalan Army officers. His widow, the American Jennifer Harbury, and members of the Guatemala Human Rights Commission, based in Washington, DC, raised protests that ultimately led the United States to declassify documents going back to 1954 related to its actions in Guatemala. It was learned that the CIA had been funding the military, although Congress had prohibited such funding since 1990 because of the Army's human rights abuses. Congress forced the CIA to end its aid to the Guatemalan Army.
On 25 May 1993, Serrano illegally dissolved Congress and the Supreme Court and tried to restrict civil freedoms, allegedly to fight corruption. The autogolpe (palace coup) failed due to unified, strong protests by most elements of Guatemalan society, international pressure, and the army's enforcement of the decisions of the Court of Constitutionality, which ruled against the attempted takeover. In the face of this pressure, Serrano fled the country.
On 5 June 1993, Congress, pursuant to the 1985 constitution, elected the Human Rights Ombudsman, Ramiro de León Carpio, to complete Serrano's presidential term. De León was not a member of any political party. Lacking a political base but with strong popular support, he launched an ambitious anti-corruption campaign to "purify" Congress and the Supreme Court, demanding the resignations of all members of the two bodies.
Despite considerable congressional resistance, presidential and popular pressure led to a November 1993 agreement brokered by the Catholic Church between the administration and Congress. This package of constitutional reforms was approved by popular referendum on 30 January 1994. In August 1994, a new Congress was elected to complete the unexpired term. Controlled by the anti-corruption parties: the populist Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG) headed by Ríos Montt, and the center-right National Advancement Party (PAN), the new Congress began to abandon the corruption that characterized its predecessors.
Under de León, the peace process, now brokered by the United Nations, took on new life. The government and the URNG signed agreements on human rights (March 1994), resettlement of displaced persons (June 1994), historical clarification (June 1994), and indigenous rights (March 1995). They also made significant progress on a socioeconomic and agrarian agreement.
National elections for president, Congress, and municipal offices were held in November 1995. With almost 20 parties competing in the first round, the presidential election came down to a 7 January 1996 runoff in which PAN candidate Álvaro Arzú Irigoyen defeated Alfonso Portillo Cabrera of the FRG by just over 2% of the vote. Arzú won because of his strength in Guatemala City, where he had previously served as mayor, and in the surrounding urban area. Portillo won all of the rural departments except Petén. Under the Arzú administration, peace negotiations were concluded, and the government signed peace accords ending the 36-year internal conflict in December 1996. (See section on peace process)
1996 Peace Accords to present
The human rights situation remained difficult during Arzú's tenure, although some initial steps were taken to reduce the influence of the military in national affairs. The most notable human rights case of this period was the brutal slaying of Bishop Juan José Gerardi on 24 April 1998, two days after he had publicly presented a major Catholic Church-sponsored human rights report known as Guatemala: Nunca Mas, summarizing testimony about human rights abuses during the Civil War. It was prepared by the Recovery of Historical Memory project, known by the acronym of REMHI. In 2001, three Army officers were convicted in civil court and sentenced to lengthy prison terms for his murder.
Guatemala held presidential, legislative, and municipal elections on 7 November 1999, and a runoff presidential election on 26 December. Alfonso Portillo was criticized during the campaign for his relationship with the FRG's chairman, former president Ríos Montt. Many charge that some of the worst human rights violations of the internal conflict were committed under Ríos Montt's rule.
In the first round the Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG) won 63 of 113 legislative seats, while the National Advancement Party (PAN) won 37. The New Nation Alliance (ANN) won nine legislative seats, and three minority parties won the remaining four. In the runoff on 26 December, Alfonso Portillo (FRG) won 68% of the vote to 32% for Óscar Berger (PAN). Portillo carried all 22 departments and Guatemala City, which was considered the PAN's stronghold.
Portillo's impressive electoral triumph, with two-thirds of the vote in the second round, gave him a mandate from the people to carry out his reform program. He pledged to maintain strong ties to the United States, enhance Guatemala's growing cooperation with Mexico, and join in the integration process in Central America and the Western Hemisphere. Domestically, he vowed to support continued liberalization of the economy, increase investment in human capital and infrastructure, establish an independent central bank, and increase revenue by stricter enforcement of tax collections rather than increasing taxation.
Portillo also promised to continue the peace process, appoint a civilian defense minister, reform the armed forces, replace the military presidential security service with a civilian one, and strengthen protection of human rights. He appointed a pluralist cabinet, including indigenous members and individuals who were independent of the FRG ruling party.
Progress in carrying out Portillo's reform agenda during his first year in office was slow. As a result, public support for the government sank to nearly record lows by early 2001. The administration made progress on such issues as taking state responsibility for past human rights cases and supporting human rights in international fora. It struggled to prosecute past human rights cases, and to achieve military reforms or a fiscal pact to help finance programs to implement peace. It is seeking legislation to increase political participation by residents.
The prosecution by Portillo's government of suspects in Bishop Gerardi's murder set a precedent in 2001; it was the first time military officers in Guatemala had been tried in civil courts.
Faced with a high crime rate, a public corruption problem, often violent harassment and intimidation by unknown assailants of human rights activists, judicial workers, journalists, and witnesses in human rights trials, the government began serious attempts in 2001 to open a national dialogue to discuss the considerable challenges facing the country.
In July 2003, the Jueves Negro demonstrations rocked the capital, forcing the closing of the US embassy and the UN mission. Supporters of Ríos Montt called for his return to power, demanding that the courts lift a ban against former coup leaders participating in government. They wanted Montt to run as a presidential candidate in the 2003 elections. The FRG fed the demonstrators.
On 9 November 2003, Óscar Berger, a former mayor of Guatemala city, won the presidential election with 39% of the vote. As he failed to achieve a fifty percent majority, he had to go through a runoff election on 28 December, which he also won. He defeated the center-left candidate Álvaro Colom. Allowed to run, Montt trailed a distant third with 11% of the vote.
In early October 2005, Guatemala was devastated by Hurricane Stan. Although a relatively weak storm, it triggered a flooding disaster, resulting in at least 1,500 people dead and thousands homeless.
Determined to make progress against crime and internal police corruption, Óscar Berger in December 2006 came to agreement with the United Nations to gain support for judicial enforcement of its laws. They created the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), an independent institution, which is to assist the Office of the Prosecutor of Guatemala, the National Police Force, and other investigative institutions. Their goal was to prosecute cells linked to organised crime and to drug trafficking. CICIG has the authority to conduct its own inquiries, and to refer the most significant cases to the national judiciary. The stated objective of CICIG is to "reinforce the national criminal justice system and to help it with its reforms."
, CICIG has led inquiries into some 20 cases. It is acting as Deputy Prosecutor in eight other cases. CICIG conducted the investigations leading to an arrest warrant against Erwin Sperisen, former Head of the National Civilian Police (Policia Nacional Civil – PNC) from 2004 to 2007. With dual Swiss-Guatemalan citizenship, he fled to Switzerland to escape prosecution in Guatemala for numerous extrajudicial killings and police corruption. In addition, 17 other persons are covered by arrest warrants related to these crimes, including several former highly placed political figures of Guatemala.
President Otto Pérez Molina government and "La Línea" case
Retired general Otto Pérez Molina was elected president along with Roxana Baldetti, the first ever woman vice president in Guatemala; the began their term in office on 14 January 2012. But on 16 April 2015, UN anti-corruption agency CICIG issued a report that implicated several high-profile politicians including Vice President Baldetti's private secretary, Juan Carlos Monzón and the director of the Guatemalan Internal Revenue Service. The revelations generated public outrage that had not been seen since the times of general Kjell Eugenio Laugerud Garcia presidency. The CICIG, working with the Guatemalan attorney general, revealed the scam known as "La Línea", following a year-long investigation that included wire taps; officials received bribes from importers in exchange for reducing tariffs the importers were required to pay, a procedure that as rooted in a long tradition of customs corruption in the country, as successive military governments tried to raise funds for counterinsurgency operations during Guatemala's 36-year-long civil war.
Citizens created an event on Facebook inviting all their friends to go to Guatemala City historic downtown to ask for Vice President Baldetti's resignation with the hashtag #RenunciaYa (Resign Now). Within days, over 10,000 people said they would attend. Quickly the organizers realized that for the action to succeed, they had to guarantee that no one would be harmed and The group set a series of rules making clear that no political party or group was behind that event, instructing protesters to follow the law, and urging people to bring water, food and sunblock but not cover their faces or wear party political colors. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Guatemala City, and due to the pressure, Baldetti resigned a few days later and was forced to remain in the country after the United States removed her visa to visit that country and the Guatemalan government arraigned her as there was enough suspicion to assume that she might be involved in "La Linea" scandal. This, and the prominent presence of US Ambassador Todd Robinson in the Guatemalan political scene since the scandal broke loose brought up the suspicion in Guatemalans that the US government was behind the investigation because it needed a government sympathetic to the US in Guatemala to counter the presence of China and Russia in the region.
Since then, the UN anti-corruption committee has reported on other cases and more than 20 government officials have stepped down, some have been arrested. Of those, the largest are the ones that involve two former president private secretaries: Juan de Dios Rodríguez in the Guatemalan Social Service and Gustavo Martínez, who was involved in a bribe scandal in the coil mega power plant Jaguar Energy. Martinez was also President Perez Molina's son-in-law.
But also political opposition leaders have been involved in CICIG investigations: several legislators and members of Libertad Democrática Renovada party (LIDER) were formally accused of bribery-related issues, prompting a large decline in the electorate trend for its presidential candidate, Manuel Baldizón, who before April was almost certain to become the next Guatemalan president in the 6 September 2015 presidential elections. Baldizón popularity suffered a steep decline and he even went on to accuse CICIG leader, Iván Velásquez, of international obstruction with Guatemalan internal affairs before the Organization of American States.
CICIG presented so many cases on Thursdays that Guatemalans started calling them "CICIG's Thursdays". But it was a Friday press conference that brought up the crisis to its peak: on Friday 21 August 2015, CICIG and the Attorney General, Thelma Aldana, presented an investigation showing enough evidence to believe that both President Pérez Molina and former Vice President Baldetti were the actual leaders of "La Línea". Baldetti was arrested that same day and an impeachment was requested for the president. As a result, several cabinet members resigned, and the clamor for the president's resignation grew to unprecedented levels after President Perez Molina defiantly assured the nation that he was not going to resign on a televised message transmitted on 23 August 2015.
After a thousands of protesters took to the streets to demand the increasingly isolated president's resignation, Guatemala's Congress named a commission of five legislators to consider whether to remove the president's immunity from prosecution. The request was approved by the supreme court. A major day of action kicked off early on Thursday 27 August, with marches and roadblocks across the country. Urban groups, which have spearheaded regular protests since the scandal broke in April, on Thursday 27th sought to unite with rural and indigenous organizations who have orchestrated the road blocks.
This strike in Guatemala City was filled to bursting with a diverse and peaceful crowd ranging from the indigenous poor to the well-heeled, and included many students from public and private universities. Hundreds of schools and businesses closed in support of the protests. The organization grouping Guatemala's most powerful business leaders issued a statement demanding that Pérez Molina step down, and urged Congress to withdraw his immunity from prosecution.
The attorney general's office released its own statement calling on the president to resign, "to prevent ungovernability that could destabilize the nation." As pressure mounted, the president's former ministers of defense and the interior, who were named in the corruption investigation and resigned from cabinet recently, left the country. Pérez Molina, meanwhile, has been losing support by the day. The powerful private sector – until then a loyal supporter of Molina, their former defender in the Army during the Guatemalan Civil War – called for his resignation; however, he also has managed to get support from entrepreneurs that are not affiliated to the private sector chambers: Mario López Estrada – grand child of former dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera and the billionaire owner of cellular phone companies – had some of his executives assume the cabinet positions that had been vacated days before.
The Guatemalan radio station TGTO (“Emisoras Unidas”) reported having a text message exchange with Perez Molina, who when asked about whether he planned to resign, wrote: "I will face whatever is necessary to face, and what the law requires." Some protesters have demanded the general election be postponed, both because of the crisis and because it is plagued with accusations of irregularities. Others warn that suspending the vote could lead to an institutional vacuum. However, on 2 September 2015 Molina quit from office after Congress impeached him a day before, and on 3 September 2015 he was summoned to the Justice Department to face his first legal audience for the La Linea case.
Jimmy Morales and Alejandro Giammattei in power (2015-present)
In October 2015, presidential election, former TV comedian Jimmy Morales was elected as the new President of Guatemala after huge anti-corruption demonstrations. He took office in January 2016.
In January 2017, President Morales announced that Guatemala will move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, becoming the first nation to follow the United States.
In January 2020, Alejandro Giammattei replaced Jimmy Morales as the President of Guatemala. Giammattei had won the presidential election in August 2019 with his "tough-on-crime" agenda.
See also
List of presidents of Guatemala
Politics of Guatemala
Spanish colonization of the Americas
Timeline of Guatemala City
Notes and references
Notes
References
Bibliography
Further reading
Woodward, Ralph Lee (1992). Guatemala. Oxford, England; Santa Barbara, CA : Clio Press
Conquest and Colonial era
Cortijo Ocaña, Antonio, & Adelaida Cortijo Ocaña. Cartas desde México y Guatemala (1540–1635). El proceso Díaz de la Reguera. Cáceres, Berkeley: Universidad de Extremadura, The Bancroft Library, 2003.
Few, Martha. For All of Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala. Tucson: University of Arizona Press 2015.
Few, Martha. Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala. Austin: University of Texas Press 2002.
Komisaruk, Catherine. Labor and Love in Guatemala: The Eve of Independence. Stanford University Press 2013.
Lanning, John Tate. The Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment in the University of San Carlos de Guatemala. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1956.
Lovell, W. George. Conquest and Survival in Colonial Guatemala: A Historical Geography of the Cuchumatán Highlands, 1500–1821. 3rd edition. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 2005.
Meneray, Wilbur E. The Kingdom of Guatemala during the Reign of Charles III, 1759–1788. Chapel Hill, NC: Dissertation: Ph.D. University of North Carolina 1975
Martínez Peláez, Severo. La Patria Criollo: An Interpretation of Colonial Guatemala. Trans. Susan M. Neve and W. George Lovell. Durham: Duke University Press 2009.
Orellana, Sandra. Indian Medicine in Highland Guatemala: The Pre-Hispanic and Colonial Periods. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 1987.
Van Oss, Adriaan C. Catholic Colonialism: A Parish History of Guatemala, 1524–1821. New York: Cambridge University Press 1986.
Post-independence
Adams, Richard N. Crucifixion by Power: Essays on Guatemalan National Social Structure, 1944–1966. Austin: University of Texas Press 1970.
Arias, Arturo. "Changing Indian Identity: Guatemala's Violent Transition to Modernity," in C. Smith, ed. Guatemala Indians and the state, 1540–1988. Austin: University of Texas Press 1990.
Carmack, Robert, ed. Harvest of Violence: The Maya Indians and the Guatemalan Crisis. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1982.
Dosal, Paul J. Doing Business with the Dictators: A Political History of United Fruit in Guatemala 1899–1944, Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources 1993
Garrard-Burnett, Virginia, Terror in the land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala under General Efraín Ríos Montt, 1982–1983. Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2010.
Gibbings, Julie. “In the Shadow of Slavery: Historical Time, Labor, and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century Alta Verapaz, Guatemala,” Hispnaic American Historical Review 96.1, (February 2016): 73–107.
Grieb, Kenneth. Guatemalan Caudillo. Athens: Ohio University Press 1979.
Gleijeses, Piero, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954. Princeton University Press, 1991
Grandin, Greg. The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War, Chicago 2004
Green, Dee F., and Gareth W. Lowe, eds. 1989 Olmec Diffusion: A Sculptural View from Pacific Guatemala. In Regional Perspectives on the Olmec (Robert J. Sharer and David C. Grove, eds.): 227–246. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Eng.
Griffith, William J. Empires in the Wilderness: Foreign Colonization and Development in Guatemala, 1834–1844. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1965.
Hernández Sandoval, Bonar L. Guatemala's Catholic Revolution: A History of Religious and Social Reform, 1920-1968 (U of Notre Dame Press, 2018) Online review
Historia General de Guatemala, 1999, several authors .
Immerman, R. H., The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention, University of Texas Press: Austin, 1982.
Jonas, Susanne. The Battle for Guatemala: Rebels, Death Squads, and U.S. Power. Boulder: Westview Press 1991.
Kinzer, Stephen. Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. Henry Holt and Company, LLC. New York, 2006.
Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993.
Malmström, Vincent H. The Origins of Civilization in Mesoamerica: A Geographic Perspective, Department of Geography, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
McCreery, David. Rural Guatemala, 1760–1940. Stanford: Stanford University Press 1994.
Menchú, Rigoberta. I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. (1984).
Morier-Genoud, Eric. "Sant’ Egidio et la paix. Interviews de Don Matteo Zuppi & Ricardo Cannelli", LFM. Social sciences & missions, no. 13, Oct. 2003, pp. 119–145
Samson, Matt. "The Martyrdom of Manuel Saquic. Constructing Maya Protestantism in the face of war in contemporary Guatemala", LFM. Social sciences & missions, no. 13, Oct. 2003, pp. 41–74
Sanford, Victoria. Buried secrets : truth and human rights in Guatemala, New York [u.a.] : Palgrave Macmillan, 2003
Schlesinger, Stephen and Stephen Kinzer,Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, Garden City, NY : Doubleday, 1982
Wasserstrom, Robert. "Revolution in Guatemala: Peasants and Politics under the Arbenz Government," Comparative Studies in Society and History 17(4), 433–78.
Woodward, Ralph Lee. Class Privileges and Economic Development: The Consulado de Comericio in Guatemala, 1793–1871. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1966.
External links
Guatemala: Memory of Silence – English-language summary report of the Historical Clarification Commission report
Background Note: Guatemala – Information from the US State Department
Rights Action – Website of Rights Action, with special reports on mining, human rights, the struggles of indigenous people, and impunity
Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA – Website of the Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA, with special reports on human rights, genocide trials, impunity, the Mérida Initiative, femicide, Bishop Gerardi's assassination, and more.
The Guatemalan Military: What the U.S. Files Reveal – from George Washington University's National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 32 | [
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12159 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics%20of%20Guatemala | Demographics of Guatemala | This article is about the demographic features of the population of Guatemala, including population density, ethnicity, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects of the population.
According to the 2018 census, 43.56% of the population is Indigenous including 41.66% Mayan, 1.77% Xinca, and 0.13% Garifuna (Mixed African and indigenous). Approximately 56% of the population is "non-Indigenous", referring to the Mestizo population (people of mixed European and indigenous descent) and the people of European origin. These people are called Ladino in Guatemala. The population is divided almost evenly between rural and urban areas.
About 65% of the population speak Spanish, with nearly all the rest speaking indigenous languages (there are 23 officially recognized indigenous languages).
Population
According to the total population estimate was in . The proportion of the population below the age of 15 in 2010 was 41.5%, 54.1% were aged between 15 and 65 years of age, and 4.4% were aged 65 years or older.
Guatemala City is home to almost 3 million inhabitants. In 1900 Guatemala had a population of 1,885,000.
Over the twentifirst century Guatemala's population grew by a factor of fourteen. Even though Guatemala's population grew by a factor of 14, it still wasn't the biggest jump in that region. Although Guatemala does have an increase in population, the annual population isn't the superior in that region of the world as well.
Population by departments
In Guatemala, there are 22 departments that make up the country. Each department has its own population, with Guatemala Department ranking at 1 with the highest population and El Progreso Department ranking at 22 with the lowest population.
According to the table, Guatemala Department accounts for 20% of the entire population in Guatemala, while El Progreso only accounts for 0.14% of the population. Sololá accounts for 2.7% of the population while ranking in the middle at 11. Overall, the rankings correlate to the percent of the population that each department contains.
Emigration
The Guatemalan civil war from 1960 to 1996 led to mass emigration, particularly Guatemalan immigration to the United States. According to the International Organization for Migration, the total number of emigrants increased from 6,700 in the 1960s to 558,776 for the period 1995-2000; by 2005, the total number had reached 1.3 million. In 2013, the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) estimated that there were about 900,000 Guatemalan Americans (persons of Guatemalan origin in the United States).
Ethnic groups
Official 2018 statistics indicate that approximately 56% of the population is "non-Indigenous", referring to the Mestizo population of mixed indigenous and European origins (50-52%) and the people of European origin (14-26%), Most are of Spanish, German and Italian descent. These people are called Ladino in Guatemala. Genetic testing indicates that Guatemalan Mestizos are of predominantly indigenous ancestry, although they have a high level of European ancestry as well.
Approximately 43.4% of the population is Indigenous and consist of 23 Maya groups and one non-Maya group. In 2012 these are divided as follows: K'iche 9.1%, 8.4% Kaqchikel, Mam 7.9%, 6.3% Q'eqchi', other Maya peoples 8.6%, 0.2% Indigenous non-Maya. They live all over the country, especially in the highlands. While the official censuses usually count around 40% of the Guatemalan population being indigenous, this percentage is actually much higher, with around 60% of Guatemalans being indigenous.
In 2002 Census, The Amerindian populations in Guatemala include the K'iche' 9.1%, Kaqchikel 8.4%, Mam 7.9% and Q'eqchi 6.3%. 8.6% belongs to other Maya groups, 0.4% belong to non-Maya Indigenous peoples. The whole Indigenous community in Guatemala is about 40.5% of the population.
The Maya Civilization ruled Guatemala and the surrounding regions until around 1,000 A.D. Following 1,000 A.D., Guatemala became a Spanish colony for approximately three centuries, until in 1821 when Guatemala won its independence. Since the independence of Guatemala, the country has experienced a wide range of governments, including civilian and military governments. In 1996, a peace treaty was signed by the government that ended internal conflicts within the region, which caused over 200,000 casualties and approximately one million refugees.
Historically, the ethnicity population in the Kingdom of Guatemala at the time of Independence amounted to nearly 600,000 Indians, 300,000 Castas (mostly Mestizos and a lesser number of Mulattos, Zambos, and Pardos), and 45,000 Criollos or Spaniards, with a very small number of English traders.
Other racial groups include numbers of Afro-Guatemalans, Afro-Mestizos, and Garifuna of mixed African and Indigenous Caribbean origins who live in the country's eastern end. Some Garifunas live mainly in Livingston, San Vicente and Puerto Barrios. They descend mainly from the Arawaks and Belizean Creoles.
There are thousands of Arab Guatemalans descending from; Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and other Arab countries who reside in Guatemala City. Some belong to Christian Churches while others to Islamic Mosques.
There are also thousands of Jews residing in Guatemala. They are immigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe that arrived in the 19th century. Many immigrated during World War II. There are approximately 9,000 Jews living in Guatemala today. Most live in Guatemala City, Quezaltenango and San Marcos. Today, the Jewish community in Guatemala is made up of Orthodox Jews, Sephardi, Eastern European and German Jews.
In 2014, numerous members of the Hasidic communities Lev Tahor and Toiras Jesed began settling in the village of San Juan La Laguna. The mainstream Jewish community was reportedly dismayed and concerned that the arrival of communities with a more visible adherence to Judaism might stir up anti-Jewish sentiment. Despite the tropical heat, the members of the community continued to wear the traditional ancient Jewish clothing.
Asian Guatemalans are primarily of Korean descent and Chinese descent, whose ancestors were farm workers and railroad laborers in the early 20th century.
Vital statistics
UN estimates
The Population Department of the United Nations prepared the following estimates.
Vital statistics
(C) = Census results.
Fertility and births (demographic and health surveys)
Total fertility rate (TFR) (wanted fertility rate) and crude birth rate (CBR):
Structure of the population
Structure of the population (01.07.2005) (estimates):
Structure of the population (01.07.2010) (estimates) (projections based on the 2002 Population Census):
Structure of the population (2015):
Marriage and childbearing
The legal age for females to get married in Guatemala was 14, but was raised to 16 with parental consent and 18 without in November 2015. This phenomenon, known as child marriage, is prevalent in Central America; in rural areas of Guatemala, 53% of 20 to 24 year-old women married before their 18th birthday. Once married, young girls are likely to abandon their education and are exposed to domestic and sexual violence. They are no longer seen as girls; their husbands, who are often older men, see them as servants. Frequently births are at home. Most of these women are isolated without networks of support.
In most cases, motherhood comes after marriage. However, due to the fact that these young women' bodies are not entirely developed, many pregnancies result in high complications and high risks for both the mother and baby, during and after labor. Because there is limited access to health services, women in Guatemala choose a different alternative when it comes to the care during and after child delivery. Pregnancies before marriage are on the rise and unmarried women make their decision based on their image more than their safety. Single Guatemalan women may choose midwives as their health care provider during pregnancy and delivery to avoid feeling ashamed. Other women know the midwives in the community personally so they opt for a private healthcare provider. Throughout the country, midwives are known as the providers of choice for approximately 80% of the births even though they are not professionally trained. This contributes to the increasing infant mortality rate of 100 per 1,000 births as reported in some Guatemalan communities.
Other demographic statistics
Demographic statistics according to the World Population Review in 2019.
One birth every 1 minutes
One death every 6 minutes
One net migrant every 58 minutes
Net gain of one person every 2 minutes
Demographic statistics according to the CIA World Factbook, unless otherwise indicated.
Population
16,581,273 (July 2018 est.)
Ethnic groups
Mestizo (mixed Amerindian-Spanish - in local Spanish called Ladino) and European 60.1%, Maya 39.3% (K'iche 11.3%, Q'eqchi 7.6%, Kaqchikel 7.4%, Mam 5.5%, other 7.5%), non-Maya, non-Mestizo 0.15% (Xinca (indigenous, non-Maya), Garifuna (mixed West and Central African, Island Carib, and Arawak)), other 0.5% (2001 est.)
Age structure
0-14 years: 34.55% (male 2,919,281 /female 2,810,329)
15-24 years: 20.23% (male 1,688,900 /female 1,665,631)
25-54 years: 35.47% (male 2,878,075 /female 3,002,920)
55-64 years: 5.28% (male 407,592 /female 468,335)
65 years and over: 4.46% (male 336,377 /female 403,833) (2018 est.)
Median age
total: 22.5 years. Country comparison to the world: 179th
male: 22 years
female: 23.1 years (2018 est.)
Birth rate
24.6 births/1,000 population (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 50th
Death rate
5 deaths/1,000 population (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 194th
Total fertility rate
2.87 children born/woman (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 58th
Net migration rate
-2.4 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 168th
Population growth rate
1.72% (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 59th
Mother's mean age at first birth
21.2 years (2014/15 est.)
note: median age at first birth among women 25-29
Contraceptive prevalence rate
60.6% (2014/15)
Dependency ratios
total dependency ratio: 68.7 (2015 est.)
youth dependency ratio: 61.1 (2015 est.)
elderly dependency ratio: 7.6 (2015 est.)
potential support ratio: 13.1 (2015 est.)
Life expectancy at birth
total population: 71.8 years
male: 69.8 years
female: 73.9 years (2018 est.)
Languages
Spanish (official) 68.9%, Maya languages 30.9% (K'iche 8.7%, Q'eqchi 7%, Mam 4.6%, Kaqchikel 4.3%, other 6.3%), other 0.3% (includes Xinca and Garifuna) (2001 est.)
note: the 2003 Law of National Languages officially recognized 23 indigenous languages, including 21 Maya languages, Xinka, and Garifuna
Urbanization
urban population: 51.1% of total population (2018)
rate of urbanization: 2.68% annual rate of change (2015-20 est.)
Education expenditures
2.8% of GDP (2017) Country comparison to the world: 149th
Literacy
definition: age 15 and over can read and write (2015 est.)
total population: 81.5%
male: 87.4%
female: 76.3% (2015 est.)
School life expectancy (primary to tertiary education)
total: 11 years
male: 11 years
female: 11 years (2014)
Unemployment, youth ages 15–24
total: 6.1%. Country comparison to the world: 151st
male: 4.6%
female: 9.1% (2016 est.)
Languages
The official language of Guatemala is Spanish. It is spoken by nearly 93% of the population and is found mainly in the departments of the Southern region, Eastern region, Guatemala City and Peten. Though the official language is Spanish, it is often the second language among the Indigenous population.
Approximately 23 additional Amerindian languages are spoken by more than 40% of the population. 21 Mayan languages, one indigenous, and one Arawakan are spoken in Guatemala. The most significant are; Quiche, Cakchiquel, Kekchi, Mam, Garifuna and Xinca.
There are also significant numbers of German, Chinese, French and English speakers.
Religion
Catholicism was the official religion during the colonial era, and today is the most professed church in the population, but since the 1960s, with the Armed Conflict, Protestantism has increased progressively, today around two fifths of Guatemalans are Protestant, specially Evangelicals (with Pentecostals as the biggest branch). Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy claim rapid growth, especially among the Indigenous Maya. Other churches include The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Jehovah's Witnesses, and other Christian minorities. More than 60% of Catholics and 80% of Protestants are actives members, today Catholicism and Protestantism are more unity to obtain the Politic control against globalization influence such as the acceptance of Homosexuality, abortion and other Human rights. Although Christianity is largely influential in public complex, since 1990 decade there are notable presence of non-religious people in surveys of religious identification.
Indigenous beliefs are sometimes combined with Christianity. Maya religion believers only account for less than 0.1 % of the population and since the mid-1990s the Constitution recognizes the rights of Maya Religion. The Islamic community in Guatemala is growing, and is projected to include at least 2,000 believers by 2030. There is a mosque in Guatemala City called the Islamic Da'wah Mosque of Guatemala (Spanish: Mezquita de Aldawaa Islámica). The president of the Islamic Community of the country is Jamal Mubarak.
References | [
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12160 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics%20of%20Guatemala | Politics of Guatemala | Politics of Guatemala takes place in a framework of a presidential representative democratic republic, where by the President of Guatemala is both head of state, head of government, and of a multi-party system. Executive power is exercised by the government. Legislative power is vested in both the government and the Congress of the Republic. The judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislature. Guatemala is a Constitutional Republic.
Guatemala's 1985 Constitution provides for a separation of powers among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government.
Executive branch
The president and vice president are directly elected through universal suffrage and limited to one term. A vice president can run for president after four years out of office.
|President
|Alejandro Giammattei
|Vamos
|14 January 2020
|}
Legislative branch
The Congress of the Republic (Congreso de la República) has 158 members, elected for a four-year term, partially in departmental constituencies and partially by nationwide proportional representation.
Political parties and elections
Political parties in Guatemala are generally numerous and unstable. No party has won the presidency more than once and in every election period the majority of the parties are small and newly formed. Even the longer-lived parties, such as the Christian Democrats (DCG) or the URNG, tend to last less than a decade as significant forces in Guatemalan politics.
Judicial branch
The Constitutional Court (Corte de Constitucionalidad) is Guatemala's constitutional court and only interprets the law in matters that affect the country's constitution. It is composed of five judges, elected for concurrent five-year terms each with a supplement, each serving one year as president of the Court: one is elected by Congress, one elected by the Supreme Court of Justice, one is appointed by the President, one is elected by Superior Council of the Universidad San Carlos de Guatemala, and one by the Bar Association (Colegio de Abogados);
The Supreme Court of Justice (Corte Suprema de Justicia) is Guatemala's highest court. It comprises thirteen members, who serve concurrent five-year terms and elect a president of the Court each year from among their number. The Supreme Court has an Appeal Court formed by 43 members. When one of the Supreme Court is absent or cannot participates in a case, one of the Appeal Court takes its place. The president of the Supreme Court of Justice is also president of the Judicial Branch of Guatemala (Organismo Judicial de Guatemala), and supervises both the hundreds of trial judges around the country (who are named to five-year terms) and the administrative work force which assists the magistrates.
Administrative divisions
Guatemala is divided into 22 departments, administered by governors appointed by the president. Guatemala City and 333 other municipalities are governed by popularly elected mayors or councils.
Foreign relations
Guatemala's major diplomatic interests are regional security and increasingly, regional development and economic integration.
Political culture and human rights
The 1999 presidential and legislative elections were considered by international observers to have been free and fair. Participation by women and indigenous voters was higher than in the recent past, although concerns remained regarding the accessibility of polling places in rural areas.
Alfonso Portillo's landslide victory combined with a Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG) majority in Congress suggested possibilities for rapid legislative action. However, under the Guatemalan Constitution of 1985, passage of many kinds of legislation requires a two-thirds vote. Passage of such legislation is not possible, therefore, with FRG votes alone.
The political balance was disrupted in 2000 when allegations surfaced that the FRG had illegally altered legislation. Following an investigation, the Supreme Court stripped those involved, including President of Congress and FRG chief Ríos Montt, of their legislative immunity to face charges in the case. At roughly the same time, the PAN opposition suffered an internal split and broke into factions; the same occurred in the ANN. As a result, reforms essential to peace implementation await legislative action.
New cases of human rights abuse continued to decline, although violent harassment of human rights workers presented a serious challenge to government authority. Common crime, aggravated by a legacy of violence and vigilante justice, presents another serious challenge. Impunity remains a major problem, primarily because democratic institutions, including those responsible for the administration of justice, have developed only a limited capacity to cope with this legacy. The government has stated it will require until 2002 to meet the target of increasing its tax burden (at about 10% of GDP, currently the lowest in the region) to 12% of GDP.
During the Presidential race, the FRG organized what will later be known as Black Thursday (Jueves negro). The FRG organized its partisans from the country and brought them to the city. The FRG gave them transport, food, a shelter for the night, and meter long sticks. With these sticks, the participants ran through the streets wreaking havoc on the public infrastructure. During this day a journalist of Prensa Libre (a leading newspaper) was killed.
The media, which have a tradition of being independent and free,[According to whom?] took it very personally and for the next month, every headline was about these events, and the participation of the ruling party in this day of terror. The FRG was protesting the ruling of the TSE (supreme electoral tribunal) to ban the FRG candidate Efrain Rios Mont from the race. The TSE argued that as a formal putschist, he was banned by the constitution from ever becoming president. The FRG argued that since the events in which the former general participated predate the constitution, he was eligible for presidential office. Common sense argued that if such a clause was not retroactive by nature it would have no point.
Since 2004 Óscar Berger of the GANA (a coalition of political parties rather than a single one) won the elections, it is important to note that this was the first government in the history of democratic Guatemala that did not have an overwhelming majority in Congress. After he took office in January 2004 it was made public that the FRG had wildly ransacked the government going to the extremes of stealing computer equipment and objects of historic importance. Alfonso Portillo fled to Mexico with an impressive amount of money stolen from military funds, the national hospital, and the revenue service. Guatemala made a formal request for the deportation of Portillo to face charges of embezzlement, however, Mexico has never revoked diplomatic asylum once it is granted to a person.
Though the constitution says nothing about it, the vice president runs the government like a prime minister while the president deals with foreign affairs, this can be seen regularly as the VP stands in for the president in many events that are traditionally presided by the President of the Republic.
Criminality has reached staggering proportions: about 200 murders per month and it is starting to affect the economy as many companies prefer to leave the country than face the growing corruption and insecurity. One significant problem is the ongoing gang warfare between the M18 (Mara Dieciocho) and the MS (Mara Salvatrucha). These are two rival street gangs comprising loosely linked international franchise organizations, who wield a power somewhat like that of the US mafia of the 1930s and are for the moment above and beyond the grasp of the law. They hold territory under their control and extort "taxes" (la renta) from it.
They are not yet involved in high-level organized trafficking. That industry is of a different class of organized crime in Guatemala, with Mexican smugglers and top-ranking Guatemalan police officials regularly making headlines being caught with hundreds of kilograms of cocaine.
The mara phenomenon originated in the United States in the 1980s, specifically in Los Angeles, among refugees fleeing civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala. Later many members of the maras were deported from the United States to their countries of origin, and during the 1990s this has helped fuel the spread of the two gangs across the United States, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and even Italy and Spain. There is a zone of Guatemala City, "El Gallito" which is recognized as being outside of Government control, it belongs to the drug lords that inhabit it. Barrio "El Gallito" is located in Zone 3, away from the National Palace where the Government's offices are located.
Drug trafficking has reached staggering proportions in Guatemala, with corruption extending to top positions of many branches of government. Various narco-mafias vie for control of the remote northern jungle regions of Petén, where drugs, arms, and people all cross the border into Mexico, mostly bound for the United States. Drug trafficking is undoubtedly the greatest threat to political freedom in Guatemala today.
Guatemala is plagued by lynchings which severely blemish the country's humans rights record as a violation of due process of law.
The Berger administration has been hailed in some circles for its work in devolution. Guatemala has always been a strongly centralized state and the administration sought to take halt the growing pre-eminence of the Capital. For example, the administration has engaged in mobile cabinets where the President and all his ministers will go into the country and change the seat of power every so often, to be "closer to the people".
The administration is facing growing financial difficulties, potentially in part due to 60% of the population being considered "poor" and therefore ineligible for taxation. The SAT (superintendence of tributary administration), the revenue service, is therefore obligated to tax the middle class which is starting to suffer under the burden. The SAT has become stringent in its application of the law seeking the full penalties of incarceration for tax evasion.
In September 2006 the PNC (civil national police), in a joint action with the national military took by storm the Pavon detention centre, a prison with 1,500 inmates which until that date hadn't been requisitioned for 10 years and which was a hub of criminal activity. Some inmates, the guard of the chief of the mafioso what ran the prison and the leader himself resisted the onslaught of forces of law with AK-47 and handguns, they were massacred. Around 3,000 infantry and 4 tanks participated in the action. This was a milestone in the history of Guatemala and made national headlines.
2006 saw the dismemberment of the GANA in the face of the 2007 elections. It fractured into many parties, damaging the ability of the government to get legislation through Congress.
In the November 2007, second round presidential elections, Álvaro Colom of the UNE was elected president, defeating ex-general Otto Perez Molina of the PP. And in 2011, Retired General Otto Pérez Molina of the Patriotic Party won the presidential election in a runoff against populist Manuel Baldizón of the LIDER party. Pérez Molina assumed office on 14 January 2012, and his vice president is Roxana Baldetti. In september 2015, President Otto Perez Molina resigned because of bribery allegations.
In October 2015 presidential election, former TV comedian Jimmy Morales was elected as the new President of Guatemala after huge anti-corruption demonstrations. He took office in January 2016. In January 2020, Alejandro Giammattei replaced Jimmy Morales as the President of Guatemala. Giammattei had won the presidential election in August 2019 with his "tough-on-crime" agenda.
See also
Central American Parliament
References
External links
Congresso of the Republic of Guatemala
Justice of Guatemala | [
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12161 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy%20of%20Guatemala | Economy of Guatemala | The economy of Guatemala is a considered a developing economy, highly dependent on agriculture, particularly on traditional crops such as coffee, sugar, and bananas. Guatemala's GDP per capita is roughly one-third of Brazil's. The Guatemalan economy is the largest in Central America. It grew 3.3 percent on average from 2015 to 2018. However, Guatemala remains one of the poorest countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, having highly unequal incomes and chronically malnourished children. The country is beset by political insecurity, and lacks skilled workers and infrastructure. It depends on remittances for nearly one-tenth of the GDP.
The 1996 peace accords ended the 36-years-long Guatemalan Civil War, and removed a major obstacle to foreign investment. Since then Guatemala has pursued important reforms and macroeconomic stabilization. On 1 July 2006, the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) entered into force between the United States and Guatemala. It has since spurred increased investment in the export sector. The distribution of income remains highly unequal, with 12% of the population living below the international poverty line. Guatemala's large expatriate community in the United States, has made it the top remittance recipient in Central America. These inflows are a primary source of foreign income, equivalent to nearly two-thirds of exports.
Guatemala's gross domestic product for 1990 was estimated at $19.1 billion, with real growth slowing to approximately 3.3%. Ten years later, in 2000, it rose from 1 to 4% and by 2010 it had fallen back to 3%, according to the World Bank. The final peace accord in December 1996 left Guatemala well-positioned for rapid economic growth.
Guatemala's economy is dominated by the private sector, which generates about 85% of GDP. Most of its manufacturing is light assembly and food processing, geared to the domestic, U.S., and Central American markets. In 1990 the labor force participation rate for women was 42%, later increasing by 1% in 2000 to 43% and 51% in 2010. For men, the labor force participation rate in 1990 was about 89%, decreased to 88% in 2000, and increased up to 90% in 2010 (World Bank). Self-employment for men is about 50%, while the rate for women is about 32% (Pagàn 1).
Over the past several years, tourism and exports of textiles, apparel, and nontraditional agricultural products such as winter vegetables, fruit, and cut flowers have boomed, while more traditional exports such as sugar, bananas, and coffee continue to represent a large share of the export market.Over the past twenty years the percentage of exports of goods and services has fluctuated. In 1990 it was 21% and in 2000, 20%. It increased again in 2010 to 26%. On the other hand, its level of imports of goods and services has continually increased. In 1990 its imports of goods and services was about 25%. In 2000 it increased by 4% up to 29%, and in 2010 it increased up to 36%. Migration is another important avenue in Guatemala. According to Cecilia Menjivar, remittances are "central to the economy." In 2004 remittances to Guatemala from men's migration to the U.S. accounted for approximately 97% (Menjivar 2).
The United States is the country's largest trading partner, providing 36% of Guatemala's imports and receiving 40% of its exports. The government sector is small and shrinking, with its business activities limited to public utilities—some of which have been privatized—ports and airports and several development-oriented financial institutions. Guatemala was certified to receive export trade benefits under the United States' Caribbean Basin Trade and Partnership Act (CBTPA) in October 2000, and enjoys access to U.S. Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) benefits. Due to concerns over serious worker rights protection issues, however, Guatemala's benefits under both the CBTPA and GSP are currently under review.
The country is predominantly poor, with 49 percent of the population living in rural areas. Guatemala is characterized by a markedly unequal distribution of wealth, assets, and opportunities: between 2000 and 2014, rural poverty increased from 74.5 to 76.1 percent, while extreme rural poverty increased from 23.8 to 35.3 percent. Young people and indigenous communities are the most vulnerable. Among indigenous people, who comprise almost 40 percent of the total population, the poverty rate is approximately 80 percent.
The Inequality-adjusted HDI (IHDI) index for Guatemala is 0.481 (Data from 2019), below the average for Latin America (0.596) and distant from the countries with very high human development (0.800).
Economic development and poverty in Guatemala
From 1990 until 2018, Guatemala was growing with an annual GDP growth oscillating around 3.5%.
Manufacturing (20%), commerce (18%), private services (14%), and agriculture (12%) are the biggest estimated economic sectors in Guatemala. The country's economic structure shows a declining trend in the agricultural sector.
Guatemala is the third biggest country in Central America. It has one of the highest disparities between rich and poor as well as one of the highest poverty levels worldwide, with 54% of the population living below the poverty line in 2006 and 54% in 2011. According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), which looks at multiple deprivations in the same household in regard to education, health and standard of living, found that in 2011, 25.9% of the population experienced multiple deprivations and another 9.8% were vulnerable to such deprivations. A human development report also states that the average percentage of multidimensional poverty in 2011 was 49.1%.
Poor women and unpaid work
In Guatemala in 2010, 31% of the female population was illiterate. In rural Guatemala, 70.5% are poor; women are more likely to be poor in the more rural areas. Gammage argues that women in poor households engage more in domestic tasks and undertake more household maintenance, social reproduction and care work than men. Similarly, Benería states that the women perform tough work but do not get paid and argues that there is an opportunity cost related, since the women could be paid for other work instead. Unpaid household work is associated with the number of people in the household, the location, and the availability of paid employment. This means that women in rural Guatemala are greater victims of poverty than urban women, and most poverty is found in the rural parts of Guatemala, so Gammage found that many rural women perform unpaid work.
Educated women and the labor force
The labor force participation rate for women in Guatemala was at 41% in 2018. Women have a small pay disadvantage, earning 97% of male wages in most occupations. Gender inequality declines if women have a second and/or third educational degree, and they are treated more equally with their male counterparts. As in many countries, both men and women earn the most if they have a university degree. The percent of women with a steady income increases for women who have completed the secondary level of schooling, but decreases again after university. This means that women earn about the same as men if they both have a secondary education, but after university, men earn more. The situation changes on the professional level, where women earn more than men. Men work more hours in all professions, except in the household, because many women have part-time jobs.
Child labor
Children in Guatemala are engaged in child labor, primarily in agriculture, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. In fact, 13.4% of children aged 7 to 14 work; 68% of them are in the agricultural sector, 13% in the industrial sector, and 18% in the services sector. The 2013 DOL report stated that "Guatemala [...] lacks Government programs targeting sectors in which children are known to engage in exploitative labor, such as domestic service, mining, quarrying, and construction."
In December 2014, the Department's List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor included mostly agricultural goods produced in such working conditions, namely broccoli, coffee, corn and sugarcane. Guatemala's firework and gravel production also resorted to child labor according to the report.
Maquilas
Among the most important factors in Guatemala's economy are the significant number of Korean-owned maquila factories in the highlands of Guatemala. Korean entrepreneurs have adopted a buyer-driven commodity chain process that depends on the existence of a large labor force, low capital investment and low skills. Korea presents itself to Guatemalan industry and to Guatemalan workers by means of subcontractors responsible for delivering finished orders to multiple buyers, mostly located in the United States. Buyers include Macy's and JC Penny and brands such as Liz Claiborne, OshKosh and Tracy Evans.
The first industries began in 1980s. At first, workers were very interested in the new jobs in the factories, because they offered the opportunity to transition to what was seen as a new and modern world, away from agricultural work. However, in the factories, workers' backs hurt, because they sat for many hours on backless benches in front of sewing machines. Workers would usually enter the plant at 7:00 a.m. and take a 1-hour break for lunch at noon. They were expected to work until 7:00 or 8:00pm. About 70% of the workers in macula factories were female. Years later, there was a huge turnover. Workers started to leave the macula factories for reasons like stress, bad treatment, poor payment, etc.
Economic priorities
Current economic priorities include:
Liberalizing the trade regime;
Financial services sector reform;
Overhauling Guatemala's public finances;
Simplifying the tax structure, enhancing tax compliance, and broadening the tax base.
Improving the investment climate through procedural and regulatory simplification and adopting a goal of concluding treaties to protect investment and intellectual property rights.
Import tariffs have been lowered in conjunction with Guatemala's Central American neighbors so that most fall between 0% and 15%, with further reductions planned. Responding to Guatemala's changed political and economic policy environment, the international community has mobilized substantial resources to support the country's economic and social development objectives. The United States, along with other donor countries—especially France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Japan, and the international financial institutions—have increased development project financing. Donors' response to the need for international financial support funds for implementation of the Peace Accords is, however, contingent upon Guatemalan government reforms and counterpart financing.
Problems hindering economic growth include high crime rates, illiteracy and low levels of education, and an inadequate and underdeveloped capital market. They also include lack of infrastructure, particularly in the transportation, telecommunications, and electricity sectors, although the state telephone company and electricity distribution were privatized in 1998. The distribution of income and wealth remains highly skewed. The wealthiest 10% of the population receives almost one-half of all income, and the top 20% receives two-thirds of all income. Approximately 29% of the population lives in poverty, and 6% of that number live in extreme poverty. Guatemala's social indicators, such as infant mortality and illiteracy, are successively improving, but remain in low growth and are still among the worst in the hemisphere. In 2000 the percentage of girls completing primary school was approximately 52%. That percentage rose in 2010 to about 81%. The completion rate in primary school for boys in 2000 was 63% and rose to 87% in 2010.
In 2005 Guatemala ratified its signature to the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) between the United States and several other Central American countries.
The electricity sector is being privatized, resulting in very high prices. In rural areas, although electricity consumption per household is very low, the ratings can represent more than 20% of farmers' salaries according to the Comité de développement paysan (Codeca). Since privatization, the price per kilowatthour has risen to the point of becoming one of the most expensive in Latin America. To protest against this situation and demand the renationalization of electrical services, Codeca members organized demonstrations and exposed themselves to repression. Between 2012 and 2014, 97 people were imprisoned, 220 wounded and 17 killed.
2009 food crisis
In September 2009, Guatemalan President Álvaro Colom declared that lack of food and proper nutrition were a national emergency. Colom stated that the situation is the combined result of a severe drought and global warming, which have reduced the domestic food supply, and the global financial crisis, which reduced Guatemala's ability to import food. Colom said the government would immediately seek assistance from the international community for emergency food supplies.
A number of international organizations expressed concern about Guatemala's current economic status in 2009. The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and the World Bank reported the following:
Guatemala has the fourth highest rate of chronic malnutrition in the world and the highest in the western hemisphere.
Approximately 75% of Guatemalans live below the poverty level, which is defined as an income that is not sufficient to purchase a basic basket of goods and basic services.
Approximately 58% of the population have incomes below the extreme poverty line, which is defined as the amount needed to purchase a basic basket of food.
Approximately 50% of Guatemalan children under the age of 5 now suffer from chronic under-nutrition.
In the nation's highlands, where many indigenous people live, 70% of children under age 5 are malnourished.
Agriculture
Guatemala is the world leader in Cardamom production and export. As of 2013, demand for biofuels has resulted in diversion of land from subsistence agriculture to sugar cane and African Palm plantations. Much of the land is owned by large landlords. Due to legal requirements for production of biofuels in the United States the price of maize, a Guatemalan staple, has risen sharply. Agriculture accounts for 60% of Guatemalan exports and employs more than 50% of the labor force.
In 2018, Guatemala produced 35.5 million tons of sugarcane (it's one of the 10 largest producers in the world) and 4 million tons of banana (it's one of the 15 largest world producers). In addition, in the same year it produced 2.3 million tons of palm oil, 245 thousand tons of coffee, 1.9 million tons of maize, 623 thousand tons of melon, 312 thousand tons of pineapple, 564 thousand tons of potato, 349 thousand tons of rubber, 331 thousand tons of tomato, 253 thousand tons of beans, 124 thousand tons of avocado, 124 thousand tons of lemon, 177 thousand tons of orange, 120 thousand tons of cauliflower and broccoli, 93 thousand tons of papaya, 107 thousand tons of watermelon, 98 thousand tons of carrot, 75 thousand tons of cabbage, 84 thousand tons of lettuce and chicory, 38 thousand tons of cardamom in addition to smaller productions of other agricultural products.
Scale
The agricultural sector of Guatemala's economy consists of two types of producers: numerous small-scale peasant-owned farms in the highlands, and fewer medium- to large-scale operations in the more fertile lowlands. The smaller farms produce staples for Guatemalan consumption, such as beans and maize, as well as fruits and vegetables for export. Larger farms produce export and plantation products like bananas, sugar cane, coffee, and rubber and palm oil. While 88% of agricultural land in Guatemala is in large-scale farms, 92% of all farms in Guatemala are small. Large farms produce 1/3 more per hectare than small farms, but employ fewer people overall.
Non-traditional agricultural exports
The shift to the production of non-traditional agricultural exports (NTAE) is a strategy used by developing countries like Guatemala to grow the agricultural sector and decreasing inequality by including the rural poor in the benefits of globalization. The most important NTAE crops in Guatemala include
fruit like mangos, melons, and berries
vegetables like cauliflower, cabbage, broccoli, and snow peas
organic crops such as coffee. The value of non-traditional agricultural export crops has increased from $146 million US in 1992 to $262 million in 2001. IN 1998, NTAE accounted for 8.7 percent of the total exports. NTAE production largely comes from small-scale farmers. While the farmers who are involved in this market are not failing, this market limits their capital accumulation to slow growth, and therefore they are not able to profit highly off of this market.
Gender
The agricultural sector of Guatemala is differentiated by gender, and this differential can be seen in several different areas within the sector. More men than women inherit or buy land individually, although many houses choose to rent land instead of buying it. Additionally, there is a gender gap in the division of agricultural labor. Traditionally, men dominated subsistence production and agricultural production for domestic markets, while women had roles in small animal production, craft production, and the selling of products in regional rather than national markets. With the shift toward NTAE, there has also been an increase in field labor for women. Additionally, women have been included in land-use decision processes in NTAE production. Sarah Hamilton, Linda Asturias de Barrios, and Brenda Tevalán have stated that despite a traditional patriarchal structure in Guatemala, NTAE production is associated with increased independence and equality between men and women.
Macroeconomic development
Guatemala became more economically developed and stable from 1990 to 2011. The annual GDP growth rate for Guatemala in 2000 was 3.6%, but just 0.9% in 2009, increasing slightly in 2010 to 2.0%
The poverty rate in Guatemala in 2006 was 54.8%, and the extreme poverty rate was 26.1%. Latin America as a whole had a poverty rate of 33% and an extreme poverty rate of 12.9% in 2009. The data indicate that Guatemala is behind other Latin American countries, in terms of lowering poverty rates, but there has been an increase in economic activity in terms of GDP and development. Guatemala's HDI increased from 0.462 in 1990, to 0.525 in 2000, to 0.550 in 2005, and 0.574 in 2011.3 Guatemala ranked 131st in HDI in 2011. Other important human development statistics such as the total fertility rate in Guatemala decreased from 4.8 births per woman in 2000 to 4.2 births per woman in 2006. During the same period, life expectancy increased from 67.9 years in 2000, to 69.9 years in 2006.
The following table shows the main economic indicators in 1980–2017.
Electrical infrastructure in rural Guatemala
In Guatemala lack of access to electricity is concentrated in rural areas, although informal settlements around urban peripheries also tend to lack metered service. Guatemala's post-civil war efforts to improve electrical access in the countryside have proceeded under the auspices of the Rural Electrification Plan (Spanish: PER), a public-private partnership between the government's Ministry of Education and Mines (Mineduc) and private power companies. Over the period 2000 to 2011, the PER improved rates of electrical grid connectivity among non-indigenous (62 to 82 percent) and indigenous (48 to 70 percent) households in Guatemala. Continuity of the electrical grid is robust, with both groups reporting only about one hour per day of unavailability. Even when rural users are connected to the grid and pay subsidized rates, they often have difficulty affording electrical appliances, which translates into low power consumption (less than five percent of average US residential usage). This low power usage by rural customers is often not profitable for power companies, disincentivizing further expansion of the grid. As of 2014, one third of Guatemala's poorest rural residents still lacked electricity. By contrast, only around 8% of high-income rural residents lacked service, demonstrating that affordability plays a role in the accessibility of electrical grids.
In 2016, domestic hydroelectric power supplied the majority (about 34 percent) of Guatemala's electricity. The planning process for constructing new hydropower dams was updated by the Guatemalan Congress in 1996 and 2007 (Decree 93–96, the "General Law of Electricity"), giving project developers more power over the process, especially with regards to environmental impact assessments (EIA). A study in Guatemala covering the period 2009 to 2014 found that private construction firms generally have little knowledge of the rights of rural indigenous peoples their projects may be affecting. Firms typically hire consultants to perform EIAs and liaise with affected communities. However, consultants are frequently disinterested in adequately informing rural communities of the potential impacts of proposed projects. Instead, consultants frequently resort to bribery and manipulation to obtain consent to proceed with hydroelectric projects. Interlocutors from within the government say that there is internal pressure to approve EIAs even if they are performed inadequately, showing that visions of Guatemala's energy future may be overriding the interests of segments of its populace.
External links
World Bank Summary Trade Statistics Guatemala
Tariffs applied by Guatemala as provided by ITC's Market Access Map, an online database of customs tariffs and market requirements.
References
Guatemala | [
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12162 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications%20in%20Guatemala | Telecommunications in Guatemala | Telecommunications in Guatemala include radio, television, fixed and mobile telephones, and the Internet.
Radio and television
Radio stations: 1 government-owned radio station and hundreds of privately owned radio stations (2007).
Radios: 835,000 (1997).
Television stations: 4 privately owned national terrestrial channels dominate TV broadcasting; multi-channel satellite and cable services are available (2007).
Television sets: 640,000 (1997).
Telephones
Guatemala's incumbent telephone company is TELGUA, which won the bidding for the privatization of the government run GUATEL.
Calling code: +502
International call prefix: 00
Main lines in use:
665,061 lines (2000)
1.4 million lines (2006)
1.7 million lines, 63rd in the world (2012)
Mobile cellular:
663,296 lines (2000)
6.8 million lines (2006)
10.2 million lines, 70% of the population (2007)
20.8 million lines, 46th in the world (2012)
Telephone system: fairly modern network centered in Guatemala City; connected to Central American Microwave System, a trunk microwave radio relay system that links the countries of Central America and Mexico with each other.
Satellite earth stations: 1 Intelsat (Atlantic Ocean).
Communications cables: landing point for both the Americas Region Caribbean Ring (ARCOS-1) and the SAm-1 fiber optic submarine cable systems that together provide connectivity to South and Central America, parts of the Caribbean, and the US (2011).
Operators:
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! International Operator
! Brand
! Users
! Technology
! Web Site
|-
| América Móvil
| Claro/PCS Digital
| 3,591,138 (June 2007)
| CDMA 1x EVDO Rev 0 1900 MHz, GSM/GPRS/EDGE 900/1900 MHz, UMTS/HSPA 1900 MHz (1.5 Mbit/s) with video calling and data services available.
| Claro Guatemala
|-
| Telefónica
| Movistar
| 2,514,612 (June 2007)
| CDMA 1x EVDO Rev A 1900 MHz and GSM/GPRS/EDGE 1900 MHz, UMTS/HSPA 1900 MHz (7.2 Mbit/s) with data services only available.
| Movistar Guatemala
|-
| Millicom / Local partners
| TIGO/COMCEL
| 3,116,998 (June 2007)
| TDMA/N-AMPS (to be shut down) and GSM/GPRS/EDGE 850 MHz, UMTS/HSDPA 850 MHz (3.6 Mbit/s) with video calling and data services available
| TIGO Guatemala
|-
| Digicel Group
| Digicel must be launched before June 18, 2008
|
| Planned GSM/GPRS/EDGE 900 MHz
| Digicel Group
|}
Internet
Top-level domain: .gt
Internet users:
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Year
! Users
|-
| 2002
| ~200,000
|-
| 2003
| ~600,000
|-
| 2004
| ~1.0 million
|-
| 2005
| ~1.7 million
|-
| 2006
| ~2.4 million
|-
| 2007
| ~3.8 million
|-
| 2009
| ~2.3 million, 72nd in the world
|-
| 2012
| ~2.3 million, 86th in the world; 16.0% of the population, 153rd in the world
|}
Fixed broadband: unknown (2012).
Mobile broadband: 632,624 subscriptions, 85th in the world; 4.5% of the population, 113th in the world (2012).
Internet hosts: 357,552 hosts, 60th in the world (2012).
IPv4: 552,192 addresses allocated, less than 0.05% of the world total, 39.2 addresses per 1000 people (2012).
Internet Service Providers (ISPs): 27 (2004).
Internet censorship and surveillance
In 2011 the OpenNet Initiative reported no evidence of Internet filtering in Guatemala.
Guatemala's constitution protects freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and individual privacy, however, government officials routinely violate these rights. Recent constitutional reforms have legalized various electronic surveillance techniques that threaten online privacy.
The Ley de Proteccion Integral de la Niñez y Adolescencia (Law on the Protection of Children and Adolescents) permits the restriction of content for children younger than eighteen years of age if it is deemed harmful to their development. Media outlets and organizers of public events are required to evaluate and classify programmed content according to this law.
The Ley de Emisión del Pensamiento (Law on Expression of Thought) prohibits libel, slander, and treason in printed form, and stipulates that the author of any publication containing an opinion that the judiciary considers to be subversive, morally damaging, or "disrespectful" of private life may be subject to punishment. The Law on Expression of Thought explicitly requires newspapers that have incorrectly attributed acts to or published false information about people or entities to publish any corrections, explanations, or refutations sent to them by those they have accused. In cases of printed material that involves treason, is subversive, is "damaging to morals," or contains slander or libel, newspapers may be subject to a trial by jury; decisions may be appealed within 48 hours. The law makes an exception when the offended party is a government employee or official: if the offending content concerns "purely official acts" related to government work, the case will be judged in a "court of honor," and the decision will be final and closed to appeal.
The Ley de Orden Público (Law of Public Order) states that if the government has declared the country to be "in a state of siege," journalists must "refrain from publishing anything that might cause confusion or panic."
See also
Media of Guatemala
References
Source for telephone numbers - prensalibre.com.gt
External links
Registro de Dominios .GT , domain registrar for the .gt domain.
Guatemala
Guatemala
Guatemala | [
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12163 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport%20in%20Guatemala | Transport in Guatemala | Transportation in Guatemala includes roads, waterways, and airports. It formerly included railways.
Ground transportation
Chicken buses, recycled and often colorfully painted former US school buses, are popular within cities and for short-distance trips. There are a number of Guatemalan bus and van transport companies that most travelers use to get from the airport in Guatemala City to Antigua, Lake Atitlan in the Western Highlands of Guatemala and Monterrico on the Pacific coast.
Some first class bus operators (such as Litegua between Guatemala City and Puerto Barrios, Fuente del Norte between Guatemala City and Flores, and Monja Blanca to Cobán) run safe, modern air-conditioned buses for longer distances. In some parts of Guatemala City passengers on public buses are vulnerable to crime therefore it is not a good idea to take public buses in Guatemala City nor chicken buses from Guatemala City to other destinations. Shuttles and taxis (often tuk-tuks)are the better option. There are no passenger trains.
Streets
Guatemalan streets tend to be one-ways to ease congestion and move traffic.
Highways
Total: 14,095 km
Paved: 4,863 km (including 75 km of expressways)
Unpaved: 9,232 km (1999 est.)
Railways
total:
operated by the Railroad Development Corporation until September 2007, now closed
closed
narrow gauge:
884 km gauge (single track)
Railway links with adjacent countries
Mexico - currently closed (since 1996 or before) - break-of-gauge /
Belize - None
Honduras - none in use - break-of-gauge / (?)
El Salvador - currently closed
Waterways
260 km navigable year round; additional 730 km navigable during high-water season
Pipelines
oil 480 km
Ports and harbors
Atlantic Ocean
Puerto Barrios
Santo Tomás de Castilla
Pacific Ocean
Champerico, Puerto Quetzal, Puerto San José
Merchant marine
None (1999 est.)
Boats
Ferries are available in certain regions, such as Sayaxché or around Livingston. The best way to get to the various Mayan villages around Lake Atitlan is on one of the ubiquitous "shark" boats.
Airports
450 (2006 est.)
Named airports
La Aurora International Airport
Mundo Maya International Airport
San José Airport
Quetzaltenango Airport
Puerto Barrios Airport
Airports - with paved runways
total: 11
2,438 to 3,047 m: 3
1,524 to 2,437 m: 2
914 to 1,523 m: 4
under 914 m: 2 (2006 est.)
Airports - with unpaved runways
total: 439
2,438 to 3,047 m: 1
1,524 to 2,437 m: 8
914 to 1,523 m: 111
under 914 m: 319 (2006 est.)
See also
Guatemala
References
External links | [
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12164 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed%20Forces%20of%20Guatemala | Armed Forces of Guatemala | The Guatemalan Armed Forces () consists of the National Army of Guatemala (Ejercito Nacional de Guatemala, ENG), the Guatemalan National Defense Navy (Marina de la Defensa Nacional, includes Marines), the Guatemalan Air Force (Fuerza Aerea Guatemalteca, FAG), and the Presidential Honor Guard (Guardia de Honor Presidencial).
The Ministry of National Defence is the agency of the Guatemalan government responsible for the budget, training and policy of the armed forces. Based in Guatemala City, the Defence Ministry is heavily guarded, and the President of Guatemala frequently visits. the Minister of National Defence is Major General Luis Miguel Ralda Moreno.
The Minister of Defense is responsible for policy. Day-to-day operations are the responsibility of the military chief of staff and the national defense staff.
History
Guatemala is a signatory to the Rio Pact and was a member of the Central American Defense Council (CONDECA). The President of the Republic is commander-in-chief.
Prior to 1945 the Defence Ministry was titled the Secretariat of War (Secretaría de la Guerra).
An agreement signed in September 1996, which is one of the substantive peace accords, mandated that the mission of the armed forces change to focus exclusively on external threats. Presidents Álvaro Arzú and his successors Alfonso Portillo, Óscar Berger and Álvaro Colom, have used a constitutional clause to order the army on a temporary basis to support the police in response to a nationwide wave of violent crime, a product of the Mexican criminal organizations going across the north-west region.
The peace accords call for a one-third reduction in the army's authorized strength and budget — achieved in 2004 — and for a constitutional amendment to permit the appointment of a civilian minister of defense. A constitutional amendment to this end was defeated as part of a May 1999 plebiscite, but discussions between the executive and legislative branches continue on how to achieve this objective.
In 2004 the army has gone beyond its accord-mandated target, and has implemented troop reductions from an estimated 28,000 to 15,500 troops, including subordinate air force (1,000) and navy (1,000) elements. It is equipped with armaments and material from the United States, Israel, Taiwan, Argentina, Spain, and France. As part of the army downsizing, the operational structure of 19 military zones and three strategic brigades are being recast as several military zones are eliminated and their area of operations absorbed by others. The air force operates three air bases; the navy has two port bases.
The Guatemalan army has a special forces unit (specializing in anti-insurgent jungle warfare) known as the Kaibiles. In 2011, a Guatemalan court convicted four members of the Kaibiles, of killing more than 200 civilians in the Dos Erres massacre in 1982. Each man was sentenced to 6,050 years in prison. Their convictions for their roles in the massacre nearly 30 years prior, in which soldiers killed more than 200 men, women, and children, would not have happened if not for the courage of victims of violence and Guatemala's attorney general, Claudia Paz y Paz. After the convictions of the Dos Erres four, based on a Guatemalan government's commitment to reorganize its special forces units, the U.S. Department of Defense resumed military aid.
Armed Forces Day
The Día del Ejército (Army Day or Armed Forces Day) is celebrated on 30 June, although if it occurs on a Tuesday or Wednesday it is celebrated on the prior Monday, and if it occurs on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday it moves to the following Monday.
Organization
The Armed Forces today number at around 39,000 active personnel.
Leadership
Service branches
Army
The Army or Land Forces are the oldest military branch of the armed forces. In the middle of the 19th century, General Rafael Carrera promoted it with the triumph in the Battle of San José La Arada, dated to 2 February 1851, a date that is today commemorated as the day of this branch.
Navy
The Navy was founded on 15 January 1959, by the then President Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, due to the need to protect the country's marine resources, which at the time were the object of illegal predation by fishing boats from neighboring countries. It is a state entity with functions as a police agency for seas and rivers.
Air Force
The Guatemalan Air Force () constitutes the aviation portion of the Guatemalan Army. Founded in 1921, it is organized, equipped and trained to plan, conduct and execute the actions imposed by the State Military Defense in relation to the use of air power.
Honor Guard
The Presidential Honor Guard of Guatemala is a branch of the Guatemalan Land Forces, responsible for the care and protection of the President of the Republic, as well as the Vice President.
Equipment
Personal equipment
Vehicles
All data from World Military Intelligence
Armoured vehicles
Utility vehicles
Artillery
Towed artillery
12 M-101 105mm (United States)
8 M-102 105mm (United States)
56 M-56 105mm (Yugoslavia)
12 M-116 75mm (United States)
Mortars
55 M-1 81mm (United States)
12 M30 107mm (United States)
18 ECIA 120mm (Spain)
Recoilless rifles
64 M67 90mm recoilless rifles (United States)
64 M-1974 FMK-1 105mm recoilless rifles (Argentina)
56 M40A1 106mm recoilless rifles (United States)
Air defence
16 M-55 3x20mm (Yugoslavia)
16 GAI-BO1 20mm Oerlikon (Switzerland)
TCM 20 2x20mm (some reported) (Israel/Switzerland)
5 M42 Duster 2x40mm SP-AAG (United States/Sweden)
Naval boats
1 110 ft Broad class patrol boat: GC-1051
1 40 ft Dauntless class patrol boat: Iximche
2 85 ft Sewart Seacraft patrol boats: GC-851 Utatlan, GC-852 Subteniente Osoho Saravia
6 Cutlass 65 ft (Halter Marine) class patrol boats: GC 651-656
11 small patrol launches
1 ferry
2 sail training boats
2 Machete class personnel landing craft (Halter Marine)
Notable military personnel
Captain General Rafael Carrera
Colonel Jacobo Árbenz Guzman
Field Marshal José Víctor Zavala
General Justo Rufino Barrios
General Miguel Garcia Granados
References
External links
Official Website of Guatemala's Military
Raul Sohr. ‘’Centroamérica en guerra.’’ Alianza Editorial. México. 1988.
Christopher F. Foss. ‘’Jane's tank and combat vehicles recognition guide. ‘’Harper Collins Publishers. UK. 2000. | [
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12165 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign%20relations%20of%20Guatemala | Foreign relations of Guatemala | Guatemala's major diplomatic interests are regional security and increasingly, regional development and economic integration.
Diplomatic relations
Bilateral relations
Multilateral relations
The Central American Ministers of Trade meet on a regular basis to work on regional approaches to trade issues. In March 1998, Guatemala joined its Central American neighbors in signing a Trade and Investment Framework Agreement (TIFA). In 2000 it joined Honduras and El Salvador in signing a free trade agreement with Mexico, which went into effect in 2001. Guatemala also originated the idea for, and is the seat of, the Central American Parliament (PARLACEN).
Guatemala participates in several regional groups, particularly those related to the environment and trade. For example, US President Clinton and the Central American presidents signed the CONCAUSA (Conjunto Centroamerica-USA) agreement at the Summit of the Americas in December 1994. CONCAUSA is a cooperative plan of action to promote clean, efficient energy use; conserve the region's biodiversity; strengthen legal and institutional frameworks and compliance mechanisms; and improve and harmonize environmental protection standards.
Illicit drugs:
Guatemala is a transit country for cocaine shipments; minor producer of illicit opium poppy and cannabis for the international drug trade; active eradication program in 1996 effectively eliminated the cannabis crop; proximity to Mexico makes Guatemala a major staging area for drugs (cocaine shipments).
See also
Belizean–Guatemalan territorial dispute
List of diplomatic missions in Guatemala
List of diplomatic missions of Guatemala
Visa requirements for Guatemalan citizens
References
External links
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Guatemala
Legal Opinion on Guatemala's Territorial Claim to Belize and MFA Library and GAR and Other Documents and Summary of Legal Opinion of 25 November 2008
Belize/Guatemala ICJ Compromis Signed at OAS in Washington, D.C. on 8 December 2008 and Compromis and Videos and U.S. Congratulations and U.K. Congratulations and Photographs and Compromis for Christmas of 8 December 2008 and Belize Leading Counsel of 19 December 2008 | [
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12166 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernsey | Guernsey | Guernsey (; Guernésiais: Giernési) is an island in the English Channel off the coast of Normandy that is part of the Bailiwick of Guernsey, a British Crown Dependency.
It is the second largest of the Channel Islands, an island group roughly north of Saint-Malo and west of the Cotentin Peninsula. The jurisdiction consists of ten parishes on the island of Guernsey, three other inhabited islands (Herm, Jethou and Lihou), and many small islets and rocks.
It is not part of the United Kingdom, although defence and some aspects of international relations are managed by the UK. Although the bailiwicks of Jersey and Guernsey are often referred to collectively as the Channel Islands, the "Channel Islands" are not a constitutional or political unit. Jersey has a separate relationship to the Crown from the other Crown dependencies of Guernsey and the Isle of Man, although all are held by the monarch of the United Kingdom.
The island has a mixed British-Norman culture, although British cultural influence is stronger, with English being the main language and the Pound sterling its primary currency. The island has a traditional local language known as Guernésiais.
Toponymy
The island's name, "Guernsey", like that of neighbouring "Jersey", is of Old Norse origin. The second element of each word, "-ey", is the Old Norse for "island", while the original root, "guern(s)", is of uncertain origin and meaning, possibly deriving from either a personal name such as Grani or Warinn, or from gron, meaning pine tree.
Previous names for the Channel Islands vary over history, but include the Lenur islands, and Sarnia; Sarnia is the Latin name for Guernsey, or Lisia (Guernsey) and Angia (Jersey).
History
Early history
Around 6000 BC, rising seas created the English Channel and separated the Norman promontories that became the bailiwicks of Guernsey and Jersey from continental Europe. Neolithic farmers then settled on its coast and built the dolmens and menhirs found in the islands today, providing evidence of human presence dating back to around 5000 BC.
Evidence of Roman settlements on the island, and the discovery of amphorae from the Herculaneum area and Spain, show evidence of an intricate trading network with regional and long-distance trade. Buildings found in La Plaiderie, St Peter Port dating from 100 to 400 AD appear to be warehouses. The earliest evidence of shipping was the discovery of a wreck of a ship in St Peter Port harbour, which has been named "Asterix". It is thought to be a 3rd-century Roman cargo vessel and was probably at anchor or grounded when a fire broke out. Travelling from the Kingdom of Gwent, Saint Sampson, later the abbot of Dol in Brittany, is credited with the introduction of Christianity to Guernsey.
Middle Ages
In 933, the Cotentin Peninsula including Avranchin which included the islands, were placed by the French King Ranulf under the control of William I. The island of Guernsey and the other Channel Islands represent the last remnants of the medieval Duchy of Normandy. In 1204, when King John lost the continental portion of the Duchy to Philip II of France, the islands remained part of the kingdom of England. The islands were then recognised by the 1259 Treaty of Paris as part of Henry III's territories.
During the Middle Ages, the island was a haven for pirates that would use the "lamping technique" to ground ships close to the island. This intensified during the Hundred Years War, when, starting in 1339, the island was occupied by the Capetians on several occasions. The Guernsey Militia was first mentioned as operational in 1331 and would help defend the island for a further 600 years.
In 1372, the island was invaded by Aragonese mercenaries under the command of Owain Lawgoch (remembered as Yvon de Galles), who was in the pay of the French king. Owain and his dark-haired mercenaries were later absorbed into Guernsey legend as invading fairies from across the sea.
Early modern period
As part of the peace between England and France, Pope Sixtus IV issued in 1483 a Papal bull granting the Privilege of Neutrality, by which the Islands, their harbours and seas, as far as the eye can see, were considered neutral territory. Anyone molesting Islanders would be excommunicated. A Royal Charter in 1548 confirmed the neutrality. The French attempted to invade Jersey a year later in 1549 but were defeated by the militia. The neutrality lasted another century, until William III of England abolished the privilege due to privateering activity against Dutch ships.
In the mid-16th century, the island was influenced by Calvinist reformers from Normandy. During the Marian persecutions, three women, the Guernsey Martyrs, were burned at the stake for their Protestant beliefs, along with the infant son of one of the women. The burning of the infant was ordered by Bailiff Hellier Gosselin, with the advice of priests nearby who said the boy should burn due to having inherited moral stain from his mother. Later on Hellier Gosselin fled the island to escape widespread outrage.
During the English Civil War, Guernsey sided with the Parliamentarians. The allegiance was not total, however; there were a few Royalist uprisings in the southwest of the island, while Castle Cornet was occupied by the Governor, Sir Peter Osborne, and Royalist troops. In December 1651, with full honours of war, Castle Cornet surrendered – the last Royalist outpost anywhere in the British Isles to surrender.
Wars against France and Spain during the 17th and 18th centuries gave Guernsey shipowners and sea captains the opportunity to exploit the island's proximity to mainland Europe by applying for letters of marque and turning their merchantmen into privateers.
By the beginning of the 18th century, Guernsey's residents were starting to settle in North America, in particular founding Guernsey County in Ohio in 1810. The threat of invasion by Napoleon prompted many defensive structures to be built at the end of that century. The early 19th century saw a dramatic increase in the prosperity of the island, due to its success in the global maritime trade, and the rise of the stone industry. Maritime trade suffered a major decline with the move away from sailing craft as materials such as iron and steel were not available on the island.
Le Braye du Valle was a tidal channel that made the northern extremity of Guernsey, Le Clos du Valle, a tidal island. Le Braye du Valle was drained and reclaimed in 1806 by the British Government as a defence measure. The eastern end of the former channel became the town and harbour (from 1820) of St Sampson's, now the second biggest port in Guernsey. The western end of La Braye is now Le Grand Havre. The roadway called "The Bridge" across the end of the harbour at St Sampson's recalls the bridge that formerly linked the two parts of Guernsey at high tide. New roads were built and main roads metalled for ease of use by the military. Infrastructure was funded by creating money debt-free starting in 1815.
Contemporary period
During the First World War, about 3,000 island men served in the British Expeditionary Force. Of these, about 1,000 served in the Royal Guernsey Light Infantry regiment formed from the Royal Guernsey Militia in 1916.
From 30 June 1940, during the Second World War, the Channel Islands were occupied by German troops. Before the occupation, 80% of Guernsey children had been evacuated to England to live with relatives or strangers during the war. Most children returned home after the war ended in 1945. The occupying German forces deported over 1,000 Guernsey residents to camps in southern Germany, notably to the Lager Lindele (Lindele Camp) near Biberach an der Riß and to Oflag VII-C in Laufen. Guernsey was very heavily fortified during World War II, out of all proportion to the island's strategic value. German defences and alterations remain visible, particularly to Castle Cornet and around the northern coast of the island. Guernsey and Jersey were both liberated on 9 May 1945, now celebrated as Liberation Day on the two islands.
During the late 1940s the island repaired the damage caused to its buildings during the occupation. The tomato industry started up again and thrived until the 1970s when the significant increase in world oil prices led to a sharp, terminal decline. Tourism has remained important. Finance businesses grew in the 1970s and expanded in the next two decades and are important employers. Guernsey's constitutional and trading relationships with the UK is largely unaffected by Brexit.
Geography
Situated in Mont Saint-Michel Bay at around , Guernsey, Herm and some other smaller islands together have a total area of and coastlines of about . Elevation varies from sea level to at Hautnez on Guernsey.
There are many smaller islands, islets, rocks and reefs in Guernsey waters. Combined with a tidal range of and fast currents of up to 12 knots, this makes sailing in local waters dangerous. The very large tidal variation provides an environmentally rich inter-tidal zone around the islands, and some sites have received Ramsar Convention designation.
The tidal flows in the area are remarkable, owing to the flatness of the ground for nearly 32 km (20 mi) westward. Guernsey is the westernmost of the Channel Islands, and the jurisdiction is at the greatest distance from the coast of Normandy than any of the other islands.
Climate
Guernsey's climate is temperate with mild winters and mild, sunny summers. It is classified as an oceanic climate, with a dry-summer trend, although marginally wetter than mediterranean summers. The warmest months are July and August, when temperatures are generally around with some days occasionally going above . On average, the coldest month is February with an average weekly mean air temperature of . Average weekly mean air temperature reaches in August. Snow rarely falls and is unlikely to settle, but is most likely to fall in February. The temperature rarely drops below freezing, although strong wind-chill from Arctic winds can sometimes make it feel like it. The rainiest months are December (average ), November (average ) and January (average ). July is, on average, the sunniest month with 250 hours recorded sunshine; December the least with 58 hours recorded sunshine. 50% of the days are overcast.
Carbon
Guernsey plans to reach carbon neutrality by 2050 according to the Climate Change Policy & Action Plan adopted in August 2020.
Geology
Guernsey has a geological history stretching further back into the past than most of Europe. It forms part of the geological province of France known as the Armorican Massif. There is a broad geological division between the north and south of the island. The Southern Metamorphic Complex is elevated above the geologically younger, lower lying Northern Igneous Complex. Guernsey has experienced a complex geological evolution (especially the rocks of the southern complex) with multiple phases of intrusion and deformation recognisable.
Guernsey is composed of nine main rock types: two of these are granites and the rest gneiss.
Politics
Guernsey is a parliamentary representative democracy and a British Crown dependency. The Lieutenant Governor of Guernsey is the "representative of the Crown in right of the république of the Bailiwick of Guernsey". The official residence of the Lieutenant Governor is Government House. Since 2016 the incumbent has been Vice Admiral Sir Ian Corder KBE, CB, replacing his predecessor, Air Marshal Peter Walker, who had died in post. The post was created in 1835 as a result of the abolition of the office of Governor. Since that point, the Lieutenant Governor has always resided locally.
The jurisdiction is not part of the United Kingdom, although defence and most foreign relations are handled by the British Government.
The entire jurisdiction lies within the Common Travel Area of the British Islands and the Republic of Ireland. Taken together with the separate jurisdictions of Alderney and Sark it forms the Bailiwick of Guernsey.
States of Guernsey
The deliberative assembly of the States of Guernsey () is called the States of Deliberation () and consists of 38 People's Deputies, elected on an islandwide basis every four years. There are also two representatives from Alderney, a semi-autonomous dependency of the Bailiwick, but Sark sends no representative since it has its own legislature. The Bailiff or Deputy Bailiff preside in the assembly. There are also two non-voting members: H.M. Procureur (analogous to the role of Attorney General) and H.M. Comptroller (analogous to Solicitor General), both appointed by the Crown and collectively known as the Law Officers of the Crown.
A projet de loi is the equivalent of a UK bill or a French projet de loi, and a law is the equivalent of a UK act of parliament or a French loi. A draft law passed by the States can have no legal effect until formally approved by Her Majesty in Council and promulgated by means of an order in council. Laws are given the Royal Sanction at regular meetings of the Privy Council in London, after which they are returned to the islands for formal registration at the Royal Court. The States also make delegated legislation known as Ordinances (Ordonnances) and Orders (ordres) which do not require the Royal Assent. Commencement orders are usually in the form of ordinances.
The Policy and Resources Committee is responsible for Guernsey's constitutional and external affairs, developing strategic and corporate policy and coordinating States business. It also examines proposals and Reports placed before Guernsey's Parliament (the States of Deliberation) by Departments and Non States Bodies. The President of the committee is the de facto head of government of Guernsey.
Legal system
Guernsey's legal system originates in Norman Customary Law, overlaid with principles taken from English common law and Equity as well as from statute law enacted by the competent legislature(s) – usually, but not always, the States of Guernsey. Guernsey has almost complete autonomy over internal affairs and certain external matters. However, the Crown – that is to say, the UK Government – retains an ill-defined reserved power to intervene in the domestic affairs of any of the five Crown Dependencies within the British Islands "in the interests of good government". The UK Parliament is also a source of Guernsey law for those matters which are reserved to the UK, namely defence and foreign affairs.
The head of the bailiwick judiciary in Guernsey is the Bailiff, who, as well as performing the judicial functions of a Chief Justice, is also the head of the States of Guernsey and has certain civic, ceremonial and executive functions. The Bailiff's functions may be exercised by the Deputy Bailiff. The posts of Bailiff and Deputy Bailiff are Crown appointments. Sixteen Jurats, who need no specific legal training, are elected by the States of Election from among Islanders. They act as a jury, as judges in civil and criminal cases and fix the sentence in criminal cases. First mentioned in 1179, there is a list of Jurats who have served since 1299.
The oldest Courts of Guernsey can be traced back to the 9th century. The principal court is the Royal Court and exercises both civil and criminal jurisdiction. Additional courts, such as the Magistrate's Court, which deals with minor criminal matters, and the Court of Appeal, which hears appeals from the Royal Court, have been added to the Island's legal system over the years.
External relations
Several European countries have a consular presence within the jurisdiction. The French Consulate is based at Victor Hugo's former residence at Hauteville House.
While the jurisdiction of Guernsey has complete autonomy over internal affairs and certain external matters, the topic of complete independence from the British Crown has been discussed widely and frequently, with ideas ranging from Guernsey obtaining independence as a Dominion to the bailiwicks of Guernsey and Jersey uniting and forming an independent Federal State within the Commonwealth, whereby both islands retain their independence with regards to domestic affairs but internationally, the islands would be regarded as one state.
Although it was not a member of the European Union, it had a special relationship with it until Brexit. It had been treated as part of the European Community with access to the single market for the purposes of the free trade in goods. From 2021 with free travel to the continent ceasing, additional bureaucratic procedures come into force, including the need for international driving licences and green cards for vehicle insurance.
Parishes
Guernsey has ten parishes, which act as civil administration districts with limited powers. Each parish is administered by a Douzaine, usually made up of twelve members, known as Douzeniers. Douzeniers are elected for a four-year mandate, two Douzeniers being elected by parishioners at a parish meeting in November each year. The senior Douzenier is known as the Doyen (Dean). Two elected Constables () carry out the decisions of the Douzaine, serving for between one and three years. The longer serving Constable is known as the Senior Constable and his or her colleague as the Junior Constable. The Douzaines levy an Occupiers Rate on properties to provide funding for running of the administration.
Guernsey's Church of England parishes fall under the See of Canterbury, having split from the Bishopric of Winchester in 2014. The biggest parish is Castel, while the most populated is St Peter Port.
Economy
Financial services, such as banking, fund management, and insurance, account for about 37% of GDP. Tourism, manufacturing, and horticulture, mainly tomatoes and cut flowers, especially freesias, have been declining. Light tax and death duties make Guernsey a popular offshore finance centre for private-equity funds.
Guernsey does not have a Central Bank and it issues its own sterling coinage and banknotes. UK coinage and (English, Scottish and Northern Irish-faced) banknotes also circulate freely and interchangeably. Total island investment funds, used to fund pensions and future island costs, amount to £2.7billion as at June 2016. The island issued a 30-year bond in December 2015 for £330m, its first bond in 80 years. The island has been given a credit rating of AA-/A-1+ with a stable outlook from Standard & Poor's.
Guernsey has the official ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code GG and the official ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 code GGY; market data vendors, such as Reuters, will report products related to Guernsey using the alpha-3 code.
In March 2016 there were over 32,291 people employed in Guernsey with 4,864 being self-employed and 2,453 employing businesses. 19.6% work in the finance industry and median earnings were £31,215.
Infrastructure
Public services, such as water, wastewater, the two main harbours and the airport are still owned and controlled by the States of Guernsey. The electricity, and postal services have been commercialised by the States and are now operated by companies wholly owned by the States of Guernsey. Gas is supplied by an independent private company. In 1998, Guernsey and Jersey jointly formed the Channel Islands Electricity Grid to operate and manage the submarine cables between Europe and the Channel Islands. The installation of these cables was originally to provide the island with a secure form of backup power but now are effectively the primary source of power with the local diesel generators providing back-up.
Guernsey Telecoms, which provided telecommunications, was sold by the States to Cable & Wireless plc, rebranded as Sure and was sold to Batelco in April 2013. Newtel was the first alternative telecommunications company on the island and was acquired by Wave Telecom in 2010 and subsequently rebranded as Jersey Telecom. Airtel-Vodafone also provide a mobile network.
Both the Guernsey Post postal boxes (since 1969) and the telephone boxes (since 2002) are painted blue, but otherwise are identical to their British counterparts, the red pillar box and red telephone box. In 2009 the telephone boxes at the bus station were painted yellow just like they used to be when Guernsey Telecoms was state-owned. The oldest pillar box still in use in the British Isles can be found in Union Street, St Peter Port, and dates back to 1853.
Transport
Ports and harbours exist at St Peter Port and St Sampson. There is a single paved airport, Guernsey Airport. The States of Guernsey wholly own their own airline, Aurigny. The decision to purchase the airline was made to protect important air links to and from the island and the sale was completed on 15 May 2003.
The Guernsey Railway, effectively an electric tramway, began working on 20 February 1892 and was abandoned on 9 June 1934. It replaced an earlier transport system which was worked by steam, the Guernsey Steam Tramway, which had operated from 6 June 1879 with six locomotives. Alderney is now the only Channel Island with a working railway.
A narrow gauge railway was built by the German forces during WW2 to transport materials used in the construction of coastal defenses. This was removed after the War.
Guernsey has a public bus service, operated by CT Plus on behalf of the States of Guernsey Environment and Infrastructure Department.
Business
, the finance industry forms the largest economic sector in Guernsey, generating around 40% of Guernsey's GDP and directly employing around 21% of its workforce. Banks began setting up operations in the island from the early 1960s onwards in order to avoid high onshore taxes and restrictive regulation. The industry regulator is the Guernsey Financial Services Commission, which was established in 1987.In 2015, the Bailiwick of Guernsey (in conjunction with Jersey) established the Channel Islands Financial Ombudsman (CIFO) to resolve consumer complaints about financial services provided in or from the Channel Islands of Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney and Sark.
Prior to the growth of the finance industry, the island's main industries were quarrying and horticulture. The latter particularly decline as a result of the oil price shocks of the 1970s and the introduction of cheap North Sea gas that benefited Dutch growers. Guernsey is home to Specsavers Optical Group and Healthspan also has its headquarters in Guernsey.
Tourism
Guernsey has been a tourist destination since at least the Victorian days, with the first tourist guide published in 1834. In the 19th century, two rail companies (London and South Western Railway and Great Western Railway) ran competing boats from the UK to St Peter Port, with a race to the only convenient berth. This was halted with the sinking of the SS Stella in 1899.
Guernsey enters Britain in Bloom with St Martin Parish winning the small town category twice in 2006 and 2011, Saint Peter Port winning the large coastal category in 2014 and St Peter's winning the small coastal prize in 2015. Herm has won Britain in Bloom categories several times: in 2002, 2008, and 2012, Herm won the Britain in Bloom Gold Award.
The military history of the island has left a number of fortifications, including Castle Cornet, Fort Grey. Guernsey loophole towers and a large collection of German fortifications with a number of museums.
The use of the roadstead in front of St Peter Port by over 100 cruise ships a year is bringing over 100,000 day-trip passengers to the island each year.
Taxation
Guernsey, Alderney and Sark each raise their own taxation, although in 1949 Alderney (but not Sark) transferred its fiscal rights to Guernsey.
Personal tax liability differs according to whether an individual is resident in the island or not. Individuals resident in the Jurisdiction of Guernsey (which does not include Sark) pay income tax at the rate of 20% on their worldwide income, whereas non-residents are only liable on income arising from activity or ownership within Guernsey. Unlike in the UK, the income tax year in Guernsey aligns to the calendar year. All Guernsey-resident individuals are subject to an upper limit on their tax liability, which is known as the "tax cap". Individuals may elect either of the following; Tax on non-Guernsey-source income restricted to £110,000, plus tax on Guernsey-source income (excluding Guernsey bank interest), or Taxed on worldwide income restricted to £220,000, including Guernsey-source income. Income derived from Guernsey land and property is excluded from the tax cap, as from 1 January 2015, and is subject to tax at the normal rate of 20%. Only one cap applies per married couple. As from 1 Jan 2019, these tax caps have increased to £130,000 and £260,000 respectively. Guernsey has also introduced a new lower £50k tax cap for new residents for three years, subject to buying an Open Market Part A house with a document duty in excess of that amount, and not having lived in Guernsey or Alderney for three years prior.
Since 2008, Guernsey has operated three levels of corporation tax, depending on the source of the income.
A 0% corporation tax rate on most companies.
A 10% rate (income from banking business and, with effect from 1 January 2013, extended to domestic insurance business, fiduciary business, insurance intermediary business and insurance manager business).
A 20% rate (income from trading activities regulated by the Office of the Director General of Utility Regulation, and income from the ownership of lands and buildings).
Guernsey levies no capital gains, inheritance, capital transfer, value added (VAT / TVA) or general withholding taxes. In the 2011 Budget, the UK announced that it would be ending Low Value Consignment Relief that was being used to sell goods VAT free to customers across the UK, with this legislation coming into force on 1 April 2012. Tax revenues represent 22.4% of GDP.
Social Security contributions, a form of taxation, are payable by most residents, employees paying 6.6%, self employed 11% and non employed 10.4%, all subject to upper and lower limits.
Society
Demographics
The population is 63,026 (July 2016 est.) The median age for males is 40 years and for females is 42 years. The population growth rate is 0.775% with 9.62 births/1,000 population, 8 deaths/1,000 population, and annual net migration of 6.07/1,000 population. The life expectancy is 80.1 years for males and 84.5 years for females. The Bailiwick ranked 10th in the world in 2015 with an average life expectancy of 82.47 years.
Border control
The whole jurisdiction of Guernsey is part of the Common Travel Area.
For immigration and nationality purposes it is UK law, and not Guernsey law, which applies (technically the Immigration Act 1971, extended to Guernsey by Order in Council). Guernsey may not apply different immigration controls from the UK.
Housing restrictions
Guernsey undertakes a population management mechanism using restrictions over who may work in the island through control of which properties people may live in. The housing market is split between local market properties and a set number of open market properties. Anyone may live in an open market property, but local market properties can only be lived in by those who qualify – either through being born in Guernsey (to at least one local parent), by obtaining a housing licence, or by virtue of sharing a property with someone who does qualify (living en famille). Consequently, open market properties are much more expensive both to buy and to rent. Housing licences are for fixed periods, often only valid for 4 years and only as long as the individual remains employed by a specified Guernsey employer. The licence will specify the type of accommodation and be specific to the address the person lives in, and is often subject to a police record check. These restrictions apply equally regardless of whether the property is owned or rented, and only apply to occupation of the property. Thus a person whose housing licence expires may continue to own a Guernsey property, but will no longer be able to live in it. There are no restrictions on who may own a property.
There are a number of routes to qualifying as a "local" for housing purposes. Generally, it is sufficient to be born to at least one Guernsey parent and to live in the island for ten years in a twenty-year period. In a similar way a partner (married or otherwise) of a local can acquire local status. Multiple problems arise following early separation of couples, especially if they have young children or if a local partner dies, in these situations personal circumstances and compassion can add weight to requests for local status. Once "local" status has been achieved it remains in place for life. Even a lengthy period of residence outside Guernsey does not invalidate "local" housing status.
Although Guernsey's inhabitants are full British citizens, prior to the UK's withdrawal from the EU, an endorsement restricted the right of establishment in other European Union states was placed in the passport of British citizens connected solely with the Channel Islands and Isle of Man. If it was classified with "Islander Status", the British passport was be endorsed as follows: 'The holder is not entitled to benefit from EU provisions relating to employment or establishment'. Those who had a parent or grandparent born in the United Kingdom itself (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), or had lived in the United Kingdom for 5 years, were not subject to this restriction.
Education
Teaching in Guernsey is based on the English National Curriculum. There are 10 primary schools, plus two junior schools and three infant schools. , the island still has the 11-plus exam and pupils then transfer to one of four 11–16 secondary schools, or a co-educational grammar school. There are also three fee-paying colleges with lower schools, for which pupils over 11 receive grant support from the States of Guernsey. In 2016, the States of Guernsey voted to end the use of the 11-plus exams from 2019 onwards. It is also responsible for education on the neighbouring islands.
The Education Department is part way through a programme of re-building its secondary schools. The department has completed the building of Le Rondin special needs school, the Sixth Form Centre at the Grammar School and the first phase of the new College of Further Education – a performing arts centre. The construction of St Sampsons High was completed summer 2008 and admitted its first pupils in September 2008.
In 2008, the school leaving age was raised so the earliest date is the last Friday in June in the year a pupil turns 16, in line with England, Wales and Northern Ireland. This means pupils will be between 15 and 10 months and 16 and 10 months before being able to leave. Prior to this, pupils could leave school at the end of the term in which they turned 14, if they so wished: a letter was required to be sent to the Education department to confirm this. However, this option was undertaken by relatively few pupils, the majority choosing to complete their GCSEs and then either begin employment or continue their education.
Post-GCSE pupils have a choice of transferring to the state-run Grammar School & Sixth Form Centre, or to the independent colleges for academic AS/A Levels/International Baccalureate Diploma Programme. They also have the option to study vocational subjects at the island's Guernsey College of Further Education.
There are no universities in the island. Students who attend university in the United Kingdom receive state support towards both maintenance and tuition fees. In 2007, the Education Department received the approval of the States Assembly to introduce student contributions to the costs of higher education, in the form of student loans, as apply in the UK. However, immediately after the general election of 2008, the States Assembly voted in favour of a Requête which proposed abolishing the student loans scheme on the grounds that it was expensive to run and would potentially discourage students from going to, and then returning to the island from, university. In 2012, the Education Department reported to the States Assembly that it had no need to re-examine the basis of higher education funding at the present time.
Culture
The French impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir visited the island in late summer 1883. While on the island, he painted fifteen pictures of the views on the island, all featuring the bay and beach of Moulin Huet on the south coast.
The Guernsey cattle is an internationally famous icon of the island. As well as being prized for its rich creamy milk, which is claimed to hold health benefits over milk from other breeds, Guernsey cattle are increasingly being raised for their distinctively flavoured and rich yellowy-fatted beef, with butter made from the milk of Guernsey cows also has a distinctive yellow colour. Since the 1960s the number of individual islanders raising these cattle for private supply has diminished significantly, Guernsey steers can still be occasionally seen grazing on L'Ancresse common.
Guernsey also hosts a breed of goat known as the Golden Guernsey, distinguished by its golden-coloured coat. At the end of the Second World War, the Golden Guernsey had almost been rendered extinct due to interbreeding on the island. The survival of this breed is largely credited to the work of a single woman, Miriam Milbourne, who successfully hid her herd from the Germans during the occupation. Although no longer considered to be critically endangered, the breed remains on the watchlist of the Rare Breeds Survival Trust. The traditional explanation for the donkey (âne in French and Guernésiais) is the steepness of St Peter Port streets that necessitated beasts of burden for transport (in contrast to the flat terrain of the rival capital of St Helier in Jersey), although it is also used in reference to Guernsey inhabitants' stubbornness. In turn, Guernseymen traditionally refer to Jerseymen as crapauds ("toads").
The so-called Guernsey Lily, Nerine sarniensis, is also used as a symbol of the island, although this species was introduced to the island from South Africa.
Local food
A local delicacy is the ormer (Haliotis tuberculata), a variety of abalone harvested under strict laws from beaches at low spring tides. Traditional Guernsey recipes include a stew called Guernsey Bean Jar, that is particularly served at the annual Viaer Marchi festival. Chief ingredients include haricot and butter beans, pork and shin beef. Guernsey Gâche is a special bread made with raisins, sultanas and mixed peel. Gâche Mélée is a dessert consisting of spiced, chopped apples suspended in a sponge mix.
Languages
English is the language in general use by the majority of the population, while Guernésiais, the Norman language of the island, is spoken fluently by only about 2% of the population (according to 2001 census). However, 14% of the population claim some understanding of the language. Until the early 20th-century French was the only official language of the Bailiwick, and all deeds for the sale and purchase of real estate in Guernsey were written in French until 1971. Family and place names reflect this linguistic heritage. George Métivier, a poet, wrote in Guernesiais. The loss of the island's language and the Anglicisation of its culture, which began in the 19th century and proceeded inexorably for a century, accelerated sharply when the majority of the island's school children were evacuated to the UK for five years during the German occupation of 1940–45.
Literature
Victor Hugo, having arrived on Halloween 1855, wrote some of his best-known works while in exile in Guernsey, including Les Misérables. His home in St Peter Port, Hauteville House, is now a museum administered by the city of Paris. In 1866, he published a novel set on Guernsey, Travailleurs de la Mer (Toilers of the Sea), which he dedicated to the island. Guernsey was his home for fifteen years.
Mabel Collins (1851–1927), a theosophist and prolific author, was born in St Peter Port, Guernsey.
Guernseyman G. B. Edwards wrote a critically acclaimed novel, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page that was published in 1981, including insights into Guernsey life during the 20th century. In September 2008, a blue plaque was affixed to the house on the Braye Road where Edwards was raised.
Henry Watson Fowler moved to Guernsey in 1903. He and his brother Francis George Fowler composed The King's English, the Concise Oxford Dictionary and much of Modern English Usage on the island.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a novel by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, describes the Occupation of Germans during World War II. Written in 2009, it is about a writer who begins corresponding with residents of the island, and becomes compelled to visit the island.
Film
A Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society film adaptation starring Lily James and Jessica Brown Findlay was released in 2018.
In 2021 the feature film titled Marooned Awakeneing, starring Murray McArthur, Cameron Ashplant and Tilly Keeper, began filming in Guernsey
Sport
Guernsey participates in the biennial Island Games, which it hosted in 1987 and 2003 at Footes Lane. Guernsey has also participated as a country in its own right in Commonwealth Games since 1970. Its first medals came in 1982 with its first gold in 1990.
In those sporting events where Guernsey does not have international representation, but the British Home Nations are competing separately, highly skilled islanders may choose to compete for any of the Home Nations. There are, however, restrictions on subsequent transfers to represent other Home Nations. The football player Matt Le Tissier, for example, could have played for the Scottish or Welsh football teams, but opted to play for England instead.
Football in Guernsey is run by the Guernsey Football Association. The top tier of Guernsey football is the FNB Priaulx League where there are nine teams (Alderney, Belgrave Wanderers, Manzur, Northerners, Sylvans, St Martin's, Rovers, Rangers and Vale Recreation). The second tier is the Jackson League. In the 2011–12 season, Guernsey F.C. was formed and entered the Combined Counties League Division 1, becoming the first Channel Island club ever to compete in the English leagues. Guernsey became division champions comfortably on 24 March 2012, they won the Combined Counties Premier Challenge Cup on 4 May 2012. Their second season saw them promoted again on the final day in front of 1,754 'Green Lions' fans, this time to Division One South of the Isthmian League, despite their fixtures being heavily affected not only by poor winter weather, but by their notable progression to the semi-finals of the FA Vase cup competition. They play in level 8 of the English football pyramid. The Corbet Football Field, donated by Jurat Wilfred Corbet OBE in 1932, has fostered the sport greatly over the years. Recently, the island upgraded to a larger, better-quality stadium, in Footes Lane.
Guernsey has the second oldest tennis club in the world, at Kings (founded in 1857), with courts built in 1875. The island has produced a world class tennis player in Heather Watson as well as professional squash players in Martine Le Moignan, Lisa Opie and Chris Simpson.
Guernsey was declared an affiliate member by the International Cricket Council (ICC) in 2005 and an associate member in 2008. The Guernsey cricket team plays in the World Cricket League and European Cricket Championship as well as the Sussex Cricket League.
Various forms of motorsport take place on the island, including races on the sands on Vazon beach as well as a quarter-mile "sprint" along the Vazon coast road. Le Val des Terres, a steeply winding road rising south from St Peter Port to Fort George, is often the focus of both local and international hill-climb races. In addition, the 2005, 2006 and 2007 World Touring Car Champion Andy Priaulx is a Guernseyman.
The racecourse on L'Ancresse Common was re-established in 2004 after a gap of 13 years, with the first new race occurring on 2 May 2005. Races are held on most May day bank holidays, with competitors from Guernsey as well as Jersey, France and the UK participating. Sea angling around Guernsey and the other islands in the Bailiwick from shore or boat is a popular pastime for both locals and visitors with the Bailiwick boasting multiple UK records.
See also
Outline of Guernsey
Index of Guernsey-related articles
Bibliography of Guernsey
List of people from Guernsey
United Kingdom–Crown Dependencies Customs Union
References
Notes
Citations
Sources
External links
States of Guernsey
Government House Guernsey
VisitGuernsey/ Guernsey tourism
Guernsey
Crown dependencies
English-speaking countries and territories
Geography of Guernsey
Islands of the Channel Islands
States and territories established in 1204 | [
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12167 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History%20of%20Guernsey | History of Guernsey | The history of Guernsey stretches back to evidence of prehistoric habitation and settlement and encompasses the development of its modern society.
Prehistory
Around 6000 BC, rising sea created the English Channel and separated the Norman promontories that became the bailiwicks of Guernsey and Jersey from continental Europe. Neolithic farmers then settled on its coast and built the dolmens and menhirs found on the islands today. The island of Guernsey contains two sculpted menhirs of great archaeological interest, while the dolmen known as L'Autel du Dehus contains a dolmen deity known as Le Gardien du Tombeau.
The Roman occupation of western Europe induced people to flee, including to the Channel Islands where a number of hoards have been found, including the Grouville Hoard. It later brought trade and Roman settlements. A 3rd-century Gallo-Roman ship wreck was found in St Peter Port harbour. Trade was by ship down the west coast of Europe, silver from England, Breton pottery, wine amphorae, as discovered in the Kings Road excavation in St Peter Port. The Nunnery in Alderney, was a 5th-century Roman signal station fort.
Early history
The arrival of Christianity
During their migration to Brittany, Britons occupied the Lenur islands (the former name of the Channel Islands) including Sarnia or Lisia (Guernsey) and Angia (Jersey). It was formerly thought that the island's original name was Sarnia, but recent research indicates that this might have been the Latin name for Sark (Sarnia nonetheless remains the island's traditional designation.) Travelling from the Kingdom of Gwent, Saint Sampson, later the abbot of Dol in Brittany, is credited with the introduction of Christianity to Guernsey.
A chapel, dedicated to St Magloire, stood in the Vale. St Magloire was a nephew of St Samson of Dol, and was born about the year 535. The chapel in his name was mentioned in a bull of Pope Adrian IV as being in the patronage of Mont Saint-Michel, in Normandy; all traces of the chapel have gone. While the chapel would probably be of a much later date, St Magloire, the British missionary, may well have set up a centre of Christian worship before A.D. 600.
Somewhere around A.D. 968, from the Benedictine monastery of Mont Saint-Michel, came to Guernsey to establish a community in the North of the Island. The Priory of Mont Saint-Michel was a dependency of the famous Abbey of Mont Saint-Michel
The Duchy of Normandy
The history of the Bailiwick of Guernsey goes back to 933 when the islands, came under the control of William Longsword, son of Rollo the first Duke of Normandy, having been annexed from the Duchy of Brittany by the Duchy of Normandy. The island of Guernsey and the other island in the Channel Islands represent the last remnants of the medieval Duchy of Normandy. In the islands, Elizabeth II's traditional title as head of state is Duke of Normandy. (The masculine nomenclature "Duke" is retained even when the monarch is female.)
In 1020, Duke Richard II split Guernsey in half, between the viscounts of the Cotentin and the viscounts of Bessin. However, when one of the former's ancester's died heirless in around 1137, the fief reverted to the Duke, hence why it is named (the King's fief).
According to tradition, Robert I, Duke of Normandy (the father of William the Conqueror) was journeying to England in 1032, to help Edward the Confessor. He was obliged to take shelter in Guernsey and gave land, now known as the Clos du Valle, to the monks. Furthermore, in 1061, when pirates attacked and pillaged the Island, a complaint was made to Duke William. He sent over Sampson D'Anneville, who succeeded, with the aid of the monks, in driving the pirates out. For this service, Sampson D' Anneville and the monks were rewarded with a grant of half the Island between them. The portion going to the monastery being known as Le Fief St Michel, and included the parishes of St Saviour, St Pierre du Bois, Ste. Marie du Catel, and the Vale.
In 1066, the Duke William the Conqueror defeated Harold Godwinson at Hastings to become the King of England; however, he continued to rule his French possessions, including Guernsey, as a separate entity, as fealty was owed to the King of France. This initial association of Guernsey with England did not last long, as William split his possessions between his sons: Robert Curthose became Duke of Normandy and William Rufus gained the English Crown. William Rufus' son Henry I recaptured Normandy for England in 1106. The island was then part of the English King's realm (though still part of Normandy and France). Around 1142, it is recorded that Guernsey was under the control of the Count of Anjou, who administered Normandy for the Duke.
Late Middle Ages
The loss of Normandy by King John in 1204 isolated the Channel Islands from mainland Europe. Each time England and France went to war over the coming centuries, trade to and from the Channel Islands was restricted or banned and even when not officially at war, the island was repeatedly attacked by continental pirates and naval forces.
Fortifications were improved in the Channel Islands, manned by professional soldiers and the Guernsey militia who would help to defend the Island for the next 600 years. Service was compulsory in the militia for every man in the Island. Raids on Guernsey in 1336 and 1337 by exiled David Bruce, came at the start of the Hundred Years War, they were followed by Sark being captured and using this as a base, the next year when, starting in 1339, Guernsey was occupied by the Capetians, holding the Island for two years and Castle Cornet for seven. The attacks would recur on several occasions.
It was 1348 when the Black Death reached the Island, ravaging the population. In 1372, the island was invaded by Aragonese mercenaries under the command of Owain Lawgoch (remembered as Yvon de Galles), who was in the pay of the French king. Lawgoch and his dark-haired mercenaries were later absorbed into Guernsey legend as an invasion by fairies from across the sea.
In 1394 Richard II of England granted a new Charter to the islands, because of great loyalty shown to the Crown, exemption for ever, from English tolls, customs and duties.
Ship building skills improved and trade to and from Guernsey increased with a growing number of ports, sometimes using trading treaties and sometimes avoiding paying duties. Guernsey ships in the 14th century were small. 12-80 tons with crews of 8-20 men. In times of war, ships could be seized as prizes, the practice continuing in times of peace, against all nationalities, as piracy.
In 1441, Guernsey's liberties, customs and usages were set out in .
The Reformation
In the mid-16th century, the island was influenced by Calvinist reformers from Normandy. During the Marian persecutions, three local women, the Guernsey Martyrs, were burned at the stake in 1556 for their Protestant beliefs. Two years later Elizabeth I came to the throne and Catholicism faded in Guernsey.
The French and piracy were problems to trade with Guernsey in the 16th century, requiring English naval ships to keep them at bay. Guernsey and Jersey were given certain privileges as the English crown needed the Islands to be loyal, not least of which was the Islands neutrality, allowing trade to be pursued with France and England, even when these were at war. The trade creating revenue from taxes to pay for the Island garrisons.
Early modern history
Civil War
During the English Civil War, Guernsey sided with the Parliamentarians, while Jersey remained Royalist. Guernsey's decision was mainly related to the higher proportion of Calvinists and other Reformed churches, as well as Charles I's refusal to take up the case of some Guernsey seamen who had been captured by the Barbary corsairs. The allegiance was not total, however; there were a few Royalist uprisings in the southwest of the island, while Castle Cornet was occupied by the Governor, Sir Peter Osborne, and Royalist troops. Castle Cornet, which had been built to protect Guernsey, was turned on by the town of St. Peter Port, who constantly bombarded it. It was the penultimate Royalist stronghold to capitulate (in 1651)
17th and 18th trade and emigration
The Newfoundland cod trade was important to Guernsey until around 1700 when the small Guernsey ships found that the smuggling trade could prove more profitable, with Island businesses established to buy in goods for sale to smugglers until smuggling declined at the end of the 18th century, when legal privateering took over as the most profitable business.
Wars against France and Spain during the 17th and 18th centuries gave Guernsey shipowners and sea captains the opportunity to exploit the island's proximity to mainland Europe by applying for Letters of Marque and turning their merchantmen into licensed privateers. It was very profitable. In the first ten years of 18th century, the War of the Spanish Succession, 608 prizes were taken by Guernsey privateers. there was however a downside with about 50 ships being lost. To spread the risk, people would buy a share in a ship, (⅛ for instance) receiving a portion of prize monies after costs, if successful. Many Islanders became rich without ever setting foot on a sailing vessel. Ships became larger, with more crew and were better armed as more money was invested. Late in the 18th century, during the American Revolutionary War which lasted for 8 years, Guernsey and Alderney privateers took 221 prizes worth £981,300 (in today's terms, about £100m). The Islands and Guernsey in particular provided an important element to the blockading of enemies of Britain.
During the late 17th century the grant by Charles II of England of an island to George Carteret the Bailiff of Jersey, which was renamed New Jersey, combined with the Channel Island trading ships visiting New England saw Islanders setting up businesses and settling overseas. By the beginning of the 18th century, Guernsey's residents were starting to settle in North America. Guernsey County was founded in Ohio in 1810.
Ordinary trade continued, fishing had always been an important business. Knitting was an important home industry, overseas shipping carrying such diverse goods as wood, sugar, rum, coal, tobacco, salt, textiles, finished goods, glass, emigrants and wine. Trading mainly with Europe, the West Indies and the Americas.
19th century
Privateering during the Napoleonic Wars generated more profits, rolling on from the French Revolutionary Wars. London issued 5,632 letters of Marque of which Guernsey captains received 602, amongst around 70 ships varying in size from 5 to 500 ton. The Letter of Marque would set out which countries' ships could be taken, by which ship, owned by which people. Ships also became stronger and better armed. The war saw the introduction of a series of UK Privateer Acts, to set out rules of valuation of prizes to reduce disputes in Court.
Fort George was a former garrison for the British Army. Construction started in 1780, and was completed in 1812. It was built to accommodate the increase in the number of troops stationed in the island in anticipation of a French invasion during the Napoleonic Wars. Le Braye du Valle was a tidal channel that made the northern extremity of Guernsey, Le Clos du Valle, a tidal island. Le Braye du Valle was drained and reclaimed in 1806 by the British Government as a defence measure. The eastern end of the former channel became the town and harbour (from 1820) of St. Sampson's, now the second biggest port in Guernsey. The western end of La Braye is now Le Grand Havre. The roadway called "The Bridge" across the end of the harbour at St. Sampson's recalls the bridge that formerly linked the two parts of Guernsey at high tide. New roads were built and main roads metalled for ease of use by the military.
In 1813, the States requested to the Privy Council permission to issue Guernsey coinage. The Council agreed on the condition it was struck at the Royal Mint. However, when the first coins were issued in 1830, they had not been minted at the Royal Mint, but by R. Boulton & Co. of Birmingham. It is likely for this reason that coins of the Guernsey pound did not traditionally feature the sovereign. French currency remained legal tender in Guernsey until 1921. Guernsey created money debt-free for building roads in 1815.
In 1821 the population of Guernsey was 20,302 with over 50%, 11,173 living in St Peter Port. By 1901 the island population would double.
The 19th century saw a dramatic increase in prosperity of the island, due to its success in the global maritime trade, and the rise of the stone industry. Ships were travelling further to trade, one notable Guernseyman, William Le Lacheur, established the Costa Rican coffee trade with Europe and the Corbet Family who created the Fruit Export Company Shipbuilding also increased in the 1840-70 era, declining when iron ships were demanded.
The quarrying industry was an important employer in the 19th century, Guernsey granite was highly prized, with London Bridge and many important London roads being repaved in Guernsey granite, resulting in hundreds of quarries appearing in the northern parishes. Horticulture developed from the use of glasshouses for growing grapes to the growing of tomatoes, becoming a very important industry from the 1860s. Tourism during the Victorian era and the use of Guernsey as a refuge or retirement location brought money to the Island, Victor Hugo being one of the most distinguished refugees.
Light industry businesses would regularly appear and after a few decades would move on, such as the Dundee firm James Keiller, who set up in Guernsey in 1857 and lasting until 1879 to avoid the high taxes on sugar in the UK, with marmalade manufactured in Guernsey exported all over the world.
It was normal for the island to deport vagrants, criminals and anyone who had fallen on hard times who were not "local". Between 1842 and 1880 10,000 people were deported. This included local born widows and local born children of "foreign" men and people who, whilst not born in Guernsey, had resided in Guernsey for over 50 years. This reduced the burden on the parish requirement to look after their poor and discouraged France, England and Ireland encouraging their poor to emigrate to Guernsey.
At the end of the century, long resisted, the time had arrived for change, to schools, where English would be taught as a language, to the government, including the use of English as a language in Court together with voting reform, and some changes to the unfair treatment of non-locals as regards their deportation if unwanted and their summary arrest and detention for petty debt offences, it being almost impossible for an immigrant to ever be recognised as a local, irrespective of their wealth and the number of decades residing in Guernsey.
20th century
World War I
During World War I, approximately 3,000 island men served in the British Expeditionary Force. Of these, about 1,000 served in the Royal Guernsey Light Infantry regiment formed from the Royal Guernsey Militia in 1916. In August 1917, Guernsey hosted an anti submarine French flying boat squadron, erecting hangars near Castle Cornet. The base is credited with having destroyed 25 German submarines. The Guernsey Roll of Honour includes 1,343 who were Bailiwick of Guernsey individuals or who served in the Royal Guernsey Light Infantry.
The economic depression in the 1930s also affected Guernsey. Unemployed labourers being given jobs such as building sea defences and constructing roads, including Le Val des Terres, opened in 1935 by Le Prince de Galles.
World War II
For most of World War II, the Bailiwick was occupied by German troops. Before the occupation, many Guernsey children had been evacuated to England to live with relatives or strangers during the war. Some children were never reunited with their families.
The occupying German forces deported some of the Bailiwick's residents to camps in the southwest of Germany, notably to the Lager Lindele (Lindele Camp) near Biberach an der Riß. Among those deported was Ambrose (later Sir Ambrose) Sherwill, who, as the President of the States Controlling Committee, was de facto head of the civilian population. Sir Ambrose, who was Guernsey-born, had served in the British Army during the First World War and later became Bailiff of Guernsey. Three islanders of Jewish descent were deported to France and from there to Auschwitz where they were killed in The Holocaust. In Alderney, four camps were built to house forced labourers, mostly from Eastern Europe, two were handed for the SS to run. They were the only concentration camps run on British soil and are commemorated on memorials under Alderney's French name Aurigny.
Occupation laws were enforced by the German garrison. For example, rewards were offered to informants who reported anyone for painting "V-for Victory" signs on walls and buildings; a practice that had become popular among islanders wishing to express their loyalty to Britain.
Guernsey was very heavily fortified during World War II out of all proportion to the island's strategic value, for example four captured vintage Russian 305mm naval guns were installed at Batterie Mirus. German defences and alterations remain visible, including additions made to Castle Cornet and a windmill. Hitler had become obsessed with the idea that the Allies would try to regain the islands at any price, so over 20 per cent of the materials used to construct the "Atlantic Wall" (the Nazi attempt to defend continental Europe from seaborne invasion) was committed to the Channel Islands, including 47,000 cu m of concrete used for gun bases. Most of the German fortifications remain intact and although the majority of them stand on private property, several are open to the public.
Starvation threatened the Island in late 1944 after the German forces were cut off and supplies could not be brought in from France. The SS Vega chartered by the Red Cross, brought Red Cross food parcels and other essential supplies into the Island.
The Island was liberated on 9 May 1945.
Post-war
After 1945 the Islanders had to rebuild their lives, the return of evacuees, especially children who could hardly remember their relatives. Many properties had been damaged through wood being stripped from them for fuel, the island had an enormous debt, tourism was destroyed and the growing industry was damaged. The amount of scrap metal collected is now regretted. Rationing continued as in the UK, until the mid 1950s.
Many traditional businesses, such as fishing and quarrying would not return. So the Islanders looked to other opportunities, the physical import/export of goods was difficult as the harbours were too small and freight cost too expensive, so control of trade was looked at, the right to supply Mateus Rosé to the UK was controlled by a Guernsey business and it became the top selling wine in the world.
By the 1960s the island had recovered, tourism was important again, the horticulture industry was booming, 500 million tomatoes being exported annually, then came the crash. Cheap North Sea fuel allowed the Netherlands to provide cheap heating to their growers, the Guernsey industry was undercut on price, which combined with rising fuel prices saw the complete demise of the tomato industry after 100 years by the end of the 1970s. Restrictions were introduced to make it harder and more expensive for people to move to the island as there was a fear of a massive population increase.
During the 1970s and 1980s the island began to boom in the finance industry. Not an easy transition for people from the growing industry to an office environment. Profits and salaries were good and the Island had revenues to support long term capital expenditure plans. Continuing through the 1990s with divergence to related industries, such as captive insurance and fund management have managed to keep unemployment low. Tourism declined in the 1980s when the price of a holiday in Spain became much cheaper than coming to Guernsey, leaving the island aiming to attract the higher end of the market.
Light industry businesses had continued to appear and operate for a few decades in Guernsey including electronic (Tektronix from 1957 to the 1980s) and the current Specsavers which was established in 1984.
See also
Archaeology of the Channel Islands
Fortifications of Guernsey
Maritime history of the Channel Islands
Further reading
Mawson, Gillian (2012) Guernsey Evacuees: Forgotten Evacuees of the Second World War, History Press
Mawson, Gillian (2016) Britain's Wartime Evacuees, Frontline Books
Johnston, Peter (2014), A Short History of Guernsey, 6th edition, Guernsey Society,
Sarnia, novel by guernesiais writer G.B. Edwards (life on Guernsey from 1900 until 1970).
References
Guernsey | [
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12170 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics%20of%20Guernsey | Politics of Guernsey | Politics of Guernsey take place in a framework of a parliamentary representative democratic British Crown dependency.
Guernsey has an unwritten constitution arising from the Treaty of Paris (1259). When Henry III and the King of France came to terms over the Duchy of Normandy, the Norman mainland the suzerainty of the King of France. The Channel Islands however remained loyal to the British crown due to the loyalties of its Seigneurs. But they were never absorbed into the Kingdom of England by any Act of Union and exist as "peculiars of the Crown".
Offices
|Lieutenant Governor
|Vice Admiral Ian Corder CB
|
|2016
|-
|Bailiff
| Richard McMahon
|
|May 2020
|-
|President of Policy and Resources Committee
| Deputy Peter Ferbrache
|
|16 October 2020
|}
The Lieutenant Governor is the appointed unelected representative of "the Crown in right of the république of the Bailiwick of Guernsey". The official residence of the Lieutenant Governor is Government House, Queens Road, St Peter Port. From 15 April 2011, the incumbent had been Peter Walker until his death on 6 September 2015.
The Bailiff is the first civil officer in the Bailiwick of Guernsey, serving as president of the legislature and the Royal Court. The Bailiff is appointed by the Crown, and generally holds office until retirement age (65). He presides at the Royal Court, and takes the opinions of the Jurats, elected lay judges; he also presides over States meetings, and represents the Crown in all civil matters.
The president of the Policy and Resources Committee, who can also be termed the Chief Minister is head of the political States of Deliberation.
The States of Deliberation
The States of Guernsey, officially called the States of Deliberation, consists of 38 People's Deputies, elected from multi-member districts every four years. There are also two representatives from Alderney, a self-governing dependency within the Bailiwick, but Sark sends no representative. There are also two non-voting members - HM Procureur and HM Comptroller, appointed by the Crown.
Laws made by the States are known as Projet(s) de Loi before they are passed and Loi or Law(s) afterwards (e.g., The Human Rights (Bailiwick of Guernsey) Law 2000.
A Project de Loi is the equivalent of an English Bill, and a Law is the equivalent of an English Act of Parliament. Laws have no effect until Royal assent is promulgated as Orders-in-Council of the Crown. They are given the Royal Sanction at regular meetings of the Privy Council in London after, which they are returned to the Islands for formal registration at the Royal Court.
The States also make delegated legislation known as Ordinances (Ordonnances) and Orders (Ordres) which do not require Royal Assent. Commencement orders are usually in the form of Ordinances.
Policy and Resources Committee
The Policy and Resources Committee is responsible for Guernsey's constitutional and external affairs, developing strategic and corporate policy and coordinating states business. It also examines proposals and reports placed before Guernsey's Parliament (the States of Deliberation) by departments and non states bodies. The president of the committee is the de facto head of government of Guernsey.
Prior to 2016 the job was undertaken by the Policy Council of Guernsey which was chaired by the Chief Minister.
Political parties and elections
Guernsey has three political parties: the Alliance Party Guernsey, the Guernsey Party, and the Guernsey Partnership of Independents. The Alliance Party was registered in February 2020 and was the first party to be formed on the Island. A third registered party, the Guernsey Partnership of Independents, claims not to be a party in the conventional sense as its members are free to set their own manifestos which may differ from the party manifesto, and are not subject to the whip.
The 1948 Reform Law resulted in the 12 Jurats and 10 Parish Rectors no longer forming part of the States of Deliberation, their place being taken by 12 Conseillers holding office for 6 years, elected by the States of Election.
In 2000 there were 33 Deputies elected with three-year mandates, and 12 Conseillers representing the Bailiwick, serving terms of six years, with half being elected every three. The Conseiller system was scrapped for the 2004 election.
In the 2004, 2008 and 2012 elections there were 45 Deputy seats for election. From 2016 the number of Deputy seats was reduced to 38.
In addition there are two representatives of the States of Alderney in the States of Guernsey.
Judicial branch
The legal system is derived from Norman French and English common law, justice being administered through a combination of Magistrates Court and the Royal Court. The Royal Court is presided over by the Bailiff (or Deputy Bailiff) and 12 Jurats (a permanent elected jury), the ultimate court of appeal being the Privy Council.
Administrative divisions
There are ten parishes in Guernsey. Each parish is administered by a Douzaine. Douzeniers are elected for a six-year mandate, two Douzeniers being elected by parishioners at a Parish Meeting in November each year. The senior Douzenier is known as the Doyen. Two elected Constables carry out the decisions of the Douzaine, serving for between one and three years. The longest serving Constable is known as the Senior Constable and his or her colleague as the Junior Constable.
Parishes: Castel, Forest, St Andrew, St Martin, St Peter, St Peter Port, St Sampson, St Saviour, Torteval and Vale
As regards General Elections, from 2020 Guernsey follows an island wide election system whereby 38 deputies are chosen by all registered voters, previously in 2004, Guernsey had seven following electoral districts, loosely based on the parish system:
European Parliament
Unlike citizens of the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar, who had a vote within the South West England constituency until Brexit in 2020, Guernsey, in common with other Crown dependencies, was never a part of the European Union and its citizens had no vote in the European Parliament.
See also
Elections in Guernsey
Electoral firsts in Guernsey
Policy Council of Guernsey
Royal Commission on the Constitution (United Kingdom)
References | [
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12176 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinea | Guinea | Guinea (), officially the Republic of Guinea (), is a coastal country in West Africa. Guinea borders the Atlantic Ocean to the west, Guinea-Bissau to the northwest, Senegal to the north, Mali to the northeast, Cote d'Ivoire to the southeast, and Sierra Leone and Liberia to the south. Formerly known as French Guinea (), the modern country is sometimes referred to as Guinea-Conakry after its capital Conakry, to distinguish it from other territories in the eponymous region such as Guinea-Bissau and Equatorial Guinea. Guinea has a population of million and an area of .
Guinea achieved independence from France in 1958. It has a long history of military coups d'état. In 2010, after decades of authoritarian rule, Guinea held its first democratic election. Although Guinea continued to hold multi-party elections, the country continued to face ethnic conflicts, widespread corruption, and abuses by military and police. Human rights in Guinea remain a controversial issue. In 2011, the United States government claimed that torture by security forces and abuse of women and children (including female genital mutilation) were ongoing human rights issues. In 2021, a military faction overthrew president Alpha Condé and suspended the constitution.
Guinea is a predominantly Islamic country, with Muslims representing 85 per cent of the population. Guinea's people belong to twenty-four ethnic groups. The country is divided into four geographic regions: Maritime Guinea on the low-lying Atlantic coast, the Fouta Djallon or Middle Guinea highlands, the Upper Guinea savanna region in the northeast, and the Guinée forestière region of tropical forests. French, the official language of Guinea, is the main language of communication in schools, in government administration, and the media, but more than twenty-four indigenous languages are also spoken. The largest are by far Susu, Pular, and Maninka, which dominate respectively in Maritime Guinea, Fouta Djallon, and Upper Guinea, while Guinée forestière is ethnolinguistically diverse.
Guinea's economy is largely dependent on agriculture and mineral production. It is the world's second largest producer of bauxite, and has rich deposits of diamonds and gold. The country was at the core of the 2014 Ebola outbreak.
Name
Guinea is named after the Guinea region. Guinea is a traditional name for the region of Africa that lies along the Gulf of Guinea. It stretches north through the forested tropical regions and ends at the Sahel. The English term Guinea comes directly from the Portuguese word Guiné, which emerged in the mid-15th century to refer to the lands inhabited by the Guineus, a generic term for the black African peoples south of the Senegal River, in contrast to the "tawny" Zenaga Berbers above it, whom they called Azenegues or Moors.
History
The land that is now Guinea belonged to a series of African empires until France colonized it in the 1890s, and made it part of French West Africa. Guinea declared its independence from France on 2 October 1958. From independence until the presidential election of 2010, Guinea was governed by a number of autocratic rulers.
West African empires and kingdoms in Guinea
What is now Guinea was on the fringes of the major West African empires. The earliest, the Ghana Empire, grew on trade but ultimately fell after repeated incursions of the Almoravids. It was in this period that Islam first arrived in the region by way of North African traders.
The Sosso Empire (12th to 13th centuries) briefly flourished in the resulting void, but the Mali Empire came to prominence when Soundiata Kéïta defeated the Sosso ruler Soumangourou Kanté at the Battle of Kirina, in c. 1235. The Mali Empire was ruled by Mansa (Emperors), the most notable being Kankou Moussa, who made a famous hajj to Mecca in 1324. Shortly after his reign, the Mali Empire began to decline and was ultimately supplanted by its vassal states in the 15th century.
The most successful of these was the Songhai Empire, which expanded its power from about 1460 and eventually surpassed the Mali Empire in both territory and wealth. It continued to prosper until a civil war, over succession, followed the death of Askia Daoud in 1582. The weakened empire fell to invaders from Morocco at the Battle of Tondibi, just three years later. The Moroccans proved unable to rule the kingdom effectively, however, and it split into many small kingdoms.
After the fall of the major West African empires, various kingdoms existed in what is now Guinea. Fulani Muslims migrated to Futa Jallon in Central Guinea, and established an Islamic state from 1727 to 1896, with a written constitution and alternate rulers. The Wassoulou or Wassulu Empire was short-lived (1878–1898), led by Samori Toure in the predominantly Malinké area of what is now upper Guinea and southwestern Mali (Wassoulou). It moved to Ivory Coast before being conquered by the French.
Colonial era
European traders competed for the cape trade from the 17th century onward and made inroads earlier. Slaves were exported to work elsewhere. The traders used the regional slave practices.
Guinea's colonial period began with French military penetration into the area in the mid-19th century. French domination was assured by the defeat in 1898 of the armies of Samori Touré, Mansa (or Emperor) of the Ouassoulou state and leader of Malinké descent, which gave France control of what today is Guinea and adjacent areas.
France negotiated Guinea's present boundaries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the British for Sierra Leone, the Portuguese for their Guinea colony (now Guinea-Bissau), and Liberia. Under the French, the country formed the Territory of Guinea within French West Africa, administered by a governor general resident in Dakar. Lieutenant governors administered the individual colonies, including Guinea.
Independence (1958)
In 1958, the French Fourth Republic collapsed due to political instability and its failures in dealing with its colonies, especially Indochina and Algeria. The founding of a Fifth Republic was supported by the French people, while French President Charles de Gaulle made it clear on 8 August 1958 that France's colonies were to be given a stark choice between more autonomy in a new French Community or immediate independence in the referendum to be held on 28 September 1958. The other colonies chose the former, but Guinea—under the leadership of Ahmed Sékou Touré whose Democratic Party of Guinea-African Democratic Rally (PDG) had won 56 of 60 seats in 1957 territorial elections—voted overwhelmingly for independence. The French withdrew quickly, and on 2 October 1958, Guinea proclaimed itself a sovereign and independent republic, with Sékou Touré as president.
In response to the vote for independence, the French settlers in Guinea were quite dramatic in severing ties with Guinea. The Washington Post observed how brutal the French were in tearing down all that they thought were their contributions to Guinea: "In reaction, and as a warning to other French-speaking territories, the French pulled out of Guinea over a two-month period, taking everything they could with them. They unscrewed lightbulbs, removed plans for sewage pipelines in Conakry, the capital, and even burned medicines rather than leave them for the Guineans."
Post-colonial rule (1958–2008)
Subsequently, Guinea quickly aligned itself with the Soviet Union and adopted socialist policies. This alliance was short-lived, however, as Guinea moved towards a Chinese model of socialism. Despite this, the country continued to receive investment from capitalist countries, such as the United States. By 1960, Touré had declared the PDG the country's only legal political party, and for the next 24 years, the government and the PDG were one. Touré was re-elected unopposed to four seven-year terms as president, and every five years voters were presented with a single list of PDG candidates for the National Assembly. Advocating a hybrid African Socialism domestically and Pan-Africanism abroad, Touré quickly became a polarising leader, with his government becoming intolerant of dissent, imprisoning thousands, and stifling the press.
Throughout the 1960s, the Guinean government nationalised land, removed French-appointed and traditional chiefs from power, and had strained ties with the French government and French companies. Touré's government relied on the Soviet Union and China for infrastructure aid and development, but much of this was used for political and not economic purposes, such as the building of large stadiums to hold political rallies. Meanwhile, the country's roads, railways and other infrastructure languished, and the economy stagnated.
On 22 November 1970, Portuguese forces from neighbouring Portuguese Guinea staged Operation Green Sea, a raid on Conakry by several hundred exiled Guinean opposition forces. Among their goals, the Portuguese military wanted to kill or capture Sekou Touré due to his support of the PAIGC, an independence movement and rebel group that had carried out attacks inside Portuguese Guinea from their bases in Guinea. After fierce fighting, the Portuguese-backed forces retreated, having freed several dozen Portuguese prisoners of war that were being held by the PAIGC in Conakry, but without having ousted Touré. In the years after the raid, massive purges were carried out by the Touré government, and at least fifty thousand people (one percent of Guinea's entire population) were killed. Countless others were imprisoned and faced torture. Often in the case of foreigners, they were forced to leave the country, after having had their Guinean spouse arrested and their children placed into state custody.
In 1977, a declining economy, mass killings, a stifling political atmosphere, and a ban on all private economic transactions led to the Market Women's Revolt, a series of anti-government riots started by women working in Conakry's Madina Market. This prompted Touré to make major reforms. Touré vacillated from supporting the Soviet Union to supporting the United States. The late 1970s and early 1980s saw some economic reforms, but Touré's centralized control of the state remained. Even the relationship with France improved; after the election of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing as French president, trade increased and the two countries exchanged diplomatic visits.
Sékou Touré died on 26 March 1984, after a heart operation in the United States, and was replaced by Prime Minister Louis Lansana Beavogui, who was to serve as interim president, pending new elections. The PDG was due to elect a new leader on 3 April 1984. Under the constitution, that person would have been the only candidate for president. However, hours before that meeting, Colonels Lansana Conté and Diarra Traoré seized power in a bloodless coup. Conté assumed the role of president, with Traoré serving as prime minister, until December.
Conté immediately denounced the previous regime's record on human rights, releasing two hundred and fifty political prisoners and encouraging approximately two hundred thousand more to return from exile. He also made explicit the turn away from socialism. This did little to alleviate poverty, and the country showed no immediate signs of moving towards democracy.
In 1992, Conté announced a return to civilian rule, with a presidential poll in 1993, followed by elections to parliament in 1995 (in which his party—the Party of Unity and Progress—won 71 of 114 seats.) Despite his stated commitment to democracy, Conté's grip on power remained tight. In September 2001, the opposition leader Alpha Condé was imprisoned for endangering state security, though he was pardoned 8 months later. He subsequently spent a period of exile in France.
In 2001, Conté organized and won a referendum to lengthen the presidential term, and in 2003, he began his third term, after elections were boycotted by the opposition. In January 2005, Conté survived a suspected assassination attempt while making a rare public appearance in the capital of Conakry. His opponents claimed that he was a "tired dictator", whose departure was inevitable, whereas his supporters believed that he was winning a battle with dissidents. Guinea still faced very real problems, and according to Foreign Policy, was in danger of becoming a failed state.
In 2000, Guinea became embroiled in the instability which had long blighted the rest of West Africa, as rebels crossed the borders with Liberia and Sierra Leone. It seemed for a time that the country was headed for civil war. Conté blamed neighbouring leaders for coveting Guinea's natural resources, though these claims were strenuously denied. In 2003, Guinea agreed to plans with her neighbours to tackle the insurgents. In 2007, there were large protests against the government, resulting in the appointment of a new prime minister.
Recent history
Conté remained in power until his death on 23 December 2008. Several hours following his death, Moussa Dadis Camara seized control in a coup, declaring himself head of a military junta. Protests against the coup became violent, and 157 people were killed when, on 28 September 2009, the junta ordered its soldiers to attack people who had gathered to protest against Camara's attempt to become president. The soldiers went on a rampage of rape, mutilation, and murder, which caused many foreign governments to withdraw their support for the new regime.
On 3 December 2009, an aide shot Camara during a dispute over the rampage in September. Camara went to Morocco for medical care. Vice-President (and defense minister) Sékouba Konaté flew back from Lebanon to run the country, in Camara's absence. After meeting in Ouagadougou on 13 and 14 January 2010, Camara, Konaté and Blaise Compaoré, President of Burkina Faso, produced a formal statement of twelve principles promising a return of Guinea to civilian rule within six months.
The presidential election was held on 27 June, with a second election held on 7 November, due to allegations of electoral fraud. Voter turnout was high, and the elections went relatively smoothly. Alpha Condé, leader of the opposition party Rally of the Guinean People (RGP), won the election, promising to reform the security sector and review mining contracts.
In late February 2013, political violence erupted in Guinea after protesters took to the streets to voice their concerns over the transparency of the upcoming May 2013 elections. The demonstrations were fueled by the opposition coalition's decision to step down from the electoral process, in protest at the lack of transparency in the preparations for elections. Nine people were killed during the protests, and around 220 were injured. Many of the deaths and injuries were caused by security forces using live ammunition on protesters.
The political violence also led to inter-ethnic clashes between the Fula and Malinke, the base of support for President Condé. The former mainly supported the opposition.
On 26 March 2013, the opposition party backed out of the negotiations with the government, over the upcoming 12 May election. The opposition said that the government had not respected them, and had not kept any promises they agreed to.
On 25 March 2014, the World Health Organization said that Guinea's Ministry of Health had reported an outbreak of Ebola virus disease in Guinea. This initial outbreak had a total of 86 cases, including 59 deaths. By 28 May, there were 281 cases, with 186 deaths. It is believed that the first case was Emile Ouamouno, a 2-year-old boy who lived in the village of Meliandou. He fell ill on 2 December 2013 and died on 6 December. On 18 September 2014, eight members of an Ebola education health care team were murdered by villagers in the town of Womey. As of 1 November 2015, there had been 3,810 cases and 2,536 deaths in Guinea.
The 2019–2020 Guinean protests were a series of bloody protests and mass civil unrest in Guinea against the rule of Alpha Conde that first broke out on October 14, 2019 against constitutional changes. More than 800 were killed in violent clashes.
After the 2020 Guinean presidential election, Alpha Condé's election to a third term was challenged by the opposition, who accused him of fraud. Condé claimed a constitutional referendum from March 2020 allowed him to run despite the two-term limit.
2021 coup
On 5 September 2021, in an apparent coup d'état, Lieutenant Colonel Mamady Doumbouya seized control of state television and declared that President Alpha Conde’s government had been dissolved and the nation’s borders closed, an announcement that came after hours of heavy gunfire erupted near the presidential palace. By the same evening, the putschists declared control over all Conakry and the country's armed forces, and, according to Guinée Matin, the military fully controlled the state administration by 6 September and started to replace the civil administration with its military counterpart.
The United Nations, European Union, African Union, and ECOWAS (which suspended Guinea's membership) immediately denounced the coup, and called for President Condé's unconditional release. Similar responses came from various neighboring and Western countries (including the United States), as well as from China (which relies on Guinea for half of its aluminum ore, facilitated by its connections to President Condé).
Government and politics
Guinea is a republic. The president is directly elected by the people and is the head of state and the head of government. The unicameral National Assembly is the legislative body of the country, and its members are directly elected by the people. The judicial branch is headed by the Supreme Court of Guinea, the highest and final court of appeal in the country.
Guinea is a member of many international organizations, including the African Union, Agency for the French-Speaking Community, African Development Bank, Economic Community of West African States, World Bank, Islamic Development Bank, IMF, and the United Nations.
Political culture
Former President Alpha Condé derived support from Guinea's second-largest ethnic group, the Malinke. Guinea's opposition was backed by the Fula ethnic group, who account for around 33.4 percent of the population.
Executive branch
The president of Guinea is normally elected by popular vote for a five-year term; the winning candidate must receive a majority of the votes cast to be elected president. The president governs Guinea, assisted by a council of 25 civilian ministers, appointed by him. The government administers the country through eight regions, 33 prefectures, over 100 subprefectures, and many districts (known as communes in Conakry and other large cities and villages, or quartiers in the interior). District-level leaders are elected; the president appoints officials to all other levels of the highly centralized administration.
Legislative branch
The National Assembly of Guinea, the country's legislative body, did not meet from 2008 to 2013, when it was dissolved after the military coup in December. Elections have been postponed many times since 2007. In April 2012, President Condé postponed the elections indefinitely, citing the need to ensure that they were "transparent and democratic".
The 2013 Guinean legislative election was held on 24 September 2013. President Alpha Condé's party, the Rally of the Guinean People (RPG), won a plurality of seats in the National Assembly of Guinea, with 53 out of 114 seats. The opposition parties won a total of 53 seats, and opposition leaders denounced the official results as fraudulent.
Foreign relations
Before 2021 coup
International organizations
Guinea is a member of the United Nations General Assembly, the African Union, and the West African regional economic and political bloc, ECOWAS.
United States
According to a February 2009 U.S. Department of State statement, Guinea's foreign relations, including those with its West African neighbours, had improved steadily since 1985. The Department's October 2018 statement indicated that -- although "the U.S. condemned" Guinea's "2008 military coup d’etat," -- the U.S. had "close relations" with Guinea before the coup, and after "Guinea’s presidential elections in 2010, the United States re-established strong diplomatic relations with the government." The statement indicated support for the "legislative elections in 2013 and a second presidential election in 2015," as signs of "democratic reform."
However, a March 2021 report by the U.S. State Department blasted extensive human rights violations by the government, security forces and businesses in Guinea. The report cited extensive international criticism of the recent national elections, which yielded "President Alpha Conde’s re-election (despite disputed results)... following a controversial March referendum amending the constitution and allowing him to run for a third term."
After 2021 coup
International organizations
The United Nations promptly denounced the coup, and some of Guinea's strongest allies also condemned the coup. The African Union and West Africa's regional bloc (ECOWAS), both threatened sanctions -- though some analysts expect the threats to be of limited effect because Guinea is not a member of the West African currency union, and is not a landlocked country.
ECOWAS promptly suspended Guinea's membership, and demanded the unconditional release of President Condé, while sending envoys to Conakry to attempt a "constitutional" resolution of the situation.
China
Uncharacteristically responding to another nation's internal affairs, China (which relies on Guinea for half of its aluminium ore, facilitated by connections to ousted President Condé) openly opposed the coup.
United States
Immediately upon the 5 September 2021 coup d'etat, the U.S. State Department condemned the coup, warning that "violence and any extra-constitutional measures will only erode Guinea’s prospects for peace, stability, and prosperity, [and] could limit the ability of the United States and Guinea’s other international partners to support the country...," While not explicitly calling for President Condé's return to power, the U.S. called for "national dialogue to address concerns sustainably and transparently to enable a peaceful and democratic way forward for Guinea..."
Military
Guinea's armed forces are divided into five branches—army, navy, air force, the paramilitary National Gendarmerie and the Republican Guard—whose chiefs report to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who is subordinate to the Minister of Defence. In addition, regime security forces include the National Police Force (Sûreté Nationale). The Gendarmerie, responsible for internal security, has a strength of several thousand.
The army, with about 15,000 personnel, is by far the largest branch of the armed forces and is mainly responsible for protecting the state borders, the security of administered territories, and defending Guinea's national interests.
Air force personnel total about 700. Its equipment includes several Russian-supplied fighter planes and transports.
The navy has about 900 personnel and operates several small patrol craft and barges.
Human rights
Homosexuality is illegal in Guinea. Same sex relations are considered a strong taboo, and the prime minister declared in 2010 that he does not consider sexual orientation a legitimate human right.
Guinea has one of the world's highest rates of female circumcision according to Anastasia Gage, an associate professor at Tulane University, and Ronan van Rossem, an associate professor at Ghent University. Female circumcision in Guinea had been performed on more than 98% of women . In Guinea almost all cultures, religions, and ethnicities practice female circumcision. The 2005 Demographic and Health Survey reported that 96% of women have gone through the operation. Prosecutions of its practitioners are nonexistent.
Regions and prefectures
The Republic of Guinea covers of West Africa, about 10 degrees north of the equator. Guinea is divided into four natural regions with distinct human, geographic, and climatic characteristics:
Maritime Guinea (La Guinée Maritime) covers 18% of the country.
Middle Guinea (La Moyenne-Guinée) covers 20% of the country.
Upper Guinea (La Haute-Guinée) covers 38% of the country.
Forested Guinea (Guinée forestière) covers 23% of the country, and is both forested and mountainous.
Guinea is divided into eight administrative regions which are subdivided into thirty-three prefectures. Conakry is Guinea's capital, largest city, and economic centre. Nzérékoré, located in the Guinée forestière region in Southern Guinea, is the second largest city.
Other major cities in the country with a population above 100,000 include Kankan, Kindia, Labe, Guéckédou, Boke, Mamou and Kissidougou.
The capital Conakry with a population of 1,675,069 ranks as a special zone.
Geography
Guinea shares a border with Guinea-Bissau to the north-west, Senegal to the north, Mali to the north-east, Ivory Coast to the east, Sierra Leone to the south-west and Liberia to the south. The nation forms a crescent as it curves from its southeast region to the north and west, to its northwest border with Guinea-Bissau and southwestern coast on the Atlantic Ocean. The sources of the Niger River, the Gambia River, and the Senegal River are all found in the Guinea Highlands.
At , Guinea is roughly the size of the United Kingdom. There are of coastline and a total land border of . It lies mostly between latitudes 7° and 13°N, and longitudes 7° and 15°W, with a small area that is west of 15°.
Guinea is divided into four main regions: Maritime Guinea, also known as Lower Guinea or the Basse-Coté lowlands, populated mainly by the Susu ethnic group; the cooler, mountainous Fouta Djallon that run roughly north–south through the middle of the country, populated by Fulas; the Sahelian Haute-Guinea to the northeast, populated by Malinké; and the forested jungle regions in the southeast, with several ethnic groups. Guinea's mountains are the source for the Niger, the Gambia, and Senegal Rivers, as well as the numerous rivers flowing to the sea on the west side of the range in Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast.
The highest point in Guinea is Mount Nimba at . Although the Guinean and Ivorian sides of the Nimba Massif are a UNESCO Strict Nature Reserve, the portion of the so-called Guinean Backbone continues into Liberia, where it has been mined for decades; the damage is quite evident in the Nzérékoré Region at .
Guinea is home to five ecoregions: Guinean montane forests, Western Guinean lowland forests, Guinean forest-savanna mosaic, West Sudanian savanna, and Guinean mangroves. It had a 2019 Forest Landscape Integrity Index mean score of 4.9/10, ranking it 114th globally out of 172 countries.
Wildlife
The wildlife of Guinea is very diverse, due to the wide variety of different habitats. The southern part of the country lies within the Guinean Forests of West Africa Biodiversity hotspot, while the north-east is characterized by dry savanna woodlands. Unfortunately, declining populations of large animals are restricted to uninhabited distant parts of parks and reserves.
Taxonomy
Species found in Guinea include the following:
Amphibians : Hemisus guineensis, Phrynobatrachus guineensis
Reptiles : Acanthodactylus guineensis, Mochlus guineensis
Arachnids: Malloneta guineensis, Dictyna guineensis
Insects : Zorotypus guineensis, Euchromia guineensis
Birds: Melaniparus guineensis
Economy
Agriculture
The majority of Guineans work in the agriculture sector, which employs approximately 75% of the country. The rice is cultivated in the flooded zones between streams and rivers. However, the local production of rice is not sufficient to feed the country, so rice is imported from Asia. The agriculture sector of Guinea cultivates coffee beans, pineapples, peaches, nectarines, mangoes, oranges, bananas, potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, pepper, and many other types of produce. Guinea is one of the emerging regional producers of apples and pears. There are many plantations of grapes, pomegranates, and recent years have seen the development of strawberry plantations, based on the vertical hydroponic system.
Natural resources
Guinea has abundant natural resources, including 25% or more of the world's known bauxite reserves. Guinea also has diamonds, gold, and other metals. The country has great potential for hydroelectric power. Currently, bauxite and alumina are the only major exports. Other industries include processing plants for beer, juices, soft drinks and tobacco. Agriculture employs 75% of the nation's labour force. Under French rule, and at the beginning of independence, Guinea was a major exporter of bananas, pineapples, coffee, peanuts, and palm oil. Guinea has considerable potential for growth in the agricultural and fishing sectors. Soil, water, and climatic conditions provide opportunities for large-scale irrigated farming and agro industry.
Mining
Guinea possesses over 25 billion tonnes (metric tons) of bauxite – and perhaps up to one-half of the world's reserves. In addition, Guinea's mineral wealth includes more than 4-billion tonnes of high-grade iron ore, significant diamond and gold deposits, and undetermined quantities of uranium. Possibilities for investment and commercial activities exist in all these areas, but Guinea's poorly developed infrastructure and rampant corruption continue to present obstacles to large-scale investment projects.
Joint venture bauxite mining and alumina operations in north-west Guinea historically provide about 80% of Guinea's Foreign exchange reserves. Bauxite is refined into alumina, which is later smelted into aluminium. The Compagnie des Bauxites de Guinée (CBG), which exports about 14 million tonnes of high-grade bauxite annually, is the main player in the bauxite industry. CBG is a joint venture, 49% owned by the Guinean government and 51% by an international consortium known as Halco Mining Inc., itself a joint venture controlled by aluminium producer Alcoa (AA), global miner Rio Tinto Group and Dadco Investments. CBG has exclusive rights to bauxite reserves and resources in north-western Guinea, through 2038. In 2008, protesters upset about poor electrical services blocked the tracks CBG uses. Guinea often includes a proviso in its agreements with international oil companies, requiring its partners to generate power for nearby communities.The Compagnie des Bauxites de Kindia (CBK), a joint venture between the government of Guinea and RUSAL, produces some 2.5 million tonnes annually, nearly all of which is exported to Russia and Eastern Europe. Dian Dian, a Guinean/Ukrainian joint bauxite venture, has a projected production rate of per year, but is not expected to begin operation for several years. The Alumina Compagnie de Guinée (ACG), which took over the former Friguia Consortium, produced about 2.4 million tonnes in 2004, as raw material for its alumina refinery. The refinery exports about 750,000 tonnes of alumina. Both Global Alumina and Alcoa-Alcan have signed conventions with the government of Guinea to build large alumina refineries, with a combined capacity of about 4 million tonnes per year.
The Simandou mine represents one of the largest iron ore reserves in Guinea and in the world. In March 2010, Anglo-Australian corporation Rio Tinto Group and its biggest shareholder, Aluminum Corporation of China Limited (Chinalco), signed a preliminary agreement to develop Rio Tinto's iron ore project. In 2017, the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), Britain's anti-fraud regulator, launched an official investigation into Rio Tinto's business and mining practices in Guinea.
Diamonds and gold also are mined and exported on a large scale. The bulk of diamonds are mined artisanally. The largest gold mining operation in Guinea is a joint venture between the government and Ashanti Goldfields of Ghana. AREDOR, a joint diamond-mining venture between the Guinean Government (50%) and an Australian, British, and Swiss consortium, began production in 1984, and mined diamonds that were 90% gem quality. Production stopped from 1993 until 1996, when First City Mining of Canada purchased the international portion of the consortium. Société Minière de Dinguiraye (SMD) also has a large gold mining facility in Lero, near the Malian border.
Tigui Camara, a former model, is the first woman in Guinea to own a mining company, which is partially run as a social enterprise.
Oil
In 2006, Guinea signed a production sharing agreement with Hyperdynamics Corporation of Houston to explore a large offshore tract, and was recently in partnership with Dana Petroleum PLC (Aberdeen, United Kingdom). The initial well, the Sabu-1, was scheduled to begin drilling in October 2011, at a site in approximately 700 metres of water. The Sabu-1 targeted a four-way anticline prospect with upper Cretaceous sands, and was anticipated to be drilled to a total depth of 3,600 meters.
Following the completion of exploratory drilling in 2012, the Sabu-1 well was not deemed commercially viable. In November 2012, Hyperdynamics subsidiary SCS reached an agreement for a sale of 40% of the concession to Tullow Oil, bringing ownership shares in the Guinea offshore tract to 37% Hyperdynamics, 40% Tullow Oil, and 23% Dana Petroleum. Hyperdynamics will have until September 2016, under the current agreement, to begin drilling its next selected site, the Fatala Cenomanian turbidite fan prospect.
Science and technology
Tourism
Due to its diverse geography, Guinea presents some interesting tourist sites. Among the top attractions are the waterfalls found mostly in the Basse Guinee (Lower Guinea) and Moyenne Guinee (Middle Guinea) regions. The Soumba cascade at the foot of Mount Kakoulima in Kindia, Voile de la Mariée (Bride's Veil) in Dubreka, the Kinkon cascades that are about high on the Kokoula River in the prefecture of Pita, the Kambadaga falls that can reach during the rainy season on the same river, the Ditinn & Mitty waterfalls in Dalaba, and the Fetoré waterfalls and the stone bridge in the region of Labe are among the most well-known water-related tourist sites.
Transport infrastructure
Air
Conakry International Airport is the largest airport in the country, with flights to other cities in Africa as well as to Europe.
Domestic air services are intermittent.
Railways
Built between 1904 and 1910, a railway once linked Conakry to Kankan via Kouroussa but it ceased operating in 1995 and had been dismantled altogether by 2007 with rails mostly stolen and/or sold for scrap. Plans had at one time been mooted for the passenger line to be rehabilitated as part of an iron-ore development master plan but although the start of work was announced in 2010, corruption charges led the whole master plan to be paused and the line was only rebuilt as a 105 km mineral railway, paralleling the old route as far as the mines of Kalia. There is also a state run mineral railway linking the bauxite mines of Sangarédi to the port of Kamsar (137 km) and a 1960s narrow-gauge line operated by Russian aluminium producer RusAl to the mines at Fria (143 km).
As part of the plans to restart iron ore mining at Simandou blocks 1 and 2, the new development consortium pledged in 2019 to fund the construction of a new heavy-duty standard gauge railway to Matakong on the Atlantic coast where they would also invest some US$20 billion in developing a deepwater port. The 650 km route is far longer than an alternative heading south to the port of Buchanan, Liberia, which was considered as an alternative in an October 2019 feasibility study. However, the Matakong route would be entirely within Guinea and tied to an agricultural development corridor for citizens along the route.
River
There is some river traffic on the Niger and Milo rivers.
Road Transport
Most vehicles in Guinea are more than 20 years old, and cabs are any four-door vehicle which the owner has designated as being for hire. Locals, nearly entirely without vehicles of their own, rely upon these taxis (which charge per seat) and small buses to take them around town and across the country.
The major roads of Guinea are the following:
N1 connects Conakry, Coyah, Kindia, Mamou, Dabola, Kouroussa, and Kankan.
N2 connects Mamou, Faranah, Kissidougou, Guékédou, Macenta, Nzérékoré, and Lola.
N4 connects Coyah, Forécariah, and, Farmoreya.
N5 connects Mamou, Dalaba, Pita, and Labé.
N6 connects Kissidougou, Kankan, and Siguiri.
N20 connects Kamsar, Kolaboui, and Boké.
Horses and donkeys pull carts, primarily to transport construction materials.
Demography
The population of Guinea is estimated at million. Conakry, the capital and largest city, is the hub of Guinea's economy, commerce, education, and culture. In 2014, the total fertility rate (TFR) of Guinea was estimated at 4.93 children born per woman.
Largest cities
Languages
The official language of Guinea is French. Pulaar was spoken by 33.9% of the population in 2018 as their first or native language, followed by Mandingo, with 29.4%. The third most spoken native language is the Susu, spoken by 21.2% of the population in 2018 as their first language. Other languages spoken in Guinea as Guineans native language totalled 16% of the population in 2018, including Kissi and Kpelle.
Ethnic groups
The population of Guinea comprises about 24 ethnic groups. The Mandinka, also known as Mandingo or Malinké, comprise 29.4% of the population and are mostly found in eastern Guinea concentrated around the Kankan and Kissidougou prefectures.
The Fulas or Fulani, comprise 33.4% of the population and are mostly found in the Futa Djallon region.
The Soussou, comprising 21.2% of the population, are predominantly in western areas around the capital Conakry, Forécariah, and Kindia. Smaller ethnic groups make up the remaining 16% of the population, including Kpelle, Kissi, Zialo, Toma and others. Approximately 10,000 non-Africans live in Guinea, predominantly Lebanese, French, and other Europeans.
Religion
The population of Guinea is approximately 85 percent Muslim and 8 percent Christian, with 7 percent adhering to indigenous religious beliefs. Much of the population, both Muslim and Christian, also incorporate indigenous African beliefs into their outlook.
The vast majority of Guinean Muslims are adherent to Sunni Islam, of the Maliki school of jurisprudence, influenced by Sufism. There is also a Shi'a community in Guinea.
Christian groups include Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Baptists, Seventh-day Adventists, and Evangelical groups. Jehovah's Witnesses are active in the country and recognized by the Government. There is a small Baháʼí Faith community. There are small numbers of Hindus, Buddhists, and traditional Chinese religious groups among the expatriate community.
There were three days of ethno-religious fighting in the city of Nzerekore in July 2013. Fighting between ethnic Kpelle, who are Christian or animist, and ethnic Konianke, who are Muslims and close to the larger Malinke ethnic group, left at least 54 dead. The dead included people who were killed with machetes and burned alive. The violence ended after the Guinea military imposed a curfew, and President Conde made a televised appeal for calm.
Education
The literacy rate of Guinea is one of the lowest in the world: in 2010 it was estimated that only 41% of adults were literate (52% of males and 30% of females).
Primary education is compulsory for 6 years, but most children do not attend for so long, and many do not go to school at all. In 1999, primary school attendance was 40 percent. Children, particularly girls, are kept out of school to assist their parents with domestic work or agriculture, or to be married: Guinea has one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world.
Health
Ebola
In 2014, an outbreak of the Ebola virus occurred in Guinea. In response, the health ministry banned the sale and consumption of bats, thought to be carriers of the disease. Despite this measure, the virus eventually spread from rural areas to Conakry, and by late June 2014 had spread to neighbouring countries - Sierra Leone and Liberia. In early August 2014 Guinea closed its borders to Sierra Leone and Liberia to help contain the spread of the virus, as more new cases of the disease were being reported in those countries than in Guinea.
The outbreak began in early December in a village called Meliandou, southeastern Guinea, not far from the borders with both Liberia and Sierra Leone. The first known case involved a two-year-old child who died, after fever and vomiting and passing black stool, on 6 December. The child's mother died a week later, then a sister and a grandmother, all with symptoms that included fever, vomiting, and diarrhoea. Then, by way of care-giving visits or attendance at funerals, the outbreak spread to other villages.
Unsafe burials remained one of the primary sources of the transmission of the disease. The World Health Organization (WHO) reported that the inability to engage with local communities hindered the ability of health workers to trace the origins and strains of the virus.
While WHO terminated the Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on 29 March 2016, the Ebola Situation Report released on 30 March confirmed 5 more cases in the preceding two weeks, with viral sequencing relating one of the cases to the November 2014 outbreak.
The Ebola epidemic affected the treatment of other diseases in Guinea. Healthcare visits by the population declined due to fear of infection and to mistrust in the health-care system, and the system's ability to provide routine health-care and HIV/AIDS treatments decreased due to the Ebola outbreak.
Ebola re-emerged in Guinea in January–February 2021.
Maternal and child healthcare
The 2010 maternal mortality rate per 100,000 births for Guinea is 680. This is compared with 859.9 in 2008 and 964.7 in 1990. The under 5 mortality rate, per 1,000 births is 146 and the neonatal mortality as a percentage of under 5's mortality is 29. In Guinea the number of midwives per 1,000 live births is 1 and the lifetime risk of death for pregnant women is 1 in 26. Guinea has the second highest prevalence of female genital mutilation in the world.
HIV/AIDS
An estimated 170,000 adults and children were infected at the end of 2004. Surveillance surveys conducted in 2001 and 2002 show higher rates of HIV in urban areas than in rural areas. Prevalence was highest in Conakry (5%) and in the cities of the Forest Guinea region (7%) bordering Côte d'Ivoire, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.
HIV is spread primarily through multiple-partner heterosexual intercourse. Men and women are at nearly equal risk for HIV, with young people aged 15 to 24 most vulnerable. Surveillance figures from 2001 to 2002 show high rates among commercial sex workers (42%), active military personnel (6.6%), truck drivers and bush taxi drivers (7.3%), miners (4.7%), and adults with tuberculosis (8.6%).
Several factors are fueling the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Guinea. They include unprotected sex, multiple sexual partners, illiteracy, endemic poverty, unstable borders, refugee migration, lack of civic responsibility, and scarce medical care and public services.
Malnutrition
Malnutrition is a serious problem for Guinea. A 2012 study reported high chronic malnutrition rates, with levels ranging from 34% to 40% by region, as well as acute malnutrition rates above 10% in Upper Guinea's mining zones. The survey showed that 139,200 children suffer from acute malnutrition, 609,696 from chronic malnutrition and further 1,592,892 suffer from anemia. Degradation of care practices, limited access to medical services, inadequate hygiene practices and a lack of food diversity explain these levels.
Malaria
Malaria is prevalent in Guinea. It is transmitted year-round, with peak transmission from July through October. Malaria is one of the top causes of disability in Guinea.
COVID-19 pandemic
The first case of COVID-19 was reported in Guinea on 13 March 2020. By the end of 2020 the total number of confirmed cases was 13,722. Of these, 13,141 had recovered, 500 were active, and 81 people had died.
Culture
Sports
Football is the most popular sport in the country of Guinea, alongside basketball.
Football operations are run by the Guinean Football Federation. The association administers the national football team, as well as the national league. It was founded in 1960 and affiliated with FIFA since 1962 and with the Confederation of African Football since 1963.
The Guinea national football team, nicknamed Syli nationale (National Elephants), have played international football since 1962. Their first opponent was East Germany. They have yet to reach World Cup finals, but they were runners-up to Morocco in the Africa Cup of Nations in 1976.
Guinée Championnat National is the top division of Guinean football. Since it was established in 1965, three teams have dominated in winning the Guinée Coupe Nationale. Horoya AC leads with 16 titles and is the current (2017–2018) champion. Hafia FC (known as Conakry II in 1960s) is second with 15 titles having dominated in 1960s and 70s, but the last coming in 1985. Third with 13 is AS Kaloum Star, known as Conakry I in the 1960s. All three teams are based in the capital, Conakry. No other team has more than five titles.
The 1970s were a golden decade for Guinean football. Hafia FC won the African Cup of Champions Clubs three times, in 1972, 1975 and 1977, while Horoya AC won the 1978 African Cup Winners' Cup.
Polygamy
Polygamy is generally prohibited by law in Guinea, but there are exceptions. UNICEF reports that 53.4% of Guinean women aged 15–49 are in polygamous marriages.
Music
Like other West African countries, Guinea has a rich musical tradition. The group Bembeya Jazz became popular in the 1960s after Guinean independence.
Cuisine
Guinean cuisine varies by region with rice as the most common staple. Cassava is also widely consumed. Part of West African cuisine, the foods of Guinea include jollof rice, maafe, and tapalapa bread. In rural areas, food is eaten from a large serving dish and eaten by hand outside of homes.
See also
Outline of Guinea
Index of Guinea-related articles
Telephone numbers in Guinea
References
Further reading
Davidson, Basil. "Guinea, Past and Present" . History Today (June 1959) vol. 9, no. 6. pp. 392–398. Covers 1800 to 1959.
External links
Guinea. The World Factbook. Central Intelligence Agency.
Guinea from UCB Libraries GovPubs
Guinea profile from the BBC News
Guinea 2008 Summary Trade Statistics
1958 establishments in Guinea
Countries in Africa
Economic Community of West African States
Central African countries
French-speaking countries and territories
Former British protectorates
Least developed countries
Member states of the African Union
Member states of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie
Member states of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation
Current member states of the United Nations
Republics
States and territories established in 1958
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12177 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History%20of%20Guinea | History of Guinea | The modern state of Guinea did not come into existence until 1958, but the history of the area stretches back well before European colonization. Its current boundaries were determined during the colonial period by the Berlin Conference (1884–1885) and the French, who ruled Guinea until 1958.
West African empires
What is now Guinea was on the fringes of the major West African empires. The Ghana Empire is believed to be the earliest of these which grew on trade but contracted and ultimately fell due to the hostile influence of the Almoravids. It was in this period that Islam first arrived in the region.
The Sosso kingdom (12th to 13th centuries) briefly flourished in the void but the Islamic Mandinka Mali Empire came to prominence when Soundiata Kéïta defeated the Sosso ruler, Sumanguru Kanté at the semi-historical Battle of Kirina in c. 1235. The Mali Empire was ruled by Mansa (Emperors), the most famous being Kankou Moussa, who made a famous hajj to Mecca in 1324. Shortly after his reign the Mali Empire began to decline and was ultimately supplanted by its vassal states in the 15th century.
The most successful of these was the Songhai Empire, expanding its power from about 1460, and eventually surpassing the Mali Empire in both territory and wealth. It continued to prosper until a civil war over succession followed the death of Askia Daoud in 1582. The weakened empire fell to invaders from Morocco at the Battle of Tondibi just 3 years later. The Moroccans proved unable to rule the kingdom effectively, however, and it split into many small kingdoms.
Starting in the 13th century, the Arab slave trade flourished in the region and the Gulf of Guinea. The slave trade was greatly expanded in the 15th century when Portugal established a number of trading posts in Guinea, purchasing and exporting captives as part of the Atlantic slave trade. Other European nations would eventually participate in the trade, which persisted into the mid 19th century.
Kingdoms in Guinea
After the fall of the major West African empires, various kingdoms existed in what is modern day Guinea.
Futa Jallon
Fulani Muslims migrated to Futa Jallon in Central Guinea and established an Islamic state from 1735 to 1898 with a written constitution and alternate rulers.
Wassoulou Empire
The Wassoulou empire was a short-lived (1878–1898) empire, led by Samory Touré in the predominantly Malinké area of what is now upper Guinea and southwestern Mali (Wassoulou). It moved to Ivory Coast before being conquered by the French.
Colonial era
Guinea's colonial period began with French military penetration into the area in the early to mid-19th century, as France replaced Portugal as the dominant European power in the region. The French exerted control by building forts and occupying costal towns, then gradually expanding inland. The French Empire first administrated the territory as part of its Senegalese colony, later establishing the colony of Rivières du Sud in 1882 and finally the colony of French Guinea in 1891. French domination was assured by the defeat in 1898 of the armies of Samori Touré, the Mansa (or Emperor) of the Ouassoulou state and leader of Malinké descent, whose defeat gave France control of what today is Guinea and adjacent areas.
France negotiated Guinea's present boundaries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with other nations, namely the British colony of Sierra Leone, Portuguese colonial Guinea (now Guinea-Bissau), and the United States-backed Liberia.
Independence (1958)
In 1958 the French Fourth Republic collapsed due to political instability and its failures in dealing with its colonies, especially Indochina and Algeria. The founding of a Fifth Republic was supported by the French people, while French President Charles de Gaulle made it clear on 8 August 1958 that France's colonies were to be given a stark choice between more autonomy in a new French Community and immediate independence in the referendum to be held on 28 September 1958.
The other French colonies chose the former but Guinea — under the leadership of Ahmed Sékou Touré whose Democratic Party of Guinea (PDG) had won 56 of 60 seats in 1957 territorial elections — voted overwhelmingly for independence. The French withdrew quickly, destroying infrastructure and equipment along the way, and on October 2, 1958, Guinea proclaimed itself a sovereign and independent republic, with Sékou Touré as president.
Sékou Touré's rule (1958–1984)
French President Charles de Gaulle warned U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower not to embrace Guinea or France would leave NATO's integrated military structure and tell United States troops to leave France. As a result the United States did not engage with the Touré government, in response Guinea quickly turned to the Soviet Union—making it the Kremlin's first success story in Africa. Following France's withdrawal, Guinea quickly aligned itself with the Soviet Union and adopted socialist policies. This alliance was short lived, however, as Guinea moved towards a Chinese model of socialism. Nevertheless, President John F. Kennedy and his Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver tried even harder than the Kremlin's Nikita Khrushchev. By 1963 Guinea had shifted away from Moscow into a closer friendship with Washington. Guinea relied more and more on aid and investment from the U.S. Even the relationship with France improved, after the election of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing as president, trade increased and the two countries exchanged diplomatic visits.
By 1960, Touré had declared the PDG the only legal party. For the next 24 years, the government and the PDG were one. Touré was reelected unopposed to four seven-year terms as president, and every five years voters were presented with a single list of PDG candidates for the National Assembly. Advocating a hybrid African Socialism domestically and Pan-Africanism abroad, Touré quickly became a polarising leader, and his government became intolerant of dissent, imprisoning hundreds, and stifling free press.
At the same time, the Guinean government nationalised land, removed French appointed and traditional chiefs from power, and broke ties with French government and companies. Vacillating between support for the Soviet Union and (by the late 1970s) the United States, Guinea's economic situation became as unpredictable as its diplomatic line. Alleging plots and conspiracies against him at home and abroad, Touré's regime targeted real and imagined opponents, driving thousands of political opponents into exile.
In 1970, Portuguese forces, from neighboring Portuguese Guinea, staged Operation Green Sea, a raid into Guinea with the support of exiled Guinean opposition forces. Among other goals, the Portuguese military wanted to kill or capture Sekou Toure due his support of the PAIGC, a guerilla movement operating inside Portuguese Guinea. After several days of fierce fighting, the Portuguese forces retreated without achieving most of their goals. The regime of Sékou Touré increased the number of internal arrests and executions.
The Guinean Market Women's Revolt in 1977 resulted in the regime's softening of economic restrictions and began a turn away from the radical socialism previously practiced by the government.
Sékou Touré died on March 26, 1984 after a heart operation in the United States, and was replaced by Prime Minister Louis Lansana Beavogui, who was to serve as interim president pending new elections.
Lansana Conté's rule (1984–2008)
The PDG was due to elect a new leader on April 3, 1984. Under the constitution, that person would have been the only candidate for president. However, hours before that meeting, Colonels Lansana Conté and Diarra Traoré seized power in a bloodless coup. Conté assumed the role of president, with Traoré serving as prime minister until December.
Conté immediately denounced the previous regime's record on human rights, released 250 political prisoners and encouraged approximately 200,000 more to return from exile. He also made explicit the turn away from socialism, but this did little to alleviate poverty and the country showed no immediate signs of moving towards democracy.
In 1992, Conté announced a return to civilian rule, with a presidential poll in 1993 followed by elections to parliament in 1995 (in which his party – the Party of Unity and Progress – won 71 of 114 seats.) Despite his stated commitment to democracy, Conté's grip on power remained tight. In September 2001 the opposition leader Alpha Condé was imprisoned for endangering state security, though he was pardoned 8 months later. He subsequently spent a period of exile in France.
In 2001 Conté organized and won a referendum to lengthen the presidential term and in 2003 begun his third term after elections were boycotted by the opposition. In January 2005, Conté survived a suspected assassination attempt while making a rare public appearance in the capital Conakry. His opponents claimed that he was a "tired dictator" whose departure was inevitable, whereas his supporters believed that he was winning a battle with dissidents. Guinea still faces very real problems and according to Foreign Policy is in danger of becoming a failed state.
In 2000 Guinea became embroiled in the instability which had long blighted the rest of West Africa as rebels crossed the borders with Liberia and Sierra Leone and it seemed for a time that the country was headed for civil war. Conté blamed neighbouring leaders for coveting Guinea's natural resources, though these claims were strenuously denied. In 2003 Guinea agreed plans with her neighbours to tackle the insurgents. In 2007 there were big protests against the government, resulting in the appointment of a new prime minister.
Conté's death and the 2008 coup d'état
In a coup d'état several days following Touré's death, Lansana Conté became the President. The constitution and parliament were suspended and a committee for national recovery was established. Conté remained in power until his death on 22 December 2008.
In several hours following his death, Moussa Dadis Camara seized control of Guinea as the head of a junta. On 28 September 2009, the junta ordered its soldiers to attack people who had gathered to protest Camara's presumed candidacy in the upcoming presidential elections. The soldiers went on a rampage of rape, mutilation, and murder.
On 3 December 2009, an aide shot Camara during a dispute about the rampage of September 2009. Camara went to Morocco for medical care. Vice-President (and defense minister) Sékouba Konaté flew back from Lebanon to run the country in Camara's absence.
On 12 January 2010 Camara was flown from Morocco to Burkina Faso. After meeting in Ouagadougou on 13 and 14 January, Camara, Konaté and Blaise Compaoré, President of Burkina Faso, produced a formal statement of twelve principles promising a return of Guinea to civilian rule within six months. It was agreed that the military would not contest the forthcoming elections, and Camara would continue his convalescence outside Guinea. On 21 January 2010 the military junta appointed Jean-Marie Doré as Prime Minister of a six-month transition government, leading up to elections.
The presidential election was set to take place on 27 June and 18 July 2010, it was held as being the first free and fair election since independence in 1958.
The first round took place normally on 27 June 2010 with ex Prime Minister Cellou Dalein Diallo and his rival Alpha Condé emerging as the two runners-up for the second round.
However, due to allegations of electoral fraud, the second round of the election was postponed until 19 September 2010. A delay until 10 October was announced by the electoral commission (CENI), subject to approval by Sékouba Konaté. Yet another delay until 24 October was announced in early October. Elections were finally held on 7 November. Voter turnout was high, and the elections went relatively smoothly.
16 November 2010, Alpha Condé, the leader of the opposition party Rally of the Guinean People (RGP), was officially declared the winner of a 7 November run-off in Guinea's presidential election. He had promised to reform the security sector and review mining contracts if elected.
On the night of 18 July 2011, President Condé's residence was attacked in an attempted coup. The attack included a fierce firefight and rocket propelled grenades. The president was unharmed. Sixteen people have been charged with the attempted assassination. Most of those indicted are close associates of Konaté.
The National Assembly of Guinea, the country's legislative body, has not met since 2008 when it was dissolved after the military coup in December. Elections have been postponed many times since 2007 and, most recently, were scheduled for 8 July 2012. In April 2012, President Condé postponed the elections indefinitely, citing the need to ensure that they were "transparent and democratic".
In February 2013, a plane carrying the head of the Guinean armed forces, General Kelefa Diallo, and nine other military officials, crashed on its way to the Liberian capital, Monrovia.
2013 protests
The opposition coalition withdrew from the electoral process in mid-February, mainly due to President Conde's insistence on using a suspicious South African firm Waymark Infotech to draw up the registered voter list. In late February 2013, political violence erupted in Guinea after protesters took to the streets to voice their concerns over the transparency of the upcoming May 2013 elections. The demonstrations were fueled by the opposition coalition's decision to step down from the electoral process in protest at the lack of transparency in the preparations for elections.
Nine people were killed during the protests, while around 220 were injured, and many of the deaths and injuries were caused by security forces using live fire on protesters. The political violence also led to inter-ethnic clashes between the Fula and Malinke peoples, the latter forming the base of support for President Condé, with the former consisting mainly of the opposition.
On 26 March 2013 the opposition party backed out of the negotiation with the government over the upcoming 12 May election. The opposition claimed that the government has not respected them, and have not kept any promises they agreed to. This is expected to lead to more protests and fighting in the streets of Guinea.
2014 Ebola outbreak
Beginning in July 2014, Guinea suffered the most severe recorded outbreak of Ebola in history, which rapidly spread to neighbouring countries Liberia and Sierra Leone. The epidemic was over by June 2016.
2020 elections
In October 2020, president Alpha Condé won presidential elections. Condé had been in power since 2010 and he won the third term. Opposition did not accept the results because of allegations of fraud. The president said a constitutional referendum in March 2020 allowed him to run despite a two-term limit. After the election there were violent protests across the country.
Coup d'état 2021
On September 5, 2021, Alpha Condé was deposed by the military. National Committee of Reconciliation and Development headed by Mamady Doumbouya, Guinea's new interim president, took power.
See also
List of heads of government of Guinea
List of heads of state of Guinea
Politics of Guinea
Conakry history and timeline
General:
History of West Africa
Further reading
Chafer, Tony. The End of Empire in French West Africa: France's Successful Decolonization. Berg (2002).
Davidson, Basil. "Guinea, Past And Present" History Today (June 1959) 9#6 pp 392–398. Covers 1800 to 1959.
O'Toole, Thomas and Bah-Lalya, Ibrahima. Historical Dictionary of Guinea (3rd ed. Scarecrow Press. 1995). online
External links
Elizabeth Blunt. Civil war fears in Guinea. BBC News. October 23, 2000.
Guinea head blames neighbours. BBC News. January 6, 2001.
Stopping Guinea’s slide. International Crisis Group, Africa Report No. 94. June 14, 2005.
Adama Sow: Chancen und Risiken von NGOs – Die Gewerkschaften in Guinea während der Unruhen 2007 – EPU Research Papers: Issue 03/07, Stadtschlaining 2007
André R. Lewin. Sékou Touré’s “No”. African Geopolitics. 2005.
Bad government, bad neighbour. The Economist. July 21, 2005.
Background Note: Guinea
Guinea (colonial)
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12178 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography%20of%20Guinea | Geography of Guinea | Guinea is a country on the coast of West Africa and is bordered by Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, Mali, Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.
Guinea is divided into four geographic regions: Maritime Guinea (Lower Guinea) a coastal plain running north to south behind the coast; the pastoral Fouta Djallon highlands (Middle Guinea); the northern savanna (Upper Guinea); and a southeastern rain-forest region (Forest Guinea).
Location
Guinea is in western Africa, bordering the North Atlantic Ocean, between Guinea-Bissau and Sierra Leone. Its geographic coordinates are . Guinea's total area is 245,857 km2, comprising 245,717 km2 of land and 140 km2 of water.
Guinea's land boundaries span a total of 4,046 km: with Ivory Coast 816 km, Guinea-Bissau 421 km, Liberia 590 km, Mali 1,062 km, Senegal 363 km, and Sierra Leone 794 km. It has a 320-km coastline, and claims an exclusive economic zone of , with a territorial sea of .
Climate
The coastal region of Guinea and most of the inland have a tropical climate, with a monsoonal-type rainy season lasting from April to November, relatively high and uniform temperatures, southwesterly winds, and high humidity.
The capital Conakry's year-round average high is , and the low is . Conakry's average annual rainfall is . Sahelian Upper Guinea has a shorter rainy season and greater daily temperature variations. There is a dry season (December to May) with northeasterly harmattan winds.
Rivers and water
The Niger River, the Gambia River, and the Senegal River are among the 22 West African rivers that have their origins in Guinea.
Ecoregions
Guinean forest-savanna mosaic covers most of the country, covering most of Maritime Guinea and Upper Guinea, as well as the lower elevations of the Fouta Djallon. It extends north into Guinea Bissau and Senegal, and east through Mali and Ivory Coast.
Western Guinean lowland forests occupies the southwestern portion of Maritime Guinea around Conakry, and Forest Guinea, along with coastal Sierra Leone, Liberia, and western Ivory Coast.
Guinean montane forests, cover the Fouta Djallon and Guinea Highlands of southeast Guinea above an elevation of 600 meters.
Guinean mangroves, in the coastal estuaries. Enclaves extend north into Guinea Bissau, Gambia and Senegal, and southeast through Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Ivory Coast.
Resources and environment
The country's natural resources include bauxite, iron ore, diamonds, gold, uranium, hydropower, fish, and salt. It has 12.21% arable land, and 2.85% of the land is permanent crops. 949.2 km2 (2003) of land is irrigated. Guinea's total renewable water resources total 226 km3.
Environmental issues
Current environmental issues in Guinea include: deforestation; inadequate supplies of potable water; desertification; soil contamination and erosion; and overfishing and overpopulation in forest regions. Poor mining practices have led to environmental damage.
Guinea is party to the following international environmental agreements: Biodiversity, Desertification, Endangered Species, Hazardous Wastes, Law of the Sea, Ozone Layer Protection, Ship Pollution, Wetlands, Whaling.
Terrain
Its terrain is generally flat coastal plain, hilly to mountainous interior. The country's lowest point is the Atlantic Ocean (0 m), and highest is Mont Nimba (1,752 m).
A recent global remote sensing analysis suggested that there were 549km² of tidal flats in Guinea, making it the 47th ranked country in terms of tidal flat area.
This is a list of the extreme points of Guinea, the points that are farther north, south, east or west than any other location.
Northernmost point – the northern section of the border with Senegal, Boké Region*.
Easternmost point – the confluence of the Gben river and the Férédougouba river on the border with Ivory Coast, Nzérékoré Region.
Southernmost point – unnamed location on the border with Liberia immediately south of the village of Gonon, Nzérékoré Region.
Westernmost point – Ile du Noufrage, Boké Region.
Westernmost point (mainland) – the point at which the border with Guinea-Bissau enters the Rio Compony estuary.
*Note: Guinea does not have a northernmost point, this section of the border being formed by a straight latitudinal line
See also
Administrative divisions of Guinea
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12179 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics%20of%20Guinea | Demographics of Guinea | Demographics of Guinea describes the condition and overview of Guinea's peoples. Demographic topics include basic education, health, and population statistics as well as identified racial and religious affiliations.
Population
According to the total population was in , compared to only 3 094 000 in 1950. The proportion of children below the age of 15 in 2010 was 42.9%, 53.8% was between 15 and 65 years of age, while 3.3% was 65 years or older
.
Vital statistics
Registration of vital events is in Guinea not complete. The Population Departement of the United Nations prepared the following estimates.
Fertility and Births
Total Fertility Rate (TFR) (Wanted Fertility Rate) and Crude Birth Rate (CBR):
Fertility data as of 2012 and 2018 (DHS Program):
Life expectancy
Ethnic groups
Fulɓe (singular Pullo). Called Peuhl or Peul in French, Fula or Fulani in English, who are chiefly found in the mountainous region of Fouta Djallon;
Maninka. Malinke in French, Mandingo in English, mostly inhabiting the savanna of Upper Guinea and the Forest region;
Susus or Soussous. Susu is not a lingua franca in Guinea. Although it is commonly spoken in the coastal areas, including the capital, Conakry, it is not largely understood in the interior of the country.
Several small groups (Gerzé or Kpelle, Toma, Kissis, etc.) in the forest region and Bagas (including Landoumas), Koniaguis etc.), In the coastal area.
West Africans make up the largest non-Guinean population. Non-Africans total about 30,000 (mostly French, other Europeans, and Lebanese). Seven national languages are used extensively; the major written languages are French, Pular (; ), and Arabic.
Other languages have established Latin orthographies that are used somewhat, notably for Susu and Maninka. The N'Ko script is increasingly used on a grassroots level for the Maninka language.
Other demographic statistics
Demographic statistics according to the World Population Review in 2019.
One birth every 1 minutes
One death every 5 minutes
One net migrant every 60 minutes
Net gain of one person every 2 minutes
The following demographic statistics are from the CIA World Factbook.
Population
11,855,411 (July 2018 est.)
Age structure
0-14 years: 41.4% (male 2,473,486 /female 2,435,139)
15-24 years: 19.23% (male 1,145,488 /female 1,134,103)
25-54 years: 30.8% (male 1,827,246 /female 1,824,162)
55-64 years: 4.72% (male 269,995 /female 289,164)
65 years and over: 3.85% (male 203,754 /female 252,874) (2018 est.)
Median age
total: 19 years. Country comparison to the world: 204th
male: 18.8 years
female: 19.3 years (2018 est.)
Total: 18.9 years
Male: 18.7 years
Female: 19.1 years (2017 est.)
Population growth rate
2.75% (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 13th
2.61% (2017 est.)
Birth rate
36.4 births/1,000 population (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 16th
Death rate
8.9 deaths/1,000 population (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 64th
Total fertility rate
4.98 children born/woman (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 14th
Mother's mean age at first birth
18.9 years (2012 est.)
note: median age at first birth among women 25-29
Contraceptive prevalence rate
8.7% (2016)
Net migration rate
0 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2017 est.) Country comparison to the world: 84th
Dependency ratios
total dependency ratio: 84.2 (2015 est.)
youth dependency ratio: 78.6 (2015 est.)
elderly dependency ratio: 5.6 (2015 est.)
potential support ratio: 17.8 (2015 est.)
Life expectancy at birth
total population: 62.1 years (2018 est.)
male: 60.4 years (2018 est.)
female: 64 years (2018 est.)
total population: 61 years
male: 59.5 years
female: 62.6 years (2017 est.)
Urbanization
urban population: 36.1% of total population (2018)
rate of urbanization: 3.54% annual rate of change (2015-20 est.)
Sex ratio
at birth
1.03 male(s)/female
under 15 years
1.02 male(s)/female
15-64 years
1 male(s)/female
65 years and over
0.78 male(s)/female
total population
1 male(s)/female (2011 est.)
HIV/AIDS
Adult prevalence rate: 1.5% (2017 est.)
People living with HIV/AIDS: 120,000 (2017 est.)
Deaths: 5,100 (2017 est.)
Nationality
noun
Guinean(s)
adjective
Guinean
Ethnic groups
Fulani (Peul) 33,4%
Malinke 29,4%
Soussou 21.2%
Guerze 7.8%
Kissi 6.2%
Toma 1.6%
Other/No Answer 4% (2018 est.)
Religions
Islam 89.1%
Christian 6.8%
Animist/Other/None 4.1% (2014 est.)
Languages
French (official), each ethnic group has its own language
Literacy
definition: age 15 and over can read and write (2015 est.)
total population: 30.4% (2015 est.)
male: 38.1% (2015 est.)
female: 22.8% (2015 est.)
School life expectancy (primary to tertiary education)
total: 9 years (2014)
male: 10 years (2014)
female: 8 years (2014)
Unemployment, youth ages 15-24
total: 1% (2012 est.)
male: 1.5% (2012 est.)
female: 0.6% (2012 est.)
References | [
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-1.1668593883514404,
-0.11082372814416885,
-0.4650057554244995,
0.7816970944404602,
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0.5989605784416199,
-1.093528151512146,
-0.6024774312973022,
-0.2113931030035019,
0.13522905111312866,
-0.23732565343379974,
0.8152678608894348,... |
12180 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics%20of%20Guinea | Politics of Guinea | Politics of Guinea takes place in a framework of a presidential representative democratic republic, whereby the President of Guinea is both head of state and head of government of Guinea. Executive power is exercised by the government. Legislative power is vested in both the government and the National Assembly.
Political history
Conté era (1984-2008)
A military dictatorship, led by then-Lt. Col. Lansana Conté and styling itself the Military Committee of National Recovery (CMRN), took control of Guinea in April 1984, shortly after the death of independent Guinea's first president, Sékou Touré. With Conté as president, the CMRN set about dismantling Touré's oppressive regime, abolishing the authoritarian constitution, dissolving the sole political party and its mass youth and women's organizations, and announcing the establishment of the Second Republic. The new government released all political prisoners and committed itself to the protection of human rights. In order to reverse the steady economic decline under Touré's rule, the CMRN reorganized the judicial system, decentralized the administration, promoted private enterprise, and encouraged foreign investment.
In 1990, Guineans approved by referendum a new constitution that inaugurated the Third Republic, and established a Supreme Court. In 1991, the CMRN was replaced by a mixed military and civilian body, the Transitional Council for National Recovery (CTRN), with Conté as president and a mandate to manage a five-year transition to full civilian rule. The CTRN drafted laws to create republican institutions and to provide for independent political parties, national elections, and freedom of the press. Political party activity was legalized in 1992, when more than 40 political parties were officially recognized for the first time.
In December 1993, Conté was elected to a 5-year term as president in the country's first multi-party elections, which were marred by irregularities and lack of transparency on the part of the government. In 1995, Conté's ruling PUP party won 76 of 114 seats in elections for the National Assembly amid opposition claims of irregularities and government tampering. In 1996, President Conté reorganized the government, appointing Sidya Touré to the revived post of Prime Minister and charging him with special responsibility for leading the government's economic reform program.
In the early hours of 23 December 2008, Aboubacar Somparé, the President of the National Assembly, announced on television that Conté had died at 6:45pm local time on 22 December "after a long illness", without specifying the cause of death.
According to Somparé, Conté "hid his physical suffering" for years "in order to give happiness to Guinea." Conté had left the country for medical treatment on numerous occasions in the years preceding his death, and speculation about his health had long been widespread. Contrary to his usual practice, Conté did not appear on television to mark Tabaski earlier in December 2008, and this sparked renewed speculation, as well as concern about the possibility of violence in the event of his death. At around the same time, a newspaper published a photograph suggesting that Conté was in poor physical condition and having difficulty standing up. The editor of that newspaper was arrested and the newspaper was required to print a photograph in which Conté looked healthy.
According to the constitution, the President of the National Assembly was to assume the Presidency of the Republic in the event of a vacancy, and a new presidential election was to be held within 60 days. Somparé requested that the President of the Supreme Court, Lamine Sidimé, declare a vacancy in the Presidency and apply the constitution. Prime Minister Souaré and Diarra Camara, the head of the army, stood alongside Somparé during his announcement. The government declared 40 days of national mourning and Camara called on soldiers to remain calm.
2008 coup and following
Six hours after Somparé announced Conté's death, a statement was read on television announcing a military coup d'état. This statement, read by Captain Moussa Dadis Camara on behalf of a group called National Council for Democracy, said that "the government and the institutions of the Republic have been dissolved". The statement also announced the suspension of the constitution "as well as political and union activity". In its place, the military said it had established a consultative council composed of civilian and military leaders.
On 27 September 2009, the day before planned demonstrations in the capital city Conakry, the government declared demonstrations illegal. Thousands of protestors defied the ban, assembling in a soccer stadium. 157 were left dead after the level of violence used by security forces escalated. Captain Moussa (Dadis) Camara told Radio France International on 28 September the shootings by members of his presidential guard were beyond his control. "Those people who committed those atrocities were uncontrollable elements in the military," he said. "Even I, as head of state in this very tense situation, cannot claim to be able to control those elements in the military."
On 3 December 2009 Captain Moussa Dadis Camara suffered a head wound in an attempted assassination in Conakry led by his aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Aboubacar Sidiki Diakité, who is known as Toumba. Captain Camara underwent surgery at a hospital in Morocco. Reports say Toumba's men opened fire on Captain Camara late Thursday at an army camp in the city of Conakry.
In a document released in 2010, an unknown source spoke with a U.S. diplomat and described the "ethnicization" of Guinea and the risk of conflict and violence like in Rwanda. He stated that Dadis Camara has recruited mercenaries from South Africa and Israel and assembled them, along with some of his own men, in Forecariah, in the ethnically Sussu region in the west of the country, while Dadis was from the Forest region to the east. His militia numbered 2,000-3,000 and was
armed with weapons from Ukraine. The risk of conflict and destabilization threatened the entire region, he said.
After a meeting in Ouagadougou on 13 and 14 January, Camara, Konaté and Blaise Compaoré, President of Burkina Faso, produced a formal statement of twelve principles promising a return of Guinea to civilian rule within six months. It was agreed that the military would not contest the forthcoming elections. On 21 January 2010 the military junta appointed Jean-Marie Doré as Prime Minister of a six-month transition government, leading up to elections.
2010 elections
The presidential election was set to take place on 27 June and 18 July 2010, it was held as being the first free and fair election since independence in 1958.
The first round took place normally on 27 June 2010 with ex Prime Minister Cellou Dalein Diallo and his rival Alpha Condé emerging as the two runners-up for the second round.
However, due to allegations of electoral fraud, the second round of the election was postponed until 19 September 2010. A delay until 10 October was announced by the electoral commission (CENI), subject to approval by Sékouba Konaté. Yet another delay until 24 October was announced in early October. Elections were finally held on 7 November. Voter turnout was high, and the elections went relatively smoothly.
16 November 2010, Alpha Condé, the leader of the opposition party Rally of the Guinean People (RGP), was officially declared the winner of a 7 November run-off in Guinea's presidential election. He had promised to reform the security sector and review mining contracts if elected.
2013 violence
In February 2013, the Guinean opposition party announced it would be stepping down from the electoral process due to a lack of transparency over the company used in registering voters. Calling on citizens to protest nationwide, the ensuing week saw multiple clashes between police and protesters, resulting in at least nine deaths, some of those due to live fire from security forces.
The protests were also a result of the previous months' political wrangling between Condé's administration and the opposition; minor protests were quelled on the street, and opposition supporters were arbitrarily arrested, prompting the resignation of two Guinean opposition ministers in September 2012. This month also saw the opposition parties announce their stepping down from the National Transitional Council, which is effectively an interim parliament, and that they would also boycott the national electoral commission. The president of the national electoral commission, Louceny Camara, also stepped down due to pressure from the opposition over his relationship with President Condé; Camara was rumoured to be his ally and a key figure in the president's rumoured attempts to pre-rig the legislative polls.
The week after the protest saw another minor clash between protesters and security forces after a march to mark the funerals of the deceased was dispersed by tear gas and gunfire.
On 7 March 2013, the government postponed the 12 May election date indefinitely until the political tension eased and preparations for free and fair elections could be established.
Despite the election postponement, President Condé ordered a crackdown on those responsible for the violence, and on 10 March, a Guinean court ordered opposition leaders to appear at a hearing scheduled for 14 March, in which they would be questioned for their role in organising the protests. Former Prime Minister Sidya Toure branded the summons as an "illegal procedure for what was an authorised march" and a "manipulation of justice for political ends".
2020 controversial elections
In October 2020, president Alpha Condé won presidential elections. Condé had been in power since 2010 and he won the third term. Opposition did not accept the results because of allegations of fraud. The president said a constitutional referendum in March 2020 allowed him to run despite a two-term limit. After the election there were violent protests across the country.
2021 coup
Following a military coup on 5 September 2021 the government was dissolved, borders closed, constitution suspended and President Condé was arrested. On 1 October 2021 Mamady Doumbouya was sworn in as Guinea's interim president after leading the coup.
Ethnic politics
President Alpha Condé derives support from Guinea's second-largest ethnic group, the Malinke. Guinea's opposition is backed by some of the Fula ethnic group (; ), who account for around 33.4 percent of the population.
Executive branch
The president of Guinea is normally elected by popular vote for a five-year term; candidate must receive a majority of the votes cast to be elected president. The president governs Guinea, assisted by a council of 25 civilian ministers appointed by him. The government administers the country through eight regions, 33 prefectures, over 100 subprefectures, and many districts (known as communes in Conakry and other large cities and villages or "quartiers" in the interior). District-level leaders are elected; the president appoints officials to all other levels of the highly centralized administration.
Between the 2010 Presidential Elections and 2021 coup the head of state was Alpha Condé. Following the 2021 coup he was replaced by Colonel Mamady Doumbouya acting as Chairman of the National Committee of Reconciliation and Development, a transitional military junta.
Legislative branch
The National Assembly of Guinea, the country's legislative body, had not met for a long period of time since 2008 when it was dissolved after the military coup in December of that year. Elections have been postponed many times since 2007. In April 2012, President Condé postponed the elections indefinitely, citing the need to ensure that they were "transparent and democratic".
The legislative elections took place on 28 September 2013 and President Alpha Conde's party, the Rally of the Guinean People, won with 53 seats.
In February 2022, five months after the 2021 military coup, a National Transitional Council headed by former lawmaker Dansa Kurouma and consisting of 81 members was established as a transitional parliament.
Administrative divisions of Guinea
Guinea is divided into seven administrative regions and subdivided into thirty-three prefectures. The national capital, Conakry, ranks as a special zone. The regions are Boké, Faranah, Kankan, Kindia, Labé, Mamou, Nzérékoré and Conakry.
Political parties and elections
Presidential elections
Parliamentary elections
International organization participation
Guinea's membership in the African Union was suspended after the coup.
Agency for the French-Speaking Community,
African, Caribbean, and Pacific Group of States,
African Development Bank,
Customs Cooperation Council,
Economic Commission for Africa,
Economic Community of West African States,
Food and Agriculture Organization,
Group of 77,
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development,
International Civil Aviation Organization,
International Criminal Court,
International Confederation of Free Trade Unions,
International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement,
International Development Association,
Islamic Development Bank,
International Fund for Agricultural Development,
International Finance Corporation,
International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies,
International Labour Organization,
International Monetary Fund,
International Maritime Organization,
International Telecommunications Satellite Organization,
International Criminal Police Organization,
International Olympic Committee,
International Organization for Migration (observer),
International Organization for Standardization (correspondent),
International Telecommunication Union,
United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara,
Non-Aligned Movement,
Organization of African Unity,
Organisation of Islamic Cooperation,
Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons,
United Nations,
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development,
United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization,
United Nations Industrial Development Organization,
Universal Postal Union,
World Confederation of Labour,
World Federation of Trade Unions,
World Health Organization,
World Intellectual Property Organization,
World Meteorological Organization,
World Tourism Organization,
World Trade Organization
See also
Moussa Dadis Camara#December 2008 army intervention
Komara government
References
Elections in Guinea | [
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0.4197320640087... |
12181 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy%20of%20Guinea | Economy of Guinea | The economy of Guinea is dependent largely on agriculture and other rural activities. Guinea is richly endowed with good minerals, possessing an estimated quarter of the world's proven reserves of bauxite, more than of high-grade iron ore, significant diamond and gold deposits, and undetermined quantities of uranium.
Guinea also has considerable potential for growth in the agricultural and fishing sectors. Land, water, and climatic conditions provide opportunities for large-scale irrigated farming and agroindustry. Remittances from Guineans living and working abroad and coffee exports account for the rest of Guinea's foreign exchanges industry.
Economic history
Guinea was part of the franc zone countries that included most of the former French Colonies. After Independence, these countries did not become completely economical free. France decided against monetary autonomy hence they could not use a freely convertible currency. The state intervention of the new governments was characterized by stops of quotas on imports and internal price controls. In the time up to c. 1980, the franc-zone countries had on average a lower inflation and a higher economic growth compared to the Anglophone counterparts, who could use their own currencies.
But regarding the time after c. 1980 and the economic liberalism, characterized by Structural Adjustments, the franc zone countries could not outperform the rest.
Since 1985, the Guinean Government has adopted policies to return commercial activity to the private sector, promote investment, reduce the role of the state in the economy, and improve the administrative and judicial framework. The government has eliminated restrictions on agricultural enterprise and foreign trade, liquidated many parastatals, increased spending on education, and vastly downsized the civil service. The government also has made major strides in restructuring the public finances.
The IMF and the World Bank are heavily involved in the development of Guinea's economy, as are many bilateral donor nations, including the United States. Guinea's economic reforms have had recent notable success, improving the rate of economic to 5% and reducing the rate of inflation to about 99%, as well as increasing government revenues while restraining official expenditures. Although Guinea's external debt burden remains high, the country is now current on external debt payments.
Current GDP per capita of Guinea shrank by 16% in the 1990s.
The government revised the private investment code in 1998 to stimulate economic activity in the spirit of a free enterprise. The code does not discriminate between foreigners and nationals and provides for repatriation of profits. Foreign investments outside Conakry are entitled to especially favorable conditions. A national investment commission has been formed to review all investment proposals. The United States and Guinea have signed an investment guarantee agreement that offers political risk insurance to American investors through OPIC. Guinea plans to inaugurate an arbitration court system to allow for the quick resolution of commercial disputes.
Mean wages were $0.45 per man-hour in 2009.
In 2002, the IMF suspended Guinea's Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) because the government failed to meet key performance criteria. In reviews of the PRGF, the World Bank noted that Guinea had met its spending goals in targeted social priority sectors. However, spending in other areas, primarily defense, contributed to a significant fiscal deficit. The loss of IMF funds forced the government to finance its debts through Central Bank advances. The pursuit of unsound economic policies has resulted in imbalances that are proving hard to correct.
Under then-Prime Minister Diallo, the government began a rigorous reform agenda in December 2004 designed to return Guinea to a PRGF with the IMF. Exchange rates have been allowed to float, price controls on gasoline have been loosened, and government spending has been reduced while tax collection has been improved. These reforms have not reduced inflation, which hit 27% in 2004 and 30% in 2005. Currency depreciation is also a concern. The Guinea franc was trading at 2550 to the dollar in January 2005. It hit 5554 to the dollar by October 2006. In August 2016 that number had reached 9089.
Despite the opening in 2005 of a new road connecting Guinea and Mali, most major roadways remain in poor repair, slowing the delivery of goods to local markets. Electricity and water shortages are frequent and sustained, and many businesses are forced to use expensive power generators and fuel to stay open.
Even though there are many problems plaguing Guinea's economy, not all foreign investors are reluctant to come to Guinea. Global Alumina's proposed alumina refinery has a price tag above $2 billion. Alcoa and Alcan are proposing a slightly smaller refinery worth about $1.5 billion. Taken together, they represent the largest private investment in sub-Saharan Africa since the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline. Also, Hyperdynamics Corporation, an American oil company, signed an agreement in 2006 to develop Guinea's offshore Senegal Basin oil deposits in a concession of ; it is pursuing seismic exploration.
On 13 October 2009, Guinean Mines Minister Mahmoud Thiam announced that the China International Fund would invest more than $7bn (£4.5bn) in infrastructure. In return, he said the firm would be a "strategic partner" in all mining projects in the mineral-rich nation. He said the firm would help build ports, railway lines, power plants, low-cost housing and even a new administrative centre in the capital, Conakry. In September 2011, Mohamed Lamine Fofana, the Mines Minister following the 2010 election, said that the government had overturned the agreement by the ex-military junta.
Youth unemployment remains a large problem. Guinea needs an adequate policy to address the concerns of urban youth. One problem is the disparity between their life and what they see on television. For youth who cannot find jobs, seeing the economic power and consumerism of richer countries only serves to frustrate them further.
Economic sectors
Mining
In 2019, the country was the world's 3rd largest producer of bauxite.
Bauxite mining and alumina production provide about 80% of Guinea's foreign exchange. Several U.S. companies are active in this sector. Diamonds and gold also are mined and exported on a large scale, providing additional foreign exchange. Concession agreements have been signed for future exploitation of Guinea's extensive iron ore deposits.
Guinea is richly endowed with minerals, possessing an estimated one-third of the world's proven reserves of bauxite, more than 1.8 billion metric tons (MT) (2.0 billion short tons) of high-grade iron ore, significant diamond and gold deposits, and undetermined quantities of uranium.
Lately, with the increase of alumina demand from the booming economy of China, there is a renew interest in Guinea riches. The consortium Alcan and Alcoa, partner with the Guinean government in the CBG mining in north western Guinea, have announced the feasibility study for the construction of a 1 million TPa alumina smelter. This comes with a similar project from Canadian start-up Global Alumina trying to come with a 2 billion dollar alumina plant in the same region. As of April 2005, the National Assembly of Guinea has not ratified Global's project.
Revenue from bauxite mining is expected to fall significantly in 2010 due mainly to the world economic situation.
Mining controversies
Guinea has large reserves of the steel-making raw material, iron ore. Rio Tinto Group was the majority owner of the $6 billion Simandou iron ore project, which it had called the world's best unexploited resource. This project is said to be of the same magnitude as the Pilbara in Western Australia.
In 2017, Och-Ziff Capital Management Group pled guilty to a multi-year bribery scheme, after an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) led to a trial in the United States and a fine of $412 million. Following this, the SEC also filed a lawsuit in the US against head of Och-Ziff European operations, Michael Cohen, for his role in a bribery scheme in the region.
In 2009 the government of Guinea gave the northern half of Simandou to BSGR for an $165 million investment in the project and a pledge to spend $1 billion on railways, saying that Rio Tinto wasn't moving into production fast enough. The US Justice Department investigated allegations that BSGR had bribed President Conté's wife to get him the concession, and so did the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the next elected President of Guinea, Alpha Condé, and an assortment of other national and international entities.
In April 2014 the Guinean government cancelled the company's mining rights in Simandou. BSGR has denied any wrongdoing, and in May 2014 sought arbitration over the government of Guinea's decision to expropriate its mining rights. In February 2019, BSGR and Guinean President Alpha Condé agreed to drop all allegations of wrongdoing as well as the pending arbitration case. Under the agreement, BSGR would relinquish rights to Simandou while being allowed to maintain an interest in the smaller Zogota deposit that would be developed by Niron Metals head Mick Davis.
In 2010 Rio Tinto signed a binding agreement with Aluminum Corporation of China Limited to establish a joint venture for the Simandou iron ore project. In November 2016, Rio Tinto admitted paying $10.5 million to a close adviser of President Alpha Condé to obtain rights on Simandou. Conde said he knew nothing about the bribe and denied any wrongdoing. However, according to recordings obtained by FRANCE 24, Guinean authorities were aware of the Simandou briberies.
In July 2017, the UK-based anti-fraud regulator, the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) and the Australian Federal Police launched an investigation into Rio Tinto's business practices in Guinea.
Further, In November 2016, the former mining minister of Guinea, Mahmoud Thiam, accused head of Rio Tinto's Guinea operation department of offering him a bribe in 2010 to regain Rio Tinto's control over half of the undeveloped Simandou project.
In September 2011, Guinea adopted a new mining code. The law set up a commission to review government deals struck during the chaotic days between the end of dictatorship in 2008 and Condé coming to power.
In September 2015, the French Financial Public Prosecutor's Office launched an investigation into President Alpha Conde's son, Mohamed Alpha Condé. He was charged with embezzlement of public funds and receiving financial and other benefits from French companies that were interested in the Guinean mining industry.
In August 2016, son of a former Prime Minister of Gabon, who worked for Och-Ziff's Africa Management Ltd, a subsidiary of the U.S. hedge fund Och-Ziff, was arrested in the US and charged with bribing officials in Guinea, Chad and Niger on behalf of the company to secure mining concessions and gain access to relevant confidential information. The investigation also revealed that he was involved in rewriting Guinea's mining law during President Conde's rule. In December 2016, the US Department of Justice announced that the man pleaded guilty to conspiring to make corrupt payments to government officials in Africa.
According to a Global Witness report, Sable Mining sought iron ore explorations rights to Mount Nimba in Guinea by getting close to Conde towards the 2010 elections, backing his campaign for presidency and bribing his son. These allegations have not been verified yet but in March 2016 Guinean authorities ordered an investigation into the matter.
The Conde government investigated two other contracts as well, one which left Hyperdynamic with a third of Guinea's offshore lease allocations as well as Rusal's purchase of the Friguia Aluminum refinery, in which it said that Rusal greatly underpaid.
Agriculture
Guinea also has considerable potential for growth in the agricultural and fishing sectors. Land, water, and climatic conditions provide opportunities for large-scale irrigated farming and agroindustry. Possibilities for investment and commercial activities exist in all these areas, but Guinea's poorly developed infrastructure continues to present obstacles to investment projects.
Energy
Three primary energy sources make up the energy mix in Guinea – biomass, oil and hydropower. With 78%, biomass (mostly charcoal) makes the largest contribution in primary energy consumption in Guinea. It is locally produced, while Guinea imports all petroleum products.
Communications
The people of Guinea are among the poorest in West Africa and this reality is reflected in the development of the country's telecommunications environment. Radio is the most important source of information for the public in Guinea, and the only one to reach the entire country.
There is a single government-owned radio network, a growing number of private radio stations, and one government TV station. The fixed telephone system is inadequate, with just 18,000 lines to serve the country's 10.5 million inhabitants in 2012. The mobile cellular system is growing rapidly and had an estimated 4.8 million lines in 2012. Internet usage is very low, reaching just 1.5% of the population in 2012.
Economic statistics
The following table shows the main economic indicators in 1990–2017.
GDP:
purchasing power parity – $26.5 billion (2017 est.)
GDP – real growth rate:
6.7% (2017 est.)
GDP – per capita:
purchasing power parity – $2,000 (2017 est.)
GDP – composition by sector:
agriculture:
19.5%
industry:
38.4%
services:
42.1% (2017 est.)
Population below poverty line:
47% (2006 est.)
Household income or consumption by percentage share:
lowest 10%:
2.7% (2007)
highest 10%:
30.3% (2007)
Inflation rate (consumer prices):
8.9% (2017 est.)
Labor force:
5.558 million (2017)
Labor force – by occupation:
agriculture 76%, industry and services 24% (2006 est.)
Unemployment rate:
2.8% (2017 est.)
Ease of Doing Business Rank
179th
Budget:
revenues:
$382.7 million
expenditures:
$711.4 million, including capital expenditures of NA (2004 est.)
Industries:
bauxite, gold, diamonds; alumina refining; light manufacturing and agricultural processing industries
Industrial production growth rate:
8% (2017 est.)
Electricity – production:
1 billion kWh (2015 est.)
Electricity – production by source:
fossil fuel:
63.55%
hydro:
36.45%
nuclear:
0%
other:
0% (1998)
Electricity – consumption:
930 million kWh (2015 est.)
Electricity – exports:
0 kWh (2016)
Electricity – imports:
0 kWh (2016)
Agriculture – products:
rice, coffee, pineapples, palm kernels, cassava (tapioca), bananas, sweet potatoes; cattle, sheep, goats; timber
Exports:
$2.115 billion (2017 est.)
Exports – commodities:
bauxite, alumina, gold, diamonds, coffee, fish, agricultural products
Exports – partners:
China 35.8%, Ghana 20.1%, UAE 11.6%, India 4.3% (2017)
Imports:
$2.475 billion (2017 est.)
Imports – commodities:
petroleum products, metals, machinery, transport equipment, textiles, grain and other foodstuffs (1997)
Imports – partners:
Netherlands 17.2%, China 13.2%, India 11.8%, Belgium 10%, France 6.9%, UAE 4.5% (2017)
Debt – external:
$1.53 billion (31 December 2017 est.)
Economic aid – recipient:
$359.2 million (1998)
Currency:
1 Guinean franc (GNF) = 100 centimes
See also
Trade unions in Guinea
Central Bank of the Republic of Guinea
Guinean franc
United Nations Economic Commission for Africa
Further reading
References
External links
(ECOWAS) Economic Community of West African States
Guinea economic analysis.
West African Agricultural Market Observer/Observatoire du Marché Agricole (RESIMAO), a project of the West-African Market Information Network (WAMIS-NET), provides live market and commodity prices from fifty seven regional and local public agricultural markets across Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea, Niger, Mali, Senegal, Togo, and Nigeria. Sixty commodities are tracked weekly. The project is run by the Benin Ministry of Agriculture, and a number of European, African, and United Nations agencies.
Encyclopedia of the Nations article on "Guinea – Mining"
Guinea latest trade data on ITC Trade Map
Guinea
Guinea | [
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12182 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications%20in%20Guinea | Telecommunications in Guinea | Telecommunications in Guinea include radio, television, fixed and mobile radio, and the Internet.
The people of Guinea are among the poorest in West Africa and this reality is reflected in the development of the country's telecommunications environment. Radio is the most important source of information for the public in Guinea, and the only one to reach the entire country.
There is a single government-owned radio network, a growing number of private radio stations, and one government TV station. The fixed telephone system is inadequate, with just 18,000 lines to serve the country's 10.5 million inhabitants in 2012. Internet usage is very low, reaching just 1.5% of the population in 2012.
Radio and television
Radio remains the most important source of information for the public, and the only one to reach the entire country. The government licensed the country's first private broadcasters in 2006.
Radio stations:
one state-run radio broadcast station, Radio Télévision Guinéenne (RTG); RTG also operates several stations in rural areas; there are a steadily increasing number of privately owned radio stations, nearly all in the capital, Conakry; and about a dozen community radio stations (2011);
4 AM, 8 FM, and 3 shortwave (1998).
Radios: 357,000 (1997).
Television stations:
one state-run TV station, Radio Télévision Guinéenne (RTG); foreign TV programming is available via satellite and cable subscription services (2011);
6 TV stations (1997).
Television sets: 85,000 (1997).
State censorship
The government maintains marginal control over broadcast media, the media laws promulgated following the 2010 democratic transition have not been implemented, and there are reports of state censorship through journalist harassment and station closures. For example:
On 26 August 2012, the National Communication Council (CNC) suspended private radio station Liberte FM, based in the Forest Region city of N’Zerekore. The closure prevented Liberte FM from covering protests announced by opposition leaders for the following day. The national government allowed Liberty FM to reopen 48 hours later, after the protests concluded.
On 1 October 2012, Electricity of Guinea cut service to Espace FM, host of the investigative reporting radio program "The Big Mouths." The utility company claimed that Espace FM and its sister station, Sweet FM, collectively owed nearly 150 million GNF ($21,521) for electricity bills, despite the station's possession of payment receipts. Both stations were forced to operate on expensive generator power.
The government has been accused of penalizing stations and journalists who broadcast items criticizing government officials and their actions. Some journalists accuse government officials of attempting to influence the tone of their reporting with inappropriate pressure and bribes. Some journalists also hire bodyguards, and many practice self-censorship.
Telephones
Calling code: +224
International call prefix: 00
Main lines:
18,000 lines in use, 115th in the world (2012);
11,000 lines in use (1995).
Mobile cellular:
12,394 million lines,(2019).
790,000 lines (2007).
Telephone system: inadequate system of open-wire lines, small radiotelephone communication stations, and a new microwave radio relay system; Conakry reasonably well-served; coverage elsewhere remains inadequate and large companies tend to rely on their own systems for nationwide links; fixed-line teledensity less than 1 per 100 persons; mobile-cellular subscribership is expanding and exceeds 40 per 100 persons (2011).
Satellite earth stations: 1 Intelsat (Atlantic Ocean) (2011).
Communications cables: African Coast to Europe (ACE) submarine communications cable, which has a landing point in Conakry, links 23 countries along the west coast of Africa and on to Portugal and France.
Internet
Top-level domain: .gn
Internet users:
4,563 million users; 38% of the population (2019),
3,131 million users; 27% of the population (2017)
2,147 million users; 20% of the population (2014)
Fixed broadband: 762 subscriptions, 183rd in the world; less than 0.05% of population, 189th in the world (2012).
Wireless broadband: Unknown (2012).
Internet hosts: 15 hosts, 223rd in the world (2012).
IPv4: 4,096 addresses allocated, less than 0.05% of the world total, 0.4 addresses per 1000 people (2012).
Internet Service Providers: several ISPs including SKYVISON, ETI Bull, and Vizocom.
Internet censorship and surveillance
There are no government restrictions on access to the Internet or credible reports that the government monitors e-mail or Internet chat rooms without judicial oversight.
The constitution and law provide for freedom of speech and of the press, but the government, nevertheless, restricts these freedoms. Libel against the head of state, slander, and false reporting are subject to heavy fines. Some journalists accuse government officials of attempting to influence the tone of their reporting with inappropriate pressure and bribes. Some journalists hire bodyguards, and many practice self-censorship. Although the constitution and law provide for the inviolability of the home and legal searches require judicial search warrants, police reportedly ignore legal procedures in the pursuit of criminal suspects or when it serves their personal interests.
See also
Radio Télévision Guinéenne (RTG), the national broadcaster of Guinea.
References
External links
.gn domain registration website. | [
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12183 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport%20in%20Guinea | Transport in Guinea | Transport in Guinea is composed by a variety of systems that people in the country use to get around as well as to and from domestic and international destinations. The railway from Conakry to Kankan ceased operating in the mid-1980s. Most vehicles in Guinea are 20+ years old, and cabs are any four-door vehicle which the owner has designated as being for hire. Domestic air services are intermittent. Conakry International Airport is the largest airport in the country, with flights to other cities in Africa as well as to Europe.
Locals, nearly entirely without vehicles of their own, rely upon these taxis (which charge per seat) and small buses to take them around town and across the country. There is some river traffic on the Niger and Milo rivers. Horses and donkeys pull carts, primarily to transport construction materials.
Iron mining at Simandou (South) in the southeast beginning in 2007 and at Kalia in the east is likely to result in the construction of a new heavy-duty standard gauge railway and deepwater port. Iron mining at Simandou (North) will load to a new port near Buchanan, Liberia, in exchange for which rehabilitation of the Conakry to Kankan line will occur.
Railways
total:
1,086 km
standard gauge:
279 km gauge
metre gauge:
807 km gauge (includes 662 km in common carrier service from Kankan to Conakry)
The lines do not all connect.
Cities served by rail
Santou - Dapilo
This 125 km long Standard Gauge railway connects bauxite mines at Boffa with a new port at Boké, both places in the north of Guinea.
A Joint Venture has already launched the $US 3bn Boffa – Boké Project which a 125km line from the Dapilon River Terminal to new mining areas of Santou II and Houda. There are 2 tunnels.
This line opened in 28-06-2021.
See: Boffa-Boke Railway
Northern line
This line is gauge (standard gauge) and carries about per annum.
Port Kamsar - port
Boké
Crossing with proposed B B line. Both 1435mm gauge. By bridge or by level crossing.
Rail Sangarédi - bauxite mine
Central line
This line is gauge and head off in a northwestern direction.
Conakry - capital and port.
Dubréka
Fria - bauxite mine
Southern line
This line is gauge. Conversion to gauge has been proposed.
Conakry - capital and port.
Kindia - provincial capital.
Kolèntèn
Konkouré - several km north of railway
Mamou - provincial capital
Kégnégo
Dabola - junction and break of gauge
Bissikrima
Cisséla -
Kouroussa - bridge over Niger River
Kankan - terminus and provincial capital.
This line is .
Dabola - junction and break of gauge
Tougué - bauxite
South Western line
This line is and parallels the Southern line.
Conakry - capital and port. Rail Map (red dots) Rail Map (gray lines)
Kindia - bauxite mine.
Proposed South Trans-Guinean Railway
The heavy duty Transguinean Railways is about 650 km long and would be (standard gauge). It goes from iron ore mines in the south east and bauxite mines in the north to a new port a Matakong.
Matakong - Deep water port
Forécariah
Madina Woula - way station
Bambafouga - junction
Marela - way station
Faranah
Tiro
Kissidougou - way station
Macenta
Koule
Nzerekore
Lola
Simandou iron ore deposit near Diéké
Nimba - iron ore
Pontiola - bauxite
Tougué - branch terminus - bauxite
Timeline
2019
Télimélé - Boffa
2008
July 2008 - wobbles over Simandou leases
four ex-Croatian locomotives refurbished and regauged in Russia
1994
Progress
Statistics
Length
Highways
total:
30,500 km
paved:
5,033 km
unpaved:
25,467 km (1996 est.)
The Trans–West African Coastal Highway crosses Guinea, connecting it to Bissau (Guinea-Bissau), and when construction in Sierra Leone and Liberia is complete, to a total of 13 other nations of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).
Waterways
1,295 km navigable by shallow-draft native craft
Ports and harbors
Boké, Conakry, Kamsar
Merchant marine
none (1999 est.)
Airports
15 (1999 est.)
Airports - with paved runways
total:
5
over 3,047 m:
1
2,438 to 3,047 m:
1
1,524 to 2,437 m:
3 (1999 est.)
The airport code for the capital, Conakry, is CKY.
Airports - with unpaved runways
total:
10
1,524 to 2,437 m:
5
914 to 1,523 m:
4
under 914 m:
1 (1999 est.)
See also
Economy of Guinea
References
External links
Google maps Conakry International Airport, Conakry, Guinea
Aviation Safety CKY Guinea
AZ World Airports Guinea | [
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12184 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic%20of%20Guinea%20Armed%20Forces | Republic of Guinea Armed Forces | The Republic of Guinea Armed Forces () are the armed forces of Guinea. They are responsible for the territorial security of Guinea's border and the defence of the country against external attack and aggression.
Guinea's armed forces are divided into five branches – army, navy, air force, the paramilitary National Gendarmerie and the Republican Guard – whose chiefs report to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who is subordinate to the Minister of Defense. In addition, regime security forces include the National Police Force (Sûreté National). The Gendarmerie, responsible for internal security, has a strength of several thousand, and is armed with military equipment. It is aided by the Republican Guard, which provides protection for government officials.
History
Upon independence in 1958, France cut all ties and immediately began to repatriate Guinean soldiers serving in the French Army. Of the about 22,000 Guinean soldiers in French service, about 10,000 decided to remain with France. The other 12,000 were demobilised and returned to Guinea. The new armed forces were formed by incorporating some of the former French soldiers, after a careful screening process to determine political reliability, with members of the former territorial Gendarmie to form the People's Army of Guinea (L'Armee Populaire de Guinee). By the end of January 1959 the new army had reached a strength of around 2,000 officers and soldiers.
In February 1969, the Guinean government moved against the armed forces after alleging that a plot centred in Labé, the centre of the Fula (; ) homeland was planning to assassinate Toure and seize power, or, failing that, force the secession of Middle Guinea. This followed military dissatisfaction over the creation of a PDG control element in each army unit. Later the alleged Fula connection was dropped, the accusations widened to other groups, and over 1,000 Guineans arrested. After the plot, the army was regarded by the government as a centre of potential subversion, and the militia was developed as a counterforce to any military threat to the government.
The army resisted the Portuguese invasion of Guinea in November 1970. Purges that followed the 1970 invasion decimated the upper ranks of the army, with eight officers sentenced to death and 900 officers and men who had reached a certain age retired from active duty. General Noumandian Keita, chief of the Combined Arms General Staff, was convicted and replaced by the army's chief of staff, Namory Kieta, who was promoted to general.
In March 1971 elements of the Guinean military were deployed to Freetown in Sierra Leone after the Sierra Leonean President, Siaka Stevens, appeared to start losing his control of the Sierra Leonean military. Stevens visited Conakry on 19 March 1971, and soon afterwards, around 200 Guinean soldiers were despatched to Freetown. Two Guinean MiGs made a low flyover of Freetown and Touré placed the Guinean military on alert 'because of the serious troubles affecting the fraternal peoples of Sierra Leone.' The force, also reported as numbering 300, protected Stevens, though it was shortly reduced to 100 and then to fifty, plus a helicopter. The last Guinean troops were withdrawn in 1974.
In early 1975 the Guinean military consisted of an army of around 5,000, an air force of 300, and a naval component of around 200. The army comprised four infantry battalions, one armoured battalion, and one engineer battalion. In the early 1970s the armed forces were organised into four military zones, corresponding to the four geographical regions (Lower Guinea, Middle Guinea, Upper Guinea, and Guinée forestière). One of the four infantry battalions was assigned to each of the military zones. The zone headquarters also doubled as battalion headquarters, and acted as a supervisory element for elements of company and platoon size assigned to each of the country's twenty-nine administrative regions.
The only concentration of troops in Conakry appeared to be the armoured battalion, with a modest number of Soviet medium tanks manufactured in the late 1940s, as well as Soviet APCs, and elements of the engineer battalion. The armed forces, though formally responsible for defending the country's territorial integrity, were really during that period focused upon national development tasks, including agricultural, industrial, and construction tasks. The engineer battalion had companies in Conakry, Kankan, and Boké, and was engaged in constructing and repairing buildings and roads.
The Militia
Increasing mistrust of the regular armed forces after the Labé plot led to the militia assuming greater importance. The militia had grown out of a 1961 Democratic Party of Guinea (PDG) decision to create workplace 'committees for the defence of the revolution.' These committees were encouraged by party officials to report dishonest practices such as theft and embezzlement of funds which might 'endanger the achievements of the revolution.'
The PDG youth arm, the Youth of the African Democratic Revolution (JRDA) was especially exhorted to report irregularities and crime to party or police authorities. Units of volunteers, formed in response to this call, assumed limited policing functions. Following government praise for these units' efforts, the militia's role expanded, especially as black-market activity and smuggling grew worse. The force was formalized as the Popular Militia (Milices Populaires) in the early 1960s, given distinctive uniforms, and linked to the developing civic service, which was engaged on national development tasks. After 1966 it was consciously modeled after the Chinese Red Guards.
In 1969, the militia was officially granted a role equivalent to the army, as a counterbalance in any military coup d'état. The elements in the Conakry area were issued small arms and given military training. Touré had heralded this policy in 1967 when he wrote: 'thanks to their special political, physical, and social training, the people's militia will become the indisputable mainspring of our security system, of which the conventional armed forces constitute [but] a fundamental section.'
The militia was re-titled the National and Popular Militia in 1974 and its regular section scaled down, as the President announced that the country could not afford the large standing force that he believed was necessary to deter what he saw as the constant threat of invasion. The militia was re-organised in multiple tiers, with a staff in Conakry, some combat units, and the remainder of the permanent element serving as a cadre for reserve militia units in villages, industrial sites, and schools.
The permanent cadre was to circulate among the villages, spending three months in each one, to train the local militia. President Touré announced that the ultimate goal was to have a 100-strong paramilitary unit in each of the country's 4,000 villages. Infantry weapons of Soviet manufacture imported from the USSR, Czechoslovakia and the PRC were to be issued as they became available.
With much focus on the militia, Touré kept much of the armed forces in poverty. The International Crisis Group said that '..conditions of service were deplorable, even for officers. The senior officer corps lived on meagre rations and saw its privileges and family allowances curtailed over time. Soldiers of all ranks had to find ways to supplement their rations and were often reduced to working either on state farms or in small agricultural projects.' '...All regular military activity, for example exercises, was considered potentially subversive.'
Command appointments under Sékou Touré, March 1984
Source: Mamadou Kaly Bah, Regard Rétrospectif sur l'Armée Guinéenne, 1 November 1993
Joint Headquarters (Chef : Général Toya Condé)
Army Headquarters (Chef : Général Soma; Adjoint : Colonel Lansana Conté)
Zone militaire de Kindia (Commandant : Capitaine Babacar N'Diaye)
Zone militaire de Boké (Commandant : Cdt. Finando Tiani)
Zone militaire de Labé (Commandant : Cdt. Lancei Camara)
Zone militaire de Kankan (Commandant : Cdt. Mory Traoré)
Zone militaire de Faranah (Commandant : Cdt. Noumoukè Keita)
Zone militaire de Nzérékoré (Commandant : Idrissa Condé)
Bataillon du Quartier Général (Camp Almamy Samory Touré) (Commandant : Capitaine Kerfalla Camara)
Conakry Spécial Battalion (Camp Alfa Yaya Diallo) (Commandant : Cdt. Sidiki Condé)
Tank Battalion (Commandant : Capitaine Baourou Condé)
Bataillon des Troupes aéroportées (Parachutistes) (Commandant : Capitaine Lanciné Fangama Kéita)
Air Force Headquarters (Chef : Cdt. Abdourahmane Kéita)
Navy Headquarters (Chef : Capitaine Mohamed Lamine Sacko)
National Gendarmerie Headquarters (Chef : Cdt. Makan Camara)
Popular Militia Headquarters (Chef : Capitaine Mamadi Bayo )
The 1980s and Conté
On 3 April 1984, following Touré's death, Lansana Conté, assistant chief of staff of the army, led a coup d'état which toppled the interim head of state. A military junta, the CMRN, was installed, which started to feud within itself, and quickly, as had occurred under the Touré regime, the paramount national security concern became the preservation of the president's power. Conté had to suppress his first revolt in July 1985, by his immediate deputy, Colonel Diarra Traoré.
Regional conflicts in the 1990s and 2000–2001 attacks along the southern border by rebels acting as proxies for Liberia's Charles Taylor had important effects on the security forces. The Conté government was deeply involved in the First Liberian Civil War as it supported ULIMO, the major grouping opposing Taylor in Liberia. Yet on the other side of the border the Guinean government also contributed troops to the ill-fated ECOWAS peacekeeping force ECOMOG in Liberia. After ECOMOG departed in 1997–98, the Guinean government began supporting the new Liberian rebel movement LURD. Attacks by Taylor-backed rebels in 2000-01 were partially an attempt to stop this support.
More serious was a 1996 attempted coup that originated as a military mutiny caused by the armed forces' poor living conditions. Conté, 'civilianised' since a rigged election in 1993, had to make significant concessions in order to save his regime. Conté appointed his first civilian Minister of Defense in 1997.
The military was used three times in 2006–2007 to suppress popular protest: in June 2006, resulting in 16 deaths, on 22 January 2007, when it fired on protesters at the 9 November Bridge in Conakry, killing over 100, and on 9 February 2007, when it killed several more protesters.
The military suffered serious unrest in 2008. Among measures taken by Conte to try and shore up his support within the military after 2007 was the transfer of the 'popular Sékouba Konaté to Conakry to head the parachute Autonomous Battalion of Airborne Troops (French acronym BATA) in an attempt to calm the troops.' However, these and other measures failed to stop the coup d'état led by Moussa Dadis Camara in late December 2008.
In January 2009 a CNDD ordonnance combined four elite units of the Guinean armed forces - the presidential guards, the Bataillon Autonome des Troupes Aéroportées (BATA), the Battaillon des Commandos de Kindia (popularly known as the 'Commandos Chinois') and the Battaillon des Rangers - into a combined commando regiment.
On 28 September 2009, in what became known as the 'Bloody Monday' massacre/2009 Guinea protest, Amnesty International said that Guinea security forces killed more than 150 people and raped over 40 women during and following the protests. More than 1,500 people were wounded and many people went missing or were detained. As of early 2010, AI said that at least two senior military officers named by the United Nations as potentially having individual criminal responsibility for events constituting crimes against humanity, remain in positions of influence in the Guinean Presidential Cabinet, despite the formation of a new transitional government.
The International Crisis Group said in September 2010 that from 2001 to 2009 the size of the armed forces has risen dramatically from 10,000 in 2001 to a reported 45,000 in 2010 (though the latter figure needs to be treated with great caution.) 'This rapid growth has resulted from both formal and informal recruitment. Erratic mass promotions have created an inverted structure, with more officers than simple soldiers, eroding professionalism and straining the defence budget. Indiscipline, criminality and impunity are rife, while working and living conditions for rank-and-file soldiers are deplorable.'
Composition
Air Force
After achieving independence from France in 1958, the Force Aerienne de Guinea was formed with Soviet assistance in the delivery of 10 MiG-17F fighters and two MiG-15UTI trainers. In the same era an An-2, An-12, An-14, Il-14 and Il-18V transports were delivered, Mil Mi-4 helicopters also entered service. Other eastern bloc deliveries included three Aero L-29 jet trainers, six Yak-11s and Romania contributed licensed built IAR-316 Alouette III and two IAR-330L Puma transport helicopters. Further Soviet aid was requested when Conakry Airport was opened for use by Soviet Naval Aviation maritime reconnaissance aircraft. This resulted in the delivery of eight MiG-21PFMs and a MiG-21U in 1986 to replace the remaining MiG-17s.
Inventory
Army
There are four military regions - the 1st RM: Kindia; 2nd RM: Labé; 3rd RM: Kankan; 4ème RM: Nzérékoré, plus the Conakry special zone.
Equipment reportedly includes 30 T-34 tanks, 8 T-54 tanks (IISS 2012), and PT-76 light tanks (15 reported in service by International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) Military Balance 2012).
The IISS Military Balance 2020 listed the Army as comprising 8,500 personnel, with one armoured battalion, one special forces battalion, five infantry battalions, one ranger battalion, one commando battalion, one air mobile battalion, and the Presidential Guard battalion.
Weapons
Source: IISS Military Balance 2021, 470. Not comprehensive.
Navy
The navy has about 900 personnel and operates several small patrol craft and barges.
References
Further reading
International Crisis Group, 'Guinee: Incertitudes autour d'une fin de regne', ICG Africa Report No. 74, 19 December 2003.
Dominique Bangoura, La Guinée, in Alan Bryden, Boubacar N'Diaye, Security Sector Governance in Francophone West Africa: Realities and Opportunities, DCAF/Lit Verlag, 2011. Probably the most recent definitive account on the security sector.
Mohamed Tétémadi Bangoura, Dominique Bangoura, Gouvernance et réforme du secteur de la sécurité en Guinée: Défis démocratiques et de refondation, Editions L'Harmattan, 2010, , 9782296255449.
Military of Guinea
de:Guinea#Streitkräfte | [
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12185 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign%20relations%20of%20Guinea | Foreign relations of Guinea | The foreign relations of Guinea, including those with its West African neighbors, have improved steadily since 1985.
Diplomatic history
Guinea re-established relations with France and West Germany in 1975, and with neighboring Ivory Coast and Senegal in 1978. Guinea has been active in efforts toward regional integration and cooperation, especially regarding the Organisation of African Unity and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).
Guinea has participated in both diplomatic and military efforts to resolve conflicts in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea-Bissau, and contributed contingents of troops to peacekeeping operations in all three countries as part of ECOMOG, the Military Observer Group of ECOWAS. In the 1990s, Guinea hosted almost a million refugees fleeing the civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia. As of 2004, Guinea maintained a policy of unrestricted admission to refugees.
Guinea is also a member of the International Criminal Court with a Bilateral Immunity Agreement of protection for the United States military (as covered under Article 98).
2009 ambassador recall
On 5 May 2009, President Moussa Dadis Camara, who seized power in a bloodless coup which followed the 22 December 2008 death of President Lansana Conté, announced the recall of 30 of Guinea's ambassadors to other countries. The order was made by a presidential decree on state television and was the first major diplomatic move made by the new leader.
The decision affected ambassadors to the United States, South Korea, the People's Republic of China, France, the United Kingdom, Russia, Egypt, South Africa, Italy, Japan, Brazil, Cuba, Switzerland, Serbia, Malaysia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Senegal, Nigeria, Libya, Ghana, Algeria, Morocco, Gabon, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau, comprising almost all of Guinea's foreign embassies. The Guinean representatives to the European Union, the United Nations and the African Union were also affected.
No reason was stated for the recall. The Tocqueville Connection states: "Most of the ambassadors were appointed by former prime minister Lansana Kouyaté, in office from February 2007 until May 2008," raising the possibility that the recall was an attempt on the part of Camara to distance himself from the previous government.
In late March 2009, the Guinean ambassador to Serbia faced expulsion for personal involvement in cigarette smuggling (1,000 packs of cigarettes were found in his BMW) but avoided arrest due to diplomatic immunity (although he was declared as persona non grata).
2021 coup d'etat
The September 5, 2021 coup d'etat brought swift condemnation and threats of sanctions from the United Nations, the African Union, the West African regional bloc ECOWAS (which suspended Guinea), and close allies of Guinea—as well as the United States—among others. China, uncharacteristically, also openly opposed the coup.
Bilateral relations
See also
List of diplomatic missions in Guinea
List of diplomatic missions of Guinea
References | [
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12186 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinea-Bissau | Guinea-Bissau | Guinea-Bissau (; , , Mandinka: ߖߌߣߍ ߺ ߓߌߛߊߥߏ߫ Gine-Bisawo), officially the Republic of Guinea-Bissau ( ), is a country in West Africa that covers with an estimated population of 1,726,000. It borders Senegal to the north and Guinea to the south-east.
Guinea-Bissau was once part of the kingdom of Kaabu, as well as part of the Mali Empire. Parts of this kingdom persisted until the 18th century, while a few others were under some rule by the Portuguese Empire since the 16th century. In the 19th century, it was colonised as Portuguese Guinea. Upon independence, declared in 1973 and recognised in 1974, the name of its capital, Bissau, was added to the country's name to prevent confusion with Guinea (formerly French Guinea). Guinea-Bissau has a history of political instability since independence, and only one elected president (José Mário Vaz) has successfully served a full five-year term. The current president is Umaro Sissoco Embaló, who was elected on 29 December 2019.
Only about 2% of the population speaks Portuguese, the official language, as a first language, and 33% speak it as a second language. However, Guinea-Bissau Creole, a Portuguese-based creole, is the national language and also considered the language of unity. According to a 2012 study, 54% of the population speak Creole as a first language and about 40% speak it as a second language. The remainder speak a variety of native African languages. There are diverse religions in Guinea-Bissau. Christianity and Islam are the main religions practised in the country. The country's per-capita gross domestic product is one of the lowest in the world.
Guinea-Bissau is a member of the United Nations, African Union, Economic Community of West African States, Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, Community of Portuguese Language Countries, Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, and the South Atlantic Peace and Cooperation Zone, and was a member of the now-defunct Latin Union.
History
Archeology has insufficiently explained the Guinea-Bissau pre-history. In 1000 AD, there were hunter-gatherers in the area, hundreds of thousands of years after they traversed the rest of Africa. This was shortly followed, in the archaeological record, by agriculturists using iron tools.
Guinea-Bissau was once part of the kingdom of Kaabu, part of the Mali Empire in the 16th century. Parts of this kingdom persisted until the 18th century. Other parts of the territory in the current country were considered by the Portuguese as part of their empire. Portuguese Guinea was known as the Slave Coast, as it was a major area for the exportation of African slaves by Europeans to the western hemisphere.
Early reports of Europeans reaching this area include those of the Venetian Alvise Cadamosto's voyage of 1455, the 1479–1480 voyage by Flemish-French trader Eustache de la Fosse, and Diogo Cão. In the 1480s this Portuguese explorer reached the Congo River and the lands of Bakongo, setting up the foundations of modern Angola, some 4200 km down the African coast from Guinea-Bissau.
Although the rivers and coast of this area were among the first places colonized by the Portuguese, who set up trading posts in the 16th century, they did not explore the interior until the 19th century. The local African rulers in Guinea, some of whom prospered greatly from the slave trade, controlled the inland trade and did not allow the Europeans into the interior. They kept them in the fortified coastal settlements where the trading took place. African communities that fought back against slave traders also distrusted European adventurers and would-be settlers. The Portuguese in Guinea were largely restricted to the ports of Bissau and Cacheu. A small number of European settlers established isolated farms along Bissau's inland rivers.
For a brief period in the 1790s, the British tried to establish a rival foothold on an offshore island, at Bolama. But by the 19th century the Portuguese were sufficiently secure in Bissau to regard the neighbouring coastline as their own special territory, also up north in part of present South Senegal.
An armed rebellion, begun in 1956 by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) under the leadership of Amílcar Cabral gradually consolidated its hold on the then Portuguese Guinea. Unlike guerrilla movements in other Portuguese colonies, the PAIGC rapidly extended its military control over large portions of the territory, aided by the jungle-like terrain, its easily reached borderlines with neighbouring allies, and large quantities of arms from Cuba, China, the Soviet Union, and left-leaning African countries. Cuba also agreed to supply artillery experts, doctors, and technicians. The PAIGC even managed to acquire a significant anti-aircraft capability in order to defend itself against aerial attack. By 1973, the PAIGC was in control of many parts of Guinea, although the movement suffered a setback in January 1973 when Cabral was assassinated.
Independence (1973)
Independence was unilaterally declared on 24 September 1973, which is now celebrated as the country's Independence Day, a public holiday. Recognition became universal following 25 April 1974 socialist-inspired military coup in Portugal, which overthrew Lisbon's Estado Novo regime. Nicolae Ceaușescu's Romania was the first country to formally recognise Guinea-Bissau and the first to sign agreements with the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde.
That same time upon independence, Esta É a Nossa Pátria Bem Amada, the national anthem of Guinea-Bissau, was shared alongside Cape Verde, which later adopted its own official national anthem Cântico da Liberdade in 1996, separating it.
Luís Cabral, brother of Amílcar and co-founder of PAIGC, was appointed the first President of Guinea-Bissau. The country was controlled by a revolutionary council until 1984. The first multi-party elections were held in 1994. An army uprising in May 1998 led to the Guinea-Bissau Civil War and the president's ousting in June 1999. Elections were held again in 2000, and Kumba Ialá was elected president.
In September 2003, a military coup was conducted. The military arrested Ialá on the charge of being "unable to solve the problems". After being delayed several times, legislative elections were held in March 2004. A mutiny of military factions in October 2004 resulted in the death of the head of the armed forces and caused widespread unrest.
From Vieira years to present
In June 2005, presidential elections were held for the first time since the coup that deposed Ialá. Ialá returned as the candidate for the PRS, claiming to be the legitimate president of the country, but the election was won by former president João Bernardo Vieira, deposed in the 1999 coup. Vieira beat Malam Bacai Sanhá in a run-off election. Sanhá initially refused to concede, claiming that tampering and electoral fraud occurred in two constituencies including the capital, Bissau.
Despite reports of arms entering the country prior to the election and some "disturbances during campaigning", including attacks on government offices by unidentified gunmen, foreign election monitors described the 2005 election overall as "calm and organized".
Three years later, PAIGC won a strong parliamentary majority, with 67 of 100 seats, in the parliamentary election held in November 2008. In November 2008, President Vieira's official residence was attacked by members of the armed forces, killing a guard but leaving the president unharmed.
On 2 March 2009, however, Vieira was assassinated by what preliminary reports indicated to be a group of soldiers avenging the death of the head of joint chiefs of staff, General Batista Tagme Na Wai, who had been killed in an explosion the day before. Vieira's death did not trigger widespread violence, but there were signs of turmoil in the country, according to the advocacy group Swisspeace. Military leaders in the country pledged to respect the constitutional order of succession. National Assembly Speaker Raimundo Pereira was appointed as an interim president until a nationwide election on 28 June 2009. It was won by Malam Bacai Sanhá of the PAIGC, against Kumba Ialá as the presidential candidate of the PRS.
On 9 January 2012, President Sanhá died of complications from diabetes, and Pereira was again appointed as an interim president. On the evening of 12 April 2012, members of the country's military staged a coup d'état and arrested the interim president and a leading presidential candidate. Former vice chief of staff, General Mamadu Ture Kuruma, assumed control of the country in the transitional period and started negotiations with opposition parties.
José Mário Vaz was the President of Guinea-Bissau from 2014 until 2019 presidential elections. At the end of his term, Vaz became the first elected president to complete his five-year mandate. He lost the 2019 election, however, to Umaro Sissoco Embaló, who took office in February 2020. Embaló is the first president to be elected without the backing of the PAIGC.
On 1 February 2022, there was an attempted coup d'état to overthrow President Umaro Sissoco Embalo. On 2 February 2022, state radio announced that four assailants and two members of the presidential guard had been killed in the incident. The African Union and ECOWAS both condemned the coup. Six days after the attempted coup d'état, on 7 February 2022, there was an attack on the building of Rádio Capital FM, a radio station critical of the Bissau-Guinean government; this was the second time the radio station suffered and attack of this nature in less than two years. A journalist working for the station recalled, while wishing to stay anonymous, that one of their colleagues had recognized one of the cars carrying the attackers as belonging to the Presidency.
Politics
Guinea-Bissau is a republic. In the past, the government had been highly centralized. Multi-party governance was not established until mid-1991. The president is the head of state and the prime minister is the head of government. Since 1974, no president had successfully served a full five-year term, until recently when Jose Mario Vaz ended his five-year term on 24 June 2019.
At the legislative level, a unicameral Assembleia Nacional Popular (National People's Assembly) is made up of 100 members. They are popularly elected from multi-member constituencies to serve a four-year term. The judicial system is headed by a Tribunal Supremo da Justiça (Supreme Court), made up of nine justices appointed by the president; they serve at the pleasure of the president.
The two main political parties are the PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) and the PRS (Party for Social Renewal). There are more than 20 minor parties.
Foreign relations
Guinea-Bissau follows a nonaligned foreign policy and seeks friendly and cooperative relations with a wide variety of states and organisations.
Guinea-Bissau is a founding member state of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP), also known as the Lusophone Commonwealth, and international organisation and political association of Lusophone nations across four continents, where Portuguese is an official language.
Military
A 2019 estimate put the size of the Guinea-Bissau Armed Forces at around 4,400 personnel and military spending is less than 2% of GDP .
In 2018, Guinea-Bissau signed the UN treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Administrative divisions
Guinea-Bissau is divided into eight regions () and one autonomous sector (). These, in turn, are subdivided into 37 Sectors. The regions are:
Geography
Guinea-Bissau is bordered by Senegal to the north and Guinea to the south and east, with the Atlantic Ocean to its west. It lies mostly between latitudes 11° and 13°N (a small area is south of 11°), and longitudes 11° and 15°W.
At , the country is larger in size than Taiwan or Belgium.
The highest point is Monte Torin with an elevation of . Its terrain is mostly low coastal plains with swamps of the Guinean mangroves rising to the Guinean forest-savanna mosaic in the east. Its monsoon-like rainy season alternates with periods of hot, dry harmattan winds blowing from the Sahara. The Bijagos Archipelago lies off of the mainland. The country is home to two ecoregions: Guinean forest-savanna mosaic and Guinean mangroves.
Climate
Guinea-Bissau is warm all year round with mild temperature fluctuations; it averages . The average rainfall for Bissau is , although this is almost entirely accounted for during the rainy season which falls between June and September/October. From December through April, the country experiences drought.
Environmental problems
Severe environmental problems include deforestation, soil erosion, overgrazing, and overfishing. Guinea-Bissau had a 2019 Forest Landscape Integrity Index mean score of 5.7/10, ranking it 97th globally out of 172 countries.
Wildlife
Economy
Guinea-Bissau's GDP per capita is one of the lowest in the world, and its Human Development Index is one of the lowest on earth. More than two-thirds of the population lives below the poverty line. The economy depends mainly on agriculture; fish, cashew nuts, and ground nuts are its major exports.
A long period of political instability has resulted in depressed economic activity, deteriorating social conditions, and increased macroeconomic imbalances. It takes longer on average to register a new business in Guinea-Bissau (233 days or about 33 weeks) than in any other country in the world except Suriname.
Guinea-Bissau has started to show some economic advances after a pact of stability was signed by the main political parties of the country, leading to an IMF-backed structural reform program. The key challenges for the country in the period ahead are to achieve fiscal discipline, rebuild public administration, improve the economic climate for private investment, and promote economic diversification. After the country became independent from Portugal in 1974 due to the Portuguese Colonial War and the Carnation Revolution, the rapid exodus of the Portuguese civilian, military, and political authorities resulted in considerable damage to the country's economic infrastructure, social order, and standard of living.
After several years of economic downturn and political instability, in 1997, Guinea-Bissau entered the CFA franc monetary system, bringing about some internal monetary stability. The civil war that took place in 1998 and 1999, and a military coup in September 2003 again disrupted economic activity, leaving a substantial part of the economic and social infrastructure in ruins and intensifying the already widespread poverty. Following the parliamentary elections in March 2004 and presidential elections in July 2005, the country is trying to recover from the long period of instability, despite a still-fragile political situation.
Beginning around 2005, drug traffickers based in Latin America began to use Guinea-Bissau, along with several neighbouring West African nations, as a transshipment point to Europe for cocaine. The nation was described by a United Nations official as being at risk for becoming a "narco-state". The government and the military have done little to stop drug trafficking, which increased after the 2012 coup d'état.
The government of Guinea-Bissau continues to be ravaged by illegal drug distribution, according to The Week magazine.
Guinea-Bissau is a member of the Organisation for the Harmonisation of Business Law in Africa (OHADA).
Society
Demographics
According to , Guinea-Bissau's population was in , compared to 518,000 in 1950. The proportion of the population below the age of 15 in 2010 was 41.3%, 55.4% were aged between 15 and 65 years of age, while 3.3% were aged 65 years or older.
Ethnic groups
The population of Guinea-Bissau is ethnically diverse and has many distinct languages, customs, and social structures.
Bissau-Guineans can be divided into the following ethnic groups:
Fula and the Mandinka-speaking people, who comprise the largest portion of the population and are concentrated in the north and northeast;
Balanta and Papel people, who live in the southern coastal regions; and
Manjaco and Mancanha, who occupy the central and northern coastal areas.
Most of the remainder are mestiços of mixed Portuguese and African descent.
Portuguese natives comprise a very small percentage of Bissau-Guineans. After Guinea-Bissau gained independence, most of the Portuguese nationals left the country. The country has a tiny Chinese population. These include traders and merchants of mixed Portuguese and Cantonese ancestry from the former Asian Portuguese colony of Macau.
Major cities
Main cities in Guinea-Bissau include:
Languages
Despite being a small country Guinea-Bissau has several ethnic groups which are very distinct from each other, with their own cultures and languages. This is due to Guinea-Bissau being a refugee and migration territory within Africa. Colonisation and racial intermixing brought Portuguese and the Portuguese creole known as Kriol or crioulo.
Although the only official language of Guinea-Bissau since independence, Standard Portuguese is spoken mostly as a second language, with few native speakers and its use is often confined to the intellectual and political elites. It is the language of government and national communication as a legacy of colonial rule. Schooling from the primary to tertiary levels is conducted in Portuguese, although only 67% of children have access to any formal education. Data suggests that the number of Portuguese speakers ranges from 11 to 15%. In the latest census (2009) 27.1% of the population claimed to speak non-creole Portuguese (46.3% of city dwellers and 14.7% of the rural population, respectively). Portuguese creole is spoken by 44% of the population and is effectively the lingua franca among distinct groups for most of the population. Creole's usage is still expanding, and it is understood by the vast majority of the population. However, decreolisation processes are occurring, due to undergoing interference from Standard Portuguese and the creole forms a continuum of varieties with the standard language, the most distant are basilects and the closer ones, acrolects. A post-creole continuum exists in Guinea-Bissau and crioulo 'leve' ('soft' creole) variety being closer to the Portuguese-language norm.
The remaining rural population speaks a variety of native African languages unique to each ethnicity: Fula (16%), Balanta (14%), Mandinka (7%), Manjak (5%), Papel (3%), Felupe (1%), Beafada (0.7%), Bijagó (0.3%), and Nalu (0.1%), which form the ethnic African languages spoken by the population. Most Portuguese and Mestiços speakers also have one of the African languages and Kriol as additional languages. Ethnic African languages are not discouraged, in any situation, despite their lower prestige. These languages are the link between individuals of the same ethnic background and daily used in villages, between neighbours or friends, traditional and religious ceremonies, and also used in contact between the urban and rural populations. However, none of these languages are dominant in Guinea-Bissau.
French is taught as a foreign language in schools, because Guinea-Bissau is surrounded by French-speaking nations. Guinea-Bissau is a full member of the Francophonie.
Religion
There are different reports of religious demographics. The CIA World Factbook has a 2020 estimate of 46.1% Muslim, 30.6% folk religions, 18.9% Christian, 4.4% other or unaffiliated. In 2010, a Pew Research survey found that the primary affiliation of the population is 45.1% Muslim and 19.7% Christian, with 30.9% Folk religion and 4.3 for other affiliations. A 2015 Pew-Templeton study claims a different distribution in 2010, consisting of 45.1% Muslim, 30.9% folk religions, 19.7% Christians, and 4.3% unaffiliated.
According to another Pew report, concerning religious identity among Muslims, it was determined that in Guinea-Bissau there is no prevailing sectarian identity. Under this same category were other Sub-Saharan countries like Tanzania, Uganda, Liberia, Nigeria and Cameroon. Other nations around the world claimed to be either predominantly Just Muslim, Mix of Sunni and Shia, or predominantly Sunni (pg. 30). This Pew research also stated that countries in this specific study that declared to not have any clear dominant sectarian identity were mostly concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa. Another Pew report, The Future of World Religions, predicts that from 2010 to 2050 Islam will increase its percent of the population in Guinea-Bissau.
Many residents practice syncretic forms of Islamic and Christian faiths, combining their practices with traditional African beliefs. Muslims dominate the north and east, while Christians dominate the south and coastal regions. The Roman Catholic Church claims most of the Christian community.
Health
Education
Education is compulsory from the age of 7 to 13. Pre-school education for children between three and six years of age is optional and in its early stages. There are five levels of education: pre-school, elemental and complementary basic education, general and complementary secondary education, general secondary education, technical and professional teaching, and higher education (university and non-universities). Basic education is under reform, and now forms a single cycle, comprising 6 years of education. Secondary education is widely available and there are two cycles (7th to 9th classe and 10th to 11th classe). Professional education in public institutions is nonoperational, however private school offerings opened, including the Centro de Formação São João Bosco (since 2004) and the Centro de Formação Luís Inácio Lula da Silva (since 2011).
Higher education is limited and most prefer to be educated abroad, with students preferring to enroll in Portugal. A number of universities, to which an institutionally autonomous Faculty of Law as well as a Faculty of Medicine
Child labor is very common. The enrollment of boys is higher than that of girls. In 1998, the gross primary enrollment rate was 53.5%, with higher enrollment ratio for males (67.7%) compared to females (40%).
Non-formal education is centered on community schools and the teaching of adults. In 2011, the literacy rate was estimated at 55.3% (68.9% male, and 42.1% female).
Conflicts
Usually, the many different ethnic groups in Guinea-Bissau coexist peacefully, but when conflicts do erupt, they tend to revolve around access to land.
Culture
Media
Music
The music of Guinea-Bissau is usually associated with the polyrhythmic gumbe genre, the country's primary musical export. However, civil unrest and other factors have combined over the years to keep gumbe, and other genres, out of mainstream audiences, even in generally syncretist African countries.
The cabasa is the primary musical instrument of Guinea-Bissau, and is used in extremely swift and rhythmically complex dance music. Lyrics are almost always in Guinea-Bissau Creole, a Portuguese-based creole language, and are often humorous and topical, revolving around current events and controversies.
The word gumbe is sometimes used generically, to refer to any music of the country, although it most specifically refers to a unique style that fuses about ten of the country's folk music traditions. Tina and tinga are other popular genres, while extent folk traditions include ceremonial music used in funerals, initiations, and other rituals, as well as Balanta brosca and kussundé, Mandinga djambadon, and the kundere sound of the Bissagos Islands.
Cuisine
Rice is a staple in the diet of residents near the coast and millet a staple in the interior. Fruits and vegetables are commonly eaten along with cereal grains. The Portuguese encouraged peanut production. Vigna subterranea (Bambara groundnut) and Macrotyloma geocarpum (Hausa groundnut) are also grown. Black-eyed peas are also part of the diet. Palm oil is harvested.
Common dishes include soups and stews. Common ingredients include yams, sweet potato, cassava, onion, tomato, and plantain. Spices, peppers, and chilis are used in cooking, including Aframomum melegueta seeds (Guinea pepper).
Film
Flora Gomes is an internationally renowned film director; his most famous film is Nha Fala (). Gomes's Mortu Nega (Death Denied) (1988) was the first fiction film and the second feature film ever made in Guinea-Bissau. (The first feature film was N’tturudu, by director in 1987.) At FESPACO 1989, Mortu Nega won the prestigious Oumarou Ganda Prize. In 1992, Gomes directed Udju Azul di Yonta, which was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival. Gomes has also served on the boards of many Africa-centric film festivals. The actress Babetida Sadjo was born in Bafatá, Guinea-Bissau.
Sports
Football is the most popular sport in Guinea-Bissau. The Guinea-Bissau national football team is controlled by the Federação de Futebol da Guiné-Bissau. They are a member of the Confederation of African Football (CAF) and FIFA. Other football clubs include Desportivo Quelele, FC Catacumba, FC Catacumba São Domingos, FC Cupelaoo Gabu, FC Djaraf, FC Prabis, and FC Babaque.
See also
Outline of Guinea-Bissau
Index of Guinea-Bissau-related articles
References
Further reading
Abdel Malek, K.,"Le processus d'accès à l'indépendance de la Guinée-Bissau", In : Bulletin de l'Association des Anciens Elèves de l'Institut National de Langues et de Cultures Orientales, N°1, Avril 1998. – pp. 53–60
Forrest, Joshua B., Lineages of State Fragility. Rural Civil Society in Guinea-Bissau (Ohio University Press/James Currey Ltd., 2003)
Galli, Rosemary E, Guinea Bissau: Politics, Economics and Society, (Pinter Pub Ltd., 1987)
Lobban Jr., Richard Andrew and Mendy, Peter Karibe, Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Guinea-Bissau, third edition (Scarecrow Press, 1997)
Vigh, Henrik, Navigating Terrains of War: Youth And Soldiering in Guinea-Bissau, (Berghahn Books, 2006)
External links
Link collection related to Guinea-Bissau on bolama.net
Country Profile from BBC News
Guinea-Bissau. The World Factbook. Central Intelligence Agency.
Guinea-Bissau from UCB Libraries GovPubs
Guinea-Bissau at Encyclopædia Britannica
Key Development Forecasts for Guinea-Bissau from International Futures
Government
Constitution of the Republic of Guinea-Bissau
Guinea-Bissau: Prime Minister’s fate unknown after apparent military coup – West Africa – Portuguese American Journal
Guinea-Bissau Holds First Post-Coup Election
Trade
Guinea-Bissau 2005 Summary Trade Statistics
News media
news headline links from AllAfrica.com
Tourism
Guinea-Bissau Turismo – RIOS AND LAGOONS
Health
The State of the World's Midwifery – Guinea-Bissau Country Profile
GIS information
Master Thesis about the developing Geographical Information for Guinea-Bissau
Economic Community of West African States
Former Portuguese colonies
Least developed countries
Member states of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie
Member states of the African Union
Member states of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries
Member states of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation
Current member states of the United Nations
Portuguese-speaking countries and territories
Republics
States and territories established in 1974
West African countries
Small Island Developing States
1974 establishments in Guinea-Bissau
Countries in Africa | [
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12187 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History%20of%20Guinea-Bissau | History of Guinea-Bissau | Guinea-Bissau was dominated by Portugal from the 1450s to the 1970s; since independence in 1974, the country was controlled by a single-party system until 1991. Following the introduction of multi-party politics in 1991, the first multi-party elections were held in 1994.
European rule
Struggle for independence
Amílcar Cabral was assassinated in Conakry in 1973, and party leadership fell to Aristides Pereira, who later became the first president of the Republic of Cape Verde. The PAIGC National Assembly met at Boe in the southeastern region and declared the independence of Guinea-Bissau on 24 September 1973 and was recognized by a 93–7 UN General Assembly vote in November.
Independence from Portugal
Following Portugal's April 1974 Carnation Revolution, it granted independence to Guinea-Bissau on 10 September 1974. Luís Cabral, Amílcar Cabral's half-brother, became President. In late 1980, the government was overthrown in a coup led by Prime Minister and former armed forces commander João Bernardo Vieira.
The United States recognised Guinea Bissau's independence on 10 September 1974.
Democracy
In 1994, 20 years after independence from Portugal, the country's first multiparty legislative and presidential elections were held. An army uprising that triggered the Guinea-Bissau Civil War in 1998, created hundreds of thousands of displaced persons. The president was ousted by a military junta on 7 May 1999. An interim government turned over power in February 2000 when opposition leader Kumba Ialá took office following two rounds of transparent presidential elections. Guinea-Bissau's transition back to democracy has been complicated by a crippled economy devastated by civil war and the military's predilection for governmental meddling.
Despite reports that there had been an influx of arms in the weeks leading up to the election and reports of some 'disturbances during campaigning' – including attacks on the presidential palace and the Interior Ministry by as-yet-unidentified gunmen – European monitors labelled the election as "calm and organized".
In January 2000, the second round of a general election took place. The presidential election resulted in a victory for opposition leader Kumba Ialá of the Party for Social Renewal (PRS), who defeated Malam Bacai Sanhá of the ruling PAIGC. The PRS were also victorious in the National People's Assembly election, winning 38 of the 102 seats.
In September 2003, a military coup was conducted. The military arrested Ialá on the charge of being "unable to solve the problems". After being delayed several times, legislative elections were held in March 2004. A mutiny of military factions in October 2004 resulted in the death of the head of the armed forces and caused widespread unrest.
In June 2005, presidential elections were held for the first time since the coup that deposed Ialá. Ialá returned as the candidate for the PRS, claiming to be the legitimate president of the country, but the election was won by former president João Bernardo Vieira, deposed in the 1999 coup. Vieira beat Malam Bacai Sanhá in a run-off election. Sanhá initially refused to concede, claiming that tampering and electoral fraud occurred in two constituencies including the capital, Bissau.
Despite reports of arms entering the country prior to the election and some "disturbances during campaigning", including attacks on government offices by unidentified gunmen, foreign election monitors described the 2005 election overall as "calm and organized".
Three years later, PAIGC won a strong parliamentary majority, with 67 of 100 seats, in the parliamentary election held in November 2008. In November 2008, President Vieira's official residence was attacked by members of the armed forces, killing a guard but leaving the president unharmed.
On 2 March 2009, however, Vieira was assassinated by what preliminary reports indicated to be a group of soldiers avenging the death of the head of joint chiefs of staff, General Batista Tagme Na Wai, who had been killed in an explosion the day before. Vieira's death did not trigger widespread violence, but there were signs of turmoil in the country, according to the advocacy group Swisspeace. Military leaders in the country pledged to respect the constitutional order of succession. National Assembly Speaker Raimundo Pereira was appointed as an interim president until a nationwide election on 28 June 2009. It was won by Malam Bacai Sanhá of the PAIGC, against Kumba Ialá as the presidential candidate of the PRS.
On 9 January 2012, President Sanhá died of complications from diabetes, and Pereira was again appointed as an interim president. On the evening of 12 April 2012, members of the country's military staged a coup d'état and arrested the interim president and a leading presidential candidate. Former vice chief of staff, General Mamadu Ture Kuruma, assumed control of the country in the transitional period and started negotiations with opposition parties.
José Mário Vaz was the President of Guinea-Bissau from 2014 until 2019 presidential elections. At the end of his term, Vaz became the first elected president to complete his five-year mandate. He lost the 2019 election, however, to Umaro Sissoco Embaló, who took office in February 2020. Embaló is the first president to be elected without the backing of the PAIGC.
See also
Politics of Guinea-Bissau
United Nations Peacebuilding Support Office in Guinea-Bissau (UNOGBIS)
City of Bissau history and timeline
References
External links
Background Note: Guinea-Bissau | [
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12188 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography%20of%20Guinea-Bissau | Geography of Guinea-Bissau | The geography of Guinea-Bissau is that of low coastal plains bordering the Atlantic Ocean. The country borders Senegal in the north and Guinea in the southeast.
Terrain and ecology
The terrain of Guinea-Bissau is mostly low coastal plain with swamps of Guinean mangroves rising to Guinean forest-savanna mosaic in the east. A recent global remote sensing analysis suggested that there were 1,203km² of tidal flats in Guinea-Bissau, making it the 28th ranked country in terms of tidal flat area.
The lowest point on Guinea-Bissau is at sea level at the Atlantic Ocean. The highest point in Guinea-Bissau is Monte Torin with an elevation of .
Natural resources found in Guinea-Bissau include fish, timber, phosphates, bauxite, clay, granite, limestone and unexploited deposits of petroleum. 10.67% of the land is arable and 235.6 square kilometres is irrigated.
Natural hazards include a hot, dry, dusty harmattan haze that may reduce visibility during the dry season and brush fires. Severe environmental issues include deforestation; soil erosion; overgrazing and overfishing.
Near the Senegal border there have been historic sightings of the painted hunting dog, Lycaon pictus, but that endangered canid may now be extirpated in that locale.
Climate
Guinea-Bissau's climate is tropical. This means it is generally hot and humid. It has a monsoonal-type rainy season (June to November) with southwesterly winds and a dry season (December to May) with northeasterly harmattan winds.
Guinea-Bissau is warm all year around and there is little temperature fluctuation; it averages . The average rainfall for the capital city Bissau is although this is almost entirely accounted for during the rainy season which falls between June and September/October. From December through April, the country receives very little rainfall.
Bissagos Islands
Information from the CIA World Factbook
Location
Western Africa, bordering the North Atlantic Ocean, between Guinea and Senegal
Geographic coordinates
Map references
Area
Total: 36,125 km2
Land: 28,120 km2
Water: 8,005 km2
Area—comparative
Slightly less than three times the size of Connecticut
Land boundaries
Total 762 km
Border countries Guinea 421 km, Senegal 341 km
Coastline
350 km
Maritime claims
Territorial sea
Exclusive economic zone
Terrain
Mostly low coastal plain rising to savanna in east
Elevation extremes
Lowest point: Atlantic Ocean 0 m
Highest point: Unnamed location in the northeast corner of the country 300 m
Natural resources
Fish, timber, phosphates, bauxite, unexploited deposits of petroleum
Land use
Arable land: 10.67%
Permanent crops: 8.89%
Other: 80.44% (2012 est.)
Irrigated land
223.6 km2 (2003)
Total renewable water resources
31 km3
Freshwater withdrawal (domestic/industrial/agricultural)
Total: 0.18 km3/yr (18%/6%/76%)
Per capita: 135.7 m3/yr (2005)
Natural hazards
Hot, dry, dusty harmattan haze may reduce visibility during dry season; brush fires
Environment—current issues
Deforestation; soil erosion; overgrazing; overfishing
Environment—international agreements
Party to: Biodiversity, Climate Change, Desertification, Endangered Species, Hazardous Wastes, Law of the Sea, Ozone Layer Protection, Wetlands
Signed, but not ratified: None of the selected agreements
Extreme points
This is a list of the extreme points of Guinea-Bissau, the points that are farther north, south, east or west than any other location.
Northernmost point – the northern section of the border with Senegal*
Easternmost point – unnamed location on the border with Guinea immediately south-west of the Guinean village of Sofan, Gabú Region
Southernmost point – unnamed headland on Ilha Cataque, Tombali Region
Westernmost point - Cape Roxo at the point where the border with Senegal enters the Atlantic Ocean, Cacheu Region
*Note: Guinea-Bissau does not have a northernmost point, the border here being formed by a straight horizontal line
See also
Guinea-Bissau
Line notes
References
C. Michael Hogan. 2009. Painted Hunting Dog: Lycaon pictus, GlobalTwitcher.com, ed. N. Stromberg
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. | [
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0.543326199054718... |
12189 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics%20of%20Guinea-Bissau | Demographics of Guinea-Bissau | This article is about the demographic features of the population of Guinea-Bissau, including population density, ethnicity, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects of the population.
Ethnic groups
The population of Guinea-Bissau is ethnically diverse with distinct languages, customs, and social structures. Most Guineans, 99%, are Black people — mostly Fula and Mandinka-speakers concentrated in the north and northeast, the Balanta and Papel, living in the southern coastal regions, and the Manjaco and Mancanha, occupying the central and northern coastal areas.
Most of the rest, 1% of its total population, are mestiços of mixed Portuguese and black descent, including Cape Verdean minority. Due to the exodus of most Portuguese settlers after independence, less than 1% of Guinea-Bissauans are pure Portuguese. The country also has a Chinese minority, including Macanese people of mixed Portuguese and Cantonese blood from Macau.
Most people are farmers. 38%-45% are Muslims - this makes Guinea-Bissau the only Portuguese-speaking nation with a sizable Muslim population. Most Muslims are Sunnis. The rest of the population are pagans, principally the Balanta, and Christians, mostly Roman Catholics.
Population
According to , Guinea-Bissau's population was in , compared to 518,000 in 1950. The proportion of the population below the age of 15 in 2010 was 41.3%, 55.4% were aged between 15 and 65 years of age, while 3.3% were aged 65 years or older.
Vital statistics
Registration of vital events is in Guinea-Bissau not complete. The Population Departement of the United Nations prepared the following estimates.
Life expectancy
Other demographic statistics
Demographic statistics according to the World Population Review in 2019.
One birth every 8 minutes
One death every 27 minutes
One net migrant every 288 minutes
Net gain of one person every 11 minutes
The following demographic are from the independent Ghana Statistical Service and from the CIA World Factbook unless otherwise indicated.
Population
1,833,247 (July 2018 est.)
1,596,677 (July 2011 est.)
Age structure
0-14 years: 43.55% (male 400,666 /female 397,704)
15-24 years: 20.23% (male 181,286 /female 189,515)
25-54 years: 29.9% (male 259,762 /female 288,300)
55-64 years: 3.29% (male 27,621 /female 32,611)
65 years and over: 3.04% (male 24,331 /female 31,451) (2018 est.)
Median age
total: 17.8 years. Country comparison to the world: 216th
male: 17.2 years
female: 18.5 years (2018 est.)
Birth rate
37.3 births/1,000 population (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 13th
Death rate
8.5 deaths/1,000 population (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 79th
Total fertility rate
4.81 children born/woman (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 18th
Population growth rate
2.48% (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 23rd
1.988% (2011 est.)
Contraceptive prevalence rate
16% (2014)
Net migration rate
-3.72 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2021 est.) Country comparison to the world: 189th
Life expectancy at birth
total population: 61.4 years (2018 est.)
male: 59.2 years (2018 est.)
female: 63.6 years (2018 est.)
total population: 50.23 years
male: 48.21 years
female: 52.31 years (2015 est.)
Dependency ratios
total dependency ratio: 80.4 (2015 est.)
youth dependency ratio: 75.2 (2015 est.)
elderly dependency ratio: 5.2 (2015 est.)
potential support ratio: 19.3 (2015 est.)
Urbanization
urban population: 43.4% of total population (2018)
rate of urbanization: 3.41% annual rate of change (2015-20 est.)
Sex ratio
at birth: 1.03 male(s)/female
0–14 years: 1 male(s)/female
15–24 years: 0.98 male(s)/female
25–54 years: 0.99 male(s)/female
55–64 years: 0.6 male(s)/female
65 years and over: 0.6 male(s)/female
total population: 0.95 male(s)/female (2015 est.)
Nationality
noun:Guinean (s)
adjective:Guinean
Ethnic groups
Fulani 28.5%
Balanta 22.5%
Mandinga 14.7%
Papel 9.1%
Manjaco 8.3%
Beafada 3.5%
Mancanha 3.1%
Bijago 2.1%
Felupe 1.7%
Mansoanca 1.4%
Balanta Mane 1%
Other 1.8%
None 2.2%
Religions
Islam 45%
Christian 22.1%
Animist 14.9
None 2%
Unspecified 15.9% (2008 est.)
Languages
Crioulo 90.4%
Portuguese 27.1% (official)
French 5.1%
English 2.9%
Other 2.4%
Literacy
definition: age 15 and over can read and write
total population: 59.9%
male: 71.8%
female: 48.3% (2015 est.)
References
Bissau-Guinean society | [
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0... |
12190 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics%20of%20Guinea-Bissau | Politics of Guinea-Bissau | The politics of Guinea-Bissau take place in a framework of a semi-presidential representative democratic republic, with a multi-party system, wherein the President is head of state and the Prime Minister is head of government. Executive power is exercised by the government. Legislative power is vested in both the government and the National People's Assembly.
Since 1994, the Bissau-Guinean party system has been dominated by the socialist African Independence Party of Guinea and Cape Verde and the Party for Social Renewal. The judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislature.
Despite the democratic, constitutional framework, the military has exercised substantial power, and has interfered repeatedly in civilian leadership since multi-party elections were instituted in 1994. In the past 16 years, Guinea-Bissau has experienced two coups, a civil war, an attempted coup, and a presidential assassination by the military. Since the country's independence in 1974, only one president successfully completed his five-year term, José Mário Vaz.
Political developments
In 1989, the ruling African Independence Party of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), under the direction of President João Bernardo "Nino" Vieira, began to outline a political liberalization program which the People's National Assembly approved in 1991. Reforms that paved the way for multi-party democracy included the repeal of articles of the constitution, which had enshrined the leading role of the PAIGC. Laws were ratified to allow the formation of other political parties, a free press, and independent trade unions with the right to strike.
Guinea-Bissau's first multi-party elections for president and parliament were held in 1994. Following the 1998-99 civil war, presidential and legislative elections were again held, bringing opposition leader Kumba Ialá and his Party for Social Renewal to power. Ialá was ousted in a bloodless coup in September 2003, and Henrique Rosa was sworn in as president.
Former president Viera was once again elected as president in July 2005. The government of Prime Minister Carlos Gomes Júnior was elected in March 2004 in a free and fair election, but was replaced by the government of Prime Minister Aristides Gomes, which took office in November 2005. Gomes lost a no-confidence vote and submitted his resignation in March 2007.
Martinho Ndafa Kabi was then nominated as prime minister by a coalition composed of the PAIGC, the Social Renewal Party (PRS), and the United Social Democratic Party (PUSD). On April 9, 2007, it was announced that President João Bernardo Vieira had rejected the choice of Kabi, but the coalition said that they maintained him as their choice. Later that day, Vieira appointed Kabi as the new prime minister. Kabi took office on April 13, and his government, composed of 20 ministers (including eight from the PAIGC, eight from the PRS, and two from the PUSD) was named on April 17.
2009 assassination
President Viera was killed on March 2, 2009 by soldiers as retaliation for the killing of the head of the joint chiefs of staff, General Tagme Na Waie, who was murdered the previous day.
2010 military unrest
Prior to the 2008 election, a decision to change the electoral date and extend the parliamentary mandate resulted in major controversy when Assembly deputies snubbed the president and chose to extend their mandate. After the Supreme Court annulled that law, President Vieira dissolved the Assembly, thus allowing the standing committee to continue working, and appointed a new government composed of loyalists.
Rear Admiral Bubo Na Tchuto tried to organize a coup on August 7, 2008, but the attempt was put down. Na Tchuto managed to escape the country. The attempted coup added to instability ahead of parliamentary elections. Gambia subsequently arrested Na Tchuto. He later returned to Guinea-Bissau disguised as a fisherman, and took refuge at a UN compound. Although the UN agreed to surrender him to the government, Na Tchuto continued to reside in the compound. As a result of his return, security in the country was tightened, contributing to uncertainty and instability.
On April 1, 2010, soldiers entered UN offices and arrested Na Tchuto. The same day, more soldiers entered Prime Minister Carlos Gomes Júnior's residence and detained him on the premises. Simultaneously, forty military officers, including Zamora Induta, head of Guinea-Bissau's armed forces, were confined at an army base. Hundreds of the PM's supporters demanded his release. In response, the deputy army chief, Antonio Indjai, said: "If the people continue to go out into the streets to show their support for Carlos Gomes Junior, then I will kill Carlos Gomes Junior ... or I will send someone to kill him."
The following day, the prime minister was taken to meet with the president where the president said: "I will not resign because I was democratically elected. I consider what happened on Thursday as an incident. The situation is now stable. I can assure you that institutions will return to their normal functions." The UN secretary general and other international powers condemned the move, while government ministers issued a statement saying "Members of government expressed their support and their attachment to the prime minister, and firmly condemned the use of force as a means to resolve problems." Tensions seemingly calmed, with President Sanha saying the coup attempt was "a confusion between soldiers that reached the government", and the UN Secretary General spoke about the PM's "detention and subsequent release." Nevertheless, while members of the cabinet and the international community condemned the attempted coup and talked about the PM's release, reports still indicated that "renegade soldiers" had the prime minister "under guard."
2011 attempted coup
After Army chief of staff General Antonio Indjai was reported arrested by the orders of navy chief Rear Admiral Jose Americo Bubo Na Tchuto, his troops freed him as Prime Minister Carlos Gomes Júnior sought political asylum at the Angolan embassy. Indjai then said that his naval counterpart had been arrested. These events occurred while President Sanha had been in Paris, France for medical care.
2012 coup
On 12 April 2012, the military took over the central district of the capital. On 16 April, military leaders and a coalition of political parties announced the formation of a Transitional National Council, under international pressure.
2019 Disputed Election
Presidential elections were held in Guinea-Bissau on 24 November 2019.
In the first round of voting, Domingos Simões Pereira led the field, with 40.13% of the vote. Incumbent president José Mário Vaz finished fourth in the first round of voting, failing to progress to the runoff. According to the preliminary and final results published by the national commission of elections, Umaro Sissoco Embaló won the runoff vote against Simões Pereira, 54% to 46%. Simões Pereira continues to dispute the results. Although neither the supreme court of Guinea-Bissau nor the parliament had given its approval for the official swearing-in ceremony, Sissoco Embaló had organized an alternative swearing-in ceremony in a hotel in Bissau to announce himself as legal president of Guinea-Bissau. Several politicians in Guinea-Bissau, including prime minister Aristides Gomes, accused Sissoco Embaló of arranging a Coup d'état, although outgoing president Mário Vaz stepped down to allow Embaló to take power.
Jose Mario Vaz was the President of Guinea-Bissau from 2014 until 2019 presidential elections. For two decades Jose Mario Vaz was the first elected president finished his five-year mandate. Umaro Sissoco Embaló was the winner of the election and he took office in February 2020. However he faced a last-minute stand-off with parliament before taking office. Embaló is the first president to be elected without the backing of the PAIGC.
Executive branch
|President
|Umaro Sissoco Embaló
|Madem G15
|27 February 2020
|-
|Prime Minister
|Nuno Gomes Nabiam
|Independent (politician)
|28 February 2020
|}
The president is elected by popular vote for a five-year term. The prime minister is appointed by the president after consultation with party leaders in the legislature.
Legislative branch
The National People's Assembly () has 102 members, elected for four-year terms in multi-member constituencies.
Political parties and elections
Presidential elections
Parliamentary elections
Judicial branch
The Supreme Court () consists of nine justices, who are appointed by the president and serve at his pleasure. It is the final court of appeals in criminal and civil cases. Regional courts, one in each of the country's nine regions, are the first courts of appeal for sectoral court decisions, and hear all felony cases, as well as civil cases concerning more than $1,000. Below these are 24 sectoral Courts, presided over by judges who are not necessarily trained in the law, which hear civil cases under $1,000 and misdemeanor criminal cases.
Administrative divisions
Guinea-Bissau is divided in 9 regions (, singular - ): Bafata, Biombo, Bissau, Bolama, Cacheu, Gabu, Oio, Quinara, and Tombali.
International organization participation
ACCT (associate),
ACP,
AfDB,
ECA,
ECOWAS,
FAO,
FZ,
G-77,
IBRD,
ICAO,
ICFTU,
ICRM,
IDA,
IDB,
IFAD,
IFC,
IFRCS,
ILO,
IMF,
IMO,
Intelsat,
Interpol,
IOC,
IOM,
ITU,
NAM,
OAU,
OIC,
OPCW,
UN,
UNCTAD,
UNESCO,
UNIDO,
UPU,
WADB (regional),
WAEMU,
WFTU,
WHO,
WIPO,
WMO,
WToO,
WTrO
References | [
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-0.7503807544708252,
0.6364443302154541,
-0.6917368173599243,
-0.1430458277463913,
-0.4923033118247986,
0.47604072093963623,
-0.07639152556657791,
0.48480924963951... |
12191 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy%20of%20Guinea-Bissau | Economy of Guinea-Bissau | The economy of Guinea-Bissau comprises a mixture of state-owned and private companies. Guinea-Bissau is among the world's least developed nations and one of the 10 poorest countries in the world, and depends mainly on agriculture and fishing. Cashew crops have increased remarkably in recent years, and the country ranked ninth in cashew production for the year of 2019.
Guinea-Bissau exports to Asia non-fillet frozen fish and seafood, peanuts, palm kernels, and timber. License fees for fishing in their sea-zone (Gulf of Guinea) provide the government with some small revenue. Rice is the major crop and staple food. Due to European regulations, fish and cashew-nuts exports to Europe are totally prohibited as well as agriculture products in general.
Economic history
Early colonialism
From a European viewpoint, the economic history of the Guinea Coast is largely associated with slavery. Indeed, one of the alternative names for the region was the Slave Coast. When the Portuguese first sailed down the Atlantic coast of Africa in the 1430s, they were interested in gold. Ever since Mansa Musa, king of the Mali Empire, made his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1325, with 500 slaves and 100 camels (each carrying gold) the region had become synonymous with such wealth. The trade from sub-Saharan Africa was controlled by the Islamic Empire which stretched along Africa's northern coast. Muslim trade routes across the Sahara, which had existed for centuries, involved salt, kola, textiles, fish, grain and slaves.
As the Portuguese extended their influence around the coast, Mauritania, Senegambia (by 1445) and Guinea, they created trading posts. Rather than becoming direct competitors to the Muslim merchants, the expanding market opportunities in Europe and the Mediterranean resulted in increased trade across the Sahara. In addition, the Portuguese merchants gained access to the interior via the Sénégal and Gambia rivers which bisected long-standing trans-Saharan routes.
The Portuguese brought in copper ware, cloth, tools, wine and horses. Trade goods soon also included arms and ammunition. In exchange, the Portuguese received gold (transported from mines of the Akan deposits), pepper (a trade which lasted until Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498) and ivory.
There was a very small market for African slaves as domestic workers in Europe, and as workers on the sugar plantations of the Mediterranean. The Portuguese found they could make considerable amounts of gold transporting slaves from one trading post to another, along the Atlantic coast of Africa. Muslim merchants had a high demand for slaves, which were used as porters on the trans-Saharan routes, and for sale in the Islamic Empire. The Portuguese found Muslim merchants entrenched along the African coast as far as the Bight of Benin.
Before the arrival of the Europeans, the African slave trade, centuries old in Africa, was not yet the major feature of the coastal economy of Guinea. The expansion of trade occurs after the Portuguese reach this region in 1446, bringing great wealth to several local slave trading tribes. The Portuguese used slave labour to colonize and develop the previously uninhabited Cape Verde islands where they founded settlements and grew cotton and indigo. They then traded these goods, in the estuary of the Geba River, for black slaves captured by other black peoples in local African wars and raids.
The slaves were sold in Europe and, from the 16th century, in the Americas. The Company of Guinea was a Portuguese governative institution whose task was to deal with the spices and to fix the prices of the goods. It was called Casa da Guiné, Casa da Guiné e Mina from 1482 to 1483 and Casa da Índia e da Guiné in 1499. The local African rulers in Guinea, who prosper greatly from the slave trade, have no interest in allowing the Europeans any further inland than the fortified coastal settlements where the trading takes place. The Portuguese presence in Guinea was therefore largely limited to the port of Bissau.
Colonial era
As with the other Portuguese territories in mainland Africa (Portuguese Angola and Portuguese Mozambique), Portugal exercised control over the coastal areas of Portuguese Guinea when first laying claim to the whole region as a colony. For three decades there are costly and continuous campaigns to suppress the local African rulers. By 1915 this process was complete, enabling Portuguese colonial rule to progress in a relatively unruffled state - until the emergence of nationalist movements all over Africa in the 1950s.
For a brief period in the 1790s the British attempted to establish a rival foothold on an offshore island, at Bolama, but by the 19th century the Portuguese were sufficiently secure in Bissau to regard the neighbouring coastline as their own special territory. It was therefore natural for Portugal to lay claim to this region, soon to be known as Portuguese Guinea, when the European scramble for Africa began in the 1880s. Britain's interest in the region declined since the end of the British slave trade in 1807. After the abolition of slavery in the Portuguese overseas territories in the 1830s, the slave trade went into serious decline.
Portugal's main rival were the French, their colonial neighbours along the coast on both sides - in Senegal and in the region which became French Guinea. The Portuguese presence in Guinea was not disputed by the French. The only point at issue was the precise line of the borders. This was established by agreement between the two colonial powers in two series of negotiations, in 1886 and 1902–5. Until the end of the 19th century, rubber was the main export.
As an overseas province
In 1951, when the Portuguese government overhauled the entire colonial system, all Portugal's colonies, including Portuguese Guinea, were renamed Overseas Provinces (Províncias Ultramarinas). New infrastructures were built for education, health, agriculture, transportation, commerce, services, and administration.
Cashew, peanut, rice, timber, livestock and fish were the main economic productions. The port of Bissau was one of the main employers and a very important source of taxes for the province's authorities.
Independence war
The fight for independence began in 1956, when Amílcar Cabral founded the Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (), the PAIGC. In 1961, when a purely political campaign for independence had made predictably little progress, the PAIGC adopted guerrilla tactics. Although heavily outnumbered by Portuguese troops (approximately 30,000 Portuguese to some 10,000 guerrillas), the PAIGe had the great advantage of safe havens over the border in Senegal and Guinea, both recently independent of French rule.
Several communist countries supported the guerrillas with weapons and military training. The conflict in Portuguese Guinea involving the PAIGC guerrillas and the Portuguese Army was the most intense and damaging of all Portuguese Colonial War. Thus, during the 1960s and early 1970s, Portuguese development plans promoting strong economic growth and effective socioeconomic policies, like those applied by the Portuguese in the other two theaters of war (Portuguese Angola and Portuguese Mozambique), were not possible. In 1972 Cabral sets up a government in exile in Conakry, the capital of neighbouring Guinea. It was there, in 1973, that he was assassinated outside his house - just a year before a left-wing military coup in Portugal dramatically altered the political situation.
By 1973 the PAIGC controlled most of the interior of the country, while the coastal and estuary towns, including the main populational and economic centres remained under Portuguese control. The village of Madina do Boé in the southeasternmost area of the territory, close to the border with neighbouring Guinea, was the location where PAIGC guerrillas declared the independence of Guinea-Bissau on September 24, 1973. The war in the colonies was increasingly unpopular in Portugal itself as the people got weary of war and balked at its ever-rising expense. Following the coup d'état in Portugal in 1974, the new left-wing revolutionary government of Portugal began to negotiate with the PAIGC and decided to offer independence to all the overseas territories.
After independence
As his brother Amílcar Cabral had been assassinated in 1973, Luís Cabral became the first president of independent Guinea-Bissau in the time after independence was granted on September 10, 1974. Already as the President of Guinea-Bissau, Luís Cabral tried to impose a planned economy in the country, and supported a socialist model that left the economy of Guinea-Bissau itself ruined. Similarly, the repression the authoritarian single-party regime he led imposed on the population and severe food shortages also left marks and, despite having always denied, Luís Cabral was accused of being responsible for the death of a large number of black Guinea-Bissauan soldiers who had fought along with the Portuguese Army against the PAIGC guerrillas during the Portuguese Colonial War.
Luís Cabral served from 1974 to 1980, when a military coup d'état led by João Bernardo "Nino" Vieira deposed him. After the military coup, in 1980 PAIGC admitted in its official newspaper "Nó Pintcha" (dated November 29, 1980) that many were executed and buried in unmarked collective graves in the woods of Cumerá, Portogole and Mansabá. All these events did not help the new-country to reach the level of prosperity, economic growth and development the new rulers had promised to its population.
Present day
Macro-economic trend
Following the April 2012 coup d'État growth plunged to reach -1.5% of GDP. In 2013, the country's GDP grew only by 0.9%. This low growth level during a period of democratic transition is explained by a combination of low administrative efficiency, low investments on account of the political instability and a bad cashew export season. Key macroeconomic indicators estimated by the African Development Bank are presented in the chart below:
Intermittent fighting between Senegalese-backed government troops and a military junta destroyed much of the country's infrastructure and caused widespread damage to the economy in 1998; the civil war led to a 28% drop in GDP that year, with partial recovery in 1999. Agricultural production is estimated to have fallen by 17% during the conflict, and the civil war led to a 28% overall drop in GDP in 1998. Cashew nut output, the main export crop, declined in 1998 by an estimated 30%. World cashew prices dropped by more than 50% in 2000, compounding the economic devastation caused by the conflict.
Before the war, trade reform and price liberalization were the most successful part of the country's structural adjustment program under IMF sponsorship. The tightening of monetary policy and the development of the private sector had also begun to reinvigorate the economy. Under the government's post-conflict economic and financial program, implemented with IMF and World Bank input, real GDP recovered in 1999 by almost 8%. In December 2000 Guinea-Bissau qualified for almost $800 million in debt-service relief under the first phase of the enhanced HIPC initiative and is scheduled to submit its Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper in March 2002. Guinea-Bissau will receive the bulk of its assistance under the enhanced HIPC initiative when it satisfies a number of conditions, including implementation of its Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper.
Because of high costs, the development of petroleum, phosphate, and other mineral resources is not a near-term prospect. It produces 400,000 barrels/day of petrol.
Mean wages were $0.52 per man-hour in 2009. In 2019 the minimal monthly wage it is around 35000 CFA = US$60.
The following table shows the main economic indicators in 1980–2017.
Financial sector
The financial sector of Guinea-Bissau is relatively underdeveloped: in 2013, financial intermediation accounted for 4% of GDP, banking penetration is below 1% of the population (IMF 2013. Article IV Consultations – Guinea-Bissau, IMF Country Report No 13/197) and access to finance is cited as the second most important constraint for businesses. As of 2015, only four banks were operating in the country. According to the IMF, regional private foreign banks held about 65% of shares in the Bissau-Guinean banking system (IMF 2013). Banks are regulated by the WAEMU authorities. In the aftermath of the civil war (1998/1999), private sector credit had fallen below 1% of GDP. In 2003 the balance sheets of banks amounted to EUR 21.3 million. Since then credit to the economy has risen to nearly 13.8% of GDP.
"Terra Ranka" (A fresh start): a new economic plan
On March 25, 2015, the Government of Guinea-Bissau convened an international donor conference in Brussels. Hosted by the European Union with support from the UNDP and other partners including the African Development Bank and the World Bank, the country's major partners joined in welcoming the country's new vision up to 2025, and to put pledges forth for its strategic and operational plan dubbed "Terra Ranka" (A fresh start). Pledges totalled EUR 1.3 billion.
The strategic and operational plan is composed of six pillars: (i) peace and governance, (ii) infrastructure, (iii) industrialisation, (iv) urban development, (v) human development and (vi) biodiversity. Each of the pillars is composed of a series of structuring projects to be financed either through direct donor support or through the mobilisation of private funding.
Income from waste dumping
In the 1980s Guinea-Bissau was part of a trend in the African continent toward the dumping of waste as a source of income. Plans to import toxic waste from Europe were cancelled after an international campaign to halt the trade. The government was offered a contract to dispose of 15 million tons of toxic waste over a 15-year period. The income from it was equivalent to twice the value of its external debt. After strong pressure from other African countries and environmental groups the Guinea-Bissau government renounced the deal.
Drug trafficking
Over the last decade European consumption of cocaine is believed to have tripled, and West Africa has become a primary transit point for trafficking the drug from Colombia to Europe. Guinea-Bissau is the leading West African country in this regard, with smugglers taking advantage of government corruption and disorder to operate unimpeded.
The army and police are alleged to be complicit and lack of boats or planes to patrol or control the vaste sea-zone turn a blind eye to cocain drug shipments from Latin America. The local population does not have access to the drug. Planes fly in, and use Guinea-Bissau's 88 remote islands, the majority of which are uninhabited.
Energy
As of 2019, only 28% of the total population had access to electricity, with only 7% of rural population and 56% of urban population having access to electricity.
In 2016, 99% of electricity generation capacity came from fossil sources and 1% from renewable sources.
See also
Transport in Guinea-Bissau
Telecommunications in Guinea-Bissau
Mining industry of Guinea-Bissau
United Nations Economic Commission for Africa
References
External links
Resources on Guinea-Bissau by the African Development Bank
Mineral resources of Guinea-Bissau
Guinea-Bissau latest trade data on ITC Trade Map
Africa's New Narcostate - photo essay by The Global Post
Guinea-Bissau
Guinea-Bissau | [
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12192 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications%20in%20Guinea-Bissau | Telecommunications in Guinea-Bissau | Telecommunications in Guinea-Bissau include radio, television, fixed and mobile telephones, and the Internet.
Guinea-Bissau is one of the poorest countries in the world. This reality is reflected in the state of the country's telecommunications development. It is estimated that in 2012 there were only 5000 fixed telephone lines serving the country's 1.6 million inhabitants and that only 2.9% of the population had access to and were regular users of the Internet.
Radio and television
Radio stations:
One state-owned radio station (Guinea-Bissau National Radio), several private radio stations, and some community radio stations; multiple international broadcasters are available (2007);
One AM, four FM, and no shortwave (2001).
Radios: 49,000 (1997).
Television stations: One state-owned TV station (Guinea-Bissau Television) and a second station, Radio e Televisao de Portugal África (RTP África), operated by Portuguese public broadcaster (RTP) (2007).
Private radio stations operate alongside the state-run broadcaster. Broadcasters face many challenges, not least the lack of a reliable power supply. The media experience "harsh treatment" from the authorities, security forces, and individuals with connections to the military and drug traffickers. A climate of fear has led to self-censorship among the media, which particularly affects reporting on drug trafficking.
Following the 12 April 2012 coup, the junta shut down all private radio stations and the national television station. They allowed only the national broadcaster, Guinea-Bissau National Radio, to broadcast intermittent military communiqués. On 15 April, the junta allowed the stations to reopen, but on 16 April warned them not to criticize the military or the coup or report on protests. These threats continued until 25 May when the civilian government was installed.
Telephones
Calling code: +245
International call prefix: 00
Main lines:
5,000 lines in use, 210th in the world (2012);
4,600 lines in use, 214th in the world (2008).
Mobile cellular:
1.1 million lines, 156th in the world (2012);
500,200 lines, 155th in the world (2008).
Telephone system: small system including a combination of microwave radio relay, open-wire lines, radiotelephone, and mobile-cellular communications; fixed-line teledensity is less than 1 per 100 persons; mobile-cellular teledensity approached 50 per 100 persons (2011).
Internet
Top-level domain: .gw
Internet users:
47,132 users, 181st in the world; 2.9% of the population, 196th in the world (2012);
37,100 users, 177th in the world (2009).
Fixed broadband: Unknown (2012).
Wireless broadband: Unknown (2012).
Internet hosts:
90 hosts, 211th in the world (2012);
82 hosts, 202nd in the world (2009).
IPv4: 5,120 addresses allocated, less than 0.05% of the world total, 3.1 addresses per 1000 people (2012).
Internet censorship and surveillance
There are no government restrictions on access to the Internet or reports that the government monitors e-mail or Internet chat rooms without judicial oversight.
The constitution and law provide for freedom of speech and press; however, there are reports that the government does not always respect these rights. The constitution and law prohibit arbitrary interference with privacy, family, home, or correspondence, but the government does not always respect these prohibitions in practice. Police routinely ignore privacy rights and protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
See also
Guinea-Bissau National Radio, national broadcaster.
Guinea-Bissau Television, national television
Media of Guinea-Bissau
References
External links
RTP África , web site. | [
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