The Year That Was 1991...

• On 16 January in the Gulf War, the US-led coalition launches Operation Desert Storm to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation • On 25 January, the Iraqis pump Kuwaiti oil into the Gulf, causing the largest-ever oil slick. On 22 February, they set alight hundreds of oil wells. The last fire is not extinguished until 3 November • On 27 January, the coalition forces liberate Kuwait. Saddam Hussein is defeated, but remains in power • On 21 May, former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi is assassinated by a suicide bomber from the Tamil Tigers, whose aim is to establish an autonomous state within Sri Lanka • Civil war between the government of Sierre Leone and the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) results in tens of thousands of deaths and the displacement of more than 2 million people (well over one-third of the population) • With the repeal of the Population Registration Act on 17 June, apartheid ends in South Africa • On 25 June, civil war begins in the former Yugoslavia as Slovenia and Croatia declare their independence. Yugoslav federal troops begin siege of Dubrovnik on 1 October, attacking the Croatian capital by air a week later • On 1 July, the Warsaw Pact is formally ended • On 20 August, Estonia declares its independence from the Soviet Union, followed – on 21 August – by Latvia • On 19 August, Communist hardliners in the Soviet Union stage a coup against President Mikhail Gorbachev, who is placed under house arrest in the Crimea. Radio and television stations are shut, and military rule is imposed on many cities. The coup collapses on 21 August following widespread popular resistance led by Boris Yeltsin • On 25 September, a peace accord ends the 11-year civil war in El Salvador • On 5 November, British/Czech publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell dies after falling from his yacht in the Canary Islands. A month later, his business empire collapses with huge debts and revelations of the misappropriation of money from pension funds • On 25 December, the Soviet Union officially ceases to exist • America writer Bret Easton Ellis publishes American Psycho, a fictional study of the pathology of murder • Films include Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs, both examples of a popular taste for violence • Freddie Mercury, lead singer of the pop group Queen, dies of Aids on 24 November •