e leading industrial countries of Western Europe.

Reunion:
The Portuguese discovered the uninhabited island in 1513.
From the 17th to the 19th centuries, French immigration supplemented
by influxes of Africans, Chinese, Malays, and Malabar Indians gave
the island its ethnic mix. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869
cost the island its importance as a stopover on the East Indies
trade route.

Romania:
Soviet occupation following World War II led to the
formation of a communist "peoples republic" in 1947 and the
abdication of the king. The decades-long rule of President Nicolae
CEAUSESCU became increasingly draconian through the 1980s. He was
overthrown and executed in late 1989. Former communists dominated
the government until 1996 when they were swept from power. Much
economic restructuring remains to be carried out before Romania can
achieve its hope of joining the EU.

Russia:
The defeat of the Russian Empire in World War I led to the
seizure of power by the communists and the formation of the USSR.
The brutal rule of Josef STALIN (1924-53) strengthened Russian
dominance of the Soviet Union at a cost of tens of millions of
lives. The Soviet economy and society stagnated in the following
decades until General Secretary Mikhail GORBACHEV (1985-91)
introduced glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) in an
attempt to modernize communism, but his initiatives inadvertently
released forces that by December 1991 splintered the USSR into 15
independent republics. Since then, Russia has struggled in its
efforts to build a democratic political system and market economy to
replace the strict social, political, and economic controls of the
communist period.

Rwanda:
In 1959, three years before independence, the majority
ethnic group, the Hutus overthrew the ruling Tutsi king. Over the
next several years thousands of Tutsis were killed, and some 150,000
driven into exile in neighboring countries. The children of these
exiles later formed a rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)
and began a civil war in 1990. The war, along with several political
and economic upheavals, exacerbated ethnic tensions culminating in
April 1994 in the genocide of roughly 800,000 Tutsis and moderate
Hutus. The Tutsi rebels defeated the Hutu regime and ended the
killing in July 1994, but approximately 2 million Hutu refugees -
many fearing Tutsi retrib