Dhekelia
By terms of the 1960 Treaty of Establishment that created
the independent Republic of Cyprus, the UK retained full sovreignty
and jurisdiction over two areas of almost 254 square kilometers in
total: Akrotiri and Dhekelia. The larger of these of these is the
Dhekelia Sovereign Base Area, which is also referred to as the
Eastern Sovereign Base Area.

Djibouti
The French Territory of the Afars and the Issas became
Djibouti in 1977. Hassan Gouled APTIDON installed an authoritarian
one-party state and proceeded to serve three consecutive six-year
terms as president. Unrest among the Afars minority during the 1990s
led to multi-party elections resulting in President Ismail Omar
GUELLEH attaining office in May 1999. A peace accord in 2001 ended
the final phases of a ten-year uprising by Afar rebels. Djibouti
occupies a very strategic geographic location at the mouth of the
Red Sea and serves as an important transshipment location for goods
entering and leaving the east African highlands. GUELLEH favors
close ties to France, which maintains a significant military
presence in the country.

Dominica
Dominica was the last of the Caribbean islands to be
colonized by Europeans, due chiefly to the fierce resistance of the
native Caribs. France ceded possession to Great Britain in 1763,
which made the island a colony in 1805. In 1980, two years after
independence, Dominica's fortunes improved when a corrupt and
tyrannical administration was replaced by that of Mary Eugenia
CHARLES, the first female prime minister in the Caribbean, who
remained in office for 15 years. Some 3,000 Carib Indians still
living on Dominica are the only pre-Columbian population remaining
in the eastern Caribbean.

Dominican Republic
Explored and claimed by Columbus on his first
voyage in 1492, the island of Hispaniola became a springboard for
Spanish conquest of the Caribbean and the American mainland. In
1697, Spain recognized French dominion over the western third of the
island, which in 1804 became Haiti. The remainder of the island, by
then known as Santo Domingo, sought to gain its own independence in
1821, but was conquered and ruled by the Haitians for 22 years; it
finally attained independence as the Dominican Republic in 1844. In
1861, the Dominicans voluntarily returned to the Spanish Empire, but
two years later they launched a war that restored independ