Today in History-over RRI World Service –Voice of Indonesia. We start from an event on 28th July 1976 about Tremendous Earthquake Hit Northern China.
Tremendous earthquake rocked China in the morning around 03.45 am precisely in Tangshan, a city located in the northern part of Beijing. The city was stricken by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake. The earthquake that only lasted for 23 seconds shattered one of the mining cities in China with population more than 100 million people. Based on the record, the number of victims approximately reached up to 250.000 people.
Now, we move to the next event on 28th July 1990 that was Alberto Fujimori became the President of Peru and the third person of East Asian descendant ruling a Non-Asian country. During his period, President Alberto Fujimori successfully revived the stability of macro economy after the era of President Alan Garcia and brought peace to conflicted countries. President Fujimori was also successful in freeing dozens of hostages that were captured by a rebellious movement led by Tupac Amaru during the attack of Japanese Ambassador’s residence in Lima. Despite of his prominent contributions for the country, President Alberto Fujimaro was also criticized for being a dictatorial leader. A corruption scandal involving the Head of Peruvian Intelligence had degraded President Fujimaro’s popularity. In the end 2000, after the APEC meeting in Brunei, President Fujimaro went to Japan and resigned as the President of Peru by sending a letter of resignation via facsimile. The letter was delivered to the Embassy of Peru in Japan. However, eventually he was captured and extradited to Peru.
We end our segment -Today in History-with an event from 28th July 1995, Vietnam was accepted as the 7th member of ASEAN.
As the Cold War started to come to an end, the change of international structural system has brought about several consequences for the leaders of Vietnam to re-examine their foreign politics’ policy. The new format of Vietnam foreign politics’ policy that began to be more adaptive for its neighborhood countries was characterized by series of actions and plans supporting the member countries of Association of South East Asian -ASEAN to terminate negative judgment about Vietnam as a threat. Vietnam realized that the new ASEAN focused on striving economic goals. As the attempt to achieve these goals, ASEAN countries firstly had to create stability instead of making demands, for instance, democratization or intervention on other countries’ affairs. The membership of Vietnam in ASEAN was purposed as a strategy to achieve the main goal of ASEAN. The goal was establishing the ASEAN-10 meaning the ASEAN that was constituted by the whole ASEAN countries.