History of Zanzibar led to the Anglo-Zanzibar War, also known as the shortest war in history. The islands gained independence from Britain in December 1963 as a constitutional monarchy. A month later, the bloody Zanzibar Revolution, in which several thousand Arabs and Indians were killed and thousands more expelled and expropriated, led to the Republic of Zanzibar and Pemba. That April, the republic merged with the mainland Tanganyika, or more accurately, was subsumed into Tanzania, of which Zanzibar remains a semi-autonomous region. Zanzibar was most recently in the international news with a January 2001 massacre, following contested elections. Zanzibar has been inhabited, perhaps
People's Republic of Zanzibar US citizens on the island, and a US Navy destroyer, the USS "Manley", arrived on 13 January. The "Manley" docked at Zanzibar Town harbour, but the US had not sought the Revolutionary Council's permission for the evacuation, and the ship was met by a group of armed men. Permission was eventually granted on 15 January, but the British considered this confrontation to be the cause of much subsequent ill will against the Western powers in Zanzibar. Western intelligence agencies believed that the revolution had been organised by communists supplied with weapons by the Warsaw Pact countries. This suspicion was strengthened