Reuters historical calendar - December 4

London, Dec 3 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on December 4 since 1900: 1918 - The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was proclaimed in what later became Yugoslavia, with Alexander I as prince regent.

1943 - British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, US President Franklin D Roosevelt and President Ismet Inonu of Turkey met at the second Cairo Conference in World War Two.

1947 - Tennessee Williams' play ''A Streetcar Named Desire'' premiered in New York.

1972 - Honduran President Ramon Cruz was overthrown in an army coup led by General Oswaldo Lopez Arellano.

1974 - A Dutch chartered DC-8 airliner crashed in a storm near Colombo, killing all 191 aboard.

1976 - The English composer Benjamin Britten died. He was famed for his operas including ''Peter Grimes'', ''Billy Budd'' and ''Death in Venice'', as well as his War Requiem.

1977 - In Malaysia, 100 people were killed when a plane hijacked by the Japanese Red Army guerrilla group crashed near Singapore.

1977 - Jean Bedel Bokassa crowned himself emperor of the Central African Empire.

1980 - Portuguese Prime Minister Francisco Sa Carneiro was killed in an air crash in Lisbon.

1991 - The American journalist Terry Anderson, the Western hostage held longest by Islamic militants in Lebanon, was freed after 2,454 days. He had been seized on March 16, 1985.

1993 - The Angolan government and its UNITA guerrilla foes formally adopted terms for a truce to end a conflict that had killed an estimated average of 1,000 people a day.

1995 - An advance team of NATO troops landed in Sarajevo in the first wave of a deployment to enforce a peace accord in former Yugoslavia after four years of war.

1996 - NASA's first Mars Rover took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. It landed successfully on Mars on July 4, 1997.

1997 - An historic treaty to ban anti-personnel landmines worldwide became reality when 121 nations signed it in Ottawa; the United States was among the abstainers.

1998 - The last Khmer Rouge fighters surrendered, ending a 20-year war against the Cambodian government.

1999 - A clerical court sentenced Abdollah Nouri, Iran's leading reformist politician, to five years in jail. He was pardoned in November 2002.

2000 - Henck Arron, who led Suriname to independence from the Netherlands in 1975 and became its first premier, died.

2001 - William Jovanovich, who championed some of the most influential 20th century writers including George Orwell, Hannah Arendt and Alice Walker as head of the American publisher Harcourt Brace and Co, died.

2003 - Serbia's special war crimes prosecutor's office issued its first indictment, charging eight people over the 1991 Vukovar massacre in Croatia in which 200 civilians were killed.

2003 - Interpol issued an arrest notice for former Liberian president Charles Taylor, indicted for war crimes in Sierra Leone and living in exile in Nigeria.

REUTERS LL RAI1305