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RECENT NEWS COVERAGE: April 23, 2000 The Hartford Courant 33-Plus Rage Around World When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, pundits and policymakers spoke of the dawning of a new era in which conflict would be the exception rather than the rule. But 11 years later, the world is still at war. There are now at least 33 major conflicts under way worldwide. You may have heard about the wars in Chechnya, Colombia and the Congo, but you probably haven’t heard much about the equally brutal conflicts occurring in Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka and the Sudan. It’s time to start paying closer attention to these far-off conflicts. The end of the Cold War has made it less likely that there will be a nuclear war between the superpowers, but it has done little to stem the spread of local and regional wars. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union fueled regional wars by backing their local proxies with troops or weaponry, but they also engaged in diplomatic efforts to limit the spread of these conflicts. By contrast, the new world of war involves a bewildering array of conflicts over territory, resources and ethnic and national identity in which it’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad. A case in point is the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which Secretary of State Madeline Albright has described as “Africa’s first world war.” The conflict involves the armies of seven sovereign nations plus a dozen or more militias and paramilitary groups. Each party to the dispute has its reasons for fighting, from Congolese President Laurent Kabila’s desire to maintain his autocratic rule to the Rwandan government’s desire to defeat the Interhamwe militias that carried out the 1994 genocide in that nation before crossing the border to set up operations in the Congo. In addition, many of the individuals involved in the Congo war, from Zimbabwean military officers to Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, have been directly profiting from the conflict by selling off diamonds and other natural resources in exchange for guns and money. The result of these conflicting political and economic motives has been a state of armed chaos that threatens to engulf the entire region. In late February, the UN Security Council approved a modest 5,500-member UN peacekeeping mission for the Congo to help the parties to the dispute police a cease-fire, but it remains to be seen whether this will be enough to stop the killing. The Congo is the latest in a long series of bloody conflicts that have punctuated the past decade, from Iraq to Somalia to Kosovo to Chechnya. What is fueling these new wars, and why hasn’t the international community come up with better ways to prevent them? Contrary to the widely held view that the bubbling up of ancient ethnic hatreds or “settling old scores” is the key driver behind contemporary conflicts, the Canadian research group Project Ploughshares has argued that “behind ethnic or national identity struggles are basic economic and social grievances . . .. “Countries at the bottom half of the United Nations human development index are almost three times as likely to fall into war as countries at the top half of the index.” Globalization has enriched many corporations, individuals and communities, but it has also left large parts of the Third World in conditions of desperate poverty in which the business of war – from the plunder of resources to the profits of gun-running – has become a means of survival for many individuals and groups. The ready availability of inexpensive but deadly weaponry – from rifles and machine guns to light trucks and rocket launchers – is another factor in the spread of ethnic and territorial conflicts. It’s too easy to get a hold of these weapons, with or without the approval of legitimate governments. As a recent report by the British American Security Information Council has pointed out, the networks involved in arming the perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan genocide included brokers in the United Kingdom, France and South Africa working with collaborators in Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Egypt, Italy, Israel, Seychelles and the former Zaire. Last but not least, the United States and the world’s other major powers have invested far too much in preparing for war and far too little in preventing conflict. When the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe was monitoring a cease-fire in Kosovo in late 1998 and early 1999, its entire annual budget for conflict prevention was just $2 million. That’s the equivalent of just two of the hundreds of cruise missiles that were rained down on the former Yugoslavia by the U.S. and NATO forces when the OSCE-monitored cease-fire broke down. And while the Clinton administration is to be commended for pressing the UN Security Council to authorize a peacekeeping force for the Congo, the proposed U.S. contribution to the force is a modest $40 million, a figure that pales in comparison with the $1.6 billion in weaponry that the U.S. government and U.S. arms companies poured into Africa during the Cold War. If a new approach to preventing conflict is to emerge, the leadership will have to come from nongovernmental organizations and the governments of middle powers – like Canada and the Scandinavian countries – that are not mired in the institutional and intellectual frameworks of the Cold War. It was precisely this kind of coalition that brought about the creation of an international treaty to ban the export, production and use of anti-personnel land mines, which has now been ratified by a majority of the world’s nations despite the opposition of major powers like the United States and Russia. A similar coalition – including veteran’s groups, public health professionals and experts in development, arms control and human rights – is now pressing for strict limits on the spread of the guns, ammunition and other small arms that are the weapons of choice on today’s most deadly battlefields. As we embark on a new century, the U.S. government should put more of its resources into efforts to prevent conflict using innovative approached to conflict prevention and peacekeeping rather than fueling conflicts through arms sales and military training programs. If not, the violence of today’s “forgotten wars” could be just the beginning of a new, more violent era in international affairs that will have devastating human and economic costs for people in every corner of the globe. William D. Hartung and Frida Berrigan are the president’s fellow and senior research associate, respectively, at the World Policy Institute at the New School in New York Coty. For a map depicting armed conflicts in 1999 go to the Project Ploughshares site at www.ploughshares.ca/imagesarticles/ACR99/acr99.jpg
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