This
is the moment when
we can diminish war
By
Jonathan
Power
June 4, 2003
LONDON - With unanimous approval in the Security
Council the UN is authorizing a beefed up peacekeeping
force into the Congo maelstrom. At least this time the
UN, hitting trouble in the face of massacres and the
deaths of its peacekeepers, is not going into reverse. In
Rwanda eight years ago it was said that the UN force
appeared to have four gears, one for forward and three
for reverse.
In Rwanda 800,000 million people were massacred.
An independent investigation by Ingvar Carlsson, the
former Swedish prime minister, laid the blame squarely on
the shoulders of the U.S. and British governments which,
when the small contingent of Belgian peacekeepers
were attacked and brutally castrated and killed, refused
to allow the UN presence to be beefed up. The report also
faulted Secretary-General Kofi Annan who was then head of
peacekeeping and Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then
Secretary-General, for not keeping the Security Council
well informed.
Today there can be no defence. The Security Council is
better informed, the press is doing a more thorough job,
the politicians in Western capitals are not in denial,
but still the wheels are turning too slowly. The UN force
will be beefed up too modestly- by 1,000 French troops
plus another 400 from other countries.
A useful perspective is added by the larger picture:
wars are diminishing. As I set out to show in my
forthcoming book the number of wars has been falling for
150 years, albeit their intensity has been ratcheting up,
mainly because of technological advances in the tools of
killing and the growing anarchy in Africa. Since the
Second World War this process has accelerated and wars
between nations are now exceedingly rare. Even ethnic war
which seemed to leap upward at the end of the Cold war
has been on a steady downward track for over a decade.
The rapid spread of democracy and the astonishing strides
forward of the human rights movement have all
contributed. So, too, has economic advance and growing
prosperity. Most wars are now fought in the poorest
countries and these are concentrated in Africa. If the UN
could get on top of these African wars the world would be
a very different place- almost war free, if President
George Bush could be refrained from winding back the
historical clock.
A new study by Paul Collier of the World Bank is, to
use the current jargon, a "road map" of how we get from
here to there. He destroys the shibboleths that these
wars owe themselves to inequality (how come Brazil never
has civil wars despite its atrocious inequalities?) or
that it's ancient hatreds (the history that matters is
always recent history). What appears to matter most is if
the economy is first poor and second that it is declining
and is dependent on natural resource exports. Once a
civil war is started in such an environment they are not
easy to stop. The war leaders tend to prosper in wartime
even though society as a whole suffers. Central
governments are weak and rebels, if they can get their
hands on the source of these exports, especially if it is
diamonds (as in Angola and Sierra Leone) or timber (as in
Cambodia) can become rich and employ or intimidate under
employed youngsters into joining their militias .
Collier concludes that while peacekeeping may be
useful to dampen down a conflict the long term solution
is in addressing these causes. Progress has been made. UN
members, as the Angolan war dragged on, did eventually
become seized with the diamond smuggling issue and an
international accord led to increased policing and
scrutiny, which in turn appears to have been a factor
contributing to the demise of important rebel groups in
Angola and Sierra Leone. It should be possible to
replicate this policing with timber exports, as the Group
of Eight discussion in Evian suggested. British Prime
Minister Tony Blair has also given the cause a push by
launching an initiative for greater transparency in the
reporting of resource revenues by multinational companies
working in extractive industries. Too many companies have
behaved like the French oil giant Elf Aquitaine which
bought oil drilling rights from Congolese rebel groups
enabling them to spend the money on arms.
Beyond this the international community needs to lean
more heavily on neighboring countries that offer rebel
movements sanctuary. It needs to be tougher on arms
salesmen and the flow of arms. It needs to watch more
carefully the financial aid from diasporas who live in
the West. (The IRA could never have prospered without its
American supporters.) Not least international aid needs
to be better timed. Collier argues persuasively that
rushing in aid as is the usual practice immediately after
a ceasefire is worse than useless. Then the country's
institutions are too weak to use it well. Major aid needs
to be delayed a couple of years when economic and
institutional recovery is under way.
What last weekend's unanimous Security Council vote
shows is that the world, despite its differences of
opinion on Iraq, could be made ready for such an effort.
If this prescription could be delivered the global
incidence of civil war will decline dramatically. Perhaps
this could be the post Iraq cause that could unite the
world.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2003 By
JONATHAN POWER
Follow this
link to read about - and order - Jonathan Power's book
written for the
40th Anniversary of
Amnesty International
"Like
Water on Stone - The Story of Amnesty
International"
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