Beslan
and the crude instinct
of solving problems by warfare
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
September 8, 2004
'We showed weakness
and weak people are beaten,' said President Vladimir
Putin after surveying the wreckage of the battle scarred
school in Beslan. Now we know what President George W.
Bush meant when he said after his first meeting with
Putin that he had looked into his eyes and had seen his
soul. He had indeed found a soul mate. The meek, they
both believe, shall not inherit the earth.
Who fights with
Dragons, said Nietzsche, shall himself become a dragon.
But the other horn of the dilemma is he who does not
fight with dragons may be devoured by them.
War is sometimes
perhaps necessary. But in too many cases it degrades the
fighter and his cause. The resort to force is too often
crudely instinctive, as in Iraq despite the thinness of
the arguments for war. In this latest case the lack of
sophistication of the Russian troops, first in Chechnya
and now, horribly, with their mad, undisciplined, rush to
free the children, has allowed animal instincts to
overcome all rational behavior. Yet for all that war in
the world is diminishing.
Undoubtedly the
European Union's greatest achievement has been to cement
the warring nations of Europe into a peaceful whole. Most
recently the lure of Europe has compelled the Turks,
after years of savage warfare, to parley with the Kurds
in a way that Russia could do well to emulate with the
Chechnyans.
For the first time
in history a not insignificant number of states have been
free from war for the best part of two centuries. In
Europe there are Sweden and Switzerland, both despite a
long tradition of warfare. In Latin America, Venezuela,
Costa Rica and Brazil have now lived out a century
without war. Indeed, entire regions of our planet have
escaped internal war for over a century- North America
most importantly. Neither Canada, Mexico nor the U.S.
maintains troops on each other's borders. Likewise the
South Pacific has long been peaceful, apart from a brief
invasion by the Japanese in the Second World War and by
relatively small-scale conflicts in West Iranian and East
Timor.
Looking back over a
vast historical panorama, Oxford historian Evan Luard, in
his meticulous book on the history of war, showed that
overtime wars have become less frequent and the number of
years in which an average country has been involved in
war has declined over the centuries. He also showed that
we see from our modern perspective that the reasons wars
were fought were not issues that would now engage most of
us. Would we fight to keep our prince in power? Would we
fight for our tribe (unless we were Basques, Serbs or
Ulstermen)? Most of us certainly wouldn't fight for our
religion and it is extremely doubtful if we would fight
to expand the territory of our country.
Putin seems to have taken a leap
backward into a history that has now moved on for most
nations. The biography of Mikhail Gorbachev by another
Oxford don, Archie Brown, reveals not one mention of
Chechnya, and that Gorbachev when faced with insurrection
in the Baltic States withstood the formidable pressure
from the Soviet military to wield the big stick. It was
Boris Yeltsin who made the decision to unravel everything
that Moscow had learnt from its war in Afghanistan and
unleashed the dogs of war in Chechnya. But to its credit
the Yeltsin administration arrived at peaceful power
sharing agreements with restless Tatarstan, Bashkiria and
forty other regions. This latter fact reflected a trend
that was worldwide. Between 1993 and 2001 the number of
wars of self-determination was halved. During the 1990s
sixteen separatist wars were settled by peace agreements
and ten others were checked by ceasefires and
negotiation, according to the Minority at Risk Project of
the University of Maryland.
War, the systematic
and organized use of violence with all its bestial
destructiveness, is peculiar to the most advanced of
animals, man. Writing in the sixteenth century the Dutch
philosopher Erasmus considered wars 'Whoever heard of
100,000 animals rushing together, to butcher each other,
as men do everywhere?'
Not for nothing is
the Vietnam memorial in Washington so different from its
flamboyant, patriotic forbears. Instead of eagles and
rifles there are only stark slabs of black marble with
the names of the American dead engraved on them. As
Michael Mandelbaum has observed, "represents the soldier
not as hero but as an innocent and faceless
victim."
Putin and Bush, the soul-mates, are
throwbacks to a bygone age. As long as they both remain
in power the peoples of the world are stymied from making
further progress to discard war- an ambition that only a
few years ago a majority seemed set on.
Copyright © 2004 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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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