01-01-2006, 07:18 AM
Signs of hope and despair
Fewer conflicts and wars, but heavy suffering mark 2005
Thu Dec 29 2005
View From The West / Gwynne Dyer
FIRST, the good news. In October, a comprehensive three-year study led by Andrew Mack, former director of the Strategic Planning Unit in the office of United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, concluded that there have been major declines in armed conflicts, genocides, human rights abuses, military coups and international crises worldwide.
The survey, commissioned by Britain, Canada, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland and conducted by the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia, revealed a drop of over 40 per cent in the number of armed conflicts since 1992. For the biggest conflicts, involving more than 1,000 battle-deaths per year, the drop was 80 per cent.
The international media by their very nature will always offer us an image of global chaos, but in fact the Americas, Europe and Asia were almost entirely at peace during 2005, Colombia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Nepal and the southern Philippines being the major exceptions.
The Middle East was also at peace, except for the American war in Iraq, and even sub-Saharan Africa, home to over half the world's remaining wars, saw some major improvements during the year.
The peace agreement in Sudan in February ended the continent's longest and worst civil war, and the death of southern leader John Garang in a helicopter crash only weeks afterwards did not upset the deal. By the end of the year millions of southern refugees were making their way home, and even the separate and more recent conflict in Darfur in western Sudan, which has killed some 200,000 people and left up to two million homeless, was abating in intensity.
On the opposite side of the continent, the November election of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf as Africa's first woman president proved that the long civil war in Liberia was finally over. The integration of rebel (Hutu) forces and the regular (Tutsi) army in Burundi, together with the election of a Hutu president, suggested that the even longer civil war in that country might also be finished.
Africa is still the poorest continent, and the most turbulent one. Ethiopia's first free election ended in violence in May, the threat of another border war between Ethiopia and Eritrea grew throughout the year, and the attempt to recreate some sort of central government in Somalia after 14 years of anarchy was falling apart at year's end.
But southern Africa was entirely at peace, so much so that the Mozambicans began discussing whether they should remove the outline of an AK-47 rifle from their national flag. Almost every southern African country was not only democratic but also making significant economic progress, Zimbabwe under the aging dictator Robert Mugabe being the horrible exception.
A dark cloud lying over the future of the continent's one industrialized country, South Africa, was lifted when Deputy President Jacob Zuma was driven from office on charges of corruption and rape. Zuma, the standard-bearer for the ruling African National Congress's more populist elements, might have derailed the whole delicate project for gradually transferring wealth and power to the non-white majority without panicking local whites and foreign investors if he had succeeded President Thabo Mbeki, but he now seems permanently out of the running.
The only other region of the world that rivalled Africa in political turbulence was the Middle East -- and if you count the guerilla war unleashed by the U.S. invasion of Iraq as a genuinely regional event, then the Middle East even gave Africa a run for its money in the past year in terms of military casualties. But almost all the killing was confined to the cauldron of Iraq; elsewhere, the upheavals were mainly political.
The biggest changes by far were in Israel and Palestine, where a series of radical shifts altered the whole political landscape. The death of Yasser Arafat in late 2004 brought Mahmoud Abbas, a much cannier and more presentable leader, to the presidency of the Palestinian Authority last January, but a new Palestinian parliamentary election was repeatedly postponed (it is now scheduled for Jan. 9) because of fears that the Hamas party, which rejects territorial compromise with Israel in return for peace, would win a majority in the new parliament. This did not much matter so long as Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon's government was determined to impose a unilateral peace on the Palestinians, but now the balance of forces has become much more fluid and unpredictable.
Right down to August, when Sharon forced the evacuation of Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip against strong opposition from within his own Likud Party, his strategy seemed to be working. The Gaza withdrawal guaranteed that he would face no serious pressure from the United States for further concessions for at least a year or two, and meanwhile the "security fence" that would define the new de facto border between Israel and the occupied territories continued to snake its way across the West Bank. But then his own Likud Party hard-liners mounted a serious assault on his leadership, pushing his long-standing rival Binyamin Netanyahu as his replacement, and his Labour Party ally, Shimon Peres, was overthrown as leader of his own party by Amir Peretz.
Peretz, a trade-union leader who favours direct peace negotiations with the Palestinians on the basis of the existing borders, promptly broke the coalition with Likud, whereupon Peres quit the Labour Party entirely.
Faced with the prospect of being pushed out by Netanyahu, Sharon also quit Likud, taking more than half its members of parliament with him, and together he and Peres founded the new Kadima ("Forward") Party. Israel will now go to the polls shortly after the Palestinians do, and the possibility exists that it could elect a Labour government led by Peretz that is ready to open genuine peace talks with Mahmoud Abbas.
And then there was Iraq. The "turning points" in Iraq came thick and fast, from elections in January to a new government in May (after four months of negotiations), a new constitution in August, a referendum on the constitution in October, and new elections in December, but no corners were actually turned. At the end of the year, the resistance was as strong or stronger than it had been at the start, American military dead had passed the 2,000 mark, the U.S.-backed Iraqi army and police were still largely unable or unwilling to fight on their own, and the possibility that the Iraqi state might actually break up, throwing all the existing borders of the region into question, had ceased to be mere fantasy.
But the impact of the Iraq conflict on the rest of the region has so far been surprisingly limited: Heightened anti-American sentiment, some terrorist bombs in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and an upsurge in recruiting for Islamist extremist organizations. The impact in the United States has been considerably greater.
"We will never give in, and we will never accept anything less than complete victory," said President George W. Bush in a speech last month, and he will doubtless continue to tough it out, because admitting that invading Iraq was a ghastly mistake would have huge political consequences for him and his party.
However, American public opinion, long insulated from the reality of failure in Iraq by uncritical media coverage of the war, began to lose faith in the administration when confronted with its arrogant and incompetent response to the disaster of hurricane Katrina in September: By December, Mr. Bush's rating in opinion polls had reached an all-time low. With three years of his second mandate still to run, he does not yet face overwhelming political or popular pressure to change course on Iraq -- but he is at risk of becoming a premature "lame duck," seen as an electoral handicap by his own party and therefore unable to command obedience in Congress.
The most remarkable result of the Bush administration's obsession with remaking the Middle East has been Washington's astonishing failure to pay attention to Latin America -- a failure all the more remarkable when the U.S. president is a Texan who speaks fluent Spanish.
The Free Trade Area of the Americas, once a pet Republican project, has withered as more and more Latin American countries elect left-wing parties that are profoundly hostile to it, but apart from half-hearted support for a coup that tried to overthrow Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez two years ago, Washington has not once acted to block or remove these governments.
Well over half the population of Latin America is already ruled by leftist governments whose relations with official Washington are very cool -- up from only 10 per cent when Mr. Bush first took office, and the proportion might reach two-thirds during this coming year if the Mexican election also swings that country to the left.
The Bush administration is so good at alienating old friends and allies that even the Canadian election campaign was taking on a distinctly anti-American flavour at year's end.
Europe had a relatively uneventful year, apart from the rejection of the new EU constitution in the spring referendums. There were bombs in London underground trains and buses in July, but apart from that Europe remained almost as free from the alleged terrorist threat as the United States itself.
The poorest parts of Paris, and subsequently of other French cities, erupted in riots in November that were widely misrepresented as an uprising by the country's disadvantaged Muslim minority, but were actually an incoherent, apolitical revolt by all the country's neglected and discarded minorities, including the bottom end of the old white working class.
The year's most important international event was unquestionably the coming into effect of the Kyoto accord on climate change in February, following Russia's decision to ratify it late in 2004. The Montreal review conference on the Kyoto deal in November, though it failed to agree on further measures to control greenhouse gas emissions after 2012, managed to keep the door open for continued negotiations on this agenda despite the wrecking attempts of the U.S. government.
And the great new global anxiety, driven by growing numbers of cases of bird-to-human transmission of avian influenza viruses in southeast Asia, was the possibility of an influenza pandemic as lethal as the one that killed 50 million to 100 million people in 1918-19. It may not strike in 2006 or even 2007, but most experts are convinced that something very nasty is on the way.
And so, finally, to Asia, home to half the human race.
The most shocking event was the devastating earthquake that struck northern Pakistan. <span style='color:red'><span style='font-size:21pt;line-height:100%'>The shock was not that it killed more people than last December's Indian Ocean tsunami (though it did), but that the international aid was so much less and so much slower to arrive. </span>Now many of the roads are blocked by snow, and unknown numbers of quake survivors are dying of exposure and malnutrition every day in cut-off mountain villages where few buildings remain standing.</span>
Afghanistan held an election of sorts in September, but it mainly served to confirm the power of the regional warlords who took over from the Taliban in most places after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001.
On the positive side, the long-running crisis over North Korea's alleged nuclear weapons came to an apparently satisfactory conclusion in November, when Kim Jong-Il's regime finally got what it had been after all along: A U.S. commitment not to invade the communist dictatorship, and some foreign aid. But it had always been a fairly implausible crisis anyway, as North Korea had no conceivable use for nuclear weapons except to deter an American attack, which had never been part of the Bush administration's plans despite all the heated rhetoric. And it's doubtful that North Korea has ever built any operational nuclear weapons despite its claims to the contrary.
April saw anti-Japanese riots all over China, in state-encouraged protests against new Japanese textbooks that minimize the crimes committed by Japan when it invaded China in 1937-45. Junichiro Koizumi's centre-right government in Tokyo, undaunted by this demonstration of Chinese displeasure, went right ahead with strengthening its military alliance with the United States (and extending a Japanese military guarantee to Taiwan as well). None of this did Koizumi any harm with the voters, and he won a national election in September by a landslide.
Subsequently, he backed new constitutional amendments that would enable Japan to send military forces overseas to fight alongside its allies.
The one truly worrisome development of the year, not just for Asia but for the whole world, was the 10-year military agreement between the United States and India that was signed in Washington in July. While not a formal military alliance that commits the two countries to fight together against any foe, it has all the hallmarks of an alliance intended to "contain" China. Indeed, it looks like the capstone in a series of such alliances and agreements between the U.S. and Asian countries that now virtually encircle China to the east, south and west. That is certainly how it will be viewed in Beijing, and the concern is that the Chinese will respond to this perception of being surrounded and threatened by racing to build up their own military forces, thereby confirming their neighbours' anxieties and setting up a positive feedback loop. This is, in fact, the way most arms races get started, and the last thing Asia and the world need in the early 21st century is a Cold War between China on one side, and the U.S., India and Japan on the other.
But don't despair. This is just a possibility so far, not a reality.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based
independent journalist.
Fewer conflicts and wars, but heavy suffering mark 2005
Thu Dec 29 2005
View From The West / Gwynne Dyer
FIRST, the good news. In October, a comprehensive three-year study led by Andrew Mack, former director of the Strategic Planning Unit in the office of United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, concluded that there have been major declines in armed conflicts, genocides, human rights abuses, military coups and international crises worldwide.
The survey, commissioned by Britain, Canada, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland and conducted by the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia, revealed a drop of over 40 per cent in the number of armed conflicts since 1992. For the biggest conflicts, involving more than 1,000 battle-deaths per year, the drop was 80 per cent.
The international media by their very nature will always offer us an image of global chaos, but in fact the Americas, Europe and Asia were almost entirely at peace during 2005, Colombia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Nepal and the southern Philippines being the major exceptions.
The Middle East was also at peace, except for the American war in Iraq, and even sub-Saharan Africa, home to over half the world's remaining wars, saw some major improvements during the year.
The peace agreement in Sudan in February ended the continent's longest and worst civil war, and the death of southern leader John Garang in a helicopter crash only weeks afterwards did not upset the deal. By the end of the year millions of southern refugees were making their way home, and even the separate and more recent conflict in Darfur in western Sudan, which has killed some 200,000 people and left up to two million homeless, was abating in intensity.
On the opposite side of the continent, the November election of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf as Africa's first woman president proved that the long civil war in Liberia was finally over. The integration of rebel (Hutu) forces and the regular (Tutsi) army in Burundi, together with the election of a Hutu president, suggested that the even longer civil war in that country might also be finished.
Africa is still the poorest continent, and the most turbulent one. Ethiopia's first free election ended in violence in May, the threat of another border war between Ethiopia and Eritrea grew throughout the year, and the attempt to recreate some sort of central government in Somalia after 14 years of anarchy was falling apart at year's end.
But southern Africa was entirely at peace, so much so that the Mozambicans began discussing whether they should remove the outline of an AK-47 rifle from their national flag. Almost every southern African country was not only democratic but also making significant economic progress, Zimbabwe under the aging dictator Robert Mugabe being the horrible exception.
A dark cloud lying over the future of the continent's one industrialized country, South Africa, was lifted when Deputy President Jacob Zuma was driven from office on charges of corruption and rape. Zuma, the standard-bearer for the ruling African National Congress's more populist elements, might have derailed the whole delicate project for gradually transferring wealth and power to the non-white majority without panicking local whites and foreign investors if he had succeeded President Thabo Mbeki, but he now seems permanently out of the running.
The only other region of the world that rivalled Africa in political turbulence was the Middle East -- and if you count the guerilla war unleashed by the U.S. invasion of Iraq as a genuinely regional event, then the Middle East even gave Africa a run for its money in the past year in terms of military casualties. But almost all the killing was confined to the cauldron of Iraq; elsewhere, the upheavals were mainly political.
The biggest changes by far were in Israel and Palestine, where a series of radical shifts altered the whole political landscape. The death of Yasser Arafat in late 2004 brought Mahmoud Abbas, a much cannier and more presentable leader, to the presidency of the Palestinian Authority last January, but a new Palestinian parliamentary election was repeatedly postponed (it is now scheduled for Jan. 9) because of fears that the Hamas party, which rejects territorial compromise with Israel in return for peace, would win a majority in the new parliament. This did not much matter so long as Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon's government was determined to impose a unilateral peace on the Palestinians, but now the balance of forces has become much more fluid and unpredictable.
Right down to August, when Sharon forced the evacuation of Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip against strong opposition from within his own Likud Party, his strategy seemed to be working. The Gaza withdrawal guaranteed that he would face no serious pressure from the United States for further concessions for at least a year or two, and meanwhile the "security fence" that would define the new de facto border between Israel and the occupied territories continued to snake its way across the West Bank. But then his own Likud Party hard-liners mounted a serious assault on his leadership, pushing his long-standing rival Binyamin Netanyahu as his replacement, and his Labour Party ally, Shimon Peres, was overthrown as leader of his own party by Amir Peretz.
Peretz, a trade-union leader who favours direct peace negotiations with the Palestinians on the basis of the existing borders, promptly broke the coalition with Likud, whereupon Peres quit the Labour Party entirely.
Faced with the prospect of being pushed out by Netanyahu, Sharon also quit Likud, taking more than half its members of parliament with him, and together he and Peres founded the new Kadima ("Forward") Party. Israel will now go to the polls shortly after the Palestinians do, and the possibility exists that it could elect a Labour government led by Peretz that is ready to open genuine peace talks with Mahmoud Abbas.
And then there was Iraq. The "turning points" in Iraq came thick and fast, from elections in January to a new government in May (after four months of negotiations), a new constitution in August, a referendum on the constitution in October, and new elections in December, but no corners were actually turned. At the end of the year, the resistance was as strong or stronger than it had been at the start, American military dead had passed the 2,000 mark, the U.S.-backed Iraqi army and police were still largely unable or unwilling to fight on their own, and the possibility that the Iraqi state might actually break up, throwing all the existing borders of the region into question, had ceased to be mere fantasy.
But the impact of the Iraq conflict on the rest of the region has so far been surprisingly limited: Heightened anti-American sentiment, some terrorist bombs in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and an upsurge in recruiting for Islamist extremist organizations. The impact in the United States has been considerably greater.
"We will never give in, and we will never accept anything less than complete victory," said President George W. Bush in a speech last month, and he will doubtless continue to tough it out, because admitting that invading Iraq was a ghastly mistake would have huge political consequences for him and his party.
However, American public opinion, long insulated from the reality of failure in Iraq by uncritical media coverage of the war, began to lose faith in the administration when confronted with its arrogant and incompetent response to the disaster of hurricane Katrina in September: By December, Mr. Bush's rating in opinion polls had reached an all-time low. With three years of his second mandate still to run, he does not yet face overwhelming political or popular pressure to change course on Iraq -- but he is at risk of becoming a premature "lame duck," seen as an electoral handicap by his own party and therefore unable to command obedience in Congress.
The most remarkable result of the Bush administration's obsession with remaking the Middle East has been Washington's astonishing failure to pay attention to Latin America -- a failure all the more remarkable when the U.S. president is a Texan who speaks fluent Spanish.
The Free Trade Area of the Americas, once a pet Republican project, has withered as more and more Latin American countries elect left-wing parties that are profoundly hostile to it, but apart from half-hearted support for a coup that tried to overthrow Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez two years ago, Washington has not once acted to block or remove these governments.
Well over half the population of Latin America is already ruled by leftist governments whose relations with official Washington are very cool -- up from only 10 per cent when Mr. Bush first took office, and the proportion might reach two-thirds during this coming year if the Mexican election also swings that country to the left.
The Bush administration is so good at alienating old friends and allies that even the Canadian election campaign was taking on a distinctly anti-American flavour at year's end.
Europe had a relatively uneventful year, apart from the rejection of the new EU constitution in the spring referendums. There were bombs in London underground trains and buses in July, but apart from that Europe remained almost as free from the alleged terrorist threat as the United States itself.
The poorest parts of Paris, and subsequently of other French cities, erupted in riots in November that were widely misrepresented as an uprising by the country's disadvantaged Muslim minority, but were actually an incoherent, apolitical revolt by all the country's neglected and discarded minorities, including the bottom end of the old white working class.
The year's most important international event was unquestionably the coming into effect of the Kyoto accord on climate change in February, following Russia's decision to ratify it late in 2004. The Montreal review conference on the Kyoto deal in November, though it failed to agree on further measures to control greenhouse gas emissions after 2012, managed to keep the door open for continued negotiations on this agenda despite the wrecking attempts of the U.S. government.
And the great new global anxiety, driven by growing numbers of cases of bird-to-human transmission of avian influenza viruses in southeast Asia, was the possibility of an influenza pandemic as lethal as the one that killed 50 million to 100 million people in 1918-19. It may not strike in 2006 or even 2007, but most experts are convinced that something very nasty is on the way.
And so, finally, to Asia, home to half the human race.
The most shocking event was the devastating earthquake that struck northern Pakistan. <span style='color:red'><span style='font-size:21pt;line-height:100%'>The shock was not that it killed more people than last December's Indian Ocean tsunami (though it did), but that the international aid was so much less and so much slower to arrive. </span>Now many of the roads are blocked by snow, and unknown numbers of quake survivors are dying of exposure and malnutrition every day in cut-off mountain villages where few buildings remain standing.</span>
Afghanistan held an election of sorts in September, but it mainly served to confirm the power of the regional warlords who took over from the Taliban in most places after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001.
On the positive side, the long-running crisis over North Korea's alleged nuclear weapons came to an apparently satisfactory conclusion in November, when Kim Jong-Il's regime finally got what it had been after all along: A U.S. commitment not to invade the communist dictatorship, and some foreign aid. But it had always been a fairly implausible crisis anyway, as North Korea had no conceivable use for nuclear weapons except to deter an American attack, which had never been part of the Bush administration's plans despite all the heated rhetoric. And it's doubtful that North Korea has ever built any operational nuclear weapons despite its claims to the contrary.
April saw anti-Japanese riots all over China, in state-encouraged protests against new Japanese textbooks that minimize the crimes committed by Japan when it invaded China in 1937-45. Junichiro Koizumi's centre-right government in Tokyo, undaunted by this demonstration of Chinese displeasure, went right ahead with strengthening its military alliance with the United States (and extending a Japanese military guarantee to Taiwan as well). None of this did Koizumi any harm with the voters, and he won a national election in September by a landslide.
Subsequently, he backed new constitutional amendments that would enable Japan to send military forces overseas to fight alongside its allies.
The one truly worrisome development of the year, not just for Asia but for the whole world, was the 10-year military agreement between the United States and India that was signed in Washington in July. While not a formal military alliance that commits the two countries to fight together against any foe, it has all the hallmarks of an alliance intended to "contain" China. Indeed, it looks like the capstone in a series of such alliances and agreements between the U.S. and Asian countries that now virtually encircle China to the east, south and west. That is certainly how it will be viewed in Beijing, and the concern is that the Chinese will respond to this perception of being surrounded and threatened by racing to build up their own military forces, thereby confirming their neighbours' anxieties and setting up a positive feedback loop. This is, in fact, the way most arms races get started, and the last thing Asia and the world need in the early 21st century is a Cold War between China on one side, and the U.S., India and Japan on the other.
But don't despair. This is just a possibility so far, not a reality.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based
independent journalist.