The balance sheet of the year left behind

Dec 28, 2005

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, milita

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 percent in the number of armed conflicts since 1992 — and for the biggest conflicts, involving more than 1,000 battle-deaths per year, the drop was 80 percent.
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 made 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. Ivory Coast, cut in half in 2002 after a failed coup led to a civil war, made only halting progress towards reconciliation, and sporadic outbreaks of violence continued to interrupt the peace-building process in eastern Congo.
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 ageing dictator Robert Mugabe being the horrible exception. A dark cloud lying over the future of the continent’s one industrialised 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 US 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. The other potentially epochal event in the region was the opening of talks for Turkey’s membership in the European Union on October 3.
It may be a decade or more before these talks conclude, but if they are successful, they will begin heal a wound that has divided the old classical world around the Mediterranean ever since half of it fell under Muslim rule a millennium ago. Despite the setback to the EU in late May and early June, when France and the Netherlands voted against a new European constitution, thus dooming that project for the foreseeable future, the larger project of European unification continues.
In Iran’s presidential election in June, over half the population refused to vote for the heavily vetted list of candidates presented to it by the conservative religious authorities, and a simplistic nationalist and religious radical, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, managed to win the presidency with the votes of just one-third of the electors.
The death in August of Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd changed nothing, since his brother and heir Abdullah has already been running the kingdom ever since Fahd's stroke ten years ago.
The one truly worrisome development of the year, not just for Asia but for the whole world, was the ten-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 US and Asian countries that now virtually encircle China to the east, south and west.
That is certainly how it will be viewed in Beijing.
This is, in fact, the way most arms races get started, and the last thing Asia and the world need in the early twenty-first century is a Cold War between China on one side, and the US, India and Japan on the other. But don’t despair. This is just a possibility so far, not a reality.
Ends








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