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| Level of violence registers big increase | | And conflict zones now exist everywhere | |
B L KAK
NEW DELHI NOV 26
If the level of violence of various types including terrorist violence, sectarian violence and violence between Islamic organisations and the United States has, in recent times, increased, the number of conflict zones have also registered a phenomenal increase across the world. Nuclear countries, particularly the US, Britain, China and Russia, are also engaged in the task of containing fires of conflict of one kind or another in their respective territories.
More serious conflicts than the much-debated conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir have engulfed more countries in recent years. There is only one absolute certainty about every one of the civil conflicts, including the one in Iraq, which are raging in various parts of the world today. That certainty is that at some point, each of them will end.
The only question is: When? Often ignored by those parts of the world that are strangers to violent internal discord is that it takes a major dislocation in relations between different parts of a united country, before the ultimate horror of civil war and sectarian violence breaks out. The only exceptions to this rule are those countries with borders arbitrarily drawn by colonial mapmakers in the days of European empires or in regions conquered and incorporated into a country.
But even in such cases in which a minority community may feel itself treated as second-class citizens by the majority, there is generally marked reluctance to abandon the benefits of peace, however limited, for the potentially unlimited dangers of conflict. The two defining elements of civil wars are their savagery and the stridency and bitterness of the accusations rival communities hurl at each other.
In conventional wars between states, there is often little mutual venom and sometimes even some chivalry. Indeed in conventional wars, each side has to employ propagandists to whip up feelings against the enemy. Little propaganda, if any, is needed to stir the hearts of fighters in a civil war. The emotions are already there, visceral and historic.
Answering the recriminations that have laid the foundations for intercommunal bloodshed is a monumental task. The nature of this challenging effort forms the core of the three-day meeting starting Monday in Singapore, co-hosted by the Geneva-based Center for Humanitarian Dialogue (HD Center) and Singapore's Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS). Behind closed doors the participants include delegates from Thailand, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, countries currently embroiled in vicious civil conflicts. They also include some would-be peacemakers from Norway whose representatives have worked so long and tirelessly to bring about the return of peace to Sri Lanka.
Norway's mediating role epitomizes a very 20th-century development in relation to civil wars. Modern communications have shrunk the world. A conflict like that in Darfur might, a century ago, have rumbled on for years without the outside world becoming aware of it. No longer. International media bring the horrors of civil conflicts into everyone's living room. Even internal wars that are difficult for journalists to cover, such as that in Chechnya, do not pass unreported.
One reason these wars are so hard to stop is that unlike warring states, the combatants have no outside measure by which to judge the conflict. Civil wars have their own perverse rationale, creating a fog in which ultimately the struggle becomes an end in itself. It is hoped that Singapore's meeting, because it includes people from countries torn apart by violence will generate some fresh insights into the way they can be brought to an end, or better still, avoided in the first place. |
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