By Gwynne Dyer, ContributorIT IS turning out to be a bad year for wars. Three of the worst have already ended, and now two more are looking distinctly wobbly.
It is true that neither the peace accord in Sudan nor the tentative deal in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) has yet stopped all the fighting in these two wars, the biggest remaining wars of the world. But the signs are better than they have been for a long time, and the possibility looms that the year may end with NO big wars going on in the world at all. It would be the first time that was true since well before the Second World War.
This must sound strange to those who buy into the media's fascination with George W. Bush's "titanic struggle against terrorism", the horrors of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the risk of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, but none of these is actually a war that kills people in very large numbers.
The 'war on terror' started with around 3,000 deaths in New York and Washington last September and has caused maybe 15,000 deaths in Afghanistan since then, but that's it. More people than that are dying in the eastern Congo each week. Since 1998, between two-and-a-half and three million people have died because of the war in the Congo.
The suicide-bombers in crowded streets and one-tonne bombs on crowded buildings that characterise the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are horrific, and the individual tragedies are very vivid, but there has been no week since the beginning of the second intifada when even a hundred people died. There has been no week for the past nineteen years when the war in the southern Sudan killed as few as a hundred people.
A nuclear war between Pakistan and India would be terrible, dwarfing all the other conflicts happening around the world, but it remains a merely potential event. The actual guerrilla/terrorist war in Kashmir that might be the trigger for that nuclear war is a brutal affair, but it rarely kills more than 50 people a week. That's not a BIG war.
One year ago, there were five wars under way that could genuinely be called big: Angola, Sierra Leone/Liberia, Sri Lanka, Sudan and Congo. All of them were in one sense or another civil wars, and three of them had already been under way for over fifteen years. But three of them are already over, and the other two may be ending now.
The linked civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia, which devastated both those countries in the 90s, were the first to go. The war in Sierra Leone was officially declared over in
January, having been smothered by a United Nations-backed British military intervention, and the fighting in
Liberia has subsided to mere back-country banditry. The long war in Angola ended with a bang on February 22, when rebel leader Jonas Savimbi was killed in battle after more than twenty years of fighting -- and on the same day the two sides in the 19-year-old war in Sri Lanka signed a cease-fire that is still holding five months later.
Now comes a peace deal in the civil war between north and south in Sudan, signed on 20 July after five weeks of negotiations in Machakos, Kenya. Three previous peace agreements have broken down and there is still not a formal cease-fire (the two sides meet again next month to settle that), but there is real hope that this time, after 19 years of war and around 2 million dead, it will stick. Two days later, the Rwandan and Congolese governments, meeting in South Africa, reached a tentative agreement to end four years of slaughter in eastern Congo that has probably killed around 6 per cent of the entire Congolese population.
It's not a sure thing in either case, but at least the negotiators have addressed the real problems behind the two wars.
In Sudan, the government has finally abandoned the attempt to extend Islamic law to the largely Christian and animist south. For the next six years there is to be a power-sharing government in Khartoum (sharing, among other things, the rapidly rising oil revenues), and then
the south will get to vote on secession. The unspoken reasoning behind the deal is that by then the southern elite will have got so fond of the oil revenues that they will want to stay.
In Congo, the deal is more fragile, involving a promise by Rwanda to remove its 20,000 troops from the east of the country in return for Congolese president Joseph Kabila's commitment to disarm the extremist Hutu militia, the 'interahamwe', now based in eastern Congo, that was originally responsible for the 1994 anti-Tutsi genocide in Rwanda. Since these two relatively disciplined forces, both of Rwandan origin, are at the heart of the two contending coalitions of rebels, tribal militias and organised bandits that have wrecked eastern Congo, withdrawing the Rwandan army and dismantling the interahamwe might actually bring peace.
Or maybe it won't: there is still lots that might go wrong. But there is a quite serious possibility that we could end this year with only one major war left in the world, or even with none. Which is hardly the kind of planet that the panic-mongers would have you believe you live on.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
