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Mideast still key to a more peaceful world

TheStar.com - Mideast still key to a more peaceful world

But U.S. pact with India fuelling fears of a new `cold war' with China, warns Gwynne Dyer
Dec. 30, 2005. 01:00 AM

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 UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, concluded there have been major declines in armed conflicts, genocides, human rights abuses, military coups and international crises worldwide.

The survey, commissioned by Canada, Britain, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland and conducted by the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia, revealed a drop of more than 40 per cent 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 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 with 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. 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 2 million homeless, was abating in intensity.

Africa

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. Almost every southern African country was not only democratic but also making significant economic progress, Zimbabwe under aging dictator Robert Mugabe being the horrible exception.

Middle East

The only other region of the world that rivalled Africa in political turbulence was the Middle East. 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 Hamas, 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 Benjamin Netanyahu as his replacement, and his Labour party ally, Shimon Peres, was overthrown as leader of his own party by Amir Peretz.

Peres quit Labour and, faced, with the prospect of being pushed out by Netanyahu, Sharon also quit Likud. Together he and Peres founded the new Kadima ("Forward") party.

Israel will now go to the polls shortly after the Palestinians and the possibility exists that it could elect a Labour government led by Peretz that is ready to open genuine peace talks with Abbas. But the possibility also exists that Hamas and other Islamist radicals will launch another suicide bombing campaign in Israel designed to drive Israelis into the arms of Likud and/or Kadima, and thus avert the threat of a durable compromise peace.

The other potentially epochal event in the region was the opening of talks for Turkey's membership in the European Union on Oct. 3. It may be a decade or more before these talks conclude, but if they are successful, they will begin to 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.

Developments elsewhere in the region were less dramatic.

In Iran's presidential election in June, more than 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 Ahmadinejad, managed to win the presidency.

The assassination of Lebanon's former prime minister Rafik al-Hariri in February (probably by Syrian intelligence operatives) triggered a non-violent democratic movement in Lebanon and forced a Syrian military withdrawal from the country. 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 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 U.S. 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, Bush's rating in opinion polls had reached an all-time low.

With three years of his second mandate still to run, the president 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.

Latin America

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. 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 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.

Europe

Europe had a relatively uneventful year, apart from the rejection of the new EU constitution in the spring referendums. There were bombs on 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.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair scrambled back into office in a spring election with a majority cut in half because of popular discontent with Britain's involvement in the Iraq war, but the Irish Republican Army's decision to destroy its entire arsenal in September, putting a definitive end to the armed campaign in Northern Ireland that it suspended 11 years ago, was a success for Blair's patient diplomacy.

The premier media event of the year was undoubtedly the death of Pope John Paul II in March and the selection of Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI in April, but it is unlikely that there will be any substantial changes of Catholic doctrine or policy as a result.

And the great new global anxiety, driven by growing numbers of cases of bird-to-human transmission of avian influenza viruses in south-east Asia, was the possibility of an influenza pandemic as lethal as the one that killed 50 million-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.

Asia

Bhutan became a world leader by becoming the first nation to ban smoking everywhere outside private homes, the ruling Burmese generals abruptly moved the country's capital from Rangoon to a sleepy up-country town called Pyinmana, and China revalued the yuan — by a very small amount.

But the most shocking event was the devastating earthquake that struck northern Pakistan. 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. 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.

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.

Sri Lanka's long civil war seemed likely to reignite after an election in that same month in which Mahinda Rajapakse, a candidate who vows never to recognize the Tamil minority's demand for an autonomous region, won the presidency by the narrowest of margins.

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 Stalinist 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.

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.

None of this did Koizumi any harm with the voters, and he won a national election in September by a landslide.

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 U.S. 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 Canadian journalist based in London whose articles are published in 45 countries.

December 30, 2005 at 02:10 PM in Middle East | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home