LONDON–War is today sweeping Kosovo. The UN-brokered peace is breaking down in Angola. In Rwanda, Hutu militiamen killed 34 Tutsis watching the World Cup in an hotel.
We hear about it all and ring our hands in despair at the ethnic hatred that now seems to be unhindered by the disciplines imposed by the exigencies of big power politics during the Cold War. What we don’t do much of is to look at it in, should I say, more positive terms. What use is conflict? In whose interest is it waged?
We assume too blithely that these wars happen despite the intentions of rational people. In fact they happen often BECAUSE of the intentions of thinking people. War is often not simply a breakdown of the system but a way of creating an alternative system of profit, power and protection. To paraphrase Clausewitz, war has increaingly become the continuation of economics by other means.
Indeed, “winning” in the conventional sense may not be particularly desirable. For war lords and their foot-soldiers–Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA in Angola is the supreme example==the point of war may be nothing less than the legitimacy which it confers on actions which in normal times would be punishable as crimes.
We hand-wringers on the outside assume war is an “end”, and the abuse of civilians the unfortunate “means”. We are wrong. The end in many of these wars (ex-Yugoslavia is the most dramatic example) is to engage in abuse (torture, rape etc.) And crimes (looting, stealing houses and their contents from those they dispossess) that bring immediate reward. The means is war and its perpetration.
In the days of colonial empire or communist expansion fighting was seen as either the struggle for a specific goal==liberation from imperial possession or the overthrow of an oppressive feudalistic structure. In both cases there tended to be ideological self-discipline. By and large, troops under the command of Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro or Che Guevara did not pillage. Nor did they rape and intimidate the population they were trying to liberate. And in Cold War days rebels could often win subsidies, both cash and guns, from Moscow, Beijing or Havana.
Nowadays everything has to be paid for. UNITA in Angola, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia are all examples of movements that have gravitated from a strong ideological purpose to a narrow, self-satisfying, economic one. (In Colombia these erstwhile leftist guerrillas are today called the “third cartel”, so deep is their involvement in the drug business.) Moreover, rebels without a financial and political godfather are more likely to resort to brutality in an effort to make maximum impact with minimum funding. Civilians have become a tool of war.
Much of it is initiated not by rebels seeking to transform the state but by elites intent on defending vested interests. Many of such elites gained power in post-colonial states; others like Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia won their privileged position in communist days, and were determined to hang on to it after, come hell or high water.
All this begs the difficult question, what can be done by outsiders to diminish the power of such people, hamstring their effectiveness and give a better chance of life and security to their would-be victims? Can the international community “reduce the benefits of violence and increase those of peace?” This question is posed in a lucid exposition by David Kean in a new study written for the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
One way is to give the leadership an economic incentive to switch to peace. This, in fact, is what the Oslo Accords did for Yasser Arafat and his cabal of officials who run the Palestinian Authority. They have gained tangible economic benefits from “peace” with Israel–from international aid, business monopolies and the ability, much of the time, to move freely in and out of Israel. The Minister of Civil Affairs, Jamil Tarifi, has even won contracts to build Israeli settlements!
Such “peace” can be a problem when the violent men make peace, as the Palestinian case shows only too well. But it is much better than what went before and gives the chance for outside pressure to be brought to bear to fashion a long-term peace that is more attractive than war for the majority, not just for the elite.
In fact, all outside help can be double-edged. Emergency aid, while reducing the need to bleed the populace, can fuel the violence by feeding the combatants to fight another day, as is clearly happening in the Sudan today.
Even pushing for democracy may not always be a panacea for deeply divided societies. Crime is eminently compatible with democracy as Milosevic has shown. Unless the law is also free, and the press and the non-governmental organizations too, thus enabling the development of a widespread peace culture, democracy can be manipulated to the old elite’s advantage.
Thus whilst offering the carrot of economic incentives–rather than the often negative blunderbuss of sanctions–it is useful to couple them with certain penalties. One way, rarely used surprisingly, is to deny the leadership and their families access to foreign bank accounts and overseas travel. Colombia’s decision to freeze guerrilla bank accounts and confiscate their assets seems to have been more effective than direct military attacks.
If the warlords are in the ethnic violence business essentially for economic reasons then the would-be peacemakers must also play the economic game. Making peace in today’s world has this new dimension. It deserves more attention than it’s getting.
