Civil Wars - The Road to Global Hell
Pacific News Service, Franz Schurmann, Posted: Mar 07, 2002
A plague of civil wars -- the most brutal wars in human history -- threatens to break out in the world if the United States focuses on the war on terrorism to the exclusion of peacemaking. The horror and turmoil of Sept. 11, writes PNS Editor Franz Schurmann, might be small in comparison.
As the Bush administration keeps doggedly fighting the war on terrorism, another chain reaction of violence of far greater danger to the world is shaping up. Civil war now rages in the Holy Land, as two peoples fight for the same territory. It is on the verge of returning in Afghanistan. And it threatens to explode on the Asian subcontinent.
Civil wars are the worst violence in human history. Entire peoples from top to bottom get emotionally involved in the bloodletting. Both sides are convinced their enemies are determined to wipe them out. Therefore, only one side can win and live while the other loses and dies.
The writer on civil wars Robert Kaplan holds that "ancient feuds" give rise to contemporary mass slaughters. But history indicates that in civil wars, both elite and masses share deep feelings about a common destiny. And they are convinced their enemies not only want to exterminate them physically, but destroy their destiny as well.
In Rwanda, the Tutsi elite believed their destiny was to rule the Hutu masses. In April 1994, the Hutus struck back with a genocidal campaign, but a few months later the Tutsis, backed by Uganda, invaded and regained power. In Bosnia and Kosovo, the Serbs destroyed hundreds of mosques and Catholic churches and killed Muslims and Croats. (Slobodan Milosevic's passionate defense at his trial in The Hague expresses that Serbian sense of destiny.)
When the Israelis occupied all of Palestine in the June 1967 "Six Days War," they came to believe their destiny was to rule all of the Holy Land. But that war also solidified Palestinian identity and gave Palestinians a new sense of destiny. Palestinians now know that their birth rate exceeds the Israelis, and that in a few decades they will be in the majority throughout the Holy Land.
When President Bush launched the war against the Taliban on last Oct. 7, he did not know how deep a sense of destiny the multiethnic peoples of Afghanistan have. The ruling Pashtuns came to power some 250 years ago. For five years the largely Pushtun Taliban used the Pashtun's shared sense of destiny to unite Afghanistan. They did so without an army and a government, but rather through 40,000 Islamic preachers.
But other Afghan peoples also have senses of destiny. The Persian-speaking Tajiks of Afghanistan and Central Asia see themselves as descendants of Alexander the Great's armies. The Uzbeks see themselves as the descendants of several glorious Turkic empires going back over a millennium.
To general surprise, shortly after America launched the war the Taliban gave up every city or town they held and fled to the mountains. The White House saw itself as the victor, and quickly created a new government. But more and more observers in and out of Afghanistan have begun wondering about how real the "victory" was.
"The rosy picture Washington paints about Afghanistan's future gets darker when seen from ground. The worst scenario for Afghanistan would be a renewed civil war." So wrote Fehmi Howeidi, Egypt's leading news analyst, in the As-Sharq al-Ausat newspaper on Feb. 25.
Other sources say civil war has already broken out. Tajiks and Uzbeks, who made up the bulk of the "victorious" Northern Alliance, are now fighting each other. Shi'ah Hazaras are killing the once dominant Sunni Pashtuns, while Pashtun warlords are fighting each other.
Taking a quote from a high Alliance official, Howeidi concludes, "So bad is the situation now that the Taliban could return to power." (Reuters, 02/18/02) People remember that "the Taliban brought security and stability to the country." By contrast, the interim leader chosen by the White House, Hamid Karzai, cannot even make Kabul safe and secure.
Wisps of thunderclouds are also visible on the horizon that portend a civil war far greater than those in the Holy Land and Afghanistan. Such a war would pit Hindu against Muslim throughout the Asian subcontinent.
The ultra-fundamentalist World Hindu Council (VHP) has promised to start building a Ram temple on the ruins of a mosque in the Himalayan hill town of Ayodhya. That comes only weeks after some of the worst Hindu-Muslim killings in the western state of Gujerat. Gandhi was born in Gujerat, and in his day Hindus and Muslims lived peaceably in a region that included the Pakistani province of Sind.
All that changed with Partition in 1947. Hindus fled from Sind to Gujerat and Muslims from Gujerat to Sind. Before then, Hindus and Muslims, especially members of Gandhi's Congress Party, shared a common destiny rooted in the defunct Moghul dynasty and a common direction that led to the end of British rule. Instead, Partition fueled such deep hatred between the two peoples that their shared direction has been lost and violence threatens to explode like a volcano.
If civil war returns to Afghanistan it will quickly spread to Pakistan. And if Hindus and Muslims launch a civil war in India, that could ignite violence in the entire Muslim world.
Only one power in the world, the United States, might halt the chain reaction of civil war. America has played a peacemaker role in the former Yugoslavia and has been able to keep the peace. But it has not played such of a role in Rwanda, and so blood continues to flow, though less than before.
In the Holy Land, the White House refuses to pressure Israel to stop using high-tech weapons against a people whose main armaments are suicide bombers. In Afghanistan it still bombs and bombs while the country slides into civil war. And in Pakistan it has so undermined the current leadership in the interests of its determination to destroy the alleged perpetrators of Sept. 11 that India may launch another war against its enemy of a half-century.
If America opts for a peacemaking role that goes beyond exhorting both sides to contain violence, there is a chance that the worst can be prevented. But if it persists in its war on terrorism to the exclusion of peacemaking, the world could face far greater turmoil than the 9/11 attacks unleashed.
Franz Schurmann (fschurmann@pacificnews.org), emeritus professor at U.C. Berkeley, has written widely on the Middle East and Asia.
Page
1 of 1
|
