The Wars of 1997

The number of armed conflicts worldwide has declined for two consecutive years, but one in six countries continues to endure the trauma and devastation of war. During 1997 there were 37 armed conflicts being fought on the territories of 32 countries (compared to 40 in 34 countries in 1996 and 44 armed conflicts in 39 countries in 1995). The number of persons killed in combat in 1997 is impossible to verify, but a conservative estimate would be deaths at the level of several thousand per week, the vast majority of the victims civilians. A great many more deaths were directly attributable to the health, social and economic consequences of war, and hundreds of thousands of people were rendered homeless, destitute and dependent on humanitarian assistance by the wars of 1997.

The world=s most warring region is still the Middle East (Table 1) where almost half of the region=s 14 states experienced warfare on their territory in 1997. Not surprisingly, the Middle East also continues to be by far the largest recipient of imported weapons (see map on page 17) B a product of the combined ingredients of enduring political conflict and significant oil wealth. About one-quarter of the states of Africa and Asia had war on their territory in 1997 B with Asia hosting almost 40 percent of all the world=s current wars.

Table1

PROJECT PLOUGHSHARES

Geographic Distributions of Armed Conflicts, 1997

37 armed conflicts in 32 countries:

India hosts 3 conflicts;
Philippines, Indonesia, Iran and Iraq each host 2 conflicts;
Israel and Lebanon together host the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

Two new armed conflicts emerged during 1997. In Congo (Brazzaville) between 5,000 and 10,000 people were killed in an intense struggle for power. Congo (Brazzaville) was earlier on the list of current armed conflicts due to fighting during the 1993-1994 period which claimed about 2,000 lives. That, however, was followed by relative stability, and in 1995 and 1996 combat deaths remained below 25 per year which meant that, according to our formula definition, the situation was no longer defined as an armed conflict and so it was removed from the 1996 map and report. Now, after just one year=s absence from the current armed conflicts list, Congo (Brazzaville) is back as a major war. The second new war of 1997 occurred in Albania where an estimated 2,000 were killed during the first six months of 1997. Fighting broke out following a breakdown of governmental authority and the development of a state of general chaos, aided by the looting of firearms and grenades from government armories.

On the other hand, five wars have been removed from the list of current armed conflicts. In Russia, the Chechens have signed peace accords with Moscow to end the fighting and to commit the parties to peaceful negotiations on Chechnya=s future status in Russia. Though the situation remains unsettled, and while conditions more conducive to war than to peace still prevail, the war with Russia has effectively ended. The armed conflict in the Aceh region of Indonesia has been essentially dormant over the past two years, and thus is removed from the list in accordance with our definition of armed conflict. The same is true for the conflict in the North of Ghana, where ethnic tensions remain but where there have not been any armed clashes for the past two years. In Liberia the August 1996 peace accord is being implemented and elections have been held. Guatemala=s 36-year civil war ended with the comprehensive peace accord signed in December 1996. Demobilization has been undertaken in Guatemala, there has been a significant improvement in the human rights situation, and, despite tensions and some extrajudicial killings by security forces, the country is on a positive political trajectory.

Several countries continue to host multiple conflicts: India has three separate armed conflicts within its borders (and, given the continuing armed clashes in Andhra Pradesh, that could soon be four); Philippines, Indonesia, Iran and Iraq were each the site of two armed conflicts. Conversely, the Israel/Palestine conflict continues to be defined as a single armed conflict, but one that takes place within the territories of two states B Israel and Lebanon. Israeli incursions into Lebanese territory are obviously not evidence of armed conflict between Lebanon and Israel, but are part of Israel=s ongoing civil war.

All 37 current armed conflicts must thus be regarded as intrastate or civil wars (the fighting is internal to a single state, although often with significant international and regional implications). In general, even though there was a small decline in the number of armed conflicts in 1997 compared with the previous year, fighting intensified in about one-quarter of the remaining conflicts. Given our estimate that the level of fighting remained steady in over half of all conflicts, and declined only in about 14 percent, we must conclude that overall 1997 was not a less warring year than 1996.

Small arms and the demilitarization of war

The continuing high level of warfare in 1997 confirms the tragic reality of the ongoing militarization of contemporary political conflict. In too many instances, modern states have failed to produce the kinds of social and political institutions that are capable of constructively and nonviolently managing serious conflict B in other words, a significant number of modern states, at least one in six, has failed to produce effective political systems through which to mediate the myriad of conflicting interests and sensibilities that are necessarily part of regionally, ethnically and economically diverse states. Social and political conflict that remains essentially unaddressed, that, by virtue of neglect or lack of capacity, is allowed to fester and undermine popular confidence in public institutions and processes, seems inevitably, in these days of ready access to the hardware of violence, transformed into armed conflict. Combinations of frustration, desperation, malice and, most notably, abundant supplies of user-friendly weapons of war make it increasingly difficult to avoid the descent into chaos and finally war B war that in almost 20 percent of states has become a form of deadly politics by other means.

Indeed, given not only the availability but also the ease of use of modern small arms, one is led to conclude that perhaps the most prominent distinguishing feature of contemporary warfare is not that it is a case of the militarization of civil conflict, but rather a case of the demilitarization of armed conflict. It has long been pointed out that civilians are increasingly the main victims of modern war, some estimates claiming that up to 90 percent of the victims in contemporary wars are civilians. But this unconscionably high rate of civilian casualties is not primarily a matter of professional soldiers and armed forces attacking civilian targets and killing unarmed civilians. Civilians are the primary victims of war, but they have also become the principal combatants. Modern combat technology B notably small arms and light weapons B has made war-fighting available to the untrained as well as the trained, the amateur and the professional alike. Much of modern small arms technology, in additional to being widely available, is durable, reliable, simple to operate, and deadly. Without any particular expertise or training required, small arms and light weapons have transformed armed combat from the Aprofession of war,@ carried out by professional military organizations and soldiers, or even volunteer soldiers trained and commanded by professionals, to the terror of civil chaos fanned by armed civilians who consider themselves to have run out of political alternatives or who, in the absence of credible state protection and the absence of any economic opportunities, take advantage of available weapons to pursue personal goals that in any other context would be more criminal than political. Hence, these days it is non-military civilians that do most of the fighting and the dying B a demilitarization of armed conflict that is especially facilitated by the simplicity and availability of small arms.

There are probably more than 500 million military-style small arms in the world. In the more than three dozen current wars, probably 90 percent of killings are by small arms, and, by some estimates, in the past decade alone they have caused more than 3 million deaths (or almost 6,000 per week).

These arms get into the hands of civilian combatants by a variety of means. There is, of course, the ubiquitous black market in guns, frequently operating in tandem with the illicit drug trade. In some instances, weakened governments find it expedient to supply military-style arms directly to select groups of their own citizens. Communal groups, for example, may be armed to combat or discipline their traditional rivals, either because the latter have fallen out of favour with the government of the day or simply as a means of fostering chaos to keep opponents of the government divided and fighting among themselves. Sometimes communal groups organize themselves into militias, but without the benefit of either military training or the discipline of commanded military units. They are simply civilian communities that are given or by some means acquire arms that they then use to advance the interests of their particular community. In parts of Africa in particular, such groups also use state-supplied weapons to pursue traditional practices such as cattle raiding B or to protect their livestock from the raiding of others B or to manage relations with rival communal groups over access to land and resources. Of course, once arms enter the civilian political economy they don=t remain among any select few for very long. The supply to one group generates new demand (and a market) in others. In addition, political insurgent groups are often supplied by neighbouring states in destabilisation tactics related to regional international dynamics and competition. Some of the supply of small arms is due to a failure to disarm in post-conflict settings, with the inevitable result that surplus weapons find their way into economically depressed and socially unstable environments, ready once again to pursue politics by other means. And former combatants in any of these recent wars, if they are not effectively reintegrated into post-conflict societies, frequently turn to one of the few skills they can claim with confidence, the menacing operation of firearm technology.

The chronically politically or personally marginalised, those driven to political desperation or domestic despair, find in small arms significantly expanded political and personal options. When people trapped in dysfunctional economies and intractable political conflicts run out of options, they don=t just give up; instead, they frequently turn to more dramatic means of gaining access to a credible political process. It is not surprising, therefore, that almost half of all states in the bottom half of the Human Development Index have been at war at some time during the past decade B compared with only 15 percent of those in the top half of the index (see map on page 9). A political and social climate of instability and insecurity sustains a demand for weapons that, in the final analysis, is accelerated simply by their availability B i.e., in political and social conflict availability advances the violent option and expands the options of the politically disaffected and criminals alike, replacing a genuine political culture with a culture of violence.

The most extreme example of war by civilians is of course the child soldier. Children can handle and fire an AK-47. Incredibly, most contemporary armed conflicts involve children under the age of 15 as combatants.

It is, however, possible to report increasing international attention to the problems of small arms diffusion, the civilianization of armed combat and of child soldiers. The remarkable political success of the campaign to ban landmines (see map on page 13) has given governments and civil society organizations increased courage to explore focused action on small arms, and the UN Secretary-General has appointed a special envoy to address issues related to children in conflict.

At the opposite end of the military technology scale from small arms, nuclear weapons, of course, continued to dominate military planning in some states and the military ambitions of others. The map of nuclear weapons and nuclear-weapon-free zones (page 21) reflects the continuing threat that localized war will, either by design or accident, be transformed into the global-scale terrorism of nuclear attack. At the same time, the map also reflects continuing efforts to keep nuclear weapons out of large areas of the globe.

Types of War

This annual report on armed conflict has adopted a simple typology of modern armed conflict based on three overlapping types of intrastate war: state control, state formation and state failure. Additional categories of international war would include border disputes, foreign invasion and other cross-border attacks, but currently, as noted in our 1997 report, due in significant measure to a robust array of institutions and conventions for responding to international tensions and disputes, there are no such international wars to categorize.

In civil armed conflict, state control wars obviously centre on struggles for control of the governing apparatus of the state. The power struggles in the two Congos (Kinshasa and Brazzaville) are obviously cases in point where rival factions struggle for control. State control struggles have typically been driven by ideologically defined revolutionary movements, decolonization campaigns or, as appears to be the case in Congo (Kinshasa), one set of elites seeking power in place of another. In some instances, communal or ethnic interests are central to the fight to transfer power (for example, the fighting B rather, the conflagration B that replaced Hutus with Tutsis in Rwanda). In other instances, as in Algeria, religion becomes a defining feature of the conflict. Examples of state control wars in the current list include Angola, Burundi, Congo (Brazzaville), Uganda, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Colombia, to name but a few. About half of current conflicts can be identified as being essentially about state control.

State formation conflicts centre on the form or shape of the state itself and generally involve particular regions of a country fighting for a greater measure of autonomy or for outright secession B or for the right to decide in a fair and binding referendum whether or not to secede. Fewer than 20 percent of contemporary armed conflicts are exclusively state formation wars (examples include India=s three conflicts, both conflicts in Indonesia, Israel, Turkey). Ethnicity, communal identity and religion are prominent in state formation conflicts, including the Kashmir war in India, the Tamil war in Sri Lanka and regional conflicts in Indonesia and the Philippines. The wars in the former Yugoslavia were classic state formation struggles. Another 20 percent of conflicts are prominently, but not exclusively, about state formation. In the Philippines, Iran and Iraq, for example, state formation conflicts are present, but so are state control issues.

For the purposes of this annual report we regard spreading domestic chaos and armed violence, frequently brought on by persistent and debilitating state control and/or state formation wars, as failed state wars B wars in which the armed conflict is neither about state control nor state formation, but about more local issues and disputes involving violence in the absence of effective government control. The primary failure is an incapacity to provide minimal human security for individual citizens, compounded by weak governance and politics of exclusion that deny the majority of citizens any significant engagement in the political process. In the emerging chaos and lost confidence in public institutions, individuals and groups seek new political entities or social groupings, often regionally or ethnically based, sometimes ideologically defined, through which to pursue their interests and to try to ensure the well-being of their particular families and communities. Somalia, with its general and continuing disarray, is the quintessential failed state B a generalized chaos that grew out of the failure of all state authority, which in turn was the product of a state control war to overthrow a corrupt regime. State formation elements were present as the north effectively separated from the south, and the war now continues as a failed state conflict as clans and militias jockey for control of regions, arable land and overall influence. The disorder in Karachi, Pakistan falls into the same category, as do the clashes in Kenya and the civil unrest in Albania. These four conflicts, or about 10 percent of the total, can be regarded as primarily failed state conflicts.

Some countries have the misfortune of hosting all three types of wars. Sudan=s current struggles include state control conflict through fighting in the Northeast aimed at overthrowing the government in Khartoum; state formation conflict through the south=s war aimed at autonomy if not separation from the north; and failed state conflict by virtue of internecine wars among Nuer clans in the south, for example, which are armed conflicts that are fundamentally born out of the persistent anarchy and the failure of state and traditional systems to mediate traditional conflicts over cattle, grazing rights and so on.

As we have noted in earlier reports, the pattern of current warfare can actually be understood as evidence of a remarkable achievement in the peaceful settlement of disputes. The fact that none of the three dozen-plus wars now active is a state at war with another state is clearly not based on an absence of serious conflicts between states. Rather, it is in significant measure due to a robust system for attending to conflicts between states before they get out of hand (although, as the 1998 clashes between Eritrea and Ethiopia remind us, it is no doubt premature to assume we have seen the last of international warfare). But, when disputes between states do escalate, a variety of responses and entry points for conflict management are available to the international community B diplomatic missions, presidential hotlines, Security Council sessions, UN envoys, dispute settlement mechanisms in regional bodies like the Organization for African Unity or through international covenants and agreements, the use of third party good offices, and so on and on. State parties to the conflict more often than not conclude that their chance of keeping damage to acceptable levels and getting a tolerable settlement are better through such means than through military remedies. As we can see, the same cannot be said for conflicts within states. In the majority of states, to be sure, national political processes do work well enough to manage social and political conflicts without resort to violence. But the continuing high numbers of civil wars are tragic testimony to significant failures of state structures to work through serious political conflict and to maintain both public order and public confidence in political processes B and, in the event of such failure, it is clear that there are few external mechanisms with either a capacity or mandate to intervene.

Failed states and the monopoly of force

Another way of describing the demilitarization of war or the civilianization of armed conflict B that is, the process by which untrained civilians, operating beyond state authority, have become the primary combatants in many of today=s armed conflicts B is as the state=s loss of its monopoly over the use of force. The idea that states have a monopoly on the deliberate use of force reserves for legitimate government authorities the prerogative to employ lethal force in the service of the legitimate interests of the state and its people. The primary occasions for such resort to force are defence against external aggression and efforts to control the unauthorized use of force, whether in criminal or political contexts. As already noted, in some instances where states are weak and unable themselves to maintain domestic control and prevent the unauthorized use of force, such states are known to distribute weapons (small arms that can be used by untrained and unskilled civilians) to citizens to protect themselves and their communities. Among pastoral communities in the Horn of Africa, for example, cattle raiding is practiced for a variety of historical and contemporary reasons in regions effectively beyond the reach of national authorities and where state authorities are unable to prevent raiding or to provide cattle herders protection from raids by rival communities. Thus, such communities have been given direct access to arms and the results have in fact led to local arms races and to the dramatic escalation of the levels of violence associated with this practice. As local conflicts are weaponized and escalate, they are transformed from basic social and resource conflicts between identifiable contesting groups into generalized disorder and chaos, with state authorities increasingly incapable of managing the situation.

In a more organized world, national authorities no longer able to provide protection to the vulnerable and to maintain even minimal order could appeal to international authorities for help. That level of organization, however, is rarely available. No such international authority or resource exists, and most states that could benefit from such external help are reluctant to seek it on grounds of national sovereignty and out of fear that they will be further discredited by the admission of failure. And those external states that would, individually or together with others, have the capacity to intervene to protect the vulnerable, are reluctant to do so unless their own immediate interests are at stake.

Even so, in the past decade there has, of course, been a significant increase in international intervention to mitigate local conflict and to at least bring help to the victims of such conflict. An impressive number of formal international intervention missions are underway (see map on page 25), most of which focus on observer and monitoring tasks. Other humanitarian interventions, such as Operation Lifeline in Sudan, are also underway, even though they are not among formal peacekeeping and observer missions.

Ethnicity and war

Ethnicity continues to be identified as a prominent factor in intrastate conflict B and it must be regarded as having been a significant political factor in more than half of the wars of 1997. However, as we have also noted in earlier reports, there is no compelling evidence that ethnicity has emerged as a new factor due to the end of the Cold War, or that in the cases of ethnic wars, it is ethnicity, or more specifically ethnic chauvinism, that is truly at the root of the conflict. Ethnic or Aidentity@ conflicts B that is, conflicts in which the rights and political/social viability of ethnic groups or national communities are central issues B are invariably reflections of a more fundamental social conflict, borne out of a community's experience of economic inequity, political discrimination, human rights violations and pressures generated by environmental degradation. Identity conflicts emerge with intensity when a community loses confidence in mainstream political institutions and processes and, in response to unmet basic needs for social and economic security, resolves to strengthen its collective influence and to struggle for political recognition as a community. Behind ethnic or national identity struggles are basic economic and social grievances. Failure to redress them has made group solidarity an increasingly attractive political strategy. In the case of the former Yugoslavia, for example, with ethnic identities having over generations become the primary political categories and the focus of entrenched historical grievances, ethnic tension seemed obviously to overwhelm all political/social consideration. In other cases, insecure leaders exploit and even promote ethnic tensions in classic divide-and-rule tactics.

As we have seen, when state structures lose the confidence of the people, when communities turn inward to advance sectarian interests, and when easy-to-use and easy-to-get small arms are thrown into the mix, the result is the persistent social/political chaos and public violence that this report reflects. In his preface to this report, Nobel Peace Laureate Oscar Arias proposes measures that would help both to restore confidence in public institutions committed to serving human security and to limit the circulation of the weapons that are a primary threat to human security.

Notes:

1. Defining Armed Conflict: For the purposes of the annual Armed Conflicts Report an armed conflict is defined as a political conflict in which armed combat involves the armed forces of at least one state (or one or more armed factions seeking to gain control of all or part of the state), and in which at least 1,000 people have been killed by the fighting during the course of the conflict. An armed conflict is added to the annual list of current armed conflicts in the year in which the death toll reaches the threshold of 1,000, but the starting date of the armed conflict is shown as the year in which the first combat deaths included in the count of 1,000 or more occurred.

The definition of "political conflict" becomes more difficult as the trend in current intrastate armed conflicts increasingly obscures the distinction between political and criminal violence. In a growing number of armed conflicts, armed bands, militia or factions engage in criminal activity (e.g., theft, looting, extortion) in order to fund their political/military campaigns, but frequently also for the personal enrichment of the leadership and the general livelihood of the fighting forces. Thus, in some circumstances, while the disintegrating order reflects the social chaos borne of state failure, the resulting violence or armed combat is not necessarily guided by a political program or a set of politically motivated or defined military objectives. However, these trends are part of the changing character of war, and conflicts characterized more by social chaos than political/military competition are thus included in the tabulation of current armed conflicts.

In many contemporary armed conflicts the fighting is intermittent and involves a very wide range of levels of intensity. An armed conflict is deemed to have ended if there has been a formal ceasefire or peace agreement and, following which, there are no longer combat deaths (or at least fewer than 25 per year); or, in the absence of a formal ceasefire, a conflict is deemed to have ended after two years of dormancy (in which fewer than 25 combat deaths per year have occurred).

The above definition builds upon, but differs in some aspects from, the definitions of other groups producing annual conflict tabulations, notably reports by Peter Wallensteen and Margareta Sollenberg of the Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University (Sweden), published annually in the yearbook of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

2. Defining the regions: For purposes of the annual Armed Conflicts Report, the world is divided into five broad regions. Africa includes the entire continent, plus Madagascar but excludes Egypt, which is included in the Middle East. The region of Asia includes the Asian republics of the former Soviet Union, as well as the Pacific region, including Australia, New Zealand and Micronesia. Europe includes all the states of Europe and the former Soviet Union (except for the Asian republics). The Americas include all of North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean.

3. Radda Barnen, the Swedish Save the Children organization, reports that in 1996-97 children under 18 took part as soldiers in 32 armed conflicts, and that in 24 of those conflicts children under the age of 15 were involved, some as young as seven or eight years of age (see http://www.rb.se.chilwar/index.htm).