World is a safer place despite people's fears
By Francis Harris in Washington
(Filed: 19/10/2005)
Widespread fears about a world in a perpetual state of war are
unfounded, a study says today. It emphasises that the number of conflicts
between nations, civil wars, battle deaths, coups and genocides has been
falling steeply for more than a decade.
While the authors note that bloody wars continue in Iraq,
Afghanistan and Congo, they argue that there are substantial grounds for
optimism.
The first Human Security Report, written by academics led by Andrew
Mack, of the University of British Columbia, cites popular notions that
war is becoming more common and deadlier, that genocide is rising and that
terrorism poses the greatest threat to humanity.
"Not one of these claims is based on reliable data," it says. "All
are suspect; some are demonstrably false. Yet they are widely believed
because they reinforce popular assumptions."
The authors say there are 40 per cent fewer armed conflicts than in
the early 1990s. Between 1991 and last year 28 wars for self-determination
began but 43 were ended or contained.
In 1992, when the Yugoslav wars of secession began, there were 51
state-based conflicts around the world. The figure dropped to 32 in 2002
and 29 in 2003. The arms trade declined by a third from 1990 to 2003 and
the number of refugees fell by 45 per cent between 1992 and 2003.
In 1950 each conflict killed 38,000 people on average. By 2002 that
had dropped to 600.
However, the report, which was funded by five nations including
Britain, says that the potential for a major upsurge in violence remains.
"The risk of new wars breaking out or old ones resuming is very real
in the absence of a sustained and strengthened commitment to conflict
prevention and post-conflict peace-building," the authors say.
Most of the data gathered ended in 2003, the last full year for
which statistics were available. That means that most of the deaths caused
by the war in Iraq are not included. But by the standards of the bloodiest
conflicts since the end of the Second World War, the deaths in Iraq are
relatively few. About 27,000 Iraqis and Americans have died.
Major conflicts of the past 60 years, including Algeria, Korea,
Vietnam, Congo and Sudan have killed between 400,000 and two million.
Prof Mack, an Australian former United Nations official, attributes
much of the success in ending conflict to UN peacekeeping operations.
The reduction in war is also attributable to the end of the Cold
War, he says. From 1945 to 1989, many local conflicts were aggravated by
the intervention of the two great power blocs.
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