1999 turned out to be a most murderous year

By Jonathan Steele

LONDON: This has been, as Eric Hobsbawm put it, "without doubt the most murderous century of which we have record by the scale, frequency and length of the warfare which filled it", but even he, great historian though he is, did not expect when he wrote his verdict five years ago that we would be stumbling to the century's close through such a welter of blood.

Artillery shells rain down on 40,000 people trapped in the Chechen capital, Grozny, a city of ruined flats which has still not recovered from the Russian assault of 1994. On a semi-arid plateau in the Horn of Africa, half a million Ethiopian and Eritrean conscripts face each other in squalid trenches which replay the sense less tragedy of the World War I. Up to 50,000 have already gone "over the top" and been mown down in the 18 months since their leaders started the conflict.

To the south and west, Africa's greatest surviving war criminal, Jonas Savimbi, who has defied the army of Angola's elected government and the blandishments of the United Nations for more than 25 years, is still adding corpses to the estimated 800,000 who are already dead.

In Sri Lanka, almost forgotten elsewhere as a result of rigid press censorship, the Tamil Tigers have just killed several hundred government troops in a new upsurge in their 16-year fight for independence. In East Timor, shattered communities are slowly recovering after a fury of ethnic murder launched by pro- Indonesian armed militias in August.

Only on the India-Pakistan border was there a glimmer of good battlefront news this year, when Asia's two newest nuclear powers struck at each other in Kashmir, and then agreed to a cease-fire.

But the mother of this year's astonishing catalog of wars occurred in Europe. The conflict over Kosovo saw wave after atrocious wave of ethnic cleansing on a scale that dwarfed even the crimes in Bosnia in the mid-1990s. It also produced the first air war to be launched by NATO on a sovereign state in its 50- year history.

The fallout continues to threaten us. Boris Yeltsin flew to Beijing last week to issue a joint Russo-Chinese denunciation of the United States. Reminding the world that they also have nuclear weapons, the two countries accused Bill Clinton of interfering over Chechnya and using Kosovo to "dictate to the world". They claim human rights interventions are a mask for unilateral U.S. crusades as and when the White House sees fit.

So 1999 turned out to be the most murderous year in the second half of the most murderous century. Rarely has a century ended in such terrible fashion.

Compare it to the last one, and you see the difference. In 1899, true enough, Britain was embroiled in the Boer War, a campaign of arms which its generals entered with amazing light- headedness, as they foolishly underestimated the intensity of the Afrikaners' determination. In 1898 Spain and the United States went to war over Cuba, and British troops inflicted appalling casualties on the Sudanese at Omdurman in a display of superior firepower against a lightly armed enemy which was not unlike the horror of overwhelming Russian artillery and air power in Chechnya.

Yet those brief imperial wars of the late 1890s were the exception in a general climate of peace and rising prosperity which seemed to face no threat. It was not until several years later that the shock of war hit the world. No wonder Hobsbawm chose 1914 as the starting point for his volume on the "short" 20th century.

Then came the catastrophe of two world wars, the barbarism of the Holocaust, and the knife-edge nuclear balancing act of the 40-year Cold War. When that ended in 1989, it was natural that the old optimism would re-emerge. Against all experience, people keep hoping peace will be permanent this time. In vain.

One of the most poignant moments of 1999 was the encounter between three former Cold War leaders, George Bush, Helmut Kohl and Mikhail Gorbachev in Berlin last month. They were there to celebrate the fall of the Wall, and the mood was designed to be triumphal. But at one point in the self-congratulatory proceedings, Gorbachev plucked up courage to ask: "George, where is the new world order you promised?"

Where indeed? Few people are likely to start the new century with as much optimism as our great-grandparents started this one, but are we right to be plunged into total gloom? Have we stepped back into barbarism again? Is the whole concept of social progress discredited, even as technological progress seems to know no bounds in its headlong flight forwards?

It is not just the number of current wars which is alarming, but the kind of wars they are. Wars are increasingly fought within states, not between them. It is civilians, rather than soldiers, who die. In an illuminating recent book, New and Old Wars (Polity Press), Mary Kaldor points out that when this century began the ratio of military to civilian casualties was 8:1. In the wars of the 1990s it has been 1:8.

In sub-Saharan Africa we see what are increasingly called "failed states" -- countries that won political independence from their colonial masters in the 1950s and 1960s but collapsed into corruption, anarchy and warlordism. Governments lost their political legitimacy as builders of new nations, partly because of demands by Western creditors for debt repayment and "structural adjustment" policies that cut health and education budgets as well as jobs.

War was "privatized" as mercenaries, rebels, mutinous officers and gangsters emerged to exploit the decline of the state. The archetype of what constitutes a state was its monopoly on violence. It alone controlled the police and the army. Now that has gone, along with the innocence of youth, as more and more young people, sometimes still in puberty, are militarized. The Kalashnikov becomes the poor man's sports car.

In the Caucasus, Central Asia and parts of the Balkans, the collapse of communism, with its forward-looking ideology, has left a vacuum that is being filled by what Kaldor calls a reinvented form of "identity politics". While the two world wars were fought for geopolitical or ideological reasons, the new wars are fought on the basis of a narrow exclusivism. Leaders claim power on a particular ethnic, linguistic, or religious specificity. They are backward-looking, because they try to inspire their followers with an "idealized, nostalgic representation of the past". "If only we Serbs could get back to the tranquility of medieval Kosovo, full of monasteries and empty of Albanians."

Some writers call the wars of the 1990s "postmodern". Others describe them as "degenerate" because of the way that national armies fighting for territorial gain have been eroded. Kaldor calls them "new wars" because, however primitive they seem, with the use of mutilation and massacre, they can only be understood in the context of globalization. It is not just that the warlords drive Mercedes and use satellite phones. The collapse of the state is due partly to the erosion of national economies and the loss of sovereignty to global capital.

Within the category of new war, Kaldor includes the changes at the other end of the spectrum in hi-tech warfare, what is known in Pentagon-speak as RMA (the Revolution in Military Affairs): She writes: "The preferred technique is spectacular aerial bombing which reproduces the appearance of classical war for public consumption and which has very little to do with reality on the ground".

In another important new book, Revolution and World Politics (Macmillan) Fred Halliday surveys the relationship between war and revolution in this century. A main reason for the frequency of war has been the number of revolutions. Halliday analyses the paradox that revolutionary thinking and internationalism are often associated with pacifist ideals and opposition to war, and yet they almost always themselves lead to war.

The reason is that revolutions are seen as inherently subversive of whatever passes as the international order. They provoke reaction, and this counter-revolution then produces a sequence of hostile moves and responses that tends sooner or later to produce war, hot or cold.

What wars will the next century give us? The end of the communist experiment in the Soviet Union and the opening-up and "capitalization" of China's economy have removed two huge motors of revolution, thereby eliminating a major threat of war.

But the "new wars" rumble on, and they are inherently less easy to bring to a managed end than the old ones. So, if no one predicted the belligerence of the 1990s, it would be folly to say too much about the next decade, let alone the whole coming century.

Halliday quotes Leon Trotsky's famous remark that capitalist development unifies the world, but in a dramatically unequal and disjointed way. For someone who died more than a half a century before globalization, it was extraordinarily prescient. It has become the common currency of modern discourse that globalization produces stunning contradictions. It integrates and simultaneously fragments. It homogenizes and diversifies. There is a new global interconnectedness, even as individual and regional inequalities increase.

The riots of December 1999 in Seattle may turn out to be the least bad guide we have to the next century. They not only showed that politics among young people in the Western world are far from dead and that the idealism of earlier generations is recurring in new circumstances. They also flashed a tantalizing road map of the new conflicts that are likely to arise: free trade or fair trade, how to combine growth with equity and a sustainable environment, how to regulate capital and recreate the legitimacy of state power.

Those who once celebrated the end of history and the end of politics have been proved wrong. If anyone believes the next century will see an end of war, he or she will soon be disappointed.

-- Observer News Service