This is the moment when we can lessen war threat

Jonathan Power, Columnist, London

With unanimous approval in the Security Council the United Nations is authorizing a beefed up peacekeeping force into the Congo maelstrom. At least this time the UN, hitting trouble in the face of massacres and the deaths of its peacekeepers, is not going into reverse. In Rwanda eight years ago it was said that the UN force appeared to have four gears, one for forward and three for reverse.

In Rwanda 800,000 million people were massacred. An independent investigation by Ingvar Carlsson, the former Swedish prime minister, laid the blame squarely on the shoulders of the U.S. and British governments which, when the small contingent of Belgian peacekeepers were attacked and brutally castrated and killed, refused to allow the UN presence to be beefed up.

The report also faulted Secretary-General Kofi Annan, then head of peacekeeping, and Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then Secretary- General, for not keeping the Security Council well informed.

Today there can be no defense. The Security Council is better informed, the press is doing a more thorough job, the politicians in Western capitals are not in denial, but still the wheels are turning too slowly. The UN force will be beefed up too modestly- by 1,000 French troops plus another 400 from other countries.

A useful perspective is added by the larger picture: Wars are diminishing. The number of wars has been falling for 150 years, albeit their intensity has been ratcheting up, mainly because of technological advances in the tools of killing and the growing anarchy in Africa.

Since World War II this process has accelerated and wars between nations are now exceedingly rare. Even ethnic war which seemed to leap upward at the end of the Cold war has been on a steady downward track for over a decade. The rapid spread of democracy and the astonishing strides forward of the human rights movement have all contributed. So, too, has economic advance and growing prosperity.

Most wars are now fought in the poorest countries and these are concentrated in Africa. If the UN could get on top of these African wars the world would be a very different place- almost war free, if President George W. Bush could be refrained from winding back the historical clock.

A new study by Paul Collier of the World Bank is a "road map" of how we get from here to there. He destroys the shibboleths that these wars owe themselves to inequality (how come Brazil never has civil wars despite its atrocious inequalities?) or its ancient hatreds (the history that matters is always recent history). What appears to matter most is if the economy is, first, poor and, second, that it is declining and is dependent on natural resource exports.

Once a civil war is started in such an environment they are not easy to stop. The war leaders tend to prosper in wartime even though society as a whole suffers. Central governments are weak and rebels, if they can get their hands on the source of these exports, especially if it is diamonds (as in Angola and Sierra Leone) or timber (as in Cambodia) can become rich and employ or intimidate under employed youngsters into joining their militias .

Collier concludes that while peacekeeping may be useful to dampen down a conflict the long term solution is in addressing these causes. Progress has been made. UN members, as the Angolan war dragged on, did eventually become seized with the diamond smuggling issue and an international accord led to increased policing and scrutiny, which in turn appears to have been a factor contributing to the demise of important rebel groups in Angola and Sierra Leone.

It should be possible to replicate this policing with timber exports, as the Group of Eight discussion in Evian suggested. British Prime Minister Tony Blair has also given the cause a push by launching an initiative for greater transparency in the reporting of resource revenues by multinational companies working in extractive industries.

Too many companies have behaved like the French oil giant Elf Aquitaine which bought oil drilling rights from Congolese rebel groups enabling them to spend the money on arms.

Beyond this the international community needs to lean more heavily on neighboring countries that offer rebel movements sanctuary. It needs to be tougher on arms salesmen and the flow of arms. It needs to watch more carefully the financial aid from diasporas who live in the West. (The Irish Republican Army could never have prospered without its American supporters.)

Not least international aid needs to be better timed. Collier argues persuasively that rushing in aid as is the usual practice immediately after a ceasefire is worse than useless. Then the country's institutions are too weak to use it well. Major aid needs to be delayed a couple of years when economic and institutional recovery is under way.

What last weekend's unanimous Security Council vote shows is that the world, despite its differences of opinion on Iraq, could be made ready for such an effort. If this prescription could be delivered the global incidence of civil war will decline dramatically. Perhaps this could be the post-Iraq cause that could unite the world.