New
evidence against
the war on civilizations
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
October 30, 2004
War of civilizations?
Violence-prone Muslims living out the inheritance of
their prophet, Mohammed who, in marked contrast to Jesus
Christ, established his creed on earth by vigorous use of
the sword. It's all there in Princeton professor Bernard
Lewis' new book, "From Babel to Dragomans". Labeled the
neo-conservatives' Islamic expert, the Wall Street
Journal says, "the Lewis doctrine has become U.S.
policy." And if George W. Bush wins re-election it will
continue unchallenged. Only last week Attorney General
John Ashcroft was claiming that the Bush administration
was assisting "the hand of Providence".
Those who read both the future and
the past this way still appear to have the intellectual
upper hand in the Anglo-Saxon political arena, even if
there is a division of opinion on how best to confront
it. Harvard professor, Samuel Huntington, author of the
seminal "The Clash of Civilizations", whose title he
borrowed from Lewis, wrote in the book's latest edition,
"In the 1990s Muslims have been far more involved in
intergroup violence than the people of any other
civilization."
Since 9/11 this school of thought
has had a field day. Apologists for the argument are
found even inside Islam - as with the influential
Pakistani, Husain Haqqani, who argued in the
International Herald Tribune a week ago that Islamic
peoples are beholden to "a cult of the warrior" and the
Muslim world has an "obsession with military
power".
But what about the largest Muslim
state of all, Indonesia, which has just conducted an
extraordinarily peaceful general election and where
serious violence is now reduced to tiny Aceh? What about
Turkey where the military is losing political strength by
the day? For all the worries in the EU about Turkish
admission, the fact is that despite Turks being by far
the single largest Islamic grouping already living inside
the EU there hasn't been one arrest of a Turk as a
suspected Islamic terrorist. And what about Bangladesh,
Nigeria and India? In none of them (Kashmir apart) are
Muslims at arms. It is these five countries that have the
largest concentrations of the world's Muslim
population.
Now with a new report of the
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute we have
well researched evidence to back up the argument. With
its annual 14 year rolling study of major armed
conflicts, the institute tells us that for each of those
years the number of civil wars (the overwhelming majority
of present day conflicts are not interstate) in the world
has been declining and that of those that still exist
most are Marxist-led or are conflicts over territory, of
which only a handful have an Islamic
ingredient.
Marxist-led, in this day and age?
It is so in Colombia, Nepal, Peru and the Philippines.
These conflicts are among the worlds most intense in
terms of cumulative casualties over the last few years.
The second significant group, which can be loosely
characterized as conflicts over territory, are in the
Indonesian province of Aceh, in Cabinda, the oil rich
province of Angola, Myanmar with the separist Karen
people and Chechnya in Russia which may now be Islamised
but certainly didn't start out that way.
Of the conflicts that resulted in a
significant numbers of deaths last year (Iraq,
Afghanistan, Israel/ Palestine and Chechnya apart) only
one, in the Sudan, can be characterized as "Islam at
war". The other major ones - Liberia, Burundi, Nepal and
Aceh - have absolutely nothing to do with
Islam.
The truth is the main cause of war
today is not religion but poverty. Once a country has
reached Western-levels of per capita income the risk of
civil war is negligible. In middle-income countries the
risk is quite low. And where wars do occur the history
that counts is current history not the history of the
fourteenth or seventh centuries.
Wars often occur following economic
collapse. This was the trigger in Aceh in Indonesia. Wars
once started also are more likely to continue where there
are rich mineral resources- rebels capture these and
extort the gains from this trade to finance their
operations- as diamonds did in Angola and Sierra Leone
and timber funded the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
If we want to diminish war we need
to look at how the West's own companies and arms traders
have helped sustain rebel wars. We need too to find ways
to accelerate economic development in the poorer
countries. And more UN-type peacekeeping is a sine qua
non for achieving stability - contrary to myth it often
works, as in the Sinai, Liberia, East Timor, the Congo
and Sierra Leone in recent years.
And above all we need to knock over
the Aunt Sally of militant Islam on the rampage the world
over. More than anything this excludes clear thinking.
And more than anything else this is reason for wishing
for Bush's defeat.
Copyright © 2004 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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