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February 7 - 11, 2000Greetings from Global Policy Forum!
Not long ago, Professor Peter Wallensteen was in New York from Uppsala University in Sweden, where he holds the Dag Hammarskjold Professorship of Peace and Conflict Research and heads the Uppsala Conflict Data Project. A genial man with a gruesome specialty, he informed us that there were 108 armed conflicts between 1989 and 1998 - the decade after the end of the Cold War. Though he has been working on methods to prevent conflicts, he admitted that conflicts proliferated as the violent final decade of the millennium proceeded. Considerably more conflicts took place towards the end of the nineties than in the earlier years.
Mr. Wallensteen didn't mention exactly how many states were caught up in conflict, but it is likely that half of all the nations in the world were directly affected by the violence. No state escaped the effects, of course, as refugees, disease and all the results of war spilled over into the rest of the world. Most of the conflicts were not inter-state wars, but civil wars of some kind and nastier in their effects on civilians, who suffered disproportionate casualties.
Wallensteein pointed out that these many conflicts have put great and almost impossible pressure on the United Nations, which is called on to act in virtually all cases - providing emergency humanitarian assistance here and complex peacekeeping or other responses there. Ironically, the UN's finances deteriorated sharply in this period, narrowing its capacity to respond just as the conflicts worsened.
Wallensteein has done some serious work on "conflict prevention" and is one of the world's leading experts and practitioners. But his field has recently been crowded by a flood of newcomers. Big foundations have been doling out millions of dollars in grants, so that research in the area has become a booming industry.
Alas, most practitioners approach conflict prevention as a technocratic exercise - a matter of organizing "dialogue" between parties in a conflict, increasing mutual understanding of potential belligerents, and similar steps. Mostly, they ignore or downplay "controversial" elements of conflicts, such as the involvement of multinational business interests, powerful states pursuing geo-strategic goals, arms merchants and the like.
Perhaps they should consider the booming profits in war-torn Africa. The September 1999 issue of the UN's excellent magazine Africa Recovery provides some striking information on this topic. A chart (page 24) shows the rate of return on US overseas investment in different world regions. During the 1990's, the decade of African chaos, Africa stood at the top of the profit chart, with investment returns consistently over 25% and even reaching 35% - rates much better even than investments in the Asia and Pacific region. An average rate of 35% is astonishingly high, and certainly includes some investments that are yielding 50%, 100% or even much more per year. Oil, gold, diamonds, copper, uranium, and other natural resources are the basis for much of the fantastic riches being extracted from this impoverished and blood-soaked continent
African issues are regularly on the agenda of the UN Security Council and recently were the subject of the US "Africa Month" presidency. For the first time, we could reliably follow the Council's activities during the month, partly because of the greater number of open meetings and partly because of a new report series prepared by the Canadians. Recently, the Canadian Foreign Ministry started to provide a weekly summary of Council activities, including all the discussions that take place behind closed doors. Canada's summary is discreet, of course, but it provides a very precious base of information and greatly increases the public transparency of the Council. We hope other members will chose to present their own summaries as well, opening still further the possibility of Council accountability.
The Council this week considered an important new action on in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The United States presented a draft resolution for deployment of a new UN peacekeeping force numbering 5,500, to promote disarmament and to protect military observers who will report on the actions of the various parties to the conflict. Though many NGOs and delegations see this number of peacekeepers as dangerously small for such a large country, all recognize that the US Congress is unlikely to authorize a greater number at present, especially in light of the recent doubling of the Sierra Leone peacekeeping operation and a big operation soon to come on-stream in East Timor. Such missions are a big gamble, because they don't have the forces to insure success.
Peacekeeping numbers will nearly double in the next few months, if Congress gives the green light. The peacekeeping budget will similarly expand - well past $2 billion. This week, thanks to Christian Kaufholz, we have posted updated peacekeeping data tables and graphs through December 1999. They provide a very good view of the ebb and flow of UN peacekeeping operations. In June of 1999, UN peacekeeping stood at its lowest level in many years - just over 12,000. By the end of December, the number had risen to 18,400 and it appears that another 17,000 or so will be deployed by mid-year, bringing the total to 35,000. This is still well below the peak of nearly 80,000 in 1994 and 1995 but a strong reversal of the downward trend since then.
The numbers on peacekeeping troop strength that we present were issued monthly by the Office of the Spokesman for the Secretary General until late 1998. Then, suddenly, they became unavailable. From then on, we have obtained them from friendly inside sources, but they remain "private." We have inquired about this to many delegations but never received a satisfactory answer. We suspect that some or all of the permanent members find the numbers embarrassing and have issued orders that the UN keep them private. It's a sad reflection on how the big powers prefer to operate in secrecy, even with such fundamental facts as these!
Readers who are interested in numbers will be glad to learn that we have finally corrected an error on the site, so that Michael Renner's wonderful graphs on mergers are now all available. Our apologies for the delay, after having announced it with fanfare in the List Serv last week.
Coming up next week will be some updated tables and graphs on the pace of activities of the Security Council, an interesting index of the Council's work. Stay tuned!
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