A World on Hold - The good news of peace on Earth was drowned out by talk of war

By Gwynne Dyer SPECIAL TO THE JOURNAL Sun, January 5, 2003

The past year has been dominated by a U.S. obsession with Iraq which, remarkably, seized the Bush administration only three months after the terrorist attacks on the United States in September, 2001. In my year-end survey 12 months ago, just after the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, I simply wrote that Middle Eastern Muslims were waiting to learn "which of their countries the United States would hit next: Iraq, Somalia or Sudan." Washington was clearly looking for a fresh target, but nobody had a clue which way it was going to jump.

Whatever the original motives for the choice of Iraq, the project now has an almost unstoppable momentum within the introverted world of Washington politics, and the Bush administration almost certainly will attack Iraq, probably in the next few months. But the weird thing about 2002 is that the international news has been virtually monopolized by a non-event. There has been no fighting in the Middle East apart from the familiar cycle of violence between Israelis and Palestinians, and no regimes have toppled. Indeed, nothing tangible has yet changed in the region, apart from a gradual increase in the usual pace of U.S. and British bombing in Iraq's "no-fly zones."

Almost unnoticed amidst all the media hype about coming events, there was dramatic progress in closing down the real wars that have been ravaging whole regions and killing huge numbers of people. First came the 27-year-old Angolan civil war, which suddenly ended in April after the rebel leader, Jonas Savimbi, was caught in an ambush and killed. Next, in July, there was a breakthrough in peace negotiations in Africa's oldest war, between the Arabized Muslim northerners and southern, mostly Christian, Africans of Sudan. There is not yet a definitive cease-fire in Sudan, but a war that has killed 2 million people over 33 years finally seems to be subsiding. Then, still in July, a peace agreement in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) ended what has been called "Africa's First World War.. Most of the six foreign armies have already gone home, and the fighting that caused more than 2 million Congolese deaths in four years has subsided to sporadic outbreaks of banditry.

The miracles then moved east, to the two longest-running wars in Asia. In September, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam dropped their demand for a separate state for Sri Lanka's Tamil minority, opening the way for negotiations to end the 19-year war that has devastated the island nation. In December, Indonesia signed a peace deal with the separatist rebels of Aceh in northern Sumatra, ending a 26-year war by granting the provincial governments of the region a 70 percent share in Aceh's oil and gas revenues. Also in December, the Tutsi-dominated government of Burundi signed a power-sharing agreement with the largest of the Hutu opposition groups, which gives the Central African country its best chance for peace since 1963.

There was bad news, too: A new civil war broke out in once-stable Ivory Coast in September, and the Maoist insurgency in Nepal, gaining strength by the month, threatens to produce a new Year Zero in that impoverished and misgoverned country. But from 15 wars only five years ago, Africa is now down to only three or four (depending on whether Sudan is really over), and Asia is down to just three (in Nepal, Kashmir and the southern Philippines). Even allowing for one civil war in the Arab world (Algeria) and one in Latin America (Colombia), the world is a more peaceful place this month than it has been at any time since September 1939.

More peaceful, but far from out of the woods. The most terrifying confrontation of the past year was the summer stand-off between India and Pakistan, two newly fledged nuclear powers that have fought each other three times already. If they were to do so again, using their new weapons, the death toll would exceed the total losses in all the other wars of the past 10 years in a matter of days. New Delhi and Islamabad have stepped back from the crisis for the moment, but huge armies still face each other across the border.

There has been one great change in the world this year, however, not in the Middle East at all, but in Latin America. An unsuccessful U.S.-backed attempt in April to overthrow the continent's one existing left-wing leader, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, was notable for the speed with which the poorest section of the population came to his defense, despite his failure to improve their economic plight. That was followed by the imposition of a state of emergency in Paraguay and widespread looting and bank closures in Uruguay in July, and an electoral upset in Bolivia in August that gave over a third of the seats to candidates of Indian descent and brought Evo Morales, the leader of the Movement Towards Socialism, to within a hair's breadth of the presidency.

Then in quick succession came the victory of Workers' Party leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in the October presidential elections in Brazil; populist Lucio Gutierrez's capture of the presidency in Ecuador's November elections, less than two year after he was jailed for leading an attempted leftist coup; and a renewed confrontation between Hugo Chavez and Venezuela's right-wing white elite that halted oil exports from one of America's largest suppliers in December. Almost half of Latin America's people now live under left-wing governments. While the Bush administration has been focusing obsessively on the Middle East, it has lost control of its own back yard.

The United States remains the great conundrum of the planet. Americans have been so traumatized by a single terrorist attack on their own soil that they have handed the country over to an administration with a radical right-wing agenda for domestic change and foreign expansion, though fewer than a quarter of them voted for it. The question is whether the American people can recover their balance without having to go through some painful and expensive, though ultimately instructive, experiences in the Middle East. The answer, at the moment, appears to be no, so a great deal of the rest of the world's business is being put on hold.