Amber Marks
Retired US colonel John B Alexander is unusual in his profession. He thinks that the best way to a peaceful world isn’t deadly force, but new weapons designed to minimise permanent injury. Some are already common, from electronic control devices like the controversial Tasers—used by Britain’s police to immobilise targets with electric shocks—to rubber bullets, chemical sprays and water cannons. But Alexander and other enthusiasts think the search for these weapons has just begun.
I met him in May on the edge of the Black Forest in Germany, at the 5th European Symposium on Non Lethal Weapons (NLWs). A handful of protestors held placards saying “against mind control.” Alexander recounted that one of these “wavers”—people who believe they are targets of microwave beams—claimed to recognise him from a UFO encounter. “They’re crazy paranoid,” he explained.
No doubt, but when even the British Medical Association voices concern about the “militarisation of biology,” it isn’t just conspiracy theorists who worry about the darker side of NLWs. As Jonathan Moreno’s Mind Wars (2006) details, military scientists are using advances in neuroscience—which shed light on the biochemical basis of much human behaviour—to design weapons. Ultimately, these could lead to the intentional manipulation of people’s emotions, memories and immune responses.
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Monica Toft
It’s a busy time for civil wars. The Sri Lankan army has pushed far into Tamil territory, seeking a decisive victory. The killings in Northern Ireland show how spoilers try to gain advantage over rivals in any political process. Then there is the threat that recently pacified civil wars, such as those in Iraq and Sudan, will come back, while the global recession may push new ones forward.
First, the good news. If public opinion in Northern Ireland is a guide, the violence will fail. The murders are widely perceived as criminal, while sympathy for the victims runs deep. The same isn’t true, however, of Iraq or Sudan. In the latter, vital provisions of the 2005 peace deal have still not been implemented. In the former, a stable peace seems unlikely any time soon. Most worryingly of all, there’s every indication that Pakistan’s domestic disputes may slide into all-out civil war.
More is known today about how such wars begin and end. Since 1940, the world has seen over 130 civil wars. Most have ended; only around a dozen rumble on, in countries such as Afghanistan, Burma, and Congo. But the manner in which they have ended has been transformed. Before the end of the cold war, more than 90 per cent of civil wars ended in outright victory, either for the government or rebels—this is the kind of definitive conclusion the Sri Lankan government is hoping for. (Rebels won in roughly half of the wars.) But since the fall of the USSR, about half of all civil wars have been ended by negotiation. Northern Ireland’s 1998 Good Friday agreement is a good example.
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David Anderson
When Kenya lurched into political crisis on 30th December, optimism over Africa’s democratic future took a heavy dent. African states have made considerable progress along the path back to plural politics over the last two decades, but Kenya’s troubles remind us that there is still a very long way to go, and that the rockiest part of the journey may yet lie ahead.
Elections have become the acid test of Africa’s democracy. With each poll, an army of international observers sweeps in to urge the democratic wave along. When they declare elections to be “free and fair,” observers give legitimacy to incoming regimes. But “free and fair” has too often been interpreted in a subjective way; electoral violence, the buying of votes and a degree of ballot-rigging have all been tolerated in the interest of higher political goals.
This tolerance has sometimes verged upon complacency. African politicians come to understand just how far they need to go to gain approval: with each election, the autocrats have got better at playing this game, bending the rules where they can.
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Bartle Bull
Discuss this article at First Drafts , Prospect’s blog
The question of what to do in Iraq today must be separated from the decision to topple Saddam Hussein four and a half years ago. That decision is a matter for historians. By any normal ethical standard, the coalition’s current project in Iraq is a just one. Britain, America and Iraq’s other allies are there as the guests of an elected government given a huge mandate by Iraqi voters under a legitimate constitution. The UN approved the coalition’s role in May 2003, and the mandate has been renewed annually since then, most recently this August. Meanwhile, the other side in this war are among the worst people in global politics: Baathists, the Nazis of the middle east; Sunni fundamentalists, the chief opponents of progress in Islam’s struggle with modernity; and the government of Iran. Ethically, causes do not come much clearer than this one.
Some just wars, however, are not worth fighting. There are countries that do not matter very much to the rest of the world. Rwanda is one tragic example; and its case illustrates the immorality of a completely pragmatic foreign policy. But Iraq, the world’s axial country since the beginning of history and all the more important in the current era for probably possessing the world’s largest reserves of oil, is no Rwanda. Nor do two or three improvised explosive devices a day, for all the personal tragedy involved in each casualty, make a Vietnam.
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Kim Sengupta
Discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
The last time I saw Nadia and Mohammed al-Hayali in Baghdad was in early 2006. They were waiting for visas to Dubai, joining the middle-class exodus out of Iraq. “We are just surviving day by day,” Nadia said. “Terrible things are taking place all around us. Unless we get out now, something bad will happen.”
But the al-Hayalis and their two children were destined not to make it together to their new life. Just when a place of safety was within reach, the violence of their homeland caught up with them in a particularly brutal way. I found out some of the story in a phone call from Nadia while I was in Helmand province. Even amid the strife of Afghanistan, I felt a sense of foreboding. Few happy calls come out of Baghdad.
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Alan Philps
In America, Africa is no longer the dark continent. Hollywood’s finest, including George Clooney and Mia Farrow, have blazed a trail to Darfur, followed by increasing numbers of politicians. Clooney’s latest film, Ocean’s 13, raised $10m to help refugees who have fled the onslaught of the Sudanese government and its Janjaweed militia. Vanity Fair, the celebrity bible, devoted its July edition to Africa, filling the pages with upbeat copy on the continent’s heritage and glittering prospects.
It is easy to satirise the juxtaposition of movie A-listers and the wretched of the earth. But for all the celebrity blather, something is actually happening. The American interest in Darfur, and the strong grassroots campaign for sanctions, has undoubtedly restrained the Sudanese government from using the most brutal means—chemical weapons and enslavement of whole tribes—which were pressed into service in an earlier conflict in the southern part of the country.
What is a reporter covering Africa to make of this? The gloomy conclusion must be that celebrity propels the story, particularly if the terrain is dramatic, as in Darfur. It also helps that the next president of the US might be Barack Obama, whose father is Kenyan.
Yet Africa correspondents have a lot to be grumpy about. They go through hell to report African wars, but ultimately the story seems to be framed by domestic politics and celebrity endorsement. Tim Butcher, formerly Africa correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, knows all about these frustrations. He was working in Africa at the time of the mother of all African wars, the civil conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has killed 4m people since its start in 1996. Even after the signing of a peace agreement in 2002, 1,200 people a day are said to be dying as a consequence of the fighting. In recent months, there has been more fighting in Congo than in Darfur—let alone the middle east.
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Horace Alexander
Where was Mahatma Gandhi on Indian independence day? I was with him on that day, so I can tell the story—and it is worth telling. For on that day Gandhi brought peace to the city of Calcutta, and to the whole of Bengal, where Hindus and Muslims had been killing one another almost daily for over a year.
Having been a teacher at a Quaker college in England, in the mid-1920s I spent a sabbatical year in India, where I received many introductions from a remarkable Englishman named CF Andrews, who had gone from India to South Africa to help Gandhi in his struggle to assert the rights of the Indian. My visit ended with a week at Gandhi’s ashram. Two years later, Gandhi came to London to take part in a conference on the future government of India, and I spent two days a week trying to be useful to him and his colleagues.
In 1942 I travelled to India with a section of the Friend’s Ambulance Unit to help Calcutta and other cities prepare for possible Japanese air raids. Happily, there were few, but a disastrous famine struck Bengal, and there was plenty of work to do. At the end of the war, the new secretary of state for India, Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, made it easy for me to return to India, and to help convince the Indian leaders that the British government was determined to leave India as soon as terms could be worked out. Gandhi and other Indian leaders welcomed us and made our work easy.
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Alex De Waal
The war in Sudan’s Darfur region has perplexed experts on Africa and experienced diplomats alike, so it is unsurprising that it has bewildered the wider public. This guide to the conflict answers ten simple questions.
1. Where is Darfur?
Darfur is the westernmost region of Sudan, Africa’s largest country. It straddles the Sahara desert, the dry savannahs and the forests of central Africa. Darfur borders Libya, Chad and the Central African Republic, and is equidistant from Africa’s coasts at the Red sea and Atlantic ocean. It is as large as France, though sparsely populated. The people of Darfur live off the land, cultivating during the rainy season (June-September) and herding animals.
Darfur was an independent sultanate from about 1600 until 1916, when it was merged with neighbouring Sudan as it became the last big territory to be absorbed into the British empire. In an earlier era Darfur had been one of Egypt’s main trading partners—its sultan exchanged letters with Napoleon in 1798. Under the British, Darfur was a backwater ruled by a few colonial officers, who delegated most of their powers to tribal chiefs. After Sudan’s independence in 1956, Darfur was again neglected, with little economic development, few roads and the poorest education and health services in all of Sudan.
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John Keegan
What is civil war? The question is often raised about the disorders in Iraq. Does the violence between Iraqi religious and political factions amount to civil war, or is it best described another way? The US-led coalition’s spokesmen, echoing the views of the White House and Downing Street, refuse to call the disorders civil war. Presumably they believe that to do so would be to admit defeat in their project to set up a stable, legitimate new Iraq.
To assess the situation in Iraq, it is helpful to understand how a civil war differs from an inter-state, cross-border war. There are three principal defining aspects of a civil war, each with numerous subsidiary requirements. The basic formula is simple: the violence must be “civil,” it must be “war,” and its aim must be either the exercise or the acquisition of national authority.
The “civil” part of the definition means the struggle must be conducted within a national territory, and that it must be carried on largely by the people of that territory, fighting between themselves. It must also involve a significant degree of popular participation.
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Rushanara Ali
Five years ago this summer, Britain had its worst riots for a generation. Bradford, Burnley and Oldham went through their own versions of the disturbances that spread across France last year, with the full panoply of burning cars and broken windows, confrontations between white and Asian youth, charging riot police and makeshift barricades.
The immediate official response was harsh—256 people were charged in Bradford alone. Almost all pleaded guilty and dozens of mainly Asian young people were given unusually stiff sentences—an average of over four years for the adults, a year and a half for the juveniles, far more than in previous incidents. (And despite the fact that many Pakistani parents, particularly in Bradford, had put pressure on their sons to give themselves up.)
But the subsequent response was more reflective. After the Brixton and Toxteth riots in 1981, Britain went through a bout of soul-searching. Lord Scarman’s inquiry prompted a review of policing and other policies, and Michael Heseltine’s famous cabinet paper, “It Took a Riot,” made the case for a more activist government inner-city strategy. Twenty years later the machinery of official inquiry moved into action once again, under the former Labour minister John Denham. The local authorities commissioned a succession of official reports which sought to explain what had led to the disturbances. Ted Cantle, the former chief executive of Nottingham city council, was given the most important task: David Blunkett, then home secretary, asked him to draw on all the other reports and explain what had caused such deep polarisation, what could be done about it and the lessons for national policy and practice.
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