Tuesday February 24' 2004

Conflict prevention
Buzzword of the week
 

Two buzz words at every encounter at the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly meetings in Addis Ababa this past week, official and unofficial. Important words to be sure.
Horn of Africa countries are at the bottom of the third world heap partly because for decades the area has been continuously ravaged by senseless civil wars for the better part of the last decades of the 1900s. Wars continued to rage and consume millions of lives long after the ’cold warriors’ called it quits.
A succession of new and improved versions of senseless conflicts consumed the lives of millions of young men and women and sent the whole region in to an economic tailspin of starvation and death.
At the tip of the Horn we have Somalia, which disintegrated and remains largely without government. A dangerous and explosive mess where warlords rule the day, it is back to pre-colonial days when the Italians ruled the land in the late 19th century. Divided into warring clans, only this time armed with mountains of AK-47s, the weapon of mass destruction of the Horn.
To the north of here, the Ethiopia-Eritrea border threatens to explode one more time and plunge the nation into the chaos of war. In the Sudan no sooner than one age-old civil war begins to look like it is over, gun ships rain bombs in western border killing and dislocating anew.
Eritrea seems to be on permanent war footing having fought with everyone but the Red Sea and turning its young into forced conscription. Is there some sort of mass addiction to war on the Horn? How do we prevent further conflict?
One sure method of reducing armed conflict would be to stop selling arms to all these states that can afford to buy tanks while their citizens are starving. More easily said than done. But not a squeak about arm reduction or arms control from any faction, from civil society, parliamentarians, non-state actors, delegates or whoever. No connecting the sale of arms to conflict prevention at the APC-EU parliamentary shuffle.
Why not a weapons buy-back program for governments, same as demobilized teenage warriors of northern Uganda or the Congo?
But the writing is clearly on the wall; aid and trade will have strings attached to them by the name of conflict prevention.
Recently half of Kazanchis was demolished to make room for a British Council regional office among others. The British already appear to be applying the brakes on that particular project as a subtle message to the Ethiopian government for not accepting the arbitration ruling on Badime. The conflict prevention string seems to be already attached, near invisible though it may be. It could serve as a tripwire that would kill all development aid and trade with the European Union although right now it is mostly aid than trade. Aid money is in the budget and it builds roads.
The price of conflict is about to skyrocket. Will we stop starving in such great numbers every time the rains are late, if we give up our guns?
The trade and aid arrangement between the ACP countries and the EU is not one of equal partnership, and the aid and trade leverage may very well work in parts of the Horn. But what leverage can the EU have on the warlords of Somalia, or on pride and nationalism or on pure madness.
A lack of clarity and understanding of the term ‘conflict prevention’ creates obstacles and understanding it on paper alone will not take us far. Long-term activities, which aim to reduce tension, may eventually prevent outbreaks of violence. Early warning systems modeled after those designed to detect impending shortages of food may also do the trick.
In the final analysis, it is only the actors who can take ownership, those who live in the region that will bring about any change. Will we take ownership and gradually discard our war mongering ways or just continue making war at the drop of a hat. If only governments of the recipients countries could take the millennium goals of 2015 seriously…rights of shelter, food, freedom, health, education, opportunity, human rights…maybe then?
There is little chance that people will simply lose their appetite for war on the Horn? Why is there so much war mongering in the offices and bars, anyhow? And it is always those of us who will not be the first ones to be sent to the fronts that always advocate war. No soldier is endeared to killing or dying.
We have to get over this frequent journey to the killing fields just like the Europeans did after butchering one another by the millions for over a hundred years.
 

yonaskab@hotmail.com