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Modern Warfare: Its Sinister Face

I suppose that that particular gentleman who refused to wear his gas-mask would have found it hard to live through the 1990s.

Up to the 1930s, war had most commonly been an effort organised by one state to defeat the armed forces of a rival state. It rapidly became clear in the 1990s that something new and sinister was developing. Across large parts of Africa, South America, Central Asia, and Southeast Europe, new kinds of paramilitary groups emerged. Sometimes they were fragments of security services from disintegrating states; sometimes militias with fundamentalist religious objectives; sometimes followers of local warlords. More often than not they were deeply embroiled in disputes over drugs, territory, and arms shipments. Other disturbing features became apparent. Huge numbers of children are learning to carry arms: one estimate is that several hundred thousand children are now fighting in over twenty-five armed conflicts. Reports indicate that many of the children are turned into drug addicts, and most of them have no idea who they are fighting for, or why.

In at least some of the great military conflicts of earlier years, armed forces generally adopted some kind of “rules of engagement”, even if they were frequently flouted. There was some sense that prisoners should not be executed, that women and children were not booty, that Red Cross and ambulance services were not combatants, that peace agreements would be respected. In the 1990s, a new term became current: ethnic cleansing. An older one, genocide, had to be resurrected. Potentially rich countries like Angola have become wastelands: over half a million people died in a civil war that brought no victors, only suffering. Kabul, a once-thriving and colourful city has become, in the words of one observer in 1998, “mile upon mile of rubble and dust, abandoned and windswept, populated here and there by ragged families eking out their survival inside abandoned truck containers that have been sawn in half. Ranging up the hillsides were thousands of roofless and windowless houses, deserted by their former inhabitants. The warring militias had spared nothing: the blue-domed mosques, the minarets, the hospitals, the schools. The Kabul museum, which once housed a collections of early Buddhist relics, lay open to the sky, its ancient columns lying about on the roadside, its collection looted. Artillery detachments were scuttling about in the ruins.”

There seems to be no room for peace in many of these conflicts, let alone forgiveness and reconciliation. Perhaps between two nations, a peace accord can be signed and may become more or less permanent. But the case is different when one is talking about paramilitaries allegedly “protecting” two communities who live alongside each other. It has proved so easy for neighbouring ethnic groups to get caught in downward spirals of mutual hatred, fear, stereotyping, hysteria, conflict and, ultimately, unrestrained violence. A peace accord in these situations most often means merely a pause in the fighting, a chance for regrouping and an adjustment of strategy.

So where is the message for the new millennium. Do forgiveness and reconciliation mean anything to millions of victims, their families, their communities? Would Provost Howard still worship his Christ “as joyfully as ever before”? Perhaps a few bright flashes still encourage us. The world has been heartened to some extent by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, and by the peace process in Northern Ireland. But the rebuilding of human values in devastated societies is going to take decades at least. Of course we are aware that the destruction of Coventry is a relatively minor affair, in terms of numbers, compared to the overall devastation of war. But suffering cannot be measured only in terms of numbers; neither can efforts at peace and reconciliation be judged only by their immediate visible effects.

There is a growing recognition, even in mainstream politics, that much of the “new” ethnic violence we have been discussing, is not easily subject to conventional monitoring like arms control. If people hate each other with sufficient force, they will manage to kill each other even if they have to use machetes. War has its technical aspects. But even more fundamentally it has its roots deep in the divided and troubled human consciousness. New “peace agreements” to be meaningful really have to indicate: “we will no longer regard these persons as our enemies”. For communities who have suffered unbearable heartache, these words are perhaps, understandably, almost impossible to utter.

Alan Hunter

Article Notes:

1. Provost Richard Howard, BBC broadcast, Christmas Day 1940; much of the information in this part of the article comes from W.E. Rose, Sent From Coventry: A Mission of International Reconciliation, (London: Wolff, 1980, p. 9). Rose’s book is based on personal interviews and archival sources.

2. Oberburgermeister Andreas Gayk, quoted in Kieler Presse, January 1947

3. Spence, Phoenix at Coventry: The Building of a Cathedral (London: Bles, 1962), p. 7

4. M. Ignatieff, The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (London: Chatto and Windus, 1998), p. 141

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