The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (46 page)

The Gulf War was the first post-Cold War resource war between civilizations. At stake was whether the bulk of the world’s largest oil reserves would be
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controlled by Saudi and emirate governments dependent on Western military power for their security or by independent anti-Western regimes which would be able and might be willing to use the oil weapon against the West. The West failed to unseat Saddam Hussein, but it scored a victory of sorts in dramatizing the security dependence of the Gulf states on the West and in achieving an expanded peacetime military presence in the Gulf. Before the war, Iran, Iraq, the Gulf Cooperation Council, and the United States jostled for influence over the Gulf. After the war the Persian Gulf was an American lake.

Wars between clans, tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities, and nations have been prevalent in every era and in every civilization because they are rooted in the identities of people. These conflicts tend to be particularistic, in that they do not involve broader ideological or political issues of direct interest to nonparticipants, although they may arouse humanitarian concerns in outside groups. They also tend to be vicious and bloody, since fundamental issues of identity are at stake. In addition, they tend to be lengthy; they may be interrupted by truces or agreements but these tend to break down and the conflict is resumed. Decisive military victory by one side in an identity civil war, on the other hand, increases the likelihood of genocide.
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Fault line conflicts are communal conflicts between states or groups from different civilizations. Fault line wars are conflicts that have become violent. Such wars may occur between states, between nongovernmental groups, and between states and nongovernmental groups. Fault line conflicts within states may involve groups which are predominantly located in geographically distinct areas, in which case the group which does not control the government normally fights for independence and may or may not be willing to settle for something less than that. Within-state fault line conflicts may also involve groups which are geographically intermixed, in which case continually tense relations erupt into violence from time to time, as with Hindus and Muslims in India and Muslims and Chinese in Malaysia, or full-scale fighting may occur, particularly when new states and their boundaries are being determined, and produce brutal efforts to separate peoples by force.

Fault line conflicts sometimes are struggles for control over people. More frequently the issue is control of territory. The goal of at least one of the participants is to conquer territory and free it of other people by expelling them, killing them, or doing both, that is, by “ethnic cleansing.” These conflicts tend to be violent and ugly, with both sides engaging in massacres, terrorism, rape, and torture. The territory at stake often is for one or both sides a highly charged symbol of their history and identity, sacred land to which they have an inviolable right: the West Bank, Kashmir, Nagorno-Karabakh, the Drina Valley, Kosovo.

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Fault line wars share some but not all of the characteristics of communal wars generally. They are protracted conflicts. When they go on within states they have on the average lasted six times longer than interstate wars. Involving fundamental issues of group identity and power, they are difficult to resolve through negotiations and compromise. When agreements are reached, they often are not subscribed to by all parties on each side and usually do not last long. Fault line wars are off-again-on-again wars that can flame up into massive violence and then sputter down into low-intensity warfare or sullen hostility only to flame up once again. The fires of communal identity and hatred are rarely totally extinguished except through genocide. As a result of their protracted character, fault line wars, like other communal wars, tend to produce large numbers of deaths and refugees. Estimates of either have to be treated with caution, but commonly accepted figures for deaths in fault line wars underway in the early 1990s included: 50,000 in the Philippines, 50,000-100,000 in Sri Lanka, 20,000 in Kashmir, 500,000-1.5 million in Sudan, 100,000 in Tajikistan, 50,000 in Croatia, 50,000-200,000 in Bosnia, 30,000-50,000 in Chechnya, 100,000 in Tibet, 200,000 in East Timor.
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Virtually all these conflicts generated much larger numbers of refugees.

Many of these contemporary wars are simply the latest round in a prolonged history of bloody conflicts, and the late-twentieth-century violence has resisted efforts to end it permanently. The fighting in Sudan, for instance, broke out in 1956, continued until 1972, when an agreement was reached providing some autonomy for southern Sudan, but resumed again in 1983. The Tamil rebellion in Sri Lanka began in 1983; peace negotiations to end it broke down in 1991 and were resumed in 1994 with an agreement reached on a cease-fire in January 1995. Four months later, however, the insurgent Tigers broke the truce and withdrew from the peace talks, and the war started up again with intensified violence. The Moro rebellion in the Philippines began in the early 1970s and slackened in 1976 after an agreement was reached providing autonomy for some areas of Mindanao. By 1993, however, renewed violence was occurring frequently and on an increasing scale, as dissident insurgent groups repudiated the peace efforts. Russian and Chechen leaders reached a demilitarization agreement in July 1995 designed to end the violence that had begun the previous December. The war eased off for a while but then was renewed with Chechen attacks on individual Russian or pro-Russian leaders, Russian retaliation, the Chechen incursion into Dagestan in January 1996, and the massive Russian offensive in early 1996.

While fault line wars share the prolonged duration, high levels of violence, and ideological ambivalence of other communal wars, they also differ from them in two ways. First, communal wars may occur between ethnic, religious, racial, or linguistic groups. Since religion, however, is the principal defining characteristic of civilizations, fault line wars are almost always between peoples of different religions. Some analysts downplay the significance of this factor.
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They point, for instance, to the shared ethnicity and language, past peaceful coexistence, and extensive intermarriage of Serbs and Muslims in Bosnia, and dismiss the religious factor with references to Freud’s “narcissism of small differences.”
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That judgment, however, is rooted in secular myopia. Millennia of human history have shown that religion is not a “small difference” but possibly the most profound difference that can exist between people. The frequency, intensity, and violence of fault line wars are greatly enhanced by beliefs in different gods.

Second, other communal wars tend to be particularistic, and hence are relatively unlikely to spread and involve additional participants. Fault line wars, in contrast, are by definition between groups which are part of larger cultural entities. In the usual communal conflict, Group A is fighting Group B, and Groups C, D, and E have no reason to become involved unless A or B directly attacks the interests of C, D, or E. In a fault line war, in contrast, Group A1 is fighting Group B1 and each will attempt to expand the war and mobilize support from civilization kin groups, A2, A3, A4, and B2, B3, and B4, and those groups will identify with their fighting kin. The expansion of transportation and communication in the modern world has facilitated the establishment of these connections and hence the “internationalization” of fault line conflicts. Migration has created diasporas in third civilizations. Communications make it easier for the contesting parties to appeal for help and for their kin groups to learn immediately the fate of those parties. The general shrinkage of the world thus enables kin groups to provide moral, diplomatic, financial, and material support to the contesting parties—and much harder not to do so. International networks develop to furnish such support, and the support in turn sustains the participants and prolongs the conflict. This “kin-country syndrome,” in H.D.S. Greenway’s phrase, is a central feature of late-twentieth-century fault line wars.
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More generally, even small amounts of violence between people of different civilizations have ramifications and consequences which intracivilizational violence lacks. When Sunni gunmen killed eighteen Shi’ite worshippers in a mosque in Karachi in February 1995, they further disrupted the peace in the city and created a problem for Pakistan. When exactly a year earlier, a Jewish settler killed twenty-nine Muslims praying at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, he disrupted the Middle Eastern peace process and created a problem for the world.

Communal conflicts and fault line wars are the stuff of history, and by one count some thirty-two ethnic conflicts occurred during the Cold War, including fault line wars between Arabs and Israelis, Indians and Pakistanis, Sudanese Muslims and Christians, Sri Lankan Buddhists and Tamils, and Lebanese Shi’ites and Maronites. Identity wars constituted about half of all civil wars
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during the 1940s and 1950s but about three-quarters of civil wars during the following decades, and the intensity of rebellions involving ethnic groups tripled between the early 1950s and the late 1980s. Given the overreaching superpower rivalry, however, these conflicts, with some notable exceptions, attracted relatively little attention and were often viewed through the prism of the Cold War. As the Cold War wound down, communal conflicts became more prominent and, arguably, more prevalent than they had been previously. Something closely resembling an “upsurge” in ethnic conflict did in fact happen.
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These ethnic conflicts and fault line wars have not been evenly distributed among the world’s civilizations. Major fault line fighting has occurred between Serbs and Croats in the former Yugoslavia and between Buddhists and Hindus in Sri Lanka, while less violent conflicts took place between non-Muslim groups in a few other places. The overwhelming majority of fault line conflicts, however, have taken place along the boundary looping across Eurasia and Africa that separates Muslims from non-Muslims. While at the macro or global level of world politics the primary clash of civilizations is between the West and the rest, at the micro or local level it is between Islam and the others.

Intense antagonisms and violent conflicts are pervasive between local Muslim and non-Muslim peoples. In Bosnia, Muslims have fought a bloody and disastrous war with Orthodox Serbs and have engaged in other violence with Catholic Croatians. In Kosovo, Albanian Muslims unhappily suffer Serbian rule and maintain their own underground parallel government, with high expectations of the probability of violence between the two groups. The Albanian and Greek governments are at loggerheads over the rights of their minorities in each other’s countries. Turks and Greeks are historically at each others throats. On Cyprus, Muslim Turks and Orthodox Greeks maintain hostile adjoining states. In the Caucasus, Turkey and Armenia are historic enemies, and Azeris and Armenians have been at war over control of Nagorno-Karabakh. In the North Caucasus, for two hundred years Chechens, Ingush, and other Muslim peoples have fought on and off for their independence from Russia, a struggle bloodily resumed by Russia and Chechnya in 1994. Fighting also has occurred between the Ingush and the Orthodox Ossetians. In the Volga basin, the Muslim Tatars have fought the Russians in the past and in the early 1990s reached an uneasy compromise with Russia for limited sovereignty.

Throughout the nineteenth century Russia gradually extended by force its control over the Muslim peoples of Central Asia. During the 1980s Afghans and Russians fought a major war, and with the Russian retreat its sequel continued in Tajikistan between Russian forces supporting the existing government and largely Islamist insurgents. In Xinjiang, Uighurs and other Muslim groups struggle against Sinification and are developing relations with their ethnic and religious kin in the former Soviet republics. In the Subcontinent, Pakistan and India have fought three wars, a Muslim insurgency contests Indian
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rule in Kashmir, Muslim immigrants fight tribal peoples in Assam, and Muslims and Hindus engage in periodic riots and violence across India, these outbreaks fueled by the rise of fundamentalist movements in both religious communities. In Bangladesh, Buddhists protest discrimination against them by the majority Muslims, while in Myanmar Muslims protest discrimination by the Buddhist majority. In Malaysia and Indonesia, Muslims periodically riot against Chinese, protesting their domination of the economy. In southern Thailand, Muslim groups have been involved in an intermittent insurgency against a Buddhist government, while in the southern Philippines a Muslim insurgency fights for independence from a Catholic country and government. In Indonesia, on the other hand, Catholic East Timorians struggle against repression by a Muslim government.

In the Middle East, conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine goes back to the establishment of the Jewish homeland. Four wars have occurred between Israel and Arab states, and the Palestinians engaged in the
intifada
against Israeli rule. In Lebanon, Maronite Christians have fought a losing battle against Shi’ites and other Muslims. In Ethiopia, the Orthodox Amharas have historically suppressed Muslim ethnic groups and have confronted an insurgency from the Muslim Oromos. Across the bulge of Africa, a variety of conflicts have gone on between the Arab and Muslim peoples to the north and animist-Christian black peoples to the south. The bloodiest Muslim-Christian war has been in Sudan, which has gone on for decades and produced hundreds of thousands of casualties. Nigerian politics has been dominated by the conflict between the Muslim Fulani-Hausa in the north and Christian tribes in the south, with frequent riots and coups and one major war. In Chad, Kenya, and Tanzania, comparable struggles have occurred between Muslim and Christian groups.

In all these places, the relations between Muslims and peoples of other civilizations—Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Hindu, Chinese, Buddhist, Jewish—have been generally antagonistic; most of these relations have been violent at some point in the past; many have been violent in the 1990s. Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors. The question naturally rises as to whether this pattern of late-twentieth-century conflict between Muslim and non-Muslim groups is equally true of relations between groups from other civilizations. In fact, it is not. Muslims make up about one-fifth of the world’s population but in the 1990s they have been far more involved in intergroup violence than the people of any other civilization. The evidence is overwhelming.