Governance...and Youth Development

Compiled by Clive Siachiyako

During the ‘cold war,’ it was considered unquestionable that the civil conflicts and the domestic violence of the underdeveloped countries were stimulated and even created by the imperialist policies of the two rival super powers. Any domestic disorder was thus suspected of ideological impregnation. The regions of Asia, Africa and Latin America were seen as game-boards where the struggle for world power between capitalists and communism was being played out.
Today, the cold war has stopped but the armed battles and acts of terrorism in the underdeveloped world has not only continued but have multiplied. A wave of armed conflicts has spread all over the continents. Since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, some twenty-three years ago; international conflicts have emerged and re-emerged involving over 50-armed groups. Such violent factions are active in Algeria, Senegal, Angola, Burundi, Congo Brazzaville, Liberia, Guinea Bissau, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Lebanon, Turkey, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Afghanistan, India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Cambodia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and East Timor, Bougainvillea, the former Yugoslavia, the Caucasus, Pakistan and many other countries.
However, none of these countriesۥ domestic armed conflicts is related to any world ideological struggle. Many of the new barbarian warriors of the underdeveloped world are predatory creatures set off by the demographic exploitation and by unemployment, plagued with social ethnic religions and cultural resentments. All of the above have been exacerbated by the worsening non-viability of their countries’ economics in the face of new global economy. Social exclusion brings out these social ethnic, religious or cultural resentments, causing battles to erupt that destroy what little there was of the state or nation.

This violence has produced 100,000 refugees in Latin America, 7.5 million in Africa, 6 million in Asia and about 4 million in Europe. By the end of the 20th century, more than 17 million men, women and children had been victims of the outbreak of the world wide predatory plague. By contrast, in the developed nations-states such as Switzerland, Belgium, Canada, Spain, the United Kingdom or the United States cultural ethnic and religious differences do not tear society apart, because material gratification helps to maintain these states’ cohesion.
The domestic armed conflicts in the quasi nation-states are veritable conflicts of national self-depredation wherein all respect, the most elementary principles of humanity is lost. This civil war is combined with massive criminality. Such predatory struggles neither liberate nor dignify any people. They only cause massive physical suffering, emotional damage and genocide. Some countries that have suffered conflicts of national self-predatory have needed humanitarian interventions from the United Nations or from regional organisations in order to reconstruct civilized life or to relieve human disasters that created thousands of refugees and displaced persons. Such were the cases for example, of Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Afghanistan, Cambodia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Congo, Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo and East Timor.
Other countries that have suffered or still suffering armed conflicts and terrorism, for example, are Algeria, Colombia, Egypt, India, Mexico, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Sudan and Tajikistan have managed to control the situation without international intervention. However, there is no guarantee that their national self-predation will totally disappear. In many of these countries, violence has become a characteristic national life in which the growing criminality, drug trafficking and terrorist armed violence combine into a sinister of reality.
In countries where violence has erupted, such as Angola, Algeria, Burundi, Cambodia, Colombia, Congo, Egypt, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Liberia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Peru, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Sri Lanka, the symptoms of economic non-viability worsened during the 1970 and 1980s. In their economies, based on slightly increased, unprofitably priced primary exports, the populations grew at explosive rate. Food production and the peri-capital consumption of energy and water lagged far behind population growth. In this manner, the imbalance between population and physical resources that are vital for social cohesion grew apace. Food insecurity increased. These countries increased their food imports and became dependent on food aid.

At the same time, the lack of energy security became critical. Some countries lost their self-sufficiency in petroleum, while others raised their imports of that strategic fuel. All this coincides with considerable reductions in the prices of their primary exports making real income growth per capita of these countries equal to zero as occurred in the 1960s. The incomes of a high percentage of their populations dropped and another large segment continue to be born into poverty.
All these viruses of non-viability caused prolonged periods of impoverishment which preceded the violence. For example, during the twenty-five years period to its civil war, El Salvador registered on average zero growth of per capita income, while the population increased at 2.5 per cent per year. Haiti and Somalia for thirty years, both registered an average decrease of 1 percent in per capita income with an annual population growth of 2 percent and 3 percent respectively. In the course of the twenty-four years preceding the great increase in the terrorist violence of Shinning Path and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), Peru had an average yearly income per capita growth rate of 0.1 percent with a yearly population of more than 2.3 percent. Nicaragua registered an average yearly decrease of 1.3 percent in per capita income during the twenty years prior to the outbreak of civil war, while the annual population growth rate was 3 percent. In all the countries that suffer today some degree of armed violence, the average per capita income for the thirty-five years from 1960 to 1995 grew by less than 3 percent, which is the minimum growth needed in order to escape from poverty. In Algeria, over three decades the average growth rate of per capita income was 0.5 percent, in Angola 0.2 percent, in Sierra Leone 1 percent, in Sudan 0.1 percent, in Mexico 1.8 percent, in Colombia 2 percent and in Peru 0.2 percent. The same tiny income growth rates happened in Liberia, Rwanda, Burundi, India, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and many other countries. The violence was due not only to that low income per capita growth rates but to the combination of these with an explosive population growth which exceeded 2.5 percent per year and with a deficient distribution of the income.

The armed struggles caused by national self-depredation can settle into situations of intermediate violence, with repeated armed truces followed by new outbreaks of fighting in which the warlords divide up or share monopoly of violence that was formerly the exclusive province of the state which this occurs, the country has become an ungovernable chaotic entity (UCE). The UCE is characterized by a collapse of state control over the territory and the population. It is a violent entity where public order no longer prevails either in the cities or in the rural areas. The entire country rebels against central power. Regions, provinces, cities, all lack a representative government and are controlled alternatively by military chiefs, warlords, drug traffickers, even thieves or by an assortment of these. The political process evapourates, legality disappears, representative institutions are replaced by armed forces or armed rebel groups or drug trafficking mafias. The civilian population becomes citizens of international Red Cross, Caritas Mèdecines Sans frontières (MSF) hundreds of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and the intensive humanitarian care of the United Nations.

At this moment the ranks of the UCEs include Afghanistan, Albania, Boston, Burundi, Cambodia, Colombia, Congo DR, Haiti, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Pakistan. The proliferations of UCEs since the 1990’s global reality’s most definitive answer to the myth of development. At this moment in history, countries do not only newly industrialized, but disintegrated instead. If the current situation in much of Africa, Latin America and Asia remain unchanged and if the urban population explosive continues, the moment will come in many more states when the inability to satisfy the vital necessities will shred even more than their fragile social fabric and erode the relations between the society and the public authority. This will result in greater social ethnic and religious tension and will foster the outbreak of new forms of national self-depredation or its resurgence and the appearance of more UCEs.
The author is a professor ofDevelopment studies at theUniversity of Zambia