UNITED NATIONS: A rash of military conflicts and civil strife in parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America has aggravated the plight of the world’s poorer nations, according to a new UN report released here.

“Conflicts tend to be concentrated in poorer countries: more than half of all low-income countries have experienced significant conflicts since 1990,” says the 90-page study titled ‘The World Social Situation, 2003’.

During the last two decades of the 20th century, there were 164 violent conflicts worldwide, affecting 89 countries for an average of six to seven years.

“The greatest impact has been in Africa, where virtually every country or an immediate neighbour has suffered a major conflict over the last decade,” said the report, which will go before the current session of the UN General Assembly.

The countries devastated by military conflicts or civil wars include Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Mozambique, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ethiopia and Eritrea.

And where violent conflicts occur, economic development is set back because industries are destroyed, social services are abandoned, agricultural areas are laid waste and already poor populations are faced with the threat of famine.

“The past decades have also witnessed a change in the nature of conflicts, with a greater likelihood of conflict emerging within States rather than between States,” the study noted.

In countries such as Sierra Leone, Liberia and DRC, warring parties sustain themselves by taking control of the country’s civilian assets and natural resources, including diamonds and timber.

Five foreign armies — those of Rwanda, Uganda, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Angola — have been involved at various times either in the DRC’s six-year-old civil war or in the illegal exploitation of mineral resources, or both.

The country’s resources — including gold, copper, coltan, diamonds, timber and cobalt — have also been ruthlessly exploited by rebel groups involved in the conflict. The illegal revenues from these sales are being used to buy both small arms and sophisticated weapons used in the conflict.

“The new economy of war has led to a proliferation of armed groups organized with weak command-and-control lines. As a result, untrained combatants have waged most of the recent wars in disregard (and probably in ignorance) of the Geneva Conventions that include provisions for the protection of civilians,” the study said.

“Civilians have been used as tools of battle in various ways, including the expulsion or massacre of populations and the rape of women, in order to gain control over resource-rich territories, to hasten a surrender or simply to gain leverage over the enemy,” it added.

The ongoing military crises in countries such as India/Pakistan, and South Korea/North Korea have also forced these Asian countries to raise military spending — at times at the expense of economic development.

Addressing the UN Committee on Disarmament and International Security, Ambassador Dumisani Kumalo of South Africa told delegates on Monday that global military conflicts have continued to fuel an arms race worldwide.

“Global military expenditure was expected to rise to one trillion dollars this year,” he said, “while half of the world languished in chronic poverty and deprivation.”

In its annual report released in June, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said that world military expenditures accelerated sharply in 2002 — rising to $784 billion compared with $741 billion in 2001.

According to World Development Indicators 2003 published by the World Bank, poverty as measured by income is most prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa where, on average 51 per cent of the population (about 324 million people) live on less than a dollar a day. In a few countries in the region, the figure is over 70 per cent.

The World Bank also said that the figures were even more alarming in South Asia where, on average, 32 per cent live on less than a dollar a day. And South Asia accounts for the largest proportion of the world’s population living below the poverty line: about 40 per cent, or about 437 million people.

At present there are about 1.2 billion people living in absolute poverty. “However compelling in absolute numbers and appalling from an income point of view, the aggregation, the lumping together and the ultimate anonymity of those who are conveniently called ‘the poor’ fail to describe the dismal conditions under which poor people live and the vulnerabilities to which they are exposed,” the UN study said.

The report examines a number of social groups, including older persons, youth, the disabled, indigenous peoples, migrants and persons in situations of conflict, with due consideration to gender-specific issues — among whom the incidence of poverty and deprivation is particularly high.

“Clearly, these social groups do not exhaust the universe of those who are poor, nor are they mutually exclusive (except for older persons and youth), but what they do represent are people with an unusual degree of vulnerability to events outside their control because of their high level of social and economic dependency,” it added.

At the Millennium Summit in 2000, world leaders pledged to halve the number of people living in poverty by the year 2015.

But the international community is not expected to meet this goal due to several factors, including the decline in development aid, the rise in global debt, the increase in the spread of AIDS and the proliferation of military conflicts and civil strife.

“Owing to their lack of resources, people at or near the threshold of poverty are unable to withstand shocks since they are barely surviving, and any adverse event that reduces their income further can push then over the edge,” the study warned.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.