|
|
|
April 28, 2002
EXCERPTS: Is life so cheap?
Frances Stewart and Taimur Hyat shed light on the conflicts which have claimed 4.3 million lives in South Asia in the last 50 years
THE past half-century has seen four international wars, eighteen armed internal conflicts, and countless low-level insurgencies as well as civilian unrest in South Asia. A conservative estimate suggests that turmoil in this troubled region has claimed over 4.3 million lives. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, there are over two million conflict-related refugees in South Asia.
The region is still not at peace. India faces potential conflict with both China and Pakistan, and also has to cope with about a dozen major internal ethnic and tribal conflicts. Religious and caste differences often explode into riots and sporadic incidents of extreme violence. In Pakistan, which has interspersed parliamentary government with military rule for much of its history, three of the four provinces have engaged periodically in both violent and non-violent struggles against the domination of the fourth — Punjab.
In Bangladesh, itself the product of a brutal war with Pakistan in 1971, the peace treaty with the tribes of the Chittagong Hill Tracts has provided an uneasy peace in a country that has endured low-intensity civil conflicts ever since independence. Sri Lanka has exploded into violence regularly since 1983, mainly as a result of a guerrilla war launched by the revolutionary Janatha Vimkti Peramuna (JVP), and a secessionist war spearheaded by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which is still continuing. Bhutan has still to tackle the sensitive issue of nearly 100,000 Bhutanese refugees of Nepalese origin in UN camps, partially as a result of the government’s policy of ‘Bhutanization’.
Beneath the surface of these civil wars lie other forms of militarism and conflict. Organized crime is rampant, and small arms and ammunition circulate freely in certain regions. In the class and caste wars of Bihar (India), upper-caste private armies slaughter lower caste dalits, while Maoist guerrillas murder local landlords in return. A culture of conflict means that civil society is itself highly militarized. Underground death squads, such as the Black Cats and White Eagles, operate secretly alongside formal policing, laws and regulations. At least a dozen national leaders have been assassinated in the last half-century. And Pakistan and Bangladesh have been under direct or indirect military rule for nearly half their history as independent countries.
Religious intolerance and conflict is also on the increase. Fascist groups among the Sunni majority in Pakistan, especially in the central Punjab belt, are killing members of the Shia minority, who in turn have formed their own violent fringe groups. It is estimated that more than a hundred people were killed in 1999 in religious violence. In addition, many analysts are concerned about the social and political repercussions of fundamentalists returning from Pakistan-backed jihads in Afghanistan and Kashmir.
There have also been several serious incidents of Hindu-Muslim and Hindu-Christian conflicts in India. The most serious Hindu-Muslim conflict stemmed from the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in 1992, leading to communal riots in which over 2,000 people died. In other religion-inspired vandalism, 22 churches were destroyed and burnt in 1998 in one district in Gujarat, India. Dozens of other churches have been damaged, and there have been cases involving the rape and murder of nuns.
A classification of conflicts in South Asia
The interlocked nature of many South Asian conflicts makes them difficult to categorize systematically. For example, the three international wars between India and Pakistan have been closely linked with civil wars in Kashmir (1948 and 1965) and East Pakistan (1971), while almost every internal conflict has external dimensions, in part reflecting the international tensions in the region.
The vast number of ethnic conflicts reflects South Asia’s complex post-colonial history. Over fifteen conflicts have occurred in the span of five decades. India has witnessed eight, followed by three in Pakistan, and one each in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Bhutan. Many conflicts have been driven by a desire for greater autonomy, which itself is an outcome of a fear of assimilation and marginalization, a sense of relative deprivation, and political powerlessness. At least three secessionist movements — East Pakistan, Khalistan, and Tamil Elam — ‘originate from the mismanagement of autonomy demands, leading to conflict escalation’.
A dozen ethnic conflicts have become big enough to be described as internal wars. Most have lingered on for a long while, and led to large-scale economic and human losses. The East Pakistan war is certainly the most disastrous civil war in the region, with the death toll crossing three million, according to many estimates. The death toll resulting from the Tamil Eelam war is close to 60,000. International wars have been associated with lower casualties, but their economic, social, and political consequences have also been very large.
Most of the internal conflicts have had an important external component. The Mukti Bahini, which led the Bangladeshi independence movement, was provided important support and assistance by the Indian Army. India is also alleged to have played an important role in Sri Lanka’s violent civil war, by first supplying arms and providing a safe haven for Tamil militants, and then trying to play a peacekeeping role in the country. Many militant groups in India have received varying levels of tacit support from Pakistan, China, and Bangladesh. While such support has often been based on cross-border ethnic affinities, the conflict-groups in India’s northeast and Punjab have capitalized on regional power politics to win covert foreign backing, especially from Pakistan and China.
The fundamental issues under dispute in three of the four international wars remain unresolved. India and China have still not sorted out their territorial claims, and a viable solution to the Kashmir problem has yet to be worked out. The Indo-Pakistani conflicts have taken the form of lingering low-intensity conflicts, leading to frequent border conflagrations and small-scale fighting, such as the Siachen glacier battles in the late 1980s, and the Kargil crisis in the late 1990s. The Sino-Indian conflict has not led to any direct confrontation in recent years, though diplomatic relations between the two Asian powers have only recently begun to thaw.
Excerpts from
The South Asian challenge
Edited by Khadija Haq
Oxford University Press, 5 Bangalore Town, Sharae Faisal, Karachi-75350
Tel: 021-4529025
Email:ouppak@theoffice.net
ISBN 0-19-579647-0 332pp. Rs 595
|
|
|
|
