From ROBERT D. KAPLAN’s The Coming Anarchy article, published in February 1994:
I got a general sense of the future while driving from the airport to downtown Conakry, the capital of Guinea. Stores were built out of rusted shipping containers, junked cars, and jumbles of wire mesh. The streets were one long puddle of floating garbage. Mosquitoes and flies were everywhere. Children, many of whom had protruding bellies, seemed as numerous as ants. When the tide went out, dead rats and the skeletons of cars were exposed on the mucky beach. In twenty-eight years Guinea’s population will double if growth goes on at current rates.
Since Guinea has survived the last 13 years without civil war or collapse, one might think that Kaplan’s forecast was overly pessimistic. Yet traveling and writing in 1993, Kaplan gave an equally pessimistic outlook for Guinea’s three southern neighbors, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d’Ivoire, all which faced grotesque civil wars after publication of this article. And Guinea is the latest of the countries he visited that is in real danger of becoming a failed state as it faces a growing revolt to the brutal rule of its dying dictator president, compounded by constricted resources and little economy.
I was reminded of this forecast for Africa’s future as I read that an underground lake has been discovered in Sudan, and it could be tapped to produce at least 1,000 wells. This is the first I’ve heard that water was a cause for Sudan’s woes, but it turns out that Sudan suffered drought for 14 of the last 20 years, and scarce water was a major cause of the civil war that has now killed more than 200,000 people and displaced more than 2.5 million others. (It has also sparked a regional humanitarian crisis, fueling instability in neighboring Chad and Central African Republic, as previously noted on this blog in how instability spreads.)
Resource wars are the cause for most of Africa’s political woes. Take Rwanda. Common wisdom is that the 1994 genocide in Rwanda resulted from Hutu militias mass murdering Tutsi civilians after historical hatreds were manipulated by evil men. Yet according to recent research by Jared Diamond in his book Collapse, pre-genocide Rwanda had a population density approaching that of Holland yet supported by Stone Age agriculture. In the years preceding the genocide Rwanda suffered a precipitous decline in per capita food production because of drought and overworked soil, which in turn caused massive deforestation. The decision to kill was made by politicians and public leades, but that is the background as to how it was justified and why it was carried out so zealously by ordinary peasants.
The Coming Anarchy‘s bleak forecast for Africa’s future was written before Rwanda, before Sierra Leone, before Liberia, before the Congo War, before Zimbabwe, and before Sudan. The characteristics of failing states because of demographic unsustainability and environmental implosion that caused many of these disasters remain across the nations of Africa, and are only destined to get worse. In other words, the future that Kaplan feared in Guinea is not an isolated condition. It was true in Rwanda, is true in Sudan, and could also be true for many more nations of Africa, and parts of Asia such as Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, and India. Or as discussed in part 3: overpopulation, disease pandemics, rising crime, cultural dysfunction, are going to make a critical mass of the Third World so far behind that they won’t be able to catch up.
well, you forgot Republic of Congo 1997 (with a relapse in 98), C.A.R. 1997 with yearly relapse, the war fought by the acholi in Uganda since 84, Chad, Angola, Cabinda, Somalia, the on-going low intensity conflict in Ogaden, the Tuareg rebellions in Mali and Niger, the Casamance insurgency in Senegal and the Niger Delta in Niger.
the weird thing too is you fail to mention how most of those conflict are inter-connected. Sierra-Leone/Liberia/Ivory Coast is really the same war. as Darfur and Chad, CAR (and to an extend Niger) or the giant interconnected conflict that “links” Rwanda, DRC, Congo, Angola, Cabinda, CAR (yes it’s involved in two clusters), Burundi, Uganda..
i also have reservations about using Rwanda, Darfur and Niger Delta conflicts, which are ressource based on a “grassroots” level as template for all african conflicts.
there is also a geopolitics element and a fight for ressources that are not vital to the people..
All very, very true. Thanks for the comment.
Beyond geopolitics and resources, will growing populations with dwindling resources lead to more Rwandas and Darfurs?
A colleague pointed out that Diamond’s perception of the Rwanda Genocide is convincing and may be true, but the population is one million more today than it was just before the genocide, so demographics may be overrated in this respect.
I would not be too quick to accept the conclusions of Jared Diamond. I don’t feel like repeating what I already said here, but he tries to shove far too much under one explanation, refuses to consider certain evidence if its implications are uncomfortable, and is just plain wrong about the history of places like Easter Island and Iceland. That being said, Guns Germs & Steel is quite a good read, even if it does not actually succeed in its attempt to answer “Yali’s Question”.
well, even if the genocide happened in 94, there has been large massacres before, when the population was smaller.. so i guess it’s not as simple as a “bigger population = bigger risk” formula.
but as far as peace in Rwanda since 94, there are a certain number of explanation around:
- the FPR won, went as far as chasing its enemies on the other side of border and rules over the country in an authoritarian way. basically, no more genocide because the Hutus has been thoroughly defeated (of course, Tutsis can’t be genocidal, they just want serfs).
- even if there’s 1 more million of people, there’s a gender imbalance, a large one. and young men who have such a large pool of women to choose from have better things to do than fight wars.
- the FPR does a very good job of keeping the memory of the genocide alive and of building a new idea of Rwanda. In modern Rwanda, the words Hutus and Tutsis are only heard in the context of Memorials.
but here’s one that may interest you:
- the government of Rwanda decided that the ressources/population imbalance was an important factor. therefore they did over the last 10 years tried their best to increase the ressource part of the equation. they massively invested in education and support urbanization to build an industrial and services sector, they oriented agriculture towards tea, coffee, flowers (way more productive than rice), they’re making serious efforts in the tourism sector… basically they’re making the pie bigger and land less important.
and as far as your question, i don’t think so. Rwanda and Darfur have/had real ressource problems, vital things, water and land. Others fight over the distribution of rare ressources that are only vital as far as it provides foreign currency. And on the other hand, Burkina Faso, Mali have survived severe droughts and population booms without wars, genocides and conflicts. probably because they were more solidary societies.