On Demographics, Part 4: The Rwanda Domino Effect

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.