There are hundreds of conflicts causing thousands of victims which however receive very little attention by the media At the beginning of each year, the Institute for Strategic Studies in London draws up a report on all the ongoing wars in the world, along with an estimate of the casualties they have caused, of the impact they have on the overall level of safety and of the danger involved as far as further developments are concerned. This is a very instructive study, since not only does it reveal that there are many more ongoing wars than those regularly reported by the newspapers, but it also suggests that their dangerousness is not always commensurate with the number of victims. The fact that ten casualties in the Balkans are more likely to capture the headlines than one thousand people killed in Sierra Leone is not due to an arbitrary judgement by the media but to the fact such deaths may lead to much more significant political consequences. If we were to rephrase Orwell’s statement, we could say that all victims are equal, but some are more equal than others.
Today, our attention is rightly attracted by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which in three years has caused approximately three thousand victims, especially amongst civilians,; by Iraq, where the future set-up of the Middle-East and of the oil market is at stake, and by Kashmir, where two nuclear powers are facing each other. But there are many more areas under strain: in certain cases, we have to do with endemic wars that have distant historical origins, in others we have “dormant” conflicts which may break out again at any time, and in other cases we have territory disputes which are temporarily handled through arbitration but may suddenly develop into a war.
To complete the picture, there also are “hypothetical” disputes, such as the one which may break out in the event that the volcanic activity that today affects the area around Sicily should cause within the arm of sea between Sciacca and Pantelleria the legendary Ferdinandea island to re-emerge; during its very brief 5 month period of life, in 1831, this island was annexed in quick succession by the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, by Great Britain and by France, and to date it continues to be claimed by the three powers in question. Although we can rule out the possibility that Italy, France and Great Britain may go to war for the right of ownership over a rock, there are other similar disputes of a more explosive nature.

The fight between Spain and Morocco for the ownership of the uninhabited islet of Perejil, off the Mediterranean coast of Africa, only lasted a few days because of the American demands that king Muhammad VI called back the six policemen he had sent to occupy it; however the problem of the Ceuta and Melilla enclave, which Spain has no intention of giving up, will continue to poison the relations between the two countries for heaven knows how long.

Morocco itself has been battling for a quarter of a century in a tough confrontation aiming at the so-called Polisario Front, which, with an ill concealed support by Algeria and a certain degree of backing by UNO, challenges the legitimacy of its annexation to the former Spanish Sahara, a land that is almost desert but is very rich in phosphates. Many international disputes centre on archipelagos or individual islands with no apparent value, whose territorial waters however include submarine hydrocarbon beds or rich fishing resources.
A typical example is that of the Falkland islands, for which Argentina and Great Britain fought an extremely bloody war twenty years ago, which ended with Argentina’s defeat and the collapse of its stratocracy. Mrs Thatcher‘s government basically undertook the reconquest of the archipelago for a matter of principle and to protect the will of the 3,000 inhabitants who had no intention of falling under the power of Argentina; possibly, it also did so to reawaken its citizens’ national pride, which had been rather humiliated with the disappearance of the empire, and to prove that Great Britain still had the spirit of that great power, even though it had lost its resources. However, the deed certainly did not disdain economic purposes, since ownership of these islands makes it possible for Great Britain to exert some sort of control over a major sector of the Southern Atlantic Ocean and to have easier access to the Antarctic. On the other hand, Argentina’s goal was to satisfy atavistic nationalistic drives through the annexation of a territory which was geographically part of Argentina but which, owing to a twist of history, had remained in European hands. These drives are so strong that even in today’s devastated Argentina there are politicians who strongly claim the ownership of what they call the Malvinas.

Other debated islands are the Paracel Islands, causing a dispute between China and Vietnam; the Spratley, Islands, claimed, occasionally through cannon shots, by China again and by Malaysia, Taiwan and Philippines; the Southern Curili islands, occupied by USSR during the very last days of the war and never returned to Japan, not even against substantial economic assistance; the two rocks of Abu Mussa and Tunbs, controlling access to the Persian Gulf, embezzled by the Shah through a surprise attack against the Arab Emirates, are today firmly in the ayatollahs’ hands; the Caribbean archipelago of San Andrés and Providencia, over which Columbia and Nicaragua have been quarrelling for a century; the uninhabited islet of Imia, four miles off the Anatolian coast in the Aegean sea, over which six years ago an extremely serious accident broke out between Greece and Turkey.

Continent by continent, the hot spots in which fighting has taken place over the last five years and where it could easily be resumed, are about a hundred in number.

In Europe, despite NATO’s intervention, the Kossovo wound is still open and has also infected neighbouring Macedonia; the set-up of Bosnia, so laboriously agreed on in Dayton, remains in doubt.

Greece and Turkey, despite the gradual rapprochement taking place over the last few years, have not yet reached an agreement as to the sharing of the Aegean territorial waters, nor on the finals set-up of Cyprus, which has been split in two for thirty years.
For about ten years now, between Moldavia and Ukraine, there has been the pirate state of Russian-speaking Transnistria, whose existence nobody acknowledges nor anybody will ever acknowledge and which, if left to its own devices, runs the risk of becoming a fief of international crime.
But the real powder keg of the Old Continent is Caucasus, where Russia is unsuccessfully trying to re-establish its control over rebellious Chechnya, Georgia is torn by the secessionists of Abkhazia and of South Ossetia, whilst Armenia and Azerbaijan have long fought each other for the ownership of Nagorno-Kharabakh before reaching a precarious ceasefire.
Only in this region, there have been at least fifty thousand deaths over the last ten years, and these figures are doomed to increase.

Asia offers a full range of conflicts, both ongoing and dormant, which add to the Arab-Israeli conflict, which has been in and out of the paper headlines for over fifty years, to the Iraq – Kuwait conflict, which is what is causing today’s crisis, and to the one between India and Pakistan, dating back to the sharing of the subcontinent between Hindus and Muslims, accomplished by Great Britain in 1947. Iraq and Iran, after wildly fighting each other for almost a decade, still have a territorial dispute for a slice of land to the East of Bassora.
The Saudi Arabia borders with Kuwait, Yemen, United Emirates and the Oman Sultanate are periodically the cause of dispute. Despite the eradication of the Taliban regime, Afghanistan continues to be the theatre of continuous conflicts among the various war lords. In the neighbouring Tajikistan, the civil war between the heirs of the Soviet power and Islamic fundamentalists has never ended.
India has an ongoing dispute not only with Pakistan over Kashmir, but also with Bangladesh over a portion of Bengala, and with China over slices of land in Ladakh and Assam.
Sri Lanka has witnessed bloodshed for a whole generation, owing to the Tamil rebellion against the Singhalese majority government, which may lead to the birth of an umpteenth ethnic statelet in the Northern part of the island. From Myanmar periodical news items are received with regards to the fierce repression campaign against the Northern tribes (Karen and Shan), which have always been fighting the central government.
Cambodia has not yet completely freed itself from the scourge represented by the red Khmers, who in the ‘70s were responsible for the slaughter of one third of the population, and Vietnam continues to have to face the rebellion of the so-called “Montagnard” tribes, earlier supported by the Americans and now the victim of a semi-genocide. Indonesia, with its thousands of islands scattered over an area of 6000 km, its two hundred million inhabitants and its diversified ethnic and religious makeup, is possibly the country running the greatest risk of a Soviet- or Yugoslav-type disintegration.
After a guerrilla warfare lasting dozens of years, it has already had to grant independence to the Catholic East Timor, extorted from Portugal in 1976, but it has to face other secessionist movements in the Aceh province (westernmost of Sumatra), in the Moluccas, and in the huge and wild West Irian.
Furthermore, periodic fights between Muslims and Christians cause hundreds of victims every year. A somewhat symmetrical situation can be found in the Philippines, where the Christians are in power and the Muslims, bankrolled by Al Qeada, are up in arms with the aim of establishing an independent state in the Island of Mindanao and in the Sulu archipelago. Again here kidnapping and fights between the rebels and the army take place almost every day, and people have even lost count of the casualties.
Whereas these wars can at least in part be ascribed to the incipient “civilisation clash” between Christianity and Islam, Korea has to face the latest heritage of the cold war. For almost 60 years, the peninsula has been divided by an almost insuperable wall, which not even the rapprochement attempts carried out over the last few years and the much advertised call exchange between the two leaders has managed to pierce. The North is Stalinist and miserable, but has one million soldiers in the army, an amazing missilery and possibly a couple of atomic bombs; the South is capitalist and democratic, but depends for its safety on the American umbrella; every so often they shoot at each other, every now and then they dream about reunion. Everything is still possible.
The picture of Asian conflicts is completed by China’s claims on Taiwan, which it views as a “rebellious province” and for which it obtained back in Nixon’s times expulsion from the United Nations. In actual fact, if not by right, Taiwan is now a wealthy state with 22 million inhabitants and a per capita income which is twentyfold that of the People’s Republic, and has no intention of waiving its independence. After the 1998 crisis, during which the United States had to line up their fleet in the Formosa Straits to dissuade China from invading the island, the pressure has been gradually eased, and some kind of modus vivendi has been set up between the two Chinas, based on which the “homeland” has dropped the military option and Taiwan invests every year billions of dollars on mainland economy. But the dispute continues to hold and may again ignite the region at any time.

The last item on our list (‘last’ by all means) is the situation in Africa, where conflicts cause the greatest number of victims but attract the smallest attention, because – once the cold war ended with the opportunity it involved of allowing the opposing parties to seek support by one of the two blocks – they now only have local impact.
Even a simple list of the chief wars fought over the last few years, whether now ongoing or “deep-frozen” without their causes being removed, would require a great amount of space and it is no coincidence that most of the countries which the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (La Farnesina) recommends not to visit because involving too many risks, are indeed located in the Black Continent. Let us start with Algeria, where the war between the government and the fundamentalists, which officially ended in 1999, regularly breaks out again with indescribably violent episodes. As we move clockwise, we find Sudan, where the relentless fight between the Muslims in the North, who are in power, and the Animist-Christians in the South, has caused during the course of a generation two million deaths.
Slightly to the East, we have Ethiopia and Eritrea, who have recently fought a meaningless and fruitless war for a strip of desert, which has bled these countries white, causing them once more to beg for international alms. Ethiopia continues to fight a secret war in Ogaden, not against a country such as Somalia which has been in total chaos for years and no longer has a central government, but against nomadic tribes, fighting over the ownership of a few water wells. Whilst Mozambique and Angola which, after twenty years of civil war and millions of casualties and refugees, seem to have found peace at last, the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been in chaos for almost ten years, assaulted and robbed of its wealth by the neighbouring countries, full of rebellious movements and torn by tribal hatreds. The fights between Tutsi and Hutu, which have devastated Ruanda e Burundi, are at the moment going through a slack period, but may resume any moment.
News headlines devote lots of space at the moment to Western Africa, with Nigeria and Ivory Coast that have fallen into the grip of some sort of religious war between Muslims and Christians, and with Sierra Leone and Liberia dominated by the lunacy of their tribal heads. But not even other countries in the region, and Senegal, Togo and Niger in particular, are immune from this contagion.

This is a really distressing picture, which should cause people to think when they continue to cry out for peace but in fact only wish to attack the United States and Israeli.
If, at least for these people, victims were really all equal, that is if their interest was above all of a humanitarian nature, they should be worrying about what is happening in Africa, at least as much as (if not more than) what is taking place in the Middle East.

(traslated by Interpres)