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Managing internal conflict is a major foreign policy challenge
for the next century. However, it represents a fundamentally
different security problem than those with which we are
familiar. The international community is only just beginning
to fathom the differences.
Internal conflict is the most lethal form of violence that
has erupted in the wake of the Cold War. Indeed, more civilians
have died from internal war than from terrorism and interstate
war combined. The estimated ratio of civilian to military
casualties in these conflicts is about 9:1, the majority
being women, children, the poor and the weak. Internal conflict
has caused the death of an estimated four million people
in over thirty countries since 1989, and it threatens to
claim the lives of many more. As some have noted, the future threat
is potentially greater than most observers imagine:
According to some estimates, there are over five
thousand minorities and approximately eighty ethnically
oriented protracted conflicts around the globe. Roughly
thirty-five internal wars were underway in 1994;
if the usual threshold used to define such wars, one
thousand battle-related casualties, is set aside, the
number increases to somewhere between one hundred and
fifty and two hundred and forty.
No region is free from inter-group rivalry.
Violent internal wars have erupted in the former Soviet Union,
the southern Balkans, Africa, Asia, South America and
the Pacific. Even America's neighbors face separatist
movements, from Quebec's quest for autonomy in Canada
to an armed insurgency in the Chiapas province in Mexico.
Which of these are likely to turn toward extreme violence,
and which may be capable of being resolved peacefully,
is a question that challenges policymakers worldwide.
Despite a reluctance to get deeply involved, neither the
international community nor the US are able to remain
aloof from this strife. In the five years following the
end of Desert Storm, the US military conducted 27 overseas
operations arising from internal conflict, from a non-combat
evacuation in Sierra Leone in 1992 to Operation Restore
Democracy in Haiti in 1994. The US paid over 30 percent
of the donor assistance for complex humanitarian emergencies
stemming from such conflicts in 1996. There are also
economic interests at stake. Dozens of large multinational
companies, including the Fortune 500, have operations
in or near countries at risk.
For these reasons, the pervasiveness and destructiveness
of internal conflict, which in extreme cases result in
mass violence and genocide, make it one of the most virulent,
costly and serious threats to peace in our time.
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