LONDON – The private schools of Britain, the Etons, Harrows, Winchesters et al produce the Tutsis of my land. I grew up as a rank and file Hutu, part of the majority, graduating from the city high school of Liverpool- along with my classmate, Paul McCartney- and then on to the red brick university of Manchester. The Tutus in large numbers colonized Oxford and Cambridge- and still do despite a generation of educational reforms- taking a good half of the places. All my journalistic life I’ve struggled against the Tutsi. They take most of the top jobs in the BBC and the classier papers. If it hadn’t been for the American paper in Europe, the International Herald Tribune, I might never have made it.
Yet not for one moment did I consider rallying my putative majority to fight the Tutsis. Years of conditioning bred me to accept the virtues of a calm society. I would rather accept a measure of disadvantage than upturn the apple cart. Besides the gates weren’t exactly closed in my face; it was just rather harder for a Hutu than a Tutsi to get through them.
In Northern Ireland this British ability to stratify society has been far more rigid and much more complex. The division between Catholics and Protestants is rooted in the 17th century when British settlers, made up of English and Scottish nobles and war veterans, settled on land confiscated from the Irish Catholics. For most of the time the Catholics sublimated their yearnings; the advent in the 1960s of the civil rights movement and subsequently the re-birth of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) changed all that. Britain paid for its obduracy with quarter of a century of bitter civil war. Finally it seems peace is at hand. The IRA has made the critical concession to allow inspection of its arms caches. Doubtless, the Protestant ascendancy will live in ways both large and small for another century at least. Yet a functioning power sharing executive with a devolved parliament will allow the Catholics to feel they have an important say. Another Tutsi-Hutu situation in the British Isles (although with the majority-minority roles reversed) looks as if it too is becoming manageable.
It is this coming to terms with partially deferred gratification that is a large part of the essence of civilization. Something that the real Tutsis and Hutus have not yet learnt to acquire. Neither have the Serbs and the Kosovars, though the Bosnian Muslims and the Croats may be getting there. In Sri Lanka, the Sinhalese and the Tamils are certainly not. Nor are they in the Congo or once again in the Philippines. But, hopefully, in Indonesia with East Timor settled, the ethnic dispute in the dissident province of Aceh will be too. Fortunately, Indonesia, with its new democratically elected president, Abdurrahman Wahid, has as leader a man apparently suffused with the timeless qualities of patience and forgiveness.
So is the world progressing or regressing on the ethnic conflict front? The media and conventional wisdom hold that tribal and nationalist fighting is still rising on a frightening scale. But they are wrong. The modern era of ethnic warfare peaked in the early 1990s. I have been arguing this in my column for years but now there is confirmation from a major study carried out by the Minorities at Risk Project at the University of Maryland. As Professor Ted Gurr observes, “The brutality of the conflict in Kosovo, East Timor and Rwanda obscures the larger shift from confrontation towards accommodation. But the trends are there: a sharp decline in new ethnic wars, the settlement of many old ones, and a pro-active effort by states and international organizations to recognize group rights and to channel ethnic disputes into conventional politics”.
It was only a few years ago that U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, commenting on the outbreak of ethnic strife in countries as Somalia, Zaire and ex-Yugoslavia, asked, “Where will it end? Will it end with 5,000 countries?” It was a gross mis-judgement. Two thirds of all new campaigns of ethnic protest and rebellion in the last fifteen years began between 1989 and 1993. Since 1993 the number of wars of self-determination has been halved. During the 1990s sixteen separatist wars were settled by peace agreements and ten others were checked by cease-fires and negotiation.
Governments and media have been culpable in cultivating a weary cynicism about the inexorable growth of ethnic conflict. They have misled us. Concerted effort by a great many people and organizations, from UN agencies, to Amnesty International, from Medicines Sans Frontieres to religious groups, from Sweden’s small, private, Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research to the large intergovernmental Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe have helped bring about a sea-change.
The list of the countries where the problems of ethnic conflict looked until quite recently potentially ominous but which are now vastly improved is a long one. Baltic nationalists have moderated their treatment of Russians. Hungarians in Slovakia and Romania are no longer under threat. Croatia’s new moderate government is respecting minorities. Likewise, conflicts between the central government and India’s Mizo people, the Gaguaz minority in Moldova and the Chakma tribal group in Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hills have all diminished. Nationalists willing to continue fighting for total independence like the rebel leaders in Chechnya and East Timor are fewer and farer between. Central governments, for their part, appear to becoming more flexible and sensible about devolving power. One of democratic Russia’s most important but least-noted achievements has been its peacefully arrived at power sharing agreements with Tatarstan, Bashkiria and forty other regions.
A list almost as long can still be made for ethnic disputes unsolved. But what we learnt the last few years is that the pool of ethnic conflicts is not infinite; that the ultra pessimism of just a few years ago was misplaced; and that human beings can settle for less, as long as the dominant party recognizes the underdog’s integrity and gives it enough room for manoeuvre.
