Resources as a factor in causation of war

A UPC (Union of Congolese Patriots) fighter controls workers at the gold mine in Iga Barriere, 18 June 2003, Ituri region, northeast of Democratic Republic of Congo.

 Source: Eric Feferberg/AFP via Getty Images 

In this series looking at the factors that lead to current wars, resources surprisingly feature in only three, in Sudan, Kivu and Colombia.

Sudan has a complex history of political differences of ethnicity, and regions, boiling down to a struggle between two military leaders, but it is all made more intense by mineral resources of gold, copper, iron, chromium, uranium  and oil. 

Kivu, a province on the eastern border of the Democratic republic of Congo, has resources of Gold, Coltan (Tantalum/Niobium ore, used in electronic equipment), Cassiterite (Tin ore), and Wolframite (Iron, Manganese and Wolfram ore). The 70-120 odd militias in the Kivu province exploited the trade in these minerals, helping to finance their operations. It is debated, but probable, that these minerals serve to maintain the violence in the province. 

In Colombia, coca is the resource that motivated and financed the FARC guerrillas.

What can be done to inhibit the ability of armed gangs to exploit resources?

There may be a model in the shape of the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme which was set up by the United Nations General Assembly in 2003 "to ensure that diamond purchases were not financing violence by rebel movements and their allies seeking to undermine legitimate governments".

There are three steps to the scheme:

1 The country producing the diamonds must ensure that a traded diamond does not finance a rebel group

2 Every diamond gets a Kimberly Process certificate

3 No diamond is to be imported from, or exported to, a non-member state.

The Kimberley Process has been criticised, but it is a start and may serve as a model for other precious materials. It could also possibly be extended to goods which come from mines where the human rights of the workers are not respected. 

Here is a useful overview of resources involvement in wars.

Here is the start page for this series on the causes of ongoing wars in 2024

Religion as a cause of war

 

St Bartholomew's Day Massacre

Religion is a factor in 9 of the 21 wars ongoing in 2024.

Israel Palestine: Fundamentalist Judaism  vs Hamas (Fundamentalist Sunni Muslim)

Maghreb :          Islamic State vs 15 (fifteen) secular Arab/Muslim nations

Syria:                 Islamic State vs ?everyone

Nigeria:             Boko Haram:     Islamic State (tendency)

Somalia :           al-Shabab (Islamic State)

Iraq:                   Sunni-Shia rivalry

Afghanistan:    Taliban (Sunni Muslim) 

NW Pakistan:   Various Islamist militant groups

Nigeria:            Islamist-Christian hatred

It is clear that Islam is involved in all of these wars, and it is tempting to infer from this that Islam is not a religion of peace, as its adherents often claim.  Just to try to rebalance the scales, the USA is a nominally Christian nation, and has bombed no less than 36 countries since 1945. Moreover, the USA and other "Christian" nations are prepared, by virtue of the nuclear weapons they they possess, to kill millions of children, women and men by crushing, burning and irradiation. Nuclear deterrence is deferred terrorism. Only a few serious Christians have condemned the nuclear deterrence strategy, so Christians (for which read "Westerners") are in no position of moral superiority over Muslims in relation to warfare.

That said, fundamentalist religion does exacerbate hatred by setting up absolute differences between people who hold different beliefs. Ironically, the etymology of the word “religion” indicates that it is a force that binds the people of faith together, a uniting force, although history shows that differences of doctrine within both Christianity (Catholic/Protestant) and Islam (Sunni/Shia) can lead to vicious and protracted wars, and that the supposed binding together does not apply to those who are outside the religious community, the Others.  "Otherness" is an essential part of hostility. The "Other" is different in some way; they may come from a different town, they may be a supporter of a different football club, have a different language or accent, a different skin colour, the causes of otherness are endless, but fundamentalist religion means that the other is actually rejecting God. Allah, or YHVH, the creator of the Universe, and this can be a very potent addition to the mix of motivations that may lead to war.

How can this tendency be resolved?

Time is an important factor. Only 300 years ago, the British Isles were tormented by wars between Protestant and Catholic brands of Christianity, and the Troubles in Ireland were only ended 28 years ago. Wars come to an end when the majority of people become sick and tired of them, and religious fervour itself wanes as the years pass. 

It is important not to stimulate religious passions by attacking the religion. Yes, we must defend ourselves against any attacks they may make, but to try to defeat a religion by attacking its tenets ideologically, or its adherents physically, will only serve to increase their faith and devotion, since the holy texts often warn of the likelihood of such attacks.

One approach that might be useful in reducing religious tensions might be to create a series of meetings where theologians of the Abrahamic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - spend a day fasting and wordlessly contemplate the following question:

"Do the Names YHVH, God and Allah refer to three different entities, or to one entity with three different names?" 

Having spent a day seriously considering the question, without speaking about it, the theologians are then asked to write their answer in less than 10 words.

There is no guarantee that they will all agree that the names given to the Origin of the Universe are of human origin, but if there is agreement that there is One Origin, it might have some effect in inducing a sense of tolerance. If the consensus is that there are three different gods, the world will be no better off, and in fact, more people might conclude that theology is not a serious discipline.

A second approach that might be tried is that mullahs should be asked by local people to declare a fatwah against terrorism (defined as the use of violence against civilians for political or religious purposes). This is not a new idea. In 1999, the Muslim Religious Council of  North America issued a Fatwa against Terrorism.  In 2011 a book titled Fatwa on Terrorism was published by a leading Islamic scholar in Pakistan. So we have precedents,  we need to ask each mullah and mosque to issue their own fatwa until the knowledge is universal and ingrained, since it is specifically not admissible for the fatwa to be requested by Government.

A fatwa is a kind of legal opinion made by a Muslim scholar. It is binding only as far as followers of the scholar who issues it are concerned - the Muslim faith is non hierarchical, and there is no central authority - so many fatwas are necessary, one for each mosque or group.

A fatwa has to have these characteristics:

1. It must be derived from the Q'ran and revered commentary
2. It must come from an authority figure
3. It should not be opportunistic or due to political subservience
4. It must be adequate to the needs of contemporary society 

The beauty of the fatwa method is that it gives us, the ordinary citizens, a part to play in world peace, since Governments cannot issue the request. To balance the request, it would be good if people paired their request for a fatwa with a request to the leaders of Christian churches to condemn the deterrence strategy, on the grounds that it is not infallible.

More on the fatwa option http://greenerblog.blogspot.com/2015/01/charlie-hebdo-call-for-widespread-fatwa.html

Religion as a factor in the causation of war is a thorny problem, but no human problem is beyond the power of humanity to ease it.

Wars between herders and farmers

 There are serious armed conflicts between nomadic herders and settled farmers in 

Cameroon

Central African Republic

Congo

Kenya, and 

Sudan (where clashes have been exacerbated by the ongoing civil war)

Herder/farmer conflicts have a long history, going back to the story of Cain and Abel in the book of Genesis in the bible. Man-made climate change is bringing added pressure on usable land, and population growth and improvements in the treatment of tetse fly and other cattle diseases are other factors.

The solution here is for authorities to arrange for agreed migration routes for herders to move their cattle to market. The UN could find a role here in spreading word and assisting with negotiations.

Ideology as a cause of war

 The ideological clash between capitalism and communism that dominated the second half of the twentieth century, the clash that presented an existential threat to humanity with the nuclear arms race between the USA and the USSR, has now faded away to a scattering of small groups mainly operating in developing countries as insurgent groups. FARC in Colombia is perhaps the most significant left wing group to be fighting, but the Columbian Peace Process seems to be bringing even this to an end.

The Naxalite war was a significant Communist insurgency that has been burning for half a century, but it also seems to be fading away.

Ideologically, the world is left with the triumph of capitalism in its most extreme form, neo-liberalism (aka free market fundamentalism), which preaches that private corporations must be allowed to make their profits free of all government regulation, and that scientific findings like global warming must be set aside if they imply that the free market in fossil fuels must be restrained in any way. 

The political challenge of our time lies in enabling democracy to bring mega-corporations back into the real world, to accept regulations that protect workers and the natural environment.

Reducing wars caused by crime, especially drug crime

This post continues the series of posts looking at the causes of wars across the world. 

Today we are looking at wars caused by crime. In order of magnitude we have :

    Mexican Drug War (since 2006, deaths 127-400K)

    Favelas of Rio de Janiero (since 2006, deaths 14,000)

    Haiti (since 2020, deaths 5,000)

    Columbia (since 1964, deaths 4.5K)

Taken as a whole, these wars centred around criminal gangs are a bewildering maze of violence, murder, control, money, drugs, power, poverty and politics. They represent partially failed states, where normal life finds its limit in no-go areas dominated by gangs. These no go areas are usually deeply impoverished, where belonging to a gang is the most promising career on offer to a young man. In Rio, repressive policing has only reinforced this tendency.

In some ways, there is an overlap between these gangs and the wars centred on militias, and so one approach to damping criminal violence down would be to focus on identifying the transport and caches of ammunition, using sniffer dogs, protected by competent groups of soldiery, to detect inward consignments of ammunition.

Illicit drugs are often the feedstuffs for the trade of these criminal gangs. There is a strong case to be made for the decriminalisation of drugs, so as to convert cannabis to being a normal, if closely regulated, item of merchandise, with more addictive drugs such as cocaine and opiates being bought up by state authorities and medicalised. There is a massive need for morphine in Africa, where there is a presumption against its use in controlling pain, with the result that millions of Africans die in unrelieved agony from cancer and other conditions.

Decriminalisation of drugs is a massive topic that cannot be covered here. What is certain is that the "war on drugs" is, like all other wars, enormously expensive in terms of human life and in terms of money; governments are on the losing side of the war; and decriminalisation is taking place, slowly but steadily (see here for places where cocaine has been decriminalised). It is also certain that serious politicians should start looking at all the costs of the war on drugs, and of the benefits of decriminalisation beginning with the cessation of crime wars that have cost up to 423,000 lives already.