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Chapter 10

From Transition Wars to Fault Line Wars

TRANSITION WARS: AFGHANISTAN AND THE GULF

La premiere guerre civilisationnelle” the distinguished Moroccan scholar Mahdi Elmandjra called the Gulf War as it was being fought. 1  In fact it was the second. The first was the Soviet-Afghan War of 1979-1989. Both wars began as straightforward invasions of one country by another but were transformed into and in large part redefined as civilization wars. They were, in effect, transition wars to an era dominated by ethnic conflict and fault line wars between groups from different civilizations.

The Afghan War started as an effort by the Soviet Union to sustain a satellite regime. It became a Cold War war when the United States reacted vigorously and organized, funded, and equipped the Afghan insurgents resisting the Soviet forces. For Americans, Soviet defeat was vindication of the Reagan doctrine of promoting armed resistance to communist regimes and a reassuring humiliation of the Soviets comparable to that which the United States had suffered in Vietnam. It was also a defeat whose ramifications spread throughout Soviet society and its political establishment and contributed significantly to the disintegration of the Soviet empire. To Americans and to Westerners generally Afghanistan was the final, decisive victory, the Waterloo, of the Cold War.

For those who fought the Soviets, however, the Afghan War was something else. It was “the first successful resistance to a foreign power,” one Western scholar observed, 2  “which was not based on either nationalist or socialist principles” but instead on Islamic principles, which was waged as a jihad, and which gave a tremendous boost to Islamic self-confidence and power. Its impact on the Islamic world was, in effect, comparable to the impact which the Japanese defeat of the Russians in 1905 had on the Oriental world. What the West sees as a victory for the Free World, Muslims see as a victory for Islam.

American dollars and missiles were indispensable to the defeat of the Soviets. Also indispensable, however, was the collective effort of Islam, in which a wide variety of governments and groups competed with each other in attempting to defeat the Soviets and to produce a victory that would serve their interests. Muslim financial support for the war came primarily from Saudi Arabia. Between 1984 and 1986 the Saudis gave $525 million to the resistance; in 1989 they agreed to supply 61 percent of a total of $715 million, or $436 million, with the remainder coming from the United States. In 1993 they provided $193 million to the Afghan government. The total amount they contributed during the course of the war was at least as much as and probably more than the $3 billion to $3.3 billion spent by the United States. During the war about 25,000 volunteers from other Islamic, primarily Arab, countries participated in the war. Recruited in large part in Jordan, these volunteers were trained by Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence agency. Pakistan also provided the indispensable external base for the resistance as well as logistical and other support. In addition, Pakistan was the agent and the conduit for the disbursement of American money, and it purposefully directed 75 percent of those funds to the more fundamentalist Islamist groups with 50 percent of the total going to the most extreme Sunni fundamentalist faction led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Although fighting the Soviets, the Arab participants in the war were overwhelmingly anti-Western and denounced Western humanitarian aid agencies as immoral and subversive of Islam. In the end, the Soviets were defeated by three factors they could not effectively equal or counter: American technology, Saudi money, and Muslim demographics and zeal. 3

The war left behind an uneasy coalition of Islamist organizations intent on promoting Islam against all non-Muslim forces. It also left a legacy of expert and experienced fighters, camps, training grounds, and logistical facilities, elaborate trans-Islam networks of personal and organizational relationships, a substantial amount of military equipment including 300 to 500 unaccounted-for Stinger missiles, and, most important, a heady sense of power and self-confidence over what had been achieved and a driving desire to move on to other victories. The “jihad credentials, religious and political,” of the Afghan volunteers, one U.S. official said in 1994, “are impeccable. They beat one of the world’s two superpowers and now they’re working on the second.” 4

The Afghan War became a civilization war because Muslims everywhere saw it as such and rallied against the Soviet Union. The Gulf War became a civilization war because the West intervened militarily in a Muslim conflict, Westerners overwhelmingly supported that intervention, and Muslims throughout the world came to see that intervention as a war against them and rallied against what they saw as one more instance of Western imperialism.

Arab and Muslim governments were initially divided over the war. Saddam Hussein violated the sanctity of borders and in August 1990 the Arab League voted by a substantial majority (fourteen in favor, two against, five abstaining or not voting) to condemn his action. Egypt and Syria agreed to contribute substantial numbers and Pakistan, Morocco, and Bangladesh lesser numbers of troops to the anti-Iraq coalition organized by the United States. Turkey closed the pipeline running through its territory from Iraq to the Mediterranean and allowed the coalition to use its air bases. In return for these actions, Turkey strengthened its claim to get into Europe; Pakistan and Morocco reaffirmed their close relationship with Saudi Arabia; Egypt got its debt canceled; and Syria got Lebanon. In contrast, the governments of Iran, Jordan, Libya, Mauritania, Yemen, Sudan, and Tunisia, as well as organizations such as the P.L.O., Hamas, and FIS, despite the financial support many had received from Saudi Arabia, supported Iraq and condemned Western intervention. Other Muslim governments, such as that of Indonesia, assumed compromise positions or tried to avoid taking any position.

While Muslim governments were initially divided, Arab and Muslim opinion was from the first overwhelmingly anti-West. The “Arab world,” one American observer reported after visiting Yemen, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia three weeks after the invasion of Kuwait, “is…seething with resentment against the U.S., barely able to contain its glee at the prospect of an Arab leader bold enough to defy the greatest power on earth.” 5  Millions of Muslims from Morocco to China rallied behind Saddam Hussein and “acclaimed him a Muslim hero.” 6  The paradox of democracy was “the great paradox of this conflict”: support for Saddam Hussein was most “fervent and widespread” in those Arab countries where politics was more open and freedom of expression less restricted. 7  In Morocco, Pakistan, Jordan, Indonesia, and other countries massive demonstrations denounced the West and political leaders like King Hassan, Benazir Bhutto, and Suharto, who were seen as lackeys of the West. Opposition to the coalition even surfaced in Syria, where “a broad spectrum of citizens opposed the presence of foreign forces in the Gulf.” Seventy-five percent of India’s 100 million Muslims blamed the United States for the war, and Indonesia’s 171 million Muslims were “almost universally” against U.S. military action in the Gulf. Arab intellectuals lined up in similar fashion and formulated intricate rationales for overlooking Saddam’s brutality and denouncing Western intervention. 8

Arabs and other Muslims generally agreed that Saddam Hussein might be a bloody tyrant, but, paralleling FDR’s thinking, “he is our bloody tyrant.” In their view, the invasion was a family affair to be settled within the family and those who intervened in the name of some grand theory of international justice were doing so to protect their own selfish interests and to maintain Arab subordination to the West. Arab intellectuals, one study reported, “despise the Iraqi regime and deplore its brutality and authoritarianism, but regard it as constituting a center of resistance to the great enemy of the Arab world, the West.” They “define the Arab world in opposition to the West.” “What Saddam has done is wrong,” a Palestinian professor said, “but we cannot condemn Iraq for standing up to Western military intervention.” Muslims in the West and elsewhere denounced the presence of non-Muslim troops in Saudi Arabia and the resulting “desecration” of the Muslim holy sites. 9  The prevailing view, in short, was: Saddam was wrong to invade, the West was more wrong to intervene, hence Saddam is right to fight the West, and we are right to support him.

Saddam Hussein, like primary participants in other fault line wars, identified his previously secular regime with the cause that would have the broadest appeal: Islam. Given the U-shaped distribution of identities in the Muslim world, Saddam had no real alternative. This choice of Islam over either Arab nationalism or vague Third World anti-Westernism, one Egyptian commentator observed, “testifies to the value of Islam as a political ideology for mobilizing support.” 10  Although Saudi Arabia is more strictly Muslim in its practices and institutions than other Muslim states, except possibly Iran and Sudan, and although it had funded Islamist groups throughout the world, no Islamist movement in any country supported the Western coalition against Iraq and virtually all opposed Western intervention.

For Muslims the war thus quickly became a war between civilizations, in which the inviolability of Islam was at stake. Islamist fundamentalist groups from Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Pakistan, Malaysia, Afghanistan, Sudan, and elsewhere denounced it as a war against “Islam and its civilization” by an alliance of “Crusaders and Zionists” and proclaimed their backing of Iraq in the face of “military and economic aggression against its people.” In the fall of 1990 the dean of the Islamic College in Mecca, Safar al-Hawali, declared in a tape widely circulated in Saudi Arabia, that the war “is not the world against Iraq. It is the West against Islam.” In similar terms, King Hussein of Jordan argued that it was “a war against all Arabs and all Muslims and not against Iraq alone.” In addition, as Fatima Mernissi points out, President Bush’s frequent rhetorical invocations of God on behalf of the United States reinforced Arab perception that it was “a religious war” with Bush’s remarks reeking “of the calculating, mercenary attacks of the pre-Islamic hordes of the seventh century and the later Christian crusades.” Arguments that the war was a crusade produced by Western and Zionist conspiracy, in turn, justified and even demanded mobilization of a jihad in response. 11

Muslim definition of the war as the West vs. Islam facilitated reduction or suspension of antagonisms within the Muslim world. Old differences among Muslims shrank in importance compared to the overriding difference between Islam and the West. In the course of the war Muslim governments and groups consistently moved to distance themselves from the West. Like its Afghan predecessor, the Gulf War brought together Muslims who previously had often been at each other’s throats: Arab secularists, nationalists, and fundamentalists; the Jordanian government and the Palestinians; the P.L.O. and Hamas; Iran and Iraq; opposition parties and governments generally. “Those Ba’athists of Iraq,” as Safar al-Hawali put it, “are our enemies for a few hours, but Rome is our enemy until doomsday.” 12  The war also started the process of reconciliation between Iraq and Iran. Iran’s Shi’ite religious leaders denounced the Western intervention and called for a jihad against the West. The Iranian government distanced itself from measures directed against its former enemy, and the war was followed by a gradual improvement in relations between the two regimes.

An external enemy also reduces conflict within a country. In January 1991, for instance, Pakistan was reported to be “awash in anti-Western polemics” which brought that country, at least briefly, together. “Pakistan has never been so united. In the southern province of Sind, where native Sindhis and immigrants from India have been murdering each other for five years, people from either side demonstrate against the Americans arm in arm. In the ultraconservative tribal areas on the Northwest Frontier, even women are out in the streets protesting, often in places where people have never assembled for anything other than Friday prayers.” 13

As public opinion became more adamant against the war, the governments that had originally associated themselves with the coalition backtracked or became divided or developed elaborate rationalizations for their actions. Leaders like Hafiz al-Assad who contributed troops now argued these were necessary to balance and eventually to replace the Western forces in Saudi Arabia and that they would, in any event, be used purely for defensive purposes and the protection of the holy places. In Turkey and Pakistan top military leaders publicly denounced the alignment of their governments with the coalition. The Egyptian and Syrian governments, which contributed the most troops, had sufficient control of their societies to be able to suppress and ignore anti-Western pressure. The governments in somewhat more open Muslim countries were induced to move away from the West and adopt increasingly anti-Western positions. In the Maghreb “the explosion of support for Iraq” was “one of the biggest surprises of the war.” Tunisian public opinion was strongly anti-West and President Ben Ali was quick to condemn Western intervention. The government of Morocco originally contributed 1500 troops to the coalition, but then as anti-Western groups mobilized also endorsed a general strike on behalf of Iraq. In Algeria a pro-Iraq demonstration of 400,000 people prompted President Bendjedid, who initially tilted toward the West, to shift his position, denounce the West, and declare that “Algeria will stand by the side of its brother Iraq.” 14  In August 1990 the three Maghreb governments had voted in the Arab League to condemn Iraq. In the fall, reacting to the intense feelings of their people, they voted in favor of a motion to condemn the American intervention.

The Western military effort also drew little support from the people of non-Western, non-Muslim civilizations. In January 1991, 53 percent of Japanese polled opposed the war, while 25 percent supported it. Hindus split evenly in blaming Saddam Hussein and George Bush for the war, which The Times of India warned, could lead to “a far more sweeping confrontation between a strong and arrogant Judeo-Christian world and a weak Muslim world fired by religious zeal.” The Gulf War thus began as a war between Iraq and Kuwait, then became a war between Iraq and the West, then one between Islam and the West, and eventually came to be viewed by many non-Westerners as a war of East versus West, “a white man’s war, a new outbreak of old-fashioned imperialism.” 15

Apart from the Kuwaitis no Islamic people were enthusiastic about the war, and most overwhelmingly opposed Western intervention. When the war ended the victory parades in London and New York were not duplicated elsewhere. The “war’s conclusion,” Sohail H. Hashmi observed, “provided no grounds for rejoicing” among Arabs. Instead the prevailing atmosphere was one of intense disappointment, dismay, humiliation, and resentment. Once again the West had won. Once again the latest Saladin who had raised Arab hopes had gone down to defeat before massive Western power that had been forcefully intruded into the community of Islam. “What worse could happen to the Arabs than what the war produced,” asked Fatima Mernissi, “the whole West with all its technology dropping bombs on us? It was the ultimate horror.” 16

Following the war, Arab opinion outside Kuwait became increasingly critical of a U.S. military presence in the Gulf. The liberation of Kuwait removed any rationale for opposing Saddam Hussein and left little rationale for a sustained American military presence in the Gulf. Hence even in countries like Egypt opinion became more and more sympathetic to Iraq. Arab governments which had joined the coalition shifted ground. 17  Egypt and Syria, as well as the others, opposed the imposition of a no-fly zone in southern Iraq in August 1992. Arab governments plus Turkey also objected to the air attacks on Iraq in January 1993. If Western air power could be used in response to attacks on Muslim Shi’ites and Kurds by Sunni Muslims, why was it not also used to respond to attacks on Bosnian Muslims by Orthodox Serbs? In June 1993 when President Clinton ordered a bombing of Baghdad in retaliation for the Iraqi effort to assassinate former President Bush, international reaction was strictly along civilizational lines. Israel and Western European governments strongly supported the raid; Russia accepted it as “justified” self-defense; China expressed “deep concern”; Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates said nothing; other Muslim governments, including that of Egypt, denounced it as another example of Western double standards, with Iran terming it “flagrant aggression” driven by American “neo-expansionism and egotism.” 18  Repeatedly the question was raised: Why doesn’t the United States and the “international community” (that is, the West) react in similar fashion to the outrageous behavior of Israel and its violations of U.N. resolutions?

The Gulf War was the first post-Cold War resource war between civilizations. At stake was whether the bulk of the world’s largest oil reserves would be controlled by Saudi and emirate governments dependent on Western military power for their security or by independent anti-Western regimes which would be able and might be willing to use the oil weapon against the West. The West failed to unseat Saddam Hussein, but it scored a victory of sorts in dramatizing the security dependence of the Gulf states on the West and in achieving an expanded peacetime military presence in the Gulf. Before the war, Iran, Iraq, the Gulf Cooperation Council, and the United States jostled for influence over the Gulf. After the war the Persian Gulf was an American lake.

CHARACTERISTICS OF FAULT LINE WARS

Wars between clans, tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities, and nations have been prevalent in every era and in every civilization because they are rooted in the identities of people. These conflicts tend to be particularistic, in that they do not involve broader ideological or political issues of direct interest to nonparticipants, although they may arouse humanitarian concerns in outside groups. They also tend to be vicious and bloody, since fundamental issues of identity are at stake. In addition, they tend to be lengthy; they may be interrupted by truces or agreements but these tend to break down and the conflict is resumed. Decisive military victory by one side in an identity civil war, on the other hand, increases the likelihood of genocide. 19

Fault line conflicts are communal conflicts between states or groups from different civilizations. Fault line wars are conflicts that have become violent. Such wars may occur between states, between nongovernmental groups, and between states and nongovernmental groups. Fault line conflicts within states may involve groups which are predominantly located in geographically distinct areas, in which case the group which does not control the government normally fights for independence and may or may not be willing to settle for something less than that. Within-state fault line conflicts may also involve groups which are geographically intermixed, in which case continually tense relations erupt into violence from time to time, as with Hindus and Muslims in India and Muslims and Chinese in Malaysia, or full-scale fighting may occur, particularly when new states and their boundaries are being determined, and produce brutal efforts to separate peoples by force.

Fault line conflicts sometimes are struggles for control over people. More frequently the issue is control of territory. The goal of at least one of the participants is to conquer territory and free it of other people by expelling them, killing them, or doing both, that is, by “ethnic cleansing.” These conflicts tend to be violent and ugly, with both sides engaging in massacres, terrorism, rape, and torture. The territory at stake often is for one or both sides a highly charged symbol of their history and identity, sacred land to which they have an inviolable right: the West Bank, Kashmir, Nagorno-Karabakh, the Drina Valley, Kosovo.

Fault line wars share some but not all of the characteristics of communal wars generally. They are protracted conflicts. When they go on within states they have on the average lasted six times longer than interstate wars. Involving fundamental issues of group identity and power, they are difficult to resolve through negotiations and compromise. When agreements are reached, they often are not subscribed to by all parties on each side and usually do not last long. Fault line wars are off-again-on-again wars that can flame up into massive violence and then sputter down into low-intensity warfare or sullen hostility only to flame up once again. The fires of communal identity and hatred are rarely totally extinguished except through genocide. As a result of their protracted character, fault line wars, like other communal wars, tend to produce large numbers of deaths and refugees. Estimates of either have to be treated with caution, but commonly accepted figures for deaths in fault line wars underway in the early 1990s included: 50,000 in the Philippines, 50,000100,000 in Sri Lanka, 20,000 in Kashmir, 500,000-1.5 million in Sudan, 100,000 in Tajikistan, 50,000 in Croatia, 50,000-200,000 in Bosnia, 30,00050,000 in Chechnya, 100,000 in Tibet, 200,000 in East Timor. 20  Virtually all these conflicts generated much larger numbers of refugees.

Many of these contemporary wars are simply the latest round in a prolonged history of bloody conflicts, and the late-twentieth-century violence has resisted efforts to end it permanently. The fighting in Sudan, for instance, broke out in 1956, continued until 1972, when an agreement was reached providing some autonomy for southern Sudan, but resumed again in 1983. The Tamil rebellion in Sri Lanka began in 1983; peace negotiations to end it broke down in 1991 and were resumed in 1994 with an agreement reached on a cease-fire in January 1995. Four months later, however, the insurgent Tigers broke the truce and withdrew from the peace talks, and the war started up again with intensified violence. The Moro rebellion in the Philippines began in the early 1970s and slackened in 1976 after an agreement was reached providing autonomy for some areas of Mindanao. By 1993, however, renewed violence was occurring frequently and on an increasing scale, as dissident insurgent groups repudiated the peace efforts. Russian and Chechen leaders reached a demilitarization agreement in July 1995 designed to end the violence that had begun the previous December. The war eased off for a while but then was renewed with Chechen attacks on individual Russian or pro-Russian leaders, Russian retaliation, the Chechen incursion into Dagestan in January 1996, and the massive Russian offensive in early 1996.

While fault line wars share the prolonged duration, high levels of violence, and ideological ambivalence of other communal wars, they also differ from them in two ways. First, communal wars may occur between ethnic, religious, racial, or linguistic groups. Since religion, however, is the principal defining characteristic of civilizations, fault line wars are almost always between peoples of different religions. Some analysts downplay the significance of this factor. They point, for instance, to the shared ethnicity and language, past peaceful coexistence, and extensive intermarriage of Serbs and Muslims in Bosnia, and dismiss the religious factor with references to Freud’s “narcissism of small differences.” 21  That judgment, however, is rooted in secular myopia. Millennia of human history have shown that religion is not a “small difference” but possibly the most profound difference that can exist between people. The frequency, intensity, and violence of fault line wars are greatly enhanced by beliefs in different gods.

Second, other communal wars tend to be particularistic, and hence are relatively unlikely to spread and involve additional participants. Fault line wars, in contrast, are by definition between groups which are part of larger cultural entities. In the usual communal conflict, Group A is fighting Group B, and Groups C, D, and E have no reason to become involved unless A or B directly attacks the interests of C, D, or E. In a fault line war, in contrast, Group Al is fighting Group Bl and each will attempt to expand the war and mobilize support from civilization kin groups, A2, A3, A4, and B2, B3, and B4, and those groups will identify with their fighting kin. The expansion of transportation and communication in the modern world has facilitated the establishment of these connections and hence the “internationalization” of fault line conflicts. Migration has created diasporas in third civilizations. Communications make it easier for the contesting parties to appeal for help and for their kin groups to learn immediately the fate of those parties. The general shrinkage of the world thus enables kin groups to provide moral, diplomatic, financial, and material support to the contesting parties—and much harder not to do so. International networks develop to furnish such support, and the support in turn sustains the participants and prolongs the conflict. This “kin-country syndrome,” in H.D.S. Greenway’s phrase, is a central feature of late-twentieth-century fault line wars. 22  More generally, even small amounts of violence between people of different civilizations have ramifications and consequences which intracivilizational violence lacks. When Sunni gunmen killed eighteen Shi’ite worshippers in a mosque in Karachi in February 1995, they further disrupted the peace in the city and created a problem for Pakistan. When exactly a year earlier, a Jewish settler killed twenty-nine Muslims praying at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, he disrupted the Middle Eastern peace process and created a problem for the world.

INCIDENCE: ISLAM’S BLOODY BORDERS

Communal conflicts and fault line wars are the stuff of history, and by one count some thirty-two ethnic conflicts occurred during the Cold War, including fault line wars between Arabs and Israelis, Indians and Pakistanis, Sudanese Muslims and Christians, Sri Lankan Buddhists and Tamils, and Lebanese Shi’ites and Maronites. Identity wars constituted about half of all civil wars during the 1940s and 1950s but about three-quarters of civil wars during the following decades, and the intensity of rebellions involving ethnic groups tripled between the early 1950s and the late 1980s. Given the overreaching superpower rivalry, however, these conflicts, with some notable exceptions, attracted relatively little attention and were often viewed through the prism of the Cold War. As the Cold War wound down, communal conflicts became more prominent and, arguably, more prevalent than they had been previously. Something closely resembling an “upsurge” in ethnic conflict did in fact happen. 23

These ethnic conflicts and fault line wars have not been evenly distributed among the world’s civilizations. Major fault line fighting has occurred between Serbs and Croats in the former Yugoslavia and between Buddhists and Hindus in Sri Lanka, while less violent conflicts took place between non-Muslim groups in a few other places. The overwhelming majority of fault line conflicts, however, have taken place along the boundary looping across Eurasia and Africa that separates Muslims from non-Muslims. While at the macro or global level of world politics the primary clash of civilizations is between the West and the rest, at the micro or local level it is between Islam and the others.

Intense antagonisms and violent conflicts are pervasive between local Muslim and non-Muslim peoples. In Bosnia, Muslims have fought a bloody and disastrous war with Orthodox Serbs and have engaged in other violence with Catholic Croatians. In Kosovo, Albanian Muslims unhappily suffer Serbian rule and maintain their own underground parallel government, with high expectations of the probability of violence between the two groups. The Albanian and Greek governments are at loggerheads over the rights of their minorities in each other’s countries. Turks and Greeks are historically at each others throats. On Cyprus, Muslim Turks and Orthodox Greeks maintain hostile adjoining states. In the Caucasus, Turkey and Armenia are historic enemies, and Azeris and Armenians have been at war over control of Nagorno-Karabakh. In the North Caucasus, for two hundred years Chechens, Ingush, and other Muslim peoples have fought on and off for their independence from Russia, a struggle bloodily resumed by Russia and Chechnya in 1994. Fighting also has occurred between the Ingush and the Orthodox Ossetians. In the Volga basin, the Muslim Tatars have fought the Russians in the past and in the early 1990s reached an uneasy compromise with Russia for limited sovereignty.

Throughout the nineteenth century Russia gradually extended by force its control over the Muslim peoples of Central Asia. During the 1980s Afghans and Russians fought a major war, and with the Russian retreat its sequel continued in Tajikistan between Russian forces supporting the existing government and largely Islamist insurgents. In Xinjiang, Uighurs and other Muslim groups struggle against Sinification and are developing relations with their ethnic and religious kin in the former Soviet republics. In the Subcontinent, Pakistan and India have fought three wars, a Muslim insurgency contests Indian rule in Kashmir, Muslim immigrants fight tribal peoples in Assam, and Muslims and Hindus engage in periodic riots and violence across India, these outbreaks fueled by the rise of fundamentalist movements in both religious communities. In Bangladesh, Buddhists protest discrimination against them by the majority Muslims, while in Myanmar Muslims protest discrimination by the Buddhist majority. In Malaysia and Indonesia, Muslims periodically riot against Chinese, protesting their domination of the economy. In southern Thailand, Muslim groups have been involved in an intermittent insurgency against a Buddhist government, while in the southern Philippines a Muslim insurgency fights for independence from a Catholic country and government. In Indonesia, on the other hand, Catholic East Timorians struggle against repression by a Muslim government.

In the Middle East, conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine goes back to the establishment of the Jewish homeland. Four wars have occurred between Israel and Arab states, and the Palestinians engaged in the intifada against Israeli rule. In Lebanon, Maronite Christians have fought a losing battle against Shi’ites and other Muslims. In Ethiopia, the Orthodox Amharas have historically suppressed Muslim ethnic groups and have confronted an insurgency from the Muslim Oromos. Across the bulge of Africa, a variety of conflicts have gone on between the Arab and Muslim peoples to the north and animist Christian black peoples to the south. The bloodiest Muslim-Christian war has been in Sudan, which has gone on for decades and produced hundreds of thousands of casualties. Nigerian politics has been dominated by the conflict between the Muslim Fulani-Hausa in the north and Christian tribes in the south, with frequent riots and coups and one major war. In Chad, Kenya, and Tanzania, comparable struggles have occurred between Muslim and Christian groups.

In all these places, the relations between Muslims and peoples of other civilizations—Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Hindu, Chinese, Buddhist, Jewish—have been generally antagonistic; most of these relations have been violent at some point in the past; many have been violent in the 1990s. Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors. The question naturally rises as to whether this pattern of late-twentieth-century conflict between Muslim and non-Muslim groups is equally true of relations between groups from other civilizations. In fact, it is not. Muslims make up about one-fifth of the world’s population but in the 1990s they have been far more involved in intergroup violence than the people of any other civilization. The evidence is overwhelming.

1. Muslims were participants in twenty-six of fifty ethnopolitical conflicts in 1993-1994 analyzed in depth by Ted Robert Gurr ( Table 10.1 ). Twenty of these conflicts were between groups from different civilizations, of which fifteen were between Muslims and non-Muslims. There were, in short, three times as many intercivilizational conflicts involving Muslims as there were conflicts between all non-Muslim civilizations. The conflicts within Islam also were more numerous than those in any other civilization, including tribal conflicts in Africa. In contrast to Islam, the West was involved in only two intracivilizational and two intercivilizational conflicts. Conflicts involving Muslims also tended to be heavy in casualties. Of the six wars in which Gurr estimates that 200,000 or more people were killed, three (Sudan, Bosnia, East Timor) were between Muslims and non-Muslims, two (Somalia, Iraq-Kurds) were between Muslims, and only one (Angola) involved only non-Muslims.

2. The New York Times identified forty-eight locations in which some fifty-nine ethnic conflicts were occurring in 1993. In half these places Muslims were clashing with other Muslims or with non-Muslims. Thirty-one of the fifty-nine conflicts were between groups from different civilizations, and, paralleling Gurr’s data, two-thirds (twenty-one) of these intercivilizational conflicts were between Muslims and others ( Table 10.2 ).

3. In yet another analysis, Ruth Leger Sivard identified twenty-nine wars (defined as conflicts involving 1000 or more deaths in a year) under way in 1992. Nine of twelve intercivilizational conflicts were between Muslims and non-Muslims, and Muslims were once again fighting more wars than people from any other civilization. 24

TABLE 10.1 ETHNOPOLITICAL CONFLICTS, 1993-1994

TABLE 10.2 ETHNIC CONFLICTS, 1993

Three different compilations of data thus yield the same conclusion: In the early 1990s Muslims were engaged in more intergroup violence than were non-Muslims, and two-thirds to three-quarters of intercivilizational wars were between Muslims and non-Muslims. Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards. *

The Muslim propensity toward violent conflict is also suggested by the degree to which Muslim societies are militarized. In the 1980s Muslim countries had military force ratios (that is, the number of military personnel per 1000 population) and military effort indices (force ratio adjusted for a country’s wealth) significantly higher than those for other countries. Christian countries, in contrast, had force ratios and military effort indices significantly lower than those for other countries. The average force ratios and military effort ratios of Muslim countries were roughly twice those of Christian countries ( Table 10.3 ). “Quite clearly,” James Payne concludes, “there is a connection between Islam and militarism.” 25

TABLE 10.3 MILITARISM OF MUSLIM AND CHRISTIAN COUNTRIES

	Average force ratio	Average military effort
Muslim countries (n = 25)	11.8	17.7
Other countries (n = 112)	7.1	12.3
Christian countries (n = 57)	5.8	8.2
Other countries (n = 80)	9.5	16.9

Source: James L. Payne, Why Nations Arm (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 125, 138-139. Muslim and Christian countries are those in which more than 80 percent of the population adhere to the defining religion.

Muslim states also have had a high propensity to resort to violence in international crises, employing it to resolve 76 crises out of a total of 142 in which they were involved between 1928 and 1979. In 25 cases violence was the primary means of dealing with the crisis; in 51 crises Muslim states used violence in addition to other means. When they did use violence, Muslim states used high-intensity violence, resorting to full-scale war in 41 percent of the cases where violence was used and engaging in major clashes in another 38 percent of the cases. While Muslim states resorted to violence in 53.5 percent of their crises, violence was used by the United Kingdom in only 11.5 percent, by the United States in 17.9 percent, and by the Soviet Union in 28.5 percent of the crises in which they were involved. Among the major powers only China’s violence propensity exceeded that of the Muslim states: it employed violence in 76.9 percent of its crises. 26  Muslim bellicosity and violence are late-twentieth-century facts which neither Muslims nor non-Muslims can deny.

CAUSES: HISTORY, DEMOGRAPHY, POLITICS

What was responsible for the late-twentieth-century upsurge in fault line wars and for the central role of Muslims in such conflicts? First, these wars had their roots in history. Intermittent fault line violence between different civilizational groups occurred in the past and existed in present memories of the past, which in turn generated fears and insecurities on both sides. Muslims and Hindus on the Subcontinent, Russians and Caucasians in the North Caucasus, Armenians and Turks in the Transcaucasus, Arabs and Jews in Palestine, Catholics, Muslims, and Orthodox in the Balkans, Russians and Turks from the Balkans to Central Asia, Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka, Arabs and blacks across Africa: these are all relationships which through the centuries have involved alternations between mistrustful coexistence and vicious violence. A historical legacy of conflict exists to be exploited and used by those who see reason to do so. In these relationships history is alive, well, and terrifying.

A history of off-again-on-again slaughter, however, does not itself explain why violence was on again in the late twentieth century. After all, as many pointed out, Serbs, Croats, and Muslims for decades lived very peacefully together in Yugoslavia. Muslims and Hindus did so in India. The many ethnic and religious groups in the Soviet Union coexisted, with a few notable exceptions produced by the Soviet government. Tamils and Sinhalese also lived quietly together on an island often described as a tropical paradise. History did not prevent these relatively peaceful relationships prevailing for substantial periods of time; hence history, by itself, cannot explain the breakdown of peace. Other factors must have intruded in the last decades of the twentieth century.

Changes in the demographic balance were one such factor. The numerical expansion of one group generates political, economic, and social pressures on other groups and induces countervailing responses. Even more important, it produces military pressures on less demographically dynamic groups. The collapse in the early 1970s of the thirty-year-old constitutional order in Lebanon was in large part a result of the dramatic increase in the Shi’ite population in relation to the Maronite Christians. In Sri Lanka, Gary Fuller has shown, the peaking of the Sinhalese nationalist insurgency in 1970 and of the Tamil insurgency in the late 1980s coincided exactly with the years when the fifteen-to-twenty-four-year-old “youth bulge” in those groups exceeded 20 percent of the total population of the group. 27  (See  Figure 10.1 .) The Sinhalese insurgents, one U.S. diplomat to Sri Lanka noted, were virtually all under twenty-four years of age, and the Tamil Tigers, it was reported, were “unique in their reliance on what amounts to a children’s army,” recruiting “boys and girls as young as eleven,” with those killed in the fighting “not yet teenagers when they died, only a few older than eighteen.” The Tigers, The Economist observed, were waging an “under-age war.” 28  In similar fashion, the fault line wars between Russians and the Muslim peoples to their south were fueled by major differences in population growth. In the early 1990s the fertility rate of women in the Russian Federation was 1.5, while in the primarily Muslim Central Asian former Soviet republics the fertility rate was about 4.4 and the rate of net population increase (crude birth rate minus crude death rate) in the late 1980s in the latter was five to six times that in Russia. Chechens increased by 26 percent in the 1980s and Chechnya was one of the most densely populated places in Russia, its high birth rates producing migrants and fighters. 29  In similar fashion high Muslim birth rates and migration into Kashmir from Pakistan stimulated renewed resistance to Indian rule.

FIGURE 10.1 SRI LANKA: SINHALESE AND TAMIL YOUTH BULGES

The complicated processes that led to intercivilizational wars in the former Yugoslavia had many causes and many starting points. Probably the single most important factor leading to these conflicts, however, was the demographic shift that took place in Kosovo. Kosovo was an autonomous province within the Serbian republic with the de facto powers of the six Yugoslav republics except the right to secede. In 1961 its population was 67 percent Albanian Muslim and 24 percent Orthodox Serb. The Albanian birth rate, however, was the highest in Europe, and Kosovo became the most densely populated area of Yugoslavia. By the 1980s close to 50 percent of the Albanians were less than twenty years old. Facing those numbers, Serbs emigrated from Kosovo in pursuit of economic opportunities in Belgrade and elsewhere. As a result, in 1991 Kosovo was 90 percent Muslim and 10 percent Serb. 30  Serbs, nonetheless, viewed Kosovo as their “holy land” or “Jerusalem,” the site, among other things, of the great battle on June 28, 1389, when they were defeated by the Ottoman Turks and, as a result, suffered Ottoman rule for almost five centuries.

By the late 1980s the shifting demographic balance led the Albanians to demand that Kosovo be elevated to the status of a Yugoslav republic. The Serbs and the Yugoslav government resisted, afraid that once Kosovo had the right to secede it would do so and possibly merge with Albania. In March 1981 Albanian protests and riots erupted in support of their demands for republic status. According to Serbs, discrimination, persecution, and violence against Serbs subsequently intensified. “In Kosovo from the late 1970s on,” observed a Croatian Protestant, “…numerous violent incidents took place which included property damage, loss of jobs, harassment, rapes, fights, and killings.” As a result, the “Serbs claimed that the threat to them was of genocidal proportions and that they could no longer tolerate it.” The plight of the Kosovo Serbs resonated elsewhere within Serbia and in 1986 generated a declaration by 200 leading Serbian intellectuals, political figures, religious leaders, and military officers, including editors of the liberal opposition journal Praxis, demanding that the government take vigorous measures to end the genocide of Serbs in Kosovo. By any reasonable definition of genocide, this charge was greatly exaggerated, although according to one foreign observer sympathetic to the Albanians, “during the 1980s Albanian nationalists were responsible for a number of violent assaults on Serbs, and for the destruction of some Serb property.” 31

All this aroused Serbian nationalism and Slobodan Milosevic saw his opportunity. In 1987 he delivered a major speech at Kosovo appealing to Serbs to claim their own land and history. “Immediately a great number of Serbs—communist, noncommunist and even anticommunist—started to gather around him, determined not only to protect the Serbian minority in Kosovo, but to suppress the Albanians and turn them into second-class citizens. Milosevic was soon acknowledged as a national leader.” 32  Two years later, on 28 June 1989, Milosevic returned to Kosovo together with 1 million to 2 million Serbs to mark the 600th anniversary of the great battle symbolizing their ongoing war with the Muslims.

The Serbian fears and nationalism provoked by the rising numbers and power of the Albanians were further heightened by the demographic changes in Bosnia. In 1961 Serbs constituted 43 percent and Muslims 26 percent of the population of Bosnia-Herzegovina. By 1991 the proportions were almost exactly reversed: Serbs had dropped to 31 percent and Muslims had risen to 44 percent. During these thirty years Croats went from 22 percent to 17 percent. Ethnic expansion by one group led to ethnic cleansing by the other. “Why do we kill children?” one Serb fighter asked in 1992 and answered, “Because someday they will grow up and we will have to kill them then.” Less brutally Bosnian Croatian authorities acted to prevent their localities from being “demographically occupied” by the Muslims. 33

Shifts in the demographic balances and youth bulges of 20 percent or more account for many of the intercivilizational conflicts of the late twentieth century. They do not, however, explain all of them. The fighting between Serbs and Croats, for instance, cannot be attributed to demography and, for that matter, only partially to history, since these two peoples lived relatively peacefully together until the Croat Ustashe slaughtered Serbs in World War II. Here and elsewhere politics was also a cause of strife. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires at the end of World War I stimulated ethnic and civilizational conflicts among successor peoples and states. The end of the British, French, and Dutch empires produced similar results after World War II. The downfall of the communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia did the same at the end of the Cold War. People could no longer identify as communists, Soviet citizens, or Yugoslavs, and desperately needed to find new identities. They found them in the old standbys of ethnicity and religion. The repressive but peaceful order of states committed to the proposition that there is no god was replaced by the violence of peoples committed to different gods.

This process was exacerbated by the need for the emerging political entities to adopt the procedures of democracy. As the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia began to come apart, the elites in power did not organize national elections. If they had done so, political leaders would have competed for power at the center and might have attempted to develop multiethnic and multicivilizational appeals to the electorate and to put together similar majority coalitions in parliament. Instead, in both the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia elections were first organized on a republic basis, which created the irresistible incentive for political leaders to campaign against the center, to appeal to ethnic nationalism, and to promote the independence of their republics. Even within Bosnia the populace voted strictly along ethnic lines in the 1990 elections. The multiethnic Reformist Party and the former communist party each got less than 10 percent of the vote. The votes for the Muslim Party of Democratic Action (34 percent), the Serbian Democratic Party (30 percent), and the Croatian Democratic Union (18 percent) roughly approximated the proportions of Muslims, Serbs, and Croats in the population. The first fairly contested elections in almost every former Soviet and former Yugoslav republic were won by political leaders appealing to nationalist sentiments and promising vigorous action to defend their nationality against other ethnic groups. Electoral competition encourages nationalist appeals and thus promotes the intensification of fault line conflicts into fault line wars. When, in Bogdan Denitch’s phrase, “ethnos becomes demos,” 34  the initial result is polemos or war.

The question remains as to why, as the twentieth century ends, Muslims are involved in far more intergroup violence than people of other civilizations. Has this always been the case? In the past Christians killed fellow Christians and other people in massive numbers. To evaluate the violence propensities of civilizations throughout history would require extensive research, which is impossible here. What can be done, however, is to identify possible causes of current Muslim group violence, both intra-Islam and extra-Islam, and distinguish between those causes which explain a greater propensity toward group conflict throughout history, if that exists, from those which only explain a propensity at the end of the twentieth century. Six possible causes suggest themselves. Three explain only violence between Muslims and non-Muslims and three explain both that and intra-Islam violence. Three also explain only the contemporary Muslim propensity to violence, while three others explain that and a historical Muslim propensity, if it exists. If that historical propensity, however, does not exist, then its presumed causes that cannot explain a nonexistent historical propensity also presumably do not explain the demonstrated contemporary Muslim propensity to group violence. The latter then can be explained only by twentieth-century causes that did not exist in previous centuries ( Table 10.4 ).

TABLE 10.4 POSSIBLE CAUSES OF MUSLIM CONFLICT PROPENSITY

	Extra-Muslim conflict	Intra- and Extra-conflict
Historical and contemporary conflict	Proximity Indigestibility	Militarism
Contemporary conflict	Victim status	Demographic bulge Core state absence

First, the argument is made that Islam has from the start been a religion of the sword and that it glorifies military virtues. Islam originated among “warring Bedouin nomadic tribes” and this “violent origin is stamped in the foundation of Islam. Muhammad himself is remembered as a hard fighter and a skillful military commander.” 35  (No one would say this about Christ or Buddha.) The doctrines of Islam, it is argued, dictate war against unbelievers, and when the initial expansion of Islam tapered off, Muslim groups, quite contrary to doctrine, then fought among themselves. The ratio of fitna or internal conflicts to jihad shifted drastically in favor of the former. The Koran and other statements of Muslim beliefs contain few prohibitions on violence, and a concept of nonviolence is absent from Muslim doctrine and practice.

Second, from its origin in Arabia, the spread of Islam across northern Africa and much of the middle East and later to central Asia, the Subcontinent, and the Balkans brought Muslims into direct contact with many different peoples, who were conquered and converted, and the legacy of this process remains. In the wake of the Ottoman conquests in the Balkans urban South Slavs often converted to Islam while rural peasants did not, and thus was born the distinction between Muslim Bosnians and Orthodox Serbs. Conversely the expansion of the Russian Empire to the Black Sea, the Caucasus, and Central Asia brought it into continuing conflict for several centuries with a variety of Muslim peoples. The West’s sponsorship, at the height of its power vis-a-vis Islam, of a Jewish homeland in the Middle East laid the basis for ongoing Arab-Israeli antagonism. Muslim and non-Muslim expansion by land thus resulted in Muslims and non-Muslims living in close physical proximity throughout Eurasia. In contrast, the expansion of the West by sea did not usually lead to Western peoples living in territorial proximity to non-Western peoples: these were either subjected to rule from Europe or, except in South Africa, were virtually decimated by Western settlers.

A third possible source of Muslim-non-Muslim conflict involves what one statesman, in reference to his own country, termed the “indigestibility” of Muslims. Indigestibility, however, works both ways: Muslim countries have problems with non-Muslim minorities comparable to those which non-Muslim countries have with Muslim minorities. Even more than Christianity, Islam is an absolutist faith. It merges religion and politics and draws a sharp line between those in the Dar al-Islam and those in the Dar al-harb. As a result, Confucians, Buddhists, Hindus, Western Christians, and Orthodox Christians have less difficulty adapting to and living with each other than any one of them has in adapting to and living with Muslims. Ethnic Chinese, for instance, are an economically dominant minority in most Southeast Asian countries. They have been successfully assimilated into the societies of Buddhist Thailand and the Catholic Philippines; there are virtually no significant instances of anti-Chinese violence by the majority groups in those countries. In contrast, anti-Chinese riots and/or violence have occurred in Muslim Indonesia and Muslim Malaysia, and the role of the Chinese in those societies remains a sensitive and potentially explosive issue in the way in which it is not in Thailand and the Philippines.

Militarism, indigestibility, and proximity to non-Muslim groups are continuing features of Islam and could explain Muslim conflict propensity throughout history, if that is the case. Three other temporally limited factors could contribute to this propensity in the late twentieth century. One explanation, advanced by Muslims, is that Western imperialism and the subjection of Muslim societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced an image of Muslim military and economic weakness and hence encourages non-Islamic groups to view Muslims as an attractive target. Muslims are, according to this argument, victims of a widespread anti-Muslim prejudice comparable to the anti-Semitism that historically pervaded Western societies. Muslim groups such as Palestinians, Bosnians, Kashmiris, and Chechens, Akbar Ahmed alleges, are like “Red Indians, depressed groups, shorn of dignity, trapped on reservations converted from their ancestral lands.” 36  The Muslim as victim argument, however, does not explain conflicts between Muslim majorities and non-Muslim minorities in countries such as Sudan, Egypt, Iran, and Indonesia.

A more persuasive factor possibly explaining both intra- and extra-Islamic conflict is the absence of one or more core states in Islam. Defenders of Islam often allege that its Western critics believe there is a central, conspiratorial, directing force in Islam mobilizing it and coordinating its actions against the West and others. If the critics believe this, they are wrong. Islam is a source of instability in the world because it lacks a dominant center. States aspiring to be leaders of Islam, such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, and potentially Indonesia, compete for influence in the Muslim world; no one of them is in a strong position to mediate conflicts within Islam; and no one of them is able to act authoritatively on behalf of Islam in dealing with conflicts between Muslim and non-Muslim groups.

Finally, and most important, the demographic explosion in Muslim societies and the availability of large numbers of often unemployed males between the ages of fifteen and thirty is a natural source of instability and violence both within Islam and against non-Muslims. Whatever other causes may be at work, this factor alone would go a long way to explaining Muslim violence in the 1980s and 1990s. The aging of this pig-in-the-python generation by the third decade of the twenty-first century and economic development in Muslim societies, if and as that occurs, could consequently lead to a significant reduction in Muslim violence propensities and hence to a general decline in the frequency and intensity of fault line wars.

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