Here's a thought-provoking news report that you won't see quoted any time soon in any Watchtower publication:
(Source: The Age, an Australian newspaper, re-published in The Dominion-Post, Wellington, New Zealand. October 19 2005):
"And now the good news. There are fewer wars than there used to be, and they are becoming less deadly. The casualities from terrorist acts are minimal and do not warrant widespread concern, and acts of genocide are becoming less common
These are the findings from a report into global trends in political violence, written by an Australian, Andrew Mack, who is director of the Vancourver-based Human Security Centre.
The report suggests that the end of the Cold War has brought more benefits than are commonly acknowledged. The number of severe conflicts - those with more than 1000 casualties a year - fell by 80 per cent during the 1990s.
The centre's report, War and Peace in the 21st Century, found that:
- The number of armed conflicts has dropped by more than 40 per cent since the early 1990s, while the deadliness of conflicts has declined dramatically, with the average battle deaths per conflict per year dropping from 38,000 in 1950 to 600 in 2002.
- Last year only 25 armed secessionist conflicts were underway, the lowest figure since 1976.
- The value of the arms trade fell by a third between 1990 and 2003, and the number of refugees fell by 30 per cent in the decade from 1993 to 2003.
The report also debunks some common beliefs, such as that 90 per cent of those killed in today's wars are civilians and that women are disproportioinately victimised. Professor Mack, who was the head of international relations at the Australian National University in Canberra, said the report was the first serious academic assessment of the extent and trends of violent conflicts. The idea for the report came when he worked in the United Nation's secretary-general's Strategic Planning Unit.
He was surprised that the secretariat had no access to reliable data on trends in political violence. Professior Mack says that thought the decline in conflict has been acknowledged in some academic circles, it is little known among policy-makers or the general public. Even his international relations students were hard pressed to name a handful of the 100 or so conflicts that have ended in the past 20 years.
He says the media give front-page treatment to new conflicts but tend to bury or ignore conflicts that are resolved. "No offence," he told The Age. "But you guys in the media do tend to do the 'if it bleeds, it leads' thing."
He said that many countries did not want to give the UN access to such data for fear that it could be used against them. Non-governmental organisations were concerned that their donors might think that because things were improving that they need not give as much. The reports says that, notwithstanding the horrors of Rwanda and Srebrenica, the number of genocides and "politicides" fell by 8- per cent between 1988 and 2001.
Professor Mack acknowledges that "wht we are talking about is the number of genocides, not the number of people killed through genocide". - The Age