Fewer global battlegrounds in 2003: Researchers
CHARLES J. HANLEY ASSOCIATED PRESS The chilling sights and sounds of war fill newspapers and television screens worldwide, but war itself is in decline, peace researchers report.
In fact, the number killed in battle has fallen to its lowest point in the post-World War II period, dipping below 20,000 a year by one measure. Peacemaking missions, in the meantime, are growing in number. "International engagement is blossoming," said American scholar Monty G. Marshall. "There's been an enormous amount of activity to try to end these conflicts.'' For months, battle reports and casualty tolls from Iraq and Afghanistan have put war in the headlines, but Swedish and Canadian non-governmental groups tracking armed conflict globally find a general decline in numbers from peaks in the 1990s. The authoritative Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in a 2004 Yearbook report obtained by Associated Press before publication, says 19 major armed conflicts were under way worldwide in 2003.This is a sharp drop from 33 wars counted in 1991. Canada's Project Ploughshares, using broader criteria to define armed conflict, says in its new annual report that the number of conflicts declined to 36 in 2003 from a peak of 44 in 1995. The Stockholm institute counts continuing wars that have produced 1,000 or more battle-related deaths in any single year. Project Ploughshares counts any armed conflict that produces 1,000 such deaths cumulatively. The Stockholm report, to be released in September, notes three wars ended, as of 2003 ? in Angola, Rwanda and Somalia ? and a fourth, the separatist war in India's Assam state, was dropped from the "major" category. It lists three new wars in 2003 ? in Liberia and in Sudan's western region of Darfur and, of course, the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq. These joined such long-running conflicts as the Kashmiri insurgency in India, the leftist guerrilla war in Colombia, and the separatist war in Russia's Chechnya region. Other major conflicts listed by the Stockholm team were in Algeria, Burundi, Peru, Burma, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Israel, Turkey, the American-Al Qaeda war, mainly in Afghanistan, the India-Pakistan conflict, two insurgencies in the Philippines and one in Aceh, Indonesia.