Meanwhile, over a single week-end of March 15-16, 10,000 Ethiopians died in battle, un-noticed by the media. Was it racism that caused this-the world's largest war involving 400,000 combatants-to slip off the radar screen? Or was it hysteria over the very idea of European genocide, with scenes reminiscent of Dachau and Buchenwald haunting our selective memories? Could it simply be abysmal ignorance that forces the locusts to seek out the most photogenic and accessible conflicts, letting all others disappear into the mist?
Recent magazine articles have listed nearly 30 conflicts involving U.S. diplomats or military forces over the past 10 years. Some, such as the conflict between Israel and Palestine, or the lingering Persian Gulf crisis, claim disproportionate headline space. Others, such as Somalia, Rwanda and Kosovo, are "flavors of the month", covered with such intensity that we can scarcely cram in another horrific detail. Yet most conflicts, like the trench war along the Ethiopia-Eritrea border or the 100,000 frozen deaths in Chechnya, just simmer out of sight, a shame too deep for our collective conscience to bear.
"Am I my brother's keeper?" was the first excuse given to fratricidal conflict, yet it remains our evasive answer to violence in Indonesia, Ireland, Sudan, Tibet, Sierra Leone, Spain, Mexico, Algeria, Turkey, Congo, Guatemala, Iraq and two-dozen other running sores. The U.S. government is far more likely to intervene to help friendly governments (17) than anti-American regimes (8) - but even among friendly regimes, U.S. intervention fails more often than it succeeds.
Intervention - or the lack of it - also creates "orphan" regimes, mostly in Africa (Sierra Leone, Liberia, Rwanda, Congo, Sudan and Somalia) that have become governments only in a hollow sense, "ghost nations" rather than "ghost towns" . The largest human loss and greatest number of interventions have occurred in Africa - 38% of the total. Despite NATO's preoccupation with stability in its field of operations, European interventions comprise only 13% of total interventions over the past decade.
According to Time Magazine, regions with the heaviest human losses (Angola, Liberia, Rwanda, Sudan, Afghanistan, Tibet) received medium to light US intervention. The only exception was Somalia, which -- like the other 8 interventions in Africa -- was a failure.
Religious and ethnic conflict is clearly visible in 90% of interventions - all except 3 (Somalia, Argentina and Haiti). Notwithstanding "intelligence" offered by U.S. security agencies, not all conflicts involve Islamic fundamentalism. Muslims or Islamic politics are involved in 16 of the 29 conflicts (55%), but several conflicts involving Muslims (Kosovo, Bosnia, Indonesia) pose no threat to the U.S. or Israel.
The majority of conflicts that were active during the past decade (58%) have been resolved in success or failure; the rest are continuing - some for decades or centuries. The number of lives lost in the 7 failures (4,381,200) is greater than the lives lost in the 10 successes (853,100).
Humanitarian interventions have largely failed. Of the 8,671,300 lives at stake in 29 conflicts, only 853,100 fatalities (9.7%) occurred during successful interventions. THIS IS THE STORY THAT IS BEING MISSED WHILE WE ARE FIXATED ON KOSOVO! Enough victims in the post-Cold War Decade for nearly two Holocausts - yet we barely notice when we see them a few thousand at a time flickering like mirages on our TV screens.
We are losing the battle for a peaceful planet, while we ineffectually decry (and bomb) the perpetrators of Balkan massacres. We are like Cain: Let someone else take care of the brother we can't see, while we obliterate the one we can. An updating of Cain's evasion might read: "Am I the keeper of a brother who never appears on the 6 o'clock news?"
John Rude, educational consultant, served in the Peace Corps in Eritrea, 1962-64.