PRESS CONFERENCE ON 2005 HUMAN SECURITY REPORT
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| Department of Public Information • News and Media Division • New York |
PRESS CONFERENCE ON 2005 HUMAN SECURITY REPORT
Despite the common perception, all forms of political violence, except international terrorism, had actually declined worldwide since the 1990s, according to a new report that gathered previously uncollected data on global security patterns, correspondents were told this morning at a Headquarters press conference.
Professor Andrew Mack, Director of the Human Security Centre at the University of British Columbia, said that the 2005 Human Security Report, which was modelled on and inspired by the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Report, set out to do an annual survey of trends in warfare, genocide and human rights abuses. The data indicated that there had been a decline in armed conflicts, genocides, military coups and other global crises.
The decline in the number of armed conflicts was due to several major factors: the end of colonialist wars; the end of the cold war, which stopped resources from flowing to insurgencies in the developing world; an increase in democratization and in the level of development, which underscored the inextricable link between security and development; and an explosion in international activism led by the United Nations, along with the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and thousands of non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
There was also an increase in preventive diplomacy, peacemaking and peacekeeping missions. “There has been an explosion in very broadly based peace operations that are essentially exercises in nation-building. They make a difference particularly with respect to stopping wars from starting again, and that’s important because about 40 per cent of the wars that have been stopped in the past tend to start again. So if you can stop wars from starting again, you can make a real difference”, he said. While there had been appalling failures at the United Nations, there had also been many quiet successes and those successes did not get nearly the same coverage.
The Report also noted that there had been a decline in the average number of people killed -- 37,000 in 1950 to 600 in 2002 -- which, Mr. Mack said, was a reflection of the changed nature of global warfare from huge wars fought with huge armies with conventional weapons, to low-intensity wars fought with light weapons and small arms in very poor countries.
On international terrorism, he said “significant” incidents, namely, high-casualty attacks, of international terrorism had been going up dramatically. Many insurgent leaders saw such attacks as an effective tactic and the increase in casualties from the incidents resulted from the growing use of car bombs and truck bombs, as well as suicide bombers.
In terms of lives lost, international terrorism was not as great a threat to global security as armed conflicts, Mr. Mack told a reporter. There was also another prominent category of terrorism which was referred to as domestic terrorism. However, over the long term, international terrorism could become a major threat if terrorists acquired weapons of mass destruction. He added that a scenario of a mass attack of some sort in the United States, much larger than those of 11 September 2001, could trigger a global economic recession which could push millions into poverty and poor health.
In response to a question on how the Report treated deaths in Iraq, whether they fell under political violence or under terrorism, he said that all the data on Iraq was problematic, and noted that the United States had its own system for categorizing deaths.
Mr. Mack, a former Director of the Strategic Planning Unit in the Secretary-General’s Executive Office [1998-2001], said that, during his time as the Director of the Unit, he realized that the United Nations had no access to any official data on political violence around the world -- no data on wars, war deaths, terrorism, gross abuse of human rights or terrorism.
“This in many ways was extraordinary because here was the United Nations whose primary responsibility is global security and the UN had no idea whether wars were increasing or decreasing, and it appeared to us then that it was vitally important that the UN had access to this global trend data”, he said. The primary purpose of the Report was to track political violence around the world, to note what the trends were and explain them, and to determine what the policy implications were. “If the UN aspires to have evidence-based policy, the first thing you need is evidence. Only with trend data can you tell if things are getting better or worse”, he added.
The Report did not deal with individual countries but rather with global trends. The data was often problematic and most difficult to collect from the countries where it was needed -- very poor countries that were involved in armed conflict. Nevertheless, those involved were very confident about the broad trends presented in the Report.
Most trends identified in the Report were surprising to people, he said. For example, the evidence that armed conflict had actually declined in the 1990s was surprising to people inside the United Nations because, for many of them, the 1990s was the worst decade that the Organization had experienced. It was the decade of Somalia, Srebrenica, Rwanda, and so forth. Yet, the reality was that, although there were those awful conflicts, the overall numbers of wars had gone down. He attributed the misperception to a lack of official data; difficulty to get access to the academic data that existed; and to the media, which operated on the imperative that “if it bleeds, it leads”. There was reporting on the wars that started, but not on those that came quietly to an end. In the 1990s, a lot more wars came to an end than started.
The Report also “exploded mythologies” that had arisen precisely because the international community did not have access to good data and because media reporting tended to emphasize “the dark side of the equation” and missed out on the good news, he added.
Among the myths debunked was that international terrorism was the greatest threat to global security, he said. In fact, international terrorism killed a small number of people in comparison to the number killed in wars. Also, the belief that 90 per cent of all people killed in wars today were civilians was untrue. No one yet knew what the actual ratio was, but it was probably closer to between 30 and 60 per cent, depending on the wars.
Another aspect examined was the role of women in war. While it was true that women were overwhelmingly the greatest victims of sexual violence, in just about every other category, men were the greatest victims. More men, of course, died in wars, but they were also the greatest victims of the collateral damage from war. Surprisingly, men also remained the major victims, even when one looked at the indirect consequences of war such as war-exacerbated disease and malnutrition.
Responding to a question in the context of the Sudan, Mr. Mack said the situation in Darfur was typical of today’s wars in poor countries, where most of the people who died did so not in battle but as a consequence of war-exacerbated disease and malnutrition. Unfortunately, no good data existed for those situations. He recalled the case of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the International Rescue Committee estimated that almost 3 million people had died, who would not have died had there not been a war. There had been an increase in killer diseases as a result of the fighting.
Next year’s report, he said, would focus on collecting data on the indirect consequences of war, which were much graver than the direct consequences.
“The bottom line message, I think, we take from this Report is that the UN really can make a difference, and it can make a difference even though the resources it has for its operations are insufficient; its mandates are very often inappropriate; and there is frequently horrible politics in the Council that makes effective action impossible”, he said, adding that, without those impediments, the United Nations could do much more.
The Report, which was produced by the Human Security Centre at the University of British Columbia, was funded by the Governments of Canada (which sponsored the press conference), Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
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For information media • not an official record