THE NEW TRIBALISM: Defending Human Rights in an Age of Ethnic Conflict : Ethnic Strife Owes More to Present Than to History

In Georgia, little Abkhazia and South Ossetia both seek secession, while Kurds want to carve a state out of Turkey. French Quebec edges toward separation from Canada, as deaths in Kashmir’s Muslim insurgency against Hindu-dominated India pass the 6,000-mark. Kazakhstan’s tongue-twisting face-off pits ethnic Kazakhs against Russian Cossacks, while Scots in Britain, Tutsis in Rwanda, Basques and Catalans in Spain and Tuaregs in Mali and Niger all seek varying degrees of self-rule or statehood.

The world’s now dizzying array of ethnic hot spots--at least four dozen at last count--starkly illustrates how, of all the features of the post-Cold War world, the most consistently troubling are turning out to be the tribal hatreds that divide humankind by race, faith and nationality.

“The explosion of communal violence is the paramount issue facing the human rights movement today. And containing the abuses committed in the name of ethnic or religious groups will be our foremost challenge for years to come,” said Kenneth Ross, acting executive director of Human Rights Watch, a global monitoring group based in New York.

Indeed, xenophobia, religious rivalry and general intolerance of anything different are often now more anguishing and cruel--not to mention costly in human lives and material destruction--than the ideological differences that until recently divided the world.

The reversion to some of the oldest organizational principles of humankind reflects an attraction seemingly more potent than the prevalent 20th-Century principle of assimilation either by choice or by force--concepts such as the U.S. “melting pot” or communism’s “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Why is ethnicity so powerful? And why now, at the end of the 20th Century, in defiance of so much that the period has stood for?

Since Communist doctrine began unraveling in 1989, conventional wisdom has linked the psychology and politics of hatred to the end of totalitarian rule that repressed ancient rivalries.

Today’s clashes between Serbs and Bosnian Muslims, for example, date back centuries to political and cultural hostility between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. In Sudan, Africa’s largest state, the war pitting Christian and animist black Africans in the south against the Arab Muslim north has roots in the 19th Century--even before the birth of the modern state.

“To a large extent, history is catching up with us. Most ethnic conflicts have a background of domination, injustice or oppression by one ethnic group of another,” explained John Garang, the U.S.-educated chairman and guerrilla commander of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in the south.

“In our case in the Sudan, it goes back centuries to the slave trade. The northern Sudanese were the slave traders selling people from the south,” he said in an interview.

Yet the proliferation of hatreds is not simply history’s legacy to the Post-Modern Era, a cruel trick that has made old differences seemingly emerge out of thin air after disappearing for decades. History provides only the context.

“Ethnicity is not enduring and unstinting; it’s shaped and given form. And what we take to be historic and ancient is often modern and recent,” said Augustus Richard Norton, a political scientist at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

The passions have instead been produced by a confluence of diverse factors, ranging from modernization and migration to democratization and limited resources, according to specialists. They flourish on fear and uncertainty.

Factor 1: Migration

The most basic cause stems from the Modern Era, which opened the way for cultural standardization and mass migration, the latter capped in the 20th Century by the largest movement of humankind in history.

On the eve of the 21st Century, fewer than 10% of the world’s 191 nations are still ethnically or racially homogeneous.

The impact of global migrations and intermixing is reflected in a stark fact: Depending on definition, there are now between 7,000 and 8,000 linguistic, ethnic or religious minorities in the world, according to Alan Phillips, director of Minority Rights Group, a human rights monitoring organization based in London. In fact, virtually every ethnic group has a minority branch living somewhere outside its own borders.

The sheer magnitude of migrations in an ever more crowded world makes clashes and conflict virtually unavoidable.

The amalgamation of the world’s peoples has already resulted in a host of otherwise unlikely skirmishes--between descendants of Africans and Koreans in white-dominated Los Angeles, or between Asian Indians and blacks in a South Africa ruled by descendants of Dutch and British settlers.

Ethnic and religious tensions have also risen due to anxieties that minority cultures will be eliminated--a not unjustified fear. In the 19th Century, South America boasted 1,000 Indian languages; in the late 20th, there are fewer than 200, according to the U.N. Development Program’s 1993 Human Development Report, released last month.

Courtesy of communications and technology, modernization is also standardizing everything from dress to music, while industrialization and Westernization have challenged traditional skills and arts, especially in developing countries.

Even in Communist Tashkent, Islamic Tehran and island-nations like Taiwan, oral folklore is increasingly being replaced by Arnold Schwarzenegger videos, ethnic music by Madonna and Metallica tapes.

“The forces of modernization have given many people a sense that they don’t belong anywhere, or that there’s nothing permanent or stable in their lives,” explained Allen Kassof, director of the Project on Ethnic Relations in Princeton, N.J.

“It’s quite understandable that they then seek something that seems eternal and can’t be taken away from them. One is membership in a group. Another is a belief system or religion.”

Some cultures are already minorities in their own lands: Native Fijians are outnumbered by descendants of indentured Indian workers. Kazakhs are only 40% of Kazakhstan, about equal to descendants of Russian settlers in the large former Soviet republic. And throughout North and South America, Indian populations have dwindled to small percentages of the total.

“Cultures need to be respected and constantly asserted or they die. Hence the determination of many groups, particularly indigenous peoples, to participate actively to preserve and reassert their identity,” the U.N. Development Program report added.

The proliferation of minorities in the 20th Century--and the consciousness accompanying it--has effectively created a new set of incentives for conflict. “The conflicts of the future are likely to be between people rather than states over issues related to culture, ethnicity or religion,” Mahbub ul Haq, a special U.N. Development Program adviser and former Pakistani minister of finance and planning, said in an interview.

Factor 2: Power Quest

The second factor is the deliberate manipulation of longstanding fears and passions by contemporary governments.

“(The year) 1992 has made clear that the roots of most of these conflicts lie less in eternal antagonisms than in particular governmental abuses that exacerbate communal tensions,” according to Human Rights Watch’s 1993 World Report.

In a variation of the old divide-and-rule tactic, a growing number of regimes have recently tried to build followings by exploiting ethnic, religious and other differences.

President Samuel K. Doe’s heavy-handedness against all Liberian tribes except his own Krahn people and President Mohamed Siad Barre’s manipulation of Somalia’s diverse clans sparked two of Africa’s nastiest civil wars. Both nations have since imploded.

In Sri Lanka, an estimated 20,000 have been killed and more than 1.5 million displaced since 1990 in a contemporary conflict sparked by age-old discrimination by predominantly Buddhist Sinhalese against minority Hindu Tamils.

Other governments claim that ethnic separatist or independence movements have forced responses that violate human rights.

On the grounds of fighting secessionists, the Indian government justifies torture, abductions and murder of Kashmiri Muslims and Punjabi Sikhs, and the Turkish government excuses abuses in handling minority Kurds, reports Human Rights Watch.

At the core of both tactics is a new breed of ethno-politicians “who see their future power base as lying in leading ethnic communities. They appeal to the basest human instinct by portraying a group as threatened from outside,” Kassof said.

Among the most blatant examples have been former Communist leaders in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics--such as Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov--who are both trying to sustain their own careers by making fear and hate primary tools of politics.

In Sudan, Garang charged that civil war erupted largely because Hassan Turabi, the power behind Khartoum’s government, wanted to impose Sharia, or Islamic law, throughout Sudan.

“Contemporary leaders use the accumulated historical animosity for their own political and economic gains. Turabi uses it to promote his Islamic agenda, which we consider a threat to our way of life and a violation of our human rights,” he said. “And when those conditions reach a level of intolerance, then people go to war.”

The rising ethnic tension over minority Hungarians in Romania, Slovakia and the rump Yugoslav nation--mostly remnants of the old Austro-Hungarian empire--is also less linked to the demise of communism than to post-Communist leaders who are exploiting the issue.

“The hatred is new, but it’s built around traditional differences that, but for nationalist appeals of opportunistic leaders, would not have been transformed into hostility or warfare,” explained Ross.

Factor 3: Insecurity

The third major factor is related to ideology--both the current wave of democratization worldwide and the lack of alternatives.

Transitions to democracy, for example, can create uncertainty that fuels ethnic and religious passions, and eventually rivalries. “The problem is not democracy per se, but the turbulent transition to democracy,” said Jack Snyder, a Columbia University political scientist.

As the former East Germans and Russians, South Africans and Jordanians have learned painfully, even political shock therapy does not produce overhauls overnight. Along the way, reforming governments have faced increasing unemployment, inflation, crime waves, public disillusionment and even resistance.

In South Africa, much of the black-on-black violence, now bloodier than black-white clashes during decades of apartheid, is a product of changing times. Zulus particularly have been reluctant to surrender their legendary identity, and the tacit power that went with it, in a new multiracial state.

“The tremendous psychological pressure on human populations from political change creates a sense of anxiety that frequently makes people seek refuge in belief systems that involve definitions of membership and belonging,” Kassof said.

Ironically, the absence of an alternative to democracy also encourages ethnic and religious passions.

“Inter-communal strife is a product of the discrediting of alternative ideologies. The idea of Western democracy, while appealing to many, lacks an antithesis to those who do not want to adopt it as a way of life,” Ross added. “So people fall back on their primordial identities, like religion and ethnicity, when there is no alternative available.”

The most visible case is the explosion of political Islam in places like Algeria and Egypt. But as Islamists redefine identities and agendas, Algeria’s ethnic Berbers and Egypt’s Coptic Christians sense new threats--and are acting accordingly.

Factor 4: Limited Resources

The final factor relates to resources and economics. At the simplest level, the struggle to survive can spawn or deepen ethnic or religious hatreds.

“The more limited the resources, the greater the danger of ethnic strife,” said Garang. In Sudan, the multilayered hostility between northerners and southerners, Arabs and Africans, Muslims and Christians has been exacerbated by a hostile desert environment and the chronic recent cycle of drought and famine.

For a range of reasons not necessarily bad or intentionally divisive, ethnic groups are also often positioned differently in an economy. Again, change can accentuate differences, triggering hostility or drastic action.

Czechoslovakia was a prime example. Czechs were better positioned, due to their skills and economic activities in their republic, for radical market reforms. But the same plan hurt the Slovaks, because their economy centered on once-profitable but now outdated military and heavy industries difficult to adapt to free market conditions or the new European Community markets.

“This created very different incentives for the two republics and contributed significantly to Czechoslovakia’s breakup,” Snyder said.

For all the dangers unleashed by ethnicity, however, scholars and analysts all counsel against condemning or trying to block ethnic expression. “It’s misguided to attack the politics of ethnicity as opposed to the intolerance of many ethnic politicians,” Snyder warned.

“It’s perfectly appropriate, for example, for black leaders to organize politically or to define their interests collectively along black lines, because neither suggests an intolerance of alternative ways of life or other races. It’s their right.”

Many also contend that there is no way to stop or reverse ethnicity. “Our tendencies toward separatism and tribalism seem to reflect something very deep in the human condition, which scholarship confirms,” Kassof said.

Yet some hold out eventual hope that ethnicity will be less divisive. “At the end of the day, we will eventually have one human community,” said Garang. “But that is still a long time away.”