While world watches Lebanon, Sri Lanka goes to war - 3-Aug-06 - Generational Dynamics

Generational Dynamics Web Log for 3-Aug-06

While world watches Lebanon, Sri Lanka goes to war

Tamil Tiger rebels have engaged Sri Lanka government forces in heavy fighting for 9 days now, with dozens of casualties, mostly civilian.

Indian subcontinent, with the island of Sri Lanka off the southern tip of India.

Indian subcontinent, with the island of Sri Lanka off the southern tip of India.

The major feature of the current hostilities is that the Tamil rebels have closed a sluice gate that provides water to 50,000 people. The Sri Lanka army has advanced to take control of the sluice gate, leading to the recent fighting. There's supposedly a peace agreement, signed in 2002, but a rebel leader has declared it to be void. However, the Sri Lanka government says that the agreement is still in force.

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics research, I've discussed three wars on this web site that are crisis wars or near-crisis wars.

Crisis wars are the worst wars that a society can endure. These wars are so bad and so genocidal that, when they end, the survivors decide to do everything possible to prevent their children or grandchildren from ever having to go through such a horrible experience. About 55-60 years later, when the generation of people who survived that war all disappear (retire or die), all at once, leaving behind the increasingly confrontational and risk-seeking generations born after the war, a new crisis war begins.

Generally speaking, a civil war is almost always a crisis war. Depending on the society, there may be low-level violence in the society between crisis wars, sometimes taking the form of terrorism.

Sometimes, terrorism begins right after the end of a crisis war by factions that are unhappy with the settlement. Or it begins during the chaos of the awakening era and continues in the form of low-level violence for decades, sometimes turning into a non-crisis civil war.

Often there's an uneasy "peace" settlement during the unraveling era, because both sides (the terrorists and the government) realize that things are getting very serious, and neither side wants a full-blown crisis war. This sets up an equilibrium that both sides can live with until further generational changes disturb the equilibrium enough to trigger a new crisis war. So, all in all, you can have several decades of on and off low-level violence, finally bursting into full scale crisis war.

This pattern has been playing out in different places today, and with the upsurge of the Sri Lanka and Lebanon wars, we have an opportunity to study how crisis wars come about.

Darfur war -- civil war in Sudan. The Darfur genocide is a crisis civil war between black non-Arab Muslims in Darfur, (western Sudan) and lighter-skinned Arab Muslim government forces in northern Sudan. The Arab Muslim Janjaweed militias, agents of the Sudan government, have been killing the men and raping the women in Darfur, forcing the displacement of millions of people.

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(At the suggestion of a web site reader, I've changed the characterization of the two sides from "white Muslim versus black Muslim." Because of centuries of intermarriage, the two sides have become physically similar.)

The Darfur conflict began in the 1980s with recurrent low-level violent clashes between Arab militias and village self-defense groups. In April 2004 a peace agreement was signed, but by June it was clear that the peace agreement had failed and that the war was increasing in intensity.

At that time there were big get-togethers of high-level officials from the U.N. and from various countries, making official pronouncements that the violence must stop. (This happened shortly after the 10-year commemoration of the 1994 Rwanda genocide. At the commemoration, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan promised "Never again." I wrote at the time that the U.N. is completely irrelevant to the Darfur genocide, and that it would not be stopped until it's run its course.)

A new peace deal was signed in May of 2006 but, as I recently wrote, the fighting in Darfur only increased since the peace deal.

The fighting in Darfur is still characterized by massive slaughter, rape and starvation. The United Nations has done nothing about it, not even officially designating a "genocide," since that would obligate the U.N. to try to stop it. The United States has been alone in designing the Darfur war a genocide.

This is a typical example of how crisis wars run. Many such wars were part of World War II, and so you can realize why no parent would ever want his children to have to go through such a war. That's why the Silent Generation, the generation that grew up during WW II, and were the nation's leaders in the 1990s, did everything they could to compromise and contain problems. But today the Silents have mostly disappeared, and the risk-seeking Boomer generation, born after the war, is leading us to a new "clash of civilizations" world war.

When I describe the Darfur war to Boomers or Generation-Xers, they automatically assume that it can't happen any more in the "civilized world." They attribute it to something about the tribal nature of Africa or the warlike nature of Muslims. They forget that a similar war happened in white, cosmopolitan Bosnia in the 1990s.

(It's worth mentioning again that the Iraqi insurgency is no crisis civil war, and there is absolutely no chance whatsoever that it will become one, as I've written many, many times.)

Five years ago, there were no crisis wars going on in the world. Today, the Darfur war is in progress, and the Mideast and Sri Lanka wars are approaching full crisis war fury.

Sri Lanka civil war. This war is fought between two ancient races: The Sinhalese (Buddhist) and the Tamils (Hindu). WW II was a crisis war for India and for Ceylon, the former name of Sri Lanka. There was relative peace on the island until 1976, when the Tamils began demanding a separate Tamil state, and formed a separatist group called the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), or just "Tamil Tigers."
A non-crisis civil war began in 1983, and the low-level violence continued until a peace treaty was signed in 2002. In the last few months, the peace treaty has been unraveling, and in the last couple of weeks it appears closer to a full-scale crisis civil war.

Mideast War - Lebanon, Palestine, Israel. The Lebanon war between Israel and Hizbollah is quite different from the Sri Lanka situation, as I recently described in my lengthy analysis of this war.
The war between Israel and Lebanon is not headed for a crisis war, because the Lebanese are in a generational awakening period, not a generational crisis period. That's because only one generation has passed since the Lebanese civil war of the 1980s.
This is a very good example of the difference between crisis and non-crisis wars.
The Israelis are very aggressive and energetic -- sending thousands of troops into Lebanon, and bombing much of the Lebanese infrastructure. This illustrates the energy with which a crisis war is waged.
Hizbollah is not fighting with anything remotely like the same level of energy. They've been planning for this war for six years, and they're prepared with 10-15000 missiles that they launch from their homes. You don't see Hizbollah terrorists pouring into Northern Israel to rape and kill Israelis, which is what they'd be doing if they were in a crisis era.
Is a country more likely to win a war in a crisis period or in an awakening period? It can go either way. America lost the Vietnam war in the 1960s-70s -- that was an awakening era war for America and a crisis war for the Vietnamese.
On the other hand, when Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, it was a crisis war for the French, but a non-crisis war for the Russians. Napoleon's army charged into Russia, expecting to meet the Russian army. But the Russians simply retreated from Moscow, and let the French occupy it without opposition. The French army lost discipline and fell apart.
These two examples illustrate some of the differences. Crisis wars are more emotional and genocidal, and fought with a great deal of energy; but non-crisis wars are fought more systematically and carefully. Depending on circumstances, either side might win.
What I've been watching for in the Mideast is a change in attitude between the Israelis and the Palestinians. I was thinking of this last Sunday during a news report that rioting Palestinians were wrecking the United Nations building in Gaza. The United Nations building? If the Palestinians were developing crisis war fury, they would be wrecking the barrier that the Israelis erected to separate Israel from the Palestinians.
So there's still a great deal of restraint being shown on all sides in the Mideast war. That's not to say that people aren't being killed; but it is to say that it's not anywhere near the Darfur war yet, or even anywhere near the Sri Lanka war. Keep your eye on the attitudes that Israelis and Palestinians have for one another; as attitudes continue to exhibit more and more fury, the region will slide into a crisis war.

Conflict risk level for next 6-12 months as of: 9-Feb-2006

W. Europe 1 Arab Israeli 3

Russia Caucasus 2 Kashmir 2

China 2 North Korea 2

Financial 3 Bird flu 3

Key: 1=green 1=Low risk 2=yellow 2=Med 3=red 3=High 4=black 4=Active

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, what's happening today is that there's a "gathering storm" of increasing violence in the world. Darfur is already in a crisis war, and both Sri Lanka and the Mideast are headed in that direction, with 100% certainly.

This is to illustrate again the concept of "chaotic attractor," in the sense of Chaos Theory. Political events are random, but in a generational crisis period, political events are "attracted" to war. This has been lucidly illustrated in the Mideast, where hardly a day has gone by in the last 18 months where political events haven't measureably brought the region closer and closer to war. The same thing is happening in Sri Lanka. As I predicted in May, 2003, when the "Mideast Roadmap to Peace" came out, the disappearance of Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon from the scene has removed the last major generational inhibitions to full-scale war. (3-Aug-06) Permanent Link
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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 3-Aug-06 While world watches Lebanon, Sri Lanka goes to war

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 3-Aug-06
While world watches Lebanon, Sri Lanka goes to war