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For many, if not most, societies in the world, the heavy hand of dictatorship or oligarchy ensures civil "peace and tranquility". The price often paid for quiet: the destruction of the expressive beauty and strength of the individual.
The latest cases in point: in Palestine, Hamas has through its brutality settled 145-square-miles of its patch of Gaza. Lawyers and judges may be in short supply and courts themselves nonexistent, but guns, discipline, and intolerance for crime are not, and that makes for some mighty quiet evenings.
In Mogadishu, Somalia, the method's on the violent part of its swing. A peaceful and proto-democratic government struggles with insurgents (or others, so few "groups" claim responsibility for the odd grenade and mayhem) who use violence to undermine confidence in the state's ability to produce a civil society. [1]
Iraq needs little introduction: for every freelanced tactic and demonstrated ability to produce violence, government and U.S. military produce a countermeasure without necessarily reducing the will on the part of a relatively few hot heads to continue making mayhem with hapless civilians the best targets ever.
At the Red Mosque in Pakistan, the government has proven so far strong enough to resist the temptation toward immediate violence and has instead produced a cordon or siege to effectively enable students, some of whom taunted police into action and met the expected response with Kalishnakovs, to surrender and get one with their still fresh and unfolding adventure in adult life.
In each of the hot spots noted here--Gaza, Mogadishu, Baghdad and surrounds, and Red Mosque, Pakistan--there has been a great deal of outside meddling. May it dawn on so many thousands of aggrieved families and refugees that the only people who can really own their villages and states are themselves because wherever they have made themselves absent, others have made themselves present, so, let's turn that downside-up, if they make themselves again present, others stand a chance of making themselves again absent.
There's no question that both the Interim Federal Government in Somalia and the government in Ethiopia wish to part ways as soon as possible, but the level of violence sustained by insurgent or other parties improves the position of the Islamists, themselves a mixed bag of international interlopers, and that keeps each of the parties noted locked in conflict.
Where are the Somali people in this?
If they're not part of the "Security Department" and not fighting with the "Islamists", they're dodging bullets and criminals at every turn, and that to the tune of nearly half a million internally displaced persons.
The Iraqi "gone missing" or refugee situation is worse: the numbers I've seen range between 4.5 and 5 million refugees, internally displaced and out-of-country combined. They cannot all be old men, women, and children, but whatever the demographics of that refugee population, they too have fled the "battle space" and left their homes and homeland to assorted others whose mixed ambitions and motivations defy simple explanation.
At the moment, and I think because Hamas has been stalled by winning and needs to form up a new agenda, the people of Gaza may be enjoying something close to secular peace, so long as they keep their mouths shut and their manners congruent with a conservative but not "Talibanesque" armed theocracy (in search, perhaps, of its ayatollah).
Pakistan would seem the most tender of locations as regards vulnerability to the fundamentalist Islamic movements, but it may have an interesting and built-in structure for modeling its conflict: the state's close to the source in its northern territories and rather knows where its militant opposition originates. That clear geopolitics alone makes the violence much easier to understand, address, and, as the state may, disassemble.
For all the drama in its newspapers, the chief challenge for Pakistan may have to do with the simple fact that its frontiers are exactly that and without the coordinated resources of local, state, and national government. Such regions are not only hard to police, they are hard to "service" in terms of the array of benefits distributed by modern states. The scales tip to those accustomed to the ways of the land.
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
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