Translated by Sasha Reiter
Bodies and more bodies. They’re the innocent victims of the new wars, conflicts without states, without frontiers, very different from those that characterized the first half of the 1900s, but just as bloody.
France had been the new target of a terrorist attack that left 84 dead in its wake. Many of them children, and almost one hundred injured, many in conditions so grave that it is unsure whether they will live. A vile attack, carried out with deranged hatred, an attack that humbled France on the day in which hundreds of people were celebrating the storming of the Bastille, awaiting the traditional pyrotechnics display, on the Promenade des Anglais, in Nice.
The world is at war. We knew it, we always knew it. We call them “new wars”, “hybrid wars”, “Low Intensity Conflicts”, “wars of the fourth generation”. The echoes of distant conflicts have reached our ears daily, since the end of the cold war, and they have multiplied over the years. It is enough to look at the data bases of organizations like SIPRI, which shows the worldwide military spending and maps the places in which the principle armed conflicts develop. Or the Uniform Collateral Data Portal, UCDP, which registers the dead from warfare.
The investigators of Uppsala divide the armed conflicts into three categories: those involving state forces (e.g. Ethiopia and Eritrea, or Colombia and the FARC), those that develop non-state actors (e.g. Islamic State and the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Syria), unilateral violence (e.g. the Rwandan genocide in 1994 or the actions of Boko Haram in Nigeria).
The figures are terrifying. Between 1989 and 2014, including the Rwandan genocide, almost 2 million human beings have lost their lives because of these wars. In 2015, they counted 118,435 victims.
The picture that emerges from these and other similar studies, demonstrates to what end the horror of weaponry has transformed every centimeter of the earth in one, desolate battlefield.
The breakup of the bipolar world has sharpened political, social and economic instabilities and has favored the emergence of new leaders who cling to history, traditions and most of all religion, all properly handled and adapted to justify the bloody actions of the empowered.
The Is (Islamic State) represents, possibly, the most dangerous and harmful result of those perpetual conflicts. The lack of ideological and ethical handles; the crisis of a capitalism that expresses its weaknesses more every day; the blindness of industrialized countries that chase their interests without thinking about the environment, about the populations most in need, and without measuring consequences; the rejection of citizens and the lack of suitable politics to accommodate the masses of the desperate who flee from hunger and fear; the hatred, cynically washed down by actors who move in the shadows, the threads of human puppets; the extremisms revived by populists who grow, like bad weeds, in every corner of the planet, are only some of the causes which for years fed the army of new martyrs / executioners. They are not soldiers who fight against other soldiers: their targets are the civilians and their objective: instill terror.
In these past months, hundreds and hundreds of people have died in Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iraq, Belgium and France. Many of them were Muslims. The cold strategy of death of the Is, is directed toward all who do not adhere to their interpretation of Islam.
After the latest attacks, analysts and intelligence agencies have understood that, although the jihadists seem weakened by the erosion of conquered territories and the loss of economic power, like wounded animals, they have become even more dangerous and unpredictable, thanks to the lone wolves that are impossible to control.
As Is loses strength and power in the conquered territories, it encourages the actions of terrorists in the world and invests more resources in recruiting acolytes in various countries and organizing mortal strategies.
There are many enemies with which civilian populations must fight day after day. War, terrorism, are only one part, without doubt the most devastating. Lurking about are ancient hatreds, like the racial conflicts in the United States; the common crime that, in countries like Venezuela, costs more victims than a war; and the dictatorships and coups like the one just suffered in Turkey. In that country, in 48 hours, a military uprising has left at least 265 dead, thousands injured, thousands imprisoned, and on top of everything, has unleashed new hatreds that will lead to new vendettas. That without knowing yet what the international consequences will be, after the halfhearted and quite late reactions of Europe and the United States against the coup. The challenges to be faced are very serious and there are many dangers that must be avoided. Fear and pain could further strengthen nationalist and xenophobic movements and parties. That is the great gamble of the Is. The jihadists know that, to the extent that populations isolate themselves, arm themselves, hate each other, the possibilities grow to slide into a war of all against all that would benefit them greatly.
Humanity must begin to understand that the world is strongly interconnected, that it is true that one small action in one place could have positive or negative repercussions in another, however distant it is, and become a boomerang. It must be understood that this is no time for divisions, but rather to seek meeting points, that the world cannot continue being so asymmetric and that problems like the climate change affects us all equally.
This is no time for votes of punishment or decisions that come from the stomach rather than the head. On top of everything, this is no time to have a dangerous clown driving a country so fundamental for world peace, as is the United States.
The echoes of distant gunfire have gotten closer, they have arrived at our homes. The lives of every one of us depends on the capacity that we have to add our grain of sand and act rationally.
We are human beings of the same planet, the time has come to act as such.