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Africa: New Study Says Continent is Becoming 'Dramatically More Secure'
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The East African (Nairobi)
2 June 2008
Posted to the web 2 June 2008
Kevin J. Kelley
Despite the violence that continues to ravage countries such as Somalia and Sudan, sub-Saharan Africa as a whole is today "dramatically more secure than it was less than 10 years ago," according to a report released at the United Nations headquarters last week.
"The current horror stories are real enough," the report acknowledges, citing the post-election killings in Kenya as well as what it describes as the bitter low-level proxy war that Ethiopia and Eritrea are waging in Somalia.
In addition, an estimated 40,000 people have been dying each month in the Democratic Republic of Congo due to elevated levels of disease and malnutrition resulting from a decade of political violence.
"But behind the headlines is another very different and far less depressing reality - one that gets little media coverage," the report declares.
Between 1999 and 2006, the number of conflicts in Africa declined by more than half while directly related fatalities also fell sharply, said Andrew Mack, director of the Human Security Report Project.
The study attributes the rise in security in Africa to several factors, including a corresponding increase in the number of democracies. In 1988, the report notes, nearly 90 percent of sub-Saharan states had autocratic governments. "By 2006, there were just two autocracies in the region, while the number of democracies had increased sixfold - from three to 18."
Democracies tend to experience fewer armed conflicts than do autocracies, the report says.
In addition, African governments are being overthrown less frequently. During the 1980s, there was an average of 6.4 coups per year in Africa, while in the period from 2000 to 2006, the average stood at four per year.
Peacemaking efforts on the part of the United Nations and other mediators have also played a role in reducing organised violence in Africa, the report suggests.
The data used in the study is drawn from three terrorism-research institutes funded by the United States government. The report itself was prepared by a team at Simon Fraser University in Canada.
The upbeat assessment rests in part on an arbitrary determination of what countries make up sub-Saharan Africa. In compiling its statistics, the report takes account of the current conflicts in Chad and the Central African Republic but not in Sudan's Darfur region, which is the source of those outbreaks of violence.
The report identifies Sudan as part of the Middle East, not Africa.
The study does point out that fighting has been halted or "sharply de-escalated" in recent years in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote d'Ivoire and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Ethiopia-Eritrea war also came to an end.
But East Africa remains within "an arc of instability" that accounts for most of the internal violence taking place in Africa today. "The centre of gravity of political violence" is said to include Burundi, the Central African Republic, Chad, Somalia, Uganda and Ethiopia.
The conflicts within these countries, however, are said to be "far less deadly than those of the late 1990s."
The study's authors caution that the positive trends they highlight should not give rise to complacency.
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"The structural risk factors that helped make sub-Saharan Africa the world's most violent and war-prone region in the 1990s remain largely unchanged," the report warns.
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