Peoples Under Threat 2009
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Introduction
Despite recent changes in US policy towards the Islamic world, the latest annual global listing of Peoples Under Threat has seen the threat level rise further for communities in Muslim countries affected by international and civil conflicts.
Above: Men, women and children from a community affected by commercial logging, Province Orientale, DRC. Mark Lattimer/MRG.
Every year Minority Rights Group International publishes Peoples Under Threat, identifying those groups or peoples around the world most at risk of genocide, mass killing or other systematic violent repression. 2009 is the fourth year that MRG has compiled the list, which is based on current indicators from authoritative sources (see How is Peoples Under Threat calculated?).
In the latest listing, published July 2009, minorities in Pakistan, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Yemen are all assessed as under greater danger than a year ago, their governments’ involvement in regional conflicts compounding the risk of repression at home. Pakistan joins states including Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan at the top of the list, as does Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Violent extremism and identity conflicts
In both his Ankara and Cairo speeches in 2009, US President Barack Obama emphasized that ‘America is not – and never will be – at war with Islam’. He went on to seek common cause with the Islamic world: ‘The enduring faith of over a billion people is so much bigger than the narrow hatred of a few. Islam is not part of the problem in combating violent extremism – it is an important part of promoting peace.’ But he also expressed his determination to continue using military means to confront extremism: ‘...despite the costs involved, America’s commitment will not weaken. Indeed, none of us should tolerate these extremists. They have killed in many countries. They have killed people of different faiths – but more than any other, they have killed Muslims.'
However, the military response to violent extremism in recent years has resulted in a new generation of identity conflicts that have placed whole communities in peril. Since 2001, when after 9/11 the US pursued the Afghanistan Taleban and the al-Qaeda unit led by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri, the ‘violent extremists’ to which Obama referred have proliferated. They now operate in many countries in South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, many under the al-Qaeda label. For the civilian populations in such countries – mainly but not exclusively Muslim – the risks do not end there. In those states most affected, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Somalia, the civilian population faces the combined threat of terrorist attacks by armed opposition groups, military operations by national armed forces or by the US or its allies and, most dangerous of all, the wider armed struggle for power that has developed based on sectarian or ethnic identities. It is this combination of factors, created and sustained by armed conflict, that makes the situation so deadly for both Muslim and non-Muslim minorities.
Communities perceived to share an identity with violent extremists, such as the Pashtun in Pakistan and Afghanistan, or Sunni Arabs in Iraq, are caught between armed opposition groups and the military operations launched to defeat them. Members of smaller sects or non-Muslim minorities, such as Yezidis, Shabak or Chaldo-Assyrians in Iraq, or Sikhs and Hindus in Pakistan, are targeted by Islamic extremists because their beliefs are considered to be un-Islamic. Historically poor or marginalized minorities with no militias to defend them, including the Bantu and Gaboye in Somalia, are particularly vulnerable where there is generalized insecurity. A state of war has also enabled governments to undertake the violent repression of other minorities, such as Baluchis in Pakistan.
Once such identity conflicts have taken hold, the cycles of community mobilization and revenge killings make them difficult to dislodge, and conflict resolution and reconciliation become messy and lengthy processes. As President Obama himself remarked in his Cairo speech, ‘It is easier to start wars than to end them’.
The top twenty
The highest five states in the Peoples Under Threat table in 2009 are unchanged in position from last year: Somalia, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan and Burma/Myanmar. In each of them violence against minorities of a widespread or systematic character is ongoing, as it is in a number of other states near the top of the list, including the Democratic Republic of Congo. The most significant risers in the top ten are Pakistan, Ethiopia, and Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (see Major risers in 2009).
Table 1: Peoples most under threat – highest rated countries 2009
Although a political re-alignment occurred in Somalia in early 2009, with the so-called Djibouti group of the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia taking control of the government, the war intensified again. The return from exile of Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys and his commitment to armed struggle has reignited the battle for Mogadishu and also led to attempted assassinations and death threats against Hawiye elders. The threat to civilians in much of south and central Somalia remains at crisis point, with those groups outside the clan system, such as the minority Bantu, at particular risk.
Some commentators may be surprised to see Iraq cling stubbornly to its position as second in the table, despite widespread media coverage of a decline in violence in the country over the last year and the new government’s relative success in establishing control. However, civilian deaths from violence, although thankfully no longer at the 2006-7 rate of 3,000 a month, were still estimated at 300 – 800 a month over the last year, making it one of the world’s most deadly conflicts. Contested areas of Nineveh and Kirkuk where many minority communities live continue to be as dangerous as ever. A recent rise in high profile bombings and the assassination of the leading Sunni Arab politician Harith al-Obeidi are also ominous signs as the US draws down its military presence. Of equal concern is the character of the new government, where power is held by an increasingly authoritarian faction with a sectarian base.
The Darfur conflict continues in Sudan, although not at the rate of some previous years, despite some predictions of a violent reaction to the indictment of Sudan’s President, Omar al-Bashir, by the International Criminal Court. The threat in 2009 remains not just in Darfur but increasingly in the oil-rich south of the country, where tensions are rising with Khartoum in advance of a scheduled referendum on independence in 2011.
Conflict has not left the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo for well over a decade, but escalated in scale again in the second half of 2008, displacing a further 250,000 people. Although the former leader of the rebel CNDP, Laurent Nkunda, was arrested near the Rwanda border in January, a subsequent agreement by the Rwandan and Congolese governments to undertake joint military operations in the Kivus succeeded neither in dislodging murderous Hutu rebel fighters nor in bringing an end to the gross human rights violations that have torn the east of the country.
In last year’s listing in 2008, the most significant risers in the table were Pakistan, Ethiopia, Chad, Sri Lanka, Iran, Central African Republic, Lebanon, Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan, Yemen, Djibouti and Kenya. During the following year (2008 - 9) new, increased or continued violence was experienced in at least 10 of those 12 states, perhaps most devastatingly in Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
A steadily-escalating conflict between the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam reached endgame in March and April when the Tigers’ last territory in the north-east was taken by the Sri Lankan military, at the cost of many thousands of Tamil civilian lives. Although the threat of immediate large-scale military operations has now passed, a continuing serious threat to Tamil and Muslim populations remains in the context of ethno-nationalist statements by leading politicians, a recent history of extra-judicial killings and forced disappearances, and the confinement of over 200,000 people in displaced people’s camps.
Table 2: Major risers in 2009
The most significant risers in the Peoples Under Threat table in 2009 include (rise in rank in brackets): Pakistan (+1), Ethiopia (+1), Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (+46), Zimbabwe (+9), Yemen (+3), Guinea (+8), Georgia (+19), Eritrea (+4), Niger (+12), Kenya (+6), Guinea Bissau (new) and Fiji (new). Note that where indicators are now separately available for Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, it is the latter that have been used for the first time this year (causing a disproportionate rise in rank).
Pakistan and Yemen have risen significantly in the table in each of the last three years, and Ethiopia and Zimbabwe in each of the last two.
Pakistan’s rise to the sixth position in the table is due to a dangerous combination of a rapidly escalating conflict against different Islamist groups in North-West Frontier Province and the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas, the existing use of violent repression to suppress dissidents in other areas of the country, and growing violence in national politics. In some respects, the crisis in north and west Pakistan can be seen as an extension of the failed tactics used in Afghanistan, with high civilian casualties from military operations, including aeriel bombing from un-manned US drones, stoking opposition in Pashtun communities to the government and its allies.
The inconclusive war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza leaves a continuing grave risk to the lives of the civilian population, particularly in the Occupied Palestinian Territories but also in Israel, of a resumption of mass violence. If the current push for peace led by the US administration and Arab states founders, there is a real risk of further radicalization on both sides. Also of serious concern – although rarely reported – are the worrying attempts to curb the freedom of Israel’s own Palestinian minority, who have become increasingly worried by the insistence of the new Israeli government on Israel’s character as a specifically Jewish state.
In Yemen, media attention is focused on the growing role of extremist Islamist groups, but an unresolved sense of grievance among the Zaydi Shia population and the continuing Al Houthi insurgency in the north also combine to threaten stability. Ethnic aspects of the crisis in Zimbabwe have again not been widely reported, but given rising political violence and the country’s previous history of mass ethnic killing, the threat level has risen. A power-sharing deal in Kenya helped end the wave of violence in the first part of 2008 sparked by a disputed election, but without some resolution of the land issues that underpinned discontent there may be a revival of violence particularly in the Rift Valley and around Mount Elgon.
Above: A boy receives a blanket donated to minority Sikhs who took refuge in a temple in Hassanabdal after fleeing the Swat and Buner districts. Jared Ferrie/MRG.
Both Ethiopia and Eritrea have also risen in the list this year. Border tensions between the two states remain after the expiry of the mandate of the UN mission last year, with a concomitant threat to Afar communities. Both states also continue to support different sides in the war in Somalia, another important factor in the growth of identity conflicts, bringing specific risks to such communities as the Somalis in Ehiopia’s Ogaden.
Tuareg rebels in Niger held peace talks with the government in 2009 after two years of fighting, but it is too early to count on de-escalation in a conflict that had led to allegations of widespread human rights abuses. Recent military coups in both Guinea and Guniea-Bissau raise the spectre of wider revenge killings and also of existing ethnic tensions turning violent. Military rule also continues in Fiji, where the government suspended the constitution, arguing inter alia that it entrenched ethnic divisions.
In Europe, the most notable development is a rise in temperature in some of the so-called ‘frozen conflicts’ left from the disintegration of the former Soviet Union. Georgia has climbed significantly in the table this year following the conflict with Russia over South Ossetia. The most pressing threat in 2009 is in Georgia’s other breakaway republic of Abkhazia, where Georgian troops clashed with Russian-supported Abkhaz fighters in the Kodori Gorge in August. Abkhaz authorities have closed the administrative border and sought to impose Abkhazian ‘citizenship’ on ethnic Georgians. In April the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities called for ‘an end to the pressure being exercised on the Georgian population in the Gali District through the limitation of their education rights, compulsory “passportization”, forced conscription into the Abkhaz military forces and restrictions on their freedom of movement’. Following the declaration of independence by the government of Kosovo in February 2008, there were also signs of heightened tension in other stalled conflicts over autonomy in the region, including in Transdniestra (Moldova) and Nagorno-Karabakh (Azerbaijan).
How is Peoples Under Threat calculated?
Since the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, our ability to identify those situations most likely to lead to genocide or mass killing has improved. A number of comparative studies of the factors preceding historic episodes of political mass killing had been undertaken since the 1970s, including by Helen Fein and Ted Robert Gurr, but it was not until the 1990s that researchers such as Rudolf Rummel and Matthew Krain pioneered quantitative longtitudinal analysis of a wide range of such factors, enabling the testing of different causal hypotheses. Rummel, for example, showed the very strong relationship between concentration of government power and state mass murder; Krain demonstrated the correlation between existing armed conflict or political instability and the onset and severity of mass killing.
Following the early work of the Clinton administration’s policy initiative on genocide early warning and prevention, Professor Barbara Harff, a senior consultant with the US State Failure Task Force, constructed and tested models of the antecedents of genocide and political mass murder and her results were published in 2003 (‘Assessing Risks of Genocide and Political Mass Murder since 1955’, American Political Science Review 97, February 2003). Her optimal model identifies six preconditions that make it possible to distinguish, with 74 per cent accuracy, between internal wars and regime collapses in the period 1955 - 1997 that did, and those that did not, lead to genocide and political mass murder (politicide). The six preconditions are: political upheaval; previous genocides or politicides; exclusionary ideology of the ruling elite; autocratic nature of the regime; minority character of the ruling elite; and low trade openness.
Minority Rights Group International has drawn on these research findings to construct the Peoples Under Threat table, although responsibility for the final table is exclusively our own. Peoples Under Threat is specifically designed to identify the risk of genocide, mass killing or other systematic violent repression, unlike most other early warning tools, which focus on violent conflict as such. Its primary application is civilian protection.
Indicators of conflict are included in the table’s construction, however, as most, although not all, episodes of mass ethnic or religious killing occur during armed conflicts. War provides the state of emergency, domestic mobilization and justification, international cover, and in some cases the military and logistic capacity, that enable massacres to be carried out. Some massacres, however, occur in peacetime, or may accompany armed conflict from its inception, presenting a problem to risk models that focus exclusively on current conflicts. In addition, severe and even violent repression of minorities may occur for years before the onset of armed conflict provides the catalyst for larger scale killing.
The statistical indicators used all relate to the state. The state is the basic unit of enquiry, rather than particular ethnic or religious groups at risk, as governments or militias connected to the government are responsible for most cases of genocidal violence. Formally, the state will reserve to itself the monopoly over the means of violence, so that where non-state actors are responsible for widespread or continued killing, it usually occurs with either the complicity of the state or in a ‘failed state’ situation where the rule of law has disintegrated. Certain characteristics at the level of the state will greatly increase the likelihood of atrocity, including habituation to illegal violence among the armed forces or police, prevailing impunity for human rights violations, official tolerance or encouragement of hate speech against particular groups, and in extreme cases, prior experience of mass killing. Egregious episodes of mass killing targeted principally at one group have also seen other groups deliberately decimated or destroyed.
However, some groups may experience higher levels of discrimination and be at greater risk than others in any given state. Minority Rights Group International has identified those groups in each state which we believe to be under most threat. (This does not mean that other groups or indeed the general population may not also be at some risk.) It should be noted that although these groups are most often minorities, in some cases ethnic or religious majorities will also be at risk and in relevant cases are therefore also listed in the table. In some cases, for example in Iraq, all the groups in the country are at risk of ethnic or sectarian killing.
One indicator that has been tested and discarded by a number of studies is the general level of ethnic or cultural diversity in a society. Krain did not find any correlation between ‘ethnic fractionalization’ and the onset of genocide or political mass killing. Similarly, neither of the patterns of ethnic diversity tested by Harff had any effect on the likelihood of mass killing (although she did find the minority character of the ruling elite to be significant). These findings are supported by research on the relationship between diversity and conflict.
The overall measure is based on a basket of ten indicators. These include indicators of democracy or good governance from the World Bank, conflict indicators from the Center for Systemic Peace and other leading global conflict research institutes, indicators of group division or elite factionalization from the Fund for Peace and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the State Failure Task Force data on prior genocides and politicides, and the country credit risk classification published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (as a proxy for trade openness). For citations and further information, see the notes to the table. For a fuller discussion of the methodology, see State of the World’s Minorities 2006.
Based on current indicators from authoritative sources, Peoples Under Threat seeks to identify those groups or peoples most under threat in 2009.
Notes to table
Sources of the indicators are as follows:
• Conflict indicators: The base data used was Monty G Marshall, ‘Major Episodes of Political Violence 1946-2008’ (Center for Systemic Peace, 2009) and, for self-determination conflicts, Monty G Marshall and Ted R Gurr, ‘Peace and Conflict 2005’ (CIDCM, University of Maryland, 2005) updated for 2008 using figures from Center for Systemic Peace, MRG and the Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research.
Self-determinations conflicts in 2008 were ranked on a scale of 0-5 as follows: 5=ongoing armed conflict; 4=contained armed conflict; 3=settled armed conflict; 2=militant politics; 1=conventional politics. Major armed conflicts were classified as 2=ongoing in late 2008; 1=emerging from conflict since 2005 or ongoing conflict with deaths under 1,000.
• Prior genocide or politicide: Harff, US Political Instability Task Force (formerly State Failure Task Force). 1=one or more episodes since 1945.
• Indicators of Group Division: Failed States Index, Fund for Peace and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2008.
• Democracy/Governance Indicators: Annual Governance Indicators, World Bank, 2008.
• OECD country risk classification: Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, ‘Country Risk Classifications of the Participants to the Arrangement on Officially Supported Export Credits’, April 2009. Where no classification is given, a value of 8 was accorded.
Indicators were rebased as necessary to give an equal weighting to the five categories above, with the exception of the prior geno-/politicide indicator. As a dichotomous variable this received a lesser weighting to avoid too great a distortion to the final ranking. Resulting values were then summed.
The full formula is: (A/2) + (Bx1.25) + (Cx2) + (D+E+F)/6 + (G+H+I)/-1 + (Jx0.625)