The 20th Century has been referred to as the 'Century of Bloodshed', because so much blood was spilled from one end of the hundred year period to the other. From beginning to end, there was hardly a moment when there wasn't a war in progress on some part of our planet.

We did seem to be making progress though. The proxy battles of the Cold War had yielded to bloodier but less newsworthy conflicts, as regional despots and tyrants of all types struggled to fill the void left in the theatres of conflict between world superpowers.

Then the 1990's came along. It had been tempting to think of massive global warfare and large-scale death and destruction as a thing of the past, as belonging to the barbarous first half of the century, that is the part before the advent of an effective global communications system, home computers and, well, all the stuff that made us feel modern and beyond all that killing. There was, by this time, the Universal Declaration of human Rights and an active system of international peacekeeping under the auspices of the United Nations. Things were looking pretty good... if you didn't look too closely. Then, in the 1990's, the wheels really seemed to fall off our modern world.

Yugoslavia splintered and, once again, neighbour fought neighbour with a bitterness and ferocity that made a mockery of all our so-called advances. Once again, cultured, intelligent people - people with cars and cell phones and, yes, digital watches - began to kill one another in a way that seemed to spring from a deep-rooted nostalgia for the bad old days, the truly horrific old days. As the flames of war leapt higher and the old red bricks and tiles of Balkan towns were blackened and pounded to dust, thousands upon thousands of people found themselves wandering back and forth, homeless, forsaken and forlorn. Many of them eventually found themselves wandering into cages and makeshift barbed wire prisons. Very many of them died there. News reports began to speak of 'ethnic cleansing', a hateful policy of getting rid of erstwhile friends and neighbours whose ethnic identity suddenly seemed unbearably inconvenient. Two world wars should have thoroughly purged us of this sort of madness.

Meanwhile, in Africa another conflict based on ethnicity was also about to awaken the demons of the world wars. In the heart of Africa's Great Lakes region, tiny and insignificant Rwanda was also crying for attention. But with the United Nations and world television audiences firmly focussed on the Balkans, there was not much interest in even more fighting in the Dark Continent. Who, after all, could tell a Tutsi from a Hutu? Who, outside the region, would consider the distinction worth making? Canadian General Dallaire and his tiny force of UN peacekeepers found themselves in the unenviable position of suddenly having to understand a lot that basically defies understanding, a lot that was basically just more brutal madness, as beautiful Rwanda tore itself apart. While the civil war raged on, ragtag militias of machete-wielding youths in sinister clown costumes butchered 800,000 people in cold blood at road blocks, in churches or in their own homes. How do you explain that kind of madness to someone in an office in New York City¹? How do you make someone understand such insane, inhuman cruelty. You can't, of course. The United Nations and the world simply refused to believe it was happening until a nation as close to the Garden of Eden as any place on earth stank of death and its dusty roads literally flowed with sticky rivers of blood.

Perhaps the last decade of the 'Century of Bloodshed' couldn't hope to keep up the standard of clinical efficiency set by American President George Bush senior and his high-tech crusade against evil in the person of former friend and ally Saddam Hussein. The triumph of technology in the Gulf War (Part One), with a minimum of human suffering that was hardly worth mentioning in the context of the victory of good, may have given us an unrealistic faith in the wonders of the modern age and left us unprepared for the atavistic horrors yet to come. On the other hand, perhaps the relative indifference of the international community to the suffering of Iraqis after the Kuwaiti oil fields were saved from Saddam provides a hint that warfare is still more about reserving the biggest bone for the biggest dog than about anything to do with honour and glory, and that an awful lot of work has to be done if the 21st Century is to stand a chance of being anything other than another century of bloodshed.