h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

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.

Until the end, that is until the 90's came along, it was 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 90's, the wheels really seemed to fall off our modern world.

Beautiful 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 ethnicity 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 yet more fighting in the Dark Continent. Who, after all, could tell a Tutsi from a Hutu? Who, after all, 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, 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 city? How do 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 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 evil provides a hint that warfare is still more about reserving the biggest bone for the biggest dog than 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 on being anything other than another century of bloodshed.

Oops!

In August, 1998, President Clinton unleashed the fury of the USA in the form of cruise missile attacks against targets in Afghanistan and Sudan. This was in retaliation for the bombing of American embassies earlier in the month in Kenya and Tanzania which killed more than 200 people.

Saudi outlaw Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist group was believed to have carried out the bombings. The American response targeted several alleged terrorist training camps (freelance terrorists, not state terrorists) in eastern Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, which was believed to be involved in making chemical weapons for bin Laden. When no evidence of actual chemical weapons could be found, this charge was amended to the production of 'precursors' for chemical weapons.

The Sudanese maintain that the wrecked building was just a pharmaceutical factory with no sinister purpose whatsoever, and the people killed by the American bombs were the innocent victims of terrorism. In Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden and his henchmen were evidently out when the Americans called, as the cruise missile attacks on that impoverished country seemed to have very little effect on al Qaeda or the proliferation of terrorism.

Predictably, world public opinion was split about the justification and efficacy of the attacks - not that very many people actually knew anything one way one way or the other, of course; then as now, knowledge was merely the sum of opinions expressed in the partisan media. Much of the Islamic world condemned the attacks as unjustified aggression by the world's remaining superpower, while Western countries (at least their governments) - notably Israel, Britain and Australia - supported the Americans' right to blow things up in self defence and in defence of the democratic way of life.

As the 1990s began, a civil war in Somalia had effectively turned the state into a nightmarish parody of the popular Mad Max films, starring Mel Gibson, in which gangs of heavily armed outlaws race around in the dust, for no apparent reason, blasting each other with automatic weapons. While all this was going on, vast numbers of ordinary people, Somalis driven from their homes by the fighting, were huddled in sprawling refugee camps, covered in flies and starving to death right on television. This disturbing spectacle might not have galvanized very much of the world's interest if the various humanitarian aid groups which regularlly interrupt our evening television viewing with seemingly incessant pleas for help in various crises hadn't added to their usual hectoring stories of being threatened themselves in a manner that was too much like Mad Max to ignore.

In 1992, the United Nations brokered a cease fire, of sorts, and a small contingent of lightly-armed Pakistani troops were sent to represent civilisation in the Somali version of post-apocalyptic mayhem. It was soon obvious, however, to anyone not quick enough with the TV remote to turn to something else that the situation in Somalia was growing worse. And so, American President Bush (the first) began to airlift emergency supplies into the worst centres of pitiful hopelessness. As the situation in the refugee camps became even more desperately unmanageable, the UN decided to send in a large peacekeeping force, led by thousands of well-equipped American troops.

Chapter Six of the UN charter allows for peacekeepers to place themselves between warring parties, which agree to follow a UN plan of reconciliation and not shoot at each other or the peacekeepers, while peace (or something like it) is gradually restored. Chapter Seven of the UN charter provides the framework for a much more aggressive program of peace enforcement, in which heavily armed UN troops effectively step into a conflict to break up the fighting, whether the combatants want them to or not.

By the start of 1993, and the Presidency of Bill Clinton, it was felt that nothing short of a major armed intervention stood any chance of restoring order to a place that was so far beyond anarchy that even fans of Mad Max were disturbed by it. When, in June, 24 Pakistani soldiers were ambushed and killed by followers of the 'war lord' Maxamad Faarax Aideed, enough was well and truly enough.

This sort of unwelcome military intervention into what was, after all and like it or not, the affairs of a sovereign state (no matter how anarchic) was something new. When American troops splashed ashore with blackened faces they were met, rather farcically, by television crews and fascinated onlookers who had strolled down the beach to see what all the commotion was about. Nevertheless, the American-led troops soon found that Somalia and the capital city of Mogadishu fully justified their caution, though in ways perhaps few of them could have foreseen.

In October, 1993, a failed attempt by American forces to arrest Aideed led to 18 of their soldiers being killed in an ambush and 75 more wounded in a desperate attempt to withdraw from the maze in which they suddenly found themselves trapped. This event was later portrayed in the film Blackhawk Down. Soon afterwards, President Clinton, perhaps recognising a no-win situation when he saw one, withdrew American forces.

The Somali conflict can be seen as a failure of the UN to come to terms with the sort of chaos represented by what was essentially a monumental gang war. Modern, well-equipped troops went to Somalia with the best of intentions and failed to impose themselves in any constructive way on a ragtag mob of thugs and petty tyrants. This led to the rather ignominious withdrawal of the American troops and to the shame of other national contingents, such as Canada, whose troops also fell short on a mission for which they were ill prepared. In a disgraceful scene which was to replay itself with American soldiers in Iraq, Canadian troops - hopelessly out of their intellectual and moral depth - committed crimes of hate and frustration on helpless Somali prisoners and brought shame on themselves and their country.

The tragic failure of the UN in Somalia would have grave consequences in the very near future. Perhaps the bitter lessons learned by the international community in the Somali intervention would increase the reluctance of the international community to commit troops to the peacekeeping mission in Rwanda, as it spiralled out of control, and lead to the needless deaths of 800,000 at the hands of a rag tag militia of youths armed with machetes and Kalashnikovs.

You should work in advertising. Your command of hyperbole is commendable.

As a left-handed person, I thank you for that left-handed compliment, miss. On the other hand, I hardly think it's possible to overstate these events.

Seeing as I'm actually a Mr, would you also appreciate a left-handed backhander?

We've met before.

I was wondering when you'd click!

A sign of old age: things sometimes take longer to click than they should and other things do nothing but click and rattle.