GUARDIAN
Friday, February 04, 2000
From Kosovo to Kosofe
By Adebayo Lamikanra
ONE of the most celebrated men in the world in the 60s was Christian
Barnards, a cardiac surgeon plying his trade at the Groote Shure Hospital in
South Africa. His claim to fame was that he was the first surgeon to
successfully carry out heart surgery. As a surgeon he saw the insides of
thousands of people and unlike most white South Africans of his generation
and perhaps, acquaintance, he was not touched by racial prejudice. When
asked about this, he dismissively reacted to the question by saying that
since he dealt with people, mostly on the inside and since all races looked
identical on his operating table, he saw no reason to treat people of
different races differently on the basis of differences which are less than
skin deep. What this means is that in spite of all apparent differences,
underneath it all, we are all the same. We are all people who are struggling
to survive the vicissitudes of a life whose basic characteristic is
continuous uncertainty. It is not unlikely that it is this uncertainty,
which has made men suspicious of each other, causing them to band together
against other bands of men, especially those who exist within the same
environment and want access to some resources, which if equitably
distributed, may not be sufficient to bring about universal satisfaction.
There is no doubt that there are many parameters which determine the
membership of human groups. The broad is race but no less important are
religion, culture and the rather nebulous matter of ethnicity. Within each
of these groups, there are sub-groups and even smaller units, which bring
about a bewildering level of fragmentation. In the end, these human groups
are fragmented into tiny families, all members of which are related by
birth. In other words, there is no limit to the fragmentation of the human
race. This has complicated human relationships to such an extent that the
formation of human interest groups has become dangerously
counter-productive. In a world in which globalisation has invaded our
collective consciousness and taken it by storm, we have all sorts of warring
groups, determined to land more than their fair share of everything on
offer.
For a large chunk of the 90s, Rwanda was a byword for ethnic intolerance as
the so called hardline Hutus set upon and slaughtered, in cold blood, close
to one million Tutsis and 'moderate' Hutus. Thereafter, the killers were in
turn massacred in large numbers by the Tutsi-dominated army. The two
antagonist groups are still at their murderous game, creating a huge army of
refugees in the process. The instability caused by this phenomenon has
spread to all countries in Africa's Great Lakes region and has gone on to
cause a whole raft of murderous ethnic problems. On the surface of it, this
whole mess was created by ethnic conflict but on reflection it is clear that
the real problem between the Hutus and Hutsis is economic. It is a fight for
the determination of whose hands are in control of the nation's economic
levers. It is about who controls the nation's resources and the ethnic badge
is simply a convenient way of identifying the competing groups and the fact
that some Hutus were identified as nominal Tutsis shows plainly that this
classification is artificial and may even be unreliable.
What happened in Rwanda was a human tragedy of truly gigantic proportions
but it was by no means unique. It has indeed duplicated in many parts of
Africa and indeed throughout the whole wide world. Not very far away in
Sierra Leone, as in Liberia, the settler community has, over the last
century and a half cornered most of the country's meagre resources, for
itself. The indigenous peoples have always resented this anomalous situation
very keenly, a situation which has been exacerbated in recent times by the
serious downturn in the nation's economy. The contradictions, which have
been operative within the country for a very long time, became so sharp that
progress to war became inevitable, a war which has consumed human lives,
limbs and careers. All the victims have been sacrificed on the altar of
stark economic reality. Africa has had more than her fair share of ethnic
conflicts in recent times and it is hardly coincidental that within this
period, Africa has been falling behind the rest of the world in economic
terms. The slide has been both precipitous and steady, leading to severe
doubts about a future, which is daily becoming more bleak and frightening.
People are trying to capture as much as economic ground as possible for
themselves and are therefore retiring into ethnic lagers and doing their
damnest to return the fire directed at them and if possible take nearby
lagers by storm. The result is widespread misery and bloodshed, a situation
that makes any form of economic reconstruction impossible.
It should not be assumed that all ethnic conflicts are brought about by
purely economic matters. It is just that given a healthy economy, it is
unlikely that ethnic differences, however, pressing they are, will be
allowed to get so much out of hand that the competing groups will resort to
armed conflict in order to settle matters satisfactorily. There are some
ethnic conflicts that are not directly traceable to economic roots but are
the results of long-standing issues, which have become intractable. A good
example, or rather, multiple examples are found in the areas of Europe which
until recently was recognised as Yugoslavia. For many hundreds of years, the
Croats, Bosnians, Slovenians, Serbs and other less easily identifiable
ethnic groups have fought each other on so many times and on so many
different grounds that they come to accept inter-ethnic violence as part of
their culture. The most recent flashpoint in the volatile region was in
Kosovo where ethnic Albanians are in large majority even though they are
minority in what is left of Tito's Yugoslavia. The Serbs have always
regarded Kosovo as special ground, ever since the territory was seized from
them by a Turkish army, all of 610 years ago after the battle of Kosovo. The
Serbs, bent on rewriting history, have insisted on annexing Kosovo, as yet
mythical Serbs, violently against the wishes of the Kosovans. The issue is
never likely to be resovled even though many thousands of lives have been
lost over this issue and perhaps many more millions will be lost in future,
all of them over what in the end, is nothing.
Here in Nigeria, the ethnic jingoists among us will do what ethnic
jingoists have always done, seize a self-proclaimed more high ground and
from there, proceed to unleash mayhem in the name of their ethnic group,
never mind that their mandate is without any democratic backing. Nothing,
least of all an appeal to reason, is likely to stop them and appeals in the
name of shared humanity is likely to fall on deaf ears. People have to be
reminded, however, that the distance between Kosovo (Yugoslavia) and Kosofe
Local Government Area in Lagos State, Nigeria is not as great in human terms
as it is in geographical terms and when ethnic conflicts break out for any
reason, including reasons outside the strictly economic, everybody loses and
lose very badly. Ironically, ethnic conflicts tend to wreak havoc on the
economy and make things worse, very much worse. All the fighting is in the
end over nothing. After all, Serbs, Igbos, Albanians, Yoruba, Tutsis,
Hausas, Somalis, Efiks, etc all look the same on the inside . Ask Dr.
Barnards!.
Prof. Adebayo Lamikaran
Faculty of Pharmacy, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife.
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