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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html ----------------------------------------------------------------------------