(6 of 6)
Missing too is the hygienic, high-tech, buttons-and-bombs warfare that developed countries have spent the past 40 years refining. The chosen weapons are often far more crude. In Rwanda, says the U.N.'s Bellamy, "it is man to man, flesh against flesh. It is a human hunt; one man butchering another with his own hands." Distinctions between soldiers and civilians become harder to make and less respected. There are no rules of engagement and no one reliable with whom to negotiate. The Hutu army chief of staff guaranteed safe passage to U.N. soldiers evacuating wounded Tutsi civilians. But soldiers along the road stopped the convoy, ordered people out and set upon them with machetes. "They said they didn't take orders from the army chief of staff," said U.N. spokesman Abdul Kabia.
Absent any discipline, warfare becomes an extension of crime by other means. The modern military model is the neighborhood gang, brothers and cousins, roaming, rule breaking, terrorizing. "Youth has no future in Rwanda," observes Jean-Claude Willame, professor of African politics at Belgium's Catholic University of Louvain. "To a certain extent, they don't give a damn about those Hutu and Tutsi things. They're paid."
From Iraq to the former Soviet empire to the Balkans, the authoritarian state exists as a piece of machinery, man-made, breakable, the borders etched by diplomats ignorant of or indifferent to ancient claims and tribal hate. Kurds fight for their freedom from Iraq and Turkey; Tamils battle Sinhalese in Sri Lanka; Armenians fight Azerbaijanis in Nagorno-Karabakh; Albanian Muslims and Serbs circle each other in Kosovo. Last week Yemen was the latest country to break apart, as those in the south accused the northerners of attempting to further impoverish them. The struggles can be ancient and visceral, religious and racial, the oppressed against the oppressors. Where the valves of democracy allow for ethnic pressures to escape, differences are settled by discussion; in the embattled outposts of the new world order, it is the tribes that rule, and the nature of war and peace in the next century may be largely determined by their ambitions.
Rwanda serves as a modern laboratory for anyone trying to figure out which factors will matter and which will not in the pursuit of peace and security. It is a crucible full of explosives that nations watching from a comfortable distance have no idea how to handle. War itself is redefined when it is waged within countries rather than between them; when the environment -- soil, water, scarce natural resources -- become the spoils that cause neighbors to kill neighbors; when economic development fails to guarantee stability; and above all when ethnic enemies use the outbreak of fighting to settle scores that can stretch back for centuries.