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- DEFINITIONS - CONFLICT - WAR - PEACE, PACIFISM AND NON VIOLENCE - FROM THE SECOND WORLD WAR TO THE BIRTH OF THE UNO - THE SYSTEM OF NATIONS - NATIONS AND THE UNO - LAW AGAINST WAR - INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT - CIVIL SOCIETY - WARS FROM 2nd WORLD CONFLICT TILL THE PRESENT DAY - THE COLD WAR AND THE EQUILIBRIUM OF TERROR - TRENDS IN THE MORE RECENT ARMED CONFLICTS - CONSEQUENCES OF THE CONFLICTS - VICTIMS - CIVIL VICTIMS - CHILDREN AT WAR - REFUGEES - ETHNIC CONFLICT - SEPARATISM AND SECESSIONISM - THE MAFIAS AND CRIME - DECOLONIZATION - FOCUS ON SOME SITUATIONS - PRODUCTION AND COMMERCE OF WEAPONS - HUMAN DEVELOPMENT, DISTRIBUTION OF THE WEALTH AND WAR - HOW THE WAR IS COMMUNICATED - HOW THE WAR IS COMMUNICATED: THE CASE OF THE WAR IN IRAQ - EFFECTS OF THE WAR IN IRAQ - THE CULT OF WAR VS THE CULTURE OF THE PEACE - THE CHAMPIONS OF PEACE - THE CONFLICT - A WIDENING DEFINITIONS Headword: concflict Definition: 1) war, battle, struggle 2) the meeting of opposing ideas or beliefs 3) disagreement, argument, quarrel Headword: war Definition: 1) armed fighting between nations 2) a struggle between opposing forces or for a particular purpose Headword: peace Definition: 1) a condition in wich there is no war between two or more nations 2) state of freedom from disorder within a country, with the citizens living according to the law 3) a state of agreement or friendliness among people living or working together 4) calmness, quietness  CONFLICT Mankind is composed by humans groups. When these groups clash, they make reciprocal claims to assert their rights. Organised violence is one of the ways in which one can make a claim, if this is not possible by means of negotiation or other ways of pressure. This violence can lead in different gradations to war, which represents the most bloody possible outcome of human conflicts. The democratic method is the most important attempt carried out up to the present day, in order to replace traditional violent means with peaceful means, in the competition of human groups to get hold of power. The essence of the democratic State consists in giving constitutionality to the right to resist: this allows the different political parties and human groups to compete peacefully and to achieve their goals without using violent methods. History has showed that conflicts democracy has been able to regulate are internal to a specific economical and social system.Democracy has replaced fights with discussion and with vote, which allow the loser of yesterday to become the winner of tomorrow without bloodshed. WAR War is armed fighting between two or more nations or between groups in a country for a particular purpose. Violence is the use of brutal force by an active subject to achieve his/her goal against a passive subject who disagrees with it. Any social conflict does not necessarily lead to a violent conflict and any violent conflict does not necessarily lead to war. Identifying the causes of tensions is the first step to find out a potential or real condition of danger. In order to make the comprehension of armed conflicts easier, it is possible to classify them in the following ways: - according to their triggering causes, by identifying the main reason (territorial disputes and disputes about borders, decolonisation; secessionism; ethnic , religious or ideological conflicts; other cultural factors with a tendency to reiterate violence through revenge and retaliations; the struggle to control the environmental and natural resources and other economic interests; poverty and underdevelopment; access to the natural resources and to the market; the democratic deficit in majority/minority dynamics; the absence or the defeat of a State with the collapse of the authority system: the presence of crime and the possible profits from trading and smuggling weapons; violation of human rights; the balance between States and the solidarity within coalitions) - according to their intensity (high intensity for wars with more than a thousand victims, medium intensity: between a hundred and a thousand victims, low intensity: less than a hundred victims) - according to the type of weapons and the way they are used (conventional war, nuclear war, germ warfare, cold war, terrorist war) - according to their scale (worldwide, international, civil, ethnic, with external agents like mercenaries or third factions) - by their duration Violence has always found apologists on all sides from time to time.Any cause has been considered good enough to justify any war: power, wealth, peace, freedom, justice.Condemnations pronounced from a pulpit have never been able to stop war. If a war was started, it would soon be legitimised by the opponents through the most erudite theses. The commonest way to justify one's violence it is to affirm that it is the only possible answer to someone else's violence, under particulars circumstances. Who can decide which is the starting violence and which is the consequential one? The starting violence is without doubt the other opponent's... From the point of view of people who have the power, justified violence is the one necessary to keep them in power. On the other hand, those who are not in power justify the opposite kind of violence, the one tending to destroy established power to replace it with another. Subversive violence leading to the establishment of a new order received a positive judgement for the first time with the French Revolution and during the national uprisings in Europe in the Nineteenth Century. The theory of the right war has been one of the main principles of international law for centuries.This theory legitimised these three typologies of wars: - defensive war - war to avenge an offence - punitive war According to this theory, war has been defined with a gross mistake as a judicial proceedings with the aim to re-establish an injured right or to punish an offender, as it happens in trials in any judicature. Even though it were possible to establish who is right and who is wrong, the procedure of war does not offer any guarantee to assign victory to who is right and defeat to who is wrong: war actually allows the winner to be right. PEACE, PACIFISM AND NON VIOLENCE The common meaning for peace is absence (ending or solution, etc.) of a conflict. Since peace is described as non-war, the definition of peace depends on the definition of war. In the pair war - peace the second term is the weakest.After the falling of the illusion that peace succeeds naturally as a result of human evolution, the problem of peace has become an ethic and moral problem. Pacifism consists of any theory (and the correspondent movement) which considers every form of war as absolute evil, the result of a surpassed stage of the history of mankind. The peace that pacifism wants to achieve is not any kind of peace, is not a kind of peace based on the equilibrium of terror as in the case of COLD WAR, neither a kind of peace connected with an empire or hegemony, as in the case of the so called PAX ROMANA, based on the forced acceptance by the weakest of a state of enslavement. The goal of pacifism is a kind of peace built by parties that do no longer make any reciprocal claims , a kind of universal peace achieved with the agreement of all the existing countries. Pacifists also think that peace is a necessary but insufficient condition to solve all the problems of mankind. Other principles have to be promoted like freedom, social justice, the removal of inequalities and of other factors that can become motives for war and that can cause the extinction of mankind in the long period. Non pacifists deny that war is an absolute evil and consider that in some circumstances war is good and peace is bad. The imperialistic doctrine is in opposition to pacifism as well. The imperialist also wants peace, but a kind of peace that is not the suppression of the strength ratios, but their perpetuation and possibly their growth in favour of the imperialist himself. The eradication of war has to proceed at the same pace with the abolition of the situations of extreme distress. To some human groups and communities there seems to be no way out but war, desperate illnesses need desperate remedies. The utmost example confirming this principle is the present phenomenon of the suicidal attacks committed by kamikazes, people ready to sacrifice their own lives to achieve a goal that is considered, rightly or wrongly, a superior interest.War can therefore appear to the hopeless a smaller evil, up to the tragic paradox of the sacrifice of their own lives. This happens independently from the fact that such extreme choices can be taken in the name of the triumph of a religion. One easily wonders which aberrant interpretation of a religion can lead to sacrifice oneself by killing other innocents in buses, trains, or other public places. At the same time, it is necessary to denounce the aberrant religious interpretations of who think to go and export freedom through bombs, certain to have God on their own side. One would expect that a religion, any religion, encouraged love, brotherhood , sympathy and certainly not indiscriminate homicide. Active pacifism presupposes some ethics, a standpoint that personally engages who assumes it. Active pacifism is proposed not only to demonstrate that war is not necessary, but also that is not good. Consequently, it presupposes the criticism of the justifications of war.The desirable transition is one toward a society with a form of cohabitation, where war is as an improbable means to resolve conflicts. Pacifism finds expression in the following ways: - it acts to achieve disarmament - it believes that in order to abolish wars, the current system of international relationships based on single nations should be abolished through the creation of a superintending universal system. The procedure is from federation to federation toward a world-wide federation. - It acts on people, believing that the root of war resides in human nature and in men's ancestral instincts. Thus man should be amended through a moral/religious reformation, with the contribution of education and culture, if not even by means of a scientific therapy, like when mankind was freed from leprosy or cholera. Among the pacifists there are also the supporters of non-violence who are inspired directly or indirectly by the theory and the experience of Gandhi. The techniques of collective non-violence aim at acting on the economic power (boycotting, sabotage, etc.) and on the political power (civil disobedience).The result they generally achieve is paralysing, creating difficulties; it is not reducing the adversary to total impotence or even destroying him. On the contrary, they tend to render the adversary inoffensive and not to offend him. FROM THE SECOND WORLD WAR TO THE BIRTH OF THE UNO From the end of 2nd World War humanity has been able to trigger hundreds and hundreds of armed conflicts, causing ten millions of victims. The violence of war has been perpetuated in every angle of the planet contradicting the new international order of 1945 that would have had to render it illegal and impossible. The Second World War represents a new modality of armed conflict, the total war, a declared total war not only against armies but against economy, infrastructures, resources and civil populations.Moreover, the launch of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki meant the debut of the atomic age with the concrete possibility of the immediate self-destruction of mankind. In the Second World War the armies of the various alliances reached the peak of 69 million soldiers while 45 million people were employed in the factories of armaments: from a third to a half of the manpower of the belligerent countries was involved directly or indirectly in the war effort. In the Second World War experts count that approximately 54 million people died, soldiers and civilians, at the front, under the air raids, in the concentration camps, in the mass massacres, in the repression of revolts or for diseases or hunger. The USSR, Polonia and Yugoslavia paid their tribute to the war with the 10-20% of the population; Germany, Italy, Japan and China with the 4-6%; Great Britain, France and the United States with approximately 1%. If the First World War had created between 4 and 5 million refugees, at the end of the Second World War the figures are about 40 million refugees only in Europe, 11 million foreign workers deported to Germany, 14 million Germans chased from Oriental Europe, 50 million Chinese people houseless. At the end of the conflict the United Nations (the victorious Allied Powers) tried to find an agreement to establish an order in international relations that would prevent and finally make disappear the tragedy of war in the future. The UN identified the search for peace at any costs and the respect of human rights as their two pillars. On these principles did the nations build up their Organization (the UNO).Without the defence of human rights (of all the rights for all the individuals) peace could not have been possible. Without peace the international order would not have been possible and without this order the absolute right of force would have ruled. In the direction to define an unique world-wide legal order, the Preamble of the Constitution of the UN established the supremacy of international right, in order to save the world from fragmentation, from racial and religious contrasts and finally from the hegemony of imperialism. International right would have been the special technique aimed at appeasing conflicts and therefore at preserving peace or re-establishing it where it was overthrown. THE SYSTEM OF NATIONS In the 19th Century and at the beginning of the 20th the more or less rigorous application of the self-determination of nations in Europe brought about great upheavals of geopolitical order, based on the predomination of the national States. This order of the international system never got dismantled, even if it was periodically modified. Only in 1945 did it become a promise of a new world-wide order. In states constituted from ethnically homogenous areas of settling, the problem of minorities appeared less dramatic with the guarantee of the democratic participation. The situations, in which the national fragmentation in minimal units was the norm and the unity between nation, population, language and territory was impracticable, favoured the development of states where national majorities dominated on inner minorities of remarkable dimensions, submitted to uncontrolled repression. The international system after 1989 witnesses the disintegration or fragmentation of state entities. The self-determination principle that had in the past an aggregating function seems now a threat to the integrity of the state and the primary engine for secessions and divisions.The States became increasingly powerful and lead every community to consider themselves a single nation, to invent their nationalism also when it was not present, to invest enormous resources in sophisticated armaments and gigantic armies. The cause of many wars before and after 1989 must be ascribed to nationalism. The issue of a balance between sovereignty and self-determination is crucial at present. It is necessary to find forms of protection of minorities, but perhaps the same ethnic concept, the idea of nation and also of state should be questioned. Actually, their value in international relations should be revised. NATIONS AND THE UNO The effects of 2nd World War were so catastrophic that they forced the whole international community to rethink the world-wide order. Founded by the will to extinguish war for good, the UN has proved to be increasingly weak and inadequate for the assigned tasks. Unfortunately, the authority of the UN is gradually declining rather than being strengthened. The most evident situation is the recent war in Iraq that the UN in no way succeeded to prevent. The Security Council of the UN is constituted by 10 temporary members elected for two years and from five permanent members with right of veto: the USA, France, Russia, China, Great Britain. The decisions are taken with at least 9 favourable votes but they must include all the favourable votes of the 5 permanent members, without any imposed veto.The Security Council is the only responsible for authorising the self-defence of a State or the intervention of the international community to restore the violated legality, but only with actions of international police, not through war. International laws allowing the states to intervene militarily by repressing the violations inside the borders of other states have never existed. In critical situations the strongest members of the UN have always tried to find solutions excluding war, so as not to be sanctioned by the right of veto of other permanent members inside the Security Council. Every time one of the strongest and influential States decided to act unilaterally against an other State with the justification of violations of human rights or other indefensible crimes, the UN either endorsed this policy or was incapable of preventing the aggression, weakening the fundamental principles of legality formulated by itself. The contradiction between two fundamental principles of the current international law, that is the prohibition of the use of force and the defence of human rights, is then still unresolved. Wars in the name of human rights have always represented a failure for the international law since they violate its fundamental principles. In addition, they are at the same time the result of the inefficiency of the international community, incapable of concretely protecting such rights through both pacific and non violent yet coercive methods.Together with not succeeding in creating a collective security system able to avoid the rising of wars, the UN has also proved unable to manage and to repress the presents conflicts. The presence of UN soldiers did not prevent the slaughter of the Muslims in Bosnia (Srebrenica); the same humiliating role was carried out from the weak and impotent patrol of observers in the genocide in Rwanda. The military participation in Kosovo was lead once again by excluding the UN and under the responsibility of the NATO , with a debatable legal device referring to the right of self-defence of the countries of the Alliance, as if these were directly threatened from Serbia. In fact, the United States and Europe did not want to face the consequences of a probable veto from Russia in the Security Council. Russia was associated to the operation only after, when the UN soldiers were called to manage a post-war period that is still lasting today. On the other hand, the policies undertaken for the disarmament and the control of armaments is dramatically contradictory: together with the increase of the agreements (in order to limit the nuclear, chemical and bacteriological weapons, to eliminate anti-personnel mines or to regulate the commerce of personal weapons), there is a continuous increase in the number of weapons and in the income of their producers, which coincide exactly with the more influential members inside the same UN. A further and not negligible political issue is that also worse regimes have their seat in the UNO, while they are violating human rights at home in full "legality".Here are, however, the strategies devised: - the development of more and more sophisticated conventions directed to limiting the effects of the degeneration of political and social conflicts into armed conflicts - initiatives of peacekeeping (maintenance of the peace) that follow truces or peace accords between belligerents and actions of post conflict peace building, that is the building of actions capable of strengthening and making peace solid and preventing the recourse to new violence - the drafting of conventions against armaments - the constitution of courts predisposed to judge crimes of war and crimes against humanity - actions for building peace (peacemaking) intended to persuade the opponents to search agreements or to settle down disputes. Despite failures, in order not to wait in vain for utopias, there are no alternatives but the strengthening of the authority of the UNO, carried out also through the modernisation of its procedures and its founding regulations. LAW AGAINST WAR If the system of the United Nations has been successful up to the present day to avoid conflicts on a world-wide scale, it has not been able to prevent the development of countless circumscribed conflicts. The new US doctrine of the preventive war could potentially contribute to destroying the same bases of the international legality. ARTICLE 1 PARAGRAPH 1 CHARTER OF THE UNITED NATIONS The Purposes of the United Nations are: 1. To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace; ARTICLE 2 PARAGRAPH 1 CHARTER OF THE UNITED NATIONS 3. All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered. 4. All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations. ARTICLE 1 NATO TREATY The Parties undertake, as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations, to settle any international dispute in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered, and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations. ARTICLE 11 ITALIAN CONSTITUTION Italy repudiates war as an instrument of offence to the freedom of the other nations and as a means to settle international controversies; it concurs in conditions of parity with other states to the limitations of sovereignty necessary to assure peace and justice between the nations; it promotes and it favours the international organisations aimed at such purpose. Therefore war as it is, except for defensive war, is not allowed neither by the principles of international right , nor by the Charter of the UN, nor by the NATO Treaty, nor by the Italian Constitution. The prohibition of the use of war as an instrument to settle international controversies not only extends to the use of force, but also to the simple threat of such use. In short, the international order does not allow the use of force in a preventive way neither by single states, nor by the same International Community. Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations about the right of self defence is often invoked to justify war. Self defence is allowed but as an exceptional measure, which must be necessary, immediate and proportioned to the endured aggression. Therefore, there must be a symmetry of effects between the endured attack and the countermeasure to it. In this way, the latter must be perceived as an answer aimed at avoiding further damages. A State can defend itself at war as long as the Security Council will not adopt the necessary measures to re-establish peace and international security. First the Security Council asserts as its exclusive competence the existence of a threat to peace, or a violation of peace, or an action of aggression by estimating its nature, imminence and gravity. Subsequently, it makes recommendations ( the state is invited to conform to the will of the Security Council, without punitive consequences) or decides about measures not involving the use of force. These can consist in economic sanctions, non-acknowledgement of illegitimate situations, moral condemnation by the International Community. In order to carry out temporary measures, supervisory bodies, missions, or groups of observers controlling the conformity to the decisions of the UN can be instituted. If the Security Council believes that the measures devised are inadequate or have proved inadequate, it can undertake any necessary action to maintain or to re-establish peace and the international security. Such actions can include demonstrations, blocks and "other operations" necessary to maintain or to re-establish peace and the international security by means of air, naval or land forces belonging to the Members of the United Nations. An example of these was the first Gulf War of 1991 when, as a result of the invasion of the Kuwait by Iraq, the Security Council of the UN with the resolution n. 678 actually authorised military intervention against Iraq. Moreover, there are two systems of rights that have different logic and different priorities: humanitarian rights and human rights. The Humanitarian International Law has the goal to limit the sufferings caused by war and to reduce the effects of this by protecting the defenceless (civilians, in particular women and children, ill and wounded people). The original Conventions of the so-called Humanitarian Law are four and were written down in Geneva in 1949. The legislative body about the defence of human rights has instead the aim to guarantee fundamental rights and freedom for individuals in all times and places - not only during wars or emergencies. This legislation has not yet been the object of a coherent organic treatment. This is why it is necessary to refer to international legal documents, starting from the same Charter of UN, so as to acknowledge the priority of the international law about human rights above any other rule. Among these principles, there are the following: - the principle of pacific solution of the controversies - the prohibition of the threat and of the use of force in international relations - the prohibition of territorial annexation or modification of borders with force actions - democracy and popular political participation within the States and in the relations between the States - right of self-determination of the peoples - right of humanitarian intervention INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT As a result of the atrocities committed by the parts in the recent so-called ethnic conflicts (Rwanda, former Yugoslavia) the Security Council of the United Nations has established two international ad hoc Criminal courts following the example of the Nuremberg Court. The Statutes of the two Courts deal with: - the crimes of genocide - the crimes against humanity (mass crimes or systematic crimes) - the crimes of war (serious violations in armed conflicts of the Conventions of Geneva of 1949 and the Additional Protocol of 1977). There are many problems for the effective functioning of this type of justice: the insufficient cooperation between States; the lack of instruments for the arrest of suspects and the difficulties in carrying out successful investigations. In order to solve these problems in a more systematic way, the International Penal Court has recently been established to judge the crimes against humanity, the crimes of war and the genocides, in any place and at any time. The Security Council of the UN, the countries signing the Treaty and the attorney in charge can resort to the International Penal Court. CIVIL SOCIETY From the end of the 80s the groups of the so-called civil society involved in international issues have increased a great deal all over the world. These NGO (Non Governmental Organizations) are by now present in every critical event on the planet and support the agencies of the UN, the UE, the Foreign Ministries of many countries operating in the same fields: humanitarian aids, emergencies, refugees, reconstruction, democratisation, development, human rights, education and training, etc. The international civil society together with the mass media focus the attention of the public on the several aspects of war. This extraordinary human wealth often becomes the instrument of the strongest factions in conflict. Nowadays more than in the past, the NGO are forced to safeguard the safety of the volunteers themselves, often victims of kidnapping or killings during their mission on the territories at war, where they operate disarmed. That is why today the most important humanitarian organizations are rethinking their role and their modalities of participation. WARS FROM 2nd WORLD CONFLICT TILL THE PRESENT DAY Although without a substantial belligerence between the great powers, the so-called COLD WAR (that is a war which was not directly fought because of the nuclear threat) drew all the countries in the imperial peripheries into a permanent condition of war. This condition is lasting up to the present day, especially in Africa and in Southern and Central Asia. The conflicts defined as the most intense (that cause beyond 1000 victims per year) have been dozens every year during the last 60 years, the medium conflicts (between 100 and 1000 annual victims) have been thousands. Nearly innumerable are the smaller conflicts and the social and political conflicts within States with sporadic but diffuse and continuous violence. None of these has counted as many victims as 2nd World War, but in the whole they have caused a comparable number and several million deaths. Some have been incredibly destructive, in the early 50s Korea lost 10% of its population, in the 60s and in the 70s Vietnam approximately 13%. The largest part of wars since 1945 were inner conflicts but in many cases they involved the whole international community. For example, the civil wars in Rwanda and Burundi were reciprocally connected, while the genocide in Rwanda also influenced the near countries, as for example Zaire. Something similar happened in the 60s and 70s as a result of the conflict in Vietnam with the subsequent involvement of other states like Cambodia, etc. Very few of the wars of the period 1946-2003 ended with the victory of one of the opponents and in only a minority was the winner able to obtain a true and fruitful pacification, often with the effect of a return to fighting in the following years. Many wars, instead, finished out of exhaustion or for the mutual acknowledgement between the parts that war was an ineffective instrument. THE COLD WAR AND THE EQUILIBRIUM OF TERROR In the post-war period the United States became the direct and natural inheritor of the Anglo-Saxon civilisation and of the British colonial power. They tried to shape the world in an international order controlled from those fields of finance and industry connected with their economic power and based on the concepts of liberalism, market and competition. At the end of 40s this program was extended on world-wide scale also with violent actions. The regions in some way influenced by the USA or considered of strategic importance (Latin America, the Middle East, the Asian South East) were closed to the other states, with the goal to keep the international communist movement outside. The USSR was the other winning power of 2nd World War. It had the objective to export the model of the communist experience from inside its own borders, in some cases with a hard treatment towards the inner opponents, and to maintain and to extend the areas of influence of Communism. Therefore two opposing blocks were created. The world was divided according to more or less identified spheres of influence with some grey zones at the margins, in which the phenomena of the greater conflicts took place. Neither agreement, nor distension were possible between the two blocks: it was the COLD WAR. The two opposing blocks, above all, found military institutionalisation also in the creation of the NATO and the WARSAW PACT. The predominant objective of these was an intensive rearmament and the creation of an incredible arsenal of atomic bombs. This atomic arms race characterised the equilibrium of the terror based on the doctrine of the mutual destruction. Both superpowers carried out interventions in the inner transactions of the weakest states in their sphere of influence either to change the political activities or to support allied governments in danger or finally to lead wars apparently untied from the bipolar contrast but heavily subjected to the influence of the superpowers. The USA promoted interventions of open war or of hidden support also to military and dictatorial forces and regimes considered as anti-Communists friends. In the post-war period the USA intervened in more than 70 nations within the so-called doctrine of control and bombed 21 countries, some of them in various conflicts. The main wars with direct participation of the USA in the Cold War period were the South Korea War and the Vietnam War. After the end of the Cold War and the collapse of USSR the new wars of the USA, such as the Iraqi, Yugoslavian and Afghanistan wars are due to different triggering factors. In the period of the Cold War the USSR gave military and economic support to all the Communist movements and regimes contrasting the USA. They also took directly part in many countries, especially near their borders. These were considered as a safety belt. Among these wars, the intervention in Czechoslovakia in the 1968, and the ones in Afghanistan in 1979 and 1989 should be remembered. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the political unification of the two German territories after the fall of the Berlin Wall resulted in the end of a geopolitical equilibrium founded on the bipolarism of the Soviet and American superpowers and on the threat of the nuclear holocaust, with the birth of a new world-wide order. TRENDS IN THE MORE RECENT ARMED CONFLICTS The general trend of armed conflicts from the post-war period up to the present day shows an enormous increase in number towards the middle of the 60s and a further escalation in the 80s, until the acme is reached with the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 90s. Afterwards the number of armed conflicts has diminished to the levels of the first post-war period. However, current wars have some characteristics that render them particularly destabilising, since they are hardly solvable and they last for longer periods of time. If the violence between sovereign states has become less frequent in comparison with the past, the violence inside the states has continued to grow and the international community has not been able to find effective countermeasures. Other alarming issues are: - the escalation of disputes originating from ancestral rivalries - the increase of separatist movements - the importance of crime and the Mafia in fomenting the conflicts - the contagious effect that local conflicts have on entire regions - the de-legitimisation of the authority of States and the inability of these and the international community to solve the problems at the base of conflicts - new doctrines gaining importance like the theory of preventive war supported by the USA and consequently the so-called war to terror - the phenomenon of a terrorism with fanatic-religious and political elements, which is often based on suicidal actions against civil targets, much more difficult to predict and to avoid. After the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, coinciding with the end of the ideological contrast, if on one hand various conflicts related to the clash of the two blocks have been resolved, on the other hand, the destruction and dissolution of multicultural and multiethnic national States and the crises of the more fragile States have been exacerbated.New typologies of wars emerged after 1989 with ethnic and/or nationalist conflicts throughout the planet, in contexts of advanced de-legitimisation of the institutions and along with tumultuous economic reforms. These new conflicts often seem incomprehensible to external observers. Paramilitary groups insufficiently disciplined and coordinated become the protagonists. In contemporary civil wars serious and systematic violations of human rights are carried out and more than 90% of the victims are civilians. Incompatible visions of identity, disagreements about borders and criteria of citizenship clash and plans of redefinition or division of the state based on pretensions of self-determination are proposed. Rapid processes of criminal expansion are taking place, creating illegal trade useful for financing war. This is sometimes made easier by the imposition of sanctions. Illegal trade involves emigrants, weapons, drugs, fuel, fake goods, smuggling. Often entire groups of the population are excluded and become fertile ground in which it is easy to cultivate and to increase religious and political extremism . This is directly proportional to the proliferation of social insecurity and poverty. The appearing motivating forces of the new wars are not therefore the universal and out-of-fashion ideologies of Capitalism and Communism, but the politics of the identity: the ethnic or tribal exclusivity to assert a new state or the dominion of a new group into an old state. These new micro-collectivist ideologies have a complete contempt for human rights. In addition, powerful multinational corporations spend money in favour of one faction or the other, in order to safeguard their own interests for the resources of greater value (oil, minerals) . The same superpowers are interested in the strategic positioning of these territories in relationship to others. When a war starts, this depends both on local violent actions and on external supports. Battles are rare, violence is directed towards the civil populations. The first civilian target are often those who try to maintain appeasing social relationships and a minimum of sense for public morality. Together with techniques like systematic murder, ethnic cleansing, the use of mines and air raids on the civil population, induced famines - in order to render the regions occupied by enemies unfit for living - social symbols are desecrated, for example, through the destruction of the religious and historical monuments, rape and systematic sexual violence are carried out. CONSEQUENCES OF CONFLICTS All armed conflicts produce destructive effects on some (or all) elements constituting a society: - on the humans (killing of combatants and non-combatant civilians; victims for other causes linked to war such as famine, epidemics, lack of sanitary measures, injures and physical/psychical disablement) - on the territorial settling (refugees and evacuees) - on the social networks (destruction of friendships, community ties, group identity, etc.) - on the environment (damages and destruction directly or indirectly consequent to the war) - on infrastructures (destruction, damages, too high level of exploitation, deterioration of resources, materials, economic activities) - on the quality of life and on the individual exchanges, within or between communities (decay of the tangible and intangible goods; loss of confidence and expectations in the future, run away of talents, etc.) VICTIMS The calculation of the number of war victims is made with extremely variable estimates and is therefore subject to criticism. Some distinguish between victims of war and victims of events related to war. Many are the factors preventing an exact counting, from the chaos generated from war itself, to the instrumental use of figures on the part of the different sides, up to the backwardness of countries or to the absence of registry offices in some territories. In wars from 1946 up to the present day the esteem on the dead vary from 20 to 60 million people, according to the various methods of calculation. In any way, they are terrifying statistical data. CIVIL VICTIMS The distinctive quality of new wars is that the percentage of civilian victims definitely surpasses the soldiers'. During 1st World War the civilian victims killed in the conflict have been estimated in 5% of the total victims; during the 2nd World War they have risen to 70%, in the armed conflicts of the 90s civilian victims have reached peaks beyond 90%. The prohibition to hit the civilians, sanctioned from the war law since the times in which the regular armies were created has been seriously and repeatedly violated. Antipersonnel mines and bullets containing impoverished uranium have repercussions on the population also in the years after the conflict: the first are aimed at rendering entire areas unfit for habitation, the others provoke diseases like leukaemia, tumours, congenital malformations. The use of bombs and rockets against civil targets has been defined "collateral effects l" or has been ignored at all and considered as the normality. In the course of the ethnic wars it has been possible to witness any sort of violence against the rival ethnic group: raped women, children and adult males barbarously killed. CHILDREN AT WAR A large part of the civilian victims of war are children, with a dramatic increase in the latest wars. In 1991 an international Convention on the rights of children was established, in order to guide the action of the international community, introducing the following principles: - the protection of the rights of minors in particular in the course of armed conflicts is not only a moral but legal principle - the protection and the care of children who are affected by armed conflicts has to be universally guaranteed - the humanitarian aids and the protection must continue also when the children have abandoned the territories in conflict. All states have the duty to guarantee the protection of the rights of these children by any means. In some situations of conflict in the south of the world, regular and irregular armies have recruited youngsters in refugee camps also by kidnapping them from villages and schools. Initially the children do the washing of the uniforms, work in the kitchen, clean the arms, are involved in the transport of crews and ammunitions, in carrying messages, in espionage missions. However, in a short time they are used as true combatants in armed conflicts. The minors act according to an absolutely merciless code of behaviour, where the only logic is that the more you kill, the stronger and more worthy of respect you are. Such code is followed literally . The soldier children have been effective authors of brutal atrocities. This happens when, under the effect of drugs and alcohol, they are not engaged in combats and missions to commit suicidal attacks. The little girls have the same doom of violence becoming sexual slaves in the hands of the adult soldiers or of the young boys. When the war is over, it is practically impossible "to recuperate" many of these survivor boys and girls. Wounds, mutilations, psychic traumas, eradication, deprivation of affective references, violence, sexual violence, murders, being at the same time victims and executioners, all these facts happening in a few years create personalities that will not be able to exit from a spiral of desperation. Some descend in the abyss of drug addiction, others become mercenaries of war; girls are neglected, are no longer able to marry and follow the only possible way of prostitution in miserable conditions. But also those that re-enter in family life are forced to experience further difficulties. A child who has killed frightens people and, instead of being accepted, becomes an outcast. Very young children also choose to join an army voluntarily, in the North as in the South of the world. One should wonder whether it is possible to consider the choice between misery and violence or misery and death as deliberate. The motivation that urges the young to enter the army is the will to survive, the necessity to get an income, even if minimum, a shelter and food. In other cases the parents themselves offer their sons voluntarily, especially when the army pays the salary of the recruit directly to the family. Extreme cases have occurred and are taking place especially in countries in conflict: in Africa, South Asia, Middle East, but also in South America. Sierra Leone represents an horrifying example: in order to remove every tie with the family, children were obliged to kill and to massacre their own parents, so that the military organization would become the only family and nobody would no longer wait for their return home. But can the Western countries be declared to be immune from this problem? Many countries, like the USA and the United Kingdom admit volunteers who are not yet eighteen in their own armies. It is astonishing that the United Kingdom has accepted and continues to accept 16-year-old voluntary boys in the Armed Forces. Baby soldiers less than 18 years were employed and died among the English troops in the conflict of the Falklands and in the first war in Iraq. Also the USA have employed volunteers less than 18 years old in several missions in the Balkans and Iraq. Therefore, also in the Western World, which boasts being considered as a model of civilization, people have the right age for killing and getting killed in war before being old enough to vote. On 12th February 2002 the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflicts was signed: until then children from the 16 to the 18 years could be obligatorily recruited in regular armies! Finally with this protocol the minimal age for obligatory enlistment has been increased to 18 years. The opposition of some States, like the USA, the United Kingdom and Australia, has not allowed to extend the obligation also to voluntary recruitment in regular armies, so that in various parts of the world children of 16 years can still be enlisted like volunteers. It is worthy of note that only 46 states decided to ratify the Protocol. REFUGEES Refugees are emigrants forced to leave their own houses. They are tens of millions all over the world. They are called refugees if they emigrate to an other state, evacuees if they remain inside the native country. Refugees represent the main factor of involvement and pressure on the international community. In front of uncontrolled flows of people who escape from a territory at war, this is forced to modify any attitude of disinterest, and to offer protection. Destabilizing effects inevitably occur inside the sheltering States. The High Commissariat for the United Nations for Refugees has inaugurated the new Millennium with an esteem that is around 20- 25 million people. Their living conditions are often degrading and all this contributes to increase desperation, perpetuation of hate and recruitments to continue the conflicts. Approximately 1/3 of refugees are Asians, approximately 1/5 Africans and as many are Europeans. ETHNIC CONFLICT An ethnic conflict is generally defined as a violent conflict between different groups due to culture, religion, physical features or language. In the last twenty years they have become the conflicts that more easily degenerate in war with the typical so-called phenomenon of "ethnic cleansing". The two main characteristics are: - the extreme violence against which every device of protection can be activated only with many difficulties. - the war cannot be easily dealt with once the degeneration of the conflict has started, together with the uncontrolled forms of hatred able to reinforce and to perpetuate the reasons of the opponents The territorial divisions on ethnic bases often encourage analogous and non pacific divisions in other multiethnic territories. According to the theorists of the territorial partition on ethnic base, the success depends on the demographic reorganisation of the new territories and on the absence of significant minorities in the new states. Creating such a condition is often utopian, unless cruel policies of capillary population mass transfer are carried out. The ethnic cooperation is possible without the necessity of a clean division. In the crisis zones it is necessary to give way to the negotiations and it is more effective to entrust the mediation task to neutral authorities. The problem is the respect then of negotiates, which are often maintained only in front of strong guarantees of safety from outside. Only a political plan aimed at a possible cohabitation through the improvement of the living conditions of the fighting populations can open the way to a long-lasting peace. To implement the plan, a deep knowledge of the social situation is necessary to defend the interests of all the federate parts. SEPARATISM AND SECESSIONISM The landslide of a great Federation and in a generalized manner a weak state structure can provoke the proliferation of claims and secessionist pushes. It was the case of Ussr, Yugoslavia, Ruanda. To this process of disintegration and state collapsing the ethnic rivalries often rise and can always receive supports on ethnic base also from external sources to the state in crisis (as an example the Albanians of the Kosovo and Albania, the separatism of the Tamil in Sri Lanka and India). In other cases the crashs are consequent to an hard repression (as for the people from Kurdistan in Turkey). Certainly in democratics countries very rarely the crises lead to violent solutions as very rarely rise separatists armed movements, (like in the case of the Ireland of the North and of the Basque separatism). More often in the democratics nations the contrasts are recomposed in pacific way or become claims leading to subsequent concessions of autonomy. Another reasons of many civil wars is to have imposed borders customized to the interests of the colonialists powers to populations who for hundred of years were organizing their own traditions. THE MAFIAS AND CRIME Many of the last wars burst in nerve centers of the drug traffics, arm or diamonds. In many countries from the end of the eighties such traffic are managed by connections of the Mafia, politicians and soldiers: army, intelligence agencies, bureaucrats prosper on the systematic theft and the tangents collected behind the windscreen of the economic crisis. Some wars are the final degeneration, the obliged outlet of a system of criminal economy. In some cases to wake up the ethnic hatred and to raise hell of the national conflict was useful and it is useful to cancel the effects of the unjustifiables accounts in the red of the regimen and to develop a parallel economy great as well as the official economy, if not more. With this illicit traffic of weapons, of smuggling and of drug become rich the associates of the several international Mafias but also the economies of some nations ready to throw themselves like voltures on the ruines of the war situations. DECOLONIZATION The decolonization process has been an historical and political phenomenon that has been come true on global scale and has regarded nearly all Africa, the Medium and Far East with Europe in the role of the colonialist continent. The decolonization concluded the historical process of the imperialism started in the eighties of XIX the century. It was the end of the second world war, fought also in the colonies, to mark the true beginning of the emancipation process. Africa entered into a revolutionary climate in political and economic fields that is still lasting. In all Asia there was a nearly contemporary outbreak of conflicts whether where the colonial power withdrew (India, Birmania pacifically), or where attempted to perpetuate the dominion (Indo-china, Indonesia) or where came up power vacuums at the end of the Japanese interregnum (China, Korea). The countries of the so-called third world were inserted into the logic of contrast between the first two worlds (capitalism and communism as first and second world) with the outbreak on one hand of the nationalist ideology of the national liberation and on the other hand of the ideology of the overwhelmed masses of Marxist Leninist inspiration. The result was to start a condition of permanent war at the peripheres that carried to the building of unsteady nations and after the end of the cold war to the collapse of the weakest states. FOCUS ON SOME SITUATIONS ISRAEL - PALESTINE In 1945 has been constituted the Arab League (Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, TransGiordania, Yemen) in order to favour the birth of a new Arabic state, Palestine subtracting it from Great Britain. At the same time took power the Zionism, a political movement that have been organized in Europe at the end of 1800 and that preconized the return in Palestine of the sons of Israel (the Jews of the European diaspora) and that promoted the constitution of an independent Jewish state. After the extermination suffered by the Jews in the German lager during the most atrocious attempt of genocide committed by the mankind, the pressure on the international community became greater and in 1947 the UN divides Palestine in two states, one Jewish and one Arabic with Jerusalem as international zone. While Great Britain is withdrawn from Palestine the state of Israel is born and the Middle East is transformed in one of the more critical areas of the planet, inflamed by the Israelian Arabic conflict and by the Palestinian issue. The local conflict is sucked in the logic of the Cold War and of bipolarity: Israel is supported and armed by USA while the Arabic nationalism is encouraged and armed by USSR in function antiAmerican. In 1967 the lightning and victorious war of the six days imposes the Israelian hegemony in the area opening the spiny issue of the Palestinian refugees. The Palestinian resistance is structured around to the OLP (Palestine Liberation Organization) guided by Arafat. In 1973 the crisis newly fall down with the aggression without outcome of Egypt and Syria to Israel (war of Kippur). Between intifade and suicidal attacks by one side and indiscriminate slaughters and lightning interventions by the other the situation of tension is still lasting. After some failed attempts to reconciliation and after the death of the Palestinian leader Arafat it seems that some gleam of hope are opened but peace is still far and only the acknowledgment and the constitution of the Palestinian state could succeed to unblock the situation in direction of a long-lasting peace. The lacked resolution of this conflict finally seems to be one of the motivations that guide the recent attacks of the Muslims fondamentalists against the West and against the dominant classes of the moderate Arabic countries considered as friends of the West and feeds therefore a spiral of hate without end interlacing as an example with the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanisthan. AFRICA The frontiers of Africa in contemporary age have been created in order to delimit the colonial possessions of each European power. Therefore the frontiers are political and not physical or ethnic ones, do not separate territories delimited by natural borders or delimiting a territory where a specific people live. The work of the colonialism has in reality divided people and artificially created territories in which live different people. The partition of Africa has had its apogee in the last quarter of the previous century with a competition between the European states in order to gain Africans territories even regulated by the Conference of Berlin of 1884-1885. But already before the so-called age of the colonialism the relationship between Europe and Africa has seen during the period of the slavery the birth of slave states on the coasts with the raid in the inside for get men and women to sell like slaves to the white men. After the end of the second world war the period of decolonization is opened and the frontiers between colonies become frontiers between sovereign states. Innumerable ethnic conflicts and civil wars but has afflicted the Africa of the post-war period, separatists wars, antigovernmental guerrillas, wars on ethnic base, etc. After second world war new ideas and new ferments between the Africans populations were discovered weakening the colonial powers. Africa entered into a revolutionary period in political and economic field that was translated in the appearance of political organized parties. The colonial powers were withdrawn gradually trying but to safeguard just their economic predominion in the several colonized territories. The weakness and the insubstantiality of many of the Africans states born in that period dramatically were revealed by the instability and the frequency of the coups d'état and in some cases from real civil wars. PRODUCTION AND COMMERCE OF WEAPONS Enormous amounts of resources have been dedicated to the planning, construction and maintenance of the nuclear arsenals. The total stock has caught up its apex in 1986 with 69.000 nuclear heads with a potential explosive of 18 billions of tons of TNT and 3,6 tons per each human being!!! To understand this quantitative it is possible to think that in the entire second world war about 6 million tons of explosive have been employed. At the same time the destructive power, the speed, the range and the maneuverability of the conventional crews has been increased. The costs also has been increased, for instance a tank today costs one hundred times more than one employed in 1945, the bombers are 130 times more expensive and so on. It is possible to estimate that the resources dedicated to the planning of new weapons in the world have caught up the 4000 billions of dollars from the end of the second world war since today. Currently annual military expenses (according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute - www.sipri.org - little less than 900 billions in 2003 for the more important weapon systems, excluded the light weapons) not only equal the total expense of the first world war but they exceed the annual military expense of the second world war. Of all the commerce of weapons nearly the two thirds parts are directed towards the underdeveloped nations, contributing to bend their economies under the weight of the debit and absorbing funds that must have other priorities instead. Amazing appears to notice that approximately 80% of all the weapons are sold from the permanent members of the Security Council of the UN. The nation who by far is the greatest exporter of weapons is the USA with 41% of the world-wide commerce in period 1998-2002 followed by Russia (22%), France (9%), Germany and United Kingdom (around to 5% ciascuna). Italy is placed to the eighth place in the sales of great weapon systems with 3% of the total. Italy is at the second world-wide place in the sale of light weapons behind the United States. The greatest purchasers of the great weapon systems have been for the same period China, India and Taiwan. The USA hold the supremacy (together with Israel in this case) also for the greatest total and per person military expense (in 2003 approximately 1.500 dollars per citizen). On the other hand as the worst examples in the percentage rate between military expenses and the social expense we see (SIPRI statistical data) for example in 2002 states as Saudi Arabia (9.8% of military expenses against 5.4% of expenses for the education and 4.2% of expenses for the health), Eritrean (23.5% of military expenses against 4.8% of expenses for the education and 2.8% of expenses for the health), Burundi (7.6% of military expenses against 3.4% of expenses for the education and 1.6% of expenses for the health), Jordan (8.4% of military expenses against 5.0% of expenses for the education and health). The average of the percentage of military expenses in the countries with high income per person is of approximately 4.7% against 4.6% for the education and 4.8% for the health. In the countries with low and medium income per person unfortunately the average of the percentage of military expenses arranges around to 9.7% against 4.9% for the education and 2.9% for the health: in the poorest countries military expenses exceed therefore the sum of expenses for the education and the health. It is enormous therefore the responsibility of the world-wide powers that would have to assume the greater burdens in the resolution of the international controversies and that mainly they would have therefore to contribute to the effectiveness of the policies in favour of the peace that constitute the main motivation of the existence of the same UN. But it is necessary to notice the complementary irresponsibility of the leaders of those nations of the third world: rather than investing in the social development of their own country those leaders choose to enrich the magnates of the military industries building a perverted process without outlets. The purchase of huge quantitatives of weapon systems like helicopters, airplane, ships and tanks would have had eventually sense thinking to international wars, much less or for nothing thinking to the resolution of eventual inner conflicts. Foolish therefore the waste of resources by side of many of the importing states of these weapon systems. The motivations about the search of the peace at any costs remain therefore vain purposes valid just on the paper of the United Nations, they are a pure illusion to which nobody in fact believes or wants to believe, in a situation in which the facts clash with the pronounced and written words that get completely emptied of any true meaning. As seen from the frightful figures quoted before for the world-wide powers the objective to search in the world the peace at any costs is evidently secondary goal regarding the eventual renunciation of the returns of their own military industries. In Italy the war industry had been favorite until the 1990 from little restrictions on the exports and had grown in market niches (small crews, aircrafts trainers, mines, artillery) towards countries like Sudafrica, Iran, Iraq, Libia, Argentine and Brasil. To the apex of the increase, with law 1885/90 it came the choice to prohibit the sale to countries in conflict or in which important violations of the human rights were present. But in the last years in Italy and inside the same European Union for the competition in the higher technological fields strong pushed have been carried out to overtake that type of legislations. L'interesse per una vittima della propria parte č molto piů forte di quello per cento vittime di un paese lontano. Per minimizzare l'impatto sull'opinione pubblica interna pur favorevole all'intervento ma in un qualche modo sensibile alle vittime della propria parte, le guerre moderne sono diventate guerre a "zero morti": a morire non sono quasi piů i soldati, soprattutto se occidentali. Il fatto che muoiano quasi esclusivamente civili č un problema per chi la guerra la subisce, i cosiddetti "danni collaterali". HUMAN DEVELOPMENT, DISTRIBUTION OF THE WEALTH AND WAR According to the data of the World Bank, the world spends per year 900 billions of dollars for the defense and 60 billions of dollars for the development. The Countries that show the lowest levels of income per capita, mostly localized in Africa, in the south of Asia and in Latin America, present a productive structure in prevailing measure circumscribed to agriculture; on the contrary the richest countries enjoy diversified and widely industrialized economies. The approach of the rich Countries to globalization is often neoliberalist when it'a a question of liberalize the market access and the economies of the poor world, but it is hyper-protectionist in defense of the inner productions. The neoliberalist label shows then all its incoherence if confronted to the politics of immigration. The circulation of goodses and of capitals between the rich Countries and towards the poor ones is favoured in any way, but a true barrier is attempted to be erected, also against the real economic interests of the enterprises, in order to hinder the circulation of persons towards the North of the world. The impoverishment of the medium classes alters the political behaviors and becomes the tank of populists movements, xenophobes, favours closing attitudes and hostilities towards immigrates and foreigners, it increases the demand of security. UN data: It has been calculated that in 1800 the gap between the more advanced economies and the poor ones it was 5 to 1. In 1900 the ratio had become 13 to 1. 33 to 1 in 1950. The most updated statistics about the civilization differences are chilling: currently (2004 UNDP report) if the annual medium income per capita of United States is attested to 35,750 Dollars and the one of the last country of the world-wide ranking, the Sierra Leone, is attested to 520 Dollars to the year, the ratio is beyond 68 to 1. In the world, 20% of the population consume 86% of all the private consumption. Only considering oil, United States (5% of the world-wide population) consume 25% of the production. Nearly a third party of the world-wide population, approximately two billions of persons in 2000, lives under the threshold of poverty with less than two dollars per day. Approximately a billion and two hundred million individuals (always year 2000) has not access to drinkable water. Two billions and 742 million do not dispose hygienic services and sewer systems. To fight AIDS (in last 20 years twenty million persons are died and 38 millions have been infected) the UN have invested 4 billions of dollars in 2004, the war in Iraq costs 200 billions dollars per year, in the four years of the Bush presidency the annual military expenses are doubled exceeding 500 billions dollars to which have to be added approximately thirty billions for the national security... 40% of the world-wide population do not have electric power. Half of the wealth of the planet is possessed from few hundreds of individuals. The United States hold 44% of the world-wide wealth, Africa 0,4%. According to a calculation made by UN, it would be sufficient 4% of the wealth of the planetary multimillionaires in order to supply elementary education, medical cures and feeding to all the poor ones of the world. The last report of UNICEF informs that five million children die per year for hunger, 30000 per day for diseases. In 2002 11 million children under the 5 years has died. In 2002 still approximately 852 millions of people suffer the hunger or are undernourished. To natural calamities, to lack of agricultural infrastructures and to infertility of too much squeezed lands have often to be added the causes due to wars with precises strategies to reduce to hunger the opponents destroying or robbing the alimentary resources, destroying the local markets, poisoning the water resources or mining the fields. The data about the human development are calculated by UNDP with the HDI index (Human Development Index), the index of human development. The index of human development HDI is focused on three measurable dimensions of the human development combining the measurement of the life hope, the scholastic registration and the knowledge to read and to write and finally the measurement of income. The economic increase is obviously the main factor that governs the generation of resources for education, for health and for reduction of poverty. In Africa AIDS is decimating the adult population that is reflected in a regression of the life hope. The african countries also because of that show the lowest levels of the index of human development HDI. In september 2000 the Millennium Summit of UN has been carried out and 189 countries have adopted the Millennium Declaration containing the goals of development for the millenium. These goals have the term of 2015. They are: - to uproot the extreme poverty and the hunger in the world - to universally achieve the primary education - to promote the equal opportunities and to give greater power to women - to reduce infantile mortality - to improve the health of mothers - to fight AIDS, the malaria, and the other diseases - to guarantee the sustainable environment - to guarantee economic aids globally between the nations for the development Nowadays the situation regarding the attainment of the goals of the Millennium Declaration not only previews several situations of trend that do not carry to the attainment of the goals but shows remarkable regressions regarding the departure positions. Useless to say that the cases of greater regression are those, like in Iraq, in which there are situations of wars, to testimony the fact, if necessary, that in war all the possible indicators of human development suffer dramatic decrements, and also numbers testify if necessary that all the population suffers in its complex. The distribution of the income - that is measured, traditionally, with the so-called Index of Gini (an index that assumes value 0 for a Country where everybody has the same income and value 1 for a country where all the income is concentrated in a single person) - shows large variations on world-wide scale and also between the more developed countries themselves. According to the report 2004 of UNPD, presenting data collected in various moments, in the world the nations that show in their inside the smallest economical inequalities are those with an index of Gini around 0,25: Japan (0,249), some countries of the North Europe (Denmark 0,247, Sweden 0,25, Belgium 0,25, Norway 0,258), and some countries former-Communists of middle Europe (Hungary 0,244, Czech Republic 0,254, Slovakia 0,258). Situations with greater inequalities are found in the South America with an index of Gini little under 0,6 (between them Brasil 0,591, Colombia 0,576, Chile 0,571, Paraguay 0,568), while the indices beyond the 0,6 that signal the maximum economical inequalities regard some countries of Africa (Namibia 0,707, Lesotho 0,632, Botswana 0,63, the Mountain range Lion 0,629, the Republic Centrafricana 0,613, the South Africa 0,593, etc). The first cause of poverty is social injustice and the bad government of whom protects that. The poverty does not generate automatically war or terrorism but lot of poverty in the population constitutes a formidable ground for propaganda and manipulation made by who wants to take advantage of that. Does it exists a direct relation between the distribution of the world-wide income and the development and the causes of war? The background idea is that if the populations had more job, more well-being and more hopes are less probable that are converted to violent or warlike behaviors. Perhaps there is not a direct and recognizable relation of cause-effect but if is true that the fight for the control of resources is one of the fundamental causes if not the fundamental cause for rising of the conflicts, this fight becomes still more pitiless when it is carried out between nations crosswise or inside nations that are the poorest. Moreover the perspective and the dream to approach the wealth of the richest countries emphasize the migratory flow from the poor countries to the richest ones with the creation also inside the rich countries of ghettos, of multitude of poor, possible situations of conflict that need to be governed in order to not lead into dangerous conflicts on ethnic or religious base. The asymmetric development between the people, with rich who become more and more rich and the poor who become more and more poor, beyond representing an authentic failure of the goals enunciated by UN and by the universal declaration of the human rights, represent an intolerable planetary injustice that if prolonged to infinite will increase the unfavorable probabilities to the pacific cohabitation between the people and inside the nations. The data on the health of the planet and on the conditions of billions of human beings would have to make to understand that the ethical route is also an absolutely realistic and not utopian requirement, in alternative to unimaginable natural and social disasters. The well-being besieged by desperation will be more and more uncertain and precarious and more and more high fencings and walls would have to be imagined by who wanted to maintain or to get worse this situation. In function of the fact that the mass consumerism has greater chances to work well in the tranquillity, against the uneasy and impending reality of the underdeveloped world, the tendency of the rich western societies is that one to take typical provisions as besieged fortresses. The search of a different division of the wealth and of the resources is considered an utopy. The alternative to utopy could be no more the progress of the current development model, but its autodistruction. HOW THE WAR IS COMMUNICATED The military logic in the modern democracies needs concrete explanations but also theoretical support and ethically and politically acceptable motivations by the public opinion. That does not prevent in the modern democracies that take place manifestations clearly dissenting from the war by great part of the population if not by the majority. The conflicts of these years have been therefore connected with military theories with pretension of ethical foundation, like those of "humanitarian bombing" (Kosovo), "preventive war" (Iraq), "self-defence war" (Afghanistan), "right of interference on the sovereignty of the states", led back afterwards to the necessity of the pure and simple war against the enemy, the terrorism and the "gangster states". The interest for a victim of the own part is much stronger than that one for one hundred victims of a far country. In order to diminish the impact on the inner public opinion also favorable to the intervention but in a some way sensitive to the victims of the own part, the modern wars have become wars with "zero died": to die they are not nearly more the soldiers, above all if western. The fact that nearly exclusively civil die is a problem for whom suffers the war, the so-called "collaterals damages". With the aim to justify and minimize has been invented the category of the "collaterals damages". In this category in the war against the Serbia for example are included the frightful pollution of the territory for effect of the bombs enriched by impoverished uranium, the errors of target on the civilians, the infrastructure destructions, roads, bridges and even hospitals, in the war against the Iraq between the "collaterals damages" have been included civil victims in thousands. There are groups of pressure connected with the military industry, the production of weapons, the technologies of the emergency, the systems of communication that have a weight in the political decisions. These groups of pressure act on the informative system, influence their decisions taking advantage sometimes of lies conceived in relation to interests and strategies functional to carry out the prefigured military intervention. The duty of a journalist would be that one to propose a possible and honest truth constructed through the direct observation and the comparison between many truths and various sources. But a tangle of falsifications continually wraps and distorts the facts. The reality is deformed by the informative system that does not tell it but it explains it and it comments inserting it into an often ideological context of interpretations and versions prefabricated for the public opinion in which that truth become diluted, is decomposed, whether it does not is upset. The war reporters are mixed with other voices that assume greater importance, the images of the international circuit, the politicians with their declarations, the commentators and the analysts telling the war scene. An increasing manipulation of the information renders more and more impossible to understand the vicissitudes, to distinguish between aggressors and assaulted, to resist to the temptation to demonize from time to time only one of the party to the case except that few months later to turn upside down the parties. "Experts" who have seen the war in television, in cinema (or in the videogames) multiply themselves and they explain the reasons of it like if they were on the battlefield, like if they had personally known behind their writing desks the dramas of the involved populations, like if they could swear on their better future as bombed. From the night of the times the truth in war is darkened by the machine of propaganda of the combatants, by the difficulty to collect controlable news on the field and from errors of the reporters. The same war propaganda is an arm of mass deceit. It is used to say that in war the first victim is the truth: therefore the information assumes a relief place between the victims of the conflict and it is reduced to pure instrument to search the consent. The truth on the wars and the massacres that inflame the world always arrives too much late that is when it is not useful anymore, when it is not more dangerous and when the disaster has already happened. If the news is awkward, the journalist who reports it and the same news is object of systematic demolition. Then logics of alignment and conditionings are incoming and the journalists can be placed in front of the choice between the search of the truth and the more or less convinced adhesion to the reasons of the own country. Blackmail of ideological type are incoming in order to prevent or to cancel the impact of a critical judgment. And when nobody succeeds to assess the truthfulness of some facts, these continue to swim in a strange limbo, with the only goal to confirm a situation or a prejudgment. When reading the speeches of the leaders during the recents or pasts conflicts, it can be noticed that the war is always right for all the combatants and that the aggressor is always the other one. And all are convinced that God is close to their own part. The combatants in all the ages assert to have worked for the peace and that they did not want the war but the triumph of the justice. "Si vis pacem para bellum", if you want the peace prepares the war, it said itself to the times of the roman empire. "We have entered into a war that we did not want" - said Adolf Hitler - "and the cause of the Reich is the one of the justice, the prosperity, the progress and the peace for the entire human community." The war propaganda demonizes the enemy. In the last years Milosevic, Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein have been painted from time to time like the new "Hitlers". And the same caricature has been declared at the opposite to the presidents of the Americans Clinton and Bush by part of the same personages. And the public? To the power of television is added the power of the sources that are credible on principle: great press agencies and institutional spokespersons set up models of political, cultural, religious adhesion. The margin of the doubt is limited to the experts, to the connoisseurs of the problem, to some journalists who take care of the vicissitude but it is excluded for the great public who listens to the news. In the age in which it is attempted to assert to planetary level the possible maximum of the human rights and the principles of democracy, the manipulation of the public opinions touches dangerously regressive levels. The global village of the free communication allows the diffusion of languages and news accessible to everybody but it produces a Babylon of lies and messages of which often it turns out impossible both the verification and the refutation. By now the press head clerk of a minister or the spokesperson of an army in war can make whichever affirmation without worrying to get refuted and by now without having to attend bad questions. Moreover in the informative circuit many journalists are deputies to always follow the same personages, from the ministers to the state heads. The result is the custom of relationships that become also friendly and confidential, often functional to spread the news but often of obstacle to their verification. The more the journalist is in good relationships with the source the more will be easy to better take advantage of it against the colleagues obtaining previews, backstage, unknown, interviews. Unfortunately sometimes also the truth is killed. In the more recent conflicts the same journalists sent as reporter in the territory of war are more and more becoming a target like the soldiers and have been kidnapped or killed. The war reporters can't carry out the job on the field and are blocked in theirs hotels with impressive protecting forces, have left the reflectors to the figures of the journalists embedded with the same combatant forces that for obvious reasons have the tendency to report a very partial vision of what is happening. HOW THE WAR IS COMMUNICATED: THE CASE OF THE WAR IN IRAQ The 11th of september 2001 a suicidal attack led in the territory of the USA has upset the recent world history causing repercussions that last since now. The attacks involved the diversion of four airliners that crashed into the World Trade Center of New York, into the Pentagon to Washington and in Shanksville, in Pennsylvania causing the loss of approximately 3.000 human beings. After short time, the government of the United States gave the guilt for the attacks to Al Qaeda, a fondamentalist Muslim group responsible of many other terroristic actions. This carried to the so-called war against the terror that included the invasion of the Afghanistan led by the army of the United States in the October 2001 and to the successive deposition of the taleban government with the support of a world-wide coalition and the OK given by the UN. Also the invasion of Iraq and the capture of Saddam Hussein led by the Anglo-American forces in 2003 have been ascribed by the United States to this war against the terrorism, although the opportunity of this choice had been, and is still, very controversial. The conflict in Iraq has represented a turning point in the long history of the lies of war and of the manipulation of the public opinion. The case of the weapons of mass destruction owned by Saddam Hussein would seem to have been an enormous manipulation, if not admitting an incredible and unforgivable levels of incompetence from who have decided and put into effect such war. The informative poisoning is begun much before the hostilities on the field and had turned out functional to the same beginning of the hostilities. Who tends to doubt regarding the motivations proposed to start the war supposes that before it had decided to make the war and then have been researched the motivations in order to justify that. In name of the preventive war has been therefore triggered a process to the intentions (the possible use of weapons of mass destruction ), based on the existence of weapons never found (the same weapons of mass destruction) and carried out through a campaign of pressure tending to delegitimize the governments opposing to the intervention, to brand like traitor or unreliable the criticizing governments and to exalt like champions of the western values the governments in tune with American politics, to even demolish the credibility of the UN inspectors who had not found the famous weapons of mass destruction. It has been carried out a campaign in order to demolish the pacifism, the contrary positions to the war were considered like allied to Saddam. "Only an idiot or a French doubts of the evidences against Saddam", wrote the New York Times, then regretting to have supported the reasons of the war. Before the war the category of the idiots has been increased day after day adding the pacifists, the young Not Global people, the leaders like Chirac and Schroeder, millions of people demonstrating in the public squares. The investigating committees of the Senate of USA have then widely refuted the existence of weapons of mass destructions in Iraq and the connection between the regimen of Saddam and the the attacks of the 11th of september (already the reports of the same CIA had previously declared like indemonstrable the presumed relationships of Saddam Hussein with Al Qaeda). After the preventive propaganda to legitimize the necessity of the conflict and conditioning the fates of the conflict itself, a following propaganda has continued. This following propaganda tends to acknowledge the critics, to admit that the things were not like declared before the war, to assert new ways of legitimation. Today is admitted that the weapons of mass destruction have never existed as the presumed connections with Al Qaeda were false. But from the point of view of those who have decided and imposed the war become important to demonstrate to have had reason, to convince people subsequently that the end of a dictatorship is however a positive fact, and that it has been contributed to the democratization with the miracle of the elections in Iraq, the final chapter of the free and democratic Iraq like the good end in the fables. It is a fact that still today million Americans think that the Iraq directly has been involved in the the attacks of the 11th of september and that it possessed arsenals ready to being hurled against the USA. Nevertheless do not lack and are not lacked in the same USA personages of great impact on the public who have proposed and explained the various truth of the facts in easy comprehensible way: John Kerry, candidate to the last Presidential elections USA as an example has asserted that "To attack the Iraq for the 11th of september would have been like having attacked Mexico after Pearl Harbour". The re-election of Bush demonstrates that USA feel and have voted in majority like a country in war and in this situation the majority of the Americans do not care about the image that the other members of the international community can have matured of USA as a result of this war. EFFECTS OF THE WAR IN IRAQ Kofi Annan - general secretary of the UN - in the annual Assembly of the UN has defined the US intervention in Iraq as "illegal" and implemented without the support of the great majority of the international community. Many have approved this illegality judgment, but the countries that have made the war. If this illegality judgment had had a continuation of coherence and logical foundation, would be considered illegal also the occupation of the country, the bombing and arrests of mass, while would have had an international semblance of legality the armed resistance of the iraqi combatants . Moreover soldiers and politicians of the western coalition could be proceeded as responsible for the thousands of civil victims, one hundred thousand, according to esteem for defect. The only effect of its denunciation of illegality is that Kofi Annan has been practically been silenced and confined in the stamped category of antiAmericanism. The war in Iraq has divided the friends of the USA (for example France and Germany were unfavorable to the intervention) and joined its enemies. In the iraqi crisis, the United States have not left alternative to UN: "or to support the US choices or to make alone". The alternatives to the war, like the inspections of the UN, has been mortified and delegitimized. The iraqi crisis imposes to ask if there were other practicable ways in order to eliminate or to make impotent the regimen of Saddam introduced as a clear danger for the USA and the entire world. The Iraq of Saddam Hussein did not seem to represent a serious threat for the USA because both attacks against the United States and the programs of weapons of mass destruction were not being prepared. The justifications of the intervention to spread to the public opinion were changed in progress, when the motivations to start the war were no more sustainable. In the USA the several investigating committees have documented the lies used to start the war. The American press and important and famous personages - too much late to avoid the war - has finally amplified these facts evidencing also the dissenting positions and at least leaving the doubt about the real motivations of the war in Iraq, before starting it and after. This can succeed thanks to the fact that the USA remain altogether to the vanguard of the group of countries that present consolidates standard of democracy, civil rights, judicial system, free information. But after the re-election of Bush, the Americans have continued to ask emergency to the chief of the White House and seem to be unrealistic the immediate withdrawal of the Americans soldiers from the Iraq, apart from the considerations with respect to the stability or instability that would be obtained in the area in case of eventual immediate withdrawal of the troops. The USA army as an example maintain still 30.000 soldiers in Korea of the South also after 50 years from the war. Strategic reasons in a logical of high power join themselves to the tangle of motivations and interests created in Iraq. Along the ways of oil flew a lot of the blood that has been poured because of wars, civil and social guerrillas, fights, criminal dictatorships, extreme terrorism. This both for the direct or indirect control of the oil reservoirs and also for the construction of oil pipe-lines towards friends ports or countries. Today oil is the most decisive factor discriminating between rich states and poor states: who possesses it or controls its production or distribution has the main key for the industrial and economic progress. Often the mass media of all the industrialized countries have silenced or have minimized with hipocrisy the oil interests of the rich states and of the multinational corporations. Great part of the motivations that are behind to a war like that one in Iraq or part of them could easily be simply explained thinking to the fight for the control of the iraqi oil reservoirs (and world-wide). In the past the same USA in function of the attainment of tactical and strategic goals have financed and armed in various occasions and in several parts of the world dictatorial regimes and combatant groups, at first between them the regimen of Saddam Hussein in function anti Iranian after the fondamentalist revolution and Osama Bin Laden too in antiSoviet function in Afghanistan. Because of that, the demolition of the regimen of Saddam Hussein, the export of the democracy and the so-called war against terror, can be considered as the only motivations useful to explain what it has happened in Iraq? The more or less direct control of the second oil reservoirs of the world (those in Iraq are second after the reservoirs of Saudi Arabia) and the business of the reconstruction seem to represent an economic engine not easy to be abandoned by the strategists who lead the fates of the first military and industrial power of the world. The position of the Iraq and the maintenance of good collaborating relationships with the future freely elected government of this country represent an objective of decisive and strategically important positioning in the heart of that Arabic and muslim world from which some apparently insanes splinters came out deciding to declare war the 11th of september to the USA (and to the allies, as the attacks of Madrid and London could explain), apart from the more or the little important implications and connotations of fanatical and religious type. An Italian contingent is present in Iraq with the goal to maintain the peace being part of the Multinational Force led by Americans and English whom occupies the iraqi territory. The Italians has suffered in Nassirya a suicidal attack by the iraqi resistance that has provoked the dead of 19 Italian soldiers, the firsts died after the second world war in military clashes. And after Madrid and London also Italy is expecting possible attacks in its own territory. The government of center-right has not followed the Spanish example of withdrawal of the troops in spite of the firm opposition both of the forces of opposition of center-left in Parliament and of wide strata of the population in the Italian public squares. In june 2004 the Security Council of the UN then has someway ratified the situation, trying with priority to rebuild a new agreement of the greater world-wide powers after the fracture created at the beginning of the war, on the base of a plan for Iraq. Therefore has been adopted the resolution n. 1546 with the attempt to create a shared path for the future of Iraq, with an evolution that previews a wide cooperation between the iraqi government and the leaders of the multinational force, precise stages for the first elections (December 2004) in order to elect an assembly and a temporary government with the task to produce the Constitution of Iraq before the new elections previewed in the month of December 2005. In the meanwhile as a result of suicidal attacks and of military interventions the counting of the dead men in the earth of former Babylon grows daily to the excess, leaving a tragic halo however on any kind of path of stabilization that will be built. After the 11th september 2001 in New York, the attacks in the heart of Europe the 11th of March 2004 in Madrid and the 7th of July 2005 in London seem to be more or less directly connected with what has happened in Afghanisthan and in Iraq. Tetre and dramatic perspectives appears in the evolution of this situation that someone defines like a third world war and a crash of civilizations. The terroristic threat and the Muslim fundamentalism are sufficient reasons to pepetuare a logic of military crash? The dialogue between various cultures and civilizations would not be more useful to the governance of the planet and to the solution of the problems that threaten it? Has a logical sense the walls of hostilities that risk to separate the masses of Muslims who already live in great number in the European societies? If the idea that behind to every immigrant can be hidden a terrorist is the product of an hysterical propaganda, of cultural and ideological simplifications, of a media conditioning, the ferocity of the terrorists risks but to flatten and to accredit the image of the Muslim world, to discredit the moderates, to delay the evolution of the Islam, to put in crisis governments and the moderates Arabic countries. The military reaction of the West and the terrorism emphasize the conflict inside the muslim societies between the fondamentalist minority and the moderate majority. The challenge is to help the muslim masses to reject the horrible crimes that are committed in the name of Allah and according to monstrous interpretations of the Koran. This aid have to found itself on the dialogue, on the reconciliation with the human factor, on the shared spread of universal values, on a political and economic cooperation that breaks the tragic gear of revenges and injustices, based on a conception of rights and respect of the human life. Tortures of prisoners, slaughters of children, bombings of villages, outbreaks of trains or buses clearly put in discussion all this. Many texts tend to consider the reasons of the peace and the sustainable development as ingenuous and unrealistic and the pacifism becomes therefore a synonym of stupidity and compliance. The logical jump is therefore to consider the war like logic and rational and the peace like unrealistic and irrational. The reasons of the peace are in some cases considered as complicity with the enemy. Today like yesterday, the eventuality of the war and the necessity to prepare it continue to being the dominant message. It is necessary to reflect on the reasons of hate against the West, on the amniotic fluid of injustices, deportations, bombings and slaughters in which the terrorists have born. It is necessary to remember that also thousands of iraqi mothers cry the death of thousands of children killed by years of embargo or by the bombs. It is necessary to ask that what pushes women and mothers from Cecenia or from Palestine to immolate themself in suicidal attacks. To cut the head to an unarmed hostage is monstrous as to make oneself explode on a bus of civilians, but a bomb on a hospital or a festivity of wedding is perhaps less serious? The terrorism does not have alibi neither justifications, but it is not tragic to think that while non-existent weapons of mass destruction were searched that it was clear that a war made with the modalities of that one in Iraq would have multiplied the kamikazes and the terrorism? It has to be affirmed the inefficiency of an exclusively military answer that has had the effect to multiply the situations of injustice and to multiply the terrorism actions. In order to fight a terrorism without borders, supernational, often inserted and infiltrated in our own societies, fed through the western financial channels and having transactions with the West (like the case of the Bin Laden family with the Bush family), the road of the conventional war, the bombings with thousands of civil victims has been chosen rather than strengthening the intelligence (coordination of the police of the world, control of the money flows, special forces), the use of the diplomacy and a different political and economic attention towards the Arabic world. To export the freedom could be a noble principle but to make it bombing the civilians and with the illusion of having God from the own part turns out catastrophic just according to the basic principles of that pluralistic democracy for definition that would be claimed to export. THE CULT OF WAR VS THE CULTURE OF THE PEACE The cult of war reduces the border between politics and military logic, because in conflict situation politics must answer first to the need of emergency, to protection of the territory and of its system of rules and convictions, therefore it rises the necessity to raise new barriers, to redefine the own identity respect to that one of the others, perceived however as different and sometimes as hostile. Politics become hostage of the emergency, of the fear, of a new and misunderstood patriotism, of a new and misunderstood religious sense. The cult of war changes inevitably the hierarchy of values and of priorities and the other challenges of our time go to the second place, the development, the atmosphere, the control of science and of technology, the diffusion of the rights and the social justice. The cult of war steal physical, intellectual, economic energies to the efforts in order to build a more vivibile and more fair planet. The cult of war diminishes the values of the solidarity and of tolerance, it silences the dissent and leaves unsolved the central topic of the equilibrium between economic development and social development. Submitted to logic of war, conditioned from the terrorism emergency and from the question of safety, politics render narrower and complicated the space of the democracy and therefore the relationship between state and individuals. THE CHAMPIONS OF PEACE In this short review of "Champions of peace" are inserted some pieces drawn from public works of some more or less famous personalities in Italy or in foreign country. This review does not have any pretension of thoroughness and it is concentrating on the selection of the contents more than on the personages. The text pieces proposed must be contextualized to the age in which they have been created but it is interesting to observe as often maintain their relevance universally. Being moreover fragments the contestualization must regard also the entirety of the texts from which they have been extrapolates. Fortunately many representatives of humanity have operated in favour of peace, not only leaving texts to the posterity but with their daily job. The selection of the proposed personages beyond not being in any case exhaustive have to be considered therefore only instrumental and illustrative, as testimonial for all those who could be also considered champions of peace even being little famous or unknown and that acted far away from the reflectors and without gratifications if not the personal fact to have worked in the perspective of a better world. Bertold Brecht (from "Poetries against the war") The war that will come is not the first one. There have been other wars before. At the end of the last one there were victors and vanquished Between vanquished the poor people went hungry. Between the victors went hungry poor people equally. At the moment to march many do not know that at their head marchs the enemy. The voice that commands them is the voice of the enemy. And who speaks about the enemy is himself the enemy. My brother is a conqueror. Our people needs space. And for us to take lands on lands is an old dream. And the space that has conquered for himself is on mounts of the Guadarrama It is a meter and eighty of length one and fifty of depth. Fedor Michailovic Dostoevskij (from "Memories of subsoil") The civilization has made the man basely and awfully bloody-thirsty. Before it saw in the spilling of blood a justice action and massacred with the calm conscience. Now, also considering the spilling of blood abominable, to this abomination we abandon ourselves equally and more than before.... Albert Einstein (from "As I see the world" and from "Science and civilization") The arms race between USA and USSR, introduced like an emergency issue, reveals from both parts an hysterical attitude. Behind a wall of mysteries we have perfected means of mass destruction. The people are victims of a disastrous illusion. Formidable financial powers are concentrated in the hands of soldiers. The youth is militarized. The persons who profess independent ideas are subjected to intimidating maneuvers. Radio, press, school work in order to indoctrinate the public opinion. The field of the information is folded to the military necessities. I deeply despise who is happy for marching in ranks and in formations following a music: That man for error has received a brain. The commanded heroism, the foolish body to body, the inauspicious nationalist spirit, how i hate all this! And how much the war appears to me ignoble and despicable! I estimate the humanity so much to be persuaded that the maleficent ghost of war would be disappeared since long time if the common sense of the people were not systematically corrupted by means of school and press, by the speculators of the political world and by the business community. We must realize that the powerful industrial groups interested in producing weapons in all countries are against the pacific regulations of the international controversies. In this age of democratics regimes the fate of the people depends on the people themselves; this fact must be present in the spirit of everyone in every moment. In periods as this one the discontent generates hatred, and hatred pushes to actions of violence and revolt, and often also to war. Therefore the uneasiness and the evil produce new uneasiness and new evils. The leaders of the nations carry the weight of tremendous responsibilities. It is not only the technical problem to ensure and to conserve peace, but also the important task to educate and to illuminate the minds. We must clearly know what is in the game, and which is our debit towards that freedom that our ancestors have conquered for us at price of hard fights. Mohandas Gandhi (from "What violence is not" and from "The force of the nonviolence") I approve the complete nonviolence and I consider it possible in the relationships between man and man and between nation and nation; but this is not a renunciation to every concrete fight against the injustice. On the contrary in my conception the violence is a kind of fight against injustice more active and more concrete than retaliation, whose effect is only that one to increase injustice. I support a mental opposition, and therefore moral, against injustice. I try with all my might to blunt the sharpening to the sword of the tyrant, but not opposing to it a more sharpen arm, but disappointing its expectation of a physical resistance from me. The moral resistance that I will oppose will serve to confuse it. At first will confuse it and at the end will force it to acknowledge the injustice, acknowledgment that will not humiliate it, indeed it will ennoble it. The fact that there are still many alive men in the world demonstrates that this is not founded on the force of weapons but on the force of truth or love. In spite of all the wars that have been had in the world, this continue to exist. Democracy, as soon as is supported from the violence, it cannot make the interest of the weak people or protect them. My conception of democracy is that under it the weakest must have the same possibilities of the strongest. This can happen only through the nonviolence. The western democracy with its currents characteristics, is a diluted shape of nazism or fascism. At most it is a windscreen to mask the nazi and fascist tendencies of imperialism. Why today there is the war, if not for longing the partition of the resources of the world? The truth and the nonviolence constitute the most powerful force of the world. The force of the spirit grows continuously and is infinite. This spiritual force resides in all the human beings, men, women and children, apart from the color of the skin. In some people it is drowsed but it can be waked up with an adequate education. Without the acknowledgment of this truth and without the due effort to realize it there is not escape to autodistruction. The violence cannot be eliminated by the violence. Mankind can only get rid from violence resorting to nonviolence. Hatred can be defeated only with love. Answering to hatred with hatred nothing but the largeness and the depth of same hatred is increasing. Our collaboration lacks when the governors provoke dislike to us. This is the passive resistance. The passive resistance is a method to ensure the rights by means of the own suffering. No man can declare of being absolute right or that a given thing is unfair because that one is its opinion; but it is evil for him until when it will be its intentional judgment. Therefore it is convenient that he does not make what recognizes as unfair despite of any consequences. This is the secret in order to catch up the force of mind. Until when it will be alive the superstition that the man must obey to unfair laws we will not be able to say that the roots of their slavery have become parched. Only who resorts to the passive resistance can extirpate such superstition. Do You believe that a coward can never disobey to a law that thinks as unfair? Giovanni XXIII (from the Encyclical "Pacem in terris") It is painful to notice as in the economically more developed political communities gigantic armaments have been created and are continuing to be created; as to such aim is absorbed an high percentage of spiritual energies and of economic resources. The armaments are used to be justified adducing the reason that if a peace today is possible cannot be that one peace founded on the equilibrium of the forces. Therefore if a political community arm itself, the other political communities must keep in step and arm themselves. If a political community produces atomic weapons, the others must also produce atomic weapons of equal destructive power. As consequence the human beings live under the incubus of an hurricane that could break out at any time with an unimaginable impetus. Justice, wisdom and humanities ask that the arms race is arrested, that simultaneously and mutually the already existing armaments are reduced, that the nuclear weapons are banned and finally that the disarmament integrated with effective controls is reached. To the peace that stands on the equilibrium of the armaments let's replace the principle of mutual confidence. It is alien from reason to think that the war is suited for repairing the violated rights. The relationships between the political communities, as those between the single human beings, have to be regulated not making resort to the force of the weapons, but in the light of the reason, and that is the truth, the justice, the operating solidarity, the freedom. The higher and qualified assemblies have to consider in depth the problem of the pacific resetting of the relationships between the political communities on the world-wide level: this resetting have to be founded on the mutual confidence, the sincerity in the negotiations, the fidelity to the assumed engagements. Martin Luther King (from "March towards the freedom" and from "I have been on the top of a mountain") The suffering has immense educational possibilities and of renewal. The suffering is infinitely more effective of the law of the jungle in converting the opponent and make him hear the voice of the reason. The nonviolent refuses to shoot against its opponent and to hate it. At the centre of the nonviolence there is the principle of love. The oppressed do not have to let themselves win from the temptation to feel rancour and to abandon themselves to hatred. To answer to offenses with offenses would make nothing but to increase the existence of hatred in the world. It is necessary in life to find someone that it is provided of good sense and sufficient morality to break the chain of hatred; and this can be only obtained with projecting the ethics of love to the centre of our life. We want to defeat injustice, not those white men who are unjust. The men are speaking about peace and about war since years. But now they cannot anymore limit themselves to speak of. In this world the choice is not anymore between violence and nonviolence; it is between nonviolence and not existence. This is the point in which we find ourselves today. When the slaves join themselves it is the beginning of the liberation from the slavery. Now let's maintain the unity. Injustice is the issue. But somewhere I read about freedom of reunion. Somewhere I read about freedom of speech. Somewhere I read about freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for the rights. John Lennon (from "Imagine") Imagine there's no countries, It is'nt hard to do, Nothing to kill or die for, No religion too, Imagine all the people living life in peace... You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one, I hope some day you'll join us, And the world will live as one. Primo Levi (from "The other people's trade") The word differentiates us from animals: we must learn to make good use of words. Thousands and million years ago minds much more rough of ours have resolved more arduous problems. We must make feel more strongly the whispering that rises from the bottom, also in the countries where to whisper is prohibited. It is a whispering that not only gushes from the fear but also from the sense of guilt of a generation. We must amplify it. We must suggest, propose, impose little obvious ideas to the men who guide us, and these are ideas that every good merchant knows: that the agreement is the better transaction, and that in the long term the good mutual faith is the thinnest of the astuteness. Nelson Mandela (from "Let a new age dawn") These great masses will have turned their backs on the grave insult to human dignity which described some as masters and others as servants, and transformed each into a predator whose survival depended on the destruction of the other. The value of our shared reward will and must be measured by the joyful peace which will triumph. Thus shall we live, because we will have created a society which recognises that all people are born equal, with each entitled in equal measure to life, liberty, prosperity, human rights and good governance. Such a society should never allow again that there should be prisoners of conscience nor that any person's human right should be violated. Neither should it ever happen that once more the avenues to peaceful change are blocked by usurpers who seek to take power away from the people, in pursuit of their own, ignoble purposes. This must be a world of democracy and respect for human rights, a world freed from the horrors of poverty, hunger, deprivation and ignorance, relieved of the threat and the scourge of civil wars and external aggression and unburdened of the great tragedy of millions forced to become refugees. Let the strivings of us all, prove Martin Luther King Jr. to have been correct, when he said that humanity can no longer be tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war. Lorenzo Milani (from the "Letter to the military chaplains"). If you have the right to divide to the world in Italians and foreigners, then I will say to you, that in your sense, I do not have native land and I claim the right to divide the world in disinherited and oppressed on one side, privileged and oppressors on the other side. The firsts are my native land, the others my foreigners. And if you have the right, without being recalled by the diocesan Curia, to teach that Italians and foreigners can lawfully indeed heroically butcher each other, then I claim the right to say that also the poor ones can and must fight the rich ones. And at least in the choice of the means I'm better than you: the weapons that you approve are horribles machines to kill, to mutilate, to destroy, to make orphans and widows. The only weapons that I approve are noble and bloodless: the strike and the vote. Who defended more the native land and the honour of the native land: those that objected or those that obeying made our native land hateful to all the civil world? Say what exactly you have taught to the soldiers. Obedience at all costs? And if the orders were the bombing of civilians, an action of reprisal against an unarmed village, the summary execution of partisans, the use of the atomic, bacteriological, chemical weapons, the torture, the execution of hostages, the summaries processes for simples suspicions, the decimations, a war of evident aggression, the order of an official rebellious to the sovereign people, the repression of popular manifestations? Nevertheless these things and many others are the daily bread of every war. In front of the young people that watch us do not make dangerous confusions between the good and the evil, between the truth and the error, between the death of an aggressor and that one of its victim. If you want we say: we pray for those poor devils who, poisoned by a propaganda of hate without their fault, are sacrificing themselves only for the misunderstood concept of native land treading the other nobles humans ideals without perceiving it. Rita Levi Montalcini (from the "Conference on the peace of November 2000"). We must favour a plan of peace based on a new educational system of the young people, since the most tender age, faced to the acknowledgment of the universal values to which all the religions are inspired. This is a task aimed to deactivate both the perverted mechanism of inculcated hatred since the first infancy and the desire of revenge. The promotion of a culture of infancy and of adolescence based on the principle of equality and brotherhood will be the more effective the more the women will be able to enter in the young minds taking advantage of the high cultural level finally caught up. Jean Paul Sartre (from "Pacific co-existence and culture"). Since the beginning the political and military bunch has aimed the growing intensification of the war production. Through which truly revolutionary practice they can be forced to disarmament? I would like to deal with this particular topic: the demilitarization of the culture. It is our culture, the one that we own produce, that penetrates slowly between the generations coming after us. In my opinion the culture is the conscience in perpetual evolution that man has of himself and of the world where lives, works and fights. If we subordinate our job to imperatives favourable to war we will make of our sons, that will consume a poisoned truth, fascists or men deprived of hope. We live in an age in which the culture it is used everywhere like a war arm. Some political writers and some men make this thing being aware; others act under the empire of objective forces that they ignore. The culture already is transformed in military strategy and tactics. The culture does not have to "be protected", the only service that it expects is up to we intellectuals to render it: it must demilitarize it. The bases of a program could be established to propose to all the nations: abolition of every form of cultural protectionism, publication of the important works - contemporary or not - in all the languages, under the control of the men of culture who would have to take in any case the responsibility to propose the works to the publisher, to explain them to the public, with the intention to make them accessible to the greater number of persons. This new force could contribute effectively to the maintenance of peace. Arthur Schnitzler (from "Once the peace will return"). The overwhelming majority of mankind lacks feelings concerning the community, the overwhelming majority of the men is ready in every moment, for honour, for glory, for career, for a decoration, for money, to send in ruin in the most miserable way thousands, hundred of thousands of men, if they are not in the number, indeed there is who is ready to even run this risk, and they are helped in that just from the lack of imagination. Voltaire (from "Philosophical dictionary"). The war comes from the imagination of three or four hundred persons scattered on the surface of the globe under the name of principles or ministers. The astounding side of this infernal enterprise is that every leader of the murders make bless its flags and invoke solemnly God before going to exterminate the neighbour. The natural religion has prevented thousand times to citizens to commit crimes. A well-born spirit does not have the will; a mild spirit is orrified. But the artificial religion encourages to commit all the cruelties. All march gladly towards the crime under the flag of the own Saint. Simone Weil (from "Let's not recommence the war of Troy"). The war, nowadays, is defined through the subordination of the combatants to the means of combat; and the armaments, authentic heroes of the modern war, are, like the men voted to their service, led by those who do not fight. Because this directive apparatus does not have other means to defeat the enemy but to send to die their own soldiers with the force, the war of a state against another state is transformed immediately into a war of the military apparatus against its own army. Every soldier is forced to sacrifice its own life to the requirements of the military apparatus, and is forced through the threat of an execution without process that the power of the state maintains suspended constantly on its head. Consequently, it imports much little that the war is defensive or offensive, imperialist or national; every state in war is forced to use this method because the enemy uses it. The great error is that one to consider the war like an episode of foreign politics, while first it constitutes a fact of inner politics. The soldiers do not expose themselves to death, they are sent to the massacre. Stefan Zweig (from "The world of yesterday") The adversary to fight: the false heroism that prefers to send the others to suffer and to die, the easy optimism of the inconsciousses prophets, politicians or soldiers, who, promising without scruples victory, extends the massacre and have at the shoulders the chorus paid by them, all the "long-winded speakers of the war". Who manifested a doubt disturbed them in their patriotic affairs; who admonished was mocked as pessimist, who fought the war of which they did not divide the pains was marked as traitor. It has always been the same mob, ready to declare vile the prudent ones, weak the humans, then getting lost in the hour of the disaster imprudently provoked by themselves. Since the beginning I had not believed to "victory" and had had a single certainty: that even if this had been caught up with incredibles sacrifices, would not have justified them. THE CONFLICT - A WIDENING The definition by the Argentinian Eduard Vinyamata: The conflict is a fight, disagreement, apparently incompatibility, the result of clashing interests, hostile feelings or behaviour between two or more parties. Conflicts are part of life, directly connected with the struggle for life. Conflicts are related to the fulfilling of needs, to stressful situations, to feelings of fear and to the development of actions leading to more or less violent and aggressive behaviour…. Conflicts are universal values to be approached in a global way. They are typical of all human activities, societies and epochs. Hence their analysis and comprehension is crucial. The conflict and the conflictual modalities The conflict situation starts when explicits behaviors of violence, physical or verbal, are visible. The mediation involves into question, not only the management of conflict, but also the prevention of the violence in which the conflict can result. I win-you lose: it is the more traditional modality, that often concludes itself with the victory of the one against the other (through more or less violent behaviors: physical, psychological or verbal). I lose-you win: it is the attitude of who, with the aim to stop the conflict for the elevates costs that it involves, is disposed to renounce to the object of the struggle and to make the other win. I lose-you lose: in this case, the object of the struggle is eliminated or removed by one of the two opponents, with the consequent impossibility to have it at disposal and the conclusive defeat for both. I win-you win: it is the modality towards which the mediation of the conflict stretches, through a third subject that helps the opponents to gain from the problematic situation advantages for both. The Negotiation According to the school of Harvard, the negotiation "is a process of conflict resolution in which one or more third impartials parts take part in the conflict with the consent of the opponents and they assist them in negotiating a consensual and informal agreement". The fundamental aspect of negotiation is the drawing up of an agreement, shared by the parts in conflict, in which behaviors, modalities and rules of relationship are regulated. The mediation of the conflicts. It is a process aimed to make dynamically evolve a conflict situation opening communication channels that were blocked. Led by a subject third and stranger, the mediation allows the parts in conflict to confront their own points of view and to try with the aid of the mediator the shared management of the problem. The mediation is: - a path of sharing and management of the problem that produces the conflict - a way in order to help the persons to manage the conflict - a support to the persons based on listening and on dialogue The mediation represents a real culture who recognizes the conflict, without avoiding it or suffering it, admitting the resources. The conflict makes to emerge the need of the subjects to define themselves and can be a large resource of change. The social mediation "The social mediation is a process of creation and of reconstruction of the social ties, of regulation of the conflicts of the daily life, in which an impartial and independent third has the task to help the individuals or the institutions to improve the relationships that ties up them or to manage a conflict that makes them antagonists, exactly through a reorganization of the relationships [... ] The social mediation must contribute to develop the abilities of autonomy of the citizens. It does not have to conceive itself in an exclusively alternative way, but has to be considered as a finalized process to produce constructive human relations". Two or three words about mediation Duccio Scatolero Teacher of Criminology at the University of Turin responsible of the centres of management of conflict of the Abel Group In order to take care on mediation, it must truly return on the road, there where the conflicts are. I would characterize three functions that the voluntary service can carry out: The first it is directly connected with the functions of mediation of management of conflicts. The second I would name it a function of alliance with some of the parts of the conflict. The third and last function that the voluntary service can assume in this game is certainly that one of cultural type. There is a culture of the management of the conflicts to diffuse and a new convincement to make circulate, that carry to consider that does not exist as only answer to the conflict the violence or the abolition of the enemy. This requirement requires the volunteer to a large role from the cultural point of view: to diffuse a different culture and to make practice in reality the contents of this culture. Saying this, returning to the first function, that is of an active voluntary service in the picture of the mediation, i think that one of the first considerations to make is in reference to the term mediation. The term mediation can be defined in many ways. With extreme simplicity is it possible to say that it is one of the many possible strategies of management of the conflict. We see the term mediation applied in other European countries and still not in ours, in very different various sectors: it exists the judicial mediation and the penitentiary mediation, scholastic mediation, familiar mediation that is perhaps the more alive and lively one in our country, social mediation etc. The problem is that one of the conflict and the issue of the strategies of management of the conflict. This is a precise point that must be clear to anyone faces this matter: we are moving in the picture of the management of the conflict, that it is other thing from the conflict resolution. The conflict resolution means to take care of a problem and to try to find solutions for it; it means to take responsability for a problem and to try to define which are the solutions. The perspective of the mediation is absolutely different from this. The mediation and all its applications do not take care of the problem "conflict", but of the opponents, the persons who are in the conflict; the mediation with its actions is taking care of what these persons live and what has happened because of the conflict within of they, in the relation between them. The problems of relation between the persons are not problems that are resolved, the relations are not resolved, the relations are get spoiled and then they are adjusted, are repaired and are redefined. If we look at the problem of the conflict from the point of view of the opponent, we see that there is one perspective of adjustment of the relation from the point of view of the opponents. Who knows, who has had directly or indirectly experience of any conflict has been able to state that the conflict creates always a situation in which the two parts alone they do not succeed more to exit from that situation, have need of someone, but nobody in the world will be able to never resolve the conflict in place of the two parts. The only practicable way is the one to help the two parts to find again their abilities to solve the conflict. The conflicts are resolved by the parts and the parts alone are not able to make it if someone does not help them to find again this ability to solve. This is the large job that the mediator must make, must refuse whichever delegation of responsibility of resolution, but must bring back the responsibility of the conflict to the two parts that have created it and that are living it and at that point they will be charged with this responsibility to feel the engagement to exit from that situation. But other responsibilities, that are the relational ones, and still more social responsibilities exist, that are notions on which the today reflection sure has fallen. Today the Other is less and less a limit in acting of the persons: there is a social irresponsibility that has become main principle of a culture much diffused in our country. According to this culture, than acknowledges itself in the social irresponsibility, I must feel me responsible only of that reduced space that it is the space of the domestic relations (putting in the domestic the family, the friendship and that narrow territory of quality relations). Outside from this responsibility I do not acknowledge any other responsibility, this makes that when I exit from house the Other for me does not exist or it is my enemy. This is the look with which watching today the topics of the city emergencies and of difficulties of citizens living their daily ordinary life. It is tremendously uncertain to live and to move itself in territories where you know that in departure the Other or is indifferent to you or is your enemy, because you have conceived, you have constructed a culture in which the other that helps you, the Other that expresses solidarity gestures is not more present. In the culture of "mind one's own business" the other that minds its own business it is an other that passes behind you indifferent or if, for its necessity, has the need to conflict with you, becomes enemy and opens a war against you. To make the social job means to side and to place oneself side by side to the weakest people, to the marginal ones, to whom lives a difficulty, but we cannot face anymore the problem of the excluded ones, if we do not place also the problem of the respect of the included ones in our country. A fundamental aspect of the issue on the excluded ones is the increasing difficulty of their relationships with the included ones. A marginal one stops of being such when the included ones grant a little of their place to him. This is the bet of the integration job. We unfortunately for too much time have reasoned on the illusion that integration consists in building parallels paths to those of the integrated ones in which holding the persons disadvantaged in difficulty. Integration means that who is marginal returns to being integrated, and this does not happen automatically, in many cases must engage itself because it happens, but this engagement is not only at the side of the marginal ones, must be an engagement at the side also of the included ones. Included and excluded today have a difficult relation, tremendously complicated in our city territories. We see it from the point of view of immigrates or from the point of view of the drugs addicts, but always there is and grows this type of relational problem that has an immediate reply, a more and more hard and bad increasing intolerance of the included ones in the comparisons of the excluded ones. This recalls us to the necessity of a social action that begins to interrogate itself also about the included ones. Who is today the included one in our country? Is it the strong subject that has all the powers, that has all means to live well or a subject more weak, with a not pathological weakness, sure, but with a weakness that is contingent, that in some moments assails him? Nowadays a great amount of included lives with the terror of being rejected beyond the limit of the exclusion and gets by daily in order to go up on this inclined train that is the position of integration. Who has these background, who has these difficulties sure cannot have attitudes of refusal towards who remembers to him with its same presence that exist the excluded ones. He does not want to see them, would want that the administrators did not take care of the problems of the excluded ones, would want that they get removed from under the eyes. This is the demand for many "good citizens" today, that are not intolerants of profession or of culture, they are citizens in difficulty and for which that image is an image of strong uneasiness. A third party exists, and here we return to the topic of the mediation, the third party interpartes that it is at the same level of the parts and that is equal to them. This is a difficult role, because this third party does not have any power, does not have any privileged position, it does not have any culture and it is alone there in the middle of the two parts that quarrel, but not to divide them, stands between them and is like them. What is doing this third party between the two that are quarreling? This is the fundamental node of the mediation, ready to receive the emotions of the two quarreling in order to make that thanks to this job they find again a dialogue possibility. The mediation space is a neutrality space where the two parts of the conflict feel that there they can pull the breath, they feel that there can stop a moment, they can speak about their sufferings and know that in such space there are not allies with them. Who is listening to them is truly a neutral person and that space is a pause space; then there the part speaks not about its conflict, but speaks about himself in its conflict and finds a comfortable listening. The position therefore is a position of humility that here is mentioned not as well as a virtue, but as a choice of position. To be humble in front of the other means to accept a position much difficult that it is that one to sit next to the other without to make plans on him. Are We convinced that when we are in front of the other we are seated without planning things on him? To accompany, this is the last key of reading of the mediation job: third must succeed to accompany the enemy towards the enemy. The role of the mediator is a guide role, is a role of a person who make easier things to happen. The mediator makes this thing: he translates, he leads, brings through. Finally the function of the mediator is the ability to make to meet the looks of the two enemies. Two enemies when are sitting at the table of the mediator watch only the mediator and if their looks meet is only in order to transmit hate and intolerance. The mediator is such if succeeds to make meet these looks outside from hate. Text edited by Andrea Cavazzuti with information collected browsing Internet and pieces drawn from the following books: - Atlas of the wars - Guido Tassinari - Alpha Test Editions - The problem of the war and the ways of the peace - Norberto Bobbio - Editions il Mulino - The war. The wars. Travel in a world of conflicts and lies - Benedetto Bellesi, Paolo Moiola - EMI - War and world - Venice Foundation for the search about peace - Altreconomia - Victims - Massimo Nava - Fazi Publisher - Generals of the peace - Fabio Giovannini - Datanews - Against the war. Thoughts for the peace - Zelig Publisher Deepening on the topic of conflict and mediation edited by Carlo Stagnoli of CSV of Modena with pieces drawn by: - Justice without revenge. The bet of the Mediation - P. Atzei - Italian Foundation for the Voluntary service |
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Last update Venerdì 5 Aprile, 2002