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Almost any place that you go in the world today, you are going to see evidence of group hatred—people in conflict over sectarian, nationalistic, racial, and religious identities. In Northern Ireland, we have the longest running violent conflict in the western hemisphere. In the former Soviet Union, with the collapse of the Soviet Empire, age-old ethnic conflicts have resurfaced. The conflict that is most visible is in Bosnia, where hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in genocidal violence. There we have also seen the return of concentration camps, and the chilling term “ethnic cleansing” has become part of everyone's vocabulary. We have also seen rape used there as an instrument of state policy.
When the Berlin wall came down, there was much joy, but the Nazism and Fascism of the Thirties, which we thought was extinct, has surfaced again, clothed as “skinheads,” with some toleration by German society, producing violent attacks on foreigners living in Germany, particularly Turkish Gastarbeiters and their families, who in some cases have been living there for generations.
Israel continues to be in conflict with the Arab world. Saddam Hussein is in the news again. Many may have thought that the Kuwait War was just about oil in 1990. It was about much more. There were deeply embedded conflicts between the groups. In Kuwait, high schools were taken over and turned into torture chambers. There's probably not a Kuwaiti family that doesn't have at least one extended family member who was held captive, tortured, or killed.
There is also continued torment in Africa, but also some progress. What is known to most of us, of course, is the genocidal slaughter in Rwanda. But we also have in Africa the end of apartheid, and it is very important that we discover what has allowed that process to proceed as far as it has: what were the underlying dynamics that permitted apartheid to be overcome without more terrible bloodshed?
The South-Asian, Indian subcontinent has been pla