Colonial curse or crutch?

Each of these regions is a former colony or has evolved from the breakup of another entity. Yugoslavia’s 1991 demise following the collapse of the Iron Curtain, for example, created six Balkan countries. Britain once controlled Zimbabwe and Kashmir. Uzbekistan emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Others are former colonies.

In some cases, the disintegration of the progenitor or the colonial past is so remote that it has no bearing on current conflict. But in others, the link between past problems and present troubles is obvious.

A civil war in Angola erupted with the African nation’s independence from Portugal in 1975. Since then, the Council on Foreign Relations says as many as 1.5 million people may have died in the power struggle between two factions.

In Indonesia, experts said, lingering memories of the nation’s legacy as a colony of the Netherlands has left a reluctance to accept help from outsiders.

“Countries that might want to provide humanitarian assistance or link development with conflict prevention strategies are seen as suspect”, said David L. Philips, a senior fellow and deputy director of the Centre for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The Soviet legacies in Uzbekistan include depleted water resources as a result of aggressive farming techniques, partially cleaned toxic dumps and soil contaminated with fertilizers that have shown up in breast milk in areas with high incidences of birth defects, said Rajan Menon, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Because the government is authoritarian, said Menon, “when social and economic tensions exist, there’s no place … to vent them, and therefore they take radical turns”.

“One is that there has been an underground Islamist movement called the IMU, the Islamist Movement of Uzbekistan, which clearly had links with the Taliban regime in central Asia.

Millions of Zimbabweans face starvation, a U.S.-based food monitoring organization reported recently. Agriculture officials blame the impending food shortage on drought and the government’s controversial seizure of farmland owned by members of the nation’s white minority for redistribution to landless blacks in an attempt to right a colonial wrong.

But placing blame on colonizers isn’t useful, Menon said.

“There is a generation now to whom colonial rule is a distant memory”, he said

“… Rulers are going to have to deal with the expectation of the public quite independently of the historical legacy”.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14