Living in war

The sad reality is that wars, like all other evils, never come alone: the instincts to kill spread like pandemics. Looking back, the sad reality is that humanity has never managed to live together in peace. The history of the world is founded on war. We are living it. The age of the most advanced technologies is not preventing serious armed conflicts. The concern aroused by Artificial Intelligence is claiming dozens of victims of armed violence every day. 

We are living through two serious conflicts, the Ukrainian-Russian and the Israeli-Hamas conflict, whose images and figures are shocking. When will it end? We ask ourselves. And the answer is not encouraging.  

While there is much unhurried rambling about how to put them on the horizon, warnings are beginning to emerge about old unfinished conflicts and other latent ones, the most serious of which are undoubtedly China's claims to Taiwan, between the two major atomic powers at loggerheads. Sudan's friendly military confrontation, which began eight months ago and was overshadowed by Russia's aggression against Ukraine, continues to claim daily lives in Khartoum and other cities. 

Many international analysts have in mind the situation in Myanmar, formerly Burma, where the ruling military dictatorship is on the verge of turning into a full-blown civil war between the hundred or so ethnic groups that divide the country's sixty million people, virtually all of whom are at war with each other and as a whole against the official repression that no longer controls the overall violence that has engulfed most of the territory. The failures of the feeble attempt at democracy by the struggling Aung San Suu Kyi, now in prison, and the dictatorial governments that have followed are not the solution. The clandestine Government of National Unity that encompasses the political alternative fails to bring together such a diverse opposition. 

Civil war is inevitable, although it is unclear who will fight among the many belligerents being prepared. In Asia, there are also tense situations in Kashmir, the disputed region between India and Pakistan, and in India itself in the face of the growing rebellion of the Sikhs, with their five hundred years and more than forty million people at odds with Hindus and Muslims. The war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh has already broken out. Nearby, Nepalis are unleashing a movement to reclaim the monarchy, following the chaos generated by its dissolution thirteen years ago, when the last king was overthrown by Trotskyist rebels who have failed to seize full control of power. 

In Latin America, there is no shortage of threats to peace either. Nicolás Maduro, not content with having led Venezuela to ruin, is now trying to distract his compatriots with a referendum on the annexation of the Esequiba region, held by Guyana for 180 years, which he won this weekend without any guarantees and provoking strong tension in the area.