The Ends of the Earth FROMTOGO TOTURKMENISTAN, FROMIRAN TOCAMBODIA – AJOURNEY TO THEFRONTIERS OFANARCHY Robert D. Kaplan Robert D. Kaplan is a contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly and the author of four previous books on travel and foreign affairs, including Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, chosen by The New York Times Book Review as one of the best books of 1993. His articles of the 1980s and early 1990s were the first by an American writer to warn of the coming cataclysm in the Balkans. His book The Arabists was chosen by The New York Times as a “notable book” of 1993. His two previous books were set in war-torn Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa. He has traveled in nearly seventy countries and now lives in Massachusetts. robin-bobin To Dick Hoagland, Ernest Latham, Kiki Munsht and Graham Miller: three diplomats and a relief worker His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. —WALTER BENJAMIN, inIlluminations writing about the Angel of History The good geographer is a philosopher. ——CARLETON S. COON, SR., Caravan: The Story of the Middle East Strife is the origin of everything. ——HERACLITUS robin-bobin We all dwell in one country, O stranger, the world. ——MELEAGER Preface JACK LONDON WRITES in Martin Eden that “a reporter’s work is all hack from morning till night... it is a whirlwind life, the life of the moment, with neither past nor future...” I have attempted to escape this restriction. In Balkan Ghosts, an earlier book of mine, completed before the outbreak of the war in Yugoslavia, I tried to see the present in terms of a difficult and bloody past. In The Ends of the Earth, I have tried to see the present in terms of the future, on the whole an ominous one for a significant part of the third world. This is a travel book. It is concrete to the extent that my ideas arise from personal experience. It is subjective, given that no two travelers interpret a people and landscape in the same way. It is idiosyncratic: I spent relatively more time in Iran than in other places, and the text reflects that. Nor—as a record of one person’s travels—is it comprehensive: India and China receive less coverage than they deserve, South America is missing, and so on. From the standpoint of many backpackers and relief workers, my journey was not arduous. Think of it as a brief romp through a swath of the globe, in which I try to give personal meaning to the kinds of issues raised in Paul Kennedy’s Preparing for the Twenty-first Century. Though many landscapes are increasingly sullied, that need not spell the decline of travel writing. It does mean that travel writing must confront the real world, slums and all, rather than escape into an airbrushed version of a more rustic past. This book, which folds international studies into a travelogue, is an attempt at that. PART I robin-bobin West Africa: Back to the Dawn? Fraudulent identity cards; fake policemen dressed in official uniform; army troops complicit with gangs of thieves and bandits; forged enrollment for exams; illegal withdrawal of money orders; fake banknotes; the circulation and sale of falsified school reports, medical certificates and damaged commodities: all of this is not only an expression of frenetic trafficking and “arranging.” It is also a manifestation of the fact that, here, things no longer exist without their parallel. ——ACHILLE MBEMBE AND JANET ROITMAN, writing about ipyos Cameroon Africa makes the last circle, navel of the world . . . ——JEAN-PAUL SARTRE *I* An Unsentimental Journey robin-bobin “THE THIEVES ARE very violent here. They will cut you up if you are not careful,” warned the Liberian woman in fine, lilting English. Night had fallen. My protectress gripped my arm, then walked me to the hotel. I felt her eyes on me—two welcoming planets appearing out of the void. The little feet of a baby, wrapped snugly around her back, bobbed at her sides. Here, on this road of decayed and oxidized red rock called laterite, was the earth without subtlety: an oppressively hot, in ways hostile, planet; seething with fecundity and—it seemed to a Northerner—too much of it. But tropical abundance is not the blessing many travelers believe: Tropical soils are not that fertile, and quick growth by no means releases man from labor. At the equator nature is a terrifying face from which humankind cannot separate itself. I was in the lower end of that great bulge of Africa that juts out into the Atlantic, far from anywhere familiar. The closest point in Europe lay two thousand miles across the Sahara Desert to the north. The closest point in South America lay almost twenty-five hundred miles across the ocean to the southwest. North America was five thousand miles to the northwest. The town of Danane, in the western Ivory Coast, near the borders of Liberia and Guinea, is a good place from which to begin a tour of the earth at the end of the twentieth century, a time when politics are increasingly shaped by the physical environment. A brief moment marked by the Industrial Revolution, which gave humankind a chance to defend itself somewhat from nature, may be closing. Population growth, along with migration that is tied to soil degradation, means we won’t hereafter be able to control the spread of disease as we have been doing for the past 150 years. Viruses luxuriating in Africa may constitute a basic risk to humanity. In the twenty-first century, Africa, like Europe in the twentieth, will have to be confronted. In my rucksack I carried a letter from a friend, a U.S. diplomat in the region. He writes: “The greatest threat to our value system comes from Africa. Can we continue to believe in universal principles as Africa declines to levels better described by Dante than by development economists? Our domestic attitudes on race and ethnicity suffer as Africa becomes a continent-wide ‘Wreck of the Medusa.’” * * * FROM THE PERSPECTIVE of space, where there is no gravity, there is also no up or down. The maps of the world that show north as up are not necessarily objective. Scan the map with the South Pole on top and you see the world entirely differently. The Mediterranean basin is no longer the focal point, lost, as it is, near the bottom of the globe. North America loses its continental width—and thus its majesty—as it narrows northward into the atrophied limb of Central America toward the center of your field of vision. South America and Africa stand out. But South America keeps narrowing toward the Antarctic nothingness at the top, insufficiently connected to other continental bodies. Africa, alas, is the inescapable center: Equidistant between the South and North poles, lying flat across the equator, with the earth’s warmest climate, hospitable to the emergence of life in countless forms—three quarters of its surface lies within the tropics. Africa looms large in the middle of the vision field, connected to Eurasia through the Middle East. This map, with south at the top, shows why humankind emerged in Africa, why it was from Africa that our species may have begun the settlement of the planet. Africa is the mother continent to which we all ultimately belong, from where human beings robin-bobin acquired their deepest genetic traits. “We are all Africans under the skin,” says anthropologist Christopher Stringer. Africa is nature writ large. As Ben Okri, a Nigerian novelist and poet, writes: We are the miracles that God made To taste the bitter fruit of Time. “This hotel is good,” the Liberian woman told me. “They lock the gate at night.” * * * “CARTOGRAPHY DEPLOYS ITS vocabulary... so that it embodies a systematic social inequality. The distinctions of class and power are engineered, reified and legitimated in the map.... The rule seems to be ‘the more powerful, the more prominent.’ To those who have strength in the world shall be added the strength of the map,” writes the late University of Chicago geographer J. Brian Harley. Maps, so seemingly objective, are actually propaganda. They represent the lowest common denominator of the conventional wisdom. But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if the Mediterranean basin is no longer the center of civilization? What if there are really not fifty-odd nations in Africa as the maps suggest—what if there are only six, or seven, or eight real nations on that continent? Or, instead of nations, several hundred tribal entities? What if the distance between the hotel in Danane to which I had just been directed and a town over the border in Guinea or Liberia, though only forty miles on the map, was really greater in terms of time than the distance between New York and St. Louis? What if the shantytowns and bidonvilles sprouting up around the globe that do not appear on any maps are far more important to the future of civilization than many of the downtowns and prosperous suburbs that do appear on maps? What if the territory held by guerrilla armies and urban mafias—territory that is never shown on maps—is more significant than the territory claimed by many recognized states? What if Africa is even farther away from North America and Europe than the maps indicate, but more important to our past and future than Europe or North America? The first act of geography is measurement. I have tried to learn by actual travel and experience just how far places are from each other, where the borders really are and where they aren’t, where the real terra incognita is. It was Claudius Ptolemy, the second century A.D. Greek geographer, who first cautioned against exaggerating the importance of Europe and the West on the map. Thus, to map the earth as the twenty-first century approaches, I would begin in Africa, the birthplace of humankind. I would, more or less, trace our species’ likely trajectory of planetary settlement from Africa across the Near East into the Indian subcontinent and, ultimately, Southeast Asia.” I thought of my wanderings in almost geological terms. As John McPhee set out to do in Basin and Range—mapping “deep time” in a journey that mocked the “unnatural subdivision [s] of the globe... framed in straight lines”—I wanted to map the future, perhaps the “deep future,” by ignoring what was robin-bobin legally and officially there and, instead, touching, feeling, and smelling what was really there. I had many questions in my head, and many plans. The nineteenth-century French geographer Elisee Reclus writes: “Each period in the life of mankind corresponds to a change in its environment. It is the inequality of planetary traits that created the diversity of human history.” My goal was to see humanity in each locale as literally an outgrowth of the terrain and climate in which it was fated to live. For instance, even as Africa’s geography was conducive to humanity’s emergence, it may not have been conducive to its further development. Though Africa is the second largest continent, with an area five times that of Europe, its coastline is little more than a quarter as long. Moreover, this coastline, south of the Sahara, lacks many good natural harbors.” Few of tropical Africa’s rivers are navigable from the sea, while the Sahara hindered human contact from the north. Thus Africa has been relatively isolated from the rest of the world. Moreover, many of the most debilitating diseases flourish mainly in tropical climates. Some 10 million square miles of Africa (an area larger than the United States) are infested with tsetse-fly diseases. It is almost certainly not accidental that Africa is both the poorest and hottest region of the world.’ The ancient Greek historians asked: Why the differences between peoples?’ It is still a fair question. On the other hand, so as not to exaggerate those differences, I had to bear in mind that it was Terence, an African who lived in ancient Rome, who said, “I am a man. I regard nothing that is human as alien to me.” * * * LIZARDS CRAWLED UNDER the door of my room in my hotel in Danane, and up the scabby walls. Mosquitoes circled the lightbulb and buzzed around my neck. I looked at the floor. Missing tiles exposed the red laterite earth. The room had no windows. The air conditioner made a loud humming noise, with a background rattle like pouring rain. I couldn’t sleep. What was I doing here? I thought I was here for answers. * * * AT THE BEGINNING of my journey, I was naive. I didn’t yet know that answers vanish as one continues to travel, that there is only further complexity, that there are still more interrelationships, and more questions. I had more than fifteen years as a foreign correspondent behind me, and had learned that when you write a magazine article, you try to fit observations into a theory, or “paradigm,” so that each article will make sense. Without such paradigms or theories—however imperfect—debate is impossible. As Francis Bacon writes, “Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.” This is why most of science robin-bobin is a mop-up operation: A paradigm is investigated until it is found to be so riddled with imperfections that it is discounted and another paradigm emerges, to undergo similar scrutiny. My initial goal was to find a paradigm for understanding the world in the early decades of the twenty-first century. Scholars have been writing more and more about the corrosive effects of overpopulation and environmental degradation in the third world, while journalists cover an increasing array of ethnic conflicts that don’t configure with state borders. Of the eighty wars since 1945, only twenty-eight have taken the traditional form of fighting between regular armies of two or more states. Forty-six were civil wars or guerrilla insurgencies. Former UN secretary-general Perez de Cuellar called this the “new anarchy.’” The fighting in the Balkans, in the Caucasus, and elsewhere suggested that this anarchic trend was proliferating. In 1993, forty-two countries were immersed in major conflicts and thirty-seven others experienced lesser forms of political violence: Sixty-five of these seventy-nine countries were in the developing world.’ In addition, improved global communications were bringing different cultures into closer contact, making us uncomfortably aware that we were anything but equal regarding the production of exportable, material wealth. If someone could write openly about culture, I thought, and interlock it with those other issues, a general state-of-the-world might emerge. Africa was potent terrain for my enterprise. It was without a convincing paradigm. For decades, those sympathetic to Africa had been providing rationalizations for material poverty and hopeful scenarios for the future while living standards continued to plummet and wars proliferated. The reasons provided for this mess—”colonialism,” “the evil international economic system,” Africa’s “corrupt elites,” its “patriarchal society,” and so on—could also apply to other third world regions that were daily pulling ahead of Africa economically: Africa’s vital statistics concerning population increase, living standards, and violence were the worst on the planet. An editor appropriately tided an article I wrote on West Africa and the third world “The Coming Anarchy.” It ran in The Atlantic Monthly in February 1994. The ethnic genocide in Rwanda, in east-central Africa, coming as it did a few months later, gave the article a gruesome currency. My problem, though, was that I kept traveling, an activity that inevitably complicated my paradigm. In 1994, immediately after this article was published, I began a journey by land—roughly speaking—from Egypt to Cambodia: through the Near East, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and Southeast Asia. While “The Coming Anarchy” was being debated at home, I was already engaged in the mop-up operation. This mop-up operation did not so much disprove “The Coming Anarchy” as it showed me how culture, politics, geography, history, and economics were inextricable. Rather than a grand theory, the best I could now hope for was a better appreciation of these interrelationships. At the end of my journey I still had a theory, but it was more refined. And I was less dogmatic about it. For instance, I had originally thought of population in neo-Malthusian terms, according to which state failure might be a direct result of overpopulation. By the end of my journey I understand that rapid population growth was just one of several agitating forces—a force that cultural ingenuity might sidestep. By the time I reached Cambodia, I realized that while I could still identify the destructive powers that I had seen in Africa, I understood their root causes less than I thought I did. Writing these words now, I am sure of one thing: that even as some nations, including the United States, may be retreating into a fortresslike nationalism, this is only a temporary stage before the world tide of population and poverty forces us all to realize that we inhabit one increasingly small and crowded earth. The benighted part of the planet near the Liberian border where I, an American citizen, had found myself on that lonely night would, ultimately—on some not so distant morrow—become part of my planetary home. robin-bobin * * * I DID NOT. choose the path of my wanderings by accident. I recalled a vision propounded to me by Thomas F. Homer-Dixon, head of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Toronto. “Think of a stretch limo in the potholed streets of New York City, where homeless beggars live. Inside the limo are the air-conditioned postindustrial regions of North America, Europe, the Pacific Rim, parts of Latin America, and a few other spots, with their trade summitry and computer-information highways. Outside is the rest of mankind, going in a completely different direction.” I wanted to wander outside the stretch limo, particularly in cities and large towns. According to the National Academy of Sciences, as much as 95 percent of all the new births in our world occur in the poorest countries, while more than half of those occur in urban and urbanizing areas.’ Before independence, the average capital in Africa had about fifty thousand inhabitants. But during the first thirty years of independence, when overall population more than doubled in Africa, that of most capital cities multiplied by ten. By the early 1980s, Lagos and Kinshasa each had populations of around 3 million, while Addis Ababa, Abidjan, Accra, Ibadan, Khartoum, and Johannesburg all had over Imillion. Dakar, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Harare, and Luanda were not far behind. By 1990 one quarter of all Africans lived in towns; by the end of the century the proportion will have risen to one half. To me, economic success stories like Japan and Singapore seemed secondary. Most of the new children being born in the world are growing up in places like West Africa, not in Japan or Singapore. Even with declining fertility rates, sub-Saharan Africa’s population will likely double in less than three decades: Japan’s population won’t double in two centuries. Lying in bed in that hotel in Danane, I even considered the possibility that a second Cold War might be upon us—a protracted struggle between ourselves and the demons of crime, population pressure, environmental degradation, disease, and culture conflict. For those who still didn’t believe that we live in revolutionary times, I had in mind a travel document that would serve as shock therapy. * * * IN 1768, LAURENCE Sterne, an English parson, published A Sentimental Journey: Through France and Italy. The opposite sex uppermost in his mind, Sterne described his trip thus: “Tis a quiet journey of the heart in pursuit of NATURE, and those affections which arise out of her.” Sterne’s sentimental preference for French women caused him to be charitable concerning the national character: “The Bourbon is by no means a cruel race: they may be misled like other people; but there is a mildness in their blood.” In 1789, twenty-one years after he published those words, came the horrific violence of the French Revolution. I would not be so naive, I told myself. Mine would be an unsentimental journey. My impressions might be the “wrong” ones to have, but they would be based on what I saw. And what I saw turned out to be consistent with what the statistics reveal. robin-bobin * * * FOR INSTANCE, AFRICA is falling off the world economic map: With 719,202,000 inhabitants out of a world population of 5,692,210,000 in 1995, Africans represented nearly 13 percent of humanity. But this 13 percent contributed only 1.2 percent of the world’s gross domestic product, down from 1.8 percent in the 1980s. Thus, as Africa’s population relative to the rest of the world has continued to soar, its contribution to world wealth has dropped by a third in the past decade. Meanwhile, Africa’s share of world trade has fallen from 4 percent to near 2 percent. As per capita food production in the rest of the developing world rose by 9 percent in the 1980s, it decreased by 6 percent in Africa. When one looks at sub-Saharan Africa rather than at Africa as a whole, the situation becomes bleaker. Sub-Saharan Africa’s population is growing at over 3 percent per year. That is nearly double the planet’s mean growth rate of 1.6 percent. No other large region of the globe comes close. For example, North Africa’s population, with the second highest rate of natural increase, grows at 2.6 percent. Southern Asia, including such poverty-racked countries as Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, is growing at 2.2 percent annually. China’s growth rate is lower. Moreover, while the growth of populations in the Indian subcontinent and China are supported by industrial development in those regions, sub-Saharan Africa’s higher rate of natural increase occurs with generally no industrial growth to back it up. In the 1980s, twenty-eight of the forty-six countries in sub-Saharan African had declining per capita gross domestic products, while in 1994 tropical African economies declined by 2 percent relative to population growth. Even if sub-Saharan African economies were to start growing at the “overoptimistic” rates predicted by the World Bank, Africans will have to wait forty years to reach the incomes they enjoyed in the 1970s. With little economic growth, sub-Saharan Africa’s exploding population is sustained by slash-and-burn agriculture and the creation of shanty-towns that erode the continent’s environmental base. To wit, in an age of decaying cities, sub-Saharan Africa has the highest urban growth rate of any region on the planet: 5.8 percent from 1965 to 1980, and 5.9 percent from 1980-1990, according to the World Bank. (The second highest was the Arab world, with a 4.5 percent urban growth rate since 1965.) In Lagos, 61.1 percent of this population growth has resulted from migration from rural areas, which suffer, in many cases, from degraded soil that can no longer sustain agriculture. Africa shows how the urban environment may come to represent the locus of future conflict in the developing world. The perpetrators of future violence will likely be urban born, with no rural experience from which to draw. According to the United Nations Human Development Report of 1994, which rated 173 countries on the basis of literacy, schooling, population growth, per capita gross domestic product, and life expectancy, twenty-two of the bottom twenty-four countries are in sub-Saharan Africa.’ * * *