Suchergebnisse

Sir George Clark (1947: 98) once remarked that "during the whole course of the seventeenth century there were only seven complete calendar years in which there was no war between European states." The impact of the longer land wars on civilian mortality during this period was often extreme. The reasons for this had little to do with the fighting itself. Wartime civilian mortality crises were precipitated by fatal epidemic diseases and starvation. Modern demographic historians attribute the starvation to military supply systems that stripped civilians of food and the means to acquire it, and the epidemics to decreased resistance to disease caused by undernutrition and to increased rates of disease transmission brought about by troop movements and civilian refugee flows (Flinn 1981: 52–53).

The wars which have wracked Liberia since the end of 1989 have reduced a country which was once regarded as one of the more fortunate in Africa to a state of long‐term aid dependency. Perhaps 150,000 or more have been killed and at many points over the last seven years a third of the country's pre‐war population has been living as refugees in neighbouring states and another third has been internally displaced by the conflict. The continuing warfare has made it difficult to address the large‐scale humanitarian problems inevitable in such circumstances: rates of undernutrition have sometimes reached very high levels and on at least one occasion have reached heights which rival the worst recorded in any part of the world (Outram, 1997).
This article seeks to advance our understanding of the causes of this suffering. It does so not primarily by examining the experiences of the victims, important though this is, but by investigating the political economy of the Liberian wars including the circumstances and the actions of the warring factions. In this I follow Keen's call to understand the actions of oppressor groups involved in humanitarian emergencies, as well as those of their victims (1994:232).

Der Beitrag analysiert den Verlauf des Bürgerkrieges in Liberia von 1989 bis 1996. Das Hauptinteresse gilt dabei den Veränderungen in der Konstellation der Akteure und des Kriegsverlaufs sowie den Faktoren, die diese Veränderungen herbeigeführt haben. Während Outram für die erste Phase des Krieges zwischen 1989-1990 eine starke ethnische Verankerung der Kriegsparteien feststellt, sieht er die Ursachen für den später entstandenen "warlordism" in der Parteilichkeit der externen Akteure, womit in erster Linie die ECOMOG, aber auch internationale Hilfsorganisationen gemeint sind. Die mangelnde Disziplin und schwache Organisation in den kämpfenden Einheiten zehrte die Kräfte der Warlords auf. Bei diesem Aspekt zieht der Autor eine Parallele zur Entstehung von Warlords in China während des Chinesisch-Japanischen Krieges. (DÜI-Spl)

Investigates the political economy of conflict, including circumstances and actions of the warring factions.