Abundant resources - such as diamonds, emeralds, lapis lazuli,
timber, coltan, and oil - should be an economic blessing to a
developing nation. Too often, they aren't. They fund conflicts.
More and more, "resource wars" trouble poor countries.
The pillaging of diamonds, for example, has fed civil wars in
Angola and Sierra Leone. Coltan, a costly mineral used in making
cellphones, helps finance bloody fighting in Congo.
Altogether, about a quarter of the roughly 50 wars and armed
conflicts active in 2001 had "a strong resource dimension," says
Michael Renner, a senior researcher with Worldwatch Institute in
Washington. In these cases, legal or illegal exploitation of
resources helped trigger or exacerbate violent conflict, or financed
its continuation. Resources sometimes become a curse, with the wars
inflicting a horrendous human toll.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, an estimated 2
million to 3 million people were killed after Ugandan and Rwandan
troops invaded in 1998 to assist rebel groups seeking to overthrow
the government of Laurent Kabila. Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and
Chad sent troops in support of Kabila. But, notes Mr. Renner, the
opportunity to plunder the enormous resource wealth of Congo soon
came to be the primary incentive.
Altogether, roughly 5 million people were killed in resource wars
in the 1990s. Renner calculates that 6 million fled to neighboring
nations and 11 million to 15 million were displaced inside their
These wars often have gruesome consequences. Children are turned
into soldiers or slaves. Limbs are hacked off in order to terrorize
populations. The environment is damaged as forests are cut down and
wildlife populations are decimated.
As awareness of this problem has risen among industrial nations
in the last two or three years, efforts to stem such conflicts have
Next week, the World Bank and the French Development Agency are
holding a "brainstorming" workshop in Paris to explore what can be
done to break the connections between resources and corrupt regimes
and civil war.
The session has the backing of the International Monetary Fund,
the Group of Eight major industrial powers, and the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development, the larger Paris-based club of
"We will attempt to see what, if anything, can be done," says
Paul Collier, head of research at the World Bank in Washington.
Ideas for preventing or halting resource wars will be explored
further in a series of meetings in coming months, with
recommendations going to the economic summit of the leaders of the
G8 in June.
Pillaging replaces geopolitics
During the cold war, many conflicts in Africa and elsewhere
resulted from the geopolitical struggle between the US and the
Soviet Union. But that motive has faded. The political divisions are
being replaced by a global scramble to obtain or tie up essential
"In some places, the pillaging of oil, minerals, metals,
gemstones, or timber allows wars to continue that were triggered by
other factors - initially driven by grievances or ideological
struggles and bankrolled by the superpowers or other external
supporters," writes Renner in a Worldwatch study, "The Anatomy of
Recent academic research finds that wars in poor countries with
rich mineral resources often last longer than similar conflicts
during the cold war.
As the world's population increases from 6.1 billion to perhaps 9
billion by 2050, the growing demand on resources may stimulate
further resource wars.
"Certain commodities which nations depend on are scarce or
becoming scarcer," warns Michael Klare, a professor of peace and
world securities studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. He
suspects national armies will redefine their primary mission as
maintaining resource security. …