A United Nations study published yesterday indicates that armed conflicts have declined by more than 40 per cent since 1992, and that genocide and human rights abuses have plummeted around the world.
The only form of political violence that appears to be getting worse is terrorism
- a serious threat but one that kills markedly fewer people than open warfare, it said.
The first Human Security Report, financed by five governments, said the end of the Cold War and breakup of the Soviet Union in 1989-91 was the most important factor in the decline in armed conflicts.
That development ended the East-West ideological battle, stopped the flow of money to proxy wars in the developing world, and allowed the United Nations for the first time to begin to play the role its founders intended, the report said.
"Over the past dozen years, the global security climate has changed in dramatic, positive, but largely unheralded ways," the report said. "Civil wars, genocides and international crises have all declined sharply."
However, the report warned that "the dramatic improvements in global security . . . are no cause for complacency," citing 60 wars still being fought around the world.
It singled out the conflicts in Iraq and Sudan's western Darfur region, which "continue to exact a deadly toll." It estimated that during the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, some 8,300 people died. It had no estimates for deaths during the subsequent insurgency or in Darfur.
Other groups have given conflicting numbers of people killed in Iraq fighting. US and coalition authorities say they have not kept a count of such deaths and Iraqi accounting has proven to be haphazard. British officials have said that there are no wholly reliable figures.