The Epidemic of Communal Violence

Among other disturbing trends in 1993, communal violence continued to pose the major threat to human rights in many regions. Once more, contrary to conventional wisdom, its usual cause was not age-old animosity among different groups, but governments and political groups that fomented strife for their own political gains.

· Over 700 were killed, mostly Muslims, when police and mobs went on a rampage in Bombay in January. The killings marked the second major outbreak of communal violence in India following the destruction of a sixteenth-century mosque in Ayodhya in December 1992, inspired by a Hindu nationalist political party.

· President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire instigated and manipulated communal conflict, particularly in Shaba, where 90,000 were displaced by mob violence, and in North Kivu, where at least 7,000 appear to have been killed, and over 200,000 displaced. His apparent goal was to destabilize his political opposition and to make the point that Zaire was ungovernable without him.

· In parallel fashion, Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi, determined to prove that multiparty democracy would spark ethnic tensions, continued to foment violence between his Kalenjin ethnic group and the majority Kikuyu community. As in Zaire, the violence began to take on a life of its own.

· Long-time persecution of Tutsi in Rwanda as part of the government's effort to maintain Hutu solidarity yielded, in 1990, a largely Tutsi-based guerrilla movement and, in the following years, including 1993, severe governmentrepression against Tutsi.

· In neighboring Burundi, an attempted military coup in late October and the assassination of Burundi's elected president set off a wave of communal violence that within one month had claimed the lives of an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 and displaced as many as one million. As in the case of Rwanda, the violence was between the Hutu majority and Tutsi minority, with military and civilian authorities playing a large role in fomenting the violence.

· Three days after the German Bundestag voted in May to restrict the right of asylum, tacitly blaming the victims for the continuing escalation of right-wing violence against foreigners, five Turkish residents died when skinheads set fire to their house in the town of Solingen. In a speech the next month before the Bundestag, Chancellor Helmut Kohl blindly denied any "connection between the asylum law and the arson attacks in Solingen and elsewhere," underscoring a failure of moral leadership that only exacerbated the problem.

Other examples of government-inspired communal violence include the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey, which was fueled by years of official restrictions on the ability of Kurds to practice their culture; the decade-long war in southern Sudan, triggered by Khartoum's effort to impose its radical version of Islamic law, in which well over a million have died from abusive fighting and related starvation and disease; the ongoing political violence in South Africa, largely fomented by those who resisted the passing of the apartheid order; and the killing in the former Yugoslavia, sparked by deliberate campaigns of hatred in the officially controlled media.