No. 438 December 2006:

A fitting end for the last weeks of 2006: At least one dictator and a former one disappeared: Turkmenistan’s President-for-life Saparmurat Niyazov died on 21 December of heart failure. Turkmenbashi or Father of the Turkmen as he liked to be called who took the cult of [his own] personality to new and absurd heights—calendar months were renamed after his family members—was the last head of the Communist Party in the Central Asian Soviet republic and the only leader since 1990 when the country became independent but not free. Typically the former communist party became the ruling Democratic Party of Turkmenistan (DPT). The outlook under the next leader is not encouraging especially since it took the DPT to drop the ban on a vice president to run for the presidential post. The other departed, General Augustus Pinochet,  died on 10 December and barely escaped trial for a great number of murders of political opponents while he was the military ruler of Chile.

Regrettably the field of strongmen is not thinning much. The commander of Fiji’s army, like his Thai colleague, seized the government and ousted the elected leaders. In a slightly different way, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe maneuvered to stay in office beyond his constitutional term by having his majority party extend his term by two years. At least the presidents of Congo (DR) and Venezuela were reelected in what appeared to be relatively regular elections.

In 2006, there were 278 political conflicts,  reports the Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research (HIIK) at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in its annual Conflict Barometer 2006. Public attention is focused on six wars— Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel-Palestine, Somalia, Sudan-Darfur, and Sri Lanka but there were also 29 severe crises, carried out with a massive amount of violence, 83 crises with occasional use of violence. In contrast, says HIIK, there were 160 non-violent conflicts. Compared to last year, the number of conflicts car­ried out on the highest intensity level increased sig­nificantly from two to six wars.

The number of crises, representing conflicts of medium intensity, has slightly decreased from the all-time high in 2005, 90, to 83. While this was on the one hand due to deescalation processes, it also shows that the extreme number of crises in 2005 had been a clear warning signal indi­cating that the all-time low of highly violent conflicts in 2005 was not the beginning of a trend towards a more peaceful world, as eight crises escalated to highly violent conflicts in this year. The number of conflicts on the non-violent intensity levels increased by four, from 156 to 160. The total number of conflicts rose from 274 to 278, as five conflicts ended in 2005 and nine new conflicts emerged in 2006. These are set as fol­lows: In Europe, two conflicts ended in 2005. In 2006, the secession conflict between Serbia and Montene­gro ended with Montenegro becoming independent and no new conflict emerged. In Africa, three conflicts ended in 2005, and three new ones emerged in 2006. In the Americas, no conflict ended in 2005, but three new ones emerged in 2006. In Asia and Oceania, no conflict ended in 2005, but one did in 2006. Two new conflicts emerged in 2006. In the Middle East and Maghreb, no conflict ended, and one new emerged. Of the nine new conflicts, only three were carried out non-violently, whereas four started as crises, and two as severe crises: Sudan (Nuer, White Army-SPLM/A) and Guinea-Bissau (MFDC­Sadio).

Leader Changes

Country Updates: October 2006

forecast: January-February 2007

literature

Survey: Brazil--Presidential, Congressional, and Gubernatorial Elections in 2006--Results