Do you know the cause of war?

“Do you know the cause of war?”

Last Wednesday, I was sitting with a group of about seven Liberian refugees in a camp outside of Accra, Ghana. I’d been hearing for the last few hours the effects of war. I’d talked to children who hadn’t seen their parents since they left for work on the morning of the day they fled Liberia. I’d talked to people who were beaten and tortured. I’d talked to people who had watched from the bush as their families were beheaded. I’d talked to people who had experienced things I could never even imagine witnessing.

The one experience that stood out most from that day was not the tales of atrocities or the pictures of bloody family members that a refugee carried in his briefcase. It was a question posed by one of the refugees, Mr. S, that captivated my memory.

After a pause, Mr. S looked at us and asked, “Do you know the cause of war?” My mind went directly to the course I am talking this fall entitled ‘The Causes of War’. How could this one man, sitting outside his brightly painted mud hut, tell me what I will be taking a 3-month course to try to understand in the fall? He had asked the question to lead to a single answer. One thing causes war. I was sitting on the edge of my seat as I waited through his pause. He looked at us. I wondered if I was about to hear some emotion fueled answer from a victim of war, or if I was going to hear a trinket of wisdom that comes only from those who have experienced such atrocities in life as had Mr. S. We locked eyes. “Poverty.” Poverty is the cause of war.

Initially, I thought this was a great answer. How many of the wars in Africa spawn from the perpetual state of poverty? The more I thought about it, however, I began to disagree. Poverty is definitely a significant contributor to the causes of war, but as I have learned, nothing stands alone.

Poverty is better attributed as a catalyst of war. Government soldiers in Somalia rob the citizens selling food in the market, not as a show of power, but because they are starving. Children will risk venturing into towns known to be inhabited by soldiers that will kidnap them because there is a chance they might find food there. People in impoverished areas have little to begin with, and what they do have is destroyed in the process of war. When in this situation, people are likely to cross the right-or-wrong line to stay on the favorable side of the life-or-death line.

In Africa, specifically, I’d attribute much of the conflict to Western colonization and the practice of putting a Sharpie outline around an aesthetically pleasing chunk of land. The chunks are occupied by several different ethnic groups and hundreds of different tribes, none who want to be controlled by another ethnic group. Viola.

As for the other causes of war? I guess I’ll find out this fall.