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Iraq's Most Dangerous
Resource - Idle Young Men

By Doug Saunders
The Globe and Mail
4-17-4
 
It was last fall when I first became aware that the coalition governing Iraq had failed to pay any attention to one of the world's most dangerous threats.
 
According to a small story in the back pages of the Financial Times of London, the U.S. military and its contractors, in their efforts to rebuild the country's infrastructure, had hired tens of thousands of workers from Bangladesh and India. Baghdad Airport had become a vast staging ground for eager new employees from the Indian subcontinent.
 
In itself, there's nothing wrong with this: Throughout the Middle East, the tough jobs tend to be done by people from poorer places farther east, and heaven knows that Bangladeshis need the work.
 
The problem wasn't the workers, but the thousands of young Iraqi men lined up outside the airport in search of any kind of occupation, no matter how nominal or paltry, to fill their time and make them part of their country's reconstruction. They were rudely and foolishly turned away.
 
"We don't want to overlook Iraqis, but we want to protect ourselves," explained Colonel Damon Walsh, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority's procurement office. "From a force-protection standpoint, Iraqis are more vulnerable to a bad-guy influence."
 
This shortsighted decision, I suspect, lies at the heart of much of the "bad-guy influence" we are witnessing in Iraq today. In the immediate interest of avoiding sabotage, Col. Walsh and his colleagues managed to inflame the world's most dangerous constituency: Men in their late teens and 20s with nothing else to do.
 
Almost all the violence and crime in the world is committed by people, mostly male, aged 15 to 29 years. You can draw a pretty accurate map of the world's trouble spots by plotting the places where there are large concentrations of young people and insufficient economic resources to give them something to do with themselves.
 
Places where half or more of the population is aged 15 to 29 ó known to demographers as an "extreme youth bulge" ó include Afghanistan, Iran, the Palestinian Territories, Lebanon, Syria, most of sub-Saharan Africa and Haiti. (In Canada, on the low end of the scale, people of this age make up less than a quarter of the population.)
 
"The evidence that a large proportion of young people is associated with the outbreak of political violence and warfare is among the best documented in the literature on population and conflict," the organization Population Action International writes in a new and fascinating study, titled "The Security Demographic: Population and Civil Conflict After the Cold War."
 
Among countries that are at war, according to detailed studies by Christian Mesquida and Neil Weiner at Toronto's York University, the ones with high youth populations experience the most severe violence.
 
Iraq is in trouble here. As of last year, according to the United Nations, 47.5 per cent of its 26 million people were aged 15 to 29. Many of them have nothing to occupy themselves: A lot of the country's industry is still on hold, there's hardly any farmland, there is no longer a monolithic army-state to provide dole and order, and the economy has yet to return to its former prosperous levels. An occupying force could either help them out of this bind, or be blamed as the cause of it.
 
Guess which happened? Last fall, the young men who had been standing outside Baghdad Airport, many of them soldiers who were further disgruntled by the lack of compensation or policing work, rioted at Coalition Provisional Authority offices across Iraq over their lack of inclusion. Marines fired shots into the crowd in Baghdad. If these young men didn't actually join the insurgency that has exploded in recent weeks, they certainly have little reason not to cheer it on.
 
People with experience in nation-building know that a crucial priority is to keep young men from becoming disenfranchised. This week, The New York Times Magazine noted that Major-General William Nash of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, who helped to oversee the restoration of Bosnia's democracy, had initially stuck to the conventional tasks of policing borders, confiscating weapons and keeping ethnic factions separate. Then, James Traub wrote, "he realized that his real problem was idle young local men. So Nash put them to work building things."
 
It worked. The employment of local young men, lest they become part of an anti-transition rebellion, has become one of the keystones of post-conflict recovery, at least in NATO and UN circles. It is not a cure-all, but it does prevent one of the most common forms of violent trouble. But it was very explicitly not done in Iraq. In fact, when military contractors tried to set up a program last year to find jobs for Iraq's 400,000 unemployed ex-soldiers, almost all of them 15 to 29, they were ordered to stop. All succeeding plans have been cancelled. The guerrilla resistance has become a make-work program unto itself.
 
Behind this immediate crisis, of course, lies a larger problem: Why does Iraq have such a huge proportion of people in their teens and 20s? Because its families continue to have, on average, 4.8 children each, far above the population-maintaining rate of two. A generation ago, this sort of unsustainable fertility could be seen in almost every nation in the world's southern two-thirds. Today, thanks to birth control and the introduction of women to education and work, it is very rare outside the African continent (Afghanistan and Pakistan are among the few remaining holdouts).
 
This helps to explain why the world is a less violent place than it was a generation ago. It also points to a long-term solution for places such as Iraq: Make sure women have full access to education, and put birth control at the centre of medical services. Around the world, the United States has a good record of supporting the former, and a terrible record of obstructing the latter. After turning Iraq's reserve army of idle men into a genuine army of angry rebels, this would be a good moment to avoid making a second, more lasting demographic mistake.
 
© Copyright 2004 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved. http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM
.20040416.wdougs17/BNStory/International/
 
 


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