Aug. 19 (EIRNS)--Two Stanford University professors published an article in Newsweek magazine on Aug. 14, entitled "Did Britain Wreck the World?" "By Jove, it certainly seems that way," they wrote. Identifying a number of former British colonies where ethnic and religious wars have kept the countries disunited, the authors said: "Most of today's festering conflicts can be traced to colonial-era meddling, either through partition, slicing and dicing the planet as they saw fit or, worse, indiscriminately corralling unrelated ethnic groups into a single, quarrelsome country."
The content and timing of the article are particularly interesting in light of the fact that the British role in President Obama's health-care reform has come under serious attack in the United States. The article has been picked up widely in India, where all major English-language news dailies have reproduced it.
The countries identified in this article are Sri Lanka, India, and Pakistan ("When they left centuries later, they divvied it up by religion, prompting mass migration and perhaps a million deaths. Kashmir, which had a Hindu leader and a Muslim majority, has been contested ever since"), Iraq, Sudan ("A British-Egyptian alliance ruled North and South Sudan separately until 1946, when the Brits abruptly changed their minds and decided the two should merge. The north was economically and politically favored over the south, and civil war has been on and off ever since"), Israel/Palestine, Somalia ("Fashioned in 1960 from a British protectorate and an Italian colony, Somalia has been divided against itself ever since. In the 1990s, after decades of civil strife, the government collapsed and the two neighbors declared autonomy"), and Nigeria ("The West African nation was once two distinct states officially joined in 1914, but administered by the British separately until independence in 1960. Here, the British favored the south, setting the stage for decades of strife").
