The world at war: does peace have a chance?

On Saturday, the UN will attempt to inaugurate the first ever one-day global ceasefire. Are they wasting their energy? Or will September 21 ultimately become as ingrained in our minds as September 11? Richard Askwith investigates

Three years ago, a young actor-turned-film-maker – not, to be honest, Britain's most successful young actor or film-maker – made an unusual announcement. He had had a dream, he told a bemused audience at London's Globe Theatre; and, from that day on, he would devote his life to making it come true. The dream was both simple and far-fetched. It was that, in future, for one day every year, the whole world would stop fighting.

You have only to glance at the map on the right to see what an unlikely vision this was. Fighting is what humanity does best. Each day, at least 500 people (most of them civilians) are killed through armed conflict, and thousands maimed; we spend more than $2 billion a day on weaponry; we lay down our arms and our hatreds with less enthusiasm than dogs lay down bones. Since 1945, we have managed to cram in 250 major wars. The last time no war of significance was in progress anywhere on the planet was – probably – 1816. If you expand the definition of war to include lesser skirmishes, it's unlikely that there's been a single day in the past two millennia when the Earth has been war-free. A world with no armed conflicts at all would be so different from the world we inhabit as to be scarcely recognisable.

So: the audience at the Globe made encouraging noises, and went home. It's unlikely that many of them expected to hear of this dream again; or, for that matter, of the dreamer, whose best previous claims to fame were playing Bugsy Malone as a teenager and being the off-screen former boyfriend of one of the stars of House of Eliott. They were wrong. For the next few days, we will be hearing of little else.

This weekend, a flock of celebrities and politicians will descend on London to honour the impressive progress that Jeremy Gilley, the dreamer in question, has already made. At the Brixton Academy on Saturday night guests will hear messages from, among others, the Dalai Lama and Kofi Annan (the UN Secretary-General), leavened with live music from bands such as Faithless, Zero 7 and Starsailor. Further star support is expected from Dave Stewart and Jimmy Cliff (who have written a song to mark the occasion), not to mention Damon Albarn, Badly Drawn Boy, Neneh Cherry, Sugababes and others. As for the audience, the great and good-looking have been falling over themselves to support the campaign, with Stephen Fry, Sir Paul McCartney, Stella McCartney, Mark Rylance, Trevor Beattie, Sir Richard Branson and Sam Taylor-Wood among the most ardent. Good causes, in short, don't currently come much more fashionable than the movement that calls itself Peace One Day. And if you're wondering how this glittering bandwagon got moving without your having noticed, there's a simple explanation. On 7 September last year, as Jeremy Gilley watched from a press box and "cried tears of joy", the nations of the world voted unanimously at the UN to set his dream in motion. UN GA Resolution 55/282 – proposed by Britain and Costa Rica – formally established the first annual day of global ceasefire, 21 September, to be inaugurated this year. Kofi Annan was going to announce it to the world at a big ceremony in New York on the morning of 11 September, 2001. The cameras that would have recorded the historic moment were already running when the first plane hit the World Trade Centre.

"It was unbelievable," recalls Gilley. "The children's choir had already started singing. Then my mobile phone rings. And then we're all trying to take it all in, and then the Secretary General comes out and says sorry, this event is cancelled, and I think you'd better leave the building."

Gilley – an improbably boyish 33-year-old with an actor's self-aware good looks – could have been excused a flash of egotistic despair. He had spent the previous two years travelling the world's war zones, interviewing tens of thousands of people, lobbying politicians, badgering corporations, living from hand to mouth, and generally moving mountains with his faith that he could change the world. He'd persuaded airlines to give him free flights, hotel chains to give him free rooms, movers and shakers to open their doors, a firm of pan-European equity traders to lend him a corner of their Brick Lane office, and a team of nearly 30 helpers to work round the clock there for £50 a day. He'd also "seen sights I never knew existed, suffering and destitution on a scale that frightened me... I'd held children in my arms who were dead a few hours later, talked to children who'd been mutilated by mines – just so much suffering..." He'd overcome every imaginable obstacle – and now his great work seemed to have collapsed, unimaginably, with the twin towers.

Within hours, however, he had extracted a more positive message from the catastrophe. "With madness like that, what hope can anyone give? What do you tell children? Well, Peace One Day is the one thing you can tell them about. I spent the next few days wandering round Brooklyn, filming and talking to kids. And there was the same awful look in their eyes that I'd seen in all those war zones – and the same look of hope when I explained that the world did actually care about them, and was trying to do something for peace.

"It's the same today, when we're all focusing on 11 September again, and there's all this talk of war. What do you tell your children? What do you tell anyone? How do you convince any individual that they can make a difference? There's so much appetite for peace, but what hope can you give people? What's the starting point for peace?"

To which his answer is: a day of peace; or, if that's beyond us, a day on which the world at least aspires to peace. "That's what's so interesting: that now, just 10 days later, there's this moment of hope. And what I hope is that one day, years from now, maybe 100 years, 21 September will be the date that everyone remembers. Like Christmas or Thanksgiving or whatever. Peace Day: the day when you don't fight. Not a date of horror, but a date of hope."

What exactly does this hope involve? How many conflicts, for example, will take this Saturday off? "We have serious commitments from people in 57 countries, including 22 governments, to mark the day." Including guerrilla leaders? "There's a limit to the number of guerrilla leaders you can reach." But there will be a ceasefire somewhere? "I don't know what will happen. This is just the beginning. Our priority is to get ordinary people to participate, at an individual level – to show a commitment to peace. It will be years before everyone in the world has even heard of us. Who knows when conflicts will actually start being suspended? The point is that we have to start somewhere."

It's easy to lose enthusiasm at this point. Can we really bring ourselves to give a damn about the UN calling on us all to express a vague commitment to peace – or, rather, to one day of peace a year, one day, many years from now, maybe? Indeed, cynics will already have been curling their lips at Gilley's luvvie-ish naivety, just as they will at the usual suspects who endorse it: the UN, the McCartneys, the Mary Robinsons and Oscar Ariases – even, perhaps, the various aid agencies (who enthuse that a one-day ceasefire in any conflict would be a priceless opportunity to rush food and medicine to where it was most needed). There's enough hot air in the world already, you might say, without yet another symbolic day of this or that. Yet the more you survey our warring planet, the harder it gets to remain convinced that the Peace One Day concept lacks merit.

According to The Independent's calculations, there are currently 22 significant wars going on in the world, with as many conflicts again where the warring parties are separated by often-precarious ceasefires and peace accords – plus as many active terrorist campaigns as you have time to count. Others reach slightly different conclusions. The US State Department, for example, considers that there are 24 wars in progress (not all the same as ours), as does the International Institute for Strategic Studies (but not all the same as theirs). The Center for Defense Studies in Washington believes that there are 36. The Peace Pledge Union lists 26, the National Defense Council Foundation 59. A spokesman for the British Foreign Office says, "I'm sorry, we've no idea."

What everyone agrees on, though (with the possible exception of the Foreign Office), is that the number of traditional, England-vs-France-style wars is declining. By the IISS's count, there were 34 fully fledged wars in progress in 1999, 36 in 2000, 30 in 2001, and 24 in 2002. As Micaela Gustavsson, a defence analyst at the IISS, puts it: "Ceasefires are breaking out all over the globe." And most of those wars that continue are internal conflicts, which are arguably less prone to escalation than full-scale international ones.

This is not to say that the horrors of war are declining. On the contrary: up to 90 per cent of the victims of war are now civilians, of whom half are children (as are a growing proportion of the soldiers). And the wounds of war heal more slowly than they used to. The number of countries irretrievably blighted by landmines and cluster bombs doesn't bear thinking about; nor does the number of psychologically damaged child-soldiers. But the total number of deaths in war has, unquestionably, declined. The IISS (which is very conservative about such figures) recorded 110,000 deaths in war in 1999, 95,000 in 2000, 60,000 in 2001, and 40,000 – so far – in 2002.

There is, however, another, darker trend, on which everyone also agrees, and that is that a new, less quantifiable kind of war is emerging to replace the old kind. That is one reason why there is so much disagreement on the figures. Who can really say if the US – or Israel – is at war? Or if Somalia is suffering from anarchy or civil war? Or if Peru is suffering from terrorism or organised crime? What we can say, though, in the reasonable expectation that neither doves nor hawks will disagree, is that the dangers of war are growing. Deadlier-than-ever weapons are available to unprecedented numbers of unprecedentedly mobile individuals. The ability of the Great Powers to contain military threats through deterrence and superior firepower is evaporating, because those threats no longer necessarily come from identifiable regimes – or even, in many cases, from abroad.

The number of terrorist incidents is lower than it was in the late 1970s and early 1980s (although it has risen sharply in the past three years). But the number of deaths caused by such incidents has never been higher; and, as we all know, the terrorists of the future have a potential for mass destruction that they have scarcely begun to explore. To say that we live in an age of terror is to state the obvious. In fact, you could make a reasonable case for colouring the whole world red on our map.

In this context, the idea of a ceasefire may seem irrelevant. How can you call a truce with an enemy you can't see (and who may not even be alive)? How can you believe in a ceasefire when your enemy has no conventional chain of command? You can't. And the idea that you can defend yourself from future attacks simply by developing a symbolic "day of peace" is, of course, ridiculous. But then so, too, is the idea that, in a world catastrophically overstocked with weaponry and fanatics, we can secure our futures indefinitely by sticking to the same old strategies, obliterating the occasional rogue state, and crossing our fingers. Common sense insists that Jeremy Gilley is right when he says: "We have to change the way we think. If we don't we'll just carry on as we are."

No amount of bombing will remove the shadow of weapons of mass destruction from our planet. But maybe, just maybe, we could do something about the attitudes that might motivate their use. According to the Center for Defense Studies, 50 per cent of the wars now in progress are motivated by religious or ethnic hatred (with a further 7 per cent driven by drugs or crime). They are caused, in other words, not by inexorable economic forces, but by the old-fashioned evils that traditionally fester in the human heart. To make no attempt to address these evils would be woolly-minded cynicism of the worst kind. To plant in the minds of future generations the idea that peace is a cause worth pursuing would, by contrast, be plain prudence. And while we're all irritated (aren't we?) by the gesture politics with which "days of peace" are usually associated, the ceasefire day initiated by Peace One Day has the unique distinction of having been formally endorsed by every government in the world.

History shows that regular truces can put down roots. The ancient Greeks' Olympic Truce is an obvious example, but there have also been effective traditions of a "peace week" in parts of Africa. Why should it be beyond us – in today's shrunken world – to develop a similar tradition globally, especially with the backing of the UN? If the international media can make the whole world aware of 9/11, why can't it do the same with 9/21?

That, at any rate, is why I will be telling my children about Peace One Day this weekend, and anyone else who cares to listen. It may be the flimsiest of straws to clutch at in the flood of violence all around us; but, as Shimon Peres says, "If we want peace for 365 days, we have to start with one."

And if Jeremy Gilley's plans are exploded again on Saturday – as they might plausibly be – by some fresh terrorist atrocity, or perhaps by outbreak of war against Iraq – well, that will just be "all the more reason," he says, "why we must continue. We've no other option. Whatever happens, we can't give up now."

For further details of Peace One Day, phone 020-7456 9180, or see www.peaceoneday.org. For details of the Day of Peace event to be held at Brixton Academy, phone 0870 771 2000

The situation around the world

THE AMERICAS

USA: The world's mightiest military power is on a war footing, having been engaged since September 2001 in loosely defined "war on terror", including yet-to-be-concluded campaign in Afghanistan. Also in low-level but escalating conflict with Iraq through Operation Desert Fox (since 1998), although technically this is UN peace-keeping.

COLOMBIA: Left-wing guerrilla insurgency, increasingly entangled with activities of drug cartels, has created a permanent state of half-war.

HAITI: Terrorist activities by opposition forces in 2002.

MEXICO: Eight-year-old uprising by "Zapatista" rebels remains explosive, despite a supposed ceasefire in January.

PERU: Sendero Luminoso, the Maoist rebel group, is resuming its low-level war on the state; 30,000 people have died since 1980.

EUROPE

THE BALKANS: Peace accords generally holding up well, but ethnic violence and terrorist activity continue, notably in and around Kosovo, and in Macedonia.

CYPRUS: Riots this summer reminded the world of the delicate nature of the 28-year-old UN-monitored ceasefire between the Turkish and Greek halves of the island.

SPAIN: Recent escalation in terrorist activities by the Basque separatist group ETA prompted the banning of ETA's political wing, Batasuna.

TURKEY: A ceasefire in 1999 has calmed but not ended the long conflict between the Turkish government and the Kurdish separatists, in which 39,000 have died since 1984. Terrorist activity by Islamic opposition groups has added to the year's death toll.

UNITED KINGDOM: Northern Ireland ceasefire continues, more or less, to hold, despite continuing punishment beatings.

SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

ANGOLA: Twenty-seven years of civil war (in which 1.5 million people died) ended in April following death of Jonas Savimbi, leader of the Unita rebels. But long-term separatist rebellion in the Cabinda enclave continues, and violence remains endemic.

BURUNDI: About 212,000 people have been killed in the civil war that has raged since the assassination of President Melchior Ndadaye in 1993, as rebels from the majority Hutu tribe battle for power with the Tutsi-dominated government. The recent ceasefire in neighbouring Congo may worsen the conflict, as rebel forces based there return to Burundi.

CHAD: Border dispute with Central African Republic occasionally erupts into violence, as it did in August. Terrorist activity in the north has killed more than 1,000 people since 1998.

CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC: In addition to its border dispute with Chad, the CAR is suffering from an army mutiny which, since 2001, has escalated into something approaching civil war.

CONGO (DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC): July's peace deal between Congo and Rwanda may mean that the end is in sight for the devastating war that began in 1998 in the country formerly known as Zaire, which grew to include Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Rwanda, Burundi, Sudan, Uganda and Chad, as well as various rebel forces. There have been numerous clashes since, and most of the foreign troops are still there and fighting. In the context of an overall death toll of 2.5 million, the signs are hopeful.

CONGO BRAZZAVILLE: Civil war currently contained by a ceasefire.

ETHIOPIA: Border war with Eritrea, in which 50,000 died, currently the subject of a peace accord; but lesser border wars with Somalia and Sudan continue, as does the long-running rebellion by the Oromo Liberation Front.

GUINEA-BISSAU: A 1999 peace accord supposedly ended the army rebellion, but there was an attempted coup in December and sporadic fighting continues.

LIBERIA: The 1989-96 civil war, which cost 150,000 lives, is theoretically resolved. But the rebellion by Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) continues.

NAMIBIA: Terrorist campaign by rebel Caprivi Liberation Army continues.

NIGERIA: Violent unrest – never quite escalating into civil war – has been endemic in Nigeria in recent years, particularly between Moslems and Christians. At least 7,000 people have died in such violence since 1999. But border clashes with Cameroon are decreasing.

RWANDA: There has been civil war in Rwanda since 1990, bar a couple of years of ceasefire. But it was the genocide of 1994, in which up to a million Tutsis were slaughtered by Hutu militias, that made the country a byword for senseless slaughter. Since then, fighting has dragged on between the Tutsi-dominated government and Hutu rebels (sometimes based in Congo). The "end" of the war in Congo may see the worst perpetrators of the 1994 massacres brought to justice – or simply see an escalation of the conflict within Rwanda's borders.

SENEGAL: Civil war rumbles on in the Casamance region, although peace talks are in progress.

SIERRA LEONE: A particularly brutal civil war, which began in 1991, was largely resolved in 2000 with the help of UN intervention. UN peacekeepers continue to oversee an uneasy peace accord.

SOMALIA: The anarchy and civil war that broke out on the overthrow of dictator Siade Barre continue, as does a longstanding border war with Ethiopia.

SOUTH AFRICA: Sporadic violence since 1996 by Pagad (People Against Gangsterism and Drugs), a mainly Muslim group operating in the Western Cape.

SUDAN: Civil war (between the largely Muslim, Arab government in the north and the largely Christian, black rebels in the south) is now in its 19th year; recent peace accords were suspended by Khartoum after attacks in the south. Border wars with Ethiopia and Uganda have added to the death toll.

TANZANIA: Political violence since 2000 over future of Zanzibar.

UGANDA: Two rebel groups – the Lord's Resistance Army and the Allied Democratic Forces – continue to wreak havoc in the north. July's peace accord should see the end of Uganda's involvement in Congo, but fighting continues on the border with Sudan.

ZIMBABWE: Politically inspired terror campaign continues, with government encouragement.

NORTH AFRICA/ MIDDLE EAST

ALGERIA: Vicious civil war between military government and Islamic fundamentalist rebels has been raging since 1992. The main rebel group, the Islamic Salvation Army, finally surrendered in 1999, but several other groups are still fighting enthusiastically.

EGYPT: Terrorist campaign by Islamic fundamentalist rebels against the secular government has claimed at least 1,200 lives since 1992, although 2002 has been quiet so far.

IRAN: Occasional clashes with Kurdish rebels in north and Mujaheddin Khalq opposition forces on the Iraqi border.

IRAQ: Remains to all intents and purposes at war with the US and UK, which have been conducting regular bombing raids since 1998 as part of Operation Desert Fox (itself a continuation of the 1991 Gulf War). Enforcement of the "no fly" zone may reasonably be said to have halted hostilities against the Kurds in the north. But fighting continues sporadically with Shiite rebels in the south (although it's hard to say where ordinary state terror ends and civil war begins). And worse is probably to come.

ISRAEL/PALESTINE: Israel's only formal, active war is on its border with Lebanon, where 30,000 lives have been lost since 1978 and where fighting continues on and off despite Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000. An uneasy, UN-monitored truce continues to hold in the Golan Heights (seized from Syria in 1967). But it is in the Occupied Territories, and in Israel itself, that the most distressing and depressing killing has recently taken place, ever since Ariel Sharon's provocative visit to the Al-Aqsa mosque two years ago sparked the current intifada. The subsequent cycle of killing and revenge has cost at least 2,000 lives.

LEBANON: Recent fears of a re-ignition of the civil war that claimed 100,000 lives between 1975 and 1990 have proved unfounded. But the Lebanese government remains technically at war with Israel, and there is sporadic shelling in both directions by the two protagonists and their proxy guerrilla militias.

SYRIA: The ceasefire over the Golan Heights holds, but still not at peace with Israel, against which its proxy, Hizbollah, remains active.

TUNISIA: Regular political violence since 1996, including terrorism attributed to al-Qa'ida.

WESTERN SAHARA: Still no peace accord in long-running war between Morocco and Polisario guerrilla army of the Saharawi, although a UN-enforced truce has been in place since 1991.

YEMEN: Regular attacks by religious terrorists since 1998 (including the attack on the USS Cole in 2000) and, this year, US-backed clashes with alleged al-Qa'ida pockets.

ASIA

AFGHANISTAN: Supposedly at peace, after a civil war that claimed 92,000 lives from 1992 onwards (and perhaps 1.5 million since 1978). But the US-led "war on terror" has yet to be declared over, and there are signs of an al- Qa'ida resurgence.

ARMENIA/AZERBAIJAN: Ceasefire holds in the two states' long-running dispute over Azerbaijan's Nagorno Karabakh enclave, but tensions remain high.

BANGLADESH: Peace settlements have ended much of the fighting by tribal guerrillas in the Chittagong hill tracts (where 3,000 people were killed between 1982 and 1998), but separatist and Islamic fundamentalist groups remain.

BURMA (MYANMAR): Civil wars have been running on and off since the Second World War. In the most recent round of fighting, since 1988, at least 10,000 people have been killed, and the increasing involvement of drugs cartels has made the problem even more intractable.

CHINA: Violent suppression of Islamic separatists in the Xinjiang province has cost 2,000 lives since 1991; hence China's support for the "war on terror".

GEORGIA: Fighting in Abkhazia and South Ossetia cost 7,000 lives in the 1990s; ceasefires now notionally operating. Also faces invasion by Russia over Chechen rebels in Pankisi Gorge.

INDIA: At least 27,000 people have been killed since 1984 in fighting in the Kashmir region, which intensified last December following the terrorist attack on India's parliament. But a full-scale war with nuclear rivals Pakistan has so far been averted. Meanwhile, India faces a bewildering variety of internal (usually separatist) rebellions: by Bodo guerrillas, by the Assamese, by various Tripura rebel groups in the north-east, by the Mizo National Front and by the Marxist/Maoist Naxalite guerrillas. And sporadic violence has persisted on the border with Bangladesh.

INDONESIA: A UN peace-keeping force maintains an uneasy peace in East Timor, where more than 200,000 people were killed between 1975 and 1999. But rebellions are still being violently suppressed in Aceh (5,000 deaths since 1999), Kalimantan (5,000 since 1997) and West Papua (30,000 since 1965). Ceasefires of a kind obtain in Sulawesi and Maluku (6,000 deaths between them since 1998), but terrorist attacks have persisted in Jakarta.

KYRGYZSTAN: Islamic rebels, some based in Tajikistan, have been fighting sporadically in southern Kyrgyzstan since August 1999, possibly as part of a wider jihad against governments of Central Asia.

NEPAL: Maoist rebels seeking to overthrow the monarchy now control a third of the country, and civil war is rapidly escalating.

NORTH KOREA: The 49-year-old ceasefire with the south continues to be breached from time to time. There were border clashes with South Korea in November and June. In the latter skirmish, near Yeonpyeong Island, a South Korean frigate was sunk and four South Korean sailors died.

PAKISTAN: The Pakistan government denies responsibility for the activities of Muslim guerrillas in Indian Kashmir but remains heavily represented on the Line of Control, where there are regular exchanges of fire. Deaths in the Kashmir region since 1989 are estimated at 27,000. Meanwhile, terrorist activity by various groups (mainly religious fundamentalists) has claimed 3,000 lives since 1985.

PAPUA NEW GUINEA: Bougainville's struggle for independence has claimed 10,000 lives since 1988, by no means all of them before the peace accord that has been in place for the past four years.

PHILIPPINES: More than 120,000 people were killed in the guerrilla war on the southern island of Mindanao between 1968 and 2001, as Islamic separatists fought for independence from the mainly Christian north. A ceasefire is now in place, but terrorist activity continues.

RUSSIAN FEDERATION: The second Chechen war has cost at least 12,000 lives since 1999 (the first, from 1994-96, cost 35,000 lives). Terrorist activity in Dagestan is related to this conflict, as was the 1991-96 fighting in North Ossetia, where a ceasefire is now in place.

SOLOMON ISLANDS: Regular political violence since 1999.

SOUTH KOREA: See North Korea.

TAIWAN: Remains technically in a state of conflict with China, although a ceasefire has been in place since 1958.

SRI LANKA: Peace talks have begun, but the vicious civil war continues between the Tamil rebels (mainly based in the north) and the ruling Sinhalese majority.

TAJIKISTAN: Fighting with Islamic militants and drug gangs.

UZBEKISTAN: Guerrilla activity by Islamic fundamentalists linked to groups based in Tajikistan.