Relatively good year, actually

If historical ingratitude was a crime, most of the people writing year-end pieces this month would be in jail.

This year was not like 1919, when 3% of the world’s population died of influenza, or 1943, when World War 2 was killing a million people each month, or 1983, when we came very close to World War 3 (though the public didn’t realise it at the time).

Comparatively 2015 has been a pretty good year. Yes, of course there is the war in Syria, and millions of refugees, and the downturn in China dragging the world economy down, and terrorism here, there and everywhere.

Of course, climate change is waiting around the corner to drag us all down. But if you are waiting for a year with nothing to worry about, you’ll be waiting a long time.

The war in Syria is four years old and still going strong. In late European summer (August) it looked for a time as if the Islamist rebels were going to destroy the Syrian army and take over the whole country, but the Russian intervention restored the stalemate. There is even talk of a ceasefire now, so that everybody can concentrate on fighting the Islamic State.

That may not happen, because Turkey and Saudi Arabia are both determined to destroy the Assad regime at any cost. The Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham (IS clones who make up the bulk of what American propaganda portrays as “the moderates”) may not agree to a ceasefire either. The war could go on for years yet.

There are other wars in the Middle East too, in Iraq (where IS also holds much territory), in Afghanistan (where the Taliban are winning), and in Yemen. Libya’s internal wars are getting worse, and there is talk of renewed Western military intervention. Turkey has also relaunched its war against the Kurds.

The Middle East is a full-spectrum mess, and the particular brand of Islamist extremism that has taken root there has expanded to produce terrorist attacks in countries stretching from India, Kenya, France to the US.

But the Middle East only contains 10% of the world’s people and the Arab world (where most of the bloodshed happens) is only half of the Middle East. Its only major export is oil, and its main import is food. What happens there is not as important as what happens in the other 90% of the world, which is by and large at peace and doing quite well.

There are no wars at all in Asia, home to half the human race, and no wars in the Americas either. There is one war in Europe, in eastern Ukraine with heavy Russian involvement, but a ceasefire has greatly reduced (but not entirely stopped) the shooting in the past four months.

The only real war in Africa this year was in South Sudan, now suspended at least temporarily, although there are half-a dozen other countries with a significant level of civil or terrorist violence (Nigeria, Somalia, Mali, Sudan, Kenya, etc.). But 40 of the 50 African countries are entirely at peace and most are at least partly democratic.

This is not a picture of world where violence is out of control. The violence is approaching catastrophic levels in parts of the Middle East, but the scattered incidents of Islamist terrorism against non-Muslims elsewhere are relatively small and few in number. Nevertheless, they have encouraged the Western media (and several Western leaders) to talk about terrorism as an “existential threat”.

That is absurd, but Donald Trump, the leading candidate for the Republican party’s nomination for president, proposed the US deal with this “threat” by stopping all Muslims from entering the US.

The number of non-Middle Eastern people who actually died in terrorist attacks in 2015, including the two Paris attacks, the Los Angeles attack, and attacks on tourists in Muslim countries (mostly British in Tunisia and Russians in Egypt) was just over 400.

The total population of Russia, the US, Britain and France is about 600-million, so the risk of being killed by Islamist terrorists, if you are a citizen of one of those countries, is one in one-and-a-half million. It is not a crisis. It is just a problem, and fairly far down the list of problems these countries face.

The number of refugees coming out of the Middle East, mainly from Syria, is much bigger issue, but the main burden of caring for them has fallen on neighbouring Muslim countries, principally Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. About one million refugees reached Europe this year, sparking political panic in the European Union (population 500-million), but the extraordinary generosity of Germany, which has taken in 80% of the refugees, more than compensates for the meaner behaviour of other Western countries.

Enough on the Middle East, in Asia, the Burmese election in November was probably the final step in ending half a century of military rule. In China the long-predicted drop in the economy’s growth rate seems to be arriving (though the regime denies it), and the question of whether the communist dictatorship can survive a prolonged period of slow growth is slowly working its way back onto the agenda. The Indian economy continues to power ahead, although it remains far smaller than China’s.

There were the usual typhoons and earthquakes and a long-term confrontation may be building over China’s new military bases on artificial islands in the South China Sea, but on the whole Asia had a fairly good year.

So did Africa, despite renewed terrorist attacks in Mali, President Jacob Zuma’s boundless corruption in South Africa, and the tail-end of the ebola epidemic in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea – at least that epidemic spurred the high-speed development of a vaccine that will help to contain future outbreaks.

Nigeria, with a new president, Muhammadu Buhari, brought the Boko Haram insurgency somewhat under control, and even Kenya, the main victim of Islamist terrorism in sub-Saharan Africa, had some good news.

The year began badly for Kenya when al-Shabaab terrorists from Somalia stormed Garissa University in April, killing 148 people, mostly Christians who they separated from Muslim students and shot or hacked them to death in front of their fellow students.

But when another group of Islamist terrorists stopped a bus on a road in northern Kenya in December and ordered Muslim passengers to identify the Christians among them, they refused: “We even gave some non-Muslims our religious attire to wear in the bus so that they would not be identified easily,” said Abdi Mohamud Abdi. Unwilling to murder Muslims, the terrorists left.

Europe has had a relatively quiet time, apart from the refugees – and this weekend’s flooding of York.

The British election returned the Conservatives to power with a wafer-thin majority, but the Spanish election destroyed the two-party system and left everything up in the air. In Italy Silvio Berlusconi finally withdrew from politics, pursued by numerous legal proceedings and leaving the scene less exciting but considerably cleaner.

There was near-panic about Greece defaulting on its debts and leaving the euro. The anti-austerity, left-wing Syriza government won two elections and a referendum in the course of the year, but eventually submitted to the disciplines of the European Union.

In Latin America, the high-profile event was the re-opening, after 54 years, of the US embassy in Havana, although ending the trade embargo against Cuba is still subject to a US congressional vote.

Left-wing governments lost elections in Argentina and Venezuela and even Brazil’s president Dilma Rousseff is in trouble. But this is the usual ebb-and-flow of politics. Latin America is no longer a place apart, it is part of the West.

And what are we to make of North America? Canada finally showed Stephen Harper the door after almost 10 years and elected his liberal antithesis, Justin Trudeau. In the same year the Jurassic Trump emerged as the Republican front-runner for the 2016 presidential election.

There is a strong argument for saying Trump’s main appeal is that he is not boring. This could be a problem for Hillary Clinton, who for all her sterling virtues is deeply, deeply boring.

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist