Islam Times - Terrorism in Many Countries Stems from Poverty, Shortages of Water: UN Official

Islam Times - Poverty and the shortage of such resources as water give birth to terrorism in many countries, UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for West Africa and the Sahel Leonardo Santos Simao said.

He stressed that fighting poverty is essential for the efficiency of anti-terrorist efforts. "All the conditions need to fight poverty should come together, combined in each one of those countries, to improve the living conditions of the populations. Then terrorism will not have a fertile ground to recruit people on that," he said in an interview with TASS.

He also noted that climate change is another reason why people take to arms as it entails shortages of essential natural resources such as water. "And water is key for that. And therefore, shrinking sources of water and lack of capacity of the government to provide there, it exacerbates also conflict in communities.

Conflict between communities - those ones which have water, and communities which do not have water, so they go to other communities to fetch water. It creates conflict," he said.

According to Simao, it is quite easy to obtain weapons in Sahel and local communities are arming to defend their interests in the fight for resources. "But also you have herders that come with their animals.

So one part of the year they are in one place, another part of the year they go to another place in search of pasture and water also. So where water is scarce, so you have conflict also between farmers and herders. All this together, it breeds the conditions for terrorism," he added.

Apart from that, in his words, poverty was the cause of several military coups in countries of the region in recent years. "There is a widespread dissatisfaction in the population on the lack of economic and social progress. Very few countries can provide basic services to the entire population of the territory, like clean potable water, basic healthcare and education.

With elections after elections, the situation is not changing. So this creates not only dissatisfaction, but also creates animosities between the population and their governments," he explained.

In this context, he noted that local residents often feel that their government are not doing enough to resolve the problems. "The citizens feel themselves abandoned by the governments and leading to poverty. So poverty is one of the root causes of this. And poverty also is associated with the malfunctioning of institutions, state institutions, which were supposed to provide this goods and services. It's not happening," he said.