The tension in Nigeria between the Muslims and Christians is already close to murderous and now the North-South tension in the Ivory Coast is about to break into civil war. Soon - and it is some sort of index of civilisation in the tropics - there will be no cold beer in any airport between the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean.

We know from bitter experience that civil wars are much easier to start than stop. The White House and the Quai D'Orsee are alive to problems in the Ivory Coast but efforts have been back-room and low-key; there will soon be no Northern candidates of any weight in the forthcoming elections and that will be the end of peace.

If we want to re-examine how bad things might be there are too many examples in Africa, but as current concern is focused more on the former Yugoslavia and Israel we might profitably use these examples to demonstrate some very simple points.

The change shows every chance of being good for Serbia but not so good for anywhere else. As long as the democratic powers had an evil dictator to pillory and bomb the Serbian question could be embodied in the evil frame of one man, but with the more apparently reasonable Kostunica (who supported Serb repression in Kosovo) the intractable questions will stand out more starkly.

Even if his observation of form is scrupulous to a fault, Kostunica will not wish to be outflanked in his nationalism by anyone, including a revived Socialist Party under Mr. Milosevic or a more creditable and credible successor.

Those in support of a de facto independence for Kosovo will find that position far more difficult to maintain when Serbia asserts its historically reasonable claim to the sovereignty of the territory, exercised under new arrangements.

Reluctant Russia will soon make itself comfortable with the new Serb leadership, there will be no mechanism or pretext to preserve sanctions, no matter who avoids the War Crimes Tribunal, and there will come a time when the presence of international troops in Kosovo becomes more of a barrier to peace than a preserver of it.

The lesson is that it is easier to resort to the quick fix when your opponent is palpably wicked than when he makes every attempt to appear reasonable.

That attempt to appear reasonable is less and less successful as Mr. Ariel Sharon gets older. He quite deliberately took his literally fatal walk on the Temple Mount to wreck a peace process which he knew Yasser Arafat did not want and which would wreck the electoral chances of Prime Minister Barak.

With every day of peace the reputation of Arafat in his own scanty and scattered territory declines but a few shrieking teenage martyrs can obscure any amount of corruption and a militant right-wing party can have no self-interest in peace.

Furthermore, Sharon accurately calculated that Barak would be drawn into violence to assert Sharon's theoretical right to behave as provocatively as he likes as long as he does not resort to illegal incitement.

Thus, the peacemaker is providing comfort for his own domestic war-monger and is being outflanked by a corrupt opponent.

The lesson, sadly, is that it isn't good enough to be good.

There is a balance to be struck between over-centralised power and autonomy which, sadly, requires some ruthlessness as well as skill.

There is not such a chasm as we would like to think between Milosevic and Arafat on the one hand and Kostunica and Barak on the other. But you only have to look at a ruler balanced on a taut wire to know how easy it is to knock it off and how difficult to put it back. Let us hope that more effort is put into the Ivory Coast this week in spite of our traditional concern with Israel and the spectacular developments in Belgrade.