Warlords in International Relations

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Contents List of Figures

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List of Abbreviations

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Notes on the Contributors

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Introduction Paul B. Rich

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1

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5

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The Emergence and Significance of Warlordism in International Politics Paul B. Rich The Arms Trade and Militarized Actors in Internal Conflict Neil Cooper

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Warlordism and Drug Trafficking: From Southeast Asia to Sub-Saharan Africa Glen Segell

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Privatizing Security, Privatizing War? The New Warrior Class and Regional Security Kevin A. O’Brien

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The Militarization of Ethnicity and the Emergence of Warlordism in Rwanda, 1990–94 Mel McNulty

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The Collapse of Albania and a Different Type of Warlord: Criminal Gangs Paolo Tripodi

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Clan Conflict and Factionalism in Somalia Samuel M. Makinda

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Warlordism and Political Violence in Jammu and Kashmir 1988–97: Gun Rule? Alexander Evans

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The Warlord and Global Order Stephen Chan

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Index

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List of Figures 4.1 Executive Outcomes’ corporate network 4.2 African interventions

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63 75

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List of Abbreviations ACDA BSF CCB DEA DSL ECOMOG ECOWAS EO FAR FIDH FMLN FRELIMO GP HM HRW INCB INPFL JKLF KMT LAC LIC MPF MPRI MRND MUF NLF NPA NRA NRM OSCE PARMEHUTU RENAMO RPF SADF SNM

Arms Control and Disarmament Agency Border Security Force Civil Cooperation Bureau Drug Enforcement Agency Defence Systems Ltd ECOWAS Military Observer Group Economic Community of West African States Executive Outcomes Forces Armées Rwandaises International Human Rights Federation Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front Front for the Liberation of Mozambique Garde Presidentielle Hizbul Mujhadeen Human Rights Watch International Narcotics Control Bureau Independent Patriotic Front of Liberia Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front Kuomintang Line of Actual Control Low Intensity Conflict Multinational Protection Force Military Professional Resources Incorporated Mouvement Révolutionnaire National pour le Développement Muslim United Front Jammu and Kashmir National Liberation Front New Peoples Army National Resistance Army National Resistance Movement Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Parti pour l’émancipation des Hutus Mozambique National Resistance Movement Rwandan Patriotic Front South African Defence Force Somali National Movement vii

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viii SSDF SSRP UNITAF UNOSOM USC UNAMIR UNAVEM III UNITA WMD ZANU-PF

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List of Abbreviations Somali Salvation Democratic Front Somali Socialist Revolutionary Party Unified Task Force United Nations Operation in Somalia United Somali Congress United Nations Assistance Mission to Rwanda United Nations Angolan Verification Mission III National Union for the Total Independence of Angola Weapons of Mass Destruction Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front

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Notes on the Contributors Stephen Chan’s family were participants in the warlordisms of precommunist China. He is safely removed from this past and is Dean of Humanities at Nottingham Trent University, where he also holds the Chair of International Relations and Ethics. His immense published output, in both scholarly and creative writing, is concerned with resistances to the received global order. He heads a private practice that advises Third World governments, but not yet warlords. Neil Cooper is a Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of Plymouth and Director of the Arms Trade Research Project based in the International Studies Centre at Plymouth. He has published widely on issues related to the arms trade and arms control. His most recent book is The Business of Death: Britain’s Arms Trade at Home and Abroad. He is currently engaged in research on the subsidization of the arms trade which has been funded by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and the Trust for Research and Education on the Arms Trade. Alexander Evans is a Research Student and Teaching Assistant in Politics at the University of Bristol, England. He has been working on Kashmir for several years, and conducted fieldwork in South Asia, the Middle-East and the United States during 1993, 1996 and 1997. He has published several articles, mainly on South Asian security studies. Samuel M. Makinda is a Senior Lecturer in International Politics at Murdoch University, Western Australia. His recent publications include Seeking Peace from Chaos: Humanitarian Intervention in Somalia and Superpower Diplomacy in the Horn of Africa. He has also published numerous articles in more than a dozen journals. Mel McNulty is a Lecturer in French at Nottingham Trent University. His doctoral thesis, on French military intervention in Africa, was researched partly in Rwanda during 1996. He has written articles for the War Studies Journal and International Peacekeeping, and contributed chapters to several edited volumes including Ethnic Conflict and the Media (edited by Tim Allen). Current projects include a co-authored comparative analysis ix

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of French and Italian peacekeeping, and a study of armed conflict and regional security in central Africa with reference to the Zairean war of 1997. Kevin A. O’Brien is the Executive Director of the Hussar International Research Group and a Research Associate of the Institute for Security Studies (South Africa). He has written extensively on South African security issues, as well as on the continuing transformation of national security structures in the post-Soviet era. He is currently Doctoral Fellow in Security Studies at the University of Hull. Paul B. Rich is Principal Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of Luton. He has previously taught at the Universities of Bristol and Melbourne. He is the author of several books and articles on international relations and Southern Africa, the most recent of which is State Power and Black Politics in South Africa. He is currently working on two studies: one on regionalism in international relations and the other on nationalism, identity and the state in international politics. Glen Segell was educated at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Hebrew University Jerusalem and King’s College London. He has taught at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and the Department of Politics, University of Reading. He has published a number of academic books and a range of articles covering economics and politics, the internet, war and military history, international relations, civil–military relations and military–industrial relations. He is on the Editorial Board of the Electronic Journal of Conflict Analysis and is a member of the Council for Arms Control. Paolo Tripodi is a Lecturer in the Department of International Studies at Nottingham Trent University. From 1990 to 1993 he served as a First Lieutenant with the Carabineri (Italian Military Police) at Carabineri Headquarters in Rome and from 1994 he was a Fellow with the Italian National Agency for New Technology, Energy and Environment. He is currently investigating the Italian involvement with peacekeeping missions in the 1990s.

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Introduction This volume explores the growing phenomenon of warlordism in contemporary international politics. There has been growing interest among analysts in recent years in the activities of warlords, though the term as such has not as yet acquired any great analytical precision. It remains in many respects a word with considerable emotive connotations since it conjures up armed groupings operating for the most part outside any framework of law and in situations where the authority of legitimate government has mostly broken down. Warlords offend the basic precepts of Western liberalism since their activities are seen as based on armed force – indeed warlord formations are in many instances closely linked both to narcotics and illegal arms dealing and the terrorizing of civilian populations. It is thus not particularly surprising that warlords are frequently depicted in the Western media as the products of a profound malaise in state authority, especially in the developing world. As some of the essays in this volume show, warlords are in many cases the result of state breakdown and operate in what has come to be termed ‘failed states’. They have become linked by some analysts to a new Hobbesian anarchy in parts of the developing world in which it is not clear whether it will be possible to restore on a long-term basis legitimate structures of state authority. Warlordism thus pinpoints weaknesses in the Westphalian system of sovereign nation states in the late twentieth century. It points analysts towards debates concerning the revision of orthodox notions of state sovereignty in order to cope with a multiplicity of allegiances and loyalties in a number of societies in both the developing world as well as parts of Europe such as the Balkans. The upsurge of warlordism can in a number of instances be linked to a particular phase of international politics in the post-Cold War era in which superpower hegemony in many parts of the international system has all but disappeared. State failure in this context can be explained in terms of the weak structures of statehood that survived as a result of the external patronage of one or other of the rival superpowers during the Cold War years. Now that this external support has either sharply declined or else vanished entirely, a rather more gloomy picture is presented in which numbers of states, especially in the developing world, no longer have the capacity to secure the support and allegiance of their populations. The societies concerned face a future of considerable economic, political and military insecurity. xi

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This growing ‘failure’ of states can lead to the pessimistic view that warlordism may come to threaten global order. The ‘warlordization’ of international politics may already be in progress with the enhanced power of such actors as drug barons and arms dealers, as well as individual states such as Iraq. Such a view – which is explored in this volume – represents in effect another gloomy prognosis on the state of international affairs reminiscent of the end of imperial eras as the barbarians appear to be at the gate threatening to destroy the basis of civilization as it has hitherto been known. It is easy to be seduced into such a view given the appalling events in various parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. At another level, though, the warlord phenomenon is likely to be containable since as actors warlords carry no serious message or ideology for the modern world and are mostly confined to the more peripheral regions of the international system. Warlords ultimately represent desperate and militarized fragments of societies. Even if they prove capable of expanding into various parts of the developed world (it is arguable that it is warlord-type formations in the form of well-armed criminal gangs that stalk some of the inner cities of the United States), they offer no long-term means of mobilizing large populations or of instilling in them serious political values that can command political allegiance. To this extent, the central theme of this volume is that warlords are actors that need to be taken far more seriously in the analysis of international politics even though their capacity to define the overall direction of global politics is likely to remain limited.

THE OUTLINE OF THIS VOLUME The first chapter of this volume by Paul Rich explores the range and meaning of the concept of warlord. It examines the roots of contemporary debate over warlordism by examining its development in inter-war China. The chapter develops a conception of warlordism as a continuum stretching from large-scale gangsterism at the lower end to quasi-insurgent movements at the upper end. This general view is reinforced by the second chapter by Neil Cooper which relates warlordism to the international arms trade. Cooper shows how the growing erosion of national controls over the arms markets has led to the emergence of what he terms a ‘diffusion model’ of arms circulation which effectively undermines any real controls over the acquisition of weapons beyond the ability to pay. This means that the security of states is likely to depend increasingly on the forging of regional security

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communities in the absence of more effective or credible action at the international level given the weakness of the UN and the unwillingness of the sole remaining superpower, the United States, to act as a global policeman. Cooper’s pessimism over the effectiveness of controls over arms is echoed by Glen Segell in Chapter 3 in a discussion on the links between warlordism and international drug trafficking. The growing globalization of the international markets in narcotics has enhanced the capacity of drug dealing to undermine states. Drug dealers are also bankrolling warlords, who are coming to represent in some respects, Cooper argues, a more significant threat to state authority than more conventional means of state transformation such as coups and revolutions. This argument is also underlined in Chapter 4, where Kevin O’Brien examines the privatization of warfare through the growth of commercial security firms. In some respects this process represents a less well-known and understood dimension of warlordism in the form of the growing emergence of what O’Brien terms a new ‘warrior class’ at the global level. Such a class undermines the authority of conventional governments in peacekeeping operations and represents a ‘dirty’ element in international society. It may of course be ultimately contained by international action such as the UN Commission on Human Rights which has labelled the actions of ‘mercenaries’ as comparable to those of criminals. There is, though, a trend here in terms of the expansion of the private sector in security firms which (as in the case of considerable evidence pointing to the British government’s effective connivance with Sandline in the restoration of a democratically-elected regime in Sierra Leone) may gain growing support from states reluctant to commit their own troops and resources to apparently intractable disputes where there are no easy political solutions. The next chapter in the volume, Chapter 5, by Mel McNulty, moves towards a more specific case study of warlord-type conflict by examining the disaster in Rwanda. McNulty looks at the deliberate fostering of warlordism by the regime of President Juvenal Habyarimana between 1990–94 leading to the wide-scale massacre of the Tutsi population in Rwanda. Significantly, in contrast to a number of other cases of societal breakdown, warlordism in Rwanda did not simply emerge as a result of the collapse of the central state but was a result of deliberate policy by what may be termed a ‘genocidal state’. Much of this was also a result of the deliberate external militarization of the Rwanda state by France. McNulty’s chapter is an important case study of the growth of warlord formations, which did not in this case simply emerge as a result of a weak ‘juridical’ state but also as a consequence of external involvement.

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A rather different picture is presented in Chapter 6 by Paolo Tripodi on Albania. Here the ‘warlords’ operated effectively as large-scale criminal gangs in a situation of near anarchy as the central state collapsed. The society was awash with arms that were looted from the military armouries and order was only restored through the auspices of a 6000-member multinational protection force (MPF) organized through the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Albania was perhaps fortunate in that its geographical position ensured that in could not be ignored or treated at a distance like many Sub-Saharan African states. It has been a particular challenge to Italy as the nearest large European state and the Italian government has tried to play a major role in the peace process. At the same time, it is also evident that this was a rather less politicized pattern of warlordism than in many developing states since the rival gangs had no clear political agenda beyond forcing the president Sali Berisha to resign. To this extent the role of the MPF was a relatively clear one in helping to restore the Albanian state which has been in existence since 1912 and, for all the oppression of the Hoxha years, has an identity that is not seriously in question. By contrast the pattern in Somalia, which is the subject of Chapter 7 by Samuel Makinda is considerably different. Here the Somali state that had been ruled by President Siad Barre since 1969 effectively collapsed following Barre’s ousting in January 1991, though even before this time the Barre régime had really only ruled over the capital Mogadishu while the countryside was in the hands of rival clan militias. The Somali story is a tragic one given that there is quite a high degree of consciousness of Somali nationhood. The clan-based structure of Somali society, however, has ensured deep fissures that make the creation of a strong and legitimate central state a difficult project to realise. Like many other developing states, Somalia by the 1990s was also awash with weapons, which had been purchased from both superpowers over the preceding decades as Somalia had been aligned with first the Soviet camp and later with the United States following a war with the Soviet-backed régime in Ethiopia over the Ogaden region. The bitter civil war that raged in Somalia in the 1990s prompted a rather ill-conceived peacekeeping operation under UN auspices that has become something of a text book case of how not to initiate humanitarian intervention. The United Nations Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM) was largely dominated by the US and became seen in Somali eyes as closely aligned with one of the major warlords, Ali Mahdi, to the exclusion of the Habr Gedir clan of Mohammed Aideed. This led to a rather disastrous military confrontation with UNOSOM and its eventual withdrawal in March 1995. The US has as a result become increasingly reluctant to get embroiled in apparently intractable

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conflicts in the developing world. Somalia still remains a divided society and there is relatively little international political will to resolve its crisis of statehood. It serves as a major example to the developed world of taking warlord formations seriously and understanding their underlying bases of support if humanitarian intervention is to be successfully prosecuted. Next, Alexander Evans examines a considerably different case in Chapter 8 of Kashmir where warlord formations have so far failed to overthrow the central state. The Kashmiri example is notable for the fact that it does not exist as an independent state since it has remained under the control of India since the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, even though its population is overwhelmingly Muslim. Guerrilla insurgency has developed in the last few years instigated by rival opposition movements to Indian rule. The identity of the envisaged Kashmiri state is a matter of contest as some Kashmiris support independence, others incorporation into Pakistan while others (a minority) favour some form of continuing association with India. The response from the Indian government has been to wage an increasingly brutal counter-insurgent war against militias who have been assisted by ‘guest’ militants. Evans argues that in many ways the insurgency goes beyond the classic styles of guerrilla warfare in the developing world since the opposition factions are to a considerable degree autonomous and under the control of local leaders who are not very different to warlords. This may in turn hinder the development of a ‘national liberation’ movement strong enough to force India into serious political negotiations over Kashmir’s future, though at the same time it pinpoints the way that warlordism has displaced national liberation struggles in the post-Cold War world where ideological appeals have declined. This theme is also taken up on a rather larger canvass in the final chapter, Chapter 9, by Stephen Chan. The chapter criticizes the discipline of International Relations (IR) for remaining largely preoccupied with states to the exclusion of non-state actors such as warlords. It points out that even though they seem archaic, warlords are by no means pre-modern. In particular they do not represent a return to some form of feudal order since they are not barons in the medieval sense since barons ultimately need the state while warlords seek to overthrow it in order to secure their own form of militarized autocratic rule. Moreover, warlords employ modern technologies and are often the result of the globalizing process in the international system. Chan suggests that the warlord may be either a cosmopolitan or ‘Kantian figure’ or at least a ‘communitarian’ containing the possibilities of developing into some form of liberation leader. Chan’s provocative contribution accords with the general argument of myself in Chapter 1 in which it is possible to see warlords and warlord-type

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activities on a continuum ranging from criminal activity at the lower end, up to insurgent movements at the upper end. His chapter is interesting for its argument that warlords represent a distinct vision of the world albeit a very localized one. He urges fellow scholars in IR to take warlordism seriously as alternative actors to those favoured by realism such as predatory régimes, arms dealers and weapons manufacturers. In order to understand the range of warlord activities and the significance of their impact on international politics it will be necessary to employ rather less orthodox research methods drawn in particular from Social Anthropology. This approach is one that pays considerable respect to the values and identities of ‘others’, that is those who have been for the most part excluded from mainstream IR and the study of modernity. To this extent, the study of warlords represents a challenge to widen the compass and range of IR as a discipline. This volume is published in the hope that it will encourage this sort of research in IR in the next few years. As some recent IR scholarship has shown, the dynamics of international political economy work at a number of different levels. The processes of globalization work to create larger structures of international and transnational cooperation centred on the growing integration of world markets. At another level, though, there are also processes of fragmentation and political fissuring which work in a rather different direction, encouraging the fermentation of different ethnic and local identities and, in some cases, state breakdown.1 Warlordism can be seen as part of this fragmentation process though the scale and intensity of it is likely to remain a matter of intense debate. PAUL B. RICH

Note 1.

See in particular Ian Clark, Globalization and Fragmentation: International Relations in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

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1 The Emergence and Significance of Warlordism in International Politics Paul B. Rich

INTRODUCTION In recent years the concept of the ‘warlord’ has increasingly entered into popular political parlance. The word has been particularly popularized by the international media as a general term of explain the fissuring of nation states and the emergence of militarized sub-national groupings. Warlords increasingly appear to be a major feature of the post-Cold War international scene in which the writ of governments scarcely runs outside national capitals and the countryside has been rendered insecure through armed gangs and militias struggling for political and economic influence. Beleaguered state administrative machines in a number of different countries have been found incapable of containing threats to their authority from various clan, tribal and ethnic factions, while the legitimacy of national leaders is continually threatened by local and regional strong men. Some analysts such as Robert Kaplan have even gone as far as seeing the warlord as representing a menacing threat to the long-term security of the international order, which is dismally projected to take on many of the features that are to be found in some of the disintegrating states of Sub-Saharan Africa.1 Much of the academic analysis of warlordism has been developed at the comparative level and there is a paucity of research on warlordism at the level of the international system. At present the debate over warlordism is one that is largely pivoted around Sub-Saharan Africa though there is considerable evidence to suggest that warlord-type formations exist in a variety of other contexts such as the market in narcotics in South America and Central and Southeast Asia and parts of the former Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe. Warlordism is a product of the fracturing of sovereign state structures and reflects the uneven integration of régimes, especially those in the developing world, into the modern global economy. Given their widely disparate nature, conflicts of this type are unlikely to follow any simple trajectory since they differ considerably in scale and intensity. 1

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The warlord phenomenon is thus of growing significance for scholars of International Relations. The term has a considerable resonance since in many respects it reflects an alternative tradition of international action to that of the sovereign state at the heart of the Westphalian international system. However, as this paper will argue, warlordism does not mark an atavistic return to medieval forms of warfare typical of European history prior to the Peace of Westphalia. While some of the mythology associated with particular forms of warlordism might, like some manifestations of ethnic identity, have such ‘traditional’ linkages, in practice warlordism has been created by forces endemic to the contemporary international system. This chapter is divided into four sections. The first section examines the nature of warlordism and develops a workable definition of it for International Relations analysis; the second section examines warlordism in relation to current concepts of warfare; the third discusses warlordism in relation to debates on sovereignty while the final section examines warlordism in terms of the functioning of the global economy. CONCEPTUALIZING WARLORDISM A clear and workable definition of warlordism is not easy given that it has emerged in a variety of different forms. The growth in warlordism in contemporary international politics has tended to undermine some of the dominant assumptions behind the notion of ‘praetorianism’ in Western social science. ‘Praetorianism’ refers to the intervention of the military into politics and the breakdown of civil–military relations. One of the most notable exponents of the concept, Samuel Huntington, argued that a praetorian society could exist with varying degrees of political participation, though he felt that the most stable would be praetorian oligarchies where politics would be dominated by rival family cliques. The greater the degree of mass-involvement the less stable the system would be, resulting in either the capture of power by a ‘totalitarian’ party or else a resort to authoritarian rule. Huntington recognized, though, that in societies with very poor development of political institutions ‘the end result of social and economic modernisation’ would be ‘political chaos’.2 It is in the later case of societies without effective political institutions that there has been a resurgence of warlordism. The phenomenon is not entirely new. Some of the best recent analysis of warlordism has been in the arena of Chinese politics following the collapse of the Manchu dynasty in 1911 and the failure to establish a coherent republican régime. The death in 1916 of Yuan Shih Kai, the one obvious claimant to national leadership in China, ushered in a period of political chaos.3 This continued

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throughout the early 1920s until Chiang Kai Shek began to restore some form of order in 1927 following the crushing of the Communists in Shanghai. Many Western analysts in the period following the 1949 revolution have seen this period as inextricably linked with political weakness and corruption, though some, such as C.P. Fitzgerald, have also seen the warlords performing a constructive role in hastening the destruction of the old imperial civil service and the withdrawal of the scholar class into the universities.4 More recently the debate over the warlords has taken a new turn as the question of federalism and local versus central power has re-emerged in Chinese politics given the upsurge of pressures for democratization and devolution of power on federal lines.5 The negative associations of the term warlord from the 1916 –27 period in China has led some scholars to avoid using the word altogether in favour of other terms such as ‘militarism’ or ‘praetorianism’. The term for warlord in Chinese, junfa, has strongly pejorative associations and in the period following 1949 it was widely assumed that warlordism had been effectively banished from Chinese politics. Arthur Waldron has shown that the junfa concept is not in fact Chinese in origin since it is an importation from Europe. Chinese military theorists did not celebrate the employment of military force and warlord figures were rare in Chinese history. The concept of the warlord only really came into prominence following the collapse of the Manchu dynasty in 1911. It was then that Chinese military commanders acquired the title dujun or ‘supervisor of military affairs’. The notion of dujun began to be replaced by the early 1920s by the more negative term of junfa or warlord, since it conjured up the idea of military activity that was oriented to no specific political purpose. This negative connotation was largely due to the general distinction that developed among radical and left-wing intellectuals in Europe after the First World War between violence that could be meaningless, as in trench warfare, or redemptive revolutionary violence as in the case of the Russian revolution of 1917. The term junfa particularly conjured up the idea of military commanders engaged in meaningless militarism. It is in this sense that it came to be used by nationalists such as Sun Yat-sen as well as Mao Zedong, who employed it as a term to denounce the Kuomintang after the crushing of the communists in Shanghai in 1927. In this usage the KMT warlords were the expression of a comprador class in league with western imperialism.6 The concept of the junfa became closely linked to either weakness or complete breakdown of central political authority at the national level, and a high degree of political autonomy for local military commanders. It meant in effect the fissuring of the Chinese military elite and the creation of a number of rival military commanders eager to gain access to political power.

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To this extent, warlordism represented what McCord has termed a ‘fragmented praetorianism’ or ‘fragmented militarism’ in which there was no longer a single and cohesive military class capable of governing the country.7 It is evident from the Chinese example that rival warlords can differ considerably in their level of power and authority. Lucien Pye has classified the warlords who emerged in the 1920s in the power vacuum at the centre of Chinese politics into three distinct types: field commanders at the local level with only limited following, more prominent military commanders known as tuchuns who were active in politics, and finally a third group of national political figures with a military following. Each group mobilized a following around the loyalty of subordinate officers and troops rather than on the basis of ideological appeals. One of the strongest forms of loyalty was family loyalty, though this was usually not an important factor in the loyalty of subordinates to the tuchuns. Where family connections did come into play, the tuchun was given added influence, as in the case of Chang Tso-lin and his two sons who were divisional commanders in the Fengtien army.8 The Chinese model of warlordism may well prove to have only limited applicability to other situations in post-1945 period. In comparison to interwar China, the emergence of more recent cases of warlord conflict in SubSaharan Africa has been a result of weak empirical statehood and strongly ethnic, ‘tribal’ and clan attachments. Unlike the Chinese case where warlords owed much of their following to the prestige that had been previously derived from the Chinese imperial army, military commanders in postcolonial African states derived their support from more localized followings. In the case of Somalia, for instance, the strength of clan followings can be ascribed to the domination of petty-bourgeois politics and the general weakness of capitalist penetration of the society in the post-independence era. In the absence of capitalist industrialization, popular attachments centred around clan affiliations, giving clan leaders considerable leeway to mobilize these for either constructive or destructive political ends. Clan consciousness was largely a defensive form of consciousness developed to cope with uneven class formation. It led to the creation of clan pyramids which operated to secure welfare goals for its members in the absence of trade union structures.9 The more recent manifestations of warlordism in the developing world indicate that the Chinese model derived from the inter-war period may be simply at one end of a continuum. Such a continuum stretches from extensive regional followings for a military commander on the basis of his personal prestige and ability to secure benefits for his followers, to more limited types of militarized ethnic and clan formations mobilized behind

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a local strongman. This continuum of warlordism also fits into a wider series of classifications of conflict. At the most developed end it blurs into a regional or secessionist movement that may be able to develop nationalist or proto-nationalist political aspirations. At the lower end of the continuum it blurs into a variety of forms of low-intensity conflict such as organized gangsterism and brigandage.

THE WARLORD AND THE THEORY OF MODERN WARFARE The growing significance of the warlord in international politics compels a reassessment of theories of modern warfare. Warlord conflict is a good example of what K.J. Holsti has termed ‘wars of the third kind’ in the twentieth century. Coming in the wake of ‘institutionalized warfare’ of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and ‘total warfare’ in the first half of the twentieth century, ‘wars of the third kind’ are characterized by an absence of fixed territorial boundaries, elaborate institutionalized military rituals, major fronts and military campaigns.10 As with various forms of guerrilla warfare, warlordism reflects a growing breakdown of professional military activity in favour of more informal forms of military conduct in which military authority and discipline becomes personalized around a single political leader. The power of the warlord is highly militarized. There is a strong tendency in such situations for terror to be also employed to buttress the leadership of the warlord, leading to what E.V. Walter, in a pioneering study in the uses of political terror among the Zulu in nineteenth century South Africa, has termed a ‘régime of terror’ where systematic violence works to maintain power relations.11 Such a model of militarized and despotic power hardly resembles that of ‘people’s war’ which Holsti has seen as a dominant feature of ‘wars of the third kind’ Warlordism tends to be derived more from models of autocratic tribal rule (as in Walter’s case of the Zulu), or large-scale gangsterism rather than revolutionary wars of national liberation in which the main basis of support lies in the general civilian population.12 Its structures of hierarchical power – where leadership is based on various forms of patronage, nepotism and political clientelism – bears little resemblance to doctrines of popular mobilization, even though these features have on occasions been exhibited by anti-colonial national liberation movements in the post-1945 era. Warlordism thus represents a rather more profound break with conventional military doctrine than guerrilla warfare and insurgency. Military strategists since Clausewitz have recognized that guerrilla warfare marks

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only a partial break with conventional military campaigning since it is ultimately pivoted around the need to foster the state as the most civilized form of political conduct. Guerrilla theorists in the twentieth century such as Mao Zedong and Giap built on this and argued that the guerrilla phase is the precursor of a more conventional phase in the evolution of revolutionary ‘peoples’ war’ in which the enemy is finally defeated.13 Compared to this, warlordism veers towards a total combination of military and political means. Warfare in effect becomes politics and politics warfare in a permanently militarized anarchical society where the authority of an effective central state no longer prevails. This has proved to be a major hindrance to efforts at resolving conflict between rival warlords in situations of complete state breakdown such as Liberia and Sierra Leone. In the case of Liberia, for instance, the morale of the regional peacekeeping force sent by ECOWAS, known as ECOMOG, plummeted when it was necessary to fire in self-defence against the child soldiers used by the Independent Patriotic Front of Liberia (IPFL) of Charles Taylor. Conventional counterinsurgency methods are not especially effective in such a situation either, as there was no clear political alternative to offer to the supporters of the rival factions. Limited by resources and political infighting, ECOMOG frequently had to make deals with some of the warlord leaders such as the Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL) and the Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia (INPFL) of Prince Johnson.14 Warlordism has increasingly come into prominence in the wake of the main period of revolutionary wars of national liberation against European colonial rule. This period can be broadly characterized as running from 1945 up to the early 1980s. It contained a number of notable examples of guerrilla movements that succeeded in fighting European colonial régimes to a military stalemate, leading in turn to a negotiated process of decolonization. Examples of such movements are the FLN’s bitter seven-year war against the French in Algeria between 1954 and 1962, the FRELIMO struggle against Portuguese colonial rule in Mozambique between 1962 and 1975, and the long war of the Vietnamese NLF against first French and then American power in Vietnam between 1945 and 1975. One of the last major examples of such anti-colonial guerrilla insurgency was the campaign of ZANU-PF against the Smith régime in Rhodesia in the 1970s leading to a negotiated transfer of power in 1979–80 under British auspices and the creation of the new state of Zimbabwe. Thereafter the impact of such insurgencies has progressively declined since, by the 1980s, most European colonial dependencies had been relinquished. The ending of the Cold War in the late 1980s also deprived any remaining movements of effective superpower patronage, especially after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. The collapse of

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such external supports was undoubtedly a major reason why one of the last major anti-colonial insurgent movements, the ANC in South Africa, was driven by 1990 to abandon ‘armed struggle’ against the white minority régime in Pretoria in favour of a negotiated transfer of power. The emergence of warlordism as an increasingly important factor in international relations really dates from the end of this post-war phase of anticolonial insurgency. It reflects the decline of ideological appeals to ‘national liberation’ in Third World politics since the early 1980s, and the fracturing of a number of post-colonial ‘quasi states’ that had enjoyed only juridical rather than empirical legitimacy.15 In some instances, both tendencies have been exemplified in the same society. The triumph of the Marxist–Leninist FRELIMO liberation movement in Mozambique, for instance, proved to be short-lived. After removing Portuguese colonial rule in 1975, FRELIMO experimented in the late 1970s with radical policies of land reform and the collectivization of peasant production. By the early 1980s it was thrust onto the defensive as its neighbour South Africa began a war of destabilization in Southern Africa. This involved South African military and political support for a guerrilla movement in Mozambique known as the Mozambique Resistance Movement (RENAMO), which had initially been established by the Smith régime in Rhodesia but taken over by the South African government in Pretoria following the 1980 transfer of power to the ZANU-PF régime of Robert Mugabe. The South African destabilization campaign led to the destruction by RENAMO of much of the basic infrastructure in Mozambique in the early 1980s and effectively forced the FRELIMO government to enter into negotiations with the South Africans. In 1984 it signed the Nkomati Accord with the government of P.W. Botha, and the same year applied to join the World Bank. RENAMO’s success, though, was not due entirely to South African backing since it had been able to pick up support from a variety of social groups inside Mozambique such as chiefs, witchdoctors, church and religious sects and cadres of young men known as mujibas. These groups had been alienated from the FRELIMO government’s landreform programme and provided a basic organizational base to RENAMO, which was not just a collection of motley ‘bandits’ as FRELIMO propaganda tried to maintain. The basic operational unit consisted of 150 men which was in frequent radio contact with RENAMO headquarters. The organizational structure was strictly hierarchical, and in a number of cases younger mujibas were pressganged into the movement and terrorized into staying on through fear of mutilation if they tried to desert. The organization was not an entirely random one since there was a clear command structure and a number of military rituals were followed, such as saluting.16

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While ultimate authority was personalized around a figurehead such as Afonso Dhlakama, at the local level the organization allied itself to local cults such as Shona spirit mediums. RENAMO’s first military commander, Andre Matsangaissa, died in 1979 trying to retake Gorongosa after being assured of victory by a Shona spirit medium. The wanton destruction of RENAMO suggests that it was the logical opposite of a ‘nation-building’ movement such as FRELIMO. However, the local dynamics of the movement indicates that it was more than just a group of bandits as local chiefs helped recruit a corps of local police to collect taxes and recruit mujibas. Much of this support was secured on an ethnic basis: in its most successful province ‘Zambezia’ it managed to establish a food production system through local chiefs, though in Gaza, by contrast, it was generally unsuccessful in gaining much of a following as it was viewed as a mainly Ndau movement.17 The ethnic base to warlordism is repeated throughout much of SubSaharan Africa. In Liberia the original opposition by Charles Taylor’s NPFL to the largely Krahn-based régime of Samuel Doe was centred on the Gio and Mano ethnic groupings. Outside Africa, too, the main basis for warlord activity has often been ethnic. In Afghanistan the warlord groupings have been largely ethnic-based: Abdul Rashid Dostum leads a mainly Uzbek group in the north, while Ahmad Shah Massou and Burhanuddin Rabbani have led Tajik groups in alliance with other ethnic groupings in the northeast. The Taliban movement by contrast was established with Pakistani backing by privately-educated ulama from the Pushtun groupings in the South.18 The growth of warlordist activity can thus in a number of instances be seen as part of a wider ‘insecurity dilemma’ among developing states. This stems from the fact that many of them are in practice state-nations with multiple ethnic communities residing inside their territorial boundaries while their governing structures command only a low level of domestic political legitimacy. Clearly not all such state-nations fragment into warring factions. Some analysts have seen this issue in cultural rather than military terms. John Glenn, for instance, has pointed to the invention of national myths in the fostering of a sense of national cohesion. This dimension of ethnic identity, though, may will extend beyond questions of cultural symbolism. The role of warlord leaders signifies an additional military variable which has been rather neglected by analysts of ethnicity.19

WARLORDISM AND DOCTRINES OF SOVEREIGNTY Much of the recent discussion on warlordism has linked it to the various challenges that have been thrown up to conventional and Western-oriented

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notions of sovereignty. In contrast to the debate on inter-war Chinese warlordism, the research on more contemporary manifestations of the phenomenon has emphasised the ethnic, clan or religious basis behind much warlord activity. There has been a growing similarity in such activities in various parts of the world as its apparent effectiveness has been spread by global media. Moreover, the retreat of superpower influence with the ending of the Cold War has removed one of the major controls on warlordism within states that enjoyed only ‘juridical’ legitimacy as a result of the power of international opinion, rather than ‘empirical’ legitimacy derived from its ability to secure its authority at the local level.20 Such states are now recognized as cases of ‘failed states’. Here the basic realist criteria of statehood – the ability to provide political goods for their citizens, to protect their populations from external threats and to secure domestic political legitimacy – fail to apply.21 For some realist analysis this fracturing of states outside Europe merely confirms the durability of the Western model of the sovereign nation state. Robert Jackson and Alan James for instance have stressed the desire by more and more social groupings to affirm their wish for national selfdetermination and the growing likelihood that this will occur as multinational states break up through ethnic secession.22 Other scholars, though, have suggested that such continuing fission indicates a growing rupture between the Western sovereign state model and political reality at the local level in which many states in the developing world, particularly SubSaharan Africa, have little or no distinct national identity, civic culture or cohesive political institutions. In such states it has proved impossible to forge an inclusive nationalism that can build upon Western notions of popular sovereignty. The nationalism in such societies has, as a consequence, really been an ethnonationalism which has taken on an increasingly exclusive form, leading in extreme cases such as Rwanda and Burundi to efforts at ethnic genocide.23 Such processes appear to have an apparently inexorable logic when viewed from the vantage of ethnic politics. Many of the recent cases of state breakdown can be traced to ethnic as opposed to purely religious attachments, indicating that ‘ethnicity’ and ‘ethnic mobilization’ are increasingly important phenomena in international politics. However, ‘ethnicity’ is a very general term. It ranges from inner-city minorities in Western Europe, Welsh, Basque and Scottish nationalism, to sub-state movements in the developing world, and it does not have much capacity purely by itself to explain particular cases of state-breakdown. What is needed in addition are concepts to explain how particular sub-state movements have been mobilized on ethnic lines by political leaderships capable of shattering nation states.

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Ethnic mobilization has been frequently understood by sociological analysts in terms very similar to those of nationalism. In the writings of such scholars as Tom Nairn. Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner and Anthony Smith, considerable importance is attached to the role of the intelligentsia in mobilizing and articulating ethnic myths and symbols while the general expansion of scale offered by industrialization or rapid social change is seen to provide a suitable social base for nationalist ideology to take root. In all this extensive literature there is relatively little concern with the role of war and militarism in nationalist and ethnic mobilization, though Anthony Smith has acknowledged that warfare can act as an independent variable in nationalist mobilization, as well as strengthening and reinforcing ethnic consciousness and imagery.24 In this regard, warlordism can be seen as one important form of militarization of ethnic identities in contemporary international politics. In the post-Cold War era, warlordism has in many cases superseded earlier forms of national liberation struggles in the developing world, reflecting the declining appeal of global ideology in Third World military conflict. Warlordism is generally based on more local and particularistic appeals anchored around a familiar and trusted local strongman capable of delivering benefits and advantages to his followers. As the inter-war Chinese example shows, not all local or regional warlords necessarily resort to ethnic political mobilization if they have already been equeathed a fairly developed military structure. However, in the post-1945 period there have been relatively few instances of large military régimes fragmenting into rival militias. The Indian army was fragmented at the time of the 1947 partition of India into two rival armies. Both armies underpinned conventional models of state-building that involved the inclusion of minority grouping such as the Pathans and Gurkhas who might otherwise have become mobilized into warlord formations. The example of the Gurkhas is especially interesting for the way it reveals how significant the contours of the historical past are in determining the way that warlord identities may or may not be allowed to form. The identity of the ‘Gurkhas’ was only really discovered or invented in the wake of the Anglo Nepal War of 1814–16, which led to the progressive inclusion of the Gurkhas into the British imperial army in India. Its British officers inculcated an ideology of imperial service and patriotism which bound the Gurkha régiments together by a tight code of chivalry and honour which has survived well into the post-imperial era.25 Such notions of honour and chivalry have secured the Gurkhas a public reputation (in Britain at least) almost the opposite of that of warlords in Asia and Africa, though this has

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been largely due to the continuing appeal of military service as a major economic livelihood for many Nepalese young men. The idea of the warlord is thus to a considerable degree contrived or invented, though it is also possible to argue that the warlord tends to emerge in situations where there was a much weaker military structure bequeathed by the former colonial power at the time of independence. Unlike the British Empire in India or the former Manchu Dynasty in China, many of the warlord formations in Sub-Saharan Africa have emerged in situations where there was no very strong imperial ethic and where, in the colonial era, the military was dominated by a small number of ethnic groups. To this extent they were prone, as in the example from Mozambique, to ethnic factionalism and secession from quite an early stage. WARLORDISM AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY Warlordism is a rather poorly understood product of globalizing forces in international politics that are undermining the legitimacy of the Westphalian nation state. Warlord formations clearly do not emerge in any uniform or even manner since there are some parts of the international system where the number of actors is declining and the nation state consolidating itself. In Northeast Asia, for instance, several of the main units are in danger of disappearing and being swallowed up by other powers. Of the nine units that existed in the early 1990s, one (Hong Kong) has already vanished and a second, Macao, will soon follow. A third, North Korea, may also be integrated with its southern neighbour.26 This will leave six actors in the region, and it is by no means evident that there will be any early fissuring of these, though a Pacific state centred on Vladivostok might eventually break free from Russia. In this region there seems to be no immediate likelihood of a radical break-up of states and the emergence of regional warlords. Neither can such tendencies be detected in many other relatively stable industrialized regions in North America, South America, Western Europe and Australasia. The warlord phenomenon appears at present to be confined to regions of chronic economic backwardness and instability such as Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Southeast Asia such as Indo China. In other regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa, the Balkans, Central and Southeast Asia the picture is rather different. Here the growth of warlordism is clearly related to a partial failure of the nation state. This suggests three possible long-term tendencies. The warlord phenomenon may be considered as (1) simply a temporary phenomenon that can be dealt with by a series of palliatives that can reconstruct the nation state which will

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eventually develop in regions where warlords operate; (2) warlords mark a far more radical rupture with the Westphalian nation state than has yet been realised, and need to be quarantined from the rest of the international system in order that some new solution based on regional authorities or international trusteeship can be devised; (3) warlords mark a deep longerterm trend within the international system that, on lines suggested by Robert Kaplan, is sooner or later destined to overtake the rest of the international system and catapult it into Hobbesian chaos. Of these alternatives, it has been (1) that has mainly dominated Western thinking so far. Following the end of the Cold War, the policy debate in the West has been orientated towards trying to resurrect collapsed states and re-establish stable political structures. This largely accords with the sentiments expressed in the UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali’s vision set out in An Agenda for Peace in 1992. While acknowledging that the era of ‘absolute and exclusive sovereignty’ had now passed, Boutros Ghali urged a process of ‘post conflict peace building’ that would lead to the support for ‘structures that will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict’. It has with this objective that a UN plan was initiated for large-scale involvement in Cambodia in order to rebuild its civil administration and supervise new elections. The main criterion for this UN involvement was the possible threat that a failing state might pose to regional peace and security, since the UN refused to get closely involved in other states such as Liberia and Haiti which were seen as posing no major regional security threat.27 A similar logic has influenced the decision of the Western powers led by the United States to secure peace in Bosnia through the NATO Implementation Force (I-For) which may soon be replaced by a smaller 18 000-strong Deterrent Force (D-For) following the disbanding of I-For in June 1998. Such actions are premised on the assumption that it is possible to reconstruct such ‘failed states’ so that they can ultimately act as credible actors in international politics. Most Western analysts have been extremely reluctant to consider any serious alternative to the nation state in regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa where post-colonial régimes and regional associations like the OAU have chosen to accept the principle of uti possidetis and the non-violation of the former colonial boundaries. This has ensured that in the West, academic debate has been generally wary of suggesting anything beyond only marginal infringements of national sovereignty in pursuit of a more ‘interdependent’ order. Thus, policy has been geared in places such as Somalia, Sierra Leone and Liberia to the eventual restoration of the nation state.28 Jeffrey Herbst, though, has recently urged a rather more radical rethinking of this issue in terms of the idea that in

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Africa, at least, the nation state has generally failed. He has argued that sovereignty in Africa needs to be rethought in terms possibly of a return to the less sharply defined boundaries of pre-colonial Africa. Here sovereignty was exercized over people rather than territory and was to a degree shared by different polities.29 There are major implications for such a breaking of the intellectual logjam over sovereignty for Western aid and economic policy towards the developing world. Once a ‘failed state’ becomes decertified then it may be possible to negotiate with warlord movements who do actually command power and resources at the local level. This may lead the IMF and the World Bank to consider dealing with rival breakaway microstates such as Somaliland which at present do not command and legitimacy in international law. The UN too mau also consider at least informal relationships with local warlords which defy conventional forms of inter-state diplomacy since such actors perform in many cases little differently to the régimes that control several African states. The longer-term implication of such a trend is unclear, but Herbst has suggested that it might in time lead to a new category of state that is not actually considered sovereign but has at least some of the rights of sovereign statehood.30 This suggestion is a halfway-house proposal that quarantines ‘failed states’ from the rest of the international system. It assumes that warlordism is ultimately only a temporary phenomenon in the state building process and will in time evolve into more acceptable forms of political behaviour in the international system. This limited or restricted definition of the warlord phenomenon, though, is undermined by evidence that links powerful structures in the West with warlord activity in a number of areas in the developing world. In the case of Afghanistan, the fracturing of the Afghan state following the Soviet military withdrawal in 1989 and the collapse of the Najibullah régime in 1992 did not represent a return to premodern politics. Foreign aid by rival superpowers had enabled a state that had been initially established by Britain and Russia as part of the ‘great game’ in the nineteenth century to survive throughout the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991–92 led to the withdrawal of the USA, and neither power nor the UN was able to create a strong enough successor régime. As Barnett Rubin has pointed out, the regional states that had supported the rival movements inside Afghanistan had ‘not evolved a cooperative agreement on the role of Afghanistan. They regulated their interstate dealings through the cooperative rules of diplomacy, but the conflict among the contending groups they backed in Afghanistan obeyed only the rules of anarchy.’31 It may still be possible for such groups to broker an accord through a Loya Jirga or shura if left to their own devices. However,

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the interdependence between such groups and the outside world may make such a project almost impossible in the contemporary global system, rendering some form of international mediation inevitable. It may thus well be the case that for warlordism to be successfully quarantined in international politics it will be necessary for the major Western powers to agree on severe restrictions and embargoes on arms and economic aid to those warlords who are seen as threatening local and regional stability.

CONCLUSION This chapter has argued that warlordism is an increasingly important phenomenon in international politics, though one that is by means uniformly exhibited throughout the international system. Warlord-type activity tends to be concentrated in the South and the developing world, despite some examples of warlordism in such places as Bosnia and parts of the former Soviet Union. To this extent, it is possible to argue that warlordism reflects a crisis of sovereignty in the South. In the post-war period, the burgeoning number of juridical or quasi states in the South derived their legitimacy from the norms of international civil society rather than from their own domestic social and political structures. Warlordism in the South is thus an especially stark and visible indicator of the crisis that the Westphalian state faces in some parts of the contemporary international system, despite the fact that in many ways the period since 1945 has seen a remarkable increase in the number of such states from around 50 in 1945, to an estimate 180 in 1996.32 While warlordism is to a considerabl degree an invented and contrived phenomenon, it is evident, as this paper has sought to show, that warlords are the product of a collapse of generally weak state structures. They are thus parasitical on the South’s general economic and military insecurity, though it is evident that warlord formations vary considerably in their range and leadership. In some cases they represent an alternative régime to that of the state; in other cases they are the product of a ‘failed state’ that may not be easily put together again. The support for warlords may also vary from the largely regional followings of warlords in inter-war China, to the militarized ethnic, clan and tribal formations mobilized behind strong leaders in parts of contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa and Central and Southeast Asia. The increasing visibility of warlords can be ascribed in part to the decline on global ideology in the post-Cold War era. Many previous ‘warlords’ remained effectively hidden behind other formations like national

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liberation movements, though these have largely disappeared in contemporary politics with the resolution of most anti-colonial struggles and the decline of superpower patronage. Warlordism may thus become an increasingly prevalent phenomenon in international politics in the future, and present a major challenge to the capacities of international organizations to formulate an adequate response in terms of peacekeeping, mediation and conflict resolution.

Notes 01. 02. 03.

04. 05. 06. 07.

08. 09. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Robert Kaplan, ‘The Coming Anarchy’, The Atlantic Monthly, vol. 273 (1994), pp. 43–76. Samule Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1971), p. 198. Yuan himself had national claims and was not really a proto-warlord. His Peiyang army was developed through the manipulation of the central government bureaucracy and was not based on regional support. Stephen R. Mackinnon, ‘The Peiyang Army, Yuan Shih-k’ai, and the Origins of Modern Chinese Warlordism’, Journal of Asian Studies, vol. XXXII, no. 3 (May 1973), pp. 405–23. C.P. Fitzgerald, The Birth of Communist China (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1970), p. 52. Arthur Waldron, ‘Warlordism versus Federalism: The Revival of a Debate?’, China Quarterly, vol. 121 (March 1990), pp. 116–28. Arthur Waldron, ‘The Warlord: Twentieth Century Chinese Understanding of Violence, Militarism and Imperialism’, American Historical Review, vol. 96, no. 4 (October 1996), pp. 1073–100. Edward A. McCord, The Power of the Gun: The Emergence of Modern Chinese Warlordism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 4. Lucien Pye detected a virtue in this feature of Chinese warlordism since he considered it contained at least the foundations for a pluralistic society, something that was wiped out by the Communist régime in China after the revolution of 1949. Lucien W. Pye, Warlord Politics: Conflict and Coalition in the Modernization of Republican China (New York: Praeger, 1971). Pye, op. cit., pp. 41–5. Hussein M. Adam, ‘Somalia: Militarism, Warlordism or Democracy?’, Review of African Political Economy, 54 (1992), p. 13. K.J. Holsti, The State, War and the State of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 34. E.V. Walter, Terror and Resistance: A Study of Political Violence (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 291. Ibid., p. 39. Geoffrey Fairbairn, Revolutionary Guerrilla Warfare (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), pp. 41– 4. For Clausewitz’s conceptions of statehood see

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14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

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Warlordism in International Politics Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). Some critics have pointed out that Paret rather underplays the moral dimension that Clausewitz attributes to the state as a Civilized political form. See Azar Gat, ‘Clausewitz’s Political and Ethical World View’, Political Studies, vol. XXXVII (1989), pp. 97–106. Herbert Howe, ‘Lesions of Liberia: ECOMOG and Regional Peacekeeping’, International Security, vol. 21, no. 3 (Winter 1996/7), pp. 145–76. Robert Jackson, Quasi States, Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge: CUP, 1990). Tom Young, ‘RENAMNO and Counter Revolutionary Insurgency’, in Paul B. Rich (ed.), The Dynamics of Change in Southern Africa (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 149– 69. Ibid., pp. 140–1. Barnett R. Rubin, The Search for Peace in Afghanistan: From Buffer State to Failed State (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 139. John Glenn, ‘The Interregnum: The South’s Insecurity Dilemma’, Nations and Nationalism, vol. 3, no. 1 (1997), pp. 45–63. Jackson, op. cit. Gerald B. Helman and Stevven R. Ratner, ‘Saving Failed States’, Foreign Policy, vol. 89 (1992), pp. 3–20. Robert H. Jackson and Alan James, ‘The Character of Independent Statehood’, in Robert H. Jackson and Alan James (eds), States in a Changing World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 6–7. Richard H. Schultz Jr, ‘State Disintegration and Ethnic Conflict: A Framework for Analysis’, Annals, AAPSS, vol. 541 (September 1995), pp. 75–88. Anthony D. Smith, ‘War and Ethnicity: The Role of Warfare in the Formation, Self-images and Cohesion of Ethnic Communities’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 434 (October 1981), pp. 375–93. See the fascinating essay by Lionel Caplan, Warrior Gentlemen: ‘Gurkhas’ in the Western Imagination (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995). Gerald Segal, ‘North East Asia’, in Jackson and James, op.cit., pp. 197–216. Helman and Ratner op. cit., pp. 8–9. Jeffrey Herbst, ‘Responding to State Failure in Africa’, International Security, vol. 21, no. 3 (Winter 1996/7), pp. 120–44 repr. Ibid., pp. 381–4. Ibid., pp. 397–8. Rubin op. cit., p. 143. Mark Webber, ‘States and Statehood’, in White, Little and Smith, op. cit., p. 24.

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2 The Arms Trade and Militarized Actors in Internal Conflict Neil Cooper

The aim in this chapter is to outline the dynamics of the post-Cold War arms trade and the way in which it services and influences conflict between actors within the state. This will be undertaken in two stages. The first section will attempt to outline the dynamics of the post-Cold War arms trade, focusing not only on the role of states as suppliers and receivers but also of other militarized actors in sub-state conflict such as insurgents, criminal organizations and mercenary groups. It will be suggested here that the mechanisms by which arms reach actors in internal conflicts are diverse and plentiful, and that the move away from the metaphor of proliferation to that of diffusion now adopted by some commentators more appropriately captures the manner in which arms are spread to (and also from) such internal conflicts. The second section will attempt to consider the extent to which arms act as causal factors precipitating internal conflict, exacerbating conflicts inbeing and inhibiting the attainment of post-conflict peace. It will be argued that where Deutschian security communities exist within states they will be able to accommodate fairly high levels of arms, but where they do not – that is, in the weak-state weapons states noted above – even relatively low levels of armaments may be sufficient to stimulate arms-racing and the slide to conflict. It will also be suggested that whilst arms supplies to conflicts in-being are likely to exacerbate conflict, there may nevertheless be times when the supply of weapons to the victims of aggression and in particular genocide is justified. In contrast, the use of arms supplies to establish a post-conflict balance of power between formerly warring factions (as has occurred in Bosnia for instance) will be criticized on the grounds that this does little to establish meaningful peace between actors and entrenches the role of the military, thus impeding the development of a security community, and therefore a society that can actually tolerate high levels of armaments without imploding. 17

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THE POST-COLD WAR ARMS TRADE The Contracting Market The global arms market has experienced a sharp fall in demand from the late 1980s onwards. Indeed, despite a small upturn in recent years, global arms exports have declined, in real terms, by 61 per cent between 1987 and 1995.1 Moreover, this decline has coincided with a marked fall in domestic weapons procurement, particularly on the part of the major arms producers, and a flood of relatively cheap surplus defence equipment onto the market as national militaries have downsized following the end of the Cold War. In consequence, the arms trade is now a highly competitive market in which buyers can extract a variety of concessions from sellers whether it be in terms of cost, financing, performance or technology transfer. Despite this decline in arms sales, the number of countries with defence capabilities has continued to grow. In 1945 only four countries outside the developed world (Argentina, Brazil, South Africa and India) produced military equipment. By 1986 this number had risen to 27 and by 1990 about 40 developing countries were producing some weaponry, with onequarter possessing a significant military–industrial infrastructure.2 The effect has been to produce new entrants into the arms market who are not necessarily as squeamish about supplying arms to pariah and non-state actors as more traditional suppliers. It is notable in this context that the non-traditional suppliers (those outside Europe, Russia and the US) have increased their share of the arms market from 3 per cent in 1981 to 13 per cent by 1995.3 This is not to suggest that the smaller suppliers have escaped the effects of market contraction. A number have responded by scaling back or abandoning their efforts to produce major weapons systems and concentrated instead on the manufacture of counterinsurgency systems and other light weapons which are one of the few sectors of the market to remain in demand. Mexico, for instance, purchased new anti-riot vehicles and other light weapons following the uprising in Chiapas.4 Indeed, ACDA has estimated that approximately 13 per cent of all international arms transfers are comprised of small arms and ammunition, and Klare has suggested that if machine guns, light artillery and anti-tank weapons are added into the equation then sales of such equipment probably account for about a quarter of the total value of global arms transfers.5 Whilst this kind of weaponry may not provide the same kind of destructive capability as heavy weapons, small arms and light weapons are often the principal weapons used in internal conflicts.6 It is now commonly asserted that as

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many as 90 per cent of the casualities in internal conflicts are caused by such weapons.7 Thus, the fact that some suppliers may be focusing more on the production of this category of arms may well exacerbate rather than alleviate the problem of internal conflict. The Erosion of National Controls A further consequence of the contraction in the arms market is that the pressure to secure sales is eroding already weak prohibitions in all states on arms sales to pariah actors and/or states in conflict.8 Moreover, this has been compounded by the fact that in the post-Cold War era the capacity of states to actually police the export controls they do operate has suffered. This is partly a function of market conditions. Critics have argued that sales of surplus defence equipment are often not subject to the same level of scrutiny as those for new weapons. Consequently, the boom in this sector has had the effect of weakening regulatory oversight of the arms trade.9 Similarly, the growing phenomenon of licensed production also provides an avenue by which firms can escape national controls on arms exports.10 The weakening of regulatory oversight of the arms trade has, however, been most noticeable in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, where the collapse of domestic arms spending has coincided with the growth of organized crime and the erosion of state authority to make the region a growing centre for the black market trade in weapons. In Russia in particular, corruption of officials is pervasive and theft from government stocks commonplace – during the first quarter of 1992, for instance, 1118 railway carriages, each carrying 20 tons of artillery, went missing.11 The problem of theft is not confined to the former Warsaw Pact states. In 1997, for example, six US Marines and a number of civilians were charged with the theft of military equipment from US bases which was then sold at gun shows and from homes in the US,12 and in South Africa police stations have regularly been attacked for the weapons they hold. Military Aid States also supply arms free or at reduced rates as part of military aid provided to allies. The scale of such aid has declined quite significantly with the end of the Cold War.13 Equipment supplied as military aid can remain in being for many years after its original supply, particularly in the case of

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light weapons. Consequently, the post-Cold War era has inherited a legacy of arms supplied under military aid as part of the Cold War battle for strategic influence, much of it with the explicit intention of providing support for allies engaged in sub-state conflict. For instance, the US provided aid to the Contras in Nicaragua (some $70 million a year in the 1980s),14 to UNITA in Angola ($250 million between 1986 and 1991)15 and to the mujaheddin in Afghanistan. In the latter case it has been suggested that as much as $8 billion of arms were supplied by the US,16 including anything between 550–900 stinger missiles.17 In consequence, despite a 1991 Soviet–US agreement to cut off military assistance to their respective clients, an estimated 10 million weapons are nevertheless circulating within the country, with roughly half having arrived during the cold war.18 Furthermore, whilst the volume of military aid has now declined it is still substantial. Pakistan, for instance, is thought to be arming separatist forces in Kashmir; Iran and Greece have been accused of arming Kurdish separatists in Turkey; and Uganda has accused Sudan of providing arms and sanctuary to rebel groups in Uganda.19 The US also continues to provide a significant volume of weaponry. In 1996 the US government authorized over $870 million of grant weapons transfers and training (not counting financial aid provided to procure new American weaponry). Moreover, according to the UNDP, the world wide fall in military aid has largely been reflected in declining transfers of major conventional weapons, whilst transfers of small arms continue largely unabated.20 If this is the case it may reflect both a change in the nature of challenges to the state in a post-Cold War era in which the possibility of sub-state rather than inter-state conflict has become the primary concern for many countries, and also a change in the nature of the concerns of arms suppliers. US military aid is increasingly being targeted at support for governments perceived to be helping America fight its domestic drugs problem at the source of production.21 It should also be noted that the transfer of arms to allies engaged in substate conflict can have long-term repercussions which actually reduce the security of whole regions and even of the state that originally provides arms. Most of the Stinger surface-to-air missiles supplied by the US to the mujaheddin have leaked onto the black market. In 1987 Iran bought 16 of the missiles and actually fired one against US helicopters. All told, it has been estimated that as much as 70 per cent of US arms supplies to Afghanistan actually leaked out to drug mafias, criminals, individuals and insurgent groups engaged in conflicts different to that for which the

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weapons were originally intended.22 The spread of arms throughout the region has even led Smith to argue: Hitherto the main threat to the security of South Asia seemed to lie in the enmity between India and Pakistan … This is no longer the case. The threat to the security of both sides now comes from within. A failure to control public access to light weapons is a salient though not definitive feature in the overall process.23 The Afghan pipeline is not the only one to produce a long-term boomerang effect. US arms supplied to the Contras have reportedly been sold on to the Colombian drug cartels that the US is now spending millions in military aid combating, and South African arms supplied to rebel movements in the region are now re-entering the country to mix with weapons originally distributed by the apartheid state to Inkatha vigilantes. The impact can be seen both in the rising volume of arms circulating within society and South Africa’s reputation as the murder capital of the world.24

Insurgents and Militarized Sub-state Factions There are a variety of non-state actors who influence the dynamics of the arms trade. First, and most obviously, there are the highly militarized insurgent groups and sub-state factions such as UNITA in Angola, the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, or the various factions in Somalia or Liberia. Such groups obviously represent a source of demand for arms. One common method of satisfying this demand is through theft or capture of government weapons.25 These are not usually sufficient for the successful prosecution of war against the state, and most sub-state groups rely either on supplies from sympathetic governments or the black market. Karp has argued that black market supplies are marginal to the success of insurgencies for which supplies of heavy or high-tech weapons, which are more likely to be obtained from sympathetic states, are required. Black market weapons are typically far more costly than those supplied by legitimate means. Jane’s Intelligence Review has estimated a premium of about 30–50 per cent over normal prices,26 and Karp has suggested that illegal arms can be traded for as much as 10 times their normal value.27 This again limits the ability of insurgent groups to purchase weapons in the quantity or of the quality necessary to successfully prosecute war against the state. Nevertheless, whilst much smaller than the legitimate trade in arms, the black market has greatly expanded in recent years as actors in internal

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conflicts have no longer had the luxury of arms supplies from Cold War patrons, and as the international community has increasingly deployed the arms embargo as a tool of diplomacy. Black market arms traffic has emerged as a major factor in sustaining ethnic and insurgent forces in the former Yugoslavia, the Horn of Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. The black market is this substantial, ranging from an estimated $1–2 billion in poor years up to $5–10 billion in good years.28 It is particularly significant at the lower end of the scale with about 55 per cent of the trade in light weapons estimated to be illegal.29 Moreover, where sub-state groups control significant swathes of territory they can obtain the financing necessary to purchase significant levels of arms through both taxes on the local population and the sale of precious commodities. Thus the warlords in Afghanistan have been forced with the ending of US aid to turn increasingly to the drugs trade to finance arms acquisitions; similarly Charles Taylor in Liberia has effectively gutted the country’s agricultural resources to finance his war effort. Insurgent groups not only represent a source of demand for weapons, but can also act as part of the supply network. The warlords in Afghanistan bring secondhand weapons into Pakistan and sell them in return for food, medicines and other products. They are also believed to have supplied arms and training to Muslim insurgents in Kashmir. Charles Taylor in Liberia on the other hand not only invaded Sierra Leone in order to gain access to diamond mines with which to finance his campaign, but he also formed alliances with local villagers and provided them with arms to help him fight the government of Sierra Leone when it attempted to prevent his invasion.30 The arms caches of insurgent groups become a particular problem when peace is established. At that point they become less useful as instruments of war and more significant for the economic returns they can provide. The establishment of peace in one country tends to result both in a flood of arms within the society and the re-transfer of weapons to other zones of conflict. Thus, weapons from Mozambique have been traded to South Africa while the Nicaraguan Contras have been accused of selling arms to Colombian drug barons. Criminal Groups Criminal groups are becoming an increasingly important factor in the black market arms trade both as suppliers and recipients of arms. In Russia in 1993, almost 2000 automatic rifles, 140 machine guns, six anti-tank missile launchers and 33 grenade launchers were confiscated from criminals,31 and the Italian Mafia is reported to have acquired arms from their

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Russian counterparts for delivery to the war in the former Yugoslavia.32 The link between the drugs and arms trade is particularly strong. The warlords in Afghanistan have increasingly turned to the sale of drugs to finance their arms purchase, as have left wing guerrillas in both Colombia and Peru. Equally, the drug barons themselves represent a potent source of demand for weapons. Russian criminal groups are reported to have sold at least two combat helicopters, along with small arms to Colombian drug traffickers, and have even offered to sell a diesel powered patrol sub marine (for shipping cocaine from Colombia to the coast of California).33 The original incentive for the drug barons to acquire weapons often derives from the need to protect their own operations either from competitors or law-enforcement agencies. It is notable that the militarization of drug-enforcement operations in Central and Latin America appears to be encouraging the cartels to upgrade their own military capability, though the financial rewards from arms trafficking are such that many cartels develop the trade as a separate branch of their commercial activities.34 Private Security and Mercenary Groups The growing inability of the state to enforce its authority and provide security for its citizens has had the effect of producing a void into which private security groups and mercenary organizations have stepped, most notably in parts of Africa. Bodyguards and particularly mercenaries are themselves one of the products that constitute the arms trade. This is particularly the case for mercenaries who can be just as effective a force multiplier as any piece of high-tech defence equipment. More pertinently, perhaps, private security groups and mercenary organizations represent a source of demand for arms, and to some extent a source of supply. Moreover, whilst the market these organizations account for probably represents only a small proportion of the arms trade, it is nevertheless a substantial and growing sector. In South Africa, for instance, private security is the fastest growing industry after tourism with some 130 000 security guards employed in 2700 companies, 40 000 of whom are armed.35 The use of mercenaries by both state and non-state actors has also blossomed in recent years. To give but a few examples: they have been used by governments in Angola, Sierra Leone and Croatia; by insurgent groups in the Philippines, Zaire and Burundi; by drug cartels and by commercial firms (indeed, the Angolan government actually requires firms such as mining and oil companies to provide for their own security).36 As Kevin O’Brien shows in Chapter 4, the post-Cold War era has been witness to the growing influence of what have been termed ‘corporate

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mercenary groups’ such as Executive Outcomes (EO), Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI) and Sandline. These corporate mercenary groups have a permanent existence which lasts beyond the duration of a particular conflict, and they are often part of an extensive corporate network which both draws on the military skills of their subsidiary to protect investments in regions of conflict and also uses the military assistance they can provide actors in conflict as a lever with which to extract trade deals such as mining rights or oil concessions. The new mercenaries also claim that, unlike traditional mercenaries, they are responsible international actors providing an important service that promotes peace and international stability and that client selection is not based solely on the profit motive. For instance, MPRI says it only operates in areas approved by the US State Department.37 Normally it would appear that the new mercenaries generally require the customer to provide and pay for arms (although EO for example, maintains it own mini-air force).38 These groups also advise customers on the type of weapons they should be deploying, provide training in their use and appear to facilitate their acquisition. EO has reputedly assisted the Angolan government in weapons procurement and introduced sophisticated weaponry such as fuel-air explosives into the Angolan conflict, acquiring arms through European intermediaries. Thus, the new mercenary groups have emerged as another avenue by which arms can reach actors engaged in internal conflict. Multinational Corporations (MNCs) There are a number of ways in which multinationals are actors in the arms trade. First, and most obviously the major defence companies are important actors without whom arms would not be made or sold. It is important to emphasise, however, that arms companies are not simply a response to free market laws of supply and demand. Most are only able to exist because they are adept at lobbying substantial levels of support from domestic governments, in terms of protection for industry, subsidies for exports and generosity in the interpretation of national export controls. Hartung has estimated that US subsidies for its arms exports amounted to $7.6 billion in 1995.39 The effect is to make weapons and technology transfers both cheaper and easier than they would otherwise be, with domestic taxpayers picking up the bill and overseas arms purchasers pocketing the savings or using them to acquire more weaponry. Civil MNCs can also be actors in the arms trade, a role that can take a variety of forms. For instance, companies can directly supply either the

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arms or more usually the finances necessary for participants in internal conflicts to maintain their forces and to acquire new weaponry. BP, for example, pays the Colombian government a $1.25 a barrel war tax,40 and according to activists has signed an agreement to provide an additional £39 million to establish a new military squad.41 The company has reportedly also hired a British private security company (Defence Systems Limited) to train Colombian police guarding its installations in counterguerrilla tactics. Companies also trade with non-state actors thus providing them with the financial support necessary to fund arms purchases. British, French and other foreign firms purchased the wood, diamonds and rubber Charles Taylor plundered from Liberia to fund his military campaign.42 The links forged between Western multinationals and insurgent groups can not only undermine attempts to control arms supplies to regions of conflict, but can provide them with powerful supporters able to lobby at the heart of government. In 1997, proposals were put forward at the UN to impose sanctions on UNITA including a travel ban on officials and the freezing of bank accounts. According to The Guardian, however, Western companies linked to UNITA’s diamond interests lobbied heavily against the proposals.43 Civil firms are also becoming increasingly militarized themselves as they respond to the realities of operating in societies experiencing conflict or social unrest, often recruiting private security organizations or mercenary groups to guard installations and personnel. This trend has been taken to extremes by the corporate mercenary groups which often use their military capabilities to protect investments in countries or offer their services in return for mining or other kinds of concessions, a trend particularly notable in Africa. The effect is to create powerful economic and military actors capable of exerting substantial influence within the weak states they typically operate in.44 From Proliferation to Diffusion As the foregoing analysis suggests, the arterial and capillary networks by which arms are supplied to actors in internal conflict are now so diverse and extensive that the proliferation model, with its emphasis on the export of arms by a small group of states to a larger number of recipient states no longer represents an adequate explanation of the dynamics by which arms are transferred to such actors. Instead, a number of commentators have argued that the diffusion model of arms circulation, with its emphasis on the diversity of suppliers, recipients and networks by which weapons are circulated offers a more accurate representation of the post-Cold War arms

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trade, and particularly that aspect of it (most notably the trade in light weapons) relevant to the supply of arms to internal conflicts.45 Consequently, despite a number of recent multilateral initiatives aimed at limiting the arms trade, and despite an increase in the use of the arms embargo as a policy instrument, the only thing that currently determines whether actors involved in internal conflict are able to obtain the weapons they need is their ability to pay or in the case of those with external sponsors, the ability to get someone else to pay. However, just because arms are widely available, it does not necessarily follow that they either cause or exacerbate internal conflict.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ARMS AND INTERNAL CONFLICT Arms and the Initiation of Conflict The notion that arms build-ups are intrinsically destabilizing, and therefore a cause of war, is often taken as axiomatic. However, the link between the proliferation of arms and conflict can be rejected on a number of grounds. Arms are simply the instruments of actors whose policy intentions are the key factors determining the slide to war – put simply, it is not the gun that is important in explaining war but the finger on the trigger. This has arguably even more relevance in the case of sub-state conflicts which are often perceived by participants as wars of national survival. As Karp has noted ‘when the stakes are that high, lack of proper weapons is not an inducement to compromise, but an invitation to improvise’.46 Even in Rwanda the influence of arms transfers can be underplayed. Prior to the genocide both the government and the RPF were obtaining large volumes of arms either on the market or from external sponsors, a state of affairs which has led Goose and Smythe to observe that an arms race was under way between the two parties.47 Once the killings began, however, the massacres were actually undertaken in a systematic manner with the earliest conducted by the army and militia groups using grenades and assault rifles. To some extent the machete seems to have been used as much as an instrument of terror as out of necessity, and eyewitness reports record victims begging to be shot rather than endure slow and painful death by machete.48 For neo-realists the security dilemma is generally taken to arise as a consequence of the fact that states in the international system exist in a state of anarchy with no overriding authority to provide order and

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protection. In theory, relations within the state should not suffer from the security dilemma as states which, with their supposed monopoly of force, are able to act as Hobbesian Leviathans guaranteeing peace and order in society. However, if a government cannot control its territory effectively enough to protect its people and another actor can, then the latter will have enough of the attributes of sovereignty to create a security dilemma.49 In reality, even the most coercive of units cannot enforce order everywhere all the time. Social order and cohesion within a unit is thus, to a significant degree, achieved not by coercion or by deterrence on the part of a Hobbesian Leviathan, but as a consequence of the fact that members share common norms and values and have a relatively high attachment to institutions which are perceived to be legitimate. The same phenomenon is also illustrated within what Holsti has termed strong states50 (or what Deutsch terms ‘amalgamated security communities’). These exhibit many of the characteristics noted above and consequently produce high levels of social and political stability. Such states are strong not because they posses significant levels of coercive capability, but because they possess what Holsti terms vertical legitimacy (where authority, consent and loyalty to the state are high) and horizontal legitimacy (where political and social relations are inclusive and do not exclude particular groups).51 Legitimacy is composed of ‘sentiments or habits based on a variety of institutions, rules, norms, practices and attitudes’52 and is derived from a number of factors including the presence of an implicit social contract, consensus on political rules of the game, equal access to decisions and allocations and ideological consensus.53 This has implications for how we view the operation of the security dilemma in both strong and weak states. Strong states with high levels of vertical and horizontal legitimacy will often be able to accommodate the acquisition of relatively high levels of militarization on the part of the state or its citizens without a corresponding escalation in threat perception on the part of either. Thus, whilst the US has by far the strongest military in the world, its citizens possess the largest number of firearms (estimates range as high as 250 million – one for every person in the US).54 In strong states breakdowns in the ‘internal security community’ are likely to be localized (socially and/or territorially) and the threat posed is not so much to the state itself but to the social order and the social fabric, although of course if the breakdown in social order becomes pervasive it may ultimately threaten the existence of the state. By contrast, in the weak state (with its low levels of vertical and horizontal legitimacy) the breakdown in the internal security community is likely to be less localized both in the sense that it will encompass a

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relatively higher proportion of actors and in the sense that its expression is likely to embrace a larger or more fundamental set of social actions that constitute a threat to the state itself. Thus, given the more pervasive breakdown of the internal security community, even relatively low levels of arms acquisition may be sufficient to awaken the security dilemma and spark an arms race with all the attendant risks of conflict that ensue. This is made worse by the fact that in internal conflicts – which tend to be characterized by guerrilla warfare, counterinsurgency and other types of irregular operations – it is often difficult to distinguish between offensive and defensive military strategies. Consequently, as Spear emphasises, ‘worst-case thinking then takes over, leading to arms races and spirals of aggression’.55 This is not to suggest that arms either inevitably cause conflict or are the only factor that precipitates conflict within the state. As has been noted already, the relation between arms and conflict is more a function of the presence or otherwise of a security community than either the absolute size of military arsenals or the innate qualities (offensive/defensive) of particular armaments. Moreover, the roots of conflict are often diverse and variable. Brown for instance lists a series of structural, political, economic/social and cultural/perceptual factors that can act as the underlying and proximate causes of internal conflict.56 Nevertheless, it seems clear that the proliferation of arms within the weak state is more likely to produce acute versions of the security dilemma than it is to produce stable deterrence, making conflict more and not less likely. Moreover, high levels of military spending can divert funds away from investment in economic infrastructure or social welfare, thus exacerbating the problems of poverty, disease and social alienation which are drivers of internal conflict in their own right.57 Arms Suppliers to Conflicts In-being If arms can act as a contributory factor precipitating internal conflict then it seems even more self-evident that they can both exacerbate conflicts and make their cessation less likely. For instance, conflicts can suddenly be made more violent by a quantitative or qualitative increase in arms. This has occurred in Kenya where historic conflicts between competing cattle herders have escalated to deadly warfare after the introduction of automatic rifles.58 Moreover, the supply of arms to an area of conflict can result in an overspill to neighbouring states which acts to militarise factional tensions or lawlessness. In contrast, the NPA in the Philippines has been unable to transform its numerical support into an effective military threat to government largely

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due to the fact that it possesses neither the funds nor the external support necessary to acquire significant levels of arms.59 Similarly, negotiated solutions to the conflicts in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Mozambique, Namibia and Cambodia were facilitated by the fact that the parties involved had lost their major external sources of weapons and military aid. In certain cases the supply of arms to one side in a conflict can help create a balance of forces which promotes or restores deterrence, thus encouraging the combatants to negotiate a resolution to their conflict.60 As already noted, though, the conditions of intra-state conflict mitigate against the rational assessment of opposing force levels required for deterrence to work and instead create the permissive conditions for acute versions of the security dilemma to flourish. Alternatively, arms supplies can be justified where one actor is clearly the victim of aggression and/or where there is a risk that defeat will precipitate indiscriminate slaughter and widespread abuse of human rights by one faction against the members (including noncombatants) of another.61 For instance, critics of the UN’s arms embargo against the parties to the conflict in the former Yugoslavia have argued that it effectively institutionalized a military imbalance which favoured the Serb aggressors.62 Furthermore, if such selective arms supplies promote stalemate, deterrence, or victory for a pacifically inclined actor, they may act to both hasten the end of conflict and reduce its costs. Black market supplies of equipment to the anti-Serb factions and the training provided to the Croatian forces by the US mercenary group, Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI), was ‘instrumental’ in bringing about a change in the balance of forces on the ground and thus was the key catalyst that brought the Serbs to the Dayton negotiating table.63 Permitting the supply of arms to victims whilst embargoing aggressors becomes both a moral and pragmatic imperative (particularly in the absence of effective intervention on the part of the international community). Clearly, the selective manipulation of arms supplies is an approach fraught with problems. Unless carefully controlled, arms supplies to one party in a conflict may simply provide the victim with the material means to extract not peace, but revenge. Such a strategy also assumes that it is possible to control, through embargo, the supply of arms to an aggressor and that arms supplies to the victim will not simply stimulate a classic action–reaction arms race which acts to both escalate and prolong conflict. Given that the sources of arms supplies are so diverse and so plentiful, this is a questionable assumption. For instance, analysts have estimated that, despite the embargo, $2 billion of arms made their way into Bosnia in 1993 alone.64 There is also the risk that arms supplies to a conflict may

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leak out into neighbouring states, promoting violent crime or factional conflict. Any decision to engage in the selective manipulation of arms supplies would have to balance the benefits to the victims of aggression against the danger that flooding a region with arms may also promote the destabilization of neighbouring states. More crucially, the distinction between aggressor and victim is not always clear-cut. The ascription of such labels by outside actors is often a political act in itself, determined more by strategic, ideological or cultural factors. Consequently, legitimizing the supply of arms to the victims of aggression could have the effect of legitimizing arms supplies to any party to a conflict whose external supporters perceive they are more sinned against than sinners. What starts out as an attempt to use arms supplies for ethical purposes can end up as a principle under which global norms against arms trading to actors in conflict can be eroded. There is both a moral imperative for the international community to support the victims of aggression (particularly where aggression borders on genocide), and a limit on the willingness of other states to risk their soldiers lives to promote peace in regions where there are no direct national interests at stake. In such circumstances, the selective manipulation of arms supplies may be the only practical means of providing such support. However, given that the adoption of this principle risks legitimizing any and all supplies to parties in conflict, the authority to sanction such an approach clearly needs to be vested in an international body – the most obvious candidate being the UN which, with all its flaws, remains the only body with the necessary international legitimacy to undertake such a role. Arms and Post-conflict Peace Once peace is brokered in a conflict, the legacy of past arms supplies can have a negative impact on the ability of actors to translate a peace agreement into conflict resolution, and also the ability of a society to create the economic and social stability necessary for post-conflict regeneration. Typically, post-conflict societies are awash with arms. For instance after the ceasefire in El Salvador the UN identified and destroyed over 10 000 arms, 4 million rounds of ammunition and 5107 kilograms of explosives belonging to the FMLN.65 Despite this, four years after the civil war ended it was estimated that 200 000 military-style weapons still remained in civilian hands contributing to an epidemic of violent lawlessness.66 The easy availability of arms in post-conflict societies can be highly destabilizing, particularly given that they are also characterized by a

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number of features that mean both peace and social order are acutely fragile anyway (for example, a persistence of interfactional tension, an absence of political trust, bankrupt economies with limited employment opportunities for ex-combatants, and a culture of violence). The legacy of arms can impede the economic and social regeneration necessary for peace to become permanent and meaningful in post-conflict societies. In Mali, a UN Advisory Mission studied the security situation in the aftermath of the 1992 peace pact between the Tuaregs and the government and concluded that ‘the lack of security was fuelling the demand for weapons. The availability of weapons was fuelling the cycle of banditry and violence which in turn was virtually bringing structural development to a halt and preventing any progress on socio-economic reforms’.67 This led to the adoption of a ‘security first’ approach under which it was recognized that post-conflict development could not proceed without addressing the insecurity created by the proliferation of arms,68 an approach which the UN’s Panel of Governmental Experts on Small Arms has now recommended as a model for other regions of the world where conflicts come to an end.69 Nevertheless, the retention or even provision of additional arms can enhance the prospects for post-conflict resolution. Ginifer for instance has argued that in Zimbabwe, disarmament of the Patriotic Front (PF) and the Rhodesian Security Forces (RSF) before elections were held would have heightened the insecurities of both parties and lessened the chances of a successful end to conflict.70 It is not uncommon for peace agreements to be secured only with the promise of additional arms supplies to one or both parties in order to guarantee a balance of forces that, in theory at least, provides security through deterrence. The Bosnian government was only persuaded to sign up to the Dayton agreement after the US had promised an extensive rearmament programme (train and equip).71 Critics, however, have argued that the programme is flawed because the most likely opponents in a new war will be the Croats and Muslims that make up the Federation and that arming them is therefore inflammatory.72 Whilst train and equip may not exceed any quantitative limitations on arms agreed as part of the peace process it is nevertheless endowing the Muslim–Croat Federation with a qualitative superiority that might tempt them to re-ignite hostilities against the Bosnian Serbs.73 The issue of military balance addressed by train and equip is certainly an important one in post-conflict societies. For instance, there has been extensive criticism of the disarmament programme in Somalia which was undertaken in fits and starts and which consequently left those who had given up their weapons at the mercy of gangs who still retained them.74 However, attempting to address this issue via an arms build-up of one or

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all factions in a conflict not only seems perverse, but does little to encourage the former combatants to seek meaningful rapprochement through dialogue and cooperation, and instead encourages them to hunker down behind their bunkers in a ‘cold war’ stand-off. Flooding arms into a former conflict zone has the potential to aggravate the very same security dilemmas which plunged the combatants into war in the first place. The provision of arms to post-conflict societies reinforces the role and political power of the military thus impeding the development of a civil society within each unit and making it more likely that an authoritarian and militaristic approach to domestic politics will be perpetuated. This is (ironically) unlikely to produce the kind of strong state with high levels of legitimacy that can actually sustain high levels of armaments without risking internal implosion. This brings us neatly back to the point made at the start of this section. Just as the relationship between arms and the outbreak of conflict is as much a function of a unit’s failure to approach the characteristics associated with a security community than any intrinsic qualities inherent in the weapons themselves, so the relationship between arms and peacebuilding is as much a function of politics and economics as it is military formations. This is not to deny that arms are an important contributory factor in inciting conflict, heightening its intensity and preventing its permanent resolution, and that limiting the global arms trade is an important requirement for the promotion of peace between actors within a unit. The exact impact arms will have on intra-state conflict will be dependent on the extent to which actors within a society can approach, or in the case of post-conflict societies can begin to approach, the ideal of trust, social and economic inclusiveness and respect, both for each other’s values and the institutions of governance. Where these are absent, even relatively low levels of arms may excite the security dilemma; where these are present, societies may be able to tolerate quite high levels of arms. CONCLUSION There are three main points that have been suggested in this chapter. l

l

First, the state, and particularly the weak state, is now increasingly permeated by a variety of militarized actors who either explictly challenge the state and its monopoly of force, or offer themselves as alternative guarantors of security for at least some members of society. Second, the diffusion model of arms circulation with its emphasis on the diversity of both actors and routes by which arms are circulated offers a

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more accurate representation of the mechanisms by which arms reach internal conflicts. The implication of this model is that, currently, the only real prohibition against the acquisition of arms by actors in internal conflicts is the ability to pay or, alternatively, to find an external sponsor able to pay. Third, order and cohesion within a unit is not imposed by force or by deterrence but by the fact that members exist in what might be termed an internal security community. Where such a security community exists, it may be possible to accommodate even a relatively significant accumulation of arms without sparking the security dilemma, arms-racing and a slide into anarchy and war. Where an internal security community does not exist, even relatively low levels of arms may be sufficient to act as a major causal factor precipitating a descent into endemic violence.

Thus, the problem of arms and internal conflict are most likely to be best addressed by a combination of strategies designed either to reduce recipients’ ability to pay, or to raise the cost of arms, and by lateral strategies that address the problem of arms and internal conflict indirectly via the development of an internal security community.

Notes 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers 1996, Table II (Washington, DC: ACDA, 1997). Brad Roberts, Weapons Proliferation and World Order – After the Cold War (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1996), p. 76. Ian Anthony and Gerd Hagmeyer-Gaverus, ‘The European Arms Trade: Trends and Patterns’, in Wilfried von Bredow, Thomas Jäger and Gerhard Kümmel, European Security (London: Macmillan, 1997). p. 91. Michael T. Klare, ‘The Arms Trade in the 1990s: Changing Patterns, rising dangers’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 17, no. 5, 1996, p. 869. Michael T. Klare, ‘The New Arms Race: Light Weapons and International Security’, Current History, April 1997, p. 176. The exact definition of small arms and light weapons is open to dispute. However, the UN Panel of Governmental experts on small arms has defined small arms as weapons defined for personal use and light weapons as those designed for use by several persons serving as a crew. Small arms in this definition include revolvers, assault rifles and light machine guns. Light weapons include heavy machine guns, portable anti-aircraft guns, portable launchers of anti-aircraft missile systems and mortar calibre’s of less than 100 mm. This is the definition that will be used here when reference is made

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17.

18.

19.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

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The Arms Trade and Internal Conflict to such weapons, see Report of the Panel of Governmental Experts on Small Arms (New York: United Nations, July 1997), p. 12. Swadesh Rana, Small Arms and Intra-State Conflicts, Research Paper 34 (Geneva: UNIDIR, 1995), p. 1; Edmund Cairns, A Safer Future: Reducing the Human Cost of War (Oxford: Oxfam Publications, 1997) p. 33; Mats R. Berdal, ‘Disarmament and Demobilisation After Civil Wars’, Adelphi Paper, no. 303 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1996), p. 18. Joanna Spear, ‘Arms Limitations, Confidence-Building Measures, and Internal Conflict’, in Michael E. Brown (ed.), The International Dimensions of Internal Conflict, CSIA Studies in International Security (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996), p. 383. Joanna Spear, ‘Arms Limitations, Confidence-Building Measures, and Internal Conflict’, in Michael E. Brown (ed.), The International Dimensions of Internal Conflict, CSIA Studies in International Security (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996), p. 383; Shyam Bhatia, ‘10,000 new rifles trained on Kurds’, The Observer, 12 October; 1997; Paul F. Pineo and Lora Lumpe, Recycled Weapons – American Exports of Surplus Arms, 1990– 1995, Federation of American Scientists, May 1996. Christopher Smith, ‘Light Weapons – The Forgotten Dimension of the International Arms Trade’, in Centre for Defence Studies, Brasseys Defence Yearbook 1994 (London, New York: Brasseys (UK), 1994), p. 279. Andrew Hull and David Markov, ‘Trends in the Arms Market, Part 2’, Jane’s Intelligence Review’, May 1997, p. 236. Dana Priest and Roberto Suro, ‘More Arrests, Charges are Seen by FBI and Defense Department’, The Washington Post, 18 October 1997, p. A10; Misti Lee, ‘Arrested US Marines not Organised Theft Ring’, Reuters, 17 October 1997. United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 1994 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 53. Aaron Karp, ‘Arming Ethnic Conflict’, Arms Control Today, vol. 23, no. 7, September 1993, p. 9. Human Rights Watch Report, ‘Angola Arms Trade and Violation of the Laws of War Since the 1992 Elections’, Human Rights Watch, 1994, p. 47. Edmund Cairns, see note 78; FCO Daily Bulletin, 5 November 1997, see: http://www.fco.gov.uk/ Report of the Panel of Governmental Experts on Small Arms, annex III, p. 35, see note 7; Jasjit Singh, ‘Evolving Approaches to Control the Spread of Small, Light and Other Similar Weapons’, in The Second Seminar on Conventional Weapons Transfer After the Cold War, 21–22 December 1995, JIIA Paper no. 11, The Japan Institute of International Affairs, 1996, p. 62. Report of the Panel of Governmental Experts on Small Arms, annex III, p. 35, see note 6. Turkish Daily News, ‘Military Equips Helicopters with Anti-missile Systems’, 20 November 1997; Anna Borzello, ‘Uganda Benefits from Sudanese Rebel Advance’, The Guardian, 11 April 1997; Michael T. Klare, ‘Light Weapons Diffusion and Global Violence in the Post-Cold War Era’,

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Neil Cooper

20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

35

in Jasjit Singh (ed.), Light Weapons and International Security, British American Security Information Council, 1995, p. 13. United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 1994 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 53. Diana Jean Schemo, ‘US to Send Arms to Fight Drugs in Colombia but Sceptics Abound’, New York Times, 25 October 1997. Edmund Cairns, see note 7; FCO Daily Bulletin, see note 16. Chris Smith, ‘Light Weapons and Ethnic Conflict in South Asia’, in Jeffrey Boutwell, Michael T. Klare and Laura W. Reed (eds), Lethal Commerce: The Global Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons (Cambridge, Mass.: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1995), p. 77. Bonn International Center for Conversion, Conversion Survey 1997 – Global Disarmament and Disposal of Surplus Weapons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 155; Jacklyn Cock, ‘A Sociological Account of Light Weapons Proliferation in Southern Africa’, in Jasjit Singh (ed.), p. 92, see note 19. Aaron Karp, pp. 10–11, see note 14. Andrew Hull and David Markov, p. 236 see note 11. Aaron Karp, p. 12, see note 14. Andrew Hull and David Markov, p. 234, see note 11. Edmund Cairns, p. 35, see note 7. Stephen John Stedman, ‘Conflict and Conciliation in Sub-Saharan Africa’, in Michael E. Brown (ed.), p. 245, see note 8. Ian Anthony (ed.), Russia and the Arms Trade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Michael T. Klare, in Jasjit Singh, p. 5, see note 19. Washington Post, ‘Russian Mob, Drug Cartels Joining Forces’, 29 September 1997. Daniel García-Peña Jaramillo, ‘Light Weapons and Internal Conflict in Colombia’, in Jeffrey Boutwell, Michael T. Klare and Laura W. Reed (eds), p. 107, see note 23. G. Mills, ‘Small Arms Control – Some Early Thoughts’, African Defence Review, no. 15, 1994. David Isenberg, Soldiers of Fortune Ltd.: A Profile of Today’s Private Sector Corporate Mercenary Firms, Washington: Center for Defense Information; Africa News Service, ‘Uganda Mercenaries Arrested in Burundi’, 8 December 1997. Ibid. Ibid.; The Guardian, ‘Corporate Dogs of War Grow Fat in Africa’, 26 January 1997. William D. Hartung, Welfare for Weapons Dealers: The Hidden Costs of the Arms Trade, World Policy Papers (New York: World Policy Institute, 1996). For discussions of subsidies for UK exports see The World Development Movement, Gunrunners Gold: How the Public’s Money Finances Arms Sales (London: World Development Movement, 1995); Neil Cooper, The Business of Death: Britain’s Arms Trade at Home and Abroad (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 1997). The Observer, ‘BP Does a U-turn on Rights Abuses’, 10 November 1996. The Guardian, Letter from Richard Brenner, Coalition Against BP, 9 May 1997.

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43. 44.

45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

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The Arms Trade and Internal Conflict Fabrice Weissman, ‘Liberia: Can Relief Organisations Cope With the Warlords?’, in Médecins Sans Frontières, World in Crisis: The Politics of Survival at the End of the Twentieth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 104. The Guardian, ‘Angola Rebels Face Deadeline’, 15 August 1997. For discussions of this issue see Kevin O Brien, ‘Privatized Peacekeeping: Military-Advisory Groups and African Society’, International Peacekeeping, vol. 5, no. 3, Autumn 1998; William Reno, ‘Privatizing War in Weak States’, paper presented at the International Studies Association Conference, Toronto, 1997; William Reno, ‘Privatizing War in Sierra Leone’, Current History, vol. 96, no. 610, May 1997, pp. 227–30. See, for instance, Jasjit Singh (ed.), see note 19; Bonn International Center for Conversion, see note 25; Michael Klare and David Andersen, A Scourge of Guns: The Diffusion of Small Arms and Light Weapons In Latin America (Washington, DC: Federation of American Scientists, Arms Sales Monitoring Project, 1996); Owen Greene, ‘Tackling Light Weapons Diffusion: Responses at the International Level’, paper presented at the annual BISA Conference, Leeds, December 1997. Aaron Karp, ‘Small Arms – The New Major Weapons’, in Jeffrey Boutwell, Michael T. Klare and Laura W. Reed (eds), p. 27, see note 23. Stephen D. Goose and Frank Smyth, ‘Arming Genocide in Rwanda’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 73, no. 5, September/October 1994, p. 86. Guy Vassall-Adams, Rwanda: An Agenda for International Action (Oxford: Oxfam Publications, 1994), pp. 37–8. Stuart J. Kaufman, ‘An international Theory of Inter-ethnic War’, Review of International Studies, vol. 22, no. 2, April 1996, p. 151. Kalevi J. Holsti, The State, War and the State of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Ibid., pp. 82–98. Ibid., p. 91. Ibid., p. 98. Michael J. Renner, Small Arms Big Impact: The Challenge of Disarmament, Worldwatch Paper 137 (Washington: Worldwatch Institute, 1997). Joanna Spear in Michael E. Brown (ed.), see note 8. Michael E. Brown, ‘The Causes and Regional Dimensions of Internal Conflict’, in Michael E. Brown (ed.), ibid., p. 577, Table 17.1. For an overview of the general literature on military expenditure and economic growth see Steve Chan, ‘The Impact of Defense Spending on Economic Performance: A Survey of Evidence and Problems, Orbis, Summer 1985, pp. 403–34, Keith Hartley and Todd Sandler, The Economics of Defense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 200–20. Michael J. Renner, see note 54. Aaron Karp, pp. 9–10, see note 14. Joanna Spear, in Michael E. Brown (ed.), see note 9; Barry R. Posen, ‘The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict’, Survival, vol. 35, no. 1, Spring 1993, pp. 27–47. Joanna Spear, ibid.: Barry R. Posen, ibid., p. 44; Aaron Karp, p. 9, see note 14. Anthony Parsons, From Cold War to Hot Peace (London: Penguin, 1995), pp. 224 –32.

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Neil Cooper 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74.

37

Maynard Glitman, ‘US Policy in Bosnia: Rethinking a Flawed Approach’, Survival, vol. 38, no. 4, Winter 1996, pp. 74–5. Andrew Hull and David Markov, p. 236, see note 11. The United Nations Blue Book Series, Vol. IV, The United Nations and El Salvador 1990–1995, Document 88 (New York: Department of Public Information, United Nation), p. 8. Bonn International Center For Conversion, p. 155, see note 24. Cited in Susannah L. Dyer and Natalie J. Goldring, ‘Analysing Policy Proposals to Limit Light Weapons Transfers’, in Jasjit Singh, p. 134, see note 19. Bonn International Center for Conversion, pp. 156–77, see note 24; Edmund Cairns, p. 37, see note 7. Report of the Panel of Governmental Experts on Small Arms, p. 25, para 79 (I), see note 6. Jeremy Ginifer, Managing Arms in Peace Processes: Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, Disarmament and Conflict Resolution Project (Geneva: UNIDIR, 1995), p. 52. Jane M.O. Sharp, ‘Update on the Dayton Arms Control Arrangements’, Bulletin of Arms Control, no. 25, March 1997, p. 11; RUSI Newsbrief, ‘And Meanwhile the Game is Continuing in Bosnia’, vol. 17, no. 5, May 1997, pp. 38– 40; RUSI Newsbrief, ‘The Train and Equip Programme in Bosnia: Siding with the Federation’, vol 16, no. 12, December 1996, pp. 92–4; US Dept. of State Daily Press Briefing briefer James P. Rublin, 3 October 1997, see http://secretary.state.gov.www/briefings/9710/971003db.hrml Jane M.O. Sharp, ibid. Ibid., Pauline Neville-Jones, ‘Dayton, IFOR and Alliance Relations in Bosnia’, Survival, vol. 38, no. 4, Winter 1996, p. 51. Clement Adibe, Managing Arms in Peace Processes: Somalia, Disarmament and Conflict Resolution Project (Geneva: United Nations, 1995), pp. 104–5; Mats R. Berdal, pp. 28– 9, see note 7; Mohamed M. Sahnoun, ‘Prevention in Conflict Resolution: The Case of Somalia’, Irish Studies in International Affairs, vol. 5, 1994, p. 12.

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3 Warlordism and Drug Trafficking: From Southeast Asia to Sub-Saharan Africa Glen Segell

This chapter will examine warlordism in Sub-Saharan Africa and compare it with warlordism in Southeast Asia in the context of drug trafficking.1 The significance of drug trafficking is how it has financed the warlord against the weapon-state. The Asian and African warlordism in this context of drugs trafficking must first be placed in respect to the global role of the criminal aspects of drugs when evaluating its military dimension as an actor of ethnic and sub-state conflict. It is the changing crime problem throughout the world which generates the most important link between warlordism and drug trafficking, and the warlordism in both geographic regions. This increasing network of criminal activities crosses traditional boundaries and merges heretofore separate offences in pursuit of common goals. It also erodes the state’s power both economically and militarily generating a new military dimension to the funding of ethnic and sub-state conflict on a global scale. The root of warlordism, however, is an ethnic aspect of the structure and culture of society where drug trafficking and its associated criminal activities are mere catalysts towards generating the means for conflict. Drug trafficking does not create new warlordism in Africa and Asia. Drug trafficking sustains existing warlordism. Although the main ‘criminal activity’ in Asia and Africa has been drug trafficking, not all drug traffickers are warlords. Similarly, not all warlords are drug traffickers. It is only when warlords take on the role of drug trafficking across state boundaries that the grey area phenomena becomes apparent as an ethnic and sub-state military dimension. In brief military terms, the grey area phenomena are transnational threats to the stability of nation states by non-state actors and non-governmental processes and organizations. In specific terms, the grey area phenomena are low-intensity conflicts associated with a combination of terrorism, insurgencies and illegal local drug trafficking, which in some cases has seen escalation to full 38

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drug warlordism, militant fundamentalism and ethnic cleansing. This can escalate to the point where the drug warlords eventually become the dominant economic, political and military authority within a region, but short of being the government of the state.2 After the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) such as nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, the grey area phenomena are viewed by many analysts as the most serious and probable issues threatening the global community in the post-Soviet era.3 This is specifically so with regard to drug trafficking in building up local drug warlords, for with stricter legislative and law enforcement measures developing around the world, major trafficking channels for illicit goods have been distrupted and criminal organizations are increasingly defending their turf by violent means. Thus, the phenomenon of drug terrorism has emerged from drug warlordism, largely because of the desire of drug traffickers to take advantage of available structures and training of terrorist groups, which in turn are attractive due to the vast amounts of money offered and new opportunities made available. The increasing use of violence by drug producers and traffickers against control efforts, as well as the dealing in drugs for arms and financing of terrorists through drug trafficking, are now seen to pose severe threats to the security and stability of nations and the well-being of their peoples. Accordingly, the UN General Assembly requested the Eighth Congress to pay particular attention to the links between illicit drug smuggling and terrorism and to propose viable control measures. The Assembly also expressed alarm at the growing link between the two, and The Global Program of Action called for measures to be taken to prevent illicit and covert arms and explosives transfers, as well as other drug-traffic-related activities. Unrestrained by borders and international protocols, these new dangers threaten the traditional nation states. This is not only within the states where the drug warlord is eroding the central authority, it is also across state boundaries where the warlord is marketing his drugs. This drug terrorism is functioning on the same basis by which the drug warlord holds power in his own region, which is through the traditional clan/tribe structure of society. For example, Nigerian drug warlords who are eroding Nigerian state authority operate Nigerian drug gangs in Europe which pose a threat to city life in the European cities in which they operate. In military terms this poses a tactical and strategic difficulty for the state military. Traditional or Westphalian states are not prepared to deal with nongovernmental dynamics operating outside the domains of state and alliance systems. Doctrine and force structures are designed around traditional

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concepts of overwhelming conventional force to achieve decisive victory against established state militaries, an unlikely formula for success against most of these drug warlord and trafficking threats. The problem for the armed forces of states is that their future role will be so widely varied that it could be difficult to accomplish everything well. The joining of narcotrafficking and terrorism, the growing organized criminal network, and the emergence of street drug gangs in European and North America as national threats are all linked to Asian and African drug warlords in their global distribution networks.4 The traditional Westphalian state is unsuccessful in resisting sub-state and local/regional challenges such as drugs warlordism where it faces a process of what might be termed ‘militarized disintegration’. This vicious circle for military disintegration is highly conducive to the emergence and sustainability of regional and local warlordism. In the latter instance, a variety of local and ethnic symbols of the clan/tribe may be mobilized to legitimate an alternative power-base to conventional statehood. Some drug warlords such as the KMT in the Golden Triangle rule their own respective fiefdoms rather like medieval princes. In these cases, we see a new pattern emerging in some parts of the global system in which the Westphalian state system faces long-term breakdown and replacement by a more complex order of mini statelets and pseudo states that depend for their survival on more or less permanent armed conflict and militarization of their populations, with drugs trafficking and production being the main financial revenue. With this in mind, the roles of armed forces of the nation state in the strategic environment of the twenty-first century deserve our attention today.5 Illicit drug trafficking by Asian and African drug warlords has contributed to disorder in some European and North American megacities where the rule of law and government services have been eroded. Countering drug trafficking is a notion that extends to the problematic issue of illicit drug trafficking. Because of the inability of democratic nations to come to grips with the supply and demand aspects of illicit drugs, narcotrafficking (and often related activities such as banditry, insurgency and terrorism) continues as a threat to national security. This danger will not soon disappear. While all the affected governments now recognize in varying degrees the threat which drugs and drug-related corruption pose to their sovereignty, only a few have been able on their own to translate this recognition into effective, sustained action.6 There is a waning ability of virtually every state to wield military power over the drug traffickers which is ever more apparent in domestic legal and police action against drug warlords such as the death penalty. Despite the

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executions worldwide of the thousands of people convicted of drug-related offences, most after unfair trials, the use of the death penalty has not suppressed drug trafficking and abuse. Although some 26 governments have adopted laws making drug-related offences punishable by death, the evidence shows the futility and injustice of official, court-sanctioned killings in stemming the tide of the global drug trade. Nigeria abolished the death penalty for drug offences in 1986 after several executions provoked widespread protests. In Mauritius, where the death penalty for drug trafficking had been introduced in a 1986 law, the section of the law providing for the death penalty was declared unconstitutional in 1992. While the death penalty has been abolished by the state in many countries, there has also been a rise in violence amongst communities where drug use is opposed. This fuels the lawlessness of society which assists the drug warlords in taking control away from the state. There is nothing better to attain regional power by the drug warlords than to divide the national population and its central state authority. For example, hundreds of South African gangsters openly brandished their weapons and paraded through the streets of rough Cape Town suburbs in August 1996, led by an admitted drug warlord whose twin brother was killed by anti-drug vigilantes a week previously. Rashied Staggie, who had led the Hard Living gang with his brother Rashaad, sat behind darkened windows of a bright red car as it crawled through the streets flanked by armed bodyguards. About 1000 supporters, on foot or standing in the back of a column of pick-up trucks, followed on, some with shotguns. Policemen and soldiers were moved into the impoverished Cape Flats area to prevent trouble between the gangs and the vigilante group, thousands of whose members arrived for a rally at a stadium just two kilometers from Mr Staggie’s route.7 Newspaper commentators have asked why they had not been in jail while official sources have remained silent. Since then the situation has deteriorated even further, and the Hard Living gang under the drugs warlord Staggie can claim that no police or soldiers can enter their domain of control without permission.8 There are few countries in Africa where national drug control strategies exist. Only Burkina Faso, Namibia and Nigeria are countries in SubSaharan Africa that have set up such structures, albeit with little practical success. Altogether, nine African states have not joined any of the three main international drug control treaties, namely the 1961, the 1971 and the 1988 Conventions. The most important of these states which have drug warlords are Angola, the Central African Republic, Comoros, Congo, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Mozambique and Namibia.9 When looking at these countries where drug warlords operate, it is clear that they hold the purse strings. Drug trafficking is an industry with

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distinct stages of production and distribution at wholesale and retail levels. It is also a highly lucrative industry, largely because there is limited competition and little threat from substitute products. The money from the drug trafficking industry goes mainly to the trafficking organizations, that is the drug warlords, while the peasants who actually grow the coca and opium earn a very modest return, albeit one that is generally better than the profits from growing other commodities. This has given the drug warlord the economic power to enhance his military power while the rest of the clan/tribe remains in poverty. Furthermore, drug money has been a major source of government corruption helping to provide secure home bases for terrorist organizations and leading to the eventual erosion of the central state authority to the regional drug warlords. In extreme cases, drug profits may even strengthen corrupt police or military élites vis-à-vis other government institutions to the point where they seize state power. Drug warlordism and narcoterrorism have thus become a part of this underworld dictionary. In Africa, where government institutions have short histories and questionable legitimacy, officials may rationalize their takeover of lucrative drug rackets as needed to pre-empt independent syndicates that threaten state power. Failure to bring those independent traffickers under control can lead to internal chaos, civil war or warlordism. As the United Nations International Narcotics Control Board noted in its 1984 annual report: Illegal drug production and trafficking financed by organized crime is so pervasive that the economies of entire countries are disrupted, legal institutions menaced and the very security of some states threatened.10 It is in this economic disruption that it is possible to see the utility of drug trafficking in warlordism. The drug trafficking warlordism that exists in Asia and Africa sustains and furthers the ethnic warlordism and erosion of the central state authority through ethnic conflict. Criminal activities such as drugs cartels are created by drug warlords to further their market expansion. These are criminal extensions of the warlordism across state boundaries but not specifically aimed at political and military power. The cartels are aimed at economic expansion. Drugs warlordism is therefore close to the definition noted in previous studies on the rise of warlordism that have focused on the devolution of power after the Taiping Rebellion and the failure of political leaders to create a workable order after the 1911 revolution in China.11 In this previous literature, warlordism was shown to have been a process of the fragmentation of military power and the dispersion of state structures in China. If one compares an example of the Fengtian Province in China with African and Asian countries it is possible to see that these are

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rapidly reaching the point similar to the then Chinese state in not only not being capable of maintaining external borders, but where internal boundaries became less firm and the subject of armed struggle as a consequence of warlordism turning towards drug trafficking. Furthermore, when looking at African and Asian drug warlordism there are similar case-result symptoms that existed in China which are worthy of noting. The Chinese experience indicated a tendency for warlordism to occur where there was a decline of centralized authority.12 This has occurred in countries such as Burma, Somalia, Thailand, Zaire and South Africa. Examples later in this chapter will show how this has been a direct cause of drug trafficking. Further similarities between historical China and Asia and Africa in the definition of warlordism stem from the practical circumstances, not only in the devolution of power but on issues of domestic unrest, fiscal crises and the pursuit of national and regional military efficiency that have led to the erosion of central authority with a very large involvement of provincial authorities in the financing of the military. In both cases the actual drug warlord was a man who was lord of a particular area by virtue of his ability to wage war. Such a warlord exercised control over a fairly well-defined region by means of a military that obeyed no higher authority than himself.13 There are further similarities between the historical Chinese warlord and the African and Asian drug warlords. The Asian and African drugs warlords exercise control over a well-defined region in governmental control. Their control is by fear and by clan/tribal respect. In a similar fashion, these Asian and African drugs warlords have a strong light-arms conventional military force at their disposal. In sum these drug warlords preside over anarchy while attempting to manage chaos. The drug warlord is thus a parochial militarist who takes control out of lack of central authority on the one hand, and who corrupts the collectivist structures of clan decision-making processes in order to promote his personal ambition, on the other.14 Both the Chinese warlord and the Asian and African drug warlord represent a form of decentralized and militarized personal rule. This similarity is strengthened by the underlying basis of the warlord’s power base where a homogeneous, cohesive ethnic entity with a common politico–military identity enters violent conflict without any goals of nationalism, or any philosophical, ideological or religious basis. The key aspect, then, that makes the origins of warlordism comparable in drugs trafficking to China, is its emergence following the destruction of the centralized state and army by centrifugal regionalist forces with such identification criteria as drugs trafficking. The armies of both the Asian and African drug warlords also know no age limits in the same fashion as those of the historical Chinese

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warlords. The whole of the clan/tribe is involved and becomes a way of life. From as young as six years old, members of the clan/tribe have been pressganged into the service of drug-dealing warlords.15 This pattern was clearly evident in the case of the Kuomintang of Chiang Kai-shek in China. Chiang created a ‘de facto’ drug monopoly to help consolidate his power within the national territory as part of his campaign to unify china. By seizing poppy fields and monopolizing drug marketing channels in the name of opium ‘suppression’, he undercut independent warlords financed from regional drug profits. Ironically, in the 1940s the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics trained Chiang’s secret police, who ganged up with the head of the Shanghai underworld to run what may have been the world’s largest drug trafficking syndicate. The KMT were a major force in creating the ‘Golden Triangle’ of northeast Burma, Laos and northern Thailand for opium drug production to further their struggle against communism in Thailand and China. It was also the KMT that set up an efficient and highly lucrative drug trafficking network in Burma’s Shan states where opium/heroin is produced. The KMT openly stated that: Necessity knows no law. That is why we deal with opium. We have to continue to fight the evil of communism, and to fight you must have an army, and an army must have guns, and to buy guns you must have money. In these mountains the only money is opium.16 The KMT were thus a freedom fighting movement which had effective government over a region and a well-established military that became involved in an Opium War in 1967 when two KMT warlords Ly and Tuan, often rivals, joined forces to defeat a third, Khun Sa. Their basis for popular support therefore stemmed from an ideological struggle but later became commercial cohesion. The central governments that they were fighting were of the same cultural background where the nation state was historically homogenous, such as in Somalia. Today the KMT is responsible for 40 per cent of the world’s entire heroin production.17 This KMT drug warlordism expanded out of the Chinese borders. Drug money has become so pervasive in the Burmese economy that it has tainted legitimate investment, and Burma has now become a fully-fledged narcodictatorship with all aspects of the government either heavily influenced by, or directly incorporated into, the burgeoning drug trade. The drugs warlords Lo Hsing Han and Khun Sa have taken over the central economy to the point that they are the de facto central bank. As in Somalia and Nigeria, this drugs trade funds Khun Sa’s 12 000 armed men where the drug warlords are the new economic kingpins.18

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The situation in the Philippines is very similar, where Fidel Ramos presided over virtual military rule outside of state authority, with corruption, a proliferation in drugs and gambling, urban mismanagement and a loss of national control of the economy.19 In 1996 in the Philippines there were 656 private armies with 33 763 men armed with 11 274 weapons. In 1989, the figure was only 152 private armed groups with 7000 members. All of these private armies are funded through drug trafficking. These examples of warlordism sustained by drug trafficking show how warlordism becomes significant when the warlord takes the clan/tribe to the stage of social consciousness before that of nationalism. As Chapter 1 of this volume points out, if this happens, fierce demands for social justice can be found allied with forms of primitive tribalism. Clanism is therefore the Asian and African version of the generic problem of ethnicity, which generates warlordism when turning to drug trafficking erodes the central state authority and builds up military forces not under the state’s control. Noting the similarities between ethnic and sub-state conflicts in both Asia and Africa gives rise to speculation as to why drug trafficking did not play a role in warlordism until the late 1980s in the African context. On closer examination the link between the Asian and African warlords were forged in the late 1980s and early 1990s out of the commercial market exploitation potential through the change/evolution of the international system after the end of the Cold War. During the Cold War there were numerous reasons which prevented such interaction. Firstly the African and Asian warlords were politically and ideologically diverse. The African states and warlords had openly embraced communism as a means of furthering de-colonization. The African warlord was until the end of the 1980s the head of a clan/tribe or a terrorist/freedom movement that had support from a particular clan/tribe. This was very similar, for example, to the origins of the KMT. The Asian warlords, on the other hand, had established their drug businesses in many cases to further a struggle against communism. Ideologically, the Asian and African warlords were on opposite sides of the political spectrum. This alone did not prevent cooperation for even the most diverse can share the same commercial bed. It was the Cold War with closely monitored international traffic by the two superpowers and the nature of the bipolar system with proxies that was the main instrument that prevented Asian and African warlord cooperation in drug trafficking. The end of the Cold War and the superpowers’ proxy role in SubSaharan Africa has enabled Southeast Asian drug warlords of the Golden Triangle to utilize Africa as a transit route. The end of the Cold War has also helped in the rejuvenation of clan/tribal identity in Africa. This rise of

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clan/tribe identity after the end of superpower proxy intervention was compounded with prolonged droughts and HIV/AIDS and created a societal support for the more traditional leadership other than the central authority based on European political systems, democratic or communist. These traditional African clan/tribe leaders saw drug trafficking offered to them by Asian drug warlords as a financial means to establish military forces and re-establish their regional and local authority. This then was the resurrection of the African warlord as a drug warlord by proxy of the Asian drug warlord. These African warlords therefore had a commonality of interest with the international drug cartels created by Asian drug warlords. The African drug warlord, in aiming to sustain power of the clan/tribe through drug trafficking, began to erode the central authority of the state through such trafficking. This furthered the African drug warlords individual power while giving the international drugs cartels more freedom of action for the transit and production of drugs. This spiral of events strengthened the Asian warlords’ global position and their local power bases by increasing production, while in both Asia and Africa it furthered the erosion of the central economic, military and political authority of the state. The law enforcement agencies in Europe were caught unawares, and by the time they realised what was developing it was too late to curb the new drug trafficking transit routes. These law enforcement agencies had not expected an African to bring in heroin because heroin is not produced in Africa.20 By mid-1997, within eight years of the falling of the Berlin Wall, there is no doubt that the entire Sub-Saharan Africa has become an integral part of a narcotics pipeline that stretches from Southeast Asia to the Americas. Of all heroin traffickers intercepted in Europe in 1996, 28 per cent were African carrying around 8 per cent of the total quantity seized in Europe. In a top-20 list of couriers, compiled by the General Secretariat of Interpol, Nigerians were ranked second after Turks, but still outranking the Pakistani, and Hong Kong Chinese couriers. These couriers, usually accompanied by white persons, travelled by bus from Thailand to Malaysia and Singapore and continued their journey from there by air.21 Of all the African countries being used by the drug trade, none has gained as much notoriety as Nigeria.22 Most of the heroin seized in the United States last year has been linked to Nigerians or smugglers working for Nigerians. Nigeria’s appeal to drug gangs is usually explained in terms of its chaos, corruption and social decay, which are also typically seen as causes for the rise of warlordism. Other reports such as from the INCB have further noted that well-placed Nigerians who are behind drug trafficking are never investigated by the authorities. And Nigeria is not the

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only country. Boxes of Mandrax tablets (legally manufactured in India but illegal in Africa) have also been found on a regular basis loaded onto Royal Swazi Airways aircraft at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta airport.23 In many cases these tablets get through to their market when drugs seized by police sometimes ‘mysteriously disappear’.24 One important statistic shows that the Sub-Saharan Africa drug trafficking annual takings, estimated at $500 billion, surpass world oil revenues and are only second to those of the arms trade.25 The scale of operations has reached such a level that Latin American drug warlords are also now using the African transit route. There are indications that a cocaine trafficking route leading through Angola, Namibia and South Africa is being developed by Brazilian Criminals.26 Most of the drugs now coming into Africa are destined for Europe and North America, although the transit countries have a habit of becoming user countries. Drug use and addiction rates among Africans are on the rise. The United Nations Development Programme has stated that, ‘Drug abuse by young combatants’ had contributed to the extension of conflicts in Liberia and in Sierra Leone. Today the profile of the Liberian fighter is a familiar one, he is a young man aged between 12 and 20, and is a regular drug user driven by his own poverty spurred by the African warlords’ quest for power.27 This addiction furthers the warlords’ power in a vicious spiral, for the warlord who turned to drug trafficking to generate funding is also able to control his subjects through drug addiction and further erode the state’s central authority through crime. In some cases the organized crime and drug trafficking has been linked to the end of apartheid. Mozambican refugees in search of jobs in South Africa have been involved in smuggling contraband items that fetch a good price in South Africa, such as drugs and AK47 assault rifles left from the Mozambique war.28 In South Africa an estimated 60 per cent of all cocaine passes through, but the rest is consumed locally. Crack is already a problem in South Africa and in several Western African countries where it is manufactured. Heroin, which is on the rise in Asia, also transits through Africa.29 South African police estimate that 120 drug gangs are now active in the country, each with a network of suppliers and pushers. Early in 1997, in Zambia, the second-in-command of the Drug Enforcement Commission was shot in the head outside his home in broad daylight. The scale of the drug trade in Zambia in such that the country has been dubbed the ‘Colombia of Africa’. Several cabinet ministers have stepped down amid allegations of drug trafficking, and it is not surprising that the international drug cartels should take an interest in Africa. It may not be the most direct route between suppliers and major markets, but this inconvenience is

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offset by other factors: instability, a breakdown in law and order and large movements of people, either refugees or illegal immigrants. To this must be added porous borders, a shortage of resources to fight the drug trade, and the kind of poverty that breeds corruption.30 But the drug trade, like any big business, needs banks and communications and transport, and nowhere on the continent are these as good as they are in South Africa. Since the beginning of 1993, Nigerian traffickers have increasingly used South Africa as a transit point for cocaine destined for Europe. Couple that with a vast supply of illegal weapons and South Africa’s history of lawless behaviour, and what emerges is a nightmare scenario for the rise of regional drug warlords which has eroded state police action and eventually state central control. Similarly Zimbabwe, though still considered a small consumer, is also increasingly becoming a user because it is usually used as a transit country. To this end, drug trafficking has widening economic influence. That is, the impact of the illicit drug trade on illegal economic infrastructures and processes in major producing or transit countries has seen outlets in the increasing political corruption in such countries, and the growing intrusion of narcocriminal enterprises into the realm of the state and the law. This is a process that some scholars associate with the delegitimation of government. The success of the narcotics business in innovation, avoiding detection and increasing operating efficiency, and especially since the early 1990s the growing transnational cooperation among criminal empires that deal in drugs and other black market items, have all contributed to an escalation of warlordism. At the same time the leaders and citizens of some trafficking countries are exhibiting clear signs of drug-war fatigue. The economic effects of the drug trade stem mainly from the processes of legitimizing narcotics earnings in the country or countries of origin. Drug trafficking has wide-ranging effects on political and administrative systems in developing countries: narcotics industries are associated with extreme anti-state violence or with the disintegration of national authority. Modern narcotics enterprises have also helped criminal authority grow at the expense of legitimate state authority. All of this has been possible in the Asian and African context for the existing corruption of the central state authority was a major consideration. Corruption is defined as the principal mode of financial accumulation for a particular class or classes rather than simply an instance of individual criminal behaviour. Corruption serves a particular social class and is vital for the affected group’s way of life in terms of wealth accumulation. Corruption becomes institutionalized or endemic when corrosion has reached the ultimate depths resulting in the deterioration of all moral and

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spiritual values that constitute the pillars of society and reflect its deepest aspirations. Time after time, the very governments and foreign security agencies that are given support with anti-drug assistance tend to shield the drug kings or monopolize the traffic themselves. Corruption knows no borders. Drug profits ensnare politicians, police and intelligence officials even in a First World nation like France, with its strong tradition of professionalism.31 A perfect example of this in the context of drug warlordism is Tanzania, where there was a concerted effort via various corrupt means through drug trafficking to divert money away from the control of government.32 This led to the devolution of the central power where the state was not only not capable of maintaining its external borders, but internal boundaries became less firm and the subject of armed struggle.33 Both the Western state and less-developed countries are similar in that characteristics have began to become apparent suggesting either complete or partial breakdown of the Westphalian nation state as a result of the emergence of sub-state ethnic and group conflict organized around regional or local drug warlords. Such corruption often follows a progression as it becomes entrenched. Drug enforcement is a form of market regulation and Darwinian selection. Police weed out traffickers less skilled at evading detection or buying protection. ‘Efficient’ traffickers develop a symbiotic relationship with ambitious agents of law. Police need underworld informants to make their cases; successful traffickers in turn need police to block their rivals. Both have an incentive to arrest large numbers of weak, unprotected competitors. These mutual needs may, and often do, promote outright cooperation and corruption. Drug-trafficking and warlordism are therefore two sides of the same coin. It is no surprise that both are able to function in a random and premeditated form towards the erosion of the central state authority and towards regional military power. This is because the nation state’s central authority is actually alien towards the traditional authority and structure of society through which warlordism and drug trafficking are succeeding. Warlordism in many cases, though, developed prior to drug trafficking, though drug trafficking has sustained warlordism to the extent that the central state authority has now become eroded both economically and militarily. Economically this has been through corruption amongst state officials in drug trafficking and through drugs becoming the main revenue for a large section of the population. Militarily this has been through the inability of the central state authority to combat these warlords, as their power base is through the international drugs cartels where the only visible enemy is the courier boarding an aircraft. Coups and revolutions are becoming less frequent as means of overthrowing national leaders, while

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civil wars between clans/tribes are becoming more frequent. Warlordism thus leads to the ignoring of state authority and the state’s legitimate role in the regional and global context in organizations aimed at promoting cooperation. The warlords reach international agreements through drug cartels and not regional state organizations! In conclusion it is clear from the Asian and African context that drug trafficking and warlordism provides a different definition of ‘weapons states’ to that of the Westphalian state which necessitates a revision of state-centric realist theory in International Relations. Drug trafficking crosses all state boundaries with no consideration to either the police, military or central socio-economic administration of the state. The contemporary arms market and its role in enhancing the growth of ‘weapons states’ bears no significance or relevance to drug warlords who hold de facto military control over large regions of the world while controlling the world’s largest untaxed industry.

Notes 1. 2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

Henceforth all mention of Africa and Asia will refer to Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. J.F. Holden-Rhodes and Peter A. Lupsha, ‘Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Grey Area Phenomena and the New World Disorder’, paper presented to the Office of International Criminal Justice, University of Illinois at Chicago; and ‘High Intensity Crime/Low Intensity Conflict Conference’, Chicago, 27–30 September 1992. Also, see Max G. Manwaring (ed.), Grey Area Phenomena, Confronting the New World Disorder (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1993). Graham H. Turbiville, ‘Operations Other Than War: Organized Crime Dimension’, Military Review, vol. 74, no. 1 (January 1994), 35–47. See also a series of articles concerning grey area phenomena and OMO in the Cass Publications International Journal, ‘Low Intensity Conflict and Law Enforcement’. Laurence E. Pope, Acting Coordinator for Counterterrorism, US Department of State, Patterns of Global Terrorism (Washington, DC: GPO, 1992). William J. Clinton, President of the United States, A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement (Washington, DC: July 1994, February 1995, February 1996). US Department of State, Bureau of International Narcotics Matters, International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (Washington, DC: 1992). ‘Flames of Vengeance: Police Stand and Stare at People’s Justice in the New South Africa’, Daily Mail, 6 August 1996.

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Glen Segell 18. 19. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

51

‘Gangsters March near Cape Town to Protest Slaying’, International Herald Tribune, 12 August 1996. ‘Africa on the Drug Trafficking Route: UN report’, Agence France Presse International, 28 February 1997. San Jose Mercury, 17 January 1985. See Chapter 1. J.A.G. Roberts, ‘Warlordism in China’, ROAPE, vol. 45/46, 1989, p. 27. James Sheridan, Chinese Warlord (Stanford: University of California Press, 1996), p. 1. Hussein M. Adam, ‘Somalia: Militarism, Warlordism or Democracy?’, Review of African Political Economy, vol. 54 (1992), pp. 11–26. ‘Trained to Kill: The Boy Warriors of a Drug baron’, The World Today, 23 November 1994. ‘Profile of Ly Wen-huan, last of the Kuomintang warlords’. Associated Press, 1 August 1984. ‘Trained to Kill’, op. cit. Yangon out to Prove there’s a Smoke without Fire in the Heroin Trade’, Asian Times, 3 June 1997. 20 August 1997, Far East Reuter Textline, ‘Ramos Dragging Philippines Back to the Dark Ages’. Reuter Textline, ‘African Couriers Carry Drugs to Europe, US’, 8 June 1990. Jan van Doorn, ‘Drug Trafficking Networks in Europe’, European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research, vol. 1, no. 2. pp. 97–104. ‘Drugs on Agenda as Africans Meet European Union’, Reuters News Service, 5 February 1995. ‘Drugs Worth $4.3 million Seized in Swaziland’, Reuters News Service, 29 December 1989. ‘Drugs go Up in Smoke in Swaziland’, Reuters News Service, 17 March 1988. Alison Jamieson (ed.), Terrorism and Drug Trafficking in the 1990s (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1994), p. 72. ‘Africa on the Drug Trafficking Route’, Agence France Presse International, 28 February 1997. The Independent, 18 July 1991. ‘Deadly Allure of Fool’s Gold’, The Observer, 29 May 1994. ‘Africa on the Drug Trafficking Route’, Agence France Presse International, 28 February 1997. ‘Africa Joins the Narcotice Pipeline’, The Toronto Star, 15 August 1995. James Mills, Underground Empire (Garden City: Doubleday, 1986), p. 555. The Tanzania Sunday News reported on 1 June 1986 that 777 people had been arrested for involvement in sugar, cigarette and beer racketeering, while Uhura reported on 7 January 1994 that 2000 packets of mandrax had been seized. H.S. Naidoo (ed.), Corruption and Drug trafficking in Tanzania: A Socio Economic Analysis (Dar es Salaam: Popular Publications, 1995).

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4 Privatizing Security, Privatizing War? The New Warrior Class and Regional Security Kevin A. O’Brien

A Prince must build on sound foundations; otherwise he is bound to come to grief. The main foundations of every state … are good laws and good arms … If a Prince bases the defence of his state on mercenaries he will never achieve stability or security. For mercenaries are disunited, thirsty for power, undisciplined and disloyal … (Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince)

INTRODUCTION On 30 April 1997, the South African Cabinet tabled a bill, subsequently passed, to limit the involvement of South African citizens in mercenary and related activities. Designated the Foreign Military Assistance Bill, it attempts not only to define mercenary activities (largely in line with 1977 Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Convention), but to restrict their activities through government authorization of such.1 This is one of the first attempts by a national government to place restrictions on mercenary activities. The traditional conception of ‘mercenaries’ is not the only problem here. In the post-Soviet era, the international community has begun to witness the rise of an ‘old’ security player, albeit in new form, which has developed out of many more traditional concepts with regard to motivated combatants. These combatants are becoming much more organized and mercantile, and a possible threat to regional and international security. This chapter will discuss this privatization of warfare (or ‘privatization of violence’, as it has often been called) and examine the debates that surround such groups and the environment within which they operate and 52

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flourish. It will, in conclusion, present a number of policy considerations for Western governments who continue to lead the establishment of international norms in practice, which is the basis for the international laws governing warfare.

FOCUS OF THREATS In the changing nature of warfare, conventional warfare – at least, in the developed world – between conventional powers is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, according to Martin van Creveld in his book The Transformation of War. Nuclear weaponry has almost eliminated the possibility of such a war between the major powers due to fears over escalation, and the advances in conventional fire-power of developed-world states against developing-world ones (as was seen in the Second Gulf War) leaves little room for the more traditional conception of organized warfare between states. Thus, Van Creveld argues, low-intensity conflict (LIC) is rapidly becoming the norm for the future, whether between developed and developing world states or within such states.2 The state arose following the end of the wars of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in which principalities and cities made war on each other. The state-system that arose in Europe attempted to regulate the provision of needs to the citizens of these allied principalities and cities. Warfare became the pure domain of the state in order to regulate its activities. Van Creveld has argued that: If states are decreasingly able to fight each other, then the concept of intermingling already points to the rise of low-intensity conflict as an alternative. The very essence of such conflict consists in that it circumvents and undermines the trinitarian structure of the modern state, which is why that state in many ways is singularly ill-suited for dealing with this kind of war … throughout the Third World, numerous new states have never been able to establish themselves vis-à-vis other kinds of social entities, including ethnic tribes in particular. In the face of their quarrels, the distinction between government, army and people began to fall apart before it had even been properly established.3 It is evident that, where the state is not strong enough or established enough to provide for its citizens, other actors are likely to step in. The conceptualization of warfare as being part of societal interaction clashes with the more traditionally-distinct concept of warfare being primarily the domain of the state. As LIC becomes the dominant nature of warfare into the twenty-first century (witness such conflicts being carried on in Tajikistan, Sudan, the

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Philippines, Columbia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and – some might argue – in American inner-cities), the nature of war is also changing. Northern powers are being forced to confront this threat to regional stability: the interactions and ties between such conflicts and the transnational trade in narcotics, weapons, nuclear materials, slaves and terrorism are becoming indistinguishable. All of these threats impact directly on the security of the Northern world. It is into this gap in society that the private security group has stepped, slowly replacing the mercenary: by privatizing security and the use of violence, removing it from the domain of the state and giving it to private interests, the state in these instances is both being strengthened and disassembled. While groups such as these are attempting to reconstruct the state in order to ensure stability and security sufficient for economic activities, they are also removing the state’s right to control violence and war. But how is this ‘privatization of violence’ a threat to regional (and international) security and stability? Because of the nature of the organizations which are increasingly taking on the role of either (sometimes both) exploiter or peacemaker. These organizations are more business-like, motivated, funded and governed (largely through a network of corporate fronts) than any other such entities have been since before the rise in dominance of the nation state. The ‘New Warrior class’ The emergence of this ‘new warrior class’ around the world has its origins in two types of more common participants: the mercenary and the private security officer. However, with the withdrawal of first the colonial powers, and now the superpowers, from the developing world, this class of combatants has grown in numbers and in strength, in organization and motivation. As security forces around the world continue to shrink with rationalization following the end of bipolar confrontation, this has resulted in an outflux of trained and, more often than not, battle-hardened combatants and former intelligence officers into the civilian sector. While a number of countries have instituted programmes to assist with this demobilization and the transition from warrior to effective member of civil society (such as the National Service Corps in South Africa), the success in implementing programmes such as these has been the exception rather than the rule. In many developing countries, as well as those of the former Soviet empire, this transition has failed for a number of reasons: the inability to provide basic sustenance and living conditions for these former combatants, the failure of education and training programmes, and sometimes the sheer

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weight-in-numbers of those being demobilized has led directly to the emergence on the international security scene of tens of thousands of demobilized combatants whose only livelihood has been war. Thus many have chosen to return to such a life for a variety of reasons. There are four classes of this ‘new warrior’. The first is the traditional mercenary, a soldier willing to sell his military skills to the highest bidder, no matter what the cause. While such activities have continued unabated, there has been a gradual change from the type of mercenary activity witnessed in the period following decolonization in Africa during the 1960s (for example, the interventions in the Belgian Congo by ‘Black-Jacques’ Schramme or ‘Mad Mike’ Hoare) to a more controlled involvement in such conflicts, with greater consideration placed on the background to the conflict and the local politics that contribute to it. This is not to say that the traditional mercenary has disappeared: in much the same way that mercenaries have been employed since the end of the Second World War, the emergence of the ‘White Legion’ during the recent conflict in Zaire was exemplary of the continued existence of this class of combatant. Reportedly raised by former GSPR (French Presidential Guard) Colonel Alain Le Carro, former Gendarme Robert Montoya, and Serbian commando Lieutenant Milorad Palemis, this unit of approximately 300 personnel was composed of Serbian, Moroccan, Belgian, Angolan, Mozambican, South African, French and British mercenaries fighting for President Mobuto Sese Seko; these forces were later reported to have moved south to the Congo following the defeat of Mobuto where they fought for the besieged government in Brazzaville.4 Mercenaries continue to be active in the on-going civil war in Sudan, in the Islamic uprising in Algeria, and were an instrumental part in each combatant force in the war in the former Yugoslavia. There have even been reports of mercenaries fighting in Chiapas (Mexico), in the Kashmir (India), in western China and Kurdistan. There has been evidence recently that former members of the US Special Operations Command, acting alongside former members of the US (and Western) intelligence community, have been providing military advice and operational support to various Mexican drug cartels, supported by former Israeli commandos;5 the irony of this, where former élite members of the US security establishment now act to support the very elements against which they operated for years, has become a noticeable mark of mercenary activities around the world. While today’s mercenary may be more ‘reflective’ than in times past, it is clear that the reasoning which pulls such people in is no longer motivated by merely monetary compensation, but also by both an interest in the nature

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of the specific conflict and by a self-awareness that this is the only life-style which such an individual could have. This final point is the key problem in dealing with this new warrior movement. The failure of such re-education or training programmes to provide every hope to such former combatants has led directly to their decisions to continue as warriors: for guerrillas and statutory forces alike worldwide, who have spent the last two to three decades in combat, the realization that they do not fit into civil society has been a prime motivator in this tendency towards mercenary activity. But it is not the only one. The second category of this warrior class is that of the religiously-motivated combatant. Often fighting only out of religious conviction in a struggle underpinned by religious militancy, these combatants have demonstrated a remarkable ability to move throughout the world in recent years. Perhaps the best example of such activities were the wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in which religiously-motivated combatants from throughout the Islamic and Christian worlds flooded to join the religiously-aligned combatant rivals; and Chechnia, in which Islamic fighters from throughout the Muslim world joined Dudayev’s forces. This was particularly the case in terms of the mujahaddin from Afghanistan, the Middle East and the former Soviet Union who joined the Bosnian Muslims in their fight against the Bosnian Serbs, themselves assisted by Orthodox Christian soldiers from the former Soviet Union. Evidence has shown that more than 40 000 ‘mercenaries’ fought in the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, compared with 15 000 in Chechnia – many of them the same people. But this activity generated even more concern when it was discovered that many of these forces fighting on the Bosnian Muslim side were in fact members of a ‘Revolutionary Guards Brigade’ sent to Bosnia by Iran. Turkish ‘guest-workers’ from Germany joined the war and were trained in Turkey.6 Even the Croatian army utilized mercenaries: early in the conflict between Croatia and Serbia, it is alleged that Croat President Franjo Tudjman used foreign mercenaries to fill-out the ranks and capabilities of his army, a reason partly blamed for its early defeat in Croatia. The third type of combatant which is making its mark on regional conflict is the child-soldier. In many parts of Africa and Asia, as well as in South America, children of less than 18 years old who have lived in warzones throughout their lives have been pulled into the fighting as a normal way of life. Recent examples of this were the rebel alliance of Laurent Kabila in Zaire, 70 per cent of whose personal forces were under 18 years old, and the group of Mai-Mai fighting Kabila’s forces in Eastern Zaire: the Mai-Mai are composed primarily of teenagers grouped into units from their home villages, with a strong belief in magic which they believe makes

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them invincible in battle.7 Many have been fighting in wars since before they were 10, and have grown-up knowing only combat. Confronting such a problem is beyond the abilities of the international community – for children such as these, they see their only future as soldiers in such wars in order to gain leverage in such anarchic societies. Finally, the fourth type of ‘new warrior’ (In comparison to the traditional mercenary) is the private security official. Where, ten years ago, such a category was composed of individuals tasked with personal and installation protection primarily, private security companies have grown to such a degree that many of them now include capabilities in transport, intelligence, combat-firepower, and para-medical skills. While most often they are accused of being ‘mercenary forces’ engaged in ‘criminal activities and violations of human rights’ (as was stated in the UNHCR reports on the ‘Use of Mercenaries as a Means of Violating Human Rights and Impeding the Exercise of the Right of Peoples to Self-Determination’8), there is a clear distinction emerging between the more traditional mercenary forces and those engaged in high-profile, high-risk private security operations.

PRIVATE SECURITY FORCES IN AN UNSTABLE WORLD There are a number of key regions in which private security forces have begun to take on a more assertive and active role in what has traditionally been deemed the domain of statutory military forces. The most publicly apparent is in Africa, where the organization Executive Outcomes has been active in low-intensity conflicts since before 1993, and where groups such as MPRI and DSL have begun to emerge recently. While the activities of such private ‘military-advisory’ groups have continued unabated since the rise of Italian mercantilism in the fifteenth century and the development of the great colonial commercial enterprises (such as the Dutch West Indies Company or the British East India Company), it is unlikely that if such an organization as Executive Outcomes, with its background in the apartheid security forces, had not emerged on the scene, such corporate security activities would have been granted the sensationalist international coverage that they have received since 1993. In the former Soviet Union, the hundreds of thousands of soldiers demobilized from the Soviet Armed Forces has led to tens of thousands of them joining increasingly-active private security firms, involved quite often in very questionable dealings with the various elements of organized crime in the former Soviet Union. This is also the case throughout Central Asia and the Pacific Rim, where demobilized combatants from the various

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guerrilla and low-intensity conflicts have sold their services to a variety of organized crirne units involved in arms trafficking, prostitution, child slavery and the drugs trade. Finally, in Latin America, the various drug cartels and families have, since the early-1980s, organized private armies composed of former soldiers, intelligence personnel and mercenaries from throughout the Americas, in order to not only defend their interests against each other and the various governments, but as well to take a proactive role against these same ‘opponents’ in order to maximize their portion of the narcotics trade. The emergence and awareness of these private groups has created a new policy concern for world governments. Given that war-fighting and security have traditionally been the domain of the state, the transference of these capabilities to private corporations has launched debate surrounding not only the usefulness and involvement of these firms in security activities around the world, but also on determining what steps should and can be taken to regulate such bodies, making them accountable to either national governments or a world body such as the UN. Under the existing international system, national military forces are controlled through the civilian political leaders in their respective countries (within the democracies), who in turn regulate and control the activities of these forces in order to (ideally) make their usage always fall within national or international legal statutes and controls. The privatization of these activities cannot be controlled in the same manner, given that enterprises which enter into commercial agreements with other governments have not, traditionally, fallen under the rubric of military oversight or arms control. Thus, the question remains as to whether such corporations should be allowed to engage in the provision of security and other military-related capabilities without being placed under the national and international laws of warfare, or whether ‘private enterprise’ – as many pundits and critics see this – should be allowed to flourish in the same way that other industries are governed. The answer to this question is of increasing importance: while this privatization of warfare emerges as a force in regional security, it is demonstrating the capability and willingness to take over the role of peacekeeper or peacemaker in a variety of regional conflicts from the international bodies (UN, NATO, OAU, OAS, ASEAN) that have traditionally undertaken such missions. Given that such operations have always been governed by international consensus as derived through a UN mandate, allowing private commercial organizations to undertake such activities places them outside of such international consensus and therefore outside of such restrictions or controls that may exist through international law. Finally, there are those who view attempts to control these activities,

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such as the South African Foreign Military Assistance Bill, as an unconstitutional breach of an individual’s basic right to freedom of employment and association; this view may be used to contest such further legislation should it emerge in countries other than South Africa.9 In response to this accusation, Kadar Asmal, the Chairman of the National Conventional Arms Control Committee in South Africa, stated that ‘although the Constitution recognises freedom of movement and of occupation, these rights are not absolute and may be regulated by law. The Constitution uniquely, also includes a prohibition on mercenary activities, unless specifically permitted by legislation’.10 This is not to say that the role of private organizations in the world’s trouble-spots is anything new: increasingly, private humanitarian and relief organizations (such as Médecins Sans Frontières, the International Red Cross, CARE, and other groups) have been replacing the role of the UN High Commission for Refugees or UNICEF in providing needed relief and support in these trouble-spots. Should the provision of security be any different in this regard? This question can only be answered by examining the groups that are engaged in such activities, as it is evident that the type of operations that these different corporations are each undertaking present very different circumstances in each case. Executive Outcomes Within the growing field of private security forces, one key name has created more controversy than any other: Executive Outcomes (EO), the world’s first ‘corporate army’. While many view it as a mercenary force, some argue that it is the only effective peacekeeping force in a continent (Africa) which the Northern world has more or less abandoned to its own problems. For many, EO denotes all the negative effects of previous mercenary activities; others perceive it as a force for security and stability – a private, Pan-African peace and security force of the kind which the international community has long promised, but failed to deliver. This is the quandary of organizations such as EO: does it represent the privatization of peacekeeping, or the privatization of war? Is it a means of establishing stability in Africa and elsewhere in order to exploit its massive mineral resources for Africa’s own benefit, or is it a return to corporate adventurism, last seen during the nineteenth century à la Cecil Rhodes, aimed at depriving the continent of its wealth? The exact origins of EO are unclear: a British intelligence report records that ‘Executive Outcomes was registered in the UK on September 1993 by Anthony Buckingham, a British businessman and Simon Mann, a former

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British officer’.11 In reality, EO was founded in 1989 by Eeben Barlow, a former South African special forces officer. At the time that EO was founded by Barlow, it was promoted as a ‘counter-intelligence consultancy’, its first client being the SADF.12 Given that Barlow was still serving in Special Forces at the time, this in turn raises a number of serious concerns relating to links between SADF Special Forces, EO, and the so-called ‘Third Force’ which has been destabilizing South Africa since the early 1990s.13 Luther Eeben Barlow came from Rhodesia in 1981, having – it is alleged – fought with the Selous Scouts there during the Rhodesian War, and entered the SADF in 1982 with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel; upon his arrival he was placed as second in command of 32 Battalion, the SADF unit operating in Angola composed of black Angolan soldiers fighting the MPLA government. Here he served for one year, prior to transferring to the Military Intelligence Directorate of Covert Collection in 1983. In 1989, he joined the SADF Special Forces Civil Co-operation Bureau, which had evolved out of 3 Recce Regiment, itself a patchwork of former Rhodesian and Portuguese special forces personnel. Barlow worked for the CCB until 1989.14 Executive Outcomes was originally founded by Barlow as a front company for the CCB; when the Civil Co-operation Bureau and the Directorate of Covert Collection of the SADF were ‘uncovered’ (in 1990 and 1992 respectively) and subsequently disbanded, it is assumed that many of their numbers joined EO, along with the majority of former members of 32 Battalion and other SADF Special Forces regiments, as well as a number of ANC Umkhonto we Sizwe and Inkatha guerrillas, former members of the Rhodesian Selous Scouts/SAS, and former members of the South African Police counter-insurgency unit Koevoet. Due to the career experiences of many of these personnel, who spent most of their professional lives either fighting counter-insurgency conflicts in Southern Africa or were involved in ‘hearts and minds’ campaigns on behalf of the South African military, EO can claim to have a unique knowledge of conflict situations in Africa, more so than any other private military company and most Western governments (with the possible exceptions of France and Britain). As William Reno, a political scientist who has extensively studied such groups, stated, ‘this “hearts and minds” philosophy informs [EO’s] strategy in Sierra Leone. Many Sierra Leonians admire the foreign firm for bringing security to most of the country, a legitimacy that the firm actively seeks and Sierra Leone’s army has never achieved.’15 Executive Outcomes has continued to grow in size since its inception. Now boasting a standing strength on battalion level (approximately 1000 personnel), it is equipped with all manner of personal and light weaponry, infantry-fighting vehicles, strategic (air) transport (two Boeing 727s, as well

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as C-47s), medium artillery, and even an air force (two Mi-17, two Mi-24 gunships, two MiG-23/27). While much of its heavier equipment (such as Russian BMPs and BTRs) is leased on-site by the contracting government, it is clear that EO maintains a sizeable standing force. According to brochures from the company, it provides, amongst other things, the services of military training and VIP protection; gold, diamond and oil exploration and mining; airline transport; civil engineering; and even chartered accountancy and off-shore financial management services.16 Finally, it is also able to provide its own Russian technicians, para-medical support, intelligence, photo reconnaissance (with infrared), and – reportedly – is contracting with private firms to provide satellite imagery in the future. It is reported that EO has a database of possible recruits numbering around 4000.17 In January 1993, Buckingham and Mann commissioned Barlow to recruit a force of South African veterans with combat experience in Angola to secure Soyo, one of the centres of the oil industry, which was in the hands of UNITA. A small force succeeded, but UNITA recaptured Soyo when the South Africans left. Luanda then requested a larger force, allegedly offering oil concessions in return. According to British intelligence, ‘Ranger [a Canadian mining firm ‘associated’ with Buckingham] allocated $30-million for the operation and placed the contract with Buckingham and Mann’. With approximately 500 men drawn from various former units of the SADF, EO routed UNITA and secured the whole oil region of Angola; payment for the contract allegedly included substantial concessions in oil and diamond mining. At the same time, they retrained the Forcas Armadas Angolanas (FAA) brigades of the Angolan Army, which began inflicting heavy casualties on UNITA; during this time, EO was alleged to have assisted the Angolan government in retaking the rich diamond fields of Saurimo and Cafunfo in Luanda Norte province, the source of much of UNITA’s funding for its war effort. This led to the signing of the Lusaka Protocols, which in 1994 effectively ended the long civil war in Angola.18 Ironically, one of EO’s first clients was UNITA, the rebel movement which the South Africans had covertly supported throughout the 1980s and which many of EO’s personnel had fought alongside of during that time; the irony of ‘switching sides’ was not lost on many observers. From Angola, they moved on to Sierra Leone. The Sierra Leonian government had already hired a British-based firm called Gurkha Security Guards led by Robert MacKenzie (the son-in-law of former CIA Assistant Director Ray S. Cline) to combat the rebels, but MacKenzie was captured, tortured and eaten by the rebels following an ambush, and Gurkha Security refused to take offensive action.19 Their contract was terminated and

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EO was hired to support Valentine Strasser’s operations against the Revolutionary United Front of Foday Sankoh; they not only turned the tide of war against the rebel forces in a few short weeks, but were also able to create a stable political and social environment in which democratic elections were held for the first time in three decades. Included in this rebuilding of the country’s infrastructure was the re-establishment of supply and communications networks, as well as the establishment (according to Barlow) of an effective intelligence service in the country. When EO’s contract was terminated by the Sierra Leonian government following pressure from the IMF, the newly-elected government was overthrown in a coup; recent reports have indicated that Tim Spicer (leader of EO sisterorganization Sandlines International) may be planning a counter-coup at the request of the deposed government and British mining interests.20 Other countries in which EO have been reported are Kenya, where they went into partnership with Raymond Moi, a son of President Daniel arap Moi, to establish security consulting companies; in Sudan they are said to have provided protection for Canadian oil interests; and in Uganda they were reported to be providing protection for gold and oil prospecting operations, as well as to have been ‘cooperating’ with the half-brother of the president, one of the country’s military commanders.21 At its recent height, EO was reported to have links with more than 30 countries, 70 per cent of which are in Africa; now, at the time of writing, they maintain that the only country in Africa in which they still have employees is Sierra Leone.22 It continues to maintain a strong selectivity in choosing its clients: Barlow has stated that EO will not become involved in religious wars or in conflicts where they don’t understand the politics; EO will not work for individual groups but only for internationally recognized governments who do not support terrorism or genocide.23 By its own admission it has carried out a wide and varying list of operations since 1989, including the training of South African Special Forces operatives in covert intelligencegathering, counter-espionage and covert operations; the planning, establishing, training and equipping of a covert counter-crime organization for a major multinational client; the securing and holding of oil installations in Africa under extremely hazardous conditions to enable the recovery of equipment by the client; the planning, establishing, training and equipping of an organization aimed at countering white-collar crime for a major product supplier; the training of market-intelligence executives in the gathering of market-related information and marketing warfare; the restructuring and retraining of Special Operations Units for a major African client; the restructuring and retraining of an African Defence Force; the prevention of

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a coup d’état; the training of Discretionary Warfare Teams for a DEA; and the planning, training and execution of a successful hostage-rescue operation, reportedly for the Indonesian government in Papua New Guinea.24 As EO gains more of an interest in the strategic mineral holdings of Africa (and other parts of the world), it may become ever richer and power ful, capable of exercizing real power against any number of states in the region. At present it is estimated to control – through holding companies, subsidiaries, and a grey network of ‘affiliations’ – more than 30 corporations specializing in everything from mining and security to education and information systems.25 If it continues to expand at the present rate, its influence could become crucial. Many of its previous contracts have allegedly included mining and strategic mineral rights in the countries where it works; often, such contracts have been conferred through the web of interrelated corporations to which EO belongs (see Figure 4.1). For example, EO owns a 60 per cent stake in Branch Mining (through the parent holding corporation of Strategic Resources Corporation (SRC) based in London and Pretoria), a company that has been handed immense mining rights in Sierra Leone and Angola.26 This evolving power is, as Peter Klerks has stated, the ultimate representation of neo-liberalism: ‘the trend is now for private corporations to actively reach out and “establish” governments, that will then make their decision with an eye first on corporate interests, so that instead of a country’s citizens, foreign shareholders become the real basis of sovereignty.’27 While such power is small and localized (largely to Africa) for the moment, it does represent a dangerous return to Figure 4.1

Executive Outcomes’ corporate network Strategic Resources (Pty) Corp Ltd (SRC) London/Pretoria

Heritage Oil and Gas Ltd (Mann & Buckingham)

Executive Outcomes Pty Ltd (van der Bergh)

Life Guards Systems

Saracen International

Ibis Air International

Trans Africa Logistics

Bridge International Corporation

Falconer Systems Pty Ltd

Sandlines International Corp (Spicer)

Capricorn Systems Ltd (Steel)

Diamond Works Ltd (Buckingham)

Branch Energy (Friedland) Branch Mining Branch Energy Grps (Various)

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exploitative neo-colonialism and a decline in the dominance of the state in these regions, albeit ‘states’ that were established (often haphazardly) by the colonial powers without regard to tribes and natural divisions. As the company’s strength continues to grow, its respectability is being grudgingly granted. British and American intelligence sources have admitted that EO is taking care of a problem (African instability) which their countries are unwilling to do. However, there are those who feel that EO is nothing more than a mercenary organization bent on the acquisition of extreme wealth at the expense of native populations. Support for this view gained in strength when the EO-affiliated company Sandlines International (which describes itself as a ‘military-advisory firm’) was hired by the government of Papua New Guinea in March 1997 to put down a rebellion that had been simmering on the island of Bougainville since the last 1980s. The military force, composed of South Africans, Britons and Ethiopians, was led by Colonel Tim Spicer, and immediately attracted negative attention when it became clear that Prime Minister Sir Julius Chan was using $36 million in aid and development funds from Australia to pay for the company’s services.28 The crisis on the island worsened when the Chief of the Army, Brigadier-General Jerry Singirok, demanded the Prime Minister’s resignation and was dismissed, retaining the loyalty of the army. The Sandlines personnel were eventually forced to leave the island when the contract was cancelled by Chan; it was alleged at the time that the contract provided for these personnel to be ‘frontline fighters rather than just consultants’. This allegation has been raised before: that EO (and its affiliates) engage in combat operations alongside the clients that they train. While Barlow has denied this, he has admitted that EO reserves the right to defend itself and its employees: in Sierra Leone, after a number of EO employees were kidnapped and killed by the rebels, EO undertook a ‘proactive defensive’ operation, eliminating that rebel unit; in Angola, similar operations occurred.29 EO insists, however, that its primary role is that of military advising and that engaging in operations as anything other than observers is the extreme exception rather than the rule. Yet EO’s record is not as bad as has been reported: by securing stability in Sierra Leone, elections were able to be held in that country in 1995 for the first time in decades. In Angola, the EO operations against UNITA forced a ceasefire and brought UNITA to the negotiating table, resulting in the UNAVEM III mission and the start of a democratic transition (although at the time of writing, fightings had begun again). These are both events which the UN and the OAU had been unable to effect for years. Furthermore, it has refused to work for regimes such as that in Sudan, which supports international terrorism, or for the military dictatorship in

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Nigeria. In October 1997, it admitted to having been approached by both former-President Mobutu and Laurent Kabila to support their operations against each other; EO refused on the grounds that it viewed each antagonist as ‘politically-suspect’.30 In the areas in Sierra Leone and Angola in which it was involved, reports from the local population indicate that EO personnel were regarded as ‘benevolent gods’ sent to restore order and end banditry, which they did. By its own account, EO ‘heartily endorses and supports reconstruction and development programmes for better quality of life and greater opportunities for individuals and communities … [and] believes that people’s beliefs, cultures and values should be treated with utmost respect’.31 This view has been supported by the local populations in which EO has operated, as well as (grudgingly) by most of the international relief agencies working in these same areas, who feel that EO secured stability in many of these regions. This is clearly not the philosophy of mercenaries out to earn pay for fighting without concern for the environment into which they are plunged. It goes further than that, however: it is hoped that the Southern African Development Community, with strong South African backing, will become the nucleus of an African peacekeeping force. While that appears to be some way into the future,32 the South African government appears to have implicitly recognized EO’s capabilities on a continent ravaged by conflict. This is particularly the case in countries where there is no clear governing power able to request UN or OAU assistance; furthermore, EO personnel are paid considerably more than soldiers of national armies and are provided with a substantial life-insurance policy – their personnel are willing to (indeed, paid to) enter combat situations which peacekeepers would avoid. This makes groups such as Executive Outcomes a force for stability in regions where the international community is unwilling or unable to act. Having noted this capability, South African sources have reported secret negotiations between Pretoria and EO; while these allegations have been strenuously denied by the ANC, the fact that the aforementioned ‘mercenary’ bill does not prohibit such activities but simply tries to bring them under governmental control seems to give some credence to this claim. Section 2 of the Bill specifically states that ‘No person may within the Republic or elsewhere (a) offer to render any foreign military assistance33 to any state or organ of state, group of persons or other entity or person unless he or she has been granted authorisation to offer such assistance … (b) render any foreign military assistance to any state or organ of state … [etc.]’: the parliamentary committee tasked with overseeing such licensing has stated that applications for such will be refused outright if they ‘would result in the violation or suppression of human rights, endanger peace by militarily

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destabilising a region, support terrorism, escalate conflict or prejudice South Africa’s national or international obligations and interests.’34 Understanding these regulations to be the case, this gives Pretoria a great deal of influence over the activities of these groups, especially regarding ‘South Africa’s national or international obligations and interests’ as mentioned above. Should South Africa not be able to provide sufficient support nationally (through the South African National Defence Force) to its ‘obligations and interests’ – such as through its intended strong role in regional and continental peace and security operations – the government has allowed itself a great deal of room to authorize companies such as Executive Outcomes to fill this space in their interests. Whatever the decisions of the South African government are with regard to regulating and perhaps capitalizing on the capabilities of EO and other similar organizations in South Africa, it appears clear that until the SADC, let alone the UN, OAU or outside powers, are able to effectively serve as a force for stabilization and security on the African continent, EO may well be the only effective force in Africa to provide such.

MILITARY PROFESSIONAL RESOURCES INCORPORATED In the past three years, a US-based company has emerged as the principal competitor to EO in the provision of defence and security needs to governments outside of the Western hemisphere. Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI) was formed in 1987. Composed of former senior US military and intelligence personnel, it includes on its executive and board such personnel as General Carl Vuonon (US Army Chief-of-Staff during Operation JUST CAUSE in Panama and the Gulf War), General Ed Soyster (former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency), General Frederick Kroesen (former commander of the US Army in Europe), and more than 20 other former senior US military commanders.35 It first came to light in April 1995 when it was revealed that it had reorganized and retrained the Croatian Army prior to its spectacular victories in Krajina and Western Slavonia. In 1996, MPRI was selected by the Bosnian–Croat Federation to train its new armed forces in a contract reportedly worth $400 million, paid for largely by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Brunei and Malaysia; such training would be occurring alongside the provision of military hardware by the US government to the Bosnian–Croat Army.36 MPRI has also been involved in training the military of Liberia, and reportedly requested license from the US government to assist former Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, a request which was turned down. MPRI was also contacted by

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the government in Columbo to provide training for the Sri Lankan Army, but maintain that they never signed a contract.37 MPRI claims to be only involved in the training of forces and not in actual combat operations; however, observers in the Balkans have reported that MPRI personnel were directly involved in the Croat retaking of Krajina.38 MPRI has very close ties with the US military industrial complex; this was made clear when President Clinton ‘forced’ the Angolan government to terminate its contract with EO (by threatening to withhold US financial aid) and to hire MPRI in its place in March 1997, partly with the help of the US State Department.39 Included in this contract with Luanda is the retraining of two brigades of the FAA, the Angolan elite paratroopers, for which EO had already provided similar training to other FAA units during its contract with Luanda; MPRI was also reported to have been tasked with establishing a military training academy for non-commissioned officers in the Cabinda region of Angola, although the company has refused to confirm this.40 There is one difference that emerges in MPRI’s (and other similar corporations in the US) abilities to offer military assistance to foreign governments: the State Department’s Office of Defense Trade Controls must issue a licence to such corporations in order for them to carry out such activities under US law.41 For this reason, the US government is able to effectively control the activities (to some degree) of these corporations in terms of who they will and will not deal with. Even once a contract has been signed between a private security company and a foreign government, the State Department continues to monitor and regulate the flow of assistance and weapons within each case. The danger that this represents, however, is the so-called ‘proxyization’ of US foreign policy, in which private companies such as MPRI with extremely close links to the US military establishment are used as the covert wing of US foreign policy, going into regions of the world where the US government is unwilling to become overtly involved.

DEFENCE SYSTEMS LIMITED Many other companies have emerged from the end of the Cold War and the scaling-back of defence establishments in the Western world. In Britain, the company Defence Systems Ltd (DSL), founded in 1981 by General Sir David Ramsbotham and composed of former British special forces personnel, was recently approached by the UN to consider taking part in security operations in countries where UN members were unwilling to go.

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In April 1997, the firm was bought out by an American firm, Armor Holdings. DSL is reported to have more than 5000 employees (only 100 of which ‘have access to firearms’, according to DSL executives) and is active in, amongst others, Singapore, Moscow, Mozambique (where they work with a World Bank project) and Bogota. DSL began providing security and logistical personnel to the UN mission in the Former Yugoslavia in 1992, becoming the largest such contractor (on the encouragement of now United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan) to the UN in the former Yugoslavia with at least 430 personnel by February 1995. They were reportedly approached by the government of Papua New Guinea in the mid-1990s to help establish a paramilitary police force for that country; the contract was never concluded due to lack of funds on the part of the PNG government, but DSL Chairman Alistair Morrison reportedly recommended Sandlines International to Port Moresby.42 In October 1997, it was reported that DSL had provided more than 1000 personnel to provide security for oil-fields, mines and embassies in Angola: a large number of the British ‘officers’ of the DSL contingent are former SAS.43 In supporting the missions of such organizations as the United Nations and the World Bank, DSL has gained gradual respectability (‘shedding its mercenary tag’ as one observer stated), which organizations such as EO have so far been unable to acquire.

OTHER PRIVATE SECURITY CORPORATIONS While the above organizations are three of the principle ones involved internationally in the provision of security and military assistance to foreign governments, they are by no means the only ones. With the demobilization of security personnel around the world, the proliferation of these organizations continues to grow. New companies emerge regularly, and many of these are simply previous companies who have ‘reinvented’ themselves under different guises or names in order to avoid either adverse publicity or financial problems in terms of tax and other concerns. Amongst these corporations are a number which have emerged out of the ashes of apartheid alongside Executive Outcomes. These companies include Omega Support Ltd, Panasec, Bridge Resources, Corporate Trading International and Strategic Concepts, all based within South Africa and styled as ‘private intelligence’ corporations. In April 1997, a group similar to EO emerged in South Africa composed of former special forces and intelligence personnel; although unnamed, it is alleged to be providing security, logistics, military instructors and combat pilots to several West African

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governments.44 In total, it is estimated that there are more than 90 ‘private armies’ operating throughout Africa alone.45 In offering these services, they are joining the growing number of political risk-consulting companies established worldwide (such as Oxford Analytica, Kroll Associates, Open-Source Solutions Incorporated, and the Economist Intelligence Unit) who are supplementing government and corporate requirements in the economic and political intelligence field. The difference with companies such as these, however, is that in addition to this consulting service they also provide services which are of equal concern to the activities of companies such as EO and MPRI. By providing intelligence assistance to foreign governments, in addition to on-site security, protection services and corporate counter-espionage, these companies often come dangerously close to breaching national security laws in the countries in which they are based. Other such corporations include the British organization KAS Enterprises, formed by Sir David Stirling, the founder of the SAS (who also founded the Capricorn Society an organization composed of former members of the SAS and other élite British forces); it has provided military-advisory services to many Middle Eastern countries. Levdan, an Israeli firm specializing in military assistance training, recently completed a three-year contract with the Congolese government, training the Presidential Guard and the armed forces (although insufficiently, it would seem, given the October 1997 overthrow of that government).46 In the United States, BDM Corporation has worked closely with the Pentagon as a leading provider to the US government of specialized training in the information technologies, information warfare, special operations and intelligence sectors; it has also provided ‘interpreters and translators’ to the various US and Allied military missions in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and the Gulf War. BDM expanded its market by purchasing Vinnell Corporation, which has provided security assistance to various Middle Eastern countries. Finally, the last major player in the US is Betac Corporation, which is involved with the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command and, reportedly, has assisted it with clandestine operations throughout the world.47 In October 1997, reports began to emerge of a new military-advisory group providing security assistance to the Angolan MPLA government in the Cabinda region. The Florida-based company AirScan was hired by Luanda in the autumn of 1997 on recommendation from Chevron Oil (who owns jointly with Luanda most of the oil assets in Cabinda) to provide protection against guerrilla attacks from the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda (FLEC), a secessionist group struggling for independence since the 1960s. The AirScan operation, under the command

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of US Brigadier (retd) Joe Stringham who reportedly ran US covert operations in El Salvador, was to have been granted to MPRI, but this firm pulled-out of negotiations with the MPLA government at the last moment.48 FLEC was supported partially by the former government in Zaire; now, however, Laurent Kabila’s new government in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) has terminated this support, leaving FLEC with no allied support-base. Kabila’s government also cooperated with the MPLA in the intervention in the Congo during mid-October, which resulted in the democratically-elected government of Pascal Lissouba being overthrown in favour of its former Marxist dictator, Denis Sassou Nguesso, who returned to power in Brazzaville on 16 October after having lost the August 1992 election to Lissouba. This support to Nguesso’s Cobras militia forces came after the MPLA supported Kabila in his drive against former President Mobutu, who had supported UNITA for years.49 The Congolese government had, for more than three years, used the Israeli firm Levdan to train the Presidential Guard and the armed forces (although insufficiently, it would seem, given the overthrow of that government).50 The realignment of the political order in Central Africa (including Zaire, Congo-Brazzaville and Angola, with peripheral interests by Uganda, Rwanda and Sudan) has centred largely on ‘oil-politics’, demonstrating the willingness and interests of the Western oil and mining companies to provide support for whichever side is best able to ensure the continued flow of oil (and thereby profits) from the region. Given a sketch of the involvement of such private security groups supporting these mining and drilling companies, it is evident that their role in regional security has become central: as Laurent Kabila secured Zaire with the assistance (some reports indicate) of Western mining firms and their security elements parachuted into the Shaba/Katanga region of southern Zaire, he effected alliances with the MPLA government in Luanda to secure their support against Mobutu in return for a termination of UNITA supply-bases in southern Zaire. At the same time, the MPLA government was employing three different private security firms to both secure their oil interests in Cabinda and northern Angola, as well as the diamond fields of eastern Angola (UNITA’s primary source of income), and to retrain their rapid reaction forces. Upon the completion of this process, with UNITA for the first time without support in the region, Luanda joined with Kabila to oust the government of Congo-Brazzaville to both secure Cabinda once and for all against FLEC (with the active support of the third private security firm which had been overseeing the arms pipeline from northern Uganda westwards through the region, many say with Rwanda’s support) and to ensure that the region would become one in which Luanda would exercise real power as the hegemon.

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Whether this realignment effects Gabon, the Central African Republic and Tanzania still remains to be seen. The fact that AirScan had just weeks before been hired by the MPLA in exactly the same region (Cabinda) from which the Angolan offensive into the Congo was launched, further solidifies this view that AirScan is, like MPRI, covertly providing training and other military services to the MPLA government out of this primary concern for oil. Given the fact that, in every conflict which has occurred in this region of Africa since 1994, foreign security forces supported by private military-advisory groups have been involved, the possible stabilization of this region in the long run remains unlikely. Should one or more of the current new political leaders in these countries fall foul of the various private security and strategic mineral and oil exploitation firms controlling the region, it is likely that such a leader would lose their considerable outside (foreign) support. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has warned that the overthrow of the constitutional government in the Republic of the Congo and the involvement of foreign forces in the conflict could become a pattern in Africa; Annan had attempted for three months prior to the overthrow to achieve consensus for a multinational intervention force for the Congo, but was blocked by the US and other powers with interests in the region.51 In this case, the private warriors may have done what the UN would have been unable to do: achieve stability through the forced termination of the conflict in the region. AirScan has also been reportedly involved in arms-trafficking from Uganda to the southern Sudan to support the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army there. This allegation further solidifies the view that a number of such private security groups are operating in this area of Africa. The oil company Arakis Energy reportedly (and, later, admittedly) contracted with such a group to protect their oil-field ventures in southern Sudan; at the same time, the SPLA is convinced that EO has been at work in Sudan training ethnic Nuer to protect the pipeline that will have to traverse Nuer country in the Upper Nile, but the Khartoum government denies this. EO itself now states that the only country in Africa in which it is presently still active is Sierra Leone, and has always stated that it will not work for the government of Sudan as it supports terrorism. It is clear, however, that at least two (including AirScan) and possibly more private security groups are operating in the Sudanese region centring on the oil-fields of the south.52 In some countries, private military firms virtually run the armed forces: Saudi Arabia is a prime example. Vinnell has been active since 1975 (in contracts reportedly worth more than $170 million) training the Saudi

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Arabian National Guard, while another US company, Booz-Allen, runs the Saudi Armed Forces Staff College;53 O’Gara Protection Services provides VIP protection to the Saudi Royal Family and trains the Saudi security forces; BDM Corporation has worked closely with the Saudi goverment in providing ‘training, logistical support and comprehensive developmental, advisory and operational services’ for their armed forces; finally, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) of Virginia supports the Saudi navy and air defence systems.54 From connections such as these, it is clear that as military-advisory and security corporations become deeply involved in the security workings of another state, while maintaining the closest ties with the government and military of their home-country, a serious concern about national sovereignty can develop. Further concerns regarding the nature of such private groups has emerged from the Former Soviet Union (FSU), where demobilized or disenfranchized former soliders and intelligence personnel have formed more that 9000 private security corporations comprising some 115 000 personnel in Russia alone.55 While the Russian government has attempted to curtail and control the activites of these groups, there has been ample evidence to suggest that many thousands of these personnel work for the various crime syndicates in the FSU; in recent months, there has been increasing concern that many of Russian-organized crime elements involved in transnational and international activities are using these personnel with specialized skills for illegal and dangerous activities throughout the world. Western intelligence sources have expressed increasing fear that the participation of these personnel in transnational activities could have a dangerous and destabilizing effect on many Western cities and industries. POLICY ISSUES FOR WESTERN GOVERNMENTS It is the role of these private security or military advisory groups in the actual operations to which they are advising where concerns emerge. Over three successive years, the UN Commission of Human Rights has tabled reports on EO labelling them as ‘criminal’ and ‘mercenary’ (oneand-the-same, according to these reports), dismissing their successes as nothing more than an attempt at exploitation. This is where the problem of definition becomes relevant: what is to be constructed mercenary activity and what as private security? Article 47 of the Protocol Additional to the Geneva Convention (1997) defines ‘mercenaries’ as: any person who is specifically recruited locally or abroad to fight in an armed conflict; does take a direct part in the hostilities; is motivated

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essentially by a desire for private gain; is, by or on behalf of a party to the conflict, promised material compensation substantially more than that paid to combatants in the armed forces of that party; and is neither a national nor a resident of the territory controlled by a party to the conflict.56 Thus, according to some of these criteria, EO and MPRI could be classified as ‘mercenary’. The one stipulation that prevents this from being the case, however, is that EO maintains (and it has not been disputed) that it has never been ‘recruited … to fight in an armed conflict’. It is still criticized quite seriously for taking an active role, albeit an indirect one, in any of these conflicts. As it becomes clear that the role of such private security forces is becoming stronger throughout the world, the debate on qualities and usefulness grows stronger. Many multinational organizations, in particular human rights groups, have strongly condemned such groups, continuing to label them as ‘mercenary’. The OAU has long held, through its Charter and the ‘Convention for the Elimination of Mercenaries in Africa’, that its member states should condemn the hiring of mercenaries; as well, the UN passed in 1989 the ‘International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries’. This UN convention, however, requires 22 signatory countries in order to come into force; currently just 12 have signed it, reflecting the lack of interest that the international community has in controlling such activities.57 Recently, the London-based Africa Research and Information Bureau began a campaign to ‘urge African leaders to stop recruiting mercenaries’.58 At the highest international levels, the UN General Assembly also condemns the use of mercenaries in conflicts; however, it is also clear that the private security corporations which are being discussed here are slowly being accorded a different status to that of the more ‘traditional’ mercenary that ravaged parts of the world during the 1960s and 1970s. The prime issue here is, however, that of the national governments which continue to hire such groups. While much condemnation can be levelled at the groups concerned themselves, as is currently the case, the majority of the ‘blame’ for the continuation of such activities must lie with the goverments and corporations that hire them. The inclusion in the OAU Charter, for example, of a condemnation of mercenary activities is a positive ideal, but the fact remains that until such a time as governments decide that they do not require the services of such organizations, these groups’ activities will continue – a simply case of supply and demand. The much larger question here is what controls can be placed on

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the organizations, through both international and national law, and with the corporations (such as Diamond Works) which hire them. Larger concerns are beginning to emerge. It has become quite clear that the majority of these private security ventures are being undertaken to support the exploitation of strategic minerals and oil; this has, however, sometimes crossed into the more traditional national military fora: British Petroleum in 1996 hired for US$60 million a battalion of élite troops from the Colombian Army to protect its oil interests in Colombia.59 The forced replacement of Executive Outcomes with MPRI in Angola may point to a dangerous precedent in which rival strategic mineral and oil companies pay private security corporations to control or even take mineral or oil deposits from rival firms; the result of such a scenario could herald the opening of the next potential step in the ‘privatization of warfare’ in which war becomes the domain of the capitalist private enterprise. This final aspect – that of the nature of competition between organizations such as these – is the most concerning. While groups such as MPRI maintain that they are involved solely in the training of national armies and do not have the standing capability for combat operations, it would be extremely easy for them to become so capable. The dangers presented by this ultimate ‘privatization of warfare’ cannot be underestimated. At the same time, should the international community be willing to support the introduction of such private groups into the role traditionally filled by the UN or other international bodies, the process of selecting these groups must be done with international sanction; such private security and military-advisory groups cannot be allowed to become the supplemental wings of national armed forces. This danger has already been witnessed with the use of MPRI by the US State and Defense Departments as ‘surrogate training forces’ in Croatia and Bosnia; the possibility that the South African government may use Executive Outcomes as its tool for African peacekeeping is equally problematic. In this way, national militaries (such as the American, British, French, German, Canadian and other Ministries of Defence) are able to retire their personnel comfortably while still retaining their skills as ‘consultants’. When national state interests become the driving force for the deployment of such forces – in other words, when private military forces become the tool of a state’s policy – the impetus for helping secure stability and peace for a people surrounded by war is lost, and the state’s interests become interventionist in another country, something prohibited under international law as an act of aggression and only condoned under the strictest of UN mandates.60 This may have already become the case: as Ken Silverstein has noted, as ‘the use of private military contractors allows the United State to pursue its geopolitical

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interests without deploying its own army, this being especially useful in cases where training is provided to regimes with ghastly human rights records.’61 Many member states of the UN, not the least of which is the United States, are increasingly unwilling to become involved in conflicts throughout the Third World that defy the traditional perceptions of ‘peacekeeping’: where the risk is too high to the peacekeeper, countries refuse to participate. This has, in the last decade, been increasingly the case for interventions in Africa: since 1992 there have been ten international/ multinational interventions in Africa under the auspices of either the UN or OAU; increasingly, however, these missions have either become bogged down in the conflicts which they are policing, suffer from socalled ‘mission-creep’ (in which the operational necessities on the ground push the peacekeepers outside of their mission-brief), or been terminated by the host government. According to Ramsbotham, military forces are being wound down all over the world and one of the problems that [the military] face is the inability to produce the sort of people that the UN want in the numbers that they want to do the task … more and more they are turning to the private sector to produce the sort of support particularly – not the front line operations but the support – for activities such as convoy protection and protection of camps of refugees. To fill this vaccum, national governments in need of extremely rapid and effective stabilizing forces have been turning to private security firms (see Figure 4.2). This issue points directly to the principle problem that the United Nations is examining today: whether the formation of UN rapid-reaction force able to engage at a moment’s notice in peace and security operations anywhere in the world is feasible. While the formation of such a force remains illusive, it is becoming apparent that, in much the same manner as the UN has been ‘contracting-out’ its operations to regional security organizations such as Figure 4.2 African interventions UN/OAU interventions in Africa (since 1992) Private security operations in Africa (since 1992) UNOSOM I & II (Somalia) UNIMIR/UNAMIR (Rwanda) MINERSO (Western Sahara) ECOMIG (Liberia) UNAVEM II & III (Angola) ONUMOZ (Mozambique) UNOMIL (Liberia) Sierra Leone (current)

Angola (ECO, MPRI, AirScan) Sierra Leona (Gurkha Security, EO) Seychelles, Comoros Islands, Zaire, Rwanda (France) Liberia, Zaire (USA) Congo (Levdan, AirScan?) Uganda (EO, AirScan,others?) Sudan (EO, AirScan, others?) Kenya (EO, others?)

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NATO, the OAS or the OAU, it is now beginning to examine what benefits may lie in similar contracting arrangements with private security corporations. The UN has for years contracted-out the provision of humanitarian resources and relief, transport, infrastructure development and other crucial aspects of its international operations; what is to prevent it from contracting its security-enforcement requirements to private corporations as well, provided that they were done under stringent oversight and accountability? In its promotional material, Executive Outcomes suggests this option: A world wide tendency is currently the privatisation of security/policing services. This is mainly due to the scaling down of Military/Peacekeeping budgets by not only the major powers but also by countries across the globe. It is therefore foreseen that future peacekeeping/refugee protection operations will be conducted more and more by companies such as EO [which] sees itself as a major role player in these developments due to its previous experience and track record in such type of operations.62 Thus, EO and companies like it perceive their ability to provide professional, cost-effective forces to carry out peacekeeping and conflictresolution services as the way ahead; many governments are beginning to agree. The international community may find this option distasteful initially, due to the fact that the forces involved in these private security groups are not interested in maintaining the status quo in unstable regions, but rather move quickly, using military force, to stabilize a region and give its leaders the ability to maintain that stability; as Elizabeth Rubin has stated, this is not a ‘traditional’ peacekeeping role: When an African political crisis does erupt into international attention – as in Zaire and Rwanda this past fall – it is treated by the powers-that-be in the UN Security Council as a purely humanitarian crisis, often with disastrous results. Although the idea of killing to end killing confounds the genteel sensibility, the fact remains that wars need to be won, one way or another.63 The UN Special Rapporteur on mercenary activities, Enrique Ballesteros, has stated that he does not believe private organizations such as EO, MPRI and DSL could ever effectively take over the role of the international community in the provision of peacekeeping, but that the main problem today is that international laws concerning mercenary activities have not ‘caught-up with the changes brought about by this new kind of security company’. This simple interpretation may not suffice in this rapidlychanging world: in many of the countries where the United Nations (and regional organizations) have become involved, there is no central

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governing authority and thus, most often, no law and order. By introducing such private security groups into these environments under the strictest of operational mandates and international sanction, not only would stability and order be reintroduced back into these countries, but the provision of humanitarian assistance, the protection of refugees, and the beginnings of reconstruction and development could be effected in regions of the world that have known only war for generations. Additionally, the training of seriously sub-standard militaries in the developing world may ultimately contribute towards stability in many of these states with the introduction of professionalism and an understanding of civil–military relations, human rights and development. This possibility, though, would have to be tempered with a strict eye to the legitimacy of governments involved and the issues of human rights, democracy and freedom from persecution in these states. And while the standing defence forces of the developed nations continue to evolve in both their structure and mission-brief as the world enters the next millennium, it may be time in the cycle of history for such a ‘new warrior class’ to retake what some would argue is its natural place in the international security order: the pursuit of commercial ventures supported by military force is as old as this closing millennium, but this re-emergence of a class of professional warriors on a global scale reflects a return, based on the perceived requirement for it, of a pure soldiering class in society. The question remains as to whether contemporary international society is accepting of such a ‘dirty’ element within it, especially considering the moves that the developed world has attempted to make away from warfare. Given the current regional instability and chaos, however, this continued ‘privatization of peacekeeping’ may become the best option for a First World unwilling or unable to intervene in the increasing chaos of regional conflict.

Notes 1.

2. 3.

Republic of South Africa, Foreign Military Assistance Bill, no. 54 of 1997 (Pretoria: Ministry of Defence, April 1997); Parliament of the Republic of South Africa National Conventional Arms Control Committee, Joint Ministerial Statement of Regulation of Foreign Military Assistance (30 April 1997); ‘Cabinet approves bill to control foreign military activities’, SAPA 30 April 1997; the bill was tabled in Parliament officially on 11 July 1997 and passed on 11 October 1997: ‘Mercenary control bill published’, SAPA 11 July 1997. Ibid., pp. 200–3. Ibid., pp. 194–5.

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05. 06.

07. 08. 09. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

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The New Warrior Class French intelligence allegedly, according to the New York Times, used the company Geolink as a cover for the provision of these mercenary forces: ‘Frenche Covert Actions in Zaire on behalf of Mobutu’ AFP 2 May 1997; 0UNDHA Integrated Regional Information Network, IRIN Emergency Update No. 74 on the Great Lakes (8 January 1997): www.reliefweb.net; Robert Block, ‘Mobutu calls up the dogs of war’, The Sunday Times, 5 January 1997, p. 18; John Swain, ‘War-hungry Serbs join Mobutu’s army’, The Sunday Times, 9 March 1997, p. 16; ‘Fighting intensifies; militia accuses mercenaries of joining’, SAPA-AP, 30 June 1997. Christopher Goodwin, ‘Mexican drug barons sign up renegades from Green Berets’, The Sunday Times (24 August 1997), p. 14. Enrique Bernales, The Right of Peoples to Self-Determination and its Application to Peoples under Colonial or Alien Domination or Foreign Occupation: Report on the Question of the Use of Mercenaries as a Means of Violating Human Rights and Impeding the Exercise of the Right of Peoples of Self-determination (Geneva: UNCHR, 17 January 1996): s16, sIV; also same report 1994, 1995, 1997. UNDHA-IRIN, op. cit. Bernales, op. cit., sA22. ‘Military assistance bill unconstitutional: SWAT’, SAPA 10 October. Parliament of the Republic of South Africa National Coventional Arms Control Committee, Joint Ministerial Statement on Regulation of Foreign Military Assistance (30 April 1997). Section 198(b) of the South African Constitution states that the ‘resolve to live in peace and harmony precludes any South African citizen from participating in armed conflict, nationally or internationally, except as provided for in the Constitution or national legislation’. Peter Klerks, ‘South African Executive Outcomes or Diamonds are a Grunt’s Best Friend’, Intelligence Newletter, 55 (10 March 1997). In the early-1990s, EO provided training to the SADF Special Forces as well as to the Military Intelligence Division and (allegedly) to Umkhonto weSizwe as part of bridge-training to prepare the ANC guerrilla force for integration with the SADF. There has been speculative allegations that EO was used as the conduit for the establishment of secret arms-dumps throughout Southern Africa and Western Europe by the CCB in the early-1990s: this was allegedly done in order to provide a ready supply of arms for the SADF Special Forces in the event that the political transition in South Africa resulted in a military backlash against the white establishment, as had happened in so many other decolonized African countries. As a French journalist indicated, ‘il n’y a donc vraisemblablement rien de fortuit dans le fait que 1989 est à la fois l’anneé durant laquele M. Barlow rejoint le CCB et celle de la fondation d’Executive Outcomes [there is really nothing fortuitous in the fact that 1989 was both the year that Mr Barlow joined the CCB and that of the founding of Executive Outocmes]’: Laurence Mazure, ‘Lucrative reconversion desmercenaires sud-africans’, Le Monde Dilpomatique (October 1996), p. 22. Klerks, op. cit.; Mazure, op.cit., p. 22. William Reno, ‘African Weak State and Commercial Alliances’, African Affairs, vol. 96 (1997): p. 181. ‘Mercenaries: A Kenyan Connection?’, The Economic Review (24 February 1997): www.africaonline.co.le/AfricaOnline/ereview/079224/mercenaries. html.

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18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

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Ibid., p. 180; Elizabeth Rubin, ‘An army of One’s Own’, Harper’s Magazine, 294, no. 1761 (February 1997), pp. 44, 47; Kevin Whitelaw,’Have gun, will prop up regime’, US News and World Report (20 January 1997), pp. 46; Executive Outcomes Pty Ltd corporate brochures; ‘Welcome to Executive Outcomes’: www.eo.net. Klerks, op. cit.; Mazure, op.cit., p. 22. Klerks, op. cit.: ‘Sierra Leone Titanium Mine and Mercenaries’, Drillbits and Tailings, 21 August 1997: www.moles.org/drillbits/970821. Ibid.; Alan Robinson et al., ‘Mercenaries eye Sierra Leone: Vancouver company helps ousted, government plot countercoup in the land of diamonds’, The Globe and Mail (1 August 1997), p. A1. ‘Mercenaries: A Kenyan Connection?’, op. cit. Angella Johnson, ‘Broker of war and death’, Weekly Mail and Guardian (28 February 1997). Rubin, op. cit., p. 55; Johnson, op. cit. This final operation (for the Indonesians) was first reported on the programme ‘60 Minutes’ (1 June 1997). For a complete description of EO’s corporate structure, see Klerks, ‘Bombing all the way to the bank–Executive Outcomes’ Corporate Structure’, op. cit. Chris Gordon, ‘Mercenaries grab gems’, Weekly Mail and Guardian (9 May 1997). Klerks, op. cit. ‘Mercenaries Leave New Guinea in Turmoil’, Reuters (21 March 1997). Tom Cohen, ‘Mercenaries overcome Africa’, Associate Press (24 March 1997). ‘Verbal clashes over South Africa anit-mercenary law’, Associated Press 13 October 1997: www.nando.net. Executive Outcomes corporate brochures. ‘Africa peace efforts shaping up’, SAPA 16 October 1997. The term ‘foreign military assistance’ is defined in the Bill as ‘military sevices or military-related services, or any attempt, encouragement, incitement or solicitation to render such services, in the form of (a) direct combative participation in armed conflict; (b) military assistance to a party to the armed conflict by means of (i) advice or training; (ii) personnel, financial, logistical, intelligence or operational support; (iii) personnel recruitment; (iv) medical or para-medical services; or (V) procurement of equipment; (c) security services for the protection of individuals involved in armed conflict or their property; (d) any other action that has the result of furthering the military interests of a party to the armed conflict’: RSA, Foreign Military Assistance Bill, op. cit., s1(iii). Parliament of the Republic of South Africa National Conventional Arms Control Committee, Joint Ministerial Statement on Regulation of Foreign Military Assistance (30 April 1997). Ken Silverstein, ‘Privatizing War: How affairs of state are outsourced to corporations beyond public control’, The Nation (28 July– 4 August 1997, p. 1; ‘Retired Generals Sell Expertise Overseas’, AP (23 November 1995). Silverstein, op. cit., p. 3; White House Press Release, ‘Statement by the President – Training and Equipping the Bosnian Federation’, 9 July 1996; Marko Mesic, ‘Croats trained by Pentagon generals’, Serbia Bulletin (May 1996): www.yugoslavia.com; ‘Mark Thompson, ‘Generals for Hire’, Time,

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37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63.

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The New Warrior Class vol. 147, no. 3 (15 January 1997); Peter Slevin, ‘Former US generals helping Bosnians build a new army’, The Seattle Times (18 July 1996). Silverstein, op. cit., p. 4; ‘We Don’t Do Wars’, Background Briefing Transcripts, ABC Radio National (Sydney) 15 June 1997: www.abc.net.au/m/ talks/bbing/bb970615.htm. Interview, Lonfon, 23 July 1997. Klerks, op. cit. Al J. Venter, ‘Ex-US army vets flood to guard Angola oilfields’, Electronic Mail and Guardian (11 October 1997): pubweb.web.co.za/mgnews/97oct/110c-angola_oildfields.html. Ken Silverstrein, op. cit., p. 1. ‘We Don’t Do Wars’, op. cit. Andrew Malone ‘SAS veterans make a killing in Angola’, The Sunday Times (19 October 1997), p. 22. Peter Alexander, ‘South Africa’s veterans recruit army of outlaws’, The Telegraph (6 April 1997). Reno, op. cit., p. 182. Adam Zagorin, ‘Soldiers for Sale’, Time, vol. 149, no. 21 (26 May 1997). Klerks, op. cit.; ‘The Business of BDM’: www.bdm.com/bdm/core.htm: Joyce Endoso, ‘A North-of-the-Border Acquisition War’, Washington Technology, vol. 10, no. 12 (28 September 1995), p. 1. Venter, op. cit. ‘Angola secures allies in north and north-east’, SAPA 16 October 1997. ‘Adam Zagorin, ‘Soldiers for Sale’, Time, vol. 49, no. 21 (26 May 1997). ‘UN caught short by rapidly developing crisis in republic of Congo’, SAPA 16 October 1997. Venter, op. cit. Zagorin, op. cit. Silverstein, op. cit. p. 1. For more on the state of private security forces and militias in the former Soviet Union, see Stephen J. Blank, Towards the Failing State: The Structure of Russian Security Policy. Conflict Studies Research Centre F56 (RMA Sandhurst), November 1996. Article 43, Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949 (Protocol I), 1125 U.N.T.S. 3, entered into force 7 December 1978. Australia to sign UN anti-mercenary convention’, Reuters (14 July 1997). ‘African leaders urged to stop recruiting mercenaries’, SAPA-IPS (19 June 1997). ‘We Don’t Do Wars’, op. cit. ‘Aggression is the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations, as set out in this Definition’: United Nations General Assembly, Definition of Aggression, Resolution 3314 (1974): Article 1. This definition includes the use of ‘agents of a State’ in its understanding. Silverstein, op. cit., p. 4. Executive Outcomes corporate literature. Rubin, op. cit., p. 55.

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5 The Militarization of Ethnicity and the Emergence of Warlordism in Rwanda, 1990 –94 Mel McNulty INTRODUCTION The characteristics of warlordism were demonstrated in the Rwandan Second Republic (1973–94) following the outbreak of civil war in 1990. Rapid, externally-sponsored militarization of an already authoritarian state (built on sectarianism, discrimination and enforced exiling or elimination of its opponents) acted as a catalyst for the hardening of the régime, and the state-sponsored emergence of extremist militias and assassination squads. External military support for the régime, in the form of arms supplies and sales, training and direct military intervention, was perceived as open-ended and unconditional. This perception reinforced extremists to the extent that there was no room for the state to move from a military to a political counterinsurgency strategy; any form of compromise (such as that represented by the 1993 Arusha accords) was deemed a betrayal by the state’s military and the unaccountable militias it had created. Accordingly, assassination of any potential agents of compromise, and the subsequent implementation of a long-planned genocide, were perceived by newly-dominant warlords as appropriate and effective responses to their enemies’ political and military successes. Such a response was intended to eliminate all the state’s opponents of any ethnicity which could constitute a support base for opposition, by applying an extreme counter-insurgency strategy. Genocide, inverting the Maoist principle, was an attempt to remove the water from the fish. The purpose of this chapter will be to trace the hardening of the Rwandan state from its inception and consolidation under a stable authoritarian régime, through civil war and rapid militarization – its emergence as a weapons state – to that state’s recourse to genocide (which led to its collapse and overthrow). 81

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Warlordism in the Rwandan context preceded state collapse. The militias which largely implemented the genocide, though initially fostered by the régime, soon overtook its leader, President Juvénal Habyarimana, and became the principal source of organized violence. Genocide did not occur as result of a weak or collapsed state, but because the state was highlycentralized and tightly controlled. It was perceived as so strong by its extremists that, radicalized by rapid and seemingly unconditional militarization, they believed that any means of which they were capable would be justified by the end: the restoration of the hard state. The Rwandan hard state collapsed when those very means – assassination and genocide – led to its abandonment by the external backers who had transformed it into a weapons state. Warlordism lived on following the régime’s collapse. The genocidal militias, having retreated under foreign protection with a two-millionstrong human shield to the former Zaire, became rulers of refugee ministates from which they sought to undermine the new administration in Rwanda and complete the unfinished business of genocide, while sabotaging much of the post-genocide judicial processes by targeting survivors and witnesses. By late 1996, the growing threat posed by renascent and rearmed warlordism in eastern Zaire provoked a Rwandan invasion of that country to break up their camps and forcibly separate refugees from warlords. These events produced the widely-welcomed overthrow of Africa’s arch-warlord Mobutu, as well as the return of low-intensity civil war to Rwanda. The destabilizing power of warlordism in central Africa – in the form of the Rwandan militias, Angola’s UNITA or Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army – looks likely to continue to threaten those states which joined forces to destroy it in 1997.

ORIGINS OF THE GENOCIDAL STATE An understanding of the hardening of the Rwandan state and its evolution – or regression – from hard state to weapons state to genocidal state – necessitates a rejection of ethnicity as the principal motor or major dynamic of conflict there. Instead, it is essential to view ethnicity in the African Great Lakes region, and the sectarianism of which it is the expression, as a symptom, not the cause of the region’s wars. It is the product of dictatorships for whom ethnic exclusion was often their sole means of holding power. It is not easy to find an account of current events in the region which eschews ethnicity as an interpretative framework. There is little consensus

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on the basic dynamics of Rwandan history, and interpretations of that history have been coloured retrospectively by contemporary events. Dominant in the West, even in the most ‘enlightened’ circles, is the interpretation enthusiastically promoted by the former Rwandan régime and which is reproduced with little question by most of the Western media. This is that the country’s quarrels are centuries-old, ethnically-driven and inevitable. By this reckoning, it was a quirk of a cruel Fate which trapped Hutu and Tutsi within states – Rwanda and its unfortunate ‘twin’ Burundi – where they are predestined to massacre each other. It would be better by far to accept that they can never live together and (as was suggested in all seriousness by commentators during the Zairean war) to create a separate, ethnically-cleansed ‘Hutuland’ and ‘Tutsiland’ in the region, perhaps giving Rwanda to one group and Burundi to the other. By this analysis, the sclerosis of the hard state which lead it to kill a million of its population was not the nadir, a crime which made imperative the régime’s overthrow, but part of an on-going process in an inevitable ethnic cat-and-dog struggle in which blame is universal, where perpetrators of genocide cannot be judged because, as a growing revisionist lobby has it, everybody killed everybody, everybody is guilty, but because not everybody can be tried and imprisoned, everybody must be forgiven. In contrast, several observers favour an anti-colonial, Africanist interpretation in line with the new Rwandan administration and which employs an anti-imperialist discourse redolent of Walter Rodney and Ali Mazrui. For example, government spokesman Colonel Wilson Rutayisire argues that: The multiplicity of influences that led to genocide in Rwanda can only be understood if we trail a long journey into history … The economic frustrations arising out of long years of colonial and post-colonial exploitation created objective conditions upon which the psychological needs and motivations [of] genocide were nurtured by successive governing groups … [I]t is the colonial plunder that reduced Banyarwanda [the people of Rwanda] to the status of sub-human beings susceptible to the ideologies of hate.1 A quasi-official Ugandan line is offered by the late Odoga ori Amaza, who makes the seemingly obvious observation, a truism of any war, that: ‘[T]he Rwandese conflict is a product of history, in particular the history of the Rwandese people during the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods.’2 This perspective argues that Rwanda’s ‘ethnic groups’, commonly perceived – most ‘catastrophically by many within those groups – as mutually

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antagonistic throughout history, are instead ‘three strands of the same rope’; that is, of one common Rwandan nationality (Banyarwanda) determined most obviously by a shared language, Kinyarwanda. By this reckoning, the constantly reiterated ‘ethnic’ division of this nation into Hutu, Tutsi and Twa was not inevitable, but was a deliberate policy of colonialism. Amaza states that: [I]t was Belgian colonialism … from 1919 to 1961 that laid the ground for the Rwandese problem as we know it today … Indirect rule invariably amounts to ‘divide and rule’ under colonialism, with the colonist using a section of the colonised people to do his dirty work such that the rest of the colonised people identify the section thus picked to do the colonist’s work, rather than the colonist himself, as the enemy.3 Most social anthropology of the Great Lakes region supports this analysis.4 What pre-colonial divisions there were in Rwanda were common to most feudal societies. The king (mwami) was drawn from one clan, and this clan distributed favours to a privileged caste, in this case comparatively wealthy cattle-herders. The majority in the richly fertile interlacustrian territories were farmers (cultivators), whose status was that of serfs. However, acquisition of cattle allowed a farmer to become a herder, and benefit from the richer meat-and-milk diet such an occupation allowed. Lowest in the social pecking-order were the ‘pygmies’, landless potters who were treated with the contempt borne by landless people everywhere. The translation of this caste system into opposing ethnic groups – complete with racist anthropology which cast the taller herders as Ethiopians or a ‘lost’ semitic tribe genetically superior to their classically negroid co-nationals – was an integral part of colonial expansion and self-justification. This interpretation argues further that division was imposed upon Rwanda – after Germany’s loss in 1919 of its colonies – by Belgians, themselves steeped in the sectarianism and division in their own country, and seeking to reproduce and by extension justify these divisions in their newly-acquired African territory as the natural order of things. Belgium had neither the will nor the means to settle its African mandate territory of Ruanda-Urundi with Europeans, nor to send its sons into lengthy service in the colonies when the post-war mother country was so labour-deficient. Instead, through the already-established Pères Blancs religious order, it sought to educate a native élite – drawn from the taller, less negroid Tutsi – to manage on its behalf. Gérard Prunier points out the danger of this policy in the context the colonists had created: ‘It was common for European colonists to administer their territories through local intermediaries, creating or solidifying local oligarchies as they did so.

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Only in Rwanda and Burundi, however, was this overlaid with such an explicitly racial ideology.’5 ‘Revolution’ and the First Republic Independence did not free Rwanda from this crippling sectarianism. In fact, it was reinforced by the very nature of the Belgian-inspired – and supervised – ‘social revolution’ of 1959, which saw those Tutsi longfavoured as the colonists’ administrators abandoned by their masters when they displayed evidence of anti-colonial ideas above their station. The idea that the majority – Hutu – had been oppressed not by Belgium but somehow independently by Tutsi genetically predisposed to dominate was embraced enthusiastically by the Belgian-sponsored PARMEHUTU (Parti pour l’emancipation des Hutu), led by Grégoire Kayibanda, who would found the Rwandan First Republic and become its President. The sectarian pogrom that was the 1959–62 ‘social revolution’ – which saw the killing or exiling of over half a million Tutsi – was ably assisted by Belgian military personnel, who armed, trained and commanded the new Rwandan army. More precisely, the consolidation of PARMEHUTU and its seizure of power at the Belgians’ behest and to the detriment – indeed the physical exclusion – of their Tutsi fellow-citizens, was part of an ill-guided strategy in Brussels. The purpose of such a strategy was to forestall a radical, antiEuropean rebellion and maintain Belgian influence on the continent – in Ruanda-Urundi itself, but more importantly in the vast Belgian Congo – by passing power to proxies and clients, as the French were to do in much of West and North-central Africa. Violent expulsions of Tutsi recurred during the 1960s and early 1970s, and the exclusion of those remaining Tutsi from employment, public life, and political, economic or military power, created a quasi-apartheid system of discrimination. The worst lessons learned from the colonist were put into practice; a citizen’s categorization as Hutu, Tutsi or Twa continued, as in colonial days, to be displayed on his or her compulsory identity card. Kakwenzire and Kamukama, themselves of Rwandan exile stock in Uganda, describe how: ‘[T]he Batutsi in Rwanda became underdogs. One had to obtain a Muhutu patron in government in order to gain access to state jobs or economic assets … The client–patron relations that existed [during the colonial and pre-colonial periods] were reproduced, but this time in reverse.’6 The net effect was that inter-ethnic tension became the definer of the country’s problems, and sectarian prejudice and exclusion became key features of the state deemed essential to the state’s survival. Although

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historically fallacious, the ethnic division became real for those who perpetrated or suffered violence because of it. Alex de Waal, co-author (with Rakiya Omaar) of the most comprehensive account of the Rwandan genocide to date, points out that: Specialists on Rwanda protest in vain that Hutu and Tutsi are not separate ethnic groups. But sixty years of colonial and Tutsi rule, and thirtyfive years of Hutu supremacy following the 1959 Revolution, which consigned half the Tutsi population to exile, have fundamentally changed the nature of the relationships between them. Political conflict, punctuated by intercommunal violence, has created distinct and mutually opposed Hutu and Tutsi identities, which, for all the hesitations of social scientists, are identifiably ‘ethnic’.7 He emphasises this point in reference to Tim Allen’s account of the creation of ethinicity on the Sudan–Uganda border: ‘To argue that the tribes thus manufactured are artificial is to miss the point. As Allen points out, it is impossible to interpret recent events without recourse to tribal labels, and they are the labels used by the people themselves. Above all, people kill each other because of them.’8 In light of these factors, the contention here is that ethnic conflict became a reality for Rwandans, both perpetrators and victims, but that ethnicity was not the root cause. As the Rwandan state hardened, the institutionalized sectarianism upon which it was built became its dominant characteristic, and continued to be the most effective means by which a dictatorship could keep the population divided. The Second Republic Fearful of betrayal, Kayibanda surrounded himself with supporters and family members from southern Rwanda, distributing patronage disproportionately to those he felt he could trust. As a result, erstwhile PARMEHUTU supporters from the north and centre of the country grew isolated from the President and distant from the levers of political and economic power he controlled. Crucially, Kayibanda failed to retain control over the army, allowing his Chief-of-Staff Juvénal Habyarimana to build a powerbase for family, friends and allies drawn from his home region in Gisenyi, north-western Rwanda. Claiming the President was unable to protect the country against attacks from without by inyenzi (‘cockroaches’) – small bands of exiles seeking his overthrow – or to guarantee peace and stability in the climate of sectarian revenge within, Habyarimana seized power in a military coup on 5 July 1973.

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The political tensions which led to the overthrow of Grégoire Kayibanda further weaken the argument that conflict in Rwanda is and always has been ethnically-driven. Kakwenzire and Kamukama point out that: The political stance shifted from an ‘ethnic’ to a regional basis of distribution [of patronage] and oppression. The result of this was the 1973 coup in which the northern and central Hutu conspired to topple the Kayibanda establishment. The coup … helps to demystify the longstanding perception of the Rwanda crisis as a result of ‘age-old hatred of the Hutu for the Tutsi’, since the 1973 coup exhibited a house divided against itself.9 Similarly, Amaza points out that Tutsi élites, those who had prospered as the colonist’s proxies, were not the only victims of the PARMEHUTU revolution: ‘The annihilation policy of the Kayibanda régime against the Tutsi political élites and the opposition political parties … meant that the single-party dictatorship had to devour its own insiders – the Hutu,.10 The exiles problem did not go away. Habyarimana and the party he founded insisted that ‘the glass was full’: densely populated, high birthrate Rwanda, with a population of 8 million in 64 200 square kilometres, was too overcrowded to allow the exiles to return. The issues of underused and unexploited land (including large areas of undrained swamp), and primitive agricultural practices, went unaddressed. Habyarimana recreated a one-party state, ensuring political and military, and by extension economic, power was concentrated in his own hands and those of a close inner circle largely composed of family members: the akazu (‘the little house’). His Mouvement Révolutionnaire National pour le Développement (MRND) party published its manifesto on 5 July 1975, the second anniversary of the coup. Amidst pious pledges to work for its three stated aims of ‘Unity, Peace and Development’, the document contains several revelatory passages which hint at the régime’s true nature: The Movement recognises, as fundamental components of Rwandan society, the three ethnic groups Twa, Hutu and Tutsi. It wishes that ethnic differences will not be a cause of the disintegration of the Rwandan people, but a source of complementarity and enrichment in equal citizenship. National unity and harmonious social relations will be pursued without respite and elements causing social disintegration will be combated systematically. Tranquility and peace will be the object of a constant preoccupation to protect citizens against those seeking to disturb social order.11

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The apartheid agenda is clear for the concept of ‘equal citizenship’ would be based on arbitrary quotas. The manifesto also explains the Movement’s universalism, which would allow it to cast itself after 199012 as the National Revolutionary Movement for Development and Democracy: ‘Every Rwandan is a full member of the MRND. Every Rwandan who participates actively in the dissemination of the ideas and exhortations (mots d’ordre) of the Movement, and gives example through the carrying out of its decisions, is considered an activist (militant).’13 Hence the party must be considered democratic, it would be argued, as it represented the patriotic (that is, Hutu) majority. Over 15 years, the tranquillity, indeed introspection of this ‘little Switzerland of Africa’ concealed a gradual hardening of its arteries as it failed repeatedly to address the basic injustice upon which it was built: the forcible exclusion of up to 600 000 citizens on the basis of sectarian discrimination. On 27 July 1987, the Central Committee of the MRND announced, despite growing international pressure, that it would not allow the immigration of large numbers of Rwandan refugees. Habyarimana thereby set the scene for a confrontation with the emerging, militant exiles’ movement, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the principal defining aim of which was the ‘right to return’ of the Rwandan diaspora. This was unsurprising given that the régime’s origins, survival and indeed its very reason for being were inextricably linked to the exclusion of its opponents, and of their natural support base: those Rwandans exiled by the régime, and those within the state excluded from full statehood, considered at best as second-class citizens and at worst as an inherently disloyal Fifth Column. Other pressures on the Habyarimana régime included a series of bad harvests, a drop in the international price of coffee (the country’s principal export), and an inability to address crucial issues of chronic poverty, shortages and land misuse. On 7 September 1990, Pope John Paul II visited fervently-Catholic Rwanda – the Pères Blancs had done their work well – and although the Pontiff made no call for greater democracy or observance of human rights by his hosts, Habyarimana felt the unaccustomed glare of international attention merited a general amnesty for prisoners, excepting those charged with subversion or endangering state security. Such an act of magnanimity freed up space in the jails for a new influx of political detainees later the same year. The Rwandan Patriotic Front In 1986 Rwandan refugees were in the vanguard of the successful campaign by Uganda’s National Resistance Movement (NRM) to overthrow

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President Milton Obote and put an end to a quarter-century of dictatorships which had caused the deaths of over half a million Ugandans. The Rwandan exiles in Uganda were driven to support the rebellion in large numbers – eventually providing 3000 of the 14 000 troops of the National Resistance Army (NRA) – by Obote’s mistaken efforts in 1982 to force potentially disloyal Rwandans back into Habyarimana’s hostile Rwanda, inadvertently creating the phenomenon he was trying to prempt. A disproportionate number of the NRA’s senior commanders were drawn from these Rwandans, notably Chief-of-Staff Fred Rwigyema, and Intelligence Chief Paul Kagame. Rwigyema’s importance and his decisive role in the war to overthrow Milton Obote is acknowledged by NRM leader Yoweri Kaguta Museveni – now Ugandan President – in his autobiography.14 Indeed Museveni, of Ankole (southern Ugandan) origin, is classed ethnically as Bahima and was dismissed by some of his sectarian opponents as nearly Rwandan himself. Rwigyema and Kagame represented a generation of exiles radicalized by combat. They were militarily experienced and aware of growing resentment of the prominence of Rwandans in the new Uganda’s army and administration. They thus decided to form the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in Kampala in December 1987. The RPF recruited initially from Rwandan exiles in Uganda but also gained support from the significant Rwandan diaspora in Tanzania, Burundi, and in Europe and North America. As people of no property, the Rwandan exiles sought advancement through education and a number of prosperous professionals were prepared to bankroll the new movement. To what extent was the RPF a necessary and appropriate response to the Rwandan state? In an early assessment of the movement, Prunier suggests that the rebels sought to provoke the Habyarimana régime before it could make concessions, albeit reluctantly and at the insistence of its foreign backers.15 This would suggest that the regimé’s hardening, its emergence as a weapons state and latterly genocidal state, was the result of provocation. By this reckoning, reform was inevitable and already underway. The RPF offensive of 1990 was a hasty and ill-prepared act, precipitated by the fear that the régime’s imminent reforms would preempt the movement’s attack and undermine its support base in the region and internationally. There was abundant opportunity after the outbreak of war for the state to ‘soften’ and to concede at least in part the principal demand of its opponents. This was the view of the post-genocide Rwandan administration and justified the RPF’s attack on Rwanda in 1990 as inevitable given the Habyarimana régime’s failure to reform. It also justifies the contention that the state was already hard and could only be changed or made to

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compromise through the use of force. When it began finally to relent, under overwhelming international pressure, it was a case of too little, too late. The weapons state, through the very process of arming, had created a warlord culture which could broach no compromise. Having considered the origins of Rwanda as a state based on sectarianism, exclusion and dictatorship, the questions remain of why, how and with whose assistance did the hard state become a weapons state, and to what effect (viz., genocide).

RWANDA AS A COUNTER-INSURGENT WEAPONS STATE (1990–94) What happened to the Rwandan state between 1990 and 1994? Belgian anthropologist Luc de Heusch entitled a documentary chronicling the country’s history up to its genocidal nadir ‘A Republic Gone Mad’ (Une République Devenue Folle). But are temporary national insanity or mass hysteria sufficient to explain the negative evolution of the Rwandan second republic? This was a state which, from a sectarian, one-party, quasiapartheid but largely stable régime, became a systematic murder machine which in just three months killed a million of its own citizens. Prunier argues, in contradiction to the oxymoronic concept of ‘genocidal anarchy’,16 that: ‘The genocide happened not because the state was weak, but on the contrary because it was so totalitarian and strong that it had the capacity to make its subjects obey absolutely any order, including one of mass slaughter.’17 The perspective allowed by even the few years since the genocide allows some of the key moments in this evolution to emerge from the fog of accusation and counter-accusation which so distorted coverage of the Rwandan conflict and has been reproduced in some academic literature. Tom Young’s introduction to his recent chapter on Mozambique may be applied with equal validity to an overview of events in Rwanda since 1990: Much has been written … but much remains obscure. Worse, much has been deliberately obscured, not only by governments and political movements … but also by academics, commentators and experts of various stripes …This has meant that certain important questions have effectively been smothered either by ignoring them or by recycling hackneyed cliches in response to them.18 Thus does coverage of and comment on events in Rwanda and its region resort with wearying regularity to ethnic and quasi-racist terminology and

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frames of reference to describe conflict there. It may be useful therefore to review events briefly in a sequence about which there may be broad agreement. On 1 October 1990, the RPF launched its long-anticipated offensive against the Habyarimana régime, crossing into Rwanda from bases in Uganda. If the war had been left to run its course, the RPF would have triumphed quickly, given their numerical and material advantage. The Rwandan government army (Forces Armées Rwandaises – FAR) numbered 5200 in 1990 against the RPF’s estimated 7000, and were by all accounts poorly trained and short of munitions. The original, core RPF (termed ‘the Ugandans’), on the other hand, were well-trained, well-armed (both with and without President Museveni’s knowledge and approval), and highly motivated, with a hunger for land, nationality and reparations typical of dispossessed peoples. The provenance of these well-armed troops reinforced Rwandan government claims of a ‘Ugandan invasion’. The régime reacted by detaining 8000 Tutsis, selected by ethnic head-count according to the ethinicity displayed on their identity card. This was followed by the first massacre of Tutsis at Kibirira. The hard state thereby ethnicized the war immediately – ethnicity was militarized – and its message to a frightened population was unambiguous: the conflict was not a result of the régime’s failure to reform and include all Rwanda’s ethnic groups; it was instead a foreignbacked invasion which would be supported by those the régime had excluded from power. These latter (all Tutsis and the régime’s critics of any ethnic group), again constituted an inherently disloyal Fifth Column; hence loyalty to the State could most ably be demonstrated by participation in the elimination of the disloyal. The logic and dynamic of the subsequent genocide were already apparent. Remarkably, the Rwandan state and the inherent conflict which led to war in 1990 functioned entirely outside of the Cold War framework which had determined the context and distorted the nature of wars elsewhere on the continent. Rwanda was of strategic importance to no-one during or after the Cold War except, for its own unique reasons, for France. Faced with the application of the ‘Ugandan model’ of insurgency by his own exiled co-nationals, Habyarimana swiftly contacted his principal foreign backers, President Mitterrand and his son Jean-Christophe (then head of the advisory ‘Africa Unit’ attached to the French presidency), and claimed Rwanda had been attacked by an expansionist Museveni. This appeal struck the right chord in Paris, where defence of France’s African sphere of influence was (until recently) a key pillar of foreign policy; and it produced the desired effect, a military intervention, and rapid militarization.

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French troops were deployed in Kigali, initially to evacuate French citizens, but remained for three years. During this time, French personnel were directly responsible, through arming and training, for the exponential growth of the FAR, which swelled from 5200 strong in 1990, to 35 000 in 1993. Eventually, a Frenchman, Lt-Col. Chollet, was made special military advisor to the President and given overall command of operations.19 The extraordinary development of the FAR, comparable in scale, expense and inefficiency to the eventually fruitless American backing of the South Vietnamese Army, has been extensively documented. A major UN-commissioned report on the international response to the Rwandan war concluded that: ‘The influx of weapons from foreign sources to the Rwandese government as well as to the RPF contributed significantly to the civil war … as well as to the massacres in 1994.’20 These were not the only means of rapid militarization used by Rwanda and its supporters. South Africa (pre-Mandela), the only major arms manufacturers on the continent, was well-placed to sell material to Habyarimana. Weapons were also supplied by France and some of Habyarimana’s other European supporters through third parties (notably Egypt), and through compliant regional clients.21 Mobutu’s Zaire was key in this respect. At France’s request, the late Marshal-President’s Presidential Guard had been in the frontline in repelling the first RPF offensive; and Zaire remained an indispensable supply route for weapons up to, including and subsequent to the Rwandan weapons state’s recourse to genocide. Indeed, the significance of Mobutu’s Zaire as a source of regional instability comparable to that of apartheid South Africa, explains the subsequent imperative for post-genocide Rwanda and other threatened states to cooperate in its destruction in 1997.22 Writing in the Wall Street Journal in November 1994, Alan Zarembo offered a useful if rare alternative to prevailing interpretations of the Rwandan conflict: ‘Colonial régimes taught Africans bad lessons in government. First, people came to believe that political power is the only source of wealth. The state dictates who prospers. Second, political entrepreneurs learned that manipulating ethnic identity is an effective way to stay in control.’23 The contention here is that swift militarization reinforced a chronically hard state, creating a weapons state in which radical, sectarian, militant extremism could flourish. Initially, the Rwandan case was not unique. Most analysts would agree with René Wadlow that the recurring causes of intrastate conflict on the African continent may be summarized as one or a combination of a struggle for political power, a struggle over basic resources, or a struggle for political participation in a multi-ethnic state. However, when the catalyst

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of militarization is added to this powder-keg, the situation becomes correspondingly explosive, and locked into a vicious circle. As Wadlow explains: ‘Militarisation is part of a cycle which leads to the impoverishment of the state, to aggravated debt concerns, to an ever narrower political base requiring ever more violence to stay in power.’24 The Rwandan weapons state’s response to the problems of exclusion and reintegration it had itself created was unrelentingly military. Faced with a ceasefire and a negotiated settlement – under the terms of the externally-brokered Arusha accords – the régime sought instead, through propaganda, ethnicization and preparations for genocide, to restore the status quo ante. There was no room for the political approach to counter-insurgency, as this would imply a political solution. The now militarized Rwandan hard state, and those it used to exert its power, had become victims of the zero-sum situation they had created; their only course, it was felt, was outright ‘victory’ through destruction of all opposition.

WARLORDS ECLIPSE THE WEAPONS STATE Amaza, who as a senior Ugandan military man was an RPF supporter in the most literal sense, argues unequivocally that: notwithstanding the massacreas … beginning April 1994, and notwithstanding the precarious security environment that was created during and after the war, not only was the war necessary, but it actually opened up possibilities for the democratic reordering of the Rwandese polity in a way few other approaches could have done … [I]t is our conviction that had the extremists in Rwanda not blocked the implementation of the Arusha Peace Accords … by the time Habyarimana’s plane was shot down (by the very forces he had created to hold the Rwandese people in subjugation), the RPF–RPA had created enough political space to bring about democratic transformations under conditions of peace.25 It not surprising that many voices within Rwanda did not share this analysis. Demands for ‘democratization’ from Western backers did not go down well with many of Habyarimana’s supporters including, it is suggested, those making positive-sounding announcements of reforms. Even the tentative move to multipartyism in 1991 was perceived as a sell-out. The sectarian hard core, adopting the ethnic label ‘Hutu Power’, used their inflammatory press, the airwaves and public meetings to demonise the RPF and the internal opposition, and incite violence. Léon Mugesera,

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MRND vice-president in Habyarimana’s home region of Gisenyi, told party militants in November 1992: The opposition parties have plotted with the enemy … They have plotted to undermine our armed forces … The law is quite clear on this point: ‘Any person who is guilty of acts aiming at sapping the morale of the armed forces will be condemned to death’. What are we waiting for? … The fatal mistake we made in 1959 was to let them [the Tutsi] get out … They belong in Ethiopia and we are going to find them a shortcut to get there by throwing them into the Nyabarongo river. I must insist on this point. We have to act. Wipe them all out!26 The role of the Rwandan media – as propaganda organs which gave voice to and mirrored the hardening of the state and its capitulation to its extremes – was key in reinforcing sectarianism and promoting a sense of crisis and siege. This contributed to the sabotaging of the Arusha peace process and damned compromise as surrender. This role has already been examined and documented in two excellent accounts.27 Suffice it to note here that a common theme invoked by all anti-RPF voices, locally and internationally, was that the movement was anti-democratic, driven by a thirst for revenge and, by implication, more likely to perpetrate acts of genocide than the state. These arguments were given credence in Rwandan ears by their repetition in the foreign press, creating a vicious circle of black propaganda. The very ethnic labelling of the RPF as ‘Tutsi’ was at source a disingenous attempt to drive a wedge between the movement and its natural allies, the internal Rwandan opposition. Statements carried uncritically in the press which labelled the RPF ‘Khmers noirs’ further muddied the waters as to the principal source of organized anti-civilian violence. Extremism was organized into a political part – the Mouvement Républicain Démocratique – the inoffensive title of little relevance to its role as a pressure group against concession by the régime, and as a political platform for the organization of paramilitary militias (milices). These were to be the footsoldiers of the genocide, organized countrywide and recruited primarily among unemployed, disaffected youth, cultivating in the process an image of machismo, violence and bigotry. Although operating as paramilitaries outside of official state control, the militias were coordinated and trained by senior military figures drawn largely from the Presidential Guard (Garde présidentielle, GP). The principal and most infamous of the militias are the Interahamwe. This group first came to public attention in March 1992 when they were held responsible for a massacre at Bugesera. The name, taken from

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a popular pro-independence song of the 1950s, means ‘Those who stand together’ or ‘Those with a common goal’.28 An article in the Rwandan press shortly after the Bugesera massacre offered the following background: ‘The Interahamwe are well-trained military killers. It has been said in many quarters that the MRND government is training interahamwe in commando tactics such as the use of knives, machetes, rope trapping and binding of victims and silent guns so as to kill people’. 29 African Rights’ account offers further detail of the origins and consolidation of these Rwandan Tonton Macoutes: ‘The “professional interahamwe” – those who received training and uniforms – were divided into various sections. These included the AbaZulu, Inyange and Inkerakubanguka. The training was carried out by members of the Presidential Guard based at Kanombe barracks in Kigali, who had in turn been trained by the French. In early 1994 their numbers were estimated at about 1700.’30 Overall, the militias were estimated to number 50 000, approximately the strength of the combined regular armed forces (FAR, Gendarmerie and GP). They were armed with some AK-47s and a large number of grenades, but the principal weapons used were basic agricultural implements: machetes, known as panga in Kiswahili.31 As the war seemed lost, the militias’ discipline collapsed, and they broke up into looting gangs. But during the key stages of the genocide they were coordinated by the state through its tightly-organized local-government hierarchy. Survivors have emphasised the key role of préfets, bourgmestres and local councillors, who received the orders from Kigali. These groups mobilized the local Gendarmerie and Interahamwe, ordered the peasants to join in the man-hunts and called for FAR support if the victims put up too much resistance.32 It is important in passing to debunk a common misapprehension about the Rwandan conflict: namely that the genocide of April to June 1994 was in some way spontaneous. Its planning and, in early 1994, its imminence, were clearly signalled in advance, by both sides in the war, and by international observers.33 As early as August 1992 when, under international pressure, Habyarimana and his government agreed to a ceasefire with the RPF and consented to externally-brokered negotiations, the dynamic of the subsequent genocide was already apparent. The ceasefire failed to prevent massacres of Tutsis by the Réseau Zéro (‘Zero Network’) death squads. Such ‘low-intensity’ massacres, and assassinations in Kigali, were by now commonplace. Recruited from the militias, Réseau Zéro was the state assassination squad which, through a campaign of assassinations and disappearances and the creation of an atmosphere of random terror, sought with some success to make the nascent

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democratization of Rwandan politics a process confined to the texts of treaties. As early as 1993 the International Human Rights Federation (FIDH) uncovered and publicized details of its operations. A leading member of Réseau Zéro, Janvier Afrika, testified that French military personnel attached to their embassy’s military cooperation mission were aware of the squad’s activities, and were stationed at a military base from which the squad operated. This was confirmed by the French human rights campaigner Jean Carbonare, who attested to having visited Bigogwe camp in north-western Rwanda, where ‘… civilians were brought by the truckload. They were tortured and killed.’34 The same year an International Commission of Investigation visited Rwanda in early 1993 and reported ‘genocidal practices in Rwanda’ and ascribed responsibility to the Rwandan authorities at the highest level in massacres. It also corroborated the testimony that French instructors were based at Bigogwe.35 New massacres followed the Commission’s departure in early 1993, accompanied by a renewed RPF offensive. A lightning assault by the RPF likely to reach Kigali was halted only with the support of French troops. France subsequently reinforced its military deployment, and its military support for the régime continued unchecked. Prunier, an occasional advisor to the French defence ministry, notes that: Paris found itself backing an ailing dictatorship in a tiny distant country producing only bananas and a declining coffee crop without even asking for political reform as a price for its support. This blind commitment was to have catastrophic consequences because, as the situation radicalised, the Rwandese leadership kept believing that no matter what it did, French support would always be forthcoming. And it had no valid reason for believing otherwise.36 Documents recovered in Rwanda in 1994 by the Belgian journalist Colette Braeckman confirm a visit by the Rwandan Armed Forces military attaché to Paris in June of that year, two months after the start of the genocide and a month after the imposition of the UN arms embargo (opposed by France, a permanent member of the Security Council, and by the then Rwandan government). In a report and covering letter dated 16 May 1994. Lt-Col. Ephrem Rwabalinda details his visit to the military section of the Cooperation Ministry in Paris, headed by General Jean-Pierre Huchon. Rwabalinda was received for five days at the Ministry, 9–13 May, and secured promises for continued shipments of existing orders for military equipment, as well as the establishment of a top-quality encrypted communications system to allow direct, instant and secure communications between the French and Rwandan armies.

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The former deputy commander of UNAMIR in Kigali, the Belgian colonel Luc Marchal, told the BBC’s Panorama programme (20 August 1995) that one of the French planes used on 8 April 1994 to evacuate French and other civilians after the outbreak of genocide carried weapons for the FAR. Subsequently, France’s consul in Goma (capital of north Kivu province in the east of the former Zaire) confirmed a Human Rights Watch report that during May and June 1994 (that is, after the imposition of the 17 May arms embargo), five cargoes of weapons arrived at Goma airport, containing artillery, machine guns, assault rifles and munitions supplied by the French government. Mr Urbano explained that these deliveries were in fulfilment of contracts negotiated with the Rwandan government before the imposition of the arms embargo. HRW notes that Mr Urbano mentioned ‘several other arms shipments emanating from sources other than the French government’, stating that they could have come private French arms suppliers. In contrast to Consul Urbano’s explanation, the then Cooperation Minister, Bernard Debré stated that the arms shipments were destined for the African troops who participated in Opération Turquoise. [Julia Ficatier, ‘Paris dément toute livraison d’armes au Rwanda’, La Croix, 31 May 1995] HRW also reports that throughout Opération Turquoise (June to August 1994), the FAR continued to receive weapons within France’s ‘Safe Humanitarian Zone’ in south-western Rwanda, via Goma airport. Zairean soldiers deployed in Goma helped transfer these weapons across the border. The French government reaction to Human Rights Watch Arms Project report (vol. 6, issue 10 of January 1994) is noteworthy: This report contains incorrect information regarding the attitude of France. The French government did, in fact, strictly respect the arms embargo regarding Rwanda which was decided by the Security Council on 17 May 1994. Nor were any arms delivered to Rwandese refugees outside their country. The French government thus categorically denies the allegations on this matter contained in the report, which are completely unfounded.37 A new ceasefire was agreed in March 1993, and new negotiations began at Arusha. UN Security Council resolution 812 envisaged the interposition of an international peacekeeping force (UNAMIR I). The RPF demanded the withdrawal of all foreign (that is, French) troops, and official French troop numbers were reduced from that summer. On 4 August 1993, the signing of the Arusha accords seemed to herald the end of the Rwandan crisis. Most reassuring for Tutsis and opposition supporters was the agreement that a battalion of 200 RPF troops would be stationed in Kigali; the

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other terms of the accords were: (a) commitment to uphold human rights and rule of law; and (b) an agreement on power sharing, which would bring the civilian opposition into government, with all government institutions – presidency, cabinet, national assembly, judiciary, civil service and security forces – to be reformed. Many powers were removed from the presidency, and the post of prime minister awarded, for a transitional period, to moderate opposition leader Faustin Twagiramungu. This, by any criteria, was a good deal for the RPF, but also seemed to be the only way the régime could, on the Mobutu model, be seen to be democratizing while ensuring its hold on the key levers of power. However, the hard weapons state was already too sclerotic to compromise; it was not long before Habyarimana dismissed the treaty he had signed at Arusha as ‘a useless scrap of paper.’ Christopher Clapham has identified the inherent flaw in the Arusha process; it was based on a Western-imposed model of peace-making, an ‘essentially mechanistic approach … which readily overlooked the need for any successful settlement to rest on a basic political formula which enjoyed the active support of the key parties which were needed to implement it, and which could where necessary be imposed on recalcitrants who might be tempted to disrupt it’.38 In April 1994, Habyarimana, attending a regional summit in Dar-esSalaam, seemed prepared under enormous international pressure to concede power-sharing with the RPF. Returning to Kigali on the night of 6 April in his personal jet (a gift from Fançois Mitterrand), Habyarimana was killed along with passengers including his Burundian counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamira, and three French crew, when the plane was shot down as it came in to land. Although shrouded in Kennedyesque conspiracy theories, most commentators now agree that Habyarimana was killed most probably by members of his own Presidential Guard, fearful of the betrayal which compromise represented for Hutu power, and backed by its extremist exponents within the presidential inner circle (the akazu) including, some argue, Habyarimana’s wife Agathe. Within an hour, Interahamwe had erected roadblocks in Kigali; within a day, most major opposition politicians had been killed – including the Prime Minister designate Agathe Uwilingiyimana, and ten Belgian paratroops of UNAMIR charged with protecting her. The machinery of the long-planned genocide moved smoothly into gear. Acknowledging their own subjectivity in the immediate post-genocide period – having lost family members – Kakwenzire and Kamukama (of Makerere University, Kampala) are unequivocal in their explanation of Rwanda’s deterioration, from hard state to weapons state to genocidal

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state: ‘At independence, the state did not address the question of proper management of ethinicity. Instead, the ethnic factor was politicised and militarised … The state … sold the people out to a sectarian ideology … The Kayibanda and later Habyarimana régimes politicised it, and [fostered] extremism …’ But after the outbreak of war in 1990, ‘Habyarimana … and his close associates … , backed by French military might, in particular President Mitterrand’s support and advice, were responsible for the rise and consolidation of extremism and genocide in Rwanda.’39 The perspective of four years later, and the luxury of objectivity which the European commentator may enjoy, do not diminish the validity of these conclusions.

CONCLUSION There has as yet been no refutation of the damning reports in the postgenocide period 1994–96 which pointed to external arming and other military support for the Habyarimana régime as a major contributory factor to the genocide. The outbreak of war in 1990 added a final catalyst to a preexisting extremism, which was then harnessed by the state and used as a means of prosecuting the war. The consolidation of extremist forces, bolstered by the rapid militarization of state and society, precluded a political or reformist reaction to insurgency. A state is never so vulnerable as when it starts to reform; and by the time Habyarimana signed the Arusha accords – which were to prove his death warrant – militarization was too far advanced and the state was too hard for reform to be possible. Habyarimana became a victim of his own propaganda; once he was seen to compromise, to bow under irresistible foreign pressure, he was eliminated by his own deliberately-cultivated hard-line inner circle and troops. Rich and Stubbs have identified this phenomenon in the counter-insurgent state: ‘[I]n many military-dominated régimes factional differences may emerge within the officer corps between hard-liners opposed to any concessions and reformers who urge that victory cannot be obtained by military means alone.’40 Habyarimana was at best a reluctant reformer. He had believed, until shortly before his death, that he could have weapons without reform; and had been sustained in this belief by his French military advisors. Externally-sponsored militarization of Rwanda was a key factor, some would argue the key factor in the intransigence of that state’s rulers. The failure to make continued support, especially military support, conditional on human rights or anti-sectarian criteria scuppered the Arusha peace process. The maintenance of French support for the régime, despite

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Habyarimana’s subsequent dismissal of the Arusha accord, convinced the régime’s extremists that such support would always be forthcoming. Christopher Clapham describes this radicalization of extremist régimes through external backing in his recent analysis of African international relations: [A]n apparently inexhaustible supply of arms and aid from an allpowerful external patron encouraged rulers to suppose that their own hegemonic ambitions were ultimately unstoppable, and that they could therefore proceed with the establishment of a monopoly state which need take no account of internal opposition or the indigenous characteristics of the societies which they governed … Ultimately, it was not the imported armaments which conferred power on the government, but the indigenous people who had to use them. When they failed, it failed.41 Habyarimana’s principal legacy, however, was the creation of the militias, warlords who thrived in the climate of state-sponsored terror, and prosecuted genocide with efficiency and zeal. Rapid militarization – the creation of a weapons state – made a hard state even harder, to the extent that its leader was eclipsed – and assassinated – by the Frankenstein of statesponsored warlordism. Warlordism’s tactics were assassination and genocide; but once these very tactics led to the removal of the foreign props upon which the weapons state depended, its defeat was swift. There are many lessons to be drawn from the failure of this military response by a counter-insurgent state. Indeed, a weapons state – no matter how well-armed – becomes effectively untenable if its power is based exclusively on sectarianism, exclusion and nepotism. This has many implications, direct and indirect, for similar states on the continent. As current events in Algeria suggest, support for a hard state and a military régime, even if the régime is perceived as the lesser evil, creates a climate of impunity in which ‘death by government’ becomes an integral part of state strategy.

Notes 1. 2.

Colonel W. Rutayisire, ‘Genocide in Rwanda: An Overview of the Causes, its Systematic Conception, Planning and Execution’, unpublished paper, Kigali November 1995. Ondoga ori Amaza (former Director of Publications for the Ugandan army – NRA), ‘Rwanda and Uganda: Post-War Prospects for Regional Peace and Security’, unpublished paper presented in Harare, 1995, p. 6.

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13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

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Ibid. See notably C. Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda (1860–1960) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). G. Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (London: Hurst, 1995), p. 39. J. Kakwenzire and D. Kamukama, ‘The Development and Consolidation of Extremist Forces in Rwanda’, (Kampala, 1996), p. 8. Alex de Waal, ‘the Genocidal State’, The Times Literary Supplement, 1 July 1994. Ibid. Kakwenzire and Kamukama op. cit., p. 14. Amaza op. cit., p. 10. Mouvement Révolutionairre Nationale pour le Développement (MRND), Manifeste et Statut (Kigali July 1975). 1990 was the year of ‘Paristroika’ in French African policy. President Mitterrand’s declaration, at the Franco-African summit at La Baule, linked development and other aid to progress towards democratization: ‘France will link its entire contribution effort to efforts made to move in the direction of greater freedom’. MRND, Manifeste (1975). ‘By the beginning of 1985 … I felt we now had enough guns to open that longawaited second front. Therefore I gave orders that we should open a new front line in the Rwenzori Mountains of western Uganda, and I detailed Fred Rwigyema, commander of the 11th Battalion, to lead the forces to the west … Rwigyema left with his group on 30 March. It was a very long journey requiring much heroic perseverance … We did not lose any people along the route, however, and that was in itself quite an achievement.’ Y.K. Museveni, Sowing the Mustard Seed (London/Kampala: Macmillan, 1997), p. 164. G. Prunier, ‘Eléments pour une histoire du front patriotique rwandais’, Politique Africaine no. 51, Paris: Karthala, October 1993, pp. 123–32. ‘Genocidal anarchy’ has become a formula almost as common as ‘heart of darkness’ in Western coverage and comment on Arican wars. See for example the leader in Financial Times, 26 July 1996. Prunier (1995), op. cit. p. 354. Tom Young, ‘Explaining the War in Mazambique’, in Paul B. Rich and Richard Stubbs (eds), The Counter-Insurgent State (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 120– 47. The French intervention forces also maintained a visible pesence in Kigali – manning checkpoints and carrying out joint patrols with the FAR. They played a less visible role at the front – commanding artillery bombardments and on at least one occasion conducting a bombardment. See M. McNulty, ‘France’s Rwanda Debacle’, War Studies Journal, Spring 1996. Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance to Rwanda, March 1996, vol. 1, 67. Data from Human Rights Watch Arms Project, Arming Rwanda: The Arms Trade and Human Rights Abuses in the Rwandan War (New York, January 1994). See Human Rights Watch Arms Project, Rwanda/Zaire: Rearming with Impunity: International Support for the Perpetrators of the Rwandan Genocide (New York: May 1995).

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28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

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The Emergence of Warlordism in Rwanda A. Zarembo, ‘Rwanda: What Apartheid Wrought’, Wall Street Journal, 12 November 1994. R. Wadlow, ‘African States: Security and Conflict Resolution’, GeneveAfrique, vol. 19, no. 2 (1991), p. 96. Amaza, op. cit., p. 2. Quoted in Prunier, op. cit., p. 2. Jean-Pierre Chretien (ed.), Rwanda: Les Medias du genocide (Paris: Karthala, 1995). See also Linda Kirschke, Article 19, Broadcasting Genocide: Censorship, Propaganda and State-Sponsored Violence in Rwanda 1990– 1994 (London: Article 19, October 1996). African Rights, 1995, pp. 54. Quoted in ibid., p. 55. Ibid. Prunier, op. cit., p. 243. Ibid., pp. 213–80, and African Rights. United Nations Assistance Mission to Rwanda (UNAMIR) commander General Romeo Dallaire’s attempts to forwarn the international communioty of the preparations for the genocide in early 1994 provied futile. See Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance to Rwanda, Vol. IV, 1996. See also Victoria Brittain, ‘Chroncile of a genocide foretold’, The Guardian, 13 March 1996. Quoted in ‘Coalition pour ramener a la raison democratique la politique africaine de la France’, ‘ler Dossier noir: Rwanda depuis le 7 avril 1994, la France choisit le camp du genocide’ (Paris, 1995). Ibid. Prunier, op. cit., p. 107. Quoted in JEEAR, vol. 1, p. 69. C. Clapham, ‘Rwanda: The Perils of Peacemaking’, paper presented to Biannual Conference of the African Studies Association, University of Bristol, 9–11 September 1996. Kakwenzire and Kamukama, op. cit., p. 18. Rich and Stubbs, op. cit., p. 9. C. Clapham, Africa and the International System: The Politics of State Survival (Cambridge, 1996), p. 156.

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6 The Collapse of Albania and a Different Type of Warlord: Criminal Gangs Paolo Tripodi

In a report from the Adriatic, Italian television recently showed a ship of the Albanian navy crammed with refugees to the point of sinking. Hundreds of men, women and children aboard that floating wreck sailed towards Italy, in front of them a mirage of a better life, behind them a country on the brink of civil war. It is the second time in less than a decade that Albania has collapsed. The first time, in 1990 –91, came as a result of the collapse of the communist régime established at the end of the Second World War. In 1997, it was a consequence of the bankruptcy of the pyramid financial scheme that wiped out the savings of thousands of Albanians. The crisis caused by the collapse of the financial sector was the most dramatic sign of the weakness of the process of democratization. The fleet of ships of all sizes that daily left Albania’s shores represented the hope of poor people willing to risk their lives to escape their country’s dire situation. But those ships also symbolized all the difficulties Albania faced in beginning a stable process of democratization. The latest influx of Albanians presented the Italian government with a crisis. Italy could not repeat the mistake of 1991 when it was completely unprepared for a similar emergency, and the only thing it was able to do was to refuse entry to the Albanians. When Albania stood on the verge of disintegration in 1997, the Italian government promoted a military multinational intervention to help Albania achieve stability and start a proper process of democratization. This study investigates the causes of the Albanian crisis in 1990–91, and in 1997. It also provides an analysis of the Italian involvement with the Multinational Protection Force (MPF) in Albania. This research also provides an analysis of the main features of criminal gangs and their role in the Albanian crisis. 103

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WHY ITALY? When in 1997 Albanians decided to leave their country for Italian shores, the international community, and particularly the Italian public opinion, saw the repetition of the events that had taken place six years earlier. In less then a decade Albania was once again going through a crisis that exacerbated poverty among its people and fuelled dissatisfaction with the State. The collapse of Communism in 1991 and the failure of the democratization process in 1997 provided the political frame that caused Albanians to leave their country in search of a better life. The decision of Albanians to choose Italy among other neighbouring countries for their migration has several reasons. To begin with, Albania has difficult relationships with all its neighbouring states. In the north, the relationships with Serbia are tense due to the problem of Kosovo, a region inside Serbia, with a population more than 90 per cent Albanian.1 Mainly in the last few years, tension in Kosovo between the Albanian and tiny Serb communities intensified, following the Serbian government’s decision to declare a state of emergency in 1990 and its adoption of a new constitution. As a consequence, the political and cultural autonomy of Albanians, granted by the constitution of 1974, has been drastically restricted. Progressively, the Serb régime has adopted a harsh repressive stance towards Kosovo’s Albanians.2 In the south of Albania the main tensions are with Greece. They have been caused by the presence of a large Greek community living inside the southern border of Albania. Furthermore, from 1992 the former Albanian president, Sali Berisha, developed links with Turkey that caused a setback in relations with Greece. On several occasions following agreements between Albania and Turkey, Athens responded by expelling thousands of Albanians migrants from Greece.3 As for Macedonia, due to its extreme poverty, it would be more realistic to assume that the Albanian community there might be better attracted by Tirana or Duress than vice versa.4 Even Montenegro, where the Albanian community numbers 100 000, remains economically unattractive to Albanian refugees. Yet Italy cannot be considered a last resort because of difficulties to entering other countries. The links between Albania and Italy, while strained during the communist era, were at best difficult until the end of the Second World War. Albania represented a focal point of fascist foreign policy. From 1928, Italy supported Ahmed Zogu, who in the same year became King Zog I of Albania. When in 1939 Zogu, under pressure from Mussolini, refused to let Albania become an Italian protectorate, Mussolini annexed it. King Zog I was deposed and King Vittorio Emanuele III of Italy became also monarch of Albania.5 While the relationship between

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the two countries during this century is historically important, it is not as significant as the Albanian migration was to Italy during the fifteenth century. The exodus of Albanian people began in 1460–61 and probably ended in the 1520s. In 1861, the Albanian community, 55 453 people, was the largest ethnic minority in southern Italy.6 Although the Albanian community, known as Aberishe, remained linked to its identity, preserving its language, traditions and the endogamy, its relationship with the Italians has been extremely good. Due to the fact that the border line between the two countries is the Adriatic, the Albanian community in Italy has never represented a threat and has been accepted by the Italian community. Italians of Albanian origin, such as Antonio Gramsci and Francesco Crispi, who was Prime Minister from 1887 to 1891 and again from 1893 to 1896, became main figures in Italian political life. Therefore the relationship between the two populations have traditionally been perceived in a positive fashion.7 Finally, the last element to give impetus to Albanian migration to Italy twice in this decade was the impact of the Italian television programmes on the Albanian society. From the second half of the 1960s, when Albania was nearly completely isolated from the Western and Eastern spheres, the first television sets were introduced and a small number of people were able to receive programmes broadcast by Italian television networks Rai 1 and Rai 2. In a country culturally isolated, watching television became the only means to compare Albanian’s conditions with the ‘external’ world. Yet in the 1970s and 1980s, Albanians lacked the critical faculties that would have allowed them to understand that, for example, television advertising with its image of wealth and success, did not necessarily reflect reality. Significantly, Ardian Vehbiu and Rando Vendole, scholars of Albanian society, stated that in Albania the influx of Western television programmes, with a significant number of commercials, created a new religion where the television set replaced the church, and commercials were its catechism.8 Although Vehbiu and Vendole’s statement might sound extreme, Italian television programmes certainly conveyed to Albania the unrealistic image of a wealthy society. Thus Albanians, not able to properly interpret those messages, believed that the Italian style of life was perfect, and that it was the product of democracy more than of an economic process. Italy represented, in sum, an ideal place of economic comfort available to anybody, and democracy the instrument to achieve it.

THE ORIGIN OF THE ALBANIAN CRISIS The strong attraction that Albanians felt for Italy and for the Western world cannot by itself explain the strong dissatisfaction of Albanians

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towards their own state. Certainly the element of attraction towards Italy, and Western Europe in general, had a significant impact and gave impetus to the Albanians to leave their country, but the main elements of analysis to explain this phenomenon have their roots in the evolution of Albania after the end of the Second World War. When in 1991 an increasing number of Albanians arrived on the Italian shores of Apulia, the main problem for journalists and political observers was to comprehend and explain its causes. Italy, with its thousands of miles of sea coast and its geopolitical position as a ‘bridge’ between the developed north and the poor south of the world, became the final destination of hundreds if not thousands of people mostly from North Africa. But it had never before experienced such a large number of poverty-stricken people reaching its shores, and it soon became evident that the influx of Albanians had different features from any other ethnic migration, and that it was the consequence of Albania’s utter isolation for half a century. It was a result of Enver Hoxha establishing in Albania an arch-Stalinist régime leading to the country’s progressive isolation also from its potential partners in the Eastern bloc. For ideological reasons, Hoxha cut Albania’s relations with Yugoslavia in 1948, with the Soviet Union in 1961, and finally even with its last partner, China, in 1977. The consequences of Hoxha’s self-imposed isolation of Albania have been dramatic. From the very beginning of his régime, Hoxha promoted the development of heavy industry relying on Albania’s substantial mineral deposits, and on the technology and purchases provided by first the Soviet Union, and China at a later stage. In the late 1970s, with Albania remaining isolated from even its most powerful partners, industry failed to maintain a growing level of productivity. The economy became increasingly autarkic and foreign trade never reached a significant level.9 Professor Roberto Morozzo della Rocca emphasised that in 1989, four years after Hoxha died, the declared annual individual income in Albania was not even 750 dollars, while in Angola it was 610 dollars and in Italy it stood above 15 000 dollars.10 However, the economic isolation was not enough to satisfy Hoxha’s ambition to shape Albania into a new model fully devoted to state control. Hoxha’s intolerance towards religions reached its pinnacle in 1967, when at the fifth congress of the Albanian Labour (communist) party Hoxha abolished the practice of all religions and imposed secularization on Albania. Mosques and churches were destroyed or changed into cinemas or gyms. Believers were prosecuted and any reference to religious tradition was forbidden.11 At the end of the Second World War, before Hoxha took power, Albania was a multi-religious society with a strong majority of Muslims. About

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70 per cent of the population was Muslim, divided in Sunni and Bektashi sects based in the centre of the country; 20 per cent were Orthodox Catholics based in the south; and 10 per cent Roman Catholics in the north. Yet, the existence of different creeds in Albania, instead of encouraging disunity, was a strong element in support of national independence. During the nineteenth century, in an unusual manifestation of equilibrium, Catholicism stopped the Hellenization of the south promoted by the Orthodox church, while Islam represented an obstacle to Serb expansion in the north. As a result, the religious question not only merged with the issue of national independence but also with that of national identity.12 Hoxha’s decision to ban any religion in order to establish an atheist state, where the only accepted ‘religion’ was communism, indirectly influenced the perception of national identity. The secularization of the state therefore wiped out an entire system of values that was not properly replaced by any other category of values. At the same time, Hoxha’s idea of state remained alien to the Albanians, despite the fact that the younger generations were educated in the cult of the state. An important side-effect of Hoxha’s position towards religion was a further isolation of the country from the three international religious groups to which Albanians belonged. Any organized religion in Albania seeking aid from their parent organizations was blocked after 1967. The isolation of Albania became increasingly oppressive. Not only foreign journalists could not visit the country, but the attempt of Albanians to leave the country was regarded as treason. The régime became paranoid to the point of banning fishing at sea and even treating the possession of a small boat as an offence.

THE FALL OF THE COMMUNIST RÉGIME The first indication of important future changes in Albania’s communist system came upon Hoxha’s death on 11 April 1985. The communist leadership was shaken by the event, but initially no significant political changes were instituted. Ramez Alia, who succeeded Hoxha, was aware that the country’s economic conditions were extremely worrying. He believed that it was necessary to reform the economy, making it more reliable and efficient, but the opposition he met inside the party was considerable. Nexhmije, Hoxha’s widow, still had a strong position inside the party leadership and she became Alia’s principal obstacle towards the modernization of the economy.13 For five years, the worst elements of Hoxha’s dictatorship survived his death. Yet a strong feeling of impatience towards the

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communist régime was growing among Albanians. For the communist leadership it was increasingly difficult to control a population that through television was indirectly participating in the international events of the late 1980s. As has been said, the image conveyed through Italian advertisements had a strong impact on Albanian society, but what about the impact of television reports of the fall of Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of communism elsewhere in Eastern Europe? These events had such an impact on the world order that not even the most isolated country in Europe could remain unaffected. In July 1990, hundreds of Albanian refugees were granted temporary safe heaven by the Italian, French and German embassies in Tirana.14 Italy and other European states showed sympathy with the Albanian people for the political repression and economic destitution they had suffered during the last 50 years. The attitude of these states probably instilled hope in the Albanians that they would find support for overt action against the communist régime. From December 1990 to March 1991, popular protests, led mainly by students, obtained significant results. Alia allowed the emergence of new political parties, which resulted in Sali Berisha establishing the Democratic Party. Following a ritual initiated in the post-communist countries of the Eastern bloc, on 20 February the Albanians demolished the main symbol of the former dictatorship: the gigantic statue of Hoxha in Skandeberg Square in Tirana. On 31 March 1991 Albania held the first free democratic election. The Democratic Party obtained a significant result mainly in the largest cities, but the Socialist Party (the new name of the former communist Labour Party) won the elections with strong support from the rural population. In April, Alia was elected president. Albania finally emerged from the communist period’s isolation. Although the country’s leadership was still an expression of the former régime, it was evident that Albania had by then started an irreversible journey towards democratization. The euphoria induced by these events did not last long, Albanians soon became aware that going to the ballot box did not have an immediate effect on the economy, and democracy at an infant stage did not mean immediate wealth. Albania remained a poor country with one of the lowest incomes per capita in the world, and inflation at 226 per cent.15 This situation could not be reversed overnight: Albania needed a serious, and probably still painful, process of economic reforms and several years of working efficiently. But Albanians did not want to wait,16 the mirage of wealth seen on television was just few miles across the sea from the Albanian coasts.

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THE EXODUS OF 1991 AND THE ‘OPERAZIONE PELLICANO’ The ‘first wave’ of Albanians reached Italy’s shores in March 1991. More than 28 000 people arrived using anything that floated. The impact of their arrival was momentous for the Italian government which was completely unprepared for this mass exodus. In July 1990 only 800 people arrived in Italy from Albania. But this changed with dramatic suddenness. In three days in August 1991, another 21 000 people disembarked in Italy. Due to the isolation in which Albania was forced for the last 50 years, it was difficult for the Italian media to establish the causes of this phenomenon. Perhaps partly because of this, but mainly as a result of the flood of refugees, Italian reactions changed from sympathy to worry, verging on hostility. In a matter of weeks the influx of people, concentrated in a few cities of Apulia, became a problem of public order. The worst decision adopted by the Italian government was to gather thousands of people in the old stadium in Bari; in the heat of August, those people were left in the sun without proper facilities. Violence increased not only against the Italians, but also among the Albanians. In a few months the Italian police repatriated more than 28 000 people. The images of that summer remained vividly impressed on Italian public opinion and the international image of Italy suffered for the tough measures Rome had adopted. This feeling and the awareness that Albanians would eventually sail across the Adriatic in large numbers if still facing very poor conditions, led the Italian government to launch Operazione Pellicano (Operation Pelican). Italy offered Albania emergency aid, mainly food and medicine. The programme was launched in October 1991 and finished in December 1993. It employed 5000 Italian soldiers who distributed 300 000 tons of food and emergency aid. Operation Pelican remains unique among missions of humanitarian interventions. Italian soldiers ‘intervened’ in a situation of crisis, mostly caused by poverty, but without having to face any violent domestic tension. The transition from the communist régime to democracy was taking place without major problems. The religious issue, that in any case in Albania has been more an element of aggregation than of fragmentation, was irrelevant. After 50 years of state atheism Albanians could practice their confession again, but this did not have any consequence on Albanian society. Even the ethnic issue in Albania has different features than those in other Balkan countries. Despite the fact that there are two main groups in Albania, Ghegs in the north and Tosks in the south, they have never been in conflict. Albanians have always regarded themselves as one nation, and despite the lack of religious, cultural, political and linguistic homogeneity,

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they have perceived their national identity as a common legacy of blood.17 Therefore there was no need for a heavy deployment of Italian troops. The majority of Italian soldiers involved in the operation were unarmed and, very unusual for a military organization, operated as an aid agency. The military aid convoys covered the whole of Albania, from the largest cities to the smallest villages in the mountains. Italian soldiers were often the first foreigners ever to have been in touch with locals. Also Operation Pelican provided the first detailed information on Albania to the outside world in half a century. Throughout the Operation relations between soldiers and people remained good. In nearly two years, the aid delivered helped Albania to cope at least with its food shortage and paved the way for close economic cooperation between small and medium-sized Italian companies and Tirana.

BERISHA AND THE SECOND CRISIS OF ALBANIA From March 1991 to April 1992, three members of the Socialist leadership, Fatos Nano, Ylli Bufi and Vilson Ahmeti, took in turns the office of Prime Minister. The situation in this period was very unstable and characterized by frequent strikes of all categories. Inevitably, new general elections were called on 22 March 1992, and this time the Democratic Party obtained 62 per cent of the vote cast and on 9 April Berisha became President of the Albanian Republic. Berisha’s main commitment was to introduce an economic system inspired by capitalism. Free market, privatization and, in the agricultural sector, the re-distribution of land collectivized during the communist régime, formed the blueprint for breaking down economic stagnation. In addition the new government elected to closely follow the suggestions of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In 1992, as a consequence of an IMF suggestion, 200 000 workers mostly employed in industry were dismissed, affecting one out of four families. On more than one subsequent occasion Berisha emphasised the positive results achieved by the Albanian economy, often mentioning the fall in inflation to 27 per cent in 1994. What Berisha failed to mention was that in 1996 Albania’s import index was six times the value of the export index, and only the money flowing back into the country from emigrants helped to bridge the gap.18 Due to the cheap cost of Albanian labour and to the country’s nearness, Italian firms found it convenient to invest there. In 1997, Luigi Fabri, representative of the Italian Businessmen’s Association in Albania, stated that 80 firms invested 200 million dollars in Albania. Those firms directly

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employed 30 000 people and another 25 000 in parallel activities. According to Fabri, 75 per cent of foreign capital in Albania was Italian.19 Francesco Divella, chairman of Fiera del Levante, emphasised the importance of the ‘Eagle’s Country’ for more than 600 Italian small firms investing there. He said that ‘for us Albania represents the door towards Macedonia, Bulgaria and Rumania’.20 Whilst the Albanian economy attracted the investments of small and medium-sized Italian companies, due to its instability it failed to attract other larger foreign capital. From the very beginning Berisha was anxious to avoid having just one foreign state as the only outside investor and thereby acquiring a hegemonic position in the country. The Albanian President developed a foreign policy that established several partnerships and not just a single strong one. Four countries developed the most friendly relationship with Albania: Italy, Turkey, the United States and Germany. Particularly relying on US support, Berisha expected to develop modern infrastructure, and he also hoped that the US would play a role in solving the Kosovo issue. Albania became a useful base for American troops involved in the peace-enforcing mission in Bosnia, and the US military provided training and technical assistance to the Albanian Army. Despite these achievements, Albanians remained frustrated by the fact that they did not experience any significant economic improvement. Poverty remained predominant. Reginald Hibbert, a former British diplomat, explained that ‘Since 1992 … there has been material progress in living conditions – striking progress to foreign eyes, but frustratingly meagre progress to most Albanian. The good life is still not in sight. Achievement lags far behind aspirations. The deep dissatisfaction which is the raw fuel for revolution has continued silently to ferment.’21 The growing differences between Berisha and the population became evident in 1994, when he promoted the adoption of a new constitution. Berisha’s proposal contained rights and freedoms that Albanians never enjoyed before, but it also enhanced the President’s powers. The opposition voted against the constitutional proposal and it was therefore impossible for Berisha to obtain the support, two-thirds of parliament, needed to introduce the new constitution. The referendum that followed Berisha’s failure in Parliament became an even larger defeat for the President: the Albanians voted heavily against the new constitution. And their decision was probably determined by the growing dissatisfaction they had with the government’s overall performance than by a reasoned rejection of the new political structure that would stem from the new constitution. In this situation the impact of the financial sector’s role became crucial to providing stability. The direct effect of the so-called pyramid scheme

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was to release economic tension among Albanians. The reason for this was obvious. Finance societies offered extremely good, but in the long term impossible to sustain, rate of interest of about 8 per cent per month. People investing could double their capital in just one year. Investors had a sudden significant supply of money that, although only temporarily, improved their life-style. Financial societies initially fulfilled the dreams nourished in Albania since the end of the communist régime. More than anything else, people wanted to forget the spectre of the former régime which was blamed for the country’s poverty. Due to the significant role that financial societies played in easing tension among the population, they were supported by politicians, and this new illusion attracted significant number of investors and money. For four years the interest on individual investments was being paid, but in January 1997 the scheme collapsed melting the savings of thousands of people and causing the second main crisis of the decade in Albania.

OPERATION ALBA AND THE CRIMINAL GANGS As soon as Albanians realised that their savings had been lost, they began widespread demonstrations against the government, holding it responsible for the financial disaster that befell them. Tension rose in a matter of weeks. Reports from Albania described the situation as being extremely dangerous and the country in turmoil. The impression was that the state was unable to cope with the anger of people who saw their dreams vanishing and their savings wasted. To Albanians, the main state institutions, the President and the two major parties, the governing democratic and the socialist opposition, became unreliable. As a result of the widespread instability and violence, people crowded the coasts to leave for Italy. With an intensity similar to the exodus in 1991, Albanians again decided to find a shelter in Italy. The weakness of the Albanian state became obvious after the army’s disintegration, as several major cities in the south of the country fell under rebel control. Officers and soldiers abandoned their barracks, some joined rebel units, but many others just returned to their homes. Several ships of the navy arrived in Italy and asked for political asylum, others were just abandoned to be used later by smugglers to transport people to Italy.22 The main problem for the Albanian military, according to Giuseppe Caforio, was about moral values. As a consequence of the fall of the communist régime, the old values disappeared, but they were not adequately replaced with new values of democracy and freedom, values that Albanian society in any case found difficult to accept.23

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By the middle of March, Albania descended into anarchy, and the government lost control over a significant part of the country’s south. Army stores were looted, hundreds of thousands of firearms passed into the hands of rebels in the south and in the north, where militias loyal to Berisha were also established. In the meantime the Albanian crisis was increasingly becoming an Italian problem. From 13 to 23 March, more than 12 000 Albanian refugees disembarked in Italian ports.24 This time the Italian government was determined to avoid the mistake it made in 1991. The first thing it did was to prevent the gathering of the refugees in just one region, and to provide better conditions for those arriving. The Albanians were given three-month non-renewable visas. Once those visas expired, the refugees had to repatriate. Despite the fact that the situation in the ‘Eagle’s Country’ was highly unstable, it was not a civil war. More than 1000 were killed during those violent days, most of them because of inexperience in handling weapons. The causes that triggered many of the low-intensity conflicts elsewhere, religious and ethnic issues, remain alien to Albanian society. Religions traditionally provided basis for unity rather than fragmentation, and the conventional partition of Albania between north and south, through the river Shkumbin, never represented an ethnic division.25 Paskal Milo, professor of history at Tirana University, dismissed reports in the Western media of a civil war caused by ethnic tension. He emphasised that ‘Never in the history of Albania have we had a war between north and south.’26 The attempt, mainly by the international media, of explaining the crisis through religious and ethnic issues was artificial; the crisis was caused by the collapse of the financial pyramid scheme and it was directed against Berisha. However, the unstable situation in Albania, where possession of weapons became widespread, could easily have worsened, with the original causes diversifying into other issues such as ethnicity, clanism or religion. Janusz Bugajski, an expert of Balkan studies, stated that ‘A Somalia-like scenario could quickly develop and Albania could be faced with a prolonged period of chaos and economic collapse.’27 This aspect of the Albanian crisis was clear to the Italian government, and procrastination could be a gamble. Moreover, this crisis could not be dealt with as in 1991, when Italy unilaterally embarked on Operation Pelican with the only aim of providing aid. In 1997, Albanians needed security and confidence, at least among the international institutions, that they could re-start the process of democratization. Baskim Fino, the newly-appointed Prime Minister,28 on 25 March appealed to the EU foreign ministers for the dispatch of an armed contingent to support a humanitarian mission. Fino’s attempts, supported by Italian diplomacy, to involve the EU in the deployment of a military

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protection force were unsuccessful mainly because of British and German opposition. Already, in early March, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl had stated that the Albanian crisis was essentially an internal matter and it remained unclear, in his view, what any Western military force could do,29 while Malcolm Rifkind, former UK foreign secretary, maintained that a military involvement was premature because the internal situation was too confused.30 Nevertheless, the Albanian initiative found support from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. On 27 March, the OSCE Permanent Council passed Decision 160 that promoted the creation in Albania of a framework within which the international aid organizations could operate safely. The following day, the UN Security Council approved Resolution 1101 that authorized the deployment in Albania of a ‘multinational protection force to facilitate the safe and prompt delivery of humanitarian assistance, and to help create a secure environment for the missions of international organisation in Albania’,31 Eight states offered troops to the MPF: Austria (110), Denmark (60), France (1000), Greece (800), Rumania (400), Spain (350), Turkey (800), and with Italy (2500–3000) in charge of the force. Within two weeks, on 12 April, the MPF began deploying its 6000 soldiers. ‘Alba’, named after the first four letters of Albania and also meaning dawn in Italian, was the first humanitarian mission led by Italy without the direct involvement of the United States. It represented an important test for Italian diplomacy and the military. The Italian initiative was immediately criticized, due to some scepticism about the capability and experience of the Italian military in performing such an important and complex task.32 In addition, it was believed that by promoting the MPF, Italy’s only aim was to stop the flow of immigrants.33 Such a view of the reasons determining the Italian commitment in Albania was superficial. There is no doubt that by stopping or reducing the influx of Albanians most of Italian public opinion could see fruit from the Italian involvement with the MPF. But Italian foreign policy aims pursued in Albania were much more complex than just halting Albanian immigration. Firstly, Rome’s centre-left government, in power since 1996, has been increasingly committed to promoting foreign trade particularly in Central and Eastern Europe. Currently, Italy enjoys good economic relations with Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, the Czech republic and Slovenia. It is also the principal economic partner of Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania. These relations, coupled with improved economic and political links with Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States, are the main elements of an Italian Ostpolitik.34

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Therefore Italy, in order to improve economic relations with a large number of post-communist countries, has a strong interest to encourage stability in the Balkans, in Albania and in Central and Eastern Europe. Secondly, peacekeeping and humanitarian interventions became increasingly important for Italian foreign policy. Italy’s view is that by playing a significant role in promoting peace processes, it maintains its international standing. The Italian-led intervention in Albania and the successful result achieved, enhances Italy’s chances of successfully opposing the Americanled reform proposal of the UN Security Council. The US wants to enlarge the Security Council to include Japan and Germany as permanent members, but to exclude as such several medium-sized powers among which is also Italy. Finally, as a consequence of the state of anarchy in Albania, there has been a significant increase of illegal activities. The country has become an ideal place to sell weapons to Bosnia and to launder money from criminal activities in Russia and Italy. International links between drug dealers from the Middle East and Colombia have been established. Albania has also become a drug-producing country, mainly marijuana, and trading-post for Turkish heroin. In all these activities the Italian Mafia plays a major role.35 Although the MPF could not get involved in public-order tasks, Italy hoped that its deployment might deter crime activities and stop Albania from being a safe haven for international crime organizations. The fact that several gangs, sometimes rebels but also criminals, controlled many areas of the country, was a reason of concern before and at the beginning of ‘Alba’. In Vlore, the city that flourished on the pyramid scheme and therefore suffered greatly for its failure, rebellion occurred spontaneously. The protest movement did not have a prearranged organization and its only political aim was to force Berisha to resign. There was not even enough time, according to Arjan Konomi, to develop a strategy and establish objectives for the rebellion. Vlore was just a territory out of control of the central government lacking an army or police.36 The main problem was to understand what political influence those gangs had in Albania. Many of these armed groups in the south were close to the political opposition and thus against Berisha, while many others in the north were supporting the President. Several others, mainly in the south, were just criminal gangs. How this last category could be controlled and what influences they had on the population were unknown. In Vlore several districts were under the control of gangs. Partizan Caushi, called ‘Zani’, controlled the eastern district of Cole; the western district of Babice was controlled by Fredi Nehbiu called ‘Kakami’; while in the north and in the central districts Muko’s and Gaxhai’s gangs had a strong position.

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Yllir Kokogi’s group had a strong influence in the area of the city council and the hospital. Those were the main gangs in Vlore, although the list numbered many other smaller formations.37 Yet it became immediately clear that they could not be associated with the so called ‘salvation committees’, established in several cities when the turmoil began. Albanians welcomed the deployment of the MPF and they expected that the military would stop the activities of criminal gangs. Often in cities such as Scutari, in the north, people took up weapons not to attack or protect Berisha, but either to rob or to defend themselves from robbers.38 From the preceding discussion it is evident that Albanian criminal gangs and their leaders do not share many similarities with warlords like those in Somalia or Bosnia. They all proliferated in a state of anarchy, but they had very different political goals and ideological foundations. Ethnicity, religions and clanism are all issues that gave impetus to the actions of the modern warlords, although crime still played an important, if secondary, role in their activities. Yet, in the case of Albanian criminal gangs, illegal activities represented their main aims. As a consequence, gangs fought for the control of territory with the aim of enhancing their illicit trade. Often they just intended to assess the control of a certain area by other criminal gangs. In other instances, for political or ideological reasons, they did not deem it convenient to engage in fights with other gangs. Very rarely, if at all, did they enjoy support from the local population. Indeed, people were often victims of the gangs’ violence and therefore deeply feared and resented them. Significantly, just as with crime organizations operating in stable countries, Albanian gangs remained isolated from society. The problem in Albania was that its society was in a condition of anarchy and, without police or army, gangs could overtly pursue their goals. Since the MPF began its deployment, gangs have felt their activities seriously threatened. On 15 April when the first soldier disembarked in Duress, Zani organized a fake attack against the hotel in which Italian journalists were staying. It was a demonstration of power that, it became immediately clear, Zani did not enjoy. Several weeks after this event Italian television networks showed footage in which an Italian NCO with the Carabinieri paratroopers was, politely but firmly, keeping Zani away from one of the MPF headquarters. It was unthinkable for something similar to happen with warlords such as Ali Mahdi or Aideed in Somalia. The way the Carabinieri NCO dealt with Zani well-represented the approach adopted by Alba towards criminal gangs. Alba did not commit itself to restore public order, especially because it was not among its mandated tasks, but it made clear that it would not tolerate activities interfering with the mission’s objectives.

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CONCLUSIONS Since the very beginning of the Italian-led humanitarian intervention in Albania the mission had two main aims: to provide protection for all humanitarian organizations operating in the country and, as an indirect objective, to help the Albanian institutions to restore the conditions of stability in which the country could call new general elections. On 29 June 1997, Albanians voted and changed their country’s leadership. The new President, Rexhep Mejdani, and the Prime Minister, Fatos Nano are Socialists. In addition, the MPF provided a framework in which the newly organized Albanian police could deal with criminal gangs. The main task of the police has been to regain territories under various gangs’ control. So far, it has achieved encouraging results. The end of anarchy and the rebuilding of important state institutions represented an important achievement against criminal activities. Reginald Hibbert, who visited Albania towards the end of 1997, gained the impression that public order had been generally reestablished.39 Today, although public order in Albania remains a sensitive issue, the situation is stable. In the long term, criminal gangs will likely be able to continue their illegal activities, but the areas of the country where they will be able to do so overtly will be increasingly fewer. However, what is important for Albania is that the democratization process proceeds along with a sustainable development of the economy. The events of this decade showed clearly that the two major crises in Albania have had different political contexts but very similar economic and social origins. The extreme poverty of the country, and the influence of Western media, was mainly responsible for instability, rather than the fall of communism and the setback in the process of democratization.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Andreas Corti, ‘Il Kossovo senza l’Albania’, Albania Emergenza Italiana, i quaderni speciali di limes, January 1997, p. 125. Stefano Bianchini, ‘La Serbia teme una Bosnia Illirica’, Albania, Emergenza Italiana, i quaderni speciali di limes, p. 118. Arian Konomi, ‘Rapporto dall’ Albania: aspettando un nuovo prinicple’, limes, March 1997. Roberto Fabiani, ‘Intanto gli altri chiudono le porte’, L’Espresso, 3 April 1997. Paolo Tripodi, ‘ “Alba.” Italy’s Multinational Intervention in Albania’, Contemporary Review, vol. 271, no. 1581, October 1997, p. 179.

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18. 19. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

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The Collapse of Albania Patrizia Resta, Un popolo in cammino, Migrazioni albanesi in Italia, BESA Editrice, Lecce, 1996, pp. 31–2. Patrizia Resta rightly emphasised that ‘Albanians and Italians from the south do not have radical differences or similarities. They both have a history that often opposed them to each other but as many often it merged their destinies, making the two populations more similar than could be supposed.’ P. Resta, op. cit., p. 7. Ardian Vehbiu and Rando Vendole, La scoperta dell’Albania, PAOLINE Editoriale Libri, Torino, 1996, pp. 39– 40. Roberto Morozzo della Rocca, Albania, Guerini e Associati, Milano, 1997, pp. 30 –1. Ibid., p. 31. Roberto Morozzo della rocca, ‘Religione dell’Albanita’ e utopia ateocratica’, in Albania, Emergenza Italiana, i quaderni speciali di limes, January 1997, p. 38. Patrizia Resta, op. cit., p. 52. Roberto Morozzo della Rocca, Albania, op. cit., pp. 25–6. The Italian embassy immediately provided hospitality for more than 800 people, and consequently Italy negotiated with Alia the transfer of those people to Italy. Armando Pitssio, ‘Il dramma di una nazione incompiuta’, Albania, Emergenza Italiana, i quaderni speciali di limes, p. 7. Roberto Morozzo della Rocca stated that ‘Albanians stopped working waiting for a magic economic reform, the adoption of a western economic system from which they expected large availability of any sort of goods’, in Albania, p. 38. Patrizia Resta, op. cit., p. 61. Armando Pitassio, op. cit., p. 8. Roberto Fabiani, ‘Valona, cosa nostra’, L’Espresso, 13 March 1997. Cristina Mariotti, ‘Invasione’, L’Espresso, 13 March 1997. Reginald Hibbert, ‘Dealing with the dispossessed’, The World Today, May 1997, p. 119. Giuseppe Caforio, ‘Albania, la crisi di un esercito’, Informazioni della Difesa, no. 4, July–August 1997, p. 13. Ibid., p. 17. Nicolo’ Carmineo, ‘Svizzera dei Balcani o Colombia d’Europa?’, Albania, Emergenza Italiana, i quaderni speciali di limes, January 1997, p. 70. Arjan Konomi, ‘Perche’ a Valona? Geopolitica della rivolta’, Albania, Emergenza Italiana, i quaderni speciali di limes, January 1997, p. 27. Guy Dinmore, ‘Albania pauses for breath’, The Financial Times, 21 March 1997. Janus Bugajsky, ‘The Balkans: on the Brink Again’, The Washington Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 4, Autumn 1997, p. 227. On 11 March Berisha appointed Baskim Fino, from the opposition Socialist Party and former mayor of the south-east town of Gjirokaster, to lead a government of national reconciliation. Guy Dinmore and Kevin Done, ‘In the shadow of the gun’, The Financial Times’ 15–16 March 1997.

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33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38 39.

119

Lionel Barber and Robert Graham, ‘EU evades Albania troops request’, The Financial Times’, 26 March 1997. United Nations Security Council, Resolution 1101, 28 March 1997. On 2 April on article published in The Times, ‘Rethink for Rome’, suggested Italy should think more carefully before getting involved in a military operation, considering the inadequacy of the Italian armed forces. Michael Williams of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London, maintained that the real problem was that Italy did not have the experience to lead such a mission. In Roberto Fabiani, ‘Alba Pericolosa’, L’Espresso, 24 April 1997. Guy Dinmore wrote that ‘Diplomats suspect Italy’s real agenda is to stop mass exodus of Albanian refugees across the Adriatic’. ‘Troops open wider Albanian front’, The Financial Times, 21 April 1997. Tim Butcher reported that aid workers ‘accused Italy of being concerned mainly with securing Albania’s chief ports and stopping the exodus of refugees’. ‘Italian soldiers arrive in Albania’, The Daily Telegraph, 12 April 1997. Piero Fassino, ‘L’Ostpolitik esiste, Roma ha schierato tutti i suoi tasselli’, Il Corriere della Sera, 14 January 1997. Mr Fassino is Under secretary of the foreign ministry. Olga Mattera, ‘Adriatico, il mare delle mafie’, Albania, Emergenza Italiana, i quaderni speciali di limes, January 1997, pp. 95–6. Arjan Konomi, ‘Perche’ a Valona? Geopolitica della rivolta’, Albania, Emergenza Italiana, i quaderni speciali di limes, January 1997, p. 27. Pino Agnetti, Operazione Alba, Stato Maggior della Difesa, Istituto Geografico De Agostini, Novara, 1997, p. 80. Arian Konomi, ‘Rapporto dall’Albania: aspettando un nuovo principe’, limes, March 1997, p. 285. Reginald Hibbert, ‘Quiet After the Storm?’, The World Today, January 1998, p. 24.

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7 Clan Conflict and Factionalism in Somalia Samuel M. Makinda INTRODUCTION At this time of writing in late 1997, Somalia had been without a formal government for more than seven years. Instead, it had large quantities of weapons, militarized and very determined political factions, and feuding clans which had made the task of re-establishing national institutions remote. Since the overthrow of former dictator Siad Barre in January 1991, Somalia has remained a classic ‘weapons state’ in which warlords and clan warfare have become the main defining features. However, it is worse than just a ‘weapons state’: Somalia appears like a collection of peoples who are in search of a state and an effective government. In terms of the values, norms, rules, principles and institutions which characterize international society, Somalia has lost most of these and appears to be heading for an exit from international society. In the past few years, Somalia has been without a national government, civil service, national army, police force, judicial system or any of the public services which people in most countries take for granted. Having lost the capacity to maintain law and order, and to feed its own citizens, Somalia has forfeited what any country needs to have in order to claim empirical sovereignty. And without empirical sovereignty, it would be pointless to talk of juridical sovereignty.1 In other words, Somalia has been something less than a state in the past few years. It is tempting to argue that it is largely because of the availability of large quantities of foreign-supplied arms and the failure of clan and factional leaders to agree on a formula for peace, that Somalia continues to disintegrate. Indeed, it is weapons from the USA, the former Soviet Union, apartheid South Africa, and several European and African states that have been used to wreak havoc on Somalia in the past few years. However, the anarchic conditions in Somalia and the availability of large quantities of arms have a long history and extend far beyond Somalia’s borders. These problems raise significant questions about the nature of the international system, the purpose and role of war in international society, the character of the international arms market, the place of Africa in the post-Cold War 120

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world, and the capacity of African societies and their leaders to establish viable states. It is not the purpose of this chapter to tackle all these questions, but it is important for us to be aware of the fact that this chapter, brief as it is, only scratches the surface. For many months before Barre’s departure, Somalia had been without an effective government due to a civil war. From the late 1980s, Barre’s government controlled Mogadishu, the capital, while the rest of the country was under the direction of different clan-based resistance groups, which hated each other almost as much as they resented Barre. The lack of central authority became more obvious to the rest of the world in 1991, and especially after Mohammed Farah Aideed and Ali Mahdi Mohammed, who both claimed the presidency, failed to establish a functioning government. With continued fighting among rival political factions, accompanied by the total breakdown of law and order, as well as clan-based and freelance militias extorting aid agencies and terrorizing other people, Somalia’s anarchy apparently started to trouble the conscience of the West. It was then that the United Nations belatedly stepped in with a view to providing humanitarian assistance, restoring law and order, and re-establishing the public institutions. However, before long the UN lost its own sense of direction and became a participant in the war. When the UN eventually pulled out in early 1995, it had opened up the routes for humanitarian assistance, but had failed to re-establish order and public institutions. The civil war and the availability of large quantities of small arms in the country have given rise to a class of people who cannot lead a normal life. Indeed, Somalia now has young people who are not comfortable with anything apart from looting, fighting and defying authority. The main purpose of this chapter is to explain briefly how and why clan conflict and factionalism have remained the defining characteristics of Somalia’s bloodied political stage. It seeks to argue that while the continuing conflict among the major clans has made the country ungovernable, Somalia cannot be governed effectively without clans. It is mainly through the system of clans that Somalia can find a lasting solution to its problems. However, some of the main obstacles to a solution lie with political and faction leaders, many of whom operate outside the traditional clan structures, who have made Somalia ungovernable because some of them benefit financially from the chaos. Some of these obstacles were enhanced in the early 1990s when the UN played into the hands of the Somali faction leaders. The chapter is divided into four sections. The first describes the nature and functions of the Somali clans and their relationship to the state. The second section examines the civil war which led to the overthrow of Siad Barre and the subsequent chaos. The third analyses the involvement of the

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UN and its failure to disarm the factions and to establish law and order. And the final section speculates about Somalia’s future.

THE CLAN STRUCTURE AND SOMALI POLITICS Unlike other Sub-Saharan African states which comprise many nations or ethnic groups, Somalia is inhabited by just one ethnic group. The states which are inhabited by several ethnic groups with different cultures and languages are often aware of the fact that they have to try very hard to bridge the differences and mould a sense of nationhood among them. Indeed, in much of Africa, the state was created before the nation, and many African states have yet to succeed in establishing true nations. For this reason, Somalia has theoretically better chances of establishing a strong, harmonious and united state than many other African countries. Somalis were a nation before the state was created, and partly for this reason Somalia’s post-independence leaders appear to have assumed that they did not have to work hard to create a strong state. Unfortunately, the consequence is that Somalia has been unable to establish a strong and harmonious state. The Somali clans, or those who claim to act on their behalf, appear to be very hostile to each other. It is largely because of intense inter-clan and intra-clan hostility that Somalia has witnessed so much instability since the late 1980s. It was clan conflict that brought down Siad Barre’s government in 1991 and prevented his would-be successors from establishing law and order. For generations, the single most important factor in Somali society has been the clan. Although all Somalis belong to one ethnic group and enjoy a sense of common identity based on a shared language and culture, clan loyalty often undercuts the sense of shared nationhood. Traditionally, Somali clans have played two apparently contradictory roles, as centrifugal and centripetal forces, whereby there has been solidarity against external threats and antagonism when the external threat has vanished. Barre, who sought to transform Somali nationalism from its old segmentary kind to a modern organic mode, banned clanism and prohibited any reference to clans in the early 1970s. He adopted the ideology of ‘scientific socialism’ in an effort to unite the country, but clans and their lineages have continued to determine the course of Somalia’s political and economic development. Clan and lineage affiliations also have been vital in obtaining jobs, services and favours, and in dispensing justice.2 Somalia’s social and economic activities, as well as political organization, have traditionally stemmed from lineage systems based on one of the six major clan families – Darod, Digil, Dir, Hawiye, Issaq and Rahanwein.

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The six family groups are further split into smaller clans, sub-clans and lineages. For instance, among the Darod clan family are five other clans: the Dolbahante, Majerteen, Marehan, Ogaden and Warsengeli. Each of these five is, in turn, split into sub-clans and other smaller divisions. Said Barre was a Marehan, while those who claimed the presidency after him – Mohammed Farah Aideed and Ali Mahdi Mohammed – were from different clans of the Hawiye clan family: Aideed belonged to the Hebr Gedir clan while Mahdi was from the Abgal clan. At a lower level, Aideed belonged to the Hebr Gedir clan while Mahdi was from the Abgal clan. At a lower level, Aideed came from the Saad sub-clan and the Reer Jalaf lineage. All these clans, sub-clans and lineages play very important roles in the political process in Somalia. Early in his tenure, Siad Barre realised that the clans could constrain him, so he tried to weaken them instead. Through intense radio propaganda and the Orientation Centres that were set up throughout the country in the 1970s with Soviet assistance, Barre had sought to replace archaic and divisive lineage loyalty by revolutionary allegiance to the nation; but he had little success. In fact, Barre himself was strongly influenced by clan and lineage considerations. He relied on his Marehan clan and most of his trusted ministers were drawn from it. He also established close links with two other clans: the Ogaden, where his mother came from; and the Dolbahante, the clan of one of his sons-in-law, Ahmed Suleiman, who, at various times, was head of the National Security Services, Interior Minister and Assistant Secretary General of the then ruling political party, the Somali Socialist Revolutionary Party (SSRP). Barre’s inner circle of advisers also came from the three clans, and in the early 1970s his government was often disparagingly referred to as MOD (which stood for Marehan, Ogaden and Dolbahante).3 At the same time, until recently, pan-Somali nationalism has been the unifying and legitimizing principle, and every Somali leader has been judged on the basis of his willingness and ability to pursue the Greater Somalia goal or the unification of all ethnic Somalis in Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya into one state. The Ogaden region of Ethiopia, inhabited predominantly by people from the Ogaden clan, was the main target of this nationalism. From 1960 to 1967, the three Somali prime ministers, all from the Darod group, laid claim to the Ogaden. Under Prime Minister Ibrahim Egal (1967– 69), an Issaq with fewer ties to the Ogaden, Somalia sought a rapprochement with Ethiopia, but he was overthrown by Said Barre, a Marehan and therefore a member of the Darod clan family. Other factors played a role in the overthrow of Egal, but his problems intensified as he sought accommodation with Ethiopia.

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Ironically, the opposition to Barre, which later contributed to the creation of the anarchy Somalia is in, increased after it was clear that he could not unite all ethnic Somalis under one flag. The first signs of disaffection with Barre’s leadership came out in 1978, following his failure to take the Ogaden region after Somalia’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1977. The war with Ethiopia had been very popular, but the defeat at the hands of Ethiopia, helped by the Soviets and Cubans, was demoralizing and led to an upsurge of clan antagonisms as each clan sought scapegoats to explain the failure.4 This, in turn, led to an abortive coup in April 1978, and some of the officers involved, mainly from the Majerteen clan, subsequently formed the Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF) which, ironically, was given sanctuary by Ethiopia, long Somalia’s bête noir. By seeking asylum in Ethiopia, the Majerteen military officers signalled the disintegration of Somali national unity. The Ethiopians, on the other hand, welcomed the defectors in the hope of using them to undermine Somali national solidarity. The biggest challenge to Barre’s rule took place in May 1988, one month after the signing of the Somali–Ethiopian peace agreement. The accord, which called for the demilitarization of their common border and effectively amounted to Somalia’s renunciation of its claims to the Ogaden region, was designed to demonstrate that Somalia had eschewed its earlier policies of destabilizing its neighbours. But it was also dictated by clan, and specifically family, interests in Mogadishu. Following Barre’s car accident in May 1986, some members of the Marehan clan started to feel insecure at the prospect of another clan taking power.5 There were also rivalries within Barre’s family clan as to who should succeed him. The ensuing disagreements led to the collapse of the MOD clan alliance, and this had a strong impact on Barre’s ability to remain in power.6 At the same time, some prominent members of the Marehan clan felt they should seek Ethiopia’s cooperation to put an end to guerrilla activity from the SSDF and the Issaq-dominated Somali National Movement (SNM), and hence the peace accord. The agreement was resented by the Ogadens, then the dominant clain in the army, who felt their homeland had been abandoned and subsequently directed their anger towards Barre. This was the beginning of the disintegration of the Somali army and the creation of rival armed militias. It could be argued that Somalia’s relative stability in the 1970s and early 1980s depended on Barre’s skilful manipulation of both domestic and external politics. At the international level, the Cold War gave Barre some leverage through which he obtained substantial economic and military assistance, first from the Soviet Union and later from the United States. He exploited whatever leverage he had to bring in arms from both the East and the West.

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At the domestic level, he maintained power by often suppressing critics and detaining opponents; by balancing and playing on clan interests and rivalries; and, occasionally, by buying out opposition groups with cash. By the late 1980s, however, his external leverage had gone with the waning of the Cold War, and internally his military muscle had weakened due to inter- and intra-clan rivalries. The weapons which he had brought in to try to consolidate and expand the Somali state were now being used to break it apart. It had also become increasingly obvious that Barre had neither the skill to manipulate clan and lineage interests nor the vision to lead the country quickly out of its political quagmire.7 Barre’s manipulative potential, however, waned as Somalia’s economic problems multiplied, a fact which demonstrates the crucial role of the economy in any country’s political stability. Barre had started as a nationalist who had great regional ambitions. By the late 1980s he was often referred to as the mayor of Mogadishu, because that was the only area of the country he controlled effectively until late 1990. The military, which had served as one of Barre’s pillars of power, had disintegrated into what looked like clan militias.8 The civil service was totally demoralized because of high levels of nepotism, clanism and corruption. Moreover, Barre’s cabinet often functioned like a federation of clans in which power was commensurate with loyalty to the president. At the same time, Barre’s centralized system was totally inappropriate to the segmented character of the Somali society. By the time the Barre régime was ousted in January 1991, it was extremely unpopular with most clans except the Marehan. Barre had relied on his Marehan clan to rule, but his main power base until the late 1980s had been the army, which had been dominated by the Ogadens. Under Barre in the late 1980s, conditions of near-anarchy existed side by side with a dictatorship, and while the government was unable to exercise power over much of the country, Barre ruled the areas he could reach with an iron hand. Operating through the Somali Socialist Revolutionary Party, established in 1976 with Soviet and East German help, Barre sought to maintain an autocratic centralized system which was alien to the Somali society. with its ever-splitting clans, sub-clans and lineages. For many years, Barre had often pitted one clan or sub-clan block against another, in order to maintain political power, and used political or economic rewards to appease a clan or sub-clan that was discontented. He frequently shuffled his ministers, partly as a way of reasserting his leadership and partly to balance clan and lineage interests. Competition for power and wealth in the 1980s often took the form of shifting alliances and conflicts between clans, sub-clans and lineages.

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Barre’s immediate successor, Ali Mahdi, took office when clan rivalry was so strong that there appeared to be little common ground between the major clan families. Mahdi’s interim government was dominated by the Hawiye, although the Ogadens and the Issaqs were also given important cabinet posts; but this was a cabinet that did not function because of clan conflicts. Mahdi pledged in early 1991 to maintain a broad-based government of national reconciliation and a multi-party system, but persistent political squabbles and clan imperatives prevented the realisation of these objectives. Moreover, Mahdi’s own Hawiye clan family was bitterly split between the pro-Aideed and pro-Mahdi clans. This created a situation similar to what Thomas Hobbes described as the war of all against all.

THE CIVIL WAR AND ANARCHY In International Relations textbooks, war and anarchy are considered normal features of international society in which they play roles that are very different from those they perform within states. For example, anarchy is conceived as a defining characteristic of international society and its existence merely implies the absence of a centralized political authority rather than chaos. It is considered a natural consequence of the recognition of state sovereignty. However, within a state anarchy denotes the breakdown of law and order, and has the potential to undermine a state’s sovereignty. The same could be said of war which is often seen as a recurring feature and an important determinant of the nature and shape of the international system. As Hedley Bull has argued, it is war, and the threat of war, that determine the rules and shape of international society.9 However, within a state war can easily hamper the state’s ability to exercise its responsibilities in international society. Indeed, the civil war and anarchy in Somalia, which have been exacerbated by international factors, especially the supply of weapons, have prevented Somalia from functioning as a normal state. Nonetheless, in this Chapter 1 argue that anarchy has not meant the total absence of authority in Somalia. I posit that anarchy has existed side by side with some of form of governance. For example, at the micro-level, clans have continued to apply their age-old rules to control some of their members. In some parts of Mogadishu and other areas of eastern Somalia, for example, faction leaders have established some form of Islamic law. Anarchy in Somalia has to be understood in terms of the readiness of some groups to use force, which has been part and parcel of the Somali political landscape since Siad Barre took power through a military coup in 1969. Since Barre had maintained an autocratic system of government, it

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was not surprising that the change from his régime to Ali Mahdi’s interim government was possible through military power rather than the ballot box. And Mahdi was prevented from establishing effective rule by armed militias. The continuing use of force by armed factions is a further indication of the close connection between the arms and political power in Somalia. Military and quasi-military forces have had such a strong influence on Somali politics, that it is sometimes difficult to draw a line between military and civilian participants in the political process. Ali Mahdi is a civilian, but for the brief period in which he was interim President he was essentially head of a para-military group. Barre was an army general, but by l976 he was ruling through a ‘civilian’ political party, the SSRP, in which the military personnel exercised enormous power. For many years, the Somali military was affected by lineage and clan rivalry, but this did not become a serious problem until the late 1980s. From 1960, various governments had made efforts to have balanced clan representation in the army. This practice was adhered to in the earlier years of Barre’s rule, but in due course, preference was given to the Marehan, Ogaden and Dolbahante clans in the recruitment of the officer corps. Barre increased the size of the armed forces rapidly in the 1970s in anticipation of a war with Ethiopia. For example, between 1973 and 1976 Somalia’s army increased from 13 500 to 25 000 troops.10 Moreover, by 1976 Somalia was estimated to have more than 250 tanks, more than 300 armoured personnel carriers, and over 52 fighter planes. However, after defeat in the 1977 Ogaden War, the Somali army started to experience some organizational problems. As a result of wartime losses and owing to the increase in the size of the army, discipline, even among senior officers, deteriorated. This problem became obvious in the late 1980s as feuding between rival generals and their clans hampered the army’s ability to fight the rebels. The Barre army’s weaknesses in the war against the rebels also stemmed from disagreements among senior officers and political manoeuvres in Mogadishu. The army’s problems were exacerbated by the fact that, in the 1980s, recruitment was done on clan lines with new recruits being put into units from their own areas and under officers from their own clans. This was done especially by the Ogaden, Marehan, Hawiye and Majerteen clans. As a result, by the late 1980s there was no clear difference between regular army units and clan militias in Somalia. As factionalism and lineage competition permeated the military, Barre increasingly came to rely heavily on the 77th sector of the army, the best-equipped and most efficient unit which, by the late 1980s, was commanded by his son, General Maslah Mohammed Siad, who was also the Chief of Staff.

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In the immediate post-Barre Somalia, there was no national army, thanks to factional fighting. The post-Barre government and claimants to power faced the daunting task of creating a totally new army out of the clan militias, but by 1997 this had not happened. Attempts were made in January 1991 by a group of respected and retired generals to establish a committee which would try to restore the status of the army as a professional body. The big question was how to integrate former guerillas with their former enemies, while at the same time stressing national loyalty as opposed to clan loyalty. As expected, this effort failed. Under Barre, the civil war had stemmed from a combination of factors: clan rivalries and differences, nepotism, corruption in high places, the uneven distribution of national resources and Barre’s dictatorial rule. There was also an increasing perception that Barre had neither the capability nor the vision to resolve the country’s crises. During the period of intense fighting in the late 1980s, Barre’s security forces had dealt with rebels and their supporters ruthlessly. Those targeted in the late 1980s were members of the Issaq clan and their allies. On several occasions, the armed forces went on the rampage, bombing civilian targets, planting land-mines, poisoning wells and sometimes deliberately destroying livestock. Rather than discouraging support for the insurgency, Barre’s brutality merely created conditions for the emergency of still more rebel movements. By the end of 1989, most of the big clans had established their own factions or resistance groups. The most prominent anti-Barre resistance groups included the Issaqdominated Somali National Movement (SNM), which bore the brunt of the assault on the Barre government, especially in 1988; the Hawiye-based United Somali Congress (USC); and the Ogaden-based Somali Patriotic Movement (SPM). The Hawiye, the largest clan in Somalia, played virtually no role in the struggle against Barre until late 1990. The Gadabursi clan in November 1989 had formed the Somali Democratic Alliance (SDA), while the Majerteen-based Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF), which was established in the late 1970s, was virtually moribund by the late 1980s; but it was revived shortly before Barre’s fall from power. The strengths of these groups were always difficult to gauge, largely because the political situation in Somalia was extremely volatile.11 Barre’s defeat in late January 1991 was expected to open the way for a reconstruction of Somalia, but instead it merely accelerated the disintegration of the country. Several reasons could be given for this disintegration. First, the anti-Barre opposition forces, which were based on clans, had only one thing in common: the defeat of Barre. Beyond that, they had no common ground and virtually hated each other as much as they did Barre. Second, when Barre

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was overthrown, power was immediately assumed by the Hawiye, a clan which played a relatively smaller role in the anti-Barre struggle until a few months before his fall. As it turned out, clan conflicts ensured that the transition to a post-Barre government would not take place smoothly. The two major protagonists, Mohammed Farah Aideed and Ali Mahdi, first split the USC into rival factions. Then, in the next two years, they each sought to form a national alliance in their struggle for the presidency, and in the process their fighting made Somalia more ungovernable. By 1992, Somalia had disintegrated into such anarchy that the international community had to step in to try to help those who were facing death from starvation, disease and war.

THE UN AND THE SOMALI FACTIONS A discussion of Somalia as a militarized state cannot proceed without reference to the three UN-sanctioned operations: the first UN Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM I) of 1992; the US-led Unified Task Force (UNITAF) from December 1992 to May 1993; and UNOSOM II from May 1993 to March 1995. UNITAF and UNOSOM II were the best-equipped military units in Somalia during their tenure. The UN first sent in a traditional peacekeeping operation in mid-1992, UNOSOM I, but some political factions, which were better armed than the peacekeepers, prevented it from being deployed. And, in the meantime, Somalis were dying in large numbers. It was then that the UN decided it was time to try to establish some form of order and it approved the deployment of UNITAF in December 1992. Between 1993 and 1995, UNOSOM II sought to end chaos and re-establish public institutions, but it failed to achieve its objectives for a number of reasons: it became a combatant and lost its neutrality; it was unable to disarm the factions; and it was unable to persuade the factions to agree to a peace formula. As already indicated, Somalia’s clans play vital roles in public life, but one of the main problems with the UN involvement was that, like earlier efforts by European colonial powers and the Barre government to try to control the Somalis, it failed to tap into clan rule. British and Italian colonial authorities, in varying degrees, sought to establish centrally-controlled administrative units in British Somaliland and Italian Somalia, respectively.12 Indeed, it could be argued that colonialism tried to erode the social fabric which had previously maintained order in a decentralized society, but it was unsuccessful. And for more than two decades in the post-independence era, Siad Barre tried in vain to ban clanism. It was

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in fact the tenacity of the Somali clan structure and the factions which it produced that brought down Barre’s government. While the UN made some efforts to involve some clan elders and leaders of the political factions in attempts to rebuild the Somali state, this was not systematic. Indeed, one of the reasons why anarchy has persisted in Somalia is that the form of governance that exists or has been attempted has not corresponded to the Somali clan structure. Moreover, the use of force by the UN troops to try to obtain Somali compliance led to an atmosphere of confrontation and legitimized the use of force by the Somali militias against anyone else. Eventually, the UN Somali operation came to be dominated by military imperatives, and this, in turn, forced Somali clans to consolidate their military formations. The UN military failure was followed by too little reconstruction of authority being done too late to be sustainable. The UNOSOM II, which was deployed in May 1993, was plagued by numerous problems from the start. It was the first enforcement operation in UN history to be commanded and directed by the UN Secretary-General. Indeed, it looked as if Somalia had ‘become the testing ground for new peacekeeping and peacemaking ideas for the United Nations’.13 The then UN Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros Ghali, who had a long-standing interest in the country, was particularly keen to send an intervention force to Somalia. This intervention was seen as an experiment in several ways: it was the first time in UN history that an enforcement operation had been directed and commanded by the Secretariat; it was also the first time that the UN had taken over the entire responsibility of running a sovereign state; and, finally, it was the first time that a UN peace-enforcement operation had been given the enormous task of providing relief supplies, undertaking political reconciliation and rebuilding a collapsed state. By the time UNOSOM II was withdrawn from Somalia in March 1995, it had not established public institutions and a properly constituted government. In terms of its mandate and objectives, UNOSOM II was a total failure. The two-year UN intervention, which cost over US$ 4 billion, did not resolve Somalia’s political, economic and security problems. Indeed, by the end of 1994 it had become clear that it would make more sense to withdraw UNOSOM II than to maintain it. There is no doubt that the inability of UNOSOM II to reconstruct the Somali institutions and bring about political reconciliation could be described as a failure. The operation was characterized by the use of force against one of the Somali factions, namely Aideed’s group, but there appeared to be no political objective for the exercise of force. UNOSOM II was also characterized by public wrangles among troop-contributing countries, which resulted in some

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commanders referring UN orders back to their national capitals before acting on them. To explain UNOSOM’s failure, it is necessary to look at three factors: the UN Security Council mandate; relations among the countries that contributed troops; and the UN Secretary-General’s role. UNOSOM’s failure was basically an inability to mount a collective action because of conflicting national interests. Boutros Boutros Ghali was undoubtedly the architect of UNOSOM II, and his efforts to assemble it underlined not only his ambition to direct and command an enforcement operation, but also a blurring of the demarcation line between the responsibilities of the SecretaryGeneral and those of the Security Council. Boutros Ghali worked hard not only to have an enforcement operation sent to Somalia, but he was also determined to direct and command it. The first UN operation in Somalia, UNOSOM I, failed dismally. The Security Council had approved 500 troops (later increased to 3500) in mid-1992 for the operation, but they were not deployed, partly because of opposition from some warlords and merchants who wanted to continue looting and maintaining ‘protection’ rackets. During this period, Boutros Ghali was eager to carry out a major military intervention to demonstrate to Western countries that the UN needed a rapid deployment force. However, his first Special Representative to Somalia, Mohamed Sahnoun, an Algerian diplomat, argued that an agreement with faction leaders and clan elders was needed before such deployment. Sahnoun, who criticized UN delays and bureaucratic obfuscation publicly, resigned in October 1992 and was replaced by Ismat Kittani, an Iraqi (Kurdish) diplomat.14 Kittani subsequently prepared a detailed report on UNOSOM I’s problems, and this report provided the rationale for Boutros Ghali’s decision in late November 1992 to approach President George Bush, then still in office, and seek an expanded military presence. For reasons which suited both Bush and Boutros-Ghali, Bush immediately offered to commit about 24 000 troops to Somalia, at an estimated cost of $450 million. The American-led Unified Task Force (UNITAF) was authorized by the Security Council Resolution 794 of 3 December 1992, and its mandate was to use all measures necessary to establish a secure environment for humanitarian relief operations; that is, to stop organized militias and bandits from looting convoys of relief supplies and to ensure the ceasefires were observed. UNITAF, with more than 37 000 troops from over 20 countries, opened supply routes. There was a hint of tension between the UN SecretaryGeneral and the US administration when Boutros Ghali demanded that UNITAF should disarm the Somali militias and factions in order to create a safe environment for the delivery of humanitarian supplies, but the

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American commander refused. In fact, UNITAF was based on a very narrow definition of security, and in operational terms it was limited to only 40 per cent of the territory. At the time of UNOSOM II’s takeover from UNITAF in May 1993, the activities of clan-based militias had been contained, and humanitarian assistance was reaching those who needed it, but serious security problems remained because of the availability of large quantities of arms, the lack of state structures, and chronic political power struggles. These problems called for a thorough understanding of the Somali political terrain and very meticulous planning. However, the US had worked out a plan to leave Somalia even before its troops were deployed in December 1992. This had to do with several factors: the low priority of Somalia; the memories of Vietnam and Lebanon; and the need to account to a vocal domestic constituency. The UN Secretariat was apparently more interested in getting into Somalia than in providing a workable timetable, in addition to very clear and achievable goals. As a result the mission was of an indefinite duration, renewable every six months. Given the fact that Somalia was of low strategic value to the great powers at this particular time, Boutros-Ghali was taking a big risk. UNOSOM II was also the first operation under Chapter VII of the UN Charter to be directed by the Secretary-General. Unlike traditional peacekeeping operations which use force only in self-defence, UNOSOM II had authority to use force to pursue UN objectives. It was seen as an appropriate response to Somalia where clan conflict and militarized political factions had prevented the establishment of a national government since the fall of former dictator Siad Barre in January 1991.15 Boutros Ghali saw an opportunity to test his new ideas about peacemaking and peace enforcement.16 The militias’ challenge to UN authority and the massive response by UNOSOM II tarnished the image of the UN Secretary-General’s office. This confrontation was not only an inauspicious sign that the task of reconstructing Somalia would be impossible under the UN, but it also demonstrated that Boutros Ghali had not won the confidence of the Somali clans. Indeed, from mid-1993 the UN Secretary-General, who is expected to remain neutral in order to deal with all sides in a conflict, was perceived by many Somalis as supporting the anti-Aideed forces. In other words, he was seen as an enemy of Aideed’s Habr Gedir clan and its allies. This perception seriously damaged the credibility of the UN and played a significant role in UNOSOM II’s failure. The lesson the UN ought to have learnt from this episode is that the Secretary-General should not direct and command an enforcement operation. Giandomenico Picco, a former UN Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs, has argued that the ‘institution of

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the Secretary-General is inherently inappropriate to manage the use of force’ because it ‘does not have the tools’ to do so.17 Picco, like many other commentators, believes that by involving himself in the use of force, the Secretary-General compromises the impartiality critical to his capacity as a negotiator. Boutros Ghali admitted in January 1995 that ‘neither the Security Council nor the Secretary-General at present has the capacity to deploy, direct, command and control operations for this purpose.’18 The second problem associated with Boutros Ghali in Somalia was that he has been involved in the country for many years and has come to be identified more closely with some clans than with others. For instance, as Egypt’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs in 1991, Boutros Ghali was involved, with other leaders in the region, in trying to persuade Aideed to recognise his rival, Ali Mahdi, as the legitimate Somali President. Partly for this reason, and partly because of the events of mid-1993, Aideed’s supporters would not accept a UN operation under Boutros Ghali’s command as neutral. Another factor that tarnished the image of the UN in Somalia was the gap between UNOSOM II’s stated goals and its activities. Efforts by UNOSOM II to retaliate against Aideed’s forces, the decision to offer a reward for anyone with information leading to his arrest and the frequent military clashes that caused the deaths of hundreds of Somalis and some peacekeepers gave the impression that UNOSOM II was operating outside its mandate. Between June and September 1993, UNOSOM II’s military objectives overshadowed its political and humanitarian goals. Had the American-led UNITAF disarmed Somali factions and freelance militias earlier, UNOSOM II’s task would have been much easier. However, the efforts by the Americans and the UN to disarm and punish Aideed’s faction, the Somali National Alliance (SNA), under UNOSOM II from June 1993, caused disquiet in some countries. Various African and Islamic countries expressed reservations about UNOSOM II’s objectives and the American role in it. Clashes between UNOSOM II and SNA supporters from 5 June to 5 September 1993 resulted in the death of 46 UN troops and more than 300 Somalis (including women and children). In subsequent months, military objectives overshadowed political and humanitarian goals. In its Resolution 837 of 6 June 1993, the Security Council reaffirmed UNOSOM II’s mandate to use all necessary measures to implement agreements reached, and to arrest, detain, try and punish those who attempted to frustrate UN aims. Hence the continued search for Aideed. When the UN Security Council approved UNOSOM II in early 1993, critics had warned that unless the troops exercised force carefully, they could find themselves enmeshed in clan politics. The Security Council

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Resolution 814 of 26 March 1993 stipulated that the operation’s objectives were: political reconciliation, economic and social reconstruction, and disarmament. The resolution also requested UNOSOM II ‘to assume responsibility for the consolidation, expansion and maintenance of a secure environment throughout Somalial’.19 However, by mid-1993, there were serious disagreements over the mandate, control and style of UNOSOM II. This controversy stemmed from the nature of UNOSOM II’s command structure and the divisions among the states which contributed contingents to the operation. These factors, and the Secretary-General’s determination to direct the operation, are crucial to understanding UNOSOM II’s failure to attain its goals. Comprising more than 33 000 troops and costing $1.55 bn annually, UNOSOM II was the biggest and most expensive peacekeeping operation in UN history.20 However, the operation’s mandate soon presented a dilemma. UNOSOM II needed to demonstrate force to compel the Somali factions to observe the ceasefires and other agreements; but, it also had to refrain from exercising too much power to avoid alienating the Somali populace. With the expanded mandate, a confrontation between UNOSOM II and Somali factions was inevitable, because warlords and faction leaders who felt that centrally-imposed order in the country was disadvantageous to them did not want to cooperate with UNOSOM II. It was partly for this reason that UNOSOM II clashed with supporters of Aideed.21 The first clash occurred on 5 June 1993, when the UN claimed that militias linked with the SNA were responsible for killing 24 Pakistani peacekeepers. From that moment, the UN sought retaliation against Aideed’s forces, and, as had been feared, UNOSOM II increasingly appeared as a part of the problem rather than the solution. In subsequent months, UNOSOM II overemphasised military activities which only served to distort the UN mission.22 The focus on military activities also raised questions about who was giving the orders, and this problem was exacerbated by the national interests and ambitions of some of the countries that contributed troops to UNOSOM II. For example, due to an element of competition between the UN and the United States about who should take credit for restoring order in Somalia, the Americans had come to dominate the UNOSOM II command. However, owing to its long association with Somalia and the fact that it contributed a contingent of 2660 – the third-largest after Pakistan23 and the United States – Italy felt it should have a greater say in the running of UNOSOM II. In fact, Italy’s Defence Minister, Fabio Fabbri, requested representation in the UNOSOM II command structure, but the request

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was refused.24 The American dominance of the UNOSOM II command structure partly stemmed from the fact that it contributed a contingent of 4600 (including 2900 logistics elements) to the operation. The UNOSOM II first commander, General Cevik Bir, was from Turkey, but he was nominated by the US; his deputy, Major General Thomas Montgomery was American, as was the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative, Admiral Jonathan Howe. Montgomery was also tactical commander of the l700-strong American Quick Reaction Force which was equipped with Cobra and Black Hawk helicopter gunships. It was this unit which carried out strikes against the Somali militias and suspected Aideed supporters. Whether the UN was aware of it or not, its military activities from mid1993 convinced some Somali clan leaders that the Americans and the UN favoured Mahdi, Aideed’s rival. In fact, some faction leaders argued that the United States and Boutros-Ghali’s opposition to Aideed stemmed from the fact that they had supported Barre in the 1980s. The US had negotiated access to Somalia’s military facilities for the Rapid Deployment Force in 1980, and for much of the decade Washington provided Barre’s government with military and economic assistance. During this period, Boutros Ghali was close to the Barre régime because Somalia was one of the three Arab League members (along with Oman and Sudan) that supported the 1978 Camp David Accords and the 1979 Egyptian–Israeli peace treaty. In 1993, Aideed’s supporters argued that the US and Boutros Ghali were now supporting a group identified with the former dictator because Barre’s sonin-law General ‘Morgan’ was allied with Mahdi and opposed to Aideed. They concluded, therefore, that the Americans, and Boutros Ghali’s partisan role in Somalia had not changed. As the cost of military activities soared, critics, even within the UN itself, argued that a fixation on Aideed was dragging the UN into Somali clan politics. A former UN Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, Jan Eliasson, told the UN Economic and Social Council in Geneva on 21 July 1993 that of the $166 million the UN had earmarked for humanitarian assistance, only 15 per cent had been provided. He said the international community was ‘spending ten dollars on military protection for every dollar of humanitarian assistance’.25 Eliasson, who shared supervision of UNOSOM II with the then Undersecretary General for Peacekeeping Operations, and now Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, warned that ‘unless sufficient funds are provided for rehabilitation activities, there is a risk that the military operation can be perceived as an end in itself’.26 One of the weaknesses of UNOSOM II was that many troop-contributing countries pursued different goals, were unwilling to allow the UN commander

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full control over their forces, and were unhappy with the way the operation was organized. The public disagreements among these countries appeared to reduce the operation’s effectiveness, and had the potential to throw future UN peace enforcement into doubt. For example, Italy, which had kept contacts with both Aideed and Mahdi from mid-1992, was reluctant to attack Aideed’s forces. In fact, the Italian contingent believed that it could disarm Aideed’s faction through negotiation rather than force. However, the UN was upset when the Italian contingent, early in July 1993, negotiated the return of a checkpoint which it had lost to Aideed’s forces. The UN had wanted to use the incident to punish Aideed. At the same time, the Italians were furious when the UN and the Americans carried out an attack on an Aideed-controlled villa on 12 July 1993 without informing them in advance. That same day the Italian Defence Minister called for the suspension of UN combat operations in Somalia in order to reduce tension, renew dialogue and review UNOSOM II’s mission.27 Other participants in UNOSOM II were also unhappy about their lack of a role in the overall UNOSOM II command structure. As a result, they were reluctant to obey UN orders without reference to their own governments. Contingents from Islamic countries were also uncomfortable with the massive American strikes against innocent people in a fellow Muslim country. France, with a contingent of 1170 and a thorough knowledge of the region as an ex-colonial power in neighbouring Djibouti, was unhappy that it was not represented in the UNOSOM II command structure. Paris had persevered in UNOSOM partly in the hope that BoutrosGhali’s next special representative to Somalia would be French, but when this appeared unlikely, Defence Minister François Léotard announced in late August 1993 that French troops would return home by the end of January 1994. The excessive use of force by the UN and the Americans did not achieve the acquiescence of the Somali factions or the humanitarian and political goals which UNOSOM II was set up to attain. Instead, force begot force. Many Somalis who had previously welcomed the UN military presence now complained of massive human-rights abuses by the UN. Although UNOSOM II made the delivery of humanitarian assistance possible, the humanitarian issue had become less critical by early 1993 as Somalis had started growing and harvesting their own crops. The most important goals were national reconciliation and reconstruction, but the UN operation did not have many people who were both knowledgeable about Somalia and experienced in establishing democracy and public institutions out of an anarchic situation. UNOSOM II was withdrawn in March 1995, leaving the Somali warlords and faction leaders as divided as they had been at the beginning of the UN operation.28

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FUTURE PROSPECTS Following the withdrawal of the UN forces there have been some changes in Somalia, but the prospects for peace and the serious reconstruction of the state remain bleak. Mohammed Farah Aideed, previously considered a stumbling-block to peace, fell out with his former financier, Osman Ato, in mid-1995. In August 1996, Ato’s fighters killed Aideed in battle, and although some faction leaders were quick to conclude that this would enable them to unite, they were wrong. Aideed’s son, Hussein Aideed, an American citizen, took over the leadership of the SNA, and its relationships with other factions remain as they were under Farah Aideed. Hussein inherited a ‘government’ that was clumsily crafted by his father in June 1995. Ali Mahdi and other experienced political players have made overtures to Hussein, but they all would like to achieve unity on their own terms. Faction and clan leaders view politics in zero-sum terms. As has been the case since the early 1990s, by late 1997 Somalia remained in anarchic conditions, with armed militias, faction leaders and clan elders unable to achieve the compromise necessary to bring about an effective national government. Given the fluidity of the international arms market, it could be assumed that Somalia’s political players will continue to obtain the quantity of weapons they need. This would appear to make the prospects of achieving peace more remote. The fact that the international community has virtually forgotten Somalia should serve as a lesson to the Somali faction leaders that they cannot expect international goodwill to last far ever. However, it has made the political conditions extremely difficult for those who are not interested in participating in factional fighting. Perhaps one way out of this imbroglio is for the Somali political leaders to aim not for a unitary system, but for a federal state based on clans.

Notes 1. 2. 3.

For a detailed examination of both forms of sovereignty, see, for example, Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-states: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambrdige: Cambridge University Press, 1990). For one of the best analyses of Somali society, see I.M. Lewis, A Modern History of Somalia: Nation and State in the Horn of Africa (London: Longman, 1980). Some of these points are raised in Samuel M. Makinda, Security in the Horn of Africa, Adelphi Paper no. 269 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1992), chapter 2.

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12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

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Clan Conflict and Factionalism in Somalia I.M. Lewis, ‘The Ogaden and the Fragility of Somali Segmentary Nationalism’, African Affairs, vol. 88, no. 354, October 1989, p. 573. See, for instance, Michael Dunn, ‘Power Struggle in Somalia’, Defence and Foreign Affairs, December 1986, p. 31. For an analysis of some these issues, see, for example, Samuel M. Makinda, ‘Politics and Clan Rivalry in Somalia’, Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 26, no. 1, March 1991, pp. 111–26. See for instance, Strategic Survey 1989–1990 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1990), pp. 85–8. For a well-informed discussion of the civil war in Somalia during the Barre era, see, for instance, a two-part special report, ‘Somalia: Political and Military Outlook’, The Indian Ocean Newsletter, 24 March 1990 and 7 April 1990. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (London: Macmillan, 1995), 2nd edn, p. 181. See, for instance, The Military Balance 1972–1973 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1972), p. 39; and The Military Balance 1976–1977 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1976), p. 44. For a useful analysis of the anti-Barre resistance forces, see Daniel Compagnon, ‘The Somali Opposition Fronts: Some Questions and Comments’, Horn of Africa, vol. XIII, nos. 1, 2, April–June 1990, pp. 29 –54. For one of the best sources on Somalia’s history, see I.M. Lewis, A Modern History of Somalia: Nation and State in the Horn of Africa (London: Longman, 1980). Samuel M. Makinda, Seeking Peace From Chaos: Humanitarian Intervention in Somalia (Boulder, Col.: Lynne Rienner, 1993), p. 76. For an insider’s examination of these issues, see, for example, Mohamed Sahnoun, Somalia: The Missed Opportunities (Washington, DC: The US Institute of Peace, 1994). Siad Barre, who ruled Somalia with an iron hand from October 1969 to January 1991, was responsible for most of the country’s problems. See, for instance, Makinda, Seeking Peace From Chaos, op. cit., chapter 2. For Boutros-Ghali’s ideas on a rapid deployment force for the UN, see his paper, An Agenda for Peace (New York: United Nations, 1992). Giandomenico Picco, ‘The UN and the Use of Force: Leave the SecretaryGeneral Out of It’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 73, no. 5, September/October 1994, p. 15. See Boutros Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace 1995 (New York: United Nations, 1995), para. 77. See UN Security Council Resolution 814 of 26 March 1993. By August 1993, a total of 24 165 UN troops from 25 countries had been deployed. However, when all the troops from the 28 countries which pledged contributions (including the US Quick Reaction Force and 4875 troops from India) are in place by early October 1993, the total deployment will be 33 369. In late August 1993, the US despatched a contingent of about 400 special forces to Somalia. The SNA, which was established in August 1992, is a multi-clan grouping consisting of about five factions.

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23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

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For insightful and very interesting accounts of the UN involvement in Somalia, see, for example, Walter Clarke and Jeffrey Herbst (eds), Learning From Somalia: The Lessons of Armed Humanitarian Intervention (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1997). Pakistan had the largest contingent of about 5 000 troops in UNOSOM II. Italy, a former colonial power in southern Somalia, has wide knowledge of the country and over the years it has had larger economic interests there than any other Western power. In fact, after the US and other Western nations abandoned Somalia in the late 1980s, Italy continued working with Somalis. See Africa Confidential, vol, 34, no. 15, 30 July 1993, p. 2, and The Indian Ocean Newsletter, 31 July 1993, p. 2. Africa Confidential, vol. 34, no. 15, 30 July 1993, p. 2. For another insider’s explanation of these issues, see Jonathan T. Howe, ‘Somalia: Learning the Right Lessons’, Washington Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 3, Summer, 1995, pp. 49– 62. For a very good discussion of the lessons from the Somalia debacle, see Thomas G. Weiss, ‘Overcoming the Somalia Syndrome – “Operation Rekindle Hope?” ’, Global Governance, vol. 1, no. 2, May–August 1995, pp. 171–87. See also Walter Clarke and Jeffrey Herbst, ‘Somalia and the Future of Humanitarian Intervention’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 75, no. 2, March/April 1996, pp. 70–85.

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8 Warlordism and Political Violence in Jammu and Kashmir, 1988–97: Gun Rule? Alexander Evans INTRODUCTION After decades of focusing on nuclear threats, the post-Cold War era has seen a new awareness of conventional weapons, and in particular light weapons. Allowing for the fact that intra-state wars have prevailed more than inter-state ones since 1945, South Asia illustrates the high levels of internal violence that characterize contemporary conflict. As a region it is increasingly weapons rich, both in terms of small arms as well as hi-tech systems.1 It is the proliferation of small arms and light weapons above all that creates an environment ripe for criminal and political violence. The two, of course, are not as distinct from each other as they might at first appear. War has historically been about personal gain (such as the rapine and looting that constituted much of the ‘reward’ of the individual footsoldier in the Middle-Ages), and violent crime has often been virtually indistinguishable from acts of war.2 The distinction has been maintained and defended mainly for legalistic reasons. War and criminal violence are differentiated by the state; the former could be termed state-sanctioned criminality, the latter state-vilified violence. War cements the authority of the state, for it has traditionally been the state in the post-Westphalian age that has been authorized to wage war. Criminal violence, on the other hand, subverts the authority of the state, even when it may seem indistinguishable from organized state violence.

POLITICAL VIOLENCE IN JAMMU AND KASHMIR The violence in Kashmir since 1988 is a useful lens with which to examine the utility of warlordism and weapons-states as concepts. Following on 140

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from the work of Rich and Stubbs3 in which they suggest that a fullydeveloped understanding of post-colonial state-building is not possible without an appreciation of the impact of counter-insurgency on those states, this chapter seeks to show how counter-insurgency in India has assisted state-building at a national level while further alienating and dividing the people of Jammu and Kashmir. As an example of the contrary results of counter-insurgency, Kashmir neatly demonstrates how initial state policies towards insurgencies can contribute to a lessening of state authority in the periphery while strengthening a national identity. Hopefully such theorising and associated case-studies can lift security studies from the realm of mere policy advice, as Korany critiqued it back in the mid-1980s.4 The Kashmir example is of interest for two further reasons. It was very much a post-Cold War insurgency (partially provoked by the perceptions of secessionist opportunity raised by the end of the Soviet Empire) directed against a postcolonial state; secondly, the Indian state initially deployed a military response to the insurgency, before switching in 1992/3 to a more holistic, political strategy though one that still encompassed force. The consequences of the Kashmir insurgency, though still undecided, may add to our understanding of the anxieties of contemporary weapons states. Economic liberalization is now sweeping the world; in many countries state controls are being discredited, if not actively rolled back. This adds to the pressure on state budgets in what was the Third World, because an already limited tax-base along with the end of Cold-War superpower subsidies has left many states with a strong need to cut spending. Yet military spending in zones of war like South Asia and the Middle East, and zones of uncertainty like East Asia, remains extremely high. This may add to the financial pressure for military solutions to sub-state challenges for, as Rich and Stubbs point out, political solutions are expensive.5 Not only that, they are frequently unpredictable in their outcome. Seldom, though, do military solutions work; they frequently deepen civil alienation and increase the problems of governance. Economic liberalization adds yet another dimension, as states eagerly hunt for foreign direct investment issues of political risk can become thoroughly damaging.6 To understand current conflict in South Asia one must appreciate the significance of 1947, not taken as a date signifying independence from British imperial rule but as a symptom of the failure of decolonization to successfully define and establish a postcolonial South Asian state structure. Fifty years ago both India and Pakistan were born as modern states; and both immediately competed for overlapping territory, not only in

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Kashmir but elsewhere.7 Both were based on principles that rendered the other state project suspect. India was supposed to be the successor state to the British Raj – a secular, pluralistic democracy, capable of representing not just Hindus but all the religious and cultural communities within her borders. Pakistan, its very name taken from states (for example, the K is for Kashmir), was established as a confessional state which could represent and govern South Asian Moslems. As Barry Buzan puts it, ‘[India and Pakistan’s] organizing principles pose a permanent threat to each other; a threat amplified by the fact that both states are politically vulnerable’.8 JAMMU AND KASHMIR: 1900–639 In 1947 Jammu and Kashmir, Maharajah Hari Singh ruled over the Princely state under the protection of the British. He was a Hindu ruling a majority Moslem state in which an established Hindu Pandit minority provided the political and administrative élite. From the early 1900s political mobilization had begun to seep through the state, provoked by the Hindu reformist movement in India as a whole, which prompted the development of small, élite Hindu groupings like the Yuvak Sabah and the Dogra Sabah. More general activism was sparked by labour unrest in a Kashmiri Silk factory in 1924, which led to a formal memorandum of complaint by Muslim community leaders over discrimination, extortionate taxation and the lack of political representation. In 1931 another crisis struck as it was alleged that the Maharaja’s government had disrupted Muslim worship and insulted the Koran, which led to widespread protest which continued as a particularly trenchant critic of the Maharaja was prosecuted for inciting violent opposition to the Maharaja’s rule. On 13 July 1931 a demonstration in support of the defendant was fired upon by state police, killing 22 protesters and one policeman. Continuing opposition led to an independent commission and the first state constitution, which was running by 1934. Two years previously a political opposition party, the Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference, had begun to meet. This party found a toehold in the small amount of democracy permitted by the 1934 constitution, and campaigned for further reform. Growing contact with the Indian National Congress saw the influence of secular ideals, and the Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference was dissolved to be replaced with the Jammu and Kashmir National Conference in 1939. Led by the charismatic Sheikh Abdullah, the National Conference (NC) would dominate politics in Kashmir until the early 1980s. In 1939 and 1944 there were further political reforms, while instances

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of repression continued. By 1946 a ‘Quit Kashmir’ movement had arisen similar to the ‘Quit India’ movement against the British. The future of Jammu and Kashmir in 1947 thus remained undecided. Like all the princely states in which each ruler had three theoretical choices, the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir could either accede to India or Pakistan, or (technically) choose independence. This swiftly turned to two real options for most states, Pakistan or India, a choice severely limited by location and political realism. But as 15 August 1947 marked the birth of India and Pakistan, Kashmir was still deciding on its parent, and the choice was the Maharaja’s to make. Tribals aided by Pakistan invaded Jammu and Kashmir (or rebelled against the autocratic Maharajah according to the Pakistani line) on 22–23 October 1947.10 For India, this was an example of Pakistani deviousness, and according to the one version (supported by India) this soon led to the Maharajah signing a document of accession and requesting Indian military assistance to quell this intrusion. An alternative version (supported by Pakistan) plays more on the Indian role, claiming that to begin with a Moslem majority state ought to have gone to Pakistan on a confessional basis, and then that Indian military aid in October 1947 was actually military intervention because the document of accession was signed (if it was signed at all) after troops actually arrived in Srinagar, rendering it suspect. This debate continues to rage, paying salaries, printing books, and making as well as breaking careers.11 The ensuing war between India and Pakistan left a part of Jammu and Kashmir in Pakistani hands, and India with most of it (including both state capitals, Jammu and Srinagar, and the bulk of the state population). This situation has more or less remained to this day, and 50 years on, all the components are still in place – a massive deployment of forces, occasional skirmishes, and a UN Military Observer Group along the cease-fire line (now the Line of Actual Control – LAC). Arguments over the legitimate status of Jammu and Kashmir have also raged ever since. The Indians promised a referendum, then reneged, arguing that normal parliamentary elections in the state legitimized accession, and that anyway, there was no requirement for such a referendum in the first place. The Pakistanis, meanwhile, cried foul, arguing that Indians were afraid of an anti-Indian decision. Because Kashmir was strategically important due to its geographical position, and also a crucial symbol to both emerging successor states because of what it meant to shore up their uncertain and contested ideologies, Jammu and Kashmir became a battleground in 1947.12 Since the 1947 conflict, a war was fought in 1965 over the issue, which did little to

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alter the status quo, and the 1971 Bangladesh war saw battles again in the Kashmir sector. Following the heavy Pakistani defeat in the 1971 war, an agreement was concluded at Simla in 1972 in which both countries agreed to resolve the issue bilaterally without resort to armed force. India balked at a plebiscite after 1947 for various reasons; not least because there was the fear that Kashmiris would not choose to be Indians, but opted instead for accession to Pakistan. Later, a variation on the theme appeared: state elections had provided the substantive affirmation of Kashmiri desires, and the procedural device of a plebiscite was no longer required. Ever since the 1950s, democracy had found shallow foundations in Kashmir.13 Elections, when held, were invariably fraudulent – but generally because of the Kashmiri political élite, eager to maintain their position and encouraged to do so by the Indian government. Although the economic situation was far better in basic terms than many other parts of India – there was adequate food, for example – there was always room for complaint and charges of preferment. The first democratic phase did not last long: Sheikh Abdullah was removed from office and arrested on 8 August 1953 as the Indian government began to suspect his secular and nationalist credentials. His administration had not fostered pluralism, for although it enacted significant land reforms the National Conference ruled unopposed and no opposition had been permitted to arise.14 New Delhi, however, replaced Abdullah with Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad, a more pliant local politician, who proceeded to disburse lavish amounts of government funds while restricting civil liberties. Bakshi’s corrupt administration lasted until 1963 when he too was asked to step down. During this time an organization called the Plebiscite Front campaigned, mostly underground, for Kashmiri selfdetermination.

VIOLENT STIRRINGS 1963–88 There had been phases of protest, mainly political, but occasionally violent. In December 1963 an important incident took place. A relic, claimed to be a strand of Prophet’s beard, vanished from Hazratbal mosque. Major disturbances followed that seemed to show the Islamic fervour of Kashmiri Muslims in the Valley. Possibly motivated by this apparent Kashmiri sentiment Pakistan sought to infiltrate agents into the Valley in 1965 to forment rebellion under ‘Operation Gibraltar’. Despite war between India and Pakistan the Valley remained quiescent. Wider events again prompted local action: two activists based in Pakistan, Maqbool

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Butt and Amanullah Khan, formed the Jammu and Kashmir National Liberation Front (NLF) as the armed wing of a new party, inspired by the Algerian insurgency. From June 1966 he and several others had crossed into the Valley and spent several months preparing acts of sabotage. However, he was swiftly arrested following a shoot-out and was held in jain, prosecuted, and sentenced to death before dramatically escaping and returning to Pakistan. In 1970–71 there was again some violence, but restricted to a tiny group which called itself Al Fatah, organized by Gulan Rasool Zehangir. With around 40 active members and lacking in popular legitimacy the movement soon died out, but a spectacular hijacking of a Srinagar–Delhi plane in January 1971 returned Maqbool Butt to centre scene, as he met with the hijackers (and claimed responsibility) once they had diverted the plane to Lahore. In 1976 he once again returned covertly to the Valley, only to be arrested. Amanullah Khan moved to the United Kingdom, and the NLF translated itself into the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front. Back in the Valley, Sheikh Abdullah was allowed to operate politically in the early 1970s and soon negotiated his return to power in an agreement with Indira Gandhi, the then Prime Minister of India. This agreement, the Kashmir Accord (1975), again reiterated Kashmiri autonomy from New Delhi but lacked substance: the issue of self-determination was once again sidelined. Abdullah’s new administration though was soon stymied by protests about its authoritarian and nepotistic style, and by the turn of the decade a number of National Conference activists were deserting the party for alternative loyalties. In the 1980s a number of new factors emerged. Abdullah died in 1982, passing his mantle on to his son, Farooq, a less-adept politician who did not have his father’s authority. Increasing communal tensions had been evident in the state for some time, marking a departure from the tradition of tolerance that had marked earlier history. Explicitly Islamist and Hindu parties gained votes in the 1977 state elections, and there was a moderate amount of violence during the election period. Just as the 1930s had seen a new generation of university graduates returning to the state with new ideas, so the 1980s witnessed an expansion of higher education in the Valley. Some students who had been exposed to a wide range of ideas (including those of Islamist radicalism) sought to participate politically in the state. Almost all such students sought employment commensurate with their education, but an underdeveloped Kashmir Valley offered little opportunity bar government service, and the state administration was addled with nepotism and was perceived to discriminate against

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Muslims. The mass media was expanding too. More newspapers began to be published locally during the 1970s and 1980s, and Ganguly observes that television proliferated in Jammu and Kashmir during the 1980s.15 The 1980s also saw an increased level of central intervention by New Delhi in Kashmir affairs. Authoritarian rule was declared several times (1984, 1986) as elected state governments were removed on central authority. This reflected a wider pattern of central government intervention in India as a whole, as Congress (I) sought to retain control, but it left many Kashmiris doubting the ability of democracy to produce representative administrations that would be respected by New Delhi. The Kashmiri diaspora was also becoming more politically visible, and in the United Kingdom there was growing political activism. In February 1984 Ravindra Mahtre, an Indian diplomat, was kidnapped and subsequently murdered by an organization called the Kashmir Liberation Army,16 a small but influential core of activists in the UK campaigning politically for self-determination in the state. On a wider plane, the apparently unshakeable Soviet Empire was losing the Afghan War, and by 1989 the whole Empire was collapsing. Wide media coverage of these events prompted Kashmiris to consider their position, and encouraged radical action. Within India the legacy of secularism had begun to unwind, with disturbances in the Punjab and the 1984 Delhi riots. It appeared as if the time might be ripe for possible change. Elections in 1987 in the Indian-controlled sector were widely regarded as fraudulent, as a coalition of opposition parties, the Muslim United Front (MUF), were cheated of many seats. Although it is unlikely that the MUF would have won an absolute majority (although Gulam Nabi Fai, a Kashmiri diaspora lobbyist in Washington DC claims they would have won17 and Syed Ali Shah Geelani, then with the MUF, generously estimates they would have got 33 seats18), key MUF activists later formed the nucleus of the armed insurgency. Fed up with electoral politics, they sought alternative means to translate political demands into Indian government concessions. With a more mobilized and educated élite, and greater Islamist influences from Pakistan and Iran, political violence was on the horizon. The current insurgency still came as somewhat of a surprise to both the Indian and Pakistani governments and, indeed, to some Kashmiris themselves. Just before the 1965 war the Pakistani government had infiltrated forces into the Indian zone to promote insurgency; the response from locals was both direct and negative – no uprising took place. And while low-level violence had been a feature of Kashmiri politics for some time, the Indian

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administration did not expect the outburst of anger that occurred in 1988–90.

THE CURRENT PHASE OF VIOLENCE 19 In July 1988 a series of bombings hit Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir, marking the start of a campaign by the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF)20 for Kashmiri self-determination.21 While the insurgents were in the main young, ill-trained and had a profoundly short-term perspective (there was a wide belief that liberation could be gained in a matter of months), the symbolic significance of the violence was immense. Unlike previous waves of opposition to Indian rule, which had been subdued with a combination of local force and political concession, 1988 marked a departure. As Ajit Bhattarcharjea writes, ‘in contrast to 1947 and 1965 … [a]ll the Mujahideen did not come from outside [the Indian zone]’.22 Most of the militants were from the Kashmir Valley, and they covertly crossed into Pakistan to secure arms and training before returning to fight.23 During 1989 the situation deteriorated. As totalitarianism crumbled across the former Soviet Empire, the insurgency in Kashmir gained more support. Success appeared possible, in sharp contrast to Chaliand’s comment that ‘[o]utside Indochina, no Asian insurgency movement has to far been able to win out against an independent state … The same applies to Africa … UN support for these struggles merely proves the point’.24 Yet almost as soon as the insurgency had begun, one of its central weaknesses was underlined: division. In 1989 the JKLF split into Al Umer and the JKLF,25 while Pakistan and Jamaat-i-Islami (an Islamist party with wings in both Kashmir and Pakistan) supported a new organization, Hizbul Mujahadeen (HM), let by Ahsan Dar. Unlike the JKLF, which promoted a more secular, nationalist line, the more Islamist HM sought unification of the state with Pakistan. By the end of 1991, the JKLF had been superseded militarily by Hizbul Mujahadeen.26 The government of Pakistan, and particularly the intelligence and military élites within the Pakistani state, strongly influenced by the minority Islamist political party Jamaat-i-Islami, actively sought to change the status quo in Jammu and Kashmir – backing first of all the JKLF and then later HM because of Jamaat-i-Islami pressure. According to the US Department of State in 1994, there were ‘credible reports of support by the Government of Pakistan for Kashmir militants …’27 and ‘[s]ome support came from private organizations such as Jamaat-i-Islami’.28 Such

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a vast amount of evidence points to this support that official Pakistani government denials are unconvincing, if understandable.29 From 1988 the internal political violence (mainly) in the Kashmir Valley has left 12–40 000 dead (depending on which estimates you believe). One Jamaat-i-Islami official in Lahore claims that 60 000 have been killed.30 Although some estimates claim as many as 25 000 militants,31 it is likely that militant numbers have never been more than a few thousand. Initially the whole affair was somewhat amateurish, though still lethal. JKLF militants would engage in full-frontal attacks with AK47s on military posts, there were kidnapping and murders of senior officials from the administration, and little regard was paid to ensuring the anonymity of militants involved. On visits as late as 1992 and 1993 one would see young militants hanging out at the main mosque, Hazratbal, armed and aping Bollywood film stars. As one security official put it to me in 1997, it made at least some of the task of counter-insurgency a little easier, as some militants were hardly shy of revealing their identities. Later, amateurism turned into a painful awareness in militant ranks that it was costing lives. As a leader of Jehad Force stated when interviewed in September 1993, the move to ‘cell structure’ and ‘good security’ was already in hand.32 By that time the initial belief that militancy would lead to tangible political results in months had been replaced by a greater political realism; one that acknowledged that military force alone would not dislodge India. Arms and tactics grew more sophisticated. RPG7s, RDX explosive, mortars, and even a gun powerful enough to be dubbed an ‘anti-aircraft’ gun were in evidence.33 Army and Border Security Force figures on the Indian side show seizures of 60 mm mortars from 1993 onwards, along with many more seizures of radio sets as the 1990s progressed. Equally by 1995 the casualty ratio between security forces and militants was beginning to change, having at first been firmly in favour of the security forces.34. Corruption had been increasing in militant ranks for some time, and instances of intimidation of the local media by militants have been common.35 But the longevity of the struggle and the paucity of the rewards for the population at large led to disaffection by this time: as one police source commented in 1997, intelligence was now available compared to the early years, when it cost ‘lakhs [hundreds of thousands] of rupees to get even the name of our militant’. Indian counter-insurgency tactics had much to do with this, as is explained later. The violence continues in 1998, with bombings, shoot-outs, mines, mortars and rocket-propelled grenade attacks. A wide variety of groups are responsible.36 There is an increasing rural focus as security in the

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towns has become a fixed affair, with permanent bunkers erected at strategic locations, festooned in anti-grenade netting.

THE INDIAN GOVERNMENT RESPONSE Repression, as Brian Crozier points out, alone cannot amount to counterinsurgency. He has seen the Huk rebellion in the Philippines as a particular object lesson in the failure of repression and the need for a judicious combination of repressive measures and political advances.37 The sample lesson is apparently still being learnt by the Indian government, whose response to the violence in Kashmir was initially ad hoc and based on a combination of massive deployment of force with an information policy of silence (‘on this internal matter’). On 19 January 1990, Malhotra Jagmohan was reappointed Governor of the State, having previously resigned in July 1989. An able administrator of public works, he had gained much favour from the populace while previously in office, but by now he was associated with Hindu extremism and he arrived in the state brimming with forceful rhetoric. Choosing action over words would cost India dearly: all too soon a policy of force without thought began to reap what all such policies do, a harvest of alienation. The first few months of 1990 saw massive popular mobilization as ordinary Kashmiris flooded onto the streets. The response of the security forces did not help, as the army fired on crowds.38 Jagmohan treated the civil administration and state security forces as hostile, unilaterally dissolved the state assembly, and according to various state officials would frequently interfere in detailed operational matters. He defended his actions by arguing that a firm hand was needed though he was considerably undermined by the Indian government appointment of a Minister for Kashmir Affairs (George Fernandes) early in 1990.39 Despite his claims, the undermining of both the state administration and the state police cornered India in the weakest position possible: leaving it bereft of any local institutions to work with. As a senior ex-policeman put it, with both civil authority and the Jammu and Kashmir police absent there ‘was practically no civilian oversight for [security] operations’.40 When all the state employees went on strike in 1990, this led to an administration very removed from the people. For Wajahat Habibullah, an Indian civil servant close to Rajiv Gandhi and much involved in Kashmir, the period August to November 1990 was the ‘lowest point’for the Indian government, because the ‘entire administration was non-Kashmiri’.41 Even by 1993 the state police force had yet to be reintegrated into the counter-insurgency, and in

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April of that year there was a police revolt following the death of a Kashmiri constable (allegedly in army custody).42 Confrontational rhetoric encouraged aggressive tactics, which only served to further undermine Kashmiri confidence in India. Cordon and search operations, designed to cut off an area before screening all those within it, succeeded in alienating large chunks of the civilian population. Petty harassment at checkpoints on major roads, which often involved all civilian males leaving a bus and walking half a kilometre or so past frequently physical security forces, again moved to alienate the population rather than isolate the militants. Foreign journalists and human-rights groups were also denied access to the Valley until late in 1990, when a new governor, Giresh Saxena, opened access.43 (Amnesty International were the one exception because of Indian government claims that they would be manipulated by the militants.) Very slowly, the counter-insurgency leaders learnt their lessons. The policy shifted during 1993/4, and combined force with an increasing awareness of the need to approach the violence in a more political manner. Local security forces were brought back into the process, and a unified military command was implemented in 1993 to provide central control over the numerous Indian security agencies.44 Human-rights training was introduced for the military, with activists like Balraj Puri providing training to senior officers, although as General Afsir Karim (a leading Indian expert on counter-insurgency) points out, it is difficult to ‘translate minimum force into police’.45 Yet the more local security forces were used, the more intelligence could be gleaned, and therefore force could be applied in a more discriminating fashion. From 1994 this was possible, and there were security force raids on individual houses because of better information. Much of the human-rights abuses on the Indian government side46 come from two failings; firstly inadequate command and control, secondly a reluctance in the middle-ranks to commit to human rights (one young officer in 1997 described it as ‘weakness’ in the face of a militant threat). A key policy that changed the situation on the ground more than any other was the use of ‘contras’ (or pro-government militants). These started to appear in 1994, and tended to be surrendered or captured militants who were provided with arms and funds and encouraged to help eliminate militancy. Their creation echoes an earlier British use of ‘pseudo-gangs’ during the war against the Mau-Mau in Kenya. They were frequently from the minority Gujar community, either because Gujars were never very promilitancy,47 or because of a policy of divide-and-rule and terror.48 These ‘contras’, ‘friendlies’ or renegades’ operated openly with military units and were held responsible for both human-rights abuses and extortion.

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Whatever their sins they were also very effective. In the area surrounding Bandipur, a town in the north-west of the Valley, the Hizbul Mujahadeen presence was completely removed by their counter-terror. However, contra activity did not stimulate pro-Indian sentiment in the local population, and their actions cannot be seen to discourage popular support for anti-India militancy. The Indian scheme also involved a return to democracy. Elections, longdelayed, were held for national parliamentary seats (Lok Sabha) in May 1996, and then state assembly elections were held in September 1996. Both were boycotted by the Hurriyet leadership, and both saw quite high levels of intimidation and rigging allied with low turnouts in the Kashmir Valley. However, they resulted in an elected administration taking office, again led by Farooq Abdullah of the National Conference. Abdullah remains trapped between New Delhi and the Valley population; neither trust or support him fully, and he travels in the Valley only under the highest levels of security. Strategic and tactical control of counter-insurgency remains in central government hands, which further undermines his authority. But as Sumit Ganguly, leading expert on Kashmir, points out, the process of elections and the fact of an elected government makes a substantial difference.49 Increased levels of psychological warfare accompanied these changes. By 1997, popular Bollywood films like Raja Hindustani were being shown free at Border Security Force camps, aimed at attracting locals and generating better relations between a distrustful population and the security forces. Free medical clinics for civilians were also widely implemented. A more open and proactive stance was taken with regard to information, with the Indian government lobbying hard abroad to get their point of view across.50 These policies continue today, as does the violence. Compared to 1992/3 there has been some normalization in the main cities, as urban security has improved and militant groups have been pushed into the rural areas. It remains to be seen as to whether further progress can be made by the Indians.

TRANSNATIONAL ASPECTS – EXTERNAL SUPPORT AND ‘GUEST MILITANTS’ The insurgency in Kashmir did not take place in a vacuum, nor was it solely reliant on internal support. Like most insurgencies it was the recipient

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of external support, mainly from the Pakistani government. While it is impossible to quantify or elaborate on this support in any meaningful way because of the paucity and unreliability of information on funds and arms supplies, it has most certainly been a factor in determining the scale of violence in the state. Initially support was limited, one JKLF source claimed that the organization was approached in 1985 by a major Pakistani Islamist group, and offered training and arms. Such an offer is unlikely to have been made without official approval from the army and intelligence services. This support materialized in 1986 but the agreement was that the JKLF would retain full operational control of activities. Cells were allegedly set up in some towns in the Kashmir Valley (Kupwara, Baramulla, Srinagar, Pulwama and Anantnag). Whereas it had been a ‘trickle’ of support up to 1987, it ballooned thereafter, and in 1989 –90 support and control moved to Hizbul Mujahadeen and their Pakistani backers. By 1993 the role of so-called ‘guest militants’ (generally non-Kashmiri Islamist fighters) had significantly increased, many part of organizations that had a regional, rather than a Kashmiri, focus.51 In October 1993, the chief of the Indian Border Security Force (BSF) claimed that there were over 2300 foreign mercenaries in Kashmir.52 A senior source close to one of these transnational groups stated firmly that there had never been more than 50 pure Afghans (his emphasis), along with a handful of Egyptians, Yemenis, Saudis and Bengalis. He noted that all Pakistanis involved in the Afghan conflict had learnt Pashtu and Persian, and may have forgotten they were Pakistani. While his estimate is on the low side (Indian army officers claimed about 150–200 foreign fighters at any one time in total) he mentioned that most of these guest militants belonged to the Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who has been a fervent supporter of the Kashmiri ‘cause’. A summary of foreign militants killed from 1991–96 from the Army 15th Corps indicates a steady rise from 1991 (2) to 1996 (155) of dead foreign militants.53 Broken down by country (which includes Pakistan and Azad Kashmir), one sees mainly Pakistanis, Kashmiris and Afghans followed by small numbers from Sudan, Bahrain, Iran, Turkey, Chechenya and Egypt. Given that this represents the death toll, a total of 202 have been killed during this period (excluding the Pakistani and Kashmiri contingent); this includes 75 dead who are unidentified. So it does seem that two conclusions can be drawn: 1. Guest militants have increased over time from the early 1990s to the present day. 2. Their numbers are still not as high as some Indian claims, and Kashmiri militants still outnumber their expatriate guests.

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… AND THEIR STATE BACKERS If the Pakistani government claims that they do not actively provide military or financial aid to the militancy, then who does? And given Pakistani reluctance to acknowledge their role during periods when direct logistical aid was in evidence, might not a policy of using proxies for their Kashmir policy be desirable? If private organizations or individuals were supporting Kashmiri militants with funding and arms, did the Pakistani government intervene? General Hamid Gul, ex-Director of the Pakistani InterServices Intelligence Agency (ISI) stated:54 ‘… in the case of Sikhs, for example, we never supported them, but we also did not clobber them on the head if we found that they were doing certain things so long as it was not anti-Pakistan’.55 Gul went on to assert that there was no ‘direct involvement of the ISI’, whilst pointing out that there were some retired people, maybe ISI, involved in the Afghan training camps, who might well have been keen to involve themselves in the other conflicts just by the borders. Kashmiri sources named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar as a key supporter from abroad, and it seems likely that some Kashmiri militants were trained in camps run by Hizb-e-Islami (of Agfhanistan). According to Khem Warikoo at Jawarhalal Nehru University, Hizb-e-Islami has links to three militant groups in Kashmir: Hizbul Mujahidden, AI Barq, and Harkut-ul-Mujahadeen, as well as connections with Jamaat-i-Islami in both Pakistan and Kashmir.56 Afghan fighters have certainly been operating in the Valley, though lower in numbers than some sensationalist reports might suggest.57 Given that the Afghan arms pipeline during the 1980s ‘leaked’ enormously, it would not be difficult for Kashmiri militants in Pakistan to obtain them on the black market. And militants in the Valley also pointed out that some of their weapons were procured off the Indian forces; occasionally for money, frequently through theft. The Kashmiri community in Lahore, successful in business and wealthy, has certainly contributed money towards the movement.58 Although primarily intended for relief and charity aid for Kashmiri refugees, it would be surprising if some of these funds did not find their way into militant hands. And given the enthusiasm for militancy that pervades the offices of Jamaat-i-Islami in Pakistan and Azad Kashmir, support from Jamaat to groups like Hizbul-Mujahadeen is a foregone conclusion. Determining the extent and nature of Pakistani government support is difficult, and largely relies on two sources, none of which are entirely dependable as accurate indicators. Off-record comments by militants and their supporters and the provenance of weapons seized by Indian forces are the most obvious indications. The blanket official denials in Islamabad,

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allied with the covert nature of any support, makes accurate analysis impossible. However, it is quite clear that the Pakistani government knew of Kashmiri militant organizations and their activities from the late 1980s, and that there was no direct intervention to prevent militant training, fundraising, and arms supplies shows that the government was at least willing to allow insurgency support from 1988 onwards. But the official distance from their operations, which indicates the legal uncertainty about support for political violence in Kashmir (as distinct from political activity designed to enable self-determination) would make the use of proxies within Pakistan (as well as outside) most desirable. But this evidence of Pakistani regional involvement in supporting armed opposition groups59 contributes to a misleading rhetoric of responsibility.60 It presumes that command and control is exercised by a unitary body within the state of Pakistan, when the empirical evidence supports a more complex web of national, sub-national, and transnational support for such groups. Indeed, it would be foolish to dismiss Afghan groups as being mere proxies for the Pakistanis, as several are now fighting against Pakistani manipulation of the Taliban. The likely continuation of private, possibly proxy support for the Kashmir militancy will damage both India and Pakistan, and is not going to help the Kashmiri people, whether secessionist or not. Criminal violence will increase – already militant groups either directly extort money or criminals use the name of a militant group as a cover for illegitimate activities.61 Khem Warikoo, an Indian academic who has written on Kashmir, suggests that Jamaat-i-Islami expanded its business interests in Kashmir through supporting militancy.62 Should guest militants play a larger role, then local support for the militancy may well erode; the Indian government if clever will be able to point out the alien nature of the intervention. Given that most insurgency/interventions fizzle out over time, it may not be sensible for Pakistan to maintain this policy. The implications for Pakistan itself could be destabilizing, as some of the weapons intended for the Kashmir insurgency will inevitably find their way into the hands of militant groups within Pakistan.63

… AND PRIVATE SUBCONTRACTORS In a JKLF propaganda poster India and Pakistan are personified as fighting children, both tugging at a Kashmir trapped between them. While Kashmiri politicians and administrators have been precisely those whose nepotism and compromises helped to generate alienation in the state, India

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and Pakistan appear to frequently view Kashmir as a territory, not a population. Nowhere is this more evident than in the current violence, for elements within Pakistan first backed Kashmiri militancy (the JKLF 1987–9), then pro-Pakistan forces (HM and others after 1989), and from 1992/3 have increasingly brought in so-called guest militants. Effectively guest militants are subcontractors for states, proxy fighters, paid to wage war according to their funder’s agenda. Hekmatyar’s paid volunteers in Kashmir, though relatively few in number, have had a considerable military impact on the situation as they are battle-hardened and well able to fight a guerrilla war. The mysterious rise of unknown groups (Al Hadeed 1994,64 Al Faran 1995) filled with mainly non-Kashmirispeaking militants (including Afghans and Tajiks) presents a fairly clear indication of the transnational element in the Kashmir violence. What marks these subcontractors of violence is their unaccountable nature, for they enjoy a large measure of independence from their government quartermasters. Organized in cell structures as small groups with their own leadership, their autonomy is extensive. This leads to a number of risks; the risk of rogue acts of violence that might spark a wider conflict, the danger of greater criminality and indiscriminate terror, along with the possibility of reprisals against innocent civilians. Ultimately they are a destabilizing force, even if they reflect the nuclear status of India and Pakistan and the claims of van Creveld and others that nuclear states cannot fight each other directly, but must rely on subversion.65 The kidnaps and murders of Westerners by such groups in 1994 and 1995 in Kashmir66 point to both the autonomy these groups enjoy and to their use of terror.

INDIA AND PAKISTAN: WEAPONS STATES? India and Pakistan both spend excessive amounts on defence, reflecting their mutual insecurities. India ‘has one of the largest and most potent militaries in the world, coupled with scientific and industrial capabilities to produce a full range of destructive weaponry.67 It also has over one million men in its forces. In Pakistan, ‘defence spending absorbs nearly 40% of government expenditure’ – 20 times the amount spent on education and health.68 Both states have also invested heavily in nuclear weapon programmes and missile research. However, there are also substantive differences between the two. India, unlike Pakistan, has a long-established democratic record in which the military is subservient to civilian political leadership (although there has

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frequently been greater autonomy in internal security roles). Pakistan has laboured under military rule, direct and indirect, for much of the time since independence, and today the military is institutionalized into the military structure through the National Security Council. Common problems afflict them both. The wide availability of light arms has encouraged relatively high levels of internal violence in both countries, both political and criminal in nature. Sub-state ethno-nationalist movements have afflicted both India and Pakistan. Banditry has been a particular problem in some regions of India like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Drugs-related violence is a problem in the North-west Frontier province of Pakistan which probably has a greater problem in this regard than India. The Afghan war has had permanent effects on Pakistani society, as the arms industry that grew rapidly during the conflict continues to thrive and the weapons produced circulate as much within Pakistan as in the region as a whole.

A CASE OF WARLORDISM? Has Indian government authority broken down in Jammu and Kashmir? From 1988 the political legitimacy of Indian rule collapsed in the Kashmir Valley (although in Jammu and Ladakh there was still general support for India on differing terms). As the violence developed, and the state administration was sidelined by the 1990 Jagmohan administration, indicators of state control gave evidence of this collapse. The tax base evaporated, with many businesses encouraged or coerced into funding the insurgents. Furthermore, state enterprises ceased to operate normally (for example, some utilities were effectively provided free, as electricity bills were ignored). Warlordism is helpful to understanding the violence in Kashmir because it goes beyond the internal/external lenses of domestic politics and international relations, ‘insurgency’ and ‘intervention’,69 and enables analysis of the evolving situation in the Valley to take into account increasingly transnational elements. Fighters from groups such as Harkut-al-Ansar include a spread of nationalities, but little in the way of national loyalty (either to Pakistan, their backers, or to Kashmir). The role that the wider Kashmiri diaspora has played since the 1960s in opposing the status quo again demands a wider conceptual understanding of the framework under which violence has emerged. Warlordism is also useful because it sums up the core problems facing Farooq Abdullah’s state government in Jammu and Kashmir, which lacks revenues to increase spending, the authority to take over control of the counter-insurgency, and the institutional credibility to

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represent the varying groups in the Valley. At the same time, while insurgency has inevitably degenerated into banditry, and increasing domestic disillusion with the insurgency has seen the role of ‘international’ fighters heightened, the limitations of independent ‘warlord’ authorities must be explored. No Kashmiri or transnational group has ever held territory of their own; inflated claims about ‘liberated zones’ in some of the literature is entirely at odds with the realities on the ground.70 Training and support bases lie across the line of control in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan and possibly Afghanistan. The Jehad Force base I was taken to near Srinagar in September 1993 was a large house; the insurgents within only displayed their weapons behind closed doors. The many insurgent organizations have questionable direct support from the local population in 1997/98, as can be judged by public disinclination to strike when the umbrella separatist leadership, The Hurriyet Conference, calls them to. (At the same time, public disaffection with India still rush very deep.) Yet as has been amply demonstrated in this chapter, the respective states of India and Pakistan, in particular in the Kashmir region, have no monopoly on the use of force. Both states have subverted the other; India in East Bengal (1971), Pakistan in the Punjab (1980s) and Kashmir (1990s).71 The problem with such subversions, and the influx of small arms that accompanies them, is the way in which it undermines general governance for considerable periods of time.72 Contemporary Afghanistan bears witness to this, as the consequences of the United States/Pakistan-backed war against the Soviet puppet régime of the 1980s has been a fragmentation of the state (which ironically, despite the advances of the Pakistani-backed Taliban, has in turn undermined Pakistan as some of the weapons have found their way back into the country). Behera gives a useful account of the various Pakistani insurgencies, and it is clear that equal opportunities are available to India should it wish to covertly undermine Pakistan.73 What is evident is that successful state-building across South Asia has been challenged by both the demands of modernization and effective institution-building, and also by minorities seeking a more assertive political and cultural role as the states have centralized. South Asia is still a region of ‘chronic instability’ with increasing levels of internal violence. As Sandy Gordon points out, ‘chronic instability at the subnational level feeds a vicious circle of underdevelopment and neglect.74 This only leads to a continuation of political violence – which is still apparent. What is now at risk is that ‘areas worst affected by the unrest’,75 like the Sindh,76 Assam,77 and Jammu and Kashmir, will be ignored by new development capital from within and outside India and Pakistan.

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CONCLUSIONS Social scientists have much to learn from historians, not least when it comes to extrapolating from a particular case-study or from current trends, and attempting to predict the future. Historians tend to desist from such activity – they are only too aware of how wrong almost all predictions turn out to be. So with regard to this chapter, while the analysis of the current situation in Kashmir should stand, any musings about the directions in which contemporary manifestations of warlordism may take us should be prefaced by a large warning sign. Speculation may be free but it is rarely liberated from the context of the times in which it is written. This chapter has shown how Kashmir is not as anarchic as it may seem; however, the autonomy of militant groups raises doubts about the ability of South Asian states to monopolize violence, if indeed they ever have. The proliferation of small arms and light weapons presents a serious challenge to the exercise of state sovereignty, but raises a much more pressing question about governance. Government demands authority, and if state authority is in the end secured by violence or the threat of violence, then the well-armed sub-state groups in Kashmir will continue to disable governance for as long as their coercion takes place alongside (and actively competes with) state violence. Although it seems useful to have an academic approach that is less state-centric when looking at South Asia, those who raise too deterministic a set of conclusions from current trends and claim that the post-Westphalian state itself is doomed, like Martin van Creveld, miss the still massive capacity for coercion available to states. The case of Kashmir encourages broad and inclusive analysis, and places the availability of arms and the rise of sub-state groups within the weapons states/warlordism framework, but it is too soon to judge what long-term conclusions can be drawn. However, the current trend towards proxy warfare in Kashmir suggests that in this case the weapons-rich environment in the region is a real problem. Is there a cure for weapons states and warlordism? It might seem that the demands of economic liberalization will push civil agendas further than any Western political pressure for democratization. But warlords may not wilt in the face of the market, after all, like the bandits that preceded them they frequently command their own economy and control trade within their area. For example, Amin claims that Kashmiri militants have established alternative economic institutions in both rural and urban areas.78 A lack of effective political management leads to political chaos, which in turn can cripple any local economy. In Jammu and Kashmir the economic situation remains precarious as tourism, once a major source of

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income, continues to stagnate. Kashmir is a telling reminder of how destructive the wide availability of light weapons is to civil society. It already seems that the Indian government is working more thoughtfully towards returning to representative and accountable government, although much more still needs to be done. But while weapons remain widely available in a society that has known little other than gun culture for ten years now, full normalization is unlikely. Most important of all, if external actors eager to fund, arm and encourage guest militants in Kashmir cannot be checked, then any real chance for gradual restoration of civilian rule will remain low. These groups can all to easily end up existing in a ‘grey zone’, their activities entirely unregulated by the state that supports them. It seems that weapons states encourage low-intensity conflict by their very nature, and that in areas with unrepresentative political institutions weak warlordism is a likely consequence. The end-result of sponsoring, or encouraging, political violence by sub-state actors in a weapons-rich environment is to further undermine the authority – and the well-being – of all the regional states involved.

Notes 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

See Jasjit Singh (ed.), Light Weapons and International Security (New Delhi: Pugwash India/BASIC, 1995); Ayesha Siddiqa-Agha, ‘Light Weapon Proliferation and Arms Control in South Asia: The Three Dimensions’ (London: BASIC Research Paper, 1996). Katherine Joseph at BASIC and Chris Smith at the Centre for Defence Studies, London, are continuing to research small arms proliferation in Central Asia and South Asia respectively. See E.J. Hobsbawm, Bandits (London: Pelican, 1972). Paul Rich and Richard Stubbs (eds), The Counter-Insurgent State: Guerrilla Warfare and State-building in the Twentieth Century (London: Macmillan, 1997). See Bahgat Korany, ‘Strategic Studies and the Third World: A Critical Evaluation’, International Social Science Journal, vol. 8, no. 110, 1986, pp. 547–62. Rich and Stubbs, p. 9. See John Rothgeb, Foreign Investment and Political Conflict in Developing Countries (New York: Praeger, 1996). A fluent account of this is provided by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight (London: Book Club Associates, 1975). Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear, 2nd edn (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991) p. 122.

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12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

Page 160

Warlordism in Jammu and Kashmir I have drawn on Victoria Schofield, Kashmir in the Crossfire (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996); and Alastair Lamb, Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy 1846–1990 (Hertingfordbury: Roxford Books, 1991). M.J. Akbar, India: The Siege Within (Penguin, 1985) p. 237. For the best account of the Indian position, see Prem Shankar Jha, Kashmir 1947: Rival Versions of History (Delhi: OUP, 1996). The Pakistani perspective is best put in Alastair Lamb, Kashmir: Birth of a Tragedy (Hertingfordbury: Roxford Books, 1994). Both of these books are favoured by the relevant lobbyists, who give away free copies to advance their claims. See Sumit Ganguly The Origins of War in South Asia: Indo-Pakistani Conflicts since 1947, 2nd edn (Boulder, Westview, 1994) for one of the best general history of the Indo-Pakistan conflict. See Prem Nath Bazaz, Democracy through Intimidation and Terror (New Delhi: Heritage, 1978). See Victoria Schofield, Kashmir in the Crossfire (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996), pp. 183–5. Sumit Ganguly, The Crisis in Kashmir (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 35–7. Ibid., p. 226. Interview with Gulam Nabi Fai, Kashmiri American Council, Washington DC, 13 January 1998. Interview with Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Srinagar, Kashmir, 2 February 1997. The best Kashmiri account is Balraj Puri, Towards Insurgency (New Delhi: Sangam Books, 1993); while a convincing academic explanation is provided by Sumit Ganguly, ‘Explaining the Kashmir Insurgency: Political Mobilisation and Institutional Decay’, International Security, vol. 21, no. 2, 1996, pp. 76–107. First established in 1965 in Azad Kashmir, then called the Jammu and Kashmir National Liberation Front. In 1976 the name was changed to the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front, and most of its activities shifted to the United Kindgdom as Amanullah Khan set himself up in exile. Fairly secular and nationalist, in favour of self-determination for Jammu and Kashmir. While it initiated much of the violence in 1988–89, it was less organized and aided than other groups, and in 1994 the Valley wing unilaterally declared a cease-fire, while Amanullah Khan continues to lead another group in Pakistan. However, self-determination comes in many flavours, and does not always mean better or more responsive government. Sumantra Bose, The Challenge in Kashmir (Sage: New Delhi, 1997) is an account of the current problem that somewhat uncritically approaches it from a self-determination perspective. Ajit Bhattarcharjea, Kashmir: The Wounded Valley (New Delhi: UBSPD, 1994) pp. 255–6. Headlines like ‘60 Kashmir Youth Cross Over to POK [Pakistani Occupied Kashmir] for arms Training’, Kashmir Times, 5 January 1990, were a fair indication of what was going on. The line of control is very difficult to secure, being mountainous and long. Gerard Chaliand, Terrorism: From Popular Struggle to Media Spectacle (London: Saqi Books, 1988), p. 107. Rajesh Kadian, The Kashmir Tangle (published 1982) pp. 28–32.

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30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

161

I have drawn here on the excellent article by Edward Desmond, ‘The Insurgency in Kashmir (1989 –1991)’, Contemporary South Asia – Kashmir Special Issue (vol. 4, no. 1, March 1995. US Department of State, Patterns of Global Terrorism 1993, April 1994, p. 4. Ibid., p. 4. As well as evidence in Desmond (1995 op.cit.), Hewitt (1995) pp. 159 –61 and from Government of India arms seizures (see The Proxy War Continues, New Delhi, Government of India, c. 1993: off-the-record interviews with senior ex-military figures in Pakistan confirmed training and military supplies. However, like Shakeel Bakshi (interview, Srinagar, 22 March 1997) they emphasised the limited nature of this training, generally a few weeks long. Interview, M. Ayub Munir, Jamaat-e-Islami, Lahore, Pakistan, April 1997. Tariq Jan (ed.), Foreign Policy Debate (Islamabad: Institute of Policy Studies, 1993), p. 97. Interview, Kashmir Valley, September 1993. ‘Anti-aircraft gun seized from militants’, Greater Kashmir, 11 October 1995. See Profile of Terrorist Violence in Jammu and Kashmir (Government of India, 1996), p. 132. These statistics are not necessarily reliable, but even they indicate a decline in militant deaths in 1995 with a corresponding rise in security force casualties. Greater Kashmir, a pro-militant newspaper, has been frequently closed down because of militant threats. Another example was the murder of Mushtaq Ali, a local journalist, when a letter-bomb probably intended for the BBC correspondent exploded in their office in September 1995. Based on various sources, including Afsir Karim, Kashmir: The Troubled Frontiers (New Delhi: Lancer, 1994), pp. 312–3. Brian Crozier, The Rebels (London: Chatto & Windus, 1960), pp. 195, 208–15. ‘30 killed as army fires on violent mobs in Srinagar’, Kashmir Times, 2 March 1990. Interview, Malhotra Jagmohan India International Centre, New Delhi, 6 March 1997. See also his My Frozen Turbulence in Kashmir (New Delhi: Allied Publishers Ltd., 1994), pp. 32–3. Private information, Kashmir, March 1997. Interview, Wajahat Habibullah, Indian Embassy, Washington, DC, 22 January 1998. ‘Troops break police siege’, Tim McGirk, The Independent, London, 29 April 1993. See Schofield, op.cit., p. 254. Šumit Ganguly, The Crisis in Kashmir (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 117. Interview, Major-General Afsir Karim, United Services Institute, New Delhi, 25 February 1997. See Amnesty International, ‘An Unnatural Fate’ – ‘Disappearances’ and Impunity in the Indian States of Jammu & Kashmir and Punjab (1993); Asiawatch, Rape in Kashmir: A Crime of War (1993), Zahir-ud-Din, Did they Vanish in Thin Air? (Srinagar: Sabha Publications, 1995). There is also

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47. 48.

49. 50.

51.

52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63.

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Warlordism in Jammu and Kashmir the Response of the Government of India to Report of Amnesty International (c. 1994). Claim by Miah Altaf Hussain, a Gujar minister in the Kashmir state government when interviewed in Jammu, 14 March 1997, ‘Gujars were never for militancy’ (his emphasis). As Hurriyet figures like Abdul Majid Barway (Director of Public Relations) claim, pointing out that many Gujars live in border areas and are hence more liable to pressure from the security forces. Interview, Srinagar, Kashmir, 22 March 1997. Discussion with Professor Ganguly, New York, 14 January, 1998. This has clearly borne fruits in the United States, where the Indian government has employed a professional lobbying firm. See also, Government of India, Jammu & Kashmir: International Comment – India’s Policy of Transparency (c. 1994/5). The rise in guest militants had been noted from 1993, when Greater Kashmir, a pro-separatist newspaper, ran stories like ‘New Dimension to Insurgency in Kashmir’ 20 July 1993, ‘Hunt for “Guest Militants” begins’, 11 September 1993. Most articles in the Kashmiri media played down high Indian government estimates of their numbers. See ‘Over 2,300 Foreign Mercenaries in Kashmir: BSF Chief’, Kashmir Times, 22 October 1993. A photocopy of a computer printout c. August 1997. There is still too little published on the ISI, a key player in foreign and domestic policy in Pakistan. One useful source is ‘The Face Behind the Mask Behind the Veil’, Lt. General Vijay Madan PVSM, VSM (retd.), USI Journal, New Delhi, July–September 1994. Interview, General Hamid Gul, Lahore, 12 April 1997. K. Warikoo, Afghanistan Factor in Central and South Asian Politics (New Delhi: Himalayan Research and Cultural Foundation, 1994), p. 67. Some confusion also arises because Indian figures sometimes include Kashmiris from Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, whereas many Kashmiri commentators only classify Afghanis and non-Kashmiri Pakistanis as guest militants. Hence the claim by a senior Harkut-al-Ansar figure that there have never been more than 50 guest militants at any one time (Interview, Pakistan, April 1997). This was confirmed by a senior executive of a large Pakistani firm while we chatted at Lahore airport, who said that his company had a ‘Kashmir fund’ to support the Kashmiris. A wide range of US government sources confirmed without any doubt continuing assistance when interviewed during January 1998. For example, one Indian commentator believed that there has always been a Pakistani plot to ferment a revolt in Kashmir and that events post-1988 proved it. See K. Subrahmanyam, Kashmir (Strategic Analysis, vol. XIII (II), May 1990). They also raise valuable revenue from ‘logging permits’. See ‘Ultras bless eco-vandalism in the Valley’, The Pioneer, 25 August 1993. Interview, Dr Khem Warikoo, New Delhi, 27 February 1997. Some idea of how serious leakage from weapons pipelines can be is evident in Chris Smith, The diffusion of Small Arms and Light Weapons in Pakistan and Northern India (London: Centre for Defence Studies 1993).

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67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78.

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One of the kidnappers was an ex-LSE student and Briton called Ahmed Omar Sheikh. See ‘LSE student on trial for terrorism’, Caroline Less, Sunday Telegraph, London, 8 February 1998. Interview, van Creveld, Camberley, UK, April 1996. Two kidnappings of Westerners took place in 1994, by Al Hadeed near New Delhi, and by Harkut al Ansar in the Kashmir Valley. All the hostages were released, and in the case of the latter HUA kidnap sources in HUA claimed that the local commander had initiated the kidnap himself without official sanction from the leadership. In an Asian Age newspaper interview (8 June 1994) David Housego, one of those kidnapped, stated that ‘Most of the militants were Pathans wearing Pathan dress and speaking Peshto’. In 1995 a further kidnapping took place by Al Faran; one hostage was murdered and five others are still missing. M. Ward, D. Davis, M. Penubarti, S. Rajmaira and M. Cochran, ‘Country Survey I: Military Spending in India’, Defence Economics, vol. 3, 1991, p. 41. Ron Matthews, ‘Country Survey IV: Pakistan’, Defence and Peace Economics, vol. 5, no. 4, 1994, p. 315. Both of which have heavy political overlays from the Indian and Pakistani official versions. See for example Mushtaqur Rahman, Divided Kashmir: Old Problems, New Opportunities for India, Pakistan and the Kashmiri People (London: Lynne Rienner, 1996), pp. 147–8. K.R. Singh, ‘Intra-Regional Interventions in South Asia’, USI Paper No. 10 (New Delhi: United Services Institute, c. 1989). A point made in an earlier article, Alexander Evans, ‘Subverting the State: Intervention, Insurgency and Terror in South Asia’, War Studies Journal, (vol. 2, no. 1, 1996), pp. 17–29. Ajay Durshan Behera, ‘Separatist Insurgencies in Pakistan’ Strategic Analyses, New Delhi, vol. xix, no. 2, 1996, pp. 259–70. Sandy Gordon, ‘Resources and Instability in South Asia’, Survival, vol. 35, no. 2, Summer 1993, p. 77. Ibid., p. 78. Iftakhir, H. Malik ‘World Politics and South Asia: Beginning of an End?’, Journal of South Asian and Middle-Eastern Studies, vol. XIX, no. 3, Spring 1996. ‘... Pakistan’s army continued to impose order in Karachi, which has been torn by inter-ethnic and sectarian violence. Within a month of the army’s withdrawal in December 1994 from the streets of Karachi ... more than 150 people died in such clashes, adding up to more than 750 casualties for the whole year. p. 69. See Ved Marwah, Uncivil Wars: Pathology of Terrorism in India (India: Harper Collins, 1995), pp. 224–316 for an introduction to the problems in the north-east. See Tahir Amin, Mass Resistance in Kashmir (Islamabad: Institute for Policy Studies, 1995), p. 91.

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9 The Warlord and Global Order Stephen Chan

International Relations is a gentrified discipline, its scholars speaking of officialized actors – states, international organizations – or, in its new normative concern, of moral communities and moral individualism. The determinants of morality are curiously those to which a middle-class Western academic might genuflect, claiming an Enlightenment history and an a priori prehistory drawn from the rationalized brand of Kantian metaphysics. This essay seeks to illuminate, at least partially, those individuals and their followers who have been not only criminalized but unofficialized by states, and who behave with moral visions certainly, but with actions that are very different from those sanctioned in the Augustinian and Enlightenment paradigm of the West, favoured by those in no doubt about citizenship, and their academies, from codes that limit the dealing of death and the export of corruptions. The essay is concerned with warlords in International Relations, both in practice and in the theory of an academic discipline. Warlords are here defined as those prepared and able, by force or its threat, to deny ideological and operational space to a state and who put forward, to the populations under their control, an articulated alternative to citizenship and who secure allegiance through a combination of that force and articulation, allied sometimes with charisma or claims to certain ancestries more compelling to their adherents than affiliation to a state. They are not necessarily premodern; they use, in the twentieth century, highly modern technologies; but they may see themselves as an alternative, an antidote to, or merely a tribune of the people in the face of modernity. In writing this essay, I am seeking to extend earlier work on the ways in which ‘Third World’ states might inhabit multiple worlds outside the Enlightenment values of modernity, seeking to impose, often after having first constructed, their own histories of values to condition their usage of modernity.1 This has been, invariably, a radical form, but a form all the same, of what the discipline of International Relations calls Realism. It is a disquisition concerning states that, even if claiming alternative values, are still officially ‘personalities’ in international law. What is hypothesised here is that such Third World states do not work in the field of values 164

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ab initio. Others work in this field and, often, lay the foundation for the state. Moreover, International Relations does not know how close it has come to having to deal with a magical realism. If Museveni’s forces had not held the gates of Jinja, the army of Alice Lekwina would have swept down the highway to Kampala, and Uganda would have become a state ruled by a spiritmedium – a witch. The medievalesque symbolism of that, in the late twentieth century, would have been compelling to say the least. So this is an essay in a previously unconsidered Pluralism. Der Derian has written in part about this,2 but in a postmodern series of firecrackers: a striving for effect as much as writing something new. And it sits uneasily with his views on a world of relations simulated. His is not a world of realism at least, but a world where the metaphor of ghosts in the machine has been taken literally. Here, we are merely writing about the hands of certain Others on the machines. Warlords have had their hands on the machines. They have laundered their monies through the Bank of Credit and Commerce and, since that bank’s demise, have not given up on what currencies and the movement of currencies mean. From the warlords of China who, for a time, held Chiang Kai Shek captive and were in a position to change Chinese history; to the conscious use of the warlords in short-term strategy that has now produced something the West did not expect in Afghanistan (the Mujahadeen factions used the West too);3 to warlords who fight for national or at least ethnic liberation while exporting drugs, like the Karen in Burma; to the warlordisms of Lebanon in the 1980s, these people have intruded upon international relations but have been excluded from the discourses of International Relations. Having said that, the sheer range of cause and practice in the brief list of examples in the last paragraph suggests that this essay’s introductory definition of ‘warlord’ needs amplification. Below, then, is a typology of warlords in the observed world. First, however, it might be worth pointing out that the warlord has persistent historical archetypes, as well as enduring archetypes in folklore. Although frequently dismissed as outlaws in the forest (England’s Robin Hood), or outlaws of the marshes (China’s Sung Chiang and Lin Chung in Liang Shan Po), the transition from outlaw pure and proper to warlord suggests the development and maintenance of a social order, clearly understood, among the outlaws, as well as the explicit recognition of a purpose in rebellion within the general parameters of my second paragraph. Sir Walter Scott’s depiction of Locksley in Ivanhoe was a late consolidation of English historical strands of rebellion and extrastate organization and justice at precisely to moment when the state had acquired the technological means to perpetuate itself, direct and guarantee

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the flow of capital, and to constitute its citizens within the determinations of technology and capital. Here, this Robin Hood character is a warlord at the most romantic end of the spectrum. The typology that follows, therefore, is capable of brutal and gentle, highly rational (or rationalized) and romantic variations. The warlords are often very happy to use the most romantic of historical, folkoric or even literary archetypes as their declared legitimation of style if not purpose. A final prefactory note should concern modern resistances to the idea and practice of warlordism. Warlords seem archaic, a relic of a time before the constituting state, derived from the ideology of the Enlightenment, and the enabling growth – through the rational application of knowledge – of technology, and the inter-state usage of capital. They are outside these determinations of modernity. Moreover, lacking recognized constitutional institutions, there are no institutional guarantees of the rights of citizens. They are outside, in short, any fetishized notion of the mechanical aspects of communitarianism. The short reply would be immediately to declare the warlord exactly that Kantian individual, in his or her aloneness, who answers the call of the universe against institutions that transgress its moral laws. This, of course, would fall into exactly the reductionist trap of a vulgarized normative debate within the discipline of International Relations, where Hegelians and Kantians slug it out like the Sheriff and the Merry Men; and is, moreover, merely wrong – unless one takes very seriously indeed only the romantic legitimations of warlordisms that, in practice, can be very brutal in terms of the rights of others. There may well be, however, more than a little suggestive, but non-mechanical communitanianism in it all. If International Relations is to maintain its dyadic debate, it might, at a moment of desperation, since the debate is stale and foundering, enlarge the scope of its two sides. Maybe the warlord is a type of cosmopolitan and Kantian figure; in this chapter he or she may well emerge as a type of communitarian, or at least or worst, as a type against which a ‘legitimate’ civil society and state must struggle in order to demonstrate their own moral superiority – the point here being that both state and warlord might fight for pretty much the same things, and it is the moral right to have them that is at stake.

A HEURISTIC TYPOLOGY 1.

The Local Warlord This situation may resemble gangsterism in the outset of its development, but evolves into a distinct form of organization to defend the integrity of a community. The warlords (actually

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called so in popular parlance) of the South African shanties are such local heroes (or villains). At the other end of the scale, the Druze of Lebanon, in their mountain fastness, with their internationallyeducated leadership, represented a highly sophisticated and enlarged variant. They remained committed to a local integrity, however, and did not wish to overcome the state, while resisting its encroachments and those of others who did seek to overcome the state. 2. The Warlord of an Enlarged Locality at the Frontiers Here the uses of locality are themselves enlarged by virtue of informal dealings with neighbouring states. Nevertheless, the aim remains one of defending the integrity of a local community. The Karen of Burma were one such example, but have in recent times suffered dramatic setbacks at the hands of the Burmese army. 3. The Warlords of International Crime The Karen had an international trade in opium, and this manipulation of a capital substance sustained their struggle. A distinction is drawn between warlords who use international crime, and drug barons, such as those in Colombia, who exist on the narrow basis of crime and its rewards. The Colombian barons wish to operate a parallel economy to that of the state, but to live within (even precariously) the respect and the physical environs of Colombian civil society. Indeed, they make a case for International Relations to consider just how unrelated civil society and state can be, or at least how complex, unconstitutional and extra-rational their linkages can be. Nevertheless, they are not warlords for the purposes of this discussion because they do not seek to compose or represent alternative forms of sustained political organization. In fact, the barons need the state, because it either facilitates or disguises, or officially denies and thereby permits unofficial room for their own international trade and international relations. In this typology, a true warlord of international crime resists the state not for a narrow material advantage, but for a wider agenda to do precisely with the inadequacies, demarcations and exclusions of civil society. If opium was harvested in Afghanistan for international sale by Mujahadeen warlords, then they fit this typology. 4. Client Warlords These defend the integrity, to be sure, of a local community; but these are prepared, in fact may depend on doing so, to act as the instrument of other states. Here they are unlike the Karen, where the balance of usage lay with them. Here the warlords are more used than using and, thus, may be called clients. The Christian militias of Southern Lebanon fall into this category, and Major Haddad was the exemplar of this type.

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5.

Warlords who are Partisans or Resistance Leaders Here there are enigmas in terms of loose usages of the terms right and wrong struggle, just and unjust rebellions. The point is that, even if not easily seen as just, almost anything can be justified. Augustine’s precepts read not so much as a permissive or restraining list of what is just in war as what is justified in war, and, given the difficulty of locating a truly convincing a priori justice in war in an abstract or ideal sense, such lists are purely pragmatic. The question is which lists are more convincing if merely justifications and pragmatisms are involved?’ Besides, people do not fight for years for nothing. They believe something. Thus the remnants of Amin’s soldiery on the Ugandan borders with Sudan, Alice Lekwina’s spirit-marshalled army in Uganda, and the Christian fundamentalists who terrorize Uganda today, are all partisans of sorts; they resist or have resisted Museveni’s largely nontribal, modernizing, technologizing and capital-based government. It is easier to understand the Mujahadeen warlords of Afghanistan, at least in early part, since here there was possible a reduction to textbased clarities: the Prophet’s book against the Commissar’s. 6. Warlords who become Liberation Leaders Here the warlord is engaged in war that seeks to overthrow or capture the state. The Afghan Mujahadeen may certainly be seen as liberation movements; but they may be seen also as local warlords (defending the interests of a clan), warlords of crime (trafficking illegal substances to finance their fight), clients (insomuch as they were useful to and partially sponsored by a Western agenda), and partisans (representing at least various rural constituencies bypassed by an urban elite and government). So the typology can coalesce into itself and is useful only for static and descriptive work, particularly given the limitations of understanding suggested in 5, above. By the time, however, that any public claim to being a liberation movement is made, a certain international socialization has taken place: the depiction of an apparatus as coherent enough to be an alternative government; the opening of ‘embassies’ that imitate the protocols of representation; the transformation of a General’s wardrobe from fatigues to designer suits. This is frequently taken as a movement not of superficial socialization, but of transformation. At least Che Guevara retained his fatigues, boots, beret, beard and pistol while haranguing UNCTAD. Now, the expectation is that the witch woman, having stormed the presidency, will give her press conference in Dior and recant her magical agenda as merely an instrumental device that cloaked a real and ascertainably material agenda. I have written elsewhere that there are no depths to this socialization that can be relied

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upon.4 What I want to say is something different: (a) International relations are implicated in all of the sections of the typology above. (b) Rebellion and defence are common characteristics and articulated beliefs. (c) The articulation of belief, or different, enigmatic and Other belief, is neglected in International Relations as a discipline. Yet it is, if not clear, then suggestively possible to abstract from the exercise of listing and describing, above, the ingredients of a discourse.

A TYPOLOGY OF NORMATIVE VALUE A certain discourse of rebellion by warlords may be discerned in three parts: values, needs and tradition. There is a denial of values, and the provision of alternative values couched in a language of needs. This is a basic Robin Hood scenario – the need for a redistribution of wealth so that the needs of life may be satisfied – but also extends the idea of need well beyond, for instance, the fixation in the 1980s, by international agencies, of Third World ‘basic needs’. It goes beyond lists to do with clean water and enters, indeed surpasses, Burton’s somewhat arbitrary list of needs that includes dignity. The idea that there are, beyond negotiable interests, ‘needs that are ontological to the human species and which can neither be traded nor suppressed’,5 and which cannot necessarily be easily analysed, founded as they are at least in part on ‘the hidden data of motivation and intent’,6 provides for the warlord both a rationale and a reason for expressing it in a sometimes seemingly irrational manner. It is the ‘hidden data’ that International Relations cannot understand. Secondly, frequently the construction of a set of values and rationale for rebellion based on need can be a direct outgrowth of the means of organization improvized to meet more purely physical needs. In most Third World countries, the growth of an economic informal sector, visibly manifest by small traders at roadside stalls, has a series of informal organizational pivots far away from the roadside, located in accepted norms of behaviour in the community that must seek to survive in this manner.7 What may be called a ‘black market economy’ can grow so extensive it rivals the formal economy in size and national product. If these behavioural norms already exist in operational form, and accompany an economy, then a warlord can build on values, finance and the implicit sense of need that comes, not from deprivation itself, but the perception that those

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who benefit from the formal economy are less-deprived and are both ostentatiously and manipulatively, if not powerfully, less-deprived. Here, the discourse proceeds on a basis of contrast, including the contrasting of values. Thirdly, there is a process of self-validation based on securing a tradition of need, value, economic and political organization, and contrast. The society of a warlord establishes its own hierarchies, initiations, rituals and, finally, institutions. With all this comes the declaration of successions and the interpretation of history. A warlord culture is thus ‘written’. In short, what is being manufactured here is a species of discourse-laden governance. It is this governance, based on values and needs, that now opposes the government. Fourthly, there may be a process whereby all this is further validated, not merely by a contrast with and opposition to the government, but the construction of an ultimate alternative to how people must now live. The idea of a utopia, whether derived from text and faith, or by the writing of entirely new text, may become an animating force. Speaking mostly of Western visions of utopia, Krishan Kumar wrote, ‘Utopia has for centries, accompanied that hope of progress and that striving for betterment. It has been itself a principle expression of that belief and a potent agent of that impulse’.8 Although Kumar felt that utopian animation was declining in the West, I do feel a parallel history may be written of its rise in the Third World. Apart from the utopias of received texts, for sample from Islam, the writing of entirely new texts has been a feature of the last hundred years: the Tai Ping uprising in nineteenth-century China, in which the rebels finally fielded an armed force of one million soldiers, was established on a rewriting of what the Bible was imagined to be from the reading of a few missionary tracts.9 Much more recently, the uprising of Alice Lekwina in Uganda, though its text was not written, had a new utopia at its foundation.10 Fifthly, however much localized, there is a vision of the world. There is the idea that an entire state can behave like a warlord with the popular and original values spreading still further outwards. Here there is an International Relations, not of warlordism, but authored by warlords. The discourse outlined above may well provide an investigating apparatus in the more sympathetic study of the Ghaddafis and Saddams of the world.11 Here, if you like, is a particular pluralism in International Relations: there are not merely states, but types of state, and some may be determined by previously outlaw civil societies, or carry forward the idea that there can be a dissident outlaw civil society even with international relations itself. *

*

*

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The warlord may fight out of the local arena, but he or she should inhabit the International. His or her discourse can inform and moderate out our own. Is all this too rosy a picture? Too romantic a construction? Is this now merely Sir Walter Scott brought to International Relations? Well, of course, it is. Warlords can be as atrocious as any member state of the Security Council with their, all the same, romantic constructions of history, value and purpose. This essay has been to posit an alternative – a romanticism perhaps in the face of an Enlightenment tradition – to a gentrified International Relations. It betrays my upbringing, when a grandmother would dangle me on her knee and, instead of Cinderella, tell me the tale of the ‘good warlord, Chien Fung, who could side-kick as high as our peach tree’ (… but that’s precisely the point: we have constructed the discipline out of our upbringing), but it also is a brief reflection on my wanderings around the world and such species of fieldwork that is possible amidst people with guns. Do they carry them merely to be atrocious? Each had the most articulated vision as to why he or she was prepared to die. I have never met one fighter who, beneath the posture of bravado, had not thought deeply it all and its social context and purpose. This brings me to two final points. The first is a reiteration of a call for Anthropology to inform International Relations.12 By this I mean not the interloper/voyeur and generalizer of yore. I mean that the discursive, reflexive sociology of our high modernity should be paralleled by a discursive and reflexive international sociology that first requires our willingness and ability to access the texts of Others, and to experience firsthand the conditions that either produced them or leads people to value them. It is a fieldwork of simply being in place and, above all, not being in place safely. Risking consequence, amazingly, provides sometimes instant access to Burton’s ‘hidden data’. Doctors without frontiers, aid workers, even journalists do it under critical conditions; while International Relations discusses, in grand hotels and cultured cities, the niceties of critical theory. The second point is not pejorative but obvious. I have said there are organizational, political and discursive moments that link warlords and liberation movements. They often become indistinguishable. They attract more immediate sympathy and respect them. It is not the point of this paper to discuss further the linkages and transitions involved, except to say that, in a great number, perhaps the majority of cases, warlords represent and propagate if not a text, then a sub-text of rebellion and justice, values based on popular need. They resist states. They enrich, even if only by making more complicated, our still emerging ideas of global order.

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Notes 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

10.

11. 12.

Stephen Chan, ‘Aching Towards Subjectivity: Redefining the Third World for a New Millennium’, in Nana Poku and Lloyd Pettiford (eds), Redefining the Third World (London: Macmillan, 1998). James Der Derian, Antidiplomacy – Spies, Terror, Speed and War (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). See Stephen Chan and Dominic Powell, ‘Reform, Insurgency and CounterInsurgency in Afghanistan’, in Paul B. Rich and Richard Stubbs (eds), The Counter-Insurgent State (London: Macmillan, 1997). Stephen Chan, Towards a Multicultural Roshamon Paradigm in International Relations (Tampere (Finland): Tampere Peace Research Institute, 1996). Burton’s oeuvre is, of course, vast (and controversial). He accomplished, after so many years and books, a wonderful distillation: John Burton, ‘World Society and Human Needs’, in Margot Light and A.J.R. Groom (eds), International Relations: A Handbook of Current Theory (London: Pinter, 1985). The quote is from p. 50. Ibib., p. 47. I have tried to make this point in Chapter 11 of Stephen Chan, Social Development in Africa Today: Some Radical Proposals (Lewiston: Edwin Mellon, 1991). Krishan Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p. 43. See John E. Schrecker, The Chinese Revolution in Historical Perspective (London: Praeger, 1991); for a view of the equally magical Boxer Uprising that followed, see Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) W.J.F. Jenner, The Tyranny of History (London: Allen Lane, 1992), delivers a very brief but terrifying synopsis of the power of utopian and magical text on p. 200. Little has appeared about the Lekwina uprising, still less its social animation and organization. For work on enigmatic elements in African rebellions see Christopher Clapham (ed.), African Guerrillas (London: James Currey, 1998). For the Zimbabwean experience, see Terrence Ranger, Peasant Consciousness and Guerilla War in Zimbabwe (London: James Currey, 1985). In lieu of a learned paper or essay, I tried to write about Alice through other means: Stephen Chan, ‘Alice is Wounded and Retreats’, in Krishna Srinivas (ed.), World Poetry 1991 (Madras: World Poetry, 1991). Work on Saddam has been very unsatisfactory. For a learned and fascinating account of the background to Gaddafi, see John Davis, Libyan Politics: Tribe and Revolution (London: I.B. Tauris, 1987). Stephen Chan, ‘Culture and Absent Epistemologies in International Relations Discipline’, in Our Catastrophic Century, special issue of Theoria, vol. 8, 1 February 1993.

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Index Abdullah, Farooq 151, 156 Abdullah, Sheikh 142, 144–5 Afghanistan 8, 13, 20–3, 56, 157, 165, 168 African National Congress 65 Aideed, Mohammed Farah xiv, 116, 121, 123, 129–30, 132–3, 135–7 Aideed, Hussein 137 Airscan 69, 71 Albania xiv, 103–17 Democratic Party in 108, 110 Greek community in 104 Italian policy towards 103, 109 –11, 113–15 and Kosovo issue 104, 111 links with Turkey 104 Multinational Protection Force (MPF) in xiv, 103, 114 –16 Operation Pelican in (1991) 109 –10, 113 pyramid scheme in 111–12 refugees from 109, 113 relationship with Serbia 104 Socialist Party in 108, 110 see also Hoxha Algeria 6, 55 Alia, Ramiz 107–8 Allen, Tim 86 Amaza, Odoga ori 83– 4, 87 Angola 20 –1, 23– 4, 41, 47, 63–5, 67, 70 Cabinda region of 67, 69–71 Forcas Armadas Angolanas (FAA) 61, 67 Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda (FLEC) 69 –70 MPLA Government of 24, 70 UNITA 20 –1, 25, 61, 64, 70, 82 Annan, Kofi 68, 135 Arakis Energy 71 Armor Holdings 68 arms market 18–19, 21, 23 arms, proliferation of 28

arms supplies, manipulation of 29–30 Barlow, Luther Eeben 60–2, 64 Barre, Siad xiv, 120–1, 124–30, 135 BDM Corporation 69, 72 Berisha, Sali xiv, 104, 108, 111, 113, 115 Betac Corporation 69 Bosnia 17, 29, 56, 74, 116 and Dayton Agreement 29 government of 31 Revolutionary Guards Brigade in 56 Boutros Ghali, Boutros 12, 130–3, 135 An Agenda for Peace (1992) 12 Braeckman, Colette 96 Buckingham, Anthony 59, 91 Bull, Hedley 126 Bush, President George 131 Butt, Maqbool 145 Buzan, Barry 142 Carbonare, Jean 96 Chechnia 56 Chevron Oil 69 Chiang Kai Shek 44, 165 China 2–3, 11, 43, 55, 106, 170 drug trafficking in 43 and 1911 revolution 42 warlords in xii, 2–4, 9–10, 14, 43 Clapham, Christopher 98, 100 Clinton, President Bill 67 Colombia 23, 115, 167 army of 74 drug cartels in 21–2, 167 government of 25 police in 25 Congo Brazzaville 70 Creveld, Martin van 53, 155, 158 Croatia 23, 56, 74 army of 66 Crozier, Brian 149

173

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Index

de Heusch, Luc 90 Der Derian, James 165 Defence Systems Limited (DSL) 25, 57, 67–8, 76 Doe, Samuel 8 drug trafficking xiii, 38–40, 42–3, 45– 9, 58 Colombian drug cartels 21–2 and Golden Triangle 40, 44 –5 Nigerian drug gangs 39, 46, 48 ECOMOG 6 ECOWAS 6 Egal, Ibrahim 123 Eliasson, Jan 135 El Salvador 29 –30 Ethiopia xiv, 92, 123–4, 127 Executive Outcomes 24, 57, 59– 60, 62– 6, 71–4, 76 Fabbri, Fabio

134

Gordon, Sandy 157 Gul, General Hamid 153 Gurkha Security Guards 61 Gurkhas 10 Habyarimana, President Juvenal xiii, 82, 86, 89, 92–3, 95, 98–100 Herbst, Jeffrey 12 Hibbert, Reginald 111, 117 Holsti, K.J. 5, 27 Hoxva, Enver xiv, 106–7 Hoxva, Nexhmije 107 Huntington, Samuel 2 India xv, 9, 18, 21, 141, 143–4, 146 –7, 154–7 International Human Rights Federation (FIDH) see Rwanda International Monetary Fund (IMF) 62 Iraq xii Jackson, Robert 9 Jagmohan, Malhotra 149, 156 James, Alan 9 Jammu and Kashmir see Kashmir John Paul II, Pope 88

Kabila, Laurent 56, 65 Kagame, Paul 89 Kaplan, Robert 1 Karim, General Afsir 150 KAS Enterprises 69 Kashmir xv, 20, 22, 55, 140–59 Harkut-al-Ansar 156 Hizbul Mujahadeen (HM) 147, 152–3, 155 Hurriyet Conference 157 Indian counter-insurgency in xv, 148, 152 Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) 147, 152, 154–5 Jammu and Kashmir National Conference 142 Jehad Force in 148 Kashmir Accord (1975) 145 Kashmir Liberation Army 146 National Conference (NC) 142, 144–5, 151 UN Military Observer Group in 143 Kayibanda, Gregoire 85–7 Kenya 28 Khan, Amanullah 145 Kohl, Helmut 114 Kuomintang (KMT) 3, 40, 44–5 see also China Lekwina, Alice 165, 168, 170 Léotard, François 136 Liberia 5, 8, 12, 21–2, 25, 47, 66 Lord’s Resistance Army see Uganda low-intensity conflict (LIC) 53 Lusaka Protocols (1994) 61 MacKenzie, Robert 61 Mahdi, Ali xiv, 116, 121, 123, 126–7, 129, 133, 135–7 Mann, Simon 59, 61 Mao Zedong 3–4 Mejdani, Rexhep 117 mercenaries 23, 52, 55, 58, 65, 73 Mexico 18 drug cartels in 55 Military Professional Resources Incorporated 24, 29, 57, 66–7, 71, 73–4, 76

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Index Mitterrand, President François 91, 99 Mobutu Sese Seko, President 55, 65– 6, 70, 82, 92 Morrison, Alistair, 68 Mozambique 6–7, 22, 29, 41, 68 FRELIMO regime in 7 RENAMO in 7–8 Mugesera, Leon 93 Muhammed, Bakshi Ghulam 144 Museveni, President Yoweri Kaguta 89, 91, 165, 168 Nano, Fatos 117 Nguesso, Denis Sassou 70 Ntaryamira, Cyprien 98 Organisation of African Unity 12, 58, 64 – 6, 75 Charter of 73 Convention for the Elimination of Mercenaries in Africa 73 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) xiv, 114 Pakistan xv, 20–1, 141, 143, 146–7, 153–7 Jamaat-i-Islami Party in 147–8, 153– 4 and ‘Operation Gibraltar’ in Kashmir 144 Papua New Guinea 63– 4 government of 68 PARMEHUTU see Rwanda Philippines 28, 54, 149 insurgent groups in 22, 45 praetorianism 2 Prunier, Gerard 84 Ramsbotham, Sir David 67 RENAMO see Mozambique Rifkind, Malcolm 114 Rubin, Barnett 13 Rubin, Elizabeth 76 Russia 22 corruption in 19 criminal gangs in 23, 72

175

Rwanda xiii, 9, 26, 70, 81–100 Arusha Accords (1993) 81, 93, 97, 99 Belgian colonial rule in 84–5 Bugesera massacre in 94–5 expulsion of Tutsis from 85 Forces Armées Rwandaises 91–2, 95–7 French Operation Turquoise in 96–7 Report of International Human Rights Federation (FIDH) on 96 Mouvement Républicain Démocratique in 94, Mouvement Révolutionnaire National pour le Développement (MRND) 87–8, 95 PARMEHUTU in 85–7 Presidential Guard in 94–5 Rwandan Patriotic Front 26, 88–9, 91–8 social anthropology of 84 UNAMIR I in 97–8 Rwigyema, Fred 89 Sahnoun, Mohammed 131 Sandlines International xiii, 24, 62, 64, 68 Sankoh, Foday 62 Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) 72 Siad, General Maslah Mohammed 127 Sierra Leone xiii, 12, 22–3, 47, 60, 63– 4, 71 Revolutionary United Front in 62 Unavem III mission in 64 Silverstein, Ken 74 Singh, Maharajah Hari 141–3 Singirok, Brigadier General Jerry 64 Smith, Anthony 10 Somalia xiv–xv, 4, 12, 21, 31, 43–4, 116, 120–37 army of 127 clan system in 120–2, 125, 127, 130 collapse of sovereignty in 120 Ogaden War xiv, 124, 127

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Index

Somalia – continued Rapid Deployment Force in 135 Somali Democratic Alliance (SDA) 128 Somali National Alliance (SNA) 133– 4 Somali National Movement (SNM) 124, 128 Somali Patriotic Movement (SPM) 128 Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF) 124, 128 Somali Socialist Revolutionary Party (SSRP) 123, 125, 127 United Somali Congress (USC) 128– 9 Unified Task Force (UNITAF) in 129, 131–3 United Nations Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM 1) xiv, 129, 131 United Nations Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM 11) 129 –36 South Africa 18–19, 21, 23, 43, 47, 65, 68, 92, 120 drug gangs in 41, 47 Foreign Military Assistance Bill 52, 59, 65 National Convention Arms Control Committee in South Africa 59 National Service Corps in 54 South African Special Forces 62 Southern African Development Community (SADC) 65 Spear, Joanna 28 Spicer, Colonel Tim 64 Stirling, Sir David 69 Strategic Resources Corporation 63 Stinger surface to air missiles 20 Strasser, Valentine 62 Sudan 20, 53 Sudanese People’s Liberation Army 71 Suleiman, Ahmed 123 Sun Yat-sen 3

National Resistance Army in 89 National Resistance Movement in 88 UNITA see Angola United Nations xiii, 12–13, 29–30, 58, 64–8, 74–6 Advisory Mission in Mali 31 Development Programme 47 General Assembly Condemnation of Mercenaries 73 Global Program of Action 39 International Narcotics Control Board 42 Panel of Experts on Small Arms 31 Security Council Resolution 160 on Albania 114 Security Council Resolution 814 on Somalia 134 Special Rapporteur on mercenary activities 76 United Nations High Commision on Human Rights xiii, 72 ‘Use of Mercenaries as a Means of Violating Human Rights and Impeding the Exercise of the Right of Peoples to Self Determination’ 57 United Nations Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM) see Somalia United States xii–xiv, 20, 46, 74, 111, 120, 124, 134 Federal Bureau of Narcotics 44 Special Operations Command 55 uti possidetis, principle of 12

Taylor, Charles 8, 22, 25 Twagiramungu, Faustin 98

Zaire 43, 70, 82, 92 Zambia 47 Drug Enforcement Commission 47 Zimbabwe 6, 31 Zogu, Ahmed (King Zog I) 104

Uganda 20, 70, 91, 168, 170 Lord’s Resistance Army in 82

Wadlow, René 92–3 Waal, Alex de 86 Walter, E.V. 5 Warikoo, Khem 154 weapons procurement 18 World Bank 7 Young, Tom 90 Yugoslavia 22, 29, 55, 106