Inside Insurgency

Violence, Civilians, and Revolutionary Group Behavior

Claire Metelits

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780814796092
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Once considered nationalists, many insurgent groups are now labeled as terrorists and thought to endanger not just their own people, but the world. As the unprecedented trends in political violence among insurgents have taken shape, and as hundreds of thousands of civilians continue to be displaced, brutalized, and killed, Inside Insurgency provides startling insights that help to explain the nature of insurgent behavior.

Claire Metelits draws from over 100 interviews with insurgent soldiers, commanders, government officials, scholars, and civilians in Sudan, Kenya, Colombia, Turkey, and Iraq, offering a new understanding of insurgent group behavior and providing compelling and intimate portraits of the SPLA, FARC, and PKK. The engaging narratives that emerge from her on-the-ground fieldwork provide incredibly valuable and accurate first-hand documentation of the tactics of some of the world's most notorious insurgent groups. Inside Insurgency offers the reader a timely and intimate understanding of these movements, and explains the changing behavior of insurgent groups toward the civilians they claim to represent.

1

Insurgents and Civilian-Targeted Violence

Wars teach us not to love our enemies, but to hate our allies.

—W. L. George

I sit across a desk from Daniel. It is past sundown in Yei, a small village in southern Sudan ringed by a mixture of jungle and grassland. A three-hour-long downpour has subsided and left behind intense humidity but also a light breeze that blows through the doorway of the crumbling building in which we sit. We are both exhausted. I have accompanied him on a thirteen-hour drive from Kampala, Uganda, across the border into the “liberated” zones of the Sudan People's Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M)—the insurgent group he has belonged to since joining in 1984.¹ Much of our day was spent lurching along deeply rutted mud roads, with the occasional delay to extricate our vehicle or our fellow travelers' vehicle in front of us from the sticky mud. The standing joke along our journey has been the story of the foreign-aid donor who comes to visit the region and naively asks, “Why do they put the roads in the rivers?” Everyone has laughed at this joke along the way, though the irony is not lost on anyone, for when the rainy seasons arrive the dirt roads do actually turn into rivers.

As we are jostled along in our vehicles, the drivers are careful not to veer too far from the dirt road, because the area has been heavily mined. These land mines are one of the many remnants of the civil war between the government of Sudan in the north and the insurgents of the south. It is November 2001, and much of Yei lies in a state of destruction or reconstruction. After being bombed several times by government forces between 1998 and 2000, the people of this town, along with the SPLA, have attempted to fix or make do with what has been left standing.

However, the SPLA did not always help its own people, the southern Sudanese. Following its formation in 1983, the SPLA became notorious for committing massive human-rights abuses against communities on whose behalf it claimed to fight. This group's coercive behavior included looting villages, kidnapping children, carrying out summary executions, and creating famine conditions in southern Sudan.² I ask Daniel to recall these earlier years, when war atrocities by both the government of Sudan and the SPLA abounded. I look up at him expectantly. The room is lit only by a flashlight, yet I can see him stare at me for several seconds before answering. “The movement ran from the opposition,” he says, “but we replicated the system we ran away from.” Daniel shakes his head. “Human-rights violations, little tolerance of different ideas,” he recalls.³

In 1994, the SPLA's treatment of civilians changed. The level of civilian-targeted violence decreased as the group separated its military arm from its civil administration and established structures of governance that involved local communities. Daniel comments on this change. “We ran away from dictatorship,” he explains. “We cannot be dictators [then].” The mission of the SPLA is to liberate the south of Sudan from the north. Then, he continues, it is up to the people of the south to create their own system. “We are the luckiest Africans,” he says with a small smile. I ask him to explain this remark. He tells me that the southern Sudanese have seen what mistakes were made in Sudan and in other countries on the African continent. They can learn from these mistakes.⁴ It is reasonable that the SPLA would strive for unity and greater legitimacy. It is not clear, however, why the change in the group's behavior and treatment of southern civilians occurred when it did and against the personal interests of faction leaders who continued to have resources at their disposal.

This book is about the change in insurgent behavior toward civilians. Unlike much of the recent research on insurgencies, which analyzes these groups from afar, this book takes a different approach. I draw from information I gathered by interviewing over one hundred insurgent soldiers and commanders, government officials, scholars, and civilians in Sudan, Kenya, Colombia, Turkey, and Iraq, as well as from historical analyses and data on civilian deaths. Much of this book is based on information I collected while traveling with detachments of insurgent groups. I also collected information while traveling through insurgent areas of operation and major cities where these groups have constituencies. Whereas some recent studies base their work on conflicts that have come to an end, thus making information less timely, research for this book was conducted during the period of the conflicts, on armed actors in their own environments.

Defining Cases, Refining Concepts

This book examines three insurgent groups to explore their shifting treatment of civilians whom they claim to represent. First, I examine the SPLA (chapter 3), the group described in this chapter's opening. In its formative years during the 1980s as a Marxist group supported by Ethiopian backers, the SPLA committed human-rights abuses against southern Sudanese populations. The group, however, transformed into a nascent state that garnered the support of both southern Sudanese and the international aid community.

I also analyze the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) (chapter 4). The FARC, like the SPLA, underwent a massive shift in its treatment of Colombian peasants. However, it evolved in the opposite direction from what the Sudanese insurgents did. The FARC found its roots in peasant self-defense organizations in the mid-1970s, supported in part by the Colombian Communist Party. It supported better working conditions for peasant farmers. In expanding its military strategy, the FARC began acquiring resources from the coca-growing and drug-trafficking industries. Eventually, the group became infamous for the killing of local civilians, kidnapping, and extortion.

The third group I examine in this book is the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, or Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) (chapter 5). Like the SPLA and the FARC, the PKK also began with Marxist roots. As a student-led movement in Turkey during the 1970s, the PKK soon adopted a military strategy that quickly alienated Kurdish civilians. Characterized by human-rights abuses and other coercive behavior perpetrated against civilians, the PKK, despite retaining support in parts of Turkey, was noted for its brutal treatment of its own people. However, the PKK's behavior, like that of the SPLA and the FARC, shifted over time. This case in particular demonstrates how national factors such as government policies influence insurgent groups' strategy.

The groups I analyze in this book are referred to as “insurgents,” which I define as nonstate armed actors that use violence to reformulate or destroy the foundation of politics in an existing country.⁵ Insurgents have been referred to as “guerrillas,” “separatists,” “liberators,” and “terrorists,” depending on the period in which they have fought. During the late 1960s, the government of Nigeria referred to the leaders of the breakaway Eastern Region as “ethnic separatists” or “rebels,” whereas in the 1970s, Portuguese colonizers faced “communist insurgents” in their African colonies, and locals considered the combatants “freedom fighters” dedicated to ending colonial rule. Insurgent groups are, at their core, political, though many engage in criminal activities.⁶ Most insurgent groups fight to take control of a state, in part because of the very fact that the current international political order takes the form of a system of states instead of empires or networks of small, autonomous polities. As this book demonstrates, this system shapes warfare and the violence we see in today's wars.

Several insurgent groups around the world have changed the way they treat civilians—the noncombatant host communities that the insurgents claim to represent. The treatment of civilians by insurgent groups ranges along a spectrum from coercive (which I also refer to as violent) to contractual behavior. Coercive behavior is characterized by the forcible extraction of resources from civilians without establishing a reciprocal relationship—without providing services in return. Coercion can include kidnapping children for use as soldiers or slaves, burning villages, raping women, and looting to invoke fear in civilians, as well as the intentional withholding of humanitarian aid from populations in need. During the 1991–2002 war in Sierra Leone, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) inflicted highly coercive behavior on civilians when, for example, it kidnapped children to use as soldiers. Likewise, the ongoing abuses committed against noncombatants since the late 1980s in northern Uganda by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) is clearly coercive behavior. In contrast, contractual behavior describes the relationship between a controlling power (state or insurgent group) and local residents when the controlling power provides services in return for resources.

Other insurgent groups often protect a specific ethnic group or another community of solidarity. These groups' state-building urges bear some resemblance to historical events in Europe. Like their predatory competitors, they mobilize commercial networks and exploit resources. However, at the same time, they produce different outcomes that reflect the comparative advantages and leverage of actors in commercial networks, local community organizations, and others with whom leaders of armed groups bargain, in some ways similar to what the scholar Charles Tilly describes in his book Coercion, Capital, and European States.⁷ In the FARC's nascent years, for example, the group maximized its legitimacy among its targeted membership by providing basic services for peasants, such as protection against the harsh policies of large landowners and education, in exchange for resources such as food and money.⁸

In this book, I use a broad definition of resources. Resources include, but are not limited to, any material item that helps an insurgent group achieve its goal, including food, guns, and money. Resources also include nonmaterial goods that can produce material items. For example, popular support from civilian populations is a resource because it can produce food and shelter as well as recruits. I understand that this definition is quite all-encompassing, and some people may argue that it is overinclusive. However, the research I have done on insurgent groups in their areas of operation indicates that resources are, in fact, very broad.⁹ That is understandable, as many of the regions where insurgent groups operate lack infrastructure and resources. Thus, these armed actors make use of many types of elements to support their causes.

Understanding insurgent behavior is a challenging task that bears relevancy beyond the specific events this book treats. Parties that fight a governing regime often use both violent (coercive) and nonviolent (contractual) means to achieve their objectives. Insurgent violence is primarily a tool that nonstate groups use to maintain political order.¹⁰ Yet the relationship between violence and order can just as easily be a component of state building.¹¹ Some contemporary insurgent groups reject violence as part of their state-creating strategy; this kind of strategy is often crucial in building strong connections with civilians. Other groups are exceptionally brutal toward civilians. Furthermore, some groups change their behavior over the course of their existence, beginning as violent organizations as the SPLA did and evolving into groups that provide public goods and services such as food and security. The behavior these groups display while interacting with civilians reveals a great deal about their military strength and their ability to control resources that are important to the civilian population. This dynamic, I argue, helps explain why some insurgent groups treat communities they claim to represent either coercively or contractually. The aim of this book is to uncover why transformations such as those of the SPLA and other insurgent groups occur.

Is Insurgent Violence Rational?

The central question that frames this book is, why did the insurgent groups in this study change the way they treated constituent communities? In many ways, this question requires us to look at several other issues: Why do some insurgent groups mistreat host populations? Why do other groups develop strong ties with host communities, creating desirable alternatives to the existing government and forming what these groups and their supporters call “liberated” zones?¹² What types of resources are most important to insurgent groups? Do certain kinds of resources result in specific behaviors? To answer these questions, I uncover what causes certain types of insurgent violence in the first place. What goal drives the violence? Is it a need to exercise raw power? Is it a matter of physical or political survival?

These questions in turn require an understanding of local forces that influence insurgent treatment of civilians. Some political studies emphasize the actions and responses of states at the cost of including what is happening on the front lines.¹³ Too frequently nonstate armed actors such as insurgents are misunderstood as being acted upon. In this structural view, power flows inward from larger entities such as the state or the international community of states and affects local actors. A state-centered analysis narrows the understanding of insurgent groups by failing to consider the amount of agency these groups possess. Although state policies and international events do influence insurgent groups, local politics are just as important—if not more so—in shaping these groups' decisions about the use of violence against civilians. Thus, insurgents become actors with choices, not merely groups that respond to the whim of outside forces. Insurgent groups operate rationally within a defined space and therefore have choices (albeit narrow ones at times) about the strategies they adopt. Thus, as some recent studies of insurgents demonstrate, violence is a byproduct of unintended consequences of both outside forces and local forces including insurgent choices.

A second major focus of this book is evaluating current explanations of insurgent violence against civilians. Theories that claim to account for insurgent violence (or nonviolence) are not in short supply. Some researchers emphasize “new wars” as a driving force for contemporary violence against civilians.¹⁴ Other scholars argue that greed is a motivating factor, emphasizing the recruitment of opportunistic individuals and the lack of discipline. The list of conceivable explanations is plentiful, but the problems with them are threefold: they lack timely data collected directly from these conflicts rather than after the wars have ended, and they thus mix with hindsight to shape perceptions; they fail to address the changes witnessed in insurgent behavior toward civilians; and they portray resources as static in nature. This book utilizes on-the-ground evidence from the field to evaluate the factors that drive the transformation of insurgent violence against host communities.

This book also develops an explanation of insurgent behavior that gets at the micropolitics of violence and accounts for the shift from violence to nonviolence (or vice versa) at the local level. Some of the state-building literature is useful in this context because, though insurgents do use violence to transform politics, these armed actors can also create a distinct political order. For example, when doing research on the SPLA, I had to acquire an insurgent-issued “visa” in order to travel into areas of Sudan under the group's control. Once inside these “liberated” zones, my visa (which consisted of a thick piece of paper with my passport photo stapled to it and my occupation and the purpose of my visit typed out) was checked by the local SPLA administrator. All of this was done with a good degree of ostentation, as though the group wanted to prove that it too could behave like a state. In this same context, for insurgents, violence against other armed forces serves a purpose: it is one of the primary political tools they use to reshape the foundation of politics in a state. When insurgents resort to violence in order to acquire the resources needed for survival, their behavior is comparable to state building. There have been cases in which states grew out of the social contract developed between armed groups and civilians. Groups that ensured local communities could continue to produce wealth by permitting basic social transactions and providing security enjoyed more success in the long run.¹⁵ Some insurgencies, such as the SPLA, established quasi-states or states-within-states in areas under their control.¹⁶

Although the focus of this book is the SPLA, the FARC, and the PKK, the ideas that frame this study are more general than parochial. These three groups are critical cases, or cases with strategic importance, for scholars, policymakers, military personnel, and students whose work addresses political violence and war. I strategically selected these three insurgent groups to see whether groups with different backgrounds, geographies, and directions of transformation can have similar causes of changing behavior. Likewise, several explanations of insurgent violence toward civilians derive from case studies of insurgencies. Hence, the purpose of the book is not only to evaluate and develop an explanation of insurgent violence in Sudan, Turkey, and Colombia but also ...