What Rebels Want: Resources and Supply Networks in Wartime

By Jennifer M. Hazen

How easy is it for rebel groups to purchase weapons and ammunition in the middle of a war? How quickly can commodities such as diamonds and cocoa be converted into cash to buy war supplies? And why does answering these questions matter for understanding civil wars? In What Rebels Want, Jennifer M. Hazen challenges the commonly held view that rebel groups can get what they want, when they want it, and when they most need it. Hazen’s assessments of resource availability in the wars in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Côte d’Ivoire lead to a better understanding of rebel group capacity and options for war and war termination.

Resources entail more than just cash; they include various other economic, military, and political goods, including natural resources, arms and ammunition, safe haven, and diplomatic support. However, rebel groups rarely enjoy continuous access to resources throughout a conflict. Understanding fluctuations in fortune is central to identifying the options available to rebel groups and the reasons why a rebel group chooses to pursue war or peace. The stronger the group’s capacity, the more options it possesses with respect to fighting a war. The chances for successful negotiations and the implementation of a peace agreement increase as the options of the rebel group narrow. Sustainable negotiated solutions are most likely, Hazen finds, when a rebel group views negotiations not as one of the solutions for obtaining what it wants, but as the only solution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9780801467561

Book preview

Preface

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Wars are complex. They change over time, as do the actors that fight them. The point is common sense, but it rarely comes to the fore in discussions of civil war. Most studies of civil war are static. They approach wars based on a set of assumptions about the actors, their goals, and their capacities. I approach the study of civil war from a different angle. In this book, I assume that wars are dynamic and that the groups fighting them transform and adapt over time. A group’s capacity to fight does not remain constant over time, and because of this the opportunities for war and peace change as well. These insights come from several years spent living and working in Africa.

I first arrived on the continent in 2002. My intent was to study rebel groups in West Africa and to understand why it was so difficult for international actors to help end civil wars. I lived and worked in Sierra Leone from early 2002 through 2005. During this time I worked for the International Crisis Group, a nongovernmental organization well known for its research and analysis in crisis zones, and for the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Sierra Leone. I traveled throughout Sierra Leone, speaking to many individuals from all walks of life—civilian, government, humanitarian, military, and rebel—about the war and the postconflict peace-building process. I also had the opportunity to conduct more-limited research visits to Liberia, Guinea, and Côte d’Ivoire. These visits provided a unique view from the field of the dynamics of war, the conditions on the ground, and the challenges that everyone faced to survive. From 2006 to 2010, I worked as a senior researcher with the Small Arms Survey, a nongovernmental research organization based in Geneva. I spent a great deal of time in Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, and Nigeria. These experiences enhanced my understanding of what drives conflict and the incentives that exist for war and for peace.

At the heart of understanding a group’s capacity for war is the measurement of the group’s access to resources. I use this term broadly, to encompass all resources, not just valuable gemstones, that are needed to sustain a war. Access to resources fluctuates over time, suggesting not only changes in group capacity but also new opportunities for conflict management. It is by studying these fluctuations that we come to understand why access to resources cannot be taken as static and certain across time. A story from a 2003 trip to Guinea illustrates this crucial point.

I was sitting on an old wooden chair on the porch of a run-down house in the small town of Macenta, speaking to women about war. What struck me most was the normality of the situation. These women were neatly dressed, with their nails painted bright colors, hair perfectly coiffed, and gold jewelry shining in the sun. They had returned only the day before from the front lines of the civil war in Liberia. It was January 2003, just months before the onslaught on Monrovia would begin, an offensive that would end the war several months later. The women I spoke with were soldiers in the rebel movement based in the north of Liberia, the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD). Yet I was speaking with them not in Liberia but just across the border in Guinea, where LURD maintained a safe haven. There its combatants could rest and recuperate before returning to the front lines. This unit, an all-female unit, was taking a break from the fighting.

These women, with noms de guerre like Black Diamond, were not shy about the fact that they currently sat in Guinea, where their families lived, and where fellow combatants sought short respites from the ongoing fighting in Liberia. They were not refugees. They were guests of the Guinean government. No ceremony heralded their entry into the country, and no aid agency provided them with food or medicine, but there could be no mistake that the Guinean government allowed them to live in this border region, to move freely back and forth across the border, and to operate militarily, at times, within the borders of the Guinean state.

Such hospitality did not always extend to active support. When international pressure increased for the Guinean government to stop supporting the rebels, LURD combatants were forced to return to Liberia and supplies from Guinea waned. The female combatants told me how the Guinean government had recently cracked down on LURD operations in southeast Guinea. Under international diplomatic pressure, and sensing LURD combatants had become too visible along the border and too bold in their activities, the Guinean government pressured LURD to reduce its numbers and to operate under the radar of international humanitarian organizations and human rights groups. This pressure may have constrained the most brazen actions of LURD on Guinean soil, such as the forced recruitment of local Guinean residents to serve as porters to carry goods into Liberia, but it did not completely eliminate LURD access to Guinea or its operations. In fact, it could be argued that the actions taken by the Guinean government served more to placate international actors than to radically change the situation on the ground. However, the reduction in Guinean support proved a sore point with LURD fighters, suggesting that support was both expected and needed to sustain the war effort.

The female fighters facilitated a meeting with their commander and the leader of the military wing of LURD, Sekou Conneh. We agreed to meet on the border. The Guinean military facilitated our journey by escorting our team there. We passed quickly through the border, which was guarded by a few Guinean soldiers, and ended up in that gray zone that exists between formal state frontiers, inside neither Liberia nor Guinea. Despite the well-known porosity of borders in West Africa, the Guineans clearly controlled this gateway into Liberia. We would later learn that the Guinean military also actively guarded the area in order to prevent reporting on the movements of civilians and rebels alike. The Guinean government, claiming security reasons, prevented humanitarian groups, such as Doctors without Borders, from operating in the towns closest to the border. Others argued such measures aimed to protect the secret that people and goods moved back and forth daily. Without a doubt the Guinean government supported LURD, but it wanted to keep that support quiet.

Over a dozen LURD combatants waited for us at the meeting point. They were standing next to a makeshift camp, decked out in fatigues, some sporting assault rifles. The flow of military goods from Guinea to LURD stood in open display: piles of guns and other military equipment, as well as all-terrain vehicles clearly visible in the distance. Whether Guinea had given these materials to LURD or simply facilitated their transit for a fee was unclear. Regardless, it was an impressive display of military equipment and served as a clear reminder of LURD’s ability to access military goods through its northern patron.

The visit to Macenta and the Liberian border region underscored the need to reconsider the conceptualization of civil wars as events contained within the borders of a given state. It demonstrated the importance of the external assistance LURD received from Guinea, and the fact that civil wars often encompass actors from neighboring states and further afield. Yet an assessment of LURD’s ability to access military goods based on this one visit would have presented a skewed reality. This was a good day for LURD. Not every day was so conducive to advancing the rebel campaign. Our visit to Macenta suggested that the rebel group was strong, able to access military equipment, and benefited from Guinean support and safe haven. It was not an illusion created for outside visitors to witness—there would have been no time to arrange such a display. LURD, at this point in time, was in fact doing well. Yet a review of the war suggests that LURD was not always so successful. Guinea did not always provide support when requested; nor did support come free of constraints. Guinea had its own political agenda, which included the removal of Liberian president Charles Taylor but did not extend to putting LURD into power in Monrovia.

Our visit with LURD raised several questions about the rebel group. How did LURD manage to access large quantities of weapons? Did Guinea pay for them or simply facilitate their delivery? If the latter, how did LURD pay for weapons? What did LURD do when Guinea was less generous with its support? What effect did Guinea’s conditional support have on the rebel group’s capacity to continue the war? Much has been written about civil wars and the armed groups fighting them, but these questions about resources and the capacity to continue fighting are often missing from the analysis.

In this book I tell the story of three civil wars in West Africa and, more specifically, the seven rebel groups that fought them. I trace the evolution of these groups over the course of the wars in an effort to assess both their difficulty in accessing resources and support and how fluctuations in access affected their capacity to continue fighting. I present a messy picture of war—one filled with ups and downs, victories and defeats, times of feast and famine—but a picture that fits more closely the reality of these groups and their wars. My purpose is simple: to emphasize the fallacy of plenty and the importance of change in any study of civil war; to highlight the vital role played by external actors in fueling conflicts; and to demonstrate how changes in rebel group capacity can alter the course of a war and the prospects for peace.

Abbreviations

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The country of reference appears in parentheses where necessary. CdI: Côte d’Ivoire, L: Liberia, SL: Sierra Leone.

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WHAT REBELS WANT

Introduction

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No civil war today is ever wholly internal.

—Charles King, Ending Civil Wars, 1997

Intrastate conflicts are rarely purely intrastate in nature; most involve transnational dimensions of some kind.¹ The transnational dimensions of civil wars include the trade of goods, the sale of natural resources, the movement of refugees and combatants, the intervention of external mediators, the provision of safe haven, and the patronage of neighboring states. The United Nations has intervened in Cambodia, Liberia, the Congo, Cyprus, and East Timor. NATO has engaged in operations in the Balkans and Afghanistan. The African Union has deployed peacekeepers in Darfur and Somalia. African governments have hired mercenaries to aid their war efforts in Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Congo, and Libya. Armed factions, fighting both for governments and against them, have engaged in numerous transborder activities, from selling natural resources to importing arms to fighting in neighboring wars. Although the extent of transnational activity varies across cases, from very limited in Nepal to the so-called African World War centered on the Democratic Republic of Congo, every civil war exhibits some form of connection to the world outside its borders.

In many cases these transnational connections prolong wars by providing the resources—whether arms, cash, or other goods—necessary for factions to continue fighting. Rebel groups from Latin America, Africa, and Asia have utilized transnational connections to develop support systems during wartime—systems that provide access to resources and thereby structure a group’s options on the battlefield. Access to necessary resources is never guaranteed, however, and rarely is it uninterrupted. Rebel groups face shortages and losses, just as they experience windfalls and victories. An understanding of these fluctuations provides insight into why a rebel group chooses between continuing a war and pursuing a peace. In this book I focus on assessing the role that transnational dimensions play in civil wars, and in particular how they enable rebel groups to continue fighting, when and why they may in fact limit such options, and how terminating access to transnational support systems can turn off the taps that fuel rebel groups and their war machines.

Support Systems in War

The transnational dimensions of civil wars have grown with the globalization of the international system and the end of the cold war. The loss of foreign patronage, common throughout the cold war, forced warring factions to look elsewhere for support. In Angola, the rebels turned to diamonds while the government focused on oil revenues. In Colombia, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have profited from the taxation, production, and sale of drugs, just as the Taliban has done in Afghanistan. In Sri Lanka, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) created a system by which the Tamil diaspora contributed monthly donations. Rebellions that emerged after the 1990s could no longer rely on the former superpowers to be their patrons. Instead, warring parties had to develop new systems of support—what some have referred to as the self-financing of intrastate conflict.² Conflict financing has included a range of activities from domestic (e.g., kidnapping, extortion, taxation) to transnational (e.g., trade, investments, diaspora remittances).³ Numerous rebel groups have harvested, sold, or simply taxed natural resources to fund their operations, including diamonds (Sierra Leone), timber (Burma), gold (Democratic Republic of Congo), and cocoa (Côte d’Ivoire). The expansion of global trade and the proliferation of links between developing countries and international markets have provided important avenues of access to resources previously unavailable, or at least not easily available, to nonstate actors such as rebel groups.⁴ Estimates vary widely, but by many accounts rebel groups have made millions from these endeavors.

Conflicts require more than just financial resources. Transnational dimensions of civil war also include the trade in weapons; the use of neighboring states as safe haven; the manipulation of political ties to facilitate trade or impede international actions against a rebel group; and the reliance on common links of ethnicity or religion to provide political, if not economic and military, support for a group’s cause. Highlighting the ways in which fighting factions are connected to the external world underscores the point that any characterization of a rebel group as a self-contained, localized entity fails to recognize the ways in which a group is embedded in relationships both at home and through transnational linkages. These relationships can both enable and constrain a group’s actions and its options during conflict. Support that rebels in Sierra Leone received from Liberia at certain times during the war enabled them to go on the offensive, but that support faded when fighting increased in Liberia and interdicted supply routes, leaving the Sierra Leone rebels on the defensive and poorly resourced for continuing the war. The level of access to economic profits, military resources, and political support underlies the capacity of rebel forces to wage war. Fighting factions with limited access to support will fare poorly on the battlefield, while those that are able to establish effective networks of support will prove difficult to defeat. Transborder linkages can provide necessary resources, but there is no guarantee of continuous support. Changes in the levels of external financial, military, and logistic support shape the expectations of the relative costs and benefits of conflict—particularly over time—and can alter the course of conflict.⁵

Rebel groups need to develop support systems because they begin wars at a disadvantage to the state. States often possess more numerous options for generating revenues and supplying troops than rebel groups because they enjoy the benefits of existing state structures—administrative, financial, and military—that offer sources of command and control, funding, resources, and access to military equipment and personnel.⁶ Initially, a rebel group has no equivalent bureaucratic structure, state treasury, or military force. A rebel group must build an army, create an organizational structure, and fund its war venture in order to engage a government on the battlefield, or its effort will be short-lived. Internal resources are unlikely to provide sufficient sources of support, depending on the nature of the conflict and the level of resources required. The Maoist rebellion in Nepal sustained itself for nearly a decade with limited external support.⁷ Rebel groups can loot food and tax the local population, provided there is sufficient renewal of resources to avoid depletion, as a means of generating income. However, rebel groups are usually unable to access weapons and ammunition in this way because local populations rarely possess more than limited numbers of handguns and hunting rifles, which are of limited use against larger state arsenals.⁸ A rebel group will find it difficult, if not impossible, to sustain a military campaign through the simple looting of existing resources, especially during intrastate conflicts that last years or even decades. The average civil war lasts more than a decade, suggesting any rebel group engaged in such a battle must develop access to external sources of support and trade to survive. Transnational links therefore play an important role in the survival of a rebel group.

A rebel group must develop some form of support system because without resources, the group has to stop fighting. This statement is common sense: no resources, no war. Yet it is striking how often in the literature on civil wars access to resources is presumed, not investigated. The authors of these studies presume rebels know what they need, can get what they want, can pay for military and civilian goods, can ensure their constant resupply, and know how to use what they obtain. The rebellion in Libya in 2011 challenged all these assumptions as stories emerged of the lack of command and control among the rebel forces, their inability to use weapons confiscated from Libyan military stocks, their need for financial resources, and their requests for military equipment.⁹ Similar challenges have beset other rebel groups: the Angolan rebels lost diamond revenues due to international sanctions, the Liberian rebels often wasted ammunition shooting in the air and had logistical difficulties moving new ammunition far from the border with Guinea, the Sri Lankan rebels lost diaspora support after they were labeled terrorists, and the Colombian rebels sought training from other successful rebel groups. Rebel groups clearly seek external sources of support but are constrained when avenues of support are unavailable or eliminated.

Studies tend to portray access to resources as a constant, rather than analyzing the fluctuations in access.¹⁰ Numerous statements drawn from studies of civil wars reveal such assumptions: all three sides in the conflict have ample financial resources to continue fighting; they have a continuous stream of money and weapons, and purchase weapons through international criminal networks;¹¹ rebel groups more than cover their costs during conflict;¹² and regions or countries are awash with small arms and light weapons.¹³ Yet the authors of these studies usually fail to provide concrete systematic evidence to support such assessments. Instead, they offer one or two anecdotes: The arms trade in the region also continues to be maintained through the complex regional and global networks that are the mainstay of the shadow arms economy. An example of one arms shipment to Liberia neatly illustrates this point.¹⁴ Does one example support such a vast generalization? Furthermore, the authors go on to state that the second arms shipment was impounded, suggesting that perhaps arms purchases are not always so easy. The facade of ease and abundance is further promulgated by estimates of wealth: the rebels in Sierra Leone earned $25–$125 million per year;¹⁵ Charles Taylor in Liberia grossed $75–$400 million per year;¹⁶ Colombian rebel revenues reached $3.2 billion in the 1990s;¹⁷ the rebels in Angola accrued $150–$800 million from diamond sales in one year; and the Kosovo rebel army received $600 million in the late 1990s through taxation.¹⁸ The numbers sound impressive, yet they are just rough estimates that are at best good guesses and at worst politically expedient fabrications.¹⁹ These numbers seem to gain legitimacy through repetition rather than research into their validity. There is little hard evidence of how much any rebel group has actually received from such practices or whether such funds have translated into military effectiveness. The point here is not to criticize past scholarship but to highlight potentially faulty assumptions that underlie common beliefs about rebel groups and the wars they fight, and to suggest the need for more investigation into the support networks rebel groups develop.

Challenging Common Assumptions

Blood diamonds are the natural resource most notorious for fueling conflict. Since the coining of the term during the Sierra Leone war, various other natural resources have played a role in the financing of conflict: oil in Angola, Sudan, and Nigeria; gold and coltan in the Democratic Republic of Congo; drugs in Colombia, Peru, and Afghanistan; and precious gems in Cambodia, Burma, and Afghanistan. Yet such simple assumptions about the role of resources in conflicts hide the more complicated, and less flashy, reality on the ground. Early quantitative studies demonstrated a correlation between the presence of natural resources and the onset and long duration of civil wars.²⁰ The resulting greed thesis suggested that rebel wars were fought over access to and control of natural resources. Subsequent studies have challenged the greed premise, attempting to discern more accurately what role resources play in civil wars.²¹ Yet the indicators used in these largely quantitative studies are poor measures of whether the groups fighting can control and harvest these resources, profit from their sale, easily turn cash sales into military goods, and maintain a steady output of goods and input of military necessities.²² There is little probing into whether these conditions in fact apply. Scratching below the surface in many cases suggests that none of these assumptions holds true throughout the course of a war, and in fact the fortunes and capacity of a rebel group can fluctuate greatly over time.

The approach taken in this book focuses on what a rebel group can access, how and when it accesses resources, and both how this access changes over time and why it changes. Such assessments lead to a better understanding of rebel group capacity and options for war, but they also challenge assumptions common in the conflict literature about natural resources, their value and use in war, and their fungibility into military goods. I also confront the predominantly static approach to civil wars, suggesting the need to understand how rebel groups and the civil wars they fight evolve over time. In particular, I do not presume that (a) wars are costly to the rebel group, (b) war is always an option for a rebel group, (c) a rebel group always has easy access to the resources it needs, or (d) the rebel group can easily convert one resource into another (e.g., diamonds for weapons). Such implicit assumptions common in the literature should not be taken for granted in the study of civil wars.

Wars Are Costly

Most studies of the costs of civil wars look at the impacts these wars have on populations, infrastructure, and national treasure. The presumption is that wars are costly and are therefore undertaken in a rational manner only when the potential rewards outweigh the costs.²³ The costs can be estimated using several measures: economic (e.g., suspension of foreign direct investment, loss of working population); human (e.g., death, injury of combatants); damage imposed by wars (e.g., lost infrastructure); and development delayed (e.g., lost education opportunities, suspension of foreign aid, and diversion of government attention to the war).²⁴ Estimates of the overall costs of war tend to run in the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars—a wide range, but clearly a significant cost. Yet it remains unclear who exactly bears these costs and to what degree. This is important for assessing the impact of a war on the fighting factions and what a rebel group requires to continue fighting.

Another way of viewing the costs of war is to ask how much a rebel group has to invest to be able to fight and what it costs to sustain a war. For my purposes, the latter is of greater interest, though consideration of